Category: Digital Humanities

Digital History and Early Modern Europe

The major assignment in my survey of Early Modern Europe this past semester required that students work in groups to construct guides to digital history on any topic within the period. Each guide was to comprise of an introduction to the topic using “traditional” research and a list and description of relevant online resources, databases, and/or projects. Those guides have been placed online via the course website and are available here. Topics ranged from the Reformation to French Colonialism to interactions between Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. I chose to ask students to complete this assignment in this particular course after attending the Digital Humanities Summer School at the University of Bern, Switzerland this past summer where, among other things, I was introduced to the sheer volume of digital work being done on early modern material. My students’ guides, I think, give a fairly diverse entry point to the field; materials range from basic primary source databases to complex digital mapping projects.

Most of my work in the digital humanities has involved these kinds of assignments and they pose particular difficulties, especially in a survey course. First, students often have very little preexisting experience using web publishing platforms such as WordPress, programming or markup languages, or digital humanities more broadly. This means that class time must be devoted to introducing students to at least some of these areas in order for them to be able to complete the project. Second, topics that may be very prominent in the historiography — the Reformation, say — may not be as represented online. This creates a unique tension when helping students choose their topics; while we’d prefer to see digital work on topics of digital interest, students also need to be able to locate relevant analog sources as well. The guides themselves demonstrate this difficulty. While some feature a great deal of secondary source research in the introductions and much less by way of digital history work, others show the complete opposite. Third, grading projects that can — and should be — continually in progress poses problems not simply because of the time it takes in a survey course, but also because the projects are never really finished. Students continue to have access to their projects and can edit them freely; others can comment on them and offer advice and new resources can be added. I attempted to solve this problem by having two due dates: first, the initial draft had to be put online, then two weeks later I would download whatever was available online and grade that version (I used Evernote and Skitch to mark up the pages).

Digital history in the classroom, put simply, must be much more than just another assignment. Rather, it adds an entirely new layer of inquiry to any given course. In the future, I will probably devote even more in-class time to the assignment, a task made easier by the fact that almost everyday there is a new, relevant digital source available for us to work with. How would our reading of Candide have changed had I had the time to prepare to work with the Bibliothèque nationale’s Candide app? Perhaps it would be worth considering ways that the survey itself could turn more fully around the theme of the digital without losing the narrative such a course is designed to provide.

New GradeBook Pro Features

I use the iOS app GradeBook Pro to take attendance and keep track of grades through the course of the semester. I was pleased, therefore, to see two new features appear after I upgraded to the latest version: letter grade assignments and behavior tracking.  The first simply allows you to assign letter grades to percentage scores by recording the lowest valid numerical score per letter grade (so, 93% as A, 90% as A-, 88% as B+, etc).  It’s also extremely easy to copy grade scales from courses, which means you really only have to input the scale once.

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The second new feature allows you to quickly note student “behavior” (read: participation) in class.  In small seminars, I tend to take notes and am able to assess student participation fairly consistently.  In larger classes, where I still ask students questions and hold discussions, but which also tend to go a bit faster and involve more students participating (and more students not participating), this will be a useful tool for quickly noting who has and has not participated.

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The screenshot shows the default labels for behavior.  They can be customized in the GradeBook Pro tab of the iOS settings app.

GradeBookPro can be downloaded from the iTunes store for $9.99.

Mary Louise Roberts on Entering the Digital Age

One of my favorite historians discusses her newfound enthusiasm for utilizing forms of social media in the classroom:

Somewhere along the way, I realized this is how they learn—this juxtaposition and making of connections, this linking of yesterday and today. What the technologies of the digital age have done for my classroom is to let in the outside world in new and valuable ways, so that more than ever the past is viewed through the lens of the present. This strikes me as a brilliant way to do our work and to make history matter in students’ lives.

Productivity Tools

Two of my favorite digital humanities blogs, Profhacker and Gradhacker, are collaborating on a series of posts highlighting strategies and tools for using technology smartly.  I highly recommend that my students take a look as they begin work on their research projects.

Some Digital Humanities Links

— The Chronicle of Higher Education describes a new effort to map archival materials online.  Mostly for Americanists at the moment, it seems.

— AcademiPad lists 30 online resources for academic life, writing, and technology.

— ProfHacker announces the Digital Humanities Winter Institute.  I almost went this year to the summer event, but for a variety of reasons decided against.  Maybe see you in Maryland this winter?

Use Scrible to Grade Web Based Assignments

I wish I had known about this when one of my classes was putting up their Wikipedia pages this semester, but in the course of searching for a better way of grading my blogging assignment for Modern Europe, I came across a nifty tool called Scrible.  Scrible allows you to annotate webpages without converting them to a clunky pdf version (I tried to do this using Adobe Acrobat Pro and the resulting file was just huge).  Basic annotation tools — notes, highlights, you can even change the text formatting — are all I need for grading, though the alignment between a note and its relevant text on the page could use some work.  Scrible is in beta and comes with a free library of 125 MB for storing marked up pages, which is perfect for saving graded blogs to e-mail to students once they’re all done (which you can do straight from the Scrible toolbar).  For any more research-oriented needs, Instapaper (for ease of access on the go) and Evernote (for keeping everything in one place) are clearly better solutions, but for this particular purpose it’s everything I could ask for.

Integrating IPad PDF Annotation with Zotero

Although I continue to advocate storing pretty much everything in Evernote — alongside efficient tagging and organization — I still really wanted to find a way to integrate annotating PDFs directly into my favored citation manager, Zotero. I’m hoping that I’ve hit on a solution.

1) I use the Zotero extension Zotfile to organize and rename attachments to Zotero entries into a folder on my desktop. The attachments are therefore links to local files, not files stored in the Zotero servers.

2) That folder is synced to the cloud — and my office PC — using SugarSync.

3) I open and annotate the PDF using GoodReader, which will then automatically sync the annotations with the files linked to the Zotero entry.

I had been using ZotFile’s “send to tablet” function, alongside iAnnotatePDF’s Aji Reader Service to push files back and forth from my tablet to my PC and then to both Zotero and the cloud.  This new method avoids a number of problems that method entailed.  First, everything is done without having to download individual files via the web or selecting individual files to sync and instead is done automatically. This ensures that I always have access to the files without worrying about finding the most recent version.  It also means that I don’t have to be on my home network to update my files.  Second, the files remain on my desktop in addition to the cloud and are automatically organized.  Third, I avoid quickly exceeding Zotero’s limited free storage space.

I still also e-mail the annotated files to Evernote, since I also want to have all my notes in one place. But until Zotero includes a more robust note taking system, an integrated PDF viewer and/or an iPad app, this method seems to be the best way I’ve found to link annotated articles directly to their metadata.

Productivity Helpers

I’ve recently started reading both ProfHacker and GradHacker because I’m obsessed with trying out new digital research tools (a tendency not actually good for productivity, it should be said).  Today, Gradhacker provides a list of productivity helpers.  I’m particularly glad I checked out the post since, after clicking on the “Surviving the Lit Review” link (I thought it may be useful for the course I’m teaching this year requiring undergraduates to write a short review essay themselves, I cam across this fantastic post explaining how one can use Skim, a pdf annotator and viewer, with Scrivener, a writing program.  I have only recently started using both programs; both are excellent and I’m excited to try out a method of using them together.

Hello (Again)

When I think about how hard it is to get something onto that blank word document, I’m somewhat amazed that I ever thought I would have the energy to write for anything other than professional work.  Then I remember how enjoyable it was to write for a wider audience and on topics I otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to address and I wonder why I ever stopped making the time.  This is the third time I’ve come back to the web with the intent of writing under the title of “air pollution,” but I have somewhat different goals in mind this time.

In the past, I approached my online work as simply another weblog, a way to improve and practice my writing while touching on subjects I wasn’t covering in my graduate courses or dissertation research.  This time, the blog is simply be one component of a broader space in which I can work digitally.  I keep the same address and same home, but see this space as my center of gravity for both my research and teaching.  Rather than put either aspect of my professional self behind closed doors — on a teaching platform like Blackboard or Moodle, for instance — this will be where I share what I can of what I’m doing as I’m doing it.

Right now, teaching will be the focus.  I’ve put up my first few syllabi from last semester as well as those I’m working on now.  The latter will be constantly updated with public links to PowerPoint slides and other resources my classes and I will be using throughout the semester.  Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, meaning that it can be freely used for non-commercial purposes with proper attribution.

Research will come later.  I have a few ideas about some cool digital projects — such as an interactive map of prostitution in nineteenth-century Paris — but I need a little more time to conceptualize them and lots more time getting oriented around the best tools for completing them.

So for now, here’s my latest attempt to integrate my original interests in digital tools (I did start out as a Computer Science major after all) and my new career as a professional historian.  Enjoy!