As students increasingly draw upon digital content as a primary source of information, how might they be taught to be both discriminating consumers as well as producers of online information? Doing history rather than teaching history is not a new approach, but the “doing” part of researching, writing, and publishing now includes drawing upon and creating digitized resources. In this NITLE Shared Academics seminar, NITLE subject-area specialist Michelle Moravec, Aaron Cowan, assistant professor of history at Slippery Rock University, and Kathryn Tomasek, associate professor of history at Wheaton College, provided concrete examples from their own work, and examined the opportunities and challenges of integrating digital humanities into the undergraduate curriculum. These are Dr. Michelle Moravec's slides.

1. Four Lessons Learned Doing Digital History w/ Undergrads
#powerofsmall
@professmoravec
www.michellemoravec.com
project for today
www.rdigitalh.org
class syllabus
co teacher Maggie Hobson-Baker
students Niki Brogen, Michele Ithan, Molly Rowe,
Emily Siegel, Gabriela Stamler
Rosemont College Archives, Melanie McBride, Delories Richardi

2. CHNM is FABULOUS
but what if you don’t
have 45 people to do
#digitalhistory with?

3. what happened when a
historian and an artist
formed a 2-person
digital humanities team
...
and left everything
about the class project
up to the 5 students …
and had 3 of the 15
class sessions canceled
due to snow?

4. #1 Have concrete & specific parameters
• “Course Outline: a significant aspect
of this class is the collaborative
design of our project. Therefore we
will finalize aspects of this syllabus
in course together.”
• project had to be about the campus
chapel and involve building a
Wordpress site
• Profs had the idea of focusing on the
stained glass windows of the Chapel,
which are all female figures.

5. #2 Turn over control
as soon as possible
• We brainstormed potential
audience & the type of
user experience
• sent the students off to
the chapel on their own to
take more images and
propose project

6. What’s up with the peacock?

7. #3 Let the project evolve or watch it die

8. #4 Do not fear the failure
The professors scaffolded early
assignments around windows
• students took pictures in chapel
• each student researched
hagiography and art historical
images of 1 saint & made page
• each student researched
hagiography and art historical
images of a second saint& made
page
• students made Pinterest boards of
images of a particular saint
focusing on iconography or
contemporary images
• Midterm: Compare and contrast
the portrayal of the chosen Saint
in Art History (Google Art). Work
with 3-5 different images from
different time periods and
geographical locations.
Final Page

9. • All students did some minor coding and digital
photo manipulation One student dove deep
into Wordpress widgets
• Three students did some fairly intensive work
in Photoshop with Adobe Flash.
• Everything was already digitized so we didn’t
work with OCR

10. “I think hands on work,
especially in archives,
for history majors, is
the best way to learn“
“This project provided hands
on experience both
intellectually and creatively.
I think everyone in the class
preferred this project to
writing papers”
“I like this better than a
research paper because we've
all created and worked with
materials that are now
accessible for public audiences”
“I think the small size of
the class was REALLY
important”