Final post of the day
April 9, 2013 in Uncategorized
After taking some non-DH time to talk to my partner, go to the gym, and eat dinner, I return to my last DH task of the day: looking over the personas that my students have submitted as part of their final project for my Digital History class. The deadline was 10 pm and the personas have been trickling in over the last hour or two.
My digital history course is for advanced undergraduates and focuses on the nineteenth-century city. For the first nine weeks of the semester we undertook different readings on nineteenth-century urban history and learned about different aspects of digital history. In the last five weeks students have turned to crafting proposals and prototypes for a digital site inspired by some topic of the class. I’m very much impressed with what they have come up with so far: digital mapping of African-American antislavery publishing; a gendered network analysis of the New York Society Library circulation records; a reconstruction of eighteenth-century Grosvenor Square in London modeled after Digital Harlem; a knowledge site on the first graduating class of Mundelein College; a recreation of an 1864 issue of The Clipper, a flash press title; and a geographic and spiritual topographical interpretation of Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet’s nineteenth-century map of the west.
For the final project portion of this class, I was very much inspired by Miriam Posner’s DH 196 syllabus. I’ve modeled the steps of doing the project around the ones that she used and thus far it’s worked well. We are entering the third of the fifth week of project work and the students are creating personas of the potential audience for their project.
And that’s about it. Today has been representative of my Mondays during the school year, if not what I do everyday. This is my second year at Loyola and what’s been wonderful thus far has been the ability to find wiling partners for the projects I want to undertake. The graduate and undergraduates have been great to work with, and my colleagues aren’t too bad either! You’re likely exhausted reading this, and I’m exhausted having done this. Best of luck in your own DH endeavors!