Look who stopped by…

April 8, 2013 in Uncategorized

 

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Public History Graduate Student Annie Cullen shows off her handiwork to Professor Chris Manning

An open office door invites interesting office visitors today, many of whom are involved in digital humanities initiatives in the department.

Public History Master’s student Annie Cullen is one of two of the department’s Public Media Assistants.  Instead of serving as a teaching assistant in a class, Annie and Will Ippen have been learning about how to serve the digital and social media needs of a busy academic department.  With thirty-two full time faculty, dozens of graduate students, and hundreds of undergraduate majors, the Loyola History Department has many needs.  Annie and Will spend fifteen hours (or more) a week, maintaining the department’s Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube channel and websites.  They create content for each of these areas, ranging from videos highlighting faculty scholarship to news stories about upcoming events.  (Annie is an accomplished photographer whose images have been used to promote the department).  They provide support to my colleagues who want to undertake digital initiatives in their classes and research, but don’t know how.  We just migrated our website to a new CMS and theme this past semester, so a huge amount of their time is cleaning up and rethinking the pages.

On top of all this, Annie is, with Rachel Boyle, the creator of the viral hit, Public History Ryan Gosling.

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The glow of a graduate student ready to head off into the world!

And then came by Master’s student Zac Weber, fresh from handing in his written qualifying examinations. Zac has created a wonderful website documenting the Occupy Chicago movement.  The site began as a class project for a seminar with Professor Michelle Nickerson and then grew into an independent study.  The website does a nice job combining oral history interviews, transcriptions, and photographs documenting the demonstration on one day in October 2011.

And these are just a few of the ways that we try to engage our graduate students in the digital humanities during their time at Loyola.

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