The digital revolution has already arrived in historical studies and it presents unique and exciting possibilities for the history. As more scholarly materials are converted to digital formats, students are in a position to contribute to real scholarly advances as a part of their normal liberal arts education. The question is: what are the best means to turn our students, as “digital natives,” into participants in the revitalization of the humanities? Bringing together the variety of actors and tools currently at play requires new paradigms and practices of research; the key to a teaching-learning model suited to the digital age must be constructed around collaboration.
The Digital Methods in History course provides a setting to apply digital tools now available to historical scholarship and methods for applying these in the classroom. Students will be working with the data of one history faculty member (Kathryn Jasper) and learning how to visualize that data using various tools. Dr. Jasper shares her unpublished data from primary documents to involve students in “actual” research that could result in conference presentations or publications.
History Lab
In the Department of History we have a great deal of interest from history students who want to pursue the Digital Humanities but have no idea how. To realize the potential of digitally driven projects, we must ground them in collaborative practices. The short-term goal of this project is creation of a permanent course in the Digital Humanities. It would not be limited to history majors that way, and not limited to Dr. Jasper teaching it. The long-term goal of the project is to develop a history lab in which scholars can encounter key digital tools now available to historical scholarship, and methods for applying these in the classroom.
This lab would be associated with The Traveler’s Lab, housed at Wesleyan University (http://travelerslab.research.wesleyan.edu), which is a recent effort to provide a hub for such collaborations. Only by constructing networks and collaborative platforms built, not around single courses or the next article, but for consistent and constant sharing, can we realize the revolutionary potential of these new tools for the teaching and practice of history between teacher-scholars and our undergraduate students.
