Assignments

Final Project (50% of grade)

Due: Tuesday, April 26

Individual assessment email assignment

Due: Tuesday, April 26

Please send a private email to both Prof. Heatherly and Prof. Tritt with an assessment of your role in the digital project and your partner’s role. Please devote one full paragraph for your self assessment and one full paragraph for your partner’s assessment.

Due: Tuesday, April 26

Oral Presentation (10% of grade)

Due: Thursday, April 28

You will have 15 minutes with 5 minutes for questions.

As a group you will present together, so make sure both partners have time to speak.

Please consider touching on the following topics. This is not a rigid and prescribed order for your presentation, but try to cover these topics as you move through your presentation.

Project goals/ your audience.
Link project to overall history of the era.
Talk about your project’s process, including but not limited to: research process, metadata, technology (Omeka, Timeline/map), obtaining rights, etc.
Demo your site and your research findings.
Project and class – challenges and opportunities

*Remember to dress as though you were doing an in-person presentation.

Final Blog Reflection

Due: ~~Thursday, April 28~~ Friday, April 29

Write a thoughtful reflection on your experiences in this class, on your project, distance learning within a multi-campus environment and the digital liberal arts.

Minimum of 700 words.

Place on your blog.

* Make sure this is a post and not a page.

Mini-Assignment: Project Peer Review

Begin: Tuesday, April 7

Due: April 12

Directions:

Instructions:

Students will individually assess the digital project drafts created by the other two teams in Voices. Feedback will be shared with each group. Below you will find a link to a form to fill out. You will individually fill out one out for each of the other 2 sites.

Evaluation link: http://goo.gl/forms/99rD2wE0EJ

Please read through the group’s project contract prior to reviewing their site.

Provide constructive criticism on the individual projects. Provide both positive feedback and constructive feedback areas with opportunities for improvement/development. We expect to see more feedback than “It’s great!” We also expect to see critical assessment in your feedback. This is an opportunity for you to help the other groups and for them to help you with issues that are often hard for to spot. For example, grammar, typos, image editing mistakes, etc.

Also – be specific. If you see that a statement is unclear on the “about” page, for example, be sure to specify the location of the unclear statement. Again, this is an opportunity to help your fellow classmates prepare their project for its final iteration.

As the peer review relates to your individual projects, you are not bound to follow all the suggestions provided by your peers; however, do carefully consider this feedback.

Mini-Assignment: Timeline/map + 3 Readings

Due: March 10

Directions:

For this assignment you will individually (not in a group) create one timeline or map using one of the tools discussed in class on Feb. 25. You will post this timeline/map to your individual blog using the embed code provided by the tool (TimelineJS, HistoryPin, Google’s My Maps).

For your timeline/map, please include 5 archival items. Upload your items to Omeka (you don’t need to do full Omeka metadata for this assignment), and use the image link from Omeka within the timeline/mapping tools as we discussed in class.You may reuse the one item from your metadata assignment.

*If you need archival materials, ask Prof. Heatherly or Prof. Tritt.

*For your final assignment, you will be required to include a timeline/map. While you are not required to use this timeline/map for your final project, it is advisable that you consider creating this timeline with the final project in mind.

This assignment will be due March 10.

TimelineJS – https://timeline.knightlab.com/

Follow the tutorial on their homepage. You will need to enter information on this page.

HistoryPin – https://www.historypin.org/

Create a collection: https://youtu.be/VKWBDMLhjSk
Adding a Pin video: https://youtu.be/k19wqBMqUwM
Creative Commons Licence type: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND

Google My Maps – https://www.google.com/mymaps/?hl=en_US&app=mp

Mini-Assignment: Metadata

Due: February 18

Directions:

Part 1:

Before adding an item to the Voices Omeka site, you’ll need to interpret the Dublin Core fields and digitize the item. Choose one item to digitize and describe in Omeka according to the metadata element set guidelines that we discussed on February 9th. Once the item and digital object are in Omeka, add the item to the “Metadata Mini-Assignment” Collection. Please see the Digitization Tips below for helpful information on digitization

Part 2:

In a blog post, please address the items in the following worksheet. This worksheet is intended to encourage critical thinking about metadata in digital collections. There are no right or wrong answers, and each decision you make (e.g., what to title an item) should be the result of your analysis.

Worksheet for part 2 – Dublin Core

Title:

Is there an obvious title on the item? If not, how do you come up with a title?
What is this item and why is it significant?
Think about the scope of everything else in your collection that you’ll be adding. Should you establish conventions for titling items that make sense? What might these be?
What about formatting? Do you use quotations marks or not?

Subject:

The subject of an item is often spoken of as it’s “about-ness.” What is the best way to create a meaningful category system to describe subjects?

Description:

How much information is too much?
How much is too little?
What is the goal of a description? Is it to inform people about a piece? To interpret its significance?
What extra knowledge is needed to make sense of the item?

Date:

How much of the date is available? How much should you include?
To what lengths should you go to find the date on an item?
What if you can’t find out the date of an item? What do you do?
What format do you use for entering dates? 1870-01-01 or January 1, 1870 or Jan 1 1870?

Rights:

Who owns the rights to this item?
Hint: in many cases, it may be the repository, but in others, the rights may be held elsewhere.

Creator:

What if you don’t know who made the item?
What if multiple people created the item?
What format do you use to enter names? Do you use personal titles, etc?
Can a non-person be a creator?

Coverage:

Do you have a guess as to the time frame this item could be?
What if you don’t know?

Language:

Are there any instances in which the language is not English?
How do you format this field?

Digitization Tips

In order to add your item to Omeka, you need to create a digital file of it first.

Guidelines

300 dpi
All files should be under 10mb in size
.jpg for photographs
.pdf for print items
24 bit color for color images
16 bit grayscale for sepia tone and black and white images

Blog Post: Macro History of Industrial Revolution

Due: February 9

1. Briefly describe Hay’s take on the earliest days of Prohibition. Include points on religion, politics, and rural/urban life.

2. Our era includes these “lesser known” presidents—Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, B. Harrison—please select one and highlight their term and how it fits into the Second Industrial Revolution.

3. This era is noted for its technological innovation, sometimes referred to as a technological revolution in its own right. Based on your readings, briefly describe a technology and its impact on this era.

4. Do you see any similarities in the American life of then and now?

Mini-Assignment: Review of Digital Sites

Due: February 2

Digital Analysis: Using the headings listed below, evaluate two digital repositories. One must be Century America site and you may choose the other. This mini-assignment is due Tuesday, February 2nd (week 4) and should be no less than 300 words per site. Please use the following as a framework and treat it as a blog post. One project from Century and one from another. Look at CA site contract.

– What is the title of your site?

-Include the name of the digital site and physical location/s of the participating parties, if discernible. Are the materials at a library, museum, archive, other cultural heritage organization?

-What is the scope and content of the digital project? Is it obvious? What cultural role does it play?

-Are there research/reproduction policies? Other policies?

-How is the information organized? Can you easily browse and/or search? Is there metadata?

-Do you know what platform or CMS (Content Management System) is used?

Digital Collection Sites

There are a few CMS (Content Management Systems) choices on the market with which to present digital surrogates of historical items and relate them to the public. Below are a few links. You’ll notice that not only do they appear differently, the ways in which they’re utilized also varies. This document is meant to give you a sense of the tools and how they are used. We’ll talk about this further during the semester.

COPLAC’s Century America

http://centuryamerica.org/
http://centuryamerica.org/about/

ContentDM

Digital Library of Appalachia http://dla.acaweb.org/ (suggested search: moonshine)

Digital Library of Georgia http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/?Welcome (suggested search: Franklin Roosevelt; Cherokee Phoenix)

The Church in the Southern Black Community http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/

Central Florida Memory http://www.cfmemory.org/

Digital Maryland http://www.digitalmaryland.org/

Boston Antheneum http://cdm.bostonathenaeum.org/
Web-Based (HTML, XML, etc)

First World War http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/first-world-war/

Operation War Diary http://www.operationwardiary.org/ (part of the site above, but interactive)

Omeka

IU-Bloomington Student Life http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/omeka/archives/studentlife/

Early Caribbean Digital Archive http://omekasites.northeastern.edu/ECDA/

George Mason: a history http://ahistoryofmason.gmu.edu/

James Monroe Papers http://projects.umwhistory.org/jmp/

Pullman http://publications.newberry.org/pullman/

100 Years: The Rockefeller Foundation http://rockefeller100.org/exhibits/show/culture

Woman’s Building https://wbexhibit.otis.edu/

War of 1812 http://collections.libraries.indiana.edu/warof1812/

Gilded Age Plains City http://gildedage.unl.edu/

Digital Sites about the Second Industrial Revolution

Rail: http://railroads.unl.edu/

http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/immigration/railroads.html

http://www.umsl.edu/mercantile/barriger/index.html

https://www.loc.gov/collection/railroad-maps-1828-to-1900/about-this-collection/

Pullman http://publications.newberry.org/pullman/

Due: Week 2

Blog post: Due January 19th by 2pm EST.

Please fully answer the following questions in your blog post. Minimum word count – 75 words.

What are your thoughts on Bill Spellman’s article and the idea of a distance digital liberal arts course?
Why were you interested in taking this digital liberal arts course?
What do you expect to get out of this class?

* Please make sure this is a post and not a page.

See the course technology help page for a tutorial.

Mini-Assignment – Omeka activity: Due January 21st by 2pm EST.

As your first mini-assignment, you will add your photo and biography to Omeka.

Access your Omeka account.
Add an item.
1. Complete the following metadata fields: Title, Subject, Description, Creator, Year, Language and Type.
2. Add your photo as a file.
3. Add to the Voices of Industrial America Participants Collection.

See the course technology help page for a tutorial.