Category: archives

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Women’s History Class Projects, continued

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So, a semester’s work of work comes down to tomorrow.  As I’ve discussed before, my Women’s History since 1870 course has spent the semester researching and creating a classroom from the mid-20th Century.


The students in the class spent the first half of the semester working on research in the primary sources of the school, especially those resources in our Special Collections department.  They created the following sites for each decade

Site: 1930s
Site: 1940s
Site: 1950s
Site: 1960s
We then voted on which decade would be the focus of our class re-creation and the 1950s was chosen.  We split into new groups to plan the class session itself.  
Based on all that research and the work done by the students, we came up with the following schedule for tomorrow’s class, re-creating a 1952 History class: April 17 schedule.


I’m looking forward to it.  Wish us luck.
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Vote now on the UMW decade sites

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The research sites on the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s that my US Women’s History students have created as part of our project to re-create the Mary Washington college classroom experience are now up on the course site.

Please check the sites out, and vote for the site that you think provides the best set of resources for our class to actually re-create the classroom experience.

Thanks!

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The Assignment for Recreating the historical MWC Classroom

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As I discussed in this post, my US Women’s History since 1870 class will be working on a project in which the ultimate goal is to be able to recreate a class session or two from the middle of the 20th Century.

Here is the assignment that I developed for the course, in three stages.  Note the use of individual and group work, online and IRL activities, and deep research in the archives of the school.

As always, I’d appreciate any comments or suggestions.  [The full course syllabus is here.]

MARY WASHINGTON CLASSROOM EXPERIENCE RESEARCH PROJECT
This project will be based around researching Mary Washington College classes in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, & 1960s (including course topics, pedagogical approaches, majors, gender stereotypes, technology, and clothing).  As our class lectures and readings look at the experiences of women in the United States in the late 19th and 20th Centuries, our parallel goal will be to understand what college meant to women who came to Mary Washington in the four decades in the middle of the 20th Century.
Each group of 6-7 of you will have a decade to research, using a variety of online and archival sources, as well as interviews with alums from these decades.  Rather than writing a traditional individual research paper, you’ll keep a research blog and work with your group to create a research site collecting together the information that you’ve found.
Primary source resources (many available in UMW Special Collections)
  • The Bullet
  • Course Catalogs
  • Academic Department and Faculty Files
  • Student Handbooks
  • Photographs (Centennial Collection online plus those digitized, but not online yet)
  • Alumni/Faculty Interviews (talk to me about interview waivers)
  • Resources from Historic Preservation (?)
  • Scrapbooks/Aubade/Alumni Magazine/President’s files
Secondary Sources
  • Crawley, William B. University of Mary Washington: A Centennial History, 1908-2008. Fredericksburg, VA: University of Mary Washington, 2008.
  • Key UMW faculty and staff (Parsons, McClusky, Thaden, Snyder)
Decade-based Research Groups
I will assign each of you to a group of 5-7 each with a different decade at MWC to research, using a variety of online and archival sources, as well as interviews with alums from these decades.  Each person will keep their own research log/blog and work with their group to create a research site collecting together the information that you’ve found.
Part I — Individual Research Logs
Each student will take a particular set of primary sources (or will interview alumni) and research classroom experiences for their group’s decade.  Each student will share her/his work in progress in the form of four individual research log-style blog posts posted before class starts on four consecutive Tuesdays (1/31, 2/7, 2/14, 2/21).
Part II — Group Research Project
Building on the research done by each of the group members, each group will construct a site for their decade in UMWBlogs.  The design, format, and presentation of these sites will be determined by the group, with a broad audience in mind.  These sites are due by 11:59 PM on Monday, March 12.
Grading for Parts I and II – 30% overall, with an individual grade for research logs and group grade for the research project.
Part III – Class re-creation
Based on those group research sites, we will collectively decide (with the help of some alums), which decade we will then use for the final project, a re-creation of a course session or two from that decade.  The form these class sessions will take is still yet to be determined (depending in part on the decade picked), but they will involve everyone in some way in preparation and presentation.  Specific tasks will be determined after the decade is chosen.  This recreation will take place during the week of April 17.
Grading for Part III – 10%, with individual grades defined by student’s participation in the re-creation process.
PLEASE NOTE: Throughout these projects, all ideas, phrases, and quotes must be cited using footnote-style citations and bibliographies done using the Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition) or Turabian’s newest Guide (7th Edition).   
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Thinking about Public History Projects: A DIY history toolkit

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My good friend, Leslie, begins a new tenure-track job this fall in Idaho. She recently asked for input on her next big project. If you haven’t read the post yet, you should. The gist is as follows:

Whereas public historians traditionally have done history for the public–e.g. in museum exhibits or in documentary films–there’s a small but growing group of public historians who want to foster and study history done by the public, by passionate amateurs and average folks instead of created for them. I’m one of those historians, and as I transition to life on the tenure track (I’ll have 4-5 years to prove I deserve to be employed for the next 30-35 years), I’m searching for a project or two in which I can make significant progress in 3-4 years.

I’m hoping you can help me by telling me a bit about how you use history in your life, either everyday or on special occasions. I want to find a project that not only interests me, but that really gets people excited about engaging with the history of their family, neighborhood, house, community, hobby, or whatever else they’re passionate about.

My response in her comments included two ideas, which, you’ll notice, don’t really answer her question. They do, however, raise a couple of ideas about ways to approach her rethinking of public history’s goals:

1) Create a centralized set of resources on a topic. I’m thinking of collecting links to web-based resources, but they might just be lists of various sources/works for the topic. Gathering those together in and of themselves could prove valuable to a group that has not done that yet for its own history and would allow you to bring the experiences of a public historian to help as well.

2) Create a resource that would provide access to tools, methodologies, approaches that would help people engage in their own group/family history. This would be a kind of DIY family/group history kit. You might include advice on how to do interviews; how to scan images and documents for historical purposes; discuss using WP or other blogging software (or software like Omeka) to create exhibits; how to use wikis to create crowdsourced projects like the Davis Wiki; examples of other sites (and ones that inspire a sense of possibility, not major, grant-funded institutional projects); how to fact check family/group stories (or why those stories are valuable regardless of their validity), etc.

Here I’m thinking of initially virtual tools. But with an outside grant or support from your institution, you and your new department might become known for lending the equipment (cameras, audio recorders, scanners, etc.) and expertise needed to empower people in your area to do their own individual or group history projects.

The more I think about it, the more I really like the second notion, the DIY history toolkit. Think about the value of such a guide/checklist/resource. What would you include in a DIT history toolkit?

Good luck to Leslie with her move, her new job, and her new projects. Head on over and help her out.

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Banner Lecture for VHS

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I was truly honored when the Virginia Historical Society, a wonderful museum and archive, asked me to give one of the famous Banner Lectures on my book. Oddly enough, though I’ve presented various parts at a number of conferences, I’ve never done a formal presentation of the whole project. So, I had a good time putting this talk together and it turned out pretty well. I got some great questions from the audience.

Thanks again to Nelson Lankford, Frances Pollard, and the rest of the VHS staff for all the work that they do to contribute to the history of Virginia.

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Archiving Social Media Conversations of Significant Events

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This is a rough proposal for another session at 2009 THATCamp that grew out of conversations with a number of people in my network about the role of social media in the recent events in Iran.

I propose that we have a session where THATCampers discuss the issues related to preserving (and/or analyzing) the blogs, tweets, images, Facebook postings, SMS(?) of the events in Iran with an eye toward a process for how future such events might be archived and analyzed as well. How will future historians/political scientists/geographers/humanists write the history of these events without some kind of system of preservation of these digital materials? What should be kept? How realistic is it to collect and preserve such items from so many different sources? Who should preserve these digital artifacts (Twitter/Google/Flickr/Facebook; LOC; Internet Archive; professional disciplinary organizations like the AHA)?

On the analysis side, how might we depict the events (or at least the social media response to them) through a variety of timelines/charts/graphs/word-clouds/maps? What value might we get from following/charting the spread of particular pieces of information? Of false information? How might we determine reliable/unreliable sources in the massive scope of contributions?

[I know there are many potential issues here, including language differences, privacy of individual communications, protection of individual identities, various technical limitations, and many others.]

Maybe I’m overestimating (or underthinking) here, but I’d hope that a particularly productive session might even come up with the foundations of: a plan, a grant proposal, a set of archival standards, a wish-list of tools, even an appeal to larger companies/organizations/governmental bodies to preserve the materials for this particular set of events and a process for archiving future ones.

What do people think? Is this idea worth pursuing?