Digital History Syllabus

Digital History

Hist6383

Fall 2011

Time: 2:30—5:30 Wednesdays

Rm#549

Introduction:
This seminar will focus on exploring the process of creating digital history. The course readings, workshops, and discussions expose students to the philosophy and practice of the emerging field of History and New Media. The course will be centered on the creation of a semester project that is an opportunity to experiment with new technologies; all projects will be uploaded and published on the UH Digital Library. This project includes the creation of a themed digital history using existing materials in the UH Digital Library UH People, Events, Buildings collections, or creating your own. These images will be combined with video and audio oral histories taken from alumni at football games to produce engaging digital histories. Themes will include but are not limited to ―built environment/campus‖, ―student life‖, ―race & gender‖, ―turbulent 60s‖ and ―campus/college origins‖.

The main goal of this course is to give you the opportunity to become a new kind of scholar, one who is able to use digital media to effectively present ideas and arguments in the academic field of your choice.


Objectives
From this class you should gain a better understanding of the digital tools to which historians now have access. Some of these include; Current trends and issues in digital history, from a variety of perspectives (academia, education, museums/public history, libraries, and archives) Communication and networking: Weblogs, Microblogging, syndication, collaborative writing, wikis.Digital research tools and methodologies.Basic image editing and restoration.Basic metadata creation. Basic video creation and editing. Basic project preservation. Basic project management, including steps and skills to conceive, design, develop, and implement an online digital history video.

Although the course assumes no advanced computer skills, it does require a solid knowledge of computer use and a degree of enthusiasm for digital work and history. No experience with image editing software, web design, film making or pod casting skills is needed but they will be assets.

Readings and multimedia
1. Why Digital Preservation is Important for Everyone

2. Preserving Digital Culture

3. Digital formats

4. Formats, Evaluation factors and relationships

5. Digital Formats: Factors for Sustainability, Functionality, and Quality
Caroline Arms and Carl Fleischhauer
Office of Strategic Initiatives, Library of Congress Washington, DC, USA

6. Bridging Physical and Digital Preservation

7. Why Digital Preservation is important for you

8. Digital History; A guide to gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the web.

This book provides a plainspoken and thorough introduction to the web for historians—teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts—who wish to produce online historical work, or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium. It begins with an overview of the different genres of history websites, surveying a range of digital history work that has been created since the beginning of the web. The book then takes the reader step-by-step through planning a project, understanding the technologies involved and how to choose the appropriate ones, designing a site that is both easy-to-use and scholarly, digitizing materials in a way that makes them web-friendly while preserving their historical integrity, and how to reach and respond to an intended audience effectively. It also explores the repercussions of copyright law and fair use for scholars in a digital age, and examines more cutting-edge web techniques involving interactivity, such as sites that use the medium to solicit and collect historical artifacts. Finally, the book provides basic guidance on insuring that the digital history the reader creates will not disappear in a few years.

9. Making Digital History; Three-dimensional scanning techniques can
preserve threatened cultural heritage.

10. Did you know? Quiz from the library of Congress

11. Preserving Your Personal Digital Memories – 1 hour course

12. Dan Cohen, ―The Future of Preserving the Past‖

13. Flickr.Com: http://www.flickr.com/commons (and http://www.flickr.com in general)

14. Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/

15. Reference Type: Journal Article
Author: McLellan, Hilary; Primary Title: Digital storytelling in higher education
Journal Name: Journal of Computing in Higher Education; Cover Date: 2007-09-01
Publisher: Springer Boston; Issn: 1042-1726
Subject: Educational Technology; Start Page: 65; End Page: 79; Volume: 19; Issue: 1
Url: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF03033420
Doi: 10.1007/BF03033420


Class Schedule:
This is the intended schedule for this course, though I reserve the right to make adjustments, if necessary, as the semester progresses. It is important on discussion days that you complete all of the reading in advance.

8/24
Introductions – goals of the course.
Blog creation, explore project themes, digital library introduction, assign up for video camera and learning commons computer time. Signup sheet for football games.
3 students: video production
Remaining students: audio or still camera
Examples: of digital histories.

Blog assignment: Look through the digital library UH collections and the history of the university. Come up with no less than 3 themes and explain why these would make excellent digital histories.