ASSIGNMENTS
1. Personal Blog (20%). Every student in the class must set up an academic blog on WordPress. Every week you must write at least one substantial post to your blog. This gives you a chance to comment on the reading before we get to class, to see what others have said about the reading, and provides me with some feedback about how the class has approached the material. I will often use this online forum as a place from which to begin our in class discussion. Thus, you should post your comment no later than midnight on the Monday before class, and plan on visiting the website sometime on Wednesday to look over what others have written. These posts need not be long essays but rather one or two paragraphs (300-400 words); they should give a sense of what you thought of the material and places where you would like to begin the discussion. Think of these as questions rather than a thesis.
If you have never blogged before, spend some time familiarizing yourself with existing digital history blogs. As you will see, different bloggers have different styles.
Before the second class WordPress and create an account and a blog. If possible, create the blog under your own name (e.g., http://johndoe.blogspot.com); if not, choose something professional sounding. Post an introductory message about yourself and then send me the URL of your blog so that I can add you to the course blogroll.
2. Weekly class discussions (15%). This includes being prepared to discuss weekly assigned readings, as well as one of the case studies listed in the course schedule. Each week that has case studies listed you must:
Select one of suggested case studies on syllabus
Review case study (10 minutes) in class and lead discussion on it
3. Annotated bibliography (15%): Due March 17
Compile an annotated bibliography of ten (10) secondary sources (books, book chapters, journal articles, conference papers) related to your research topic. Each source should be annotated with at least one full paragraph (but no more than two) of summary and commentary. Briefly summarize the work’s argument, scope, and method, then briefly evaluate the work. The bibliography must use Chicago style, as in the following example:
Weinberger, David. Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York: Times Books, 2007.
Grading Criteria
- Sources — Are these authoritative scholarly sources? Are they all relevant to your topic? Are they reasonably recent, when possible?
- Annotations — Does every annotation both summarize and evaluate the source? Is the writing clear and useful?
- Mechanics — Is everything spelled and formatted correctly? Is all necessary information given in the citation? Have the instructions in the assignment been followed?
4. Digital Archive and Exhibit Assignment (40%)
Build an online archive and exhibit of primary sources using Omeka software. This archive and exhibit should be valuable for both scholars and for the general public. For examples see these student projects from a similar course at NYU.
This is a two part assignment:
Part One: Archive
The items in your archive must be primary sources. These may include “born-digital” items (e-mails, web pages, digital audio and video recordings) and digitized versions of sources that exist in a physical archive elsewhere. For more about primary sources (and for a short list of some of the most important digital archives on the web), see the American Library Association’s guide to using and finding primary sources on the web at http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rusa/sections/history/resources/pubs/usingprimarysources/index.cfm
Number of items: Please include 20-30 items in your archive.
Metadata: One thing that distinguishes an item in an archive from an item elsewhere is that the item in the archive is described. This description helps researchers find the item, and, when they find it, to retrieve some essential facts about its provenance and context. Items in an Omeka archive are described using the Simple Dublin Core metadata standard; “metadata standard” is just a fancy way to say “the pieces of information that should be provided for the item.” The Simple Dublin Core metadata standard says that you should provide 15 pieces of information about an item (when possible): Title, Creator, Subject, Date, Rights, and so on through 10 more data-entry fields. All fields are optional, and all fields may have more than one value (several Subjects, for instance).
Permissions: You will undoubtedly find that you have a difficult time determining whether you have permission to include certain materials in your archive. Copyright is an extremely complex subject, and we will go over it at length in class. But for right now, for the purposes of this assignment, keep in mind two things:
- Items in the Omeka system can be made private, and indeed, are private by default. This means that you should feel absolutely safe in including any and all items for the purposes of this course assignment, because you can always restrict the ability to see these items to people enrolled in this course.
- However, please do your best to create a digital archive that will be mostly or fully open to the public. If you are in doubt about whether you can include items in your archive, you can always ask for permission to include them. Please learn as much as you can about fair use before asking permission, however, and please do not pay for scanning services or for reproduction rights without consulting with me first. If you do decide to ask for permission to include items in your archive, be sure to keep good records of all your discussions / correspondence related to that permission.
Part Two: Exhibit
Definition: Archives and especially museums have vast collections of items in storage, only a small fraction of which are on display on any given day. The online exhibit you make for this course (using Omeka’s built-in exhibit builder) will, like a museum exhibit, be a meaningful selection of items from your archive accompanied by explanatory, interpretive text.
Criteria for Grading
The archive and exhibit assignment will be graded on four criteria:
- Collection — Is this a new, interesting, and valuable collection of items? Will it be useful and interesting both to historians and to the general public? Is it useful because it contains unique material that can’t be found elsewhere, because it puts online material that wasn’t previously online, or because it collects formerly dispersed sources into one place? How many items are in the collection? Are they items worthy of being collected and archived? Does the collection draw on all available sources, or has its creator apparently overlooked major related repositories?
- Metadata — How complete, accurate, and helpful is the metadata? Does the metadata follow standards? Does the metadata create interesting and useful links between the items in the archive?
- Apparatus — Does the exhibit highlight something meaningful and interesting about the materials in the archive? Is the exhibit text clear, interesting, and helpful? Are there useful additional web pages on the site, e.g., “About this Project,” “Timeline,” “Biographies”?
- Mechanics — Is everything spelled right? Does the site work? Do all the links work? Do all the images load? Have the rules of the assignment been followed? Is it a reasonably attractive web site? When necessary (such as for any quotations in the exhibit text), are any secondary sources properly cited?
5. Class presentations (10%): Presentation of your proposals during final weeks of the course.
