The Fulbright – National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship is a new component of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program that provides opportunities for U.S. citizens to participate in an academic year of overseas travel and digital storytelling in up to three countries on a globally significant social or environmental topic. This Fellowship is made possible through a partnership between the U.S. Department of State and the National Geographic Society.

The wide variety of new digital media tools and platforms has created an unprecedented opportunity for people from all disciplines and backgrounds to share observations and personal narratives with global audiences online. These storytelling tools are powerful resources as we seek to expand our knowledge of pressing transnational issues and build ties across cultures.
Through the Fulbright – National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship, Fulbrighters will undertake an in-depth examination of a globally relevant issue, comparing and contrasting how that issue is experienced across borders. Utilizing a variety of digital storytelling tools, including text, photography, video, audio, graphic illustrations, and/or social media, Fellows will tell their stories, or the stories of those they meet, publishing their work on National Geographic media platforms with the support of National Geographic’s editorial team.

In addition to receiving Fulbright benefits (for travel, stipend, health, etc.), Fellows will receive instruction in digital storytelling techniques, including effective blog writing, video production, and photography, by National Geographic staff prior to their departure. Fellows will be paired with one or more National Geographic editors for continued training, editorial direction and mentoring throughout their Fulbright grant period. Fellows will provide material for a blog on the National Geographic website on a frequent and ongoing basis throughout their grant term, and will have the opportunity to develop additional content for use by National Geographic and the Department of State.

For the Fellowship’s inaugural year of 2014, applications will be accepted for the following themes: Biodiversity, Cities, Climate Change, Cultures, Energy, Food, Oceans, and Water.
http://us.fulbrightonline.org/fulbright-nat-geo-fellowship

2014-2015 Competition Deadline: February 28, 2014 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time

Jeffrey McClurken, Professor of History & American Studies University of Mary Washington, spoke to 40 Dickinson faculty, librarians, and administrators about the digital liberal arts

Uncomfortable–but not paralyzed. When it comes to the new methods and media of digital liberal arts, this should be the expected feeling for both students and teachers, says Jeff McClurken. The historian and digital humanist, Professor of History at the University of Mary Washington, visited Dickinson for a wide ranging all-day workshop with faculty, librarians, and administrators on various aspects of the digital humanities on Friday, January 10, 2014. Topics ranged from the question of naming and definition (not truly significant issues, he argues), to sample projects, genres of tools, and discussions of the notion of digital literacy (he prefers the term “digital fluency”), and how to evaluate digital work for tenure and promotion.

Rather than focusing on the notion of digital literacy, of making students better consumers of new media, the applications of DH in a liberal arts environment, he argued, should involve “teaching and learning through online, public, creative digital media.” When designing digital classroom projects we should encourage student creativity. The very act of producing makes students more sophisticated consumers of digital media, more “literate” in that realm, aware of its rhetoric, its genres, it pitfalls, and its possibilities. That initial discomfort with stepping outside the bounds of a traditional research paper can be a barrier, but as long as students do not feel paralyzed, they can move forward. McClurken places a significant onus on students to master tools on their own, after a brief introduction during class time. That flexibility and ability to experiment and master new tools and techniques is a key skill to be acquired in the process, he said.

Group digital projects teach effective collaboration and project management, but they have to be orchestrated carefully to ensure proper credit is given to each student. He teaches a full semester digital history seminar with 16-20 students who complete significant digital projects over the course of the semester (e.g. The James Farmer Lectures, James Monroe Museum Political Cartoons). They come up with a plan, including benchmarks of progress, and a contract regarding how the work will get done, and by whom. He pointed out that the plans are almost always too ambitious at first. The students tend to offer to do a quantity of work that would be considered entirely unreasonable if it had been assigned by the professor. The platforms he prefers for this kind of work are WordPress and Omeka.

One interesting example he pointed to of student initiative in this realm came from the Monroe Political Cartoons project, where the students took it upon themselves to create a video on the process of creating their scanned images–how the editing was done, what alterations were made to the source files. This kind of documentation and transparency would be helpful to many much grander digital projects, he noted.

He argued that a key challenge for the digital humanities in an educational context is getting students to think self-consciously about their own digital presences. Each student at University of Mary Washington is now given his or her own domain name, and encouraged to create his or her own digital portfolio of work during their student years, an Online Resume and Digital Portfolio (e.g. http://caitlinpringlemurphy.com/). This has obvious utility on the job market, but it also has the advantage of making sure that a student’s work is clearly associated  with his or her name, and of making sure they receive public credit. The program got going as a pilot for 40 faculty who were given their own domains, and was then extended to students, and will eventually be continued for alumni for a nominal fee. There are also plans at UMW to create a Digital Knowledge Center with student tutors, analogous to a traditional college writing center.

These are just a few of the highlights from a very stimulating day. A large and up-to-date collection of links, along with an outline of the whole presentation, can be found here.

In an insightful recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education (“No More Digitally Challenged Liberal-Arts Majors: How to give B.A.’s in arts and humanities more career options without abandoning the life of the mind”), William Pannapacker relates a number of conversations he has had with employers and institutions providing internships for students at Hope College, where he teaches. In short, they stated what many of us already recognize: liberal arts students have learned how to write well, synthesize large amounts of varied information, read carefully and critically, and bring a curiosity and ability to learn quickly. Yet many liberal arts students share one critical flaw that plagues students at all kinds of institutions: although they are users of some social media, most students today struggle to create meaningful content and to actively use computer-related skills that are essential in many modern workplaces.

I posted the article on Facebook and asked alumni to comment on the article and how it relates to the training they received at Dickinson College and how it prepared them for life after college, and the responses were fascinating.

Courtney Cacatian, a policy studies major who is now Marketing Manager at Arlington Convention and Visitors Service noted that learning to make effective presentations, in addition to other practical skills, made her a more attractive hire. However, she agreed with Pannapacker and his call for colleges to provide other technical skills. Employers expect today’s graduates to know social media and often digital marketing. A history alumnus who is now an administrator at a private college elaborated, saying that he looks to hire people who have a “digital win” on their resumes. They should either be able to organize and analyze data in spreadsheets and databases, complete on online project such as a blog or webpage, or be familiar with industry-specific software. Alicia LeBlanc could not agree more, and she made the important observation that as much as technical skills are important now, they will only become more important in the future. Although she had some technical skills before coming to Dickinson  College and acquired more while majoring in French and English, see argued that “it’s about applying the curiosity and confidence we liberal-arts majors gain in research & critical thinking to a different format: technology. Frankly, it’s the same process.”

In my mind, Alicia hit it on the nail and reflects my view (and Pannapacker’s it seems) about the value of the liberal arts. What we do best is to nurture students’ curiosity and provide them with broad-based research and critical thinking skills. Rather than training students for a specific job or even profession, we give them the tools to succeed in any job or profession because they have learned how to learn throughout their lifetimes.

So, how can we liberal arts schools meet the professional needs of our students? The history major suggested that the best option would be for departments to “actively replace papers and tests with digital projects that can be demonstrated” after graduation such as constructing digitized archives, making QR codes for cemetery headstones that are no longer readable, creating projects that, for example, create a statistical analysis of average grades for papers based on time of submission.  Alicia agrees that if technical skills are not taught in college, where will they be? A good friend of mine who studied history with me as undergraduate at the University of Missouri, chimed in. For nearly two decades he has been in management and training positions in a number of companies and is now a director of brand and international operations, so he certainly has a sense of what employers today need and want. Of the comments of Pannapacker and my former students, he simply said, “I can’t agree enough! Digital skills (beyond the basics in spreadsheets, presentations, documents and social media) is so important, no matter what you end up doing.” The last word goes to Alicia and her desire for greater dialogue with employers. Alicia argued for a “greater overall marketing campaign … (and we all partake in this, in living our lives as successful, in any sense of the term, liberal-arts people) to remind people of this usefulness of liberal arts.”

Hopefully the conversation on this topic will continue. Although liberal arts institutions are not (and in my mind should not) narrowly train students for particular professions, it is incumbent upon us to continue providing our students with the broad range of skills that can allow them to be successful in their lives after graduation. Whereas we once could teach students to read deeply, analyze critically, and write persuasively, these skills are not enough. They are still essential and provide the foundations for all else, but we must also begin to think of ways that we can introduce technical skills into our classrooms to complement the training we have long provided.

I encourage all readers to continue this conversation at the Dickinson College Digital Humanities Advisory Committee’s blog and on my Teaching History blog.

–Karl Qualls

The New York Times has a front page story today under the title, “As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry.” I hated most everything about this story: the assumption that students choose either science or the humanities, the over-hyped crisis rhetoric, the manufactured horse race . . . BUT buried in there is a note about classics students at Stanford using a text annotation program called RapGenius, which is interesting.

Susan Stephens at Stanford has a class called “Teaching Classics in the Digital Age” that deals with many aspects of pedagogy and research in classics. Jeremy Dean of RapGenius was visiting the class one day this month, and the NYT reporter attended as well, hence the inclusion of this in the story.

The attractive thing about RapGenius is its large community of users, and also its flexibility for annotation. You can annotate by sentence, phrase, word, whatever, and easily add images, audio, and other media to the pop up annotations. Though originally designed for obsessive rap fans to analyze lyrics, the potential of the tool for other branches of the humanities is obvious, and recognized clearly by the company. They hired Dean to be their humanities specialist, and they are developing an alternate brand for the same tool, Poetry Genius.

Oh, and it collects statistics on lyrics and creates effortless visualizations, a la Google Ngrams. Here is the graph for the occurrence of the words “love,” “hate,” and “rhyme.”

As for the humanities crisis, don’t ask a Latinist about that. We’ve taken some hits in the last century or so. On the other hand, my friends in math and science fields certainly don’t seem to feel that everything is ducky in their disciplines. It is a struggle to get students to substantively engage in science and math, just as it is a struggle for us in the humanities. Students are often utilitarian in their thinking, and this should be no cause for surprise or lament. We should use every tool at our disposal to promote learning and intelligent living in all disciplines, and to create connections between, say, computer science and humanities. This is an attractive enterprise to some computer scientists of my acquaintance as well.

Prof. Stephens’ course is a model of this kind of forward, engaged thinking. The description of the course goals lays it out nicely:

This Workshop is predicated on four assumptions: (1) on-line teaching is here to stay; (2) within the career trajectory of those of you who are now graduate students it will replace or force essential modification of traditional classroom and book-centered learning; (3) the field is growing exponentially in tools and sophistication of applications; and (4) we do not all come to these emerging technologies with equal expertise. For those of us with low technical skills, the challenges may often seem to outweigh the rewards.

Therefore the Workshop has as its primary goal to allow us to gain familiarity with a broad range of digital materials currently available for teaching classical subjects (1) initially by engaging with experienced users or designers of various digital media, then (2) by experimenting ourselves with a selection of sites in order to evaluate what works in various teaching environments. You should learn how and in what ways a medium can enhance (or distract from) learning, gain familiarity with various ways of assessing the success of various media in teaching, and understand issues of intellectual property, copyright, and plagiarism. A secondary goal is to facilitate thinking collaboratively about pedagogical issues and to encourage departmental sharing of individual digital classroom materials.

The course is a mix of presentations about all kinds of online resources and digital tools, along with a practicum component in which students create lessons using them. All along there is searching discussion of how to marry tools to learning goals in an intelligent way. RapGenius may not be your cup of tea, but the kind of dialogue going on at Stanford among humanists and those in other fields about digital tools and humanistic methods is exciting, forward thinking, and unfortunately missed by the big media outlets. But then again, I guess that’s why we have blogs.

–Chris Francese

The Dickinson College Department of Classical Studies will sponsor a full day Saturday Workshop of interest to teachers and students of the classical world and of archaeology.

Ancient Corinth and Roman City Planning

Saturday, November 16, 2013, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Tome Hall Room 115.

Speakers:

Dr. David Gilman Romano, Karabots Professor of Greek Archaeology at the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, and Director of the Corinth Computer Project and the Archaeological Mapping Lab

Dr. Nicholas Stapp, Director of Geospatial Research at the Archaeological Mapping Lab at the University of Arizona

There will be four hour-long sessions, with time for questions and discussion. Lunch will be provided. The workshop is free of charge, but to order materials and food we need to have an accurate count of attendees. To register please contact Terri Blumenthal at blumentt@dickinson.edu by November 10, 2013.

Description:

When the former Greek city of Corinth was settled as a Roman colony by Julius Caesar in 44 BC Roman land surveyors were called upon to lay out the urban as well as the rural aspects of the new colony. In the 70s AD when a second Roman colony was founded there, again the agrimensores were involved in new organization of the city and landscape. The agrimensores were Roman land surveyors responsible for the planning and measurement of cities and landscapes all over the Roman world. They were a professional group, usually a part of the Roman army, and we know a good deal about their work from a compilation of ancient texts known as the Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum. The Corpus was originally compiled in the fourth or fifth century AD, but includes texts as early as the first century AD. These texts give us substantial information about the training of the agrimensores and their day-to-day activities as well as some of the practical issues that they faced in the field.

Since 1988 a research team from the Mediterranean Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania has been involved in making a computerized architectural and topographical survey of the Roman colony of Corinth. The leader of this team, Prof. David Gilman Romano (Karabots Professor of Greek Archaeology at the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona), will present a workshop on the results of the Corinth Computer Project, http://corinthcomputerproject.org/ as they relate to the ancient written evidence for Roman city planning. He will be joined by Dr. Nicholas Stapp who has worked with Dr. Romano on the Corinth Computer Project since 1995. He is an archaeologist and an expert in the use of new emerging technologies in higher education and research.

In the workshop participants will learn some of the Latin terms that refer to Roman surveying and city and land planning and, in addition, they will learn about high tech methods utilized in the research: electronic total station survey, digital cartography and remote sensing, utilizing air photos, balloon photos and satellite images, all in the study of an ancient city. The planning of the urban and rural aspects of two Roman Colonies at Corinth are outlined in detail, including some of the social, economic and political implications of these foundations.

Anyone with an interest in Roman culture and archaeology; digital cartography, GIS, and spatial analysis; ancient and modern surveying techniques; or city-planning and urban design will find this a rewarding workshop.

Funding for this workshop is provided by the Roberts Fund for Classical Studies at Dickinson College.

Russian Rooms is a multimedia project created and curated by Maria Rubin, Visiting International Scholar at Dickinson for the 2012-2014, showing portraits of average Russians in their home environment. You can read about each person and listen to an interview with them (in Russian) while viewing their portraits and the picture of the room they call their own. As discussed an earlier post, all the material created in this project becomes a part of the open teaching resources of the Dickinson Russian department, and is available to anyone else who wishes to use it.

My goal this summer was to do 15 new portraits and interviews; in the end, with funding from the Mellon Digital Humanities grant at Dickinson, I managed to interview and photograph 20 subjects and the rooms they live in.

Five of the subjects were of non-Russian ethnicity, specifically two Tatars, one Tajik, one Azerbaijan and one British. Four of them are Muslim. I sought out these subjects to give a more accurate account of Russian diversity today. Other subject varied widely in age and occupation, which also added diversity to the range of portraits.

The project involved travelling throughout Moscow, as well as through the extensive Moscow countryside, arranging interviews, taking photographs, and often returning to improve the portraits or to take another picture of the room where the subject lives. All in all, one portrait could take up to five hours work.

I now have about 40 photographs (two for each). They will require further editing, and I also need to do further work on writing a bilingual Russian-English text for each subject putting the information from the interviews together to compile brief biographies. I hope to have finished doing this and putting the results onto the Russian Rooms blog by the end of October.

The major (unforeseen) result of this summer’s work was a conceptual reorientation of the project: I moved from thinking about Russian individuals and their personal space to thinking more deeply about what Russianness means. This was triggered by the fact that I was travelling and photographing between Russia and America: I discovered that a “Russian room” can be a room in Russia where a non-Russian (Tajik, Tatar) can live; but one can also have “Russian rooms” outside of Russia – that is, places where émigré Russians have made their homes. Some questions arise: What unites them? How do they differ?

In future I would like to expand the number of photos, and move outside the Moscow region in my search for subjects (perhaps to a region of Russia where different ethnicities live, such as Tatarstan). I would also like to continue taking pictures of Russians and their rooms in America.

Maria Rubin