Author Archives: Chris Francese

Carlisle Indian Industrial School Project

7368794278_603109deacThis summer a team of researchers at Dickinson are beginning a multi-year project to develop a comprehensive digital resource regarding the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (CIIS). The project will bring together widely dispersed materials to aid research and study, and serve as a virtual home for the ongoing work of an active CIIS community of memory and inquiry. With support from an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Digital Humanities grant, and from the College’s Research and Development Committee, Jim Gerencser (College Archivist), Susan Rose (Professor of Sociology, Director Community Studies Center), and  Malinda Triller Doran (Special Collections Librarian) will begin in summer 2013 by digitizing materials held at the National Archives in Washington, DC.  In collaboration with student assistants, they will begin the process of transcribing documents, creating metadata, uploading materials, and analyzing the information.

7368693122_49305ea86cThe CIIS is a major site of memory for many Native peoples. Richard Henry Pratt implemented his vision for educating Native American students by removing them from their communities and bringing them to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. More than 10,000 Native American students from all over the country (and Puerto Rico) were enrolled at CIIS from 1879 to 1918. The school at Carlisle served as a model for many other non-reservation boarding schools across the country.

The CIIS and indigenous boarding school movement represents a very active area of research among scholars, teachers, students (both native and non-native), Carlisle-area residents, and descendants from across the U.S. and around the world.  Scholars are working hand in hand with descendants of the CIIS students, who are learning from and contributing to this research.  In the last decade, not only have many scholarly and popular books, articles and documentaries related to the CIIS been produced, but also a number of symposia and community events, such as pow-wows and commemorations, have been held. Dickinson College faculty members have been particularly active and involved with publications and events such as these.

The project aims at a comprehensive searchable database using the information contained in the digitized materials. Subsequent phases will develop the capability for user interactivity, so that individuals may contribute digitized photos, documents, oral histories, and other personal materials to the online collection. The site wll host teaching and learning materials utilizing the digitized content and database, and support the addition of original scholarly and popular works based on the CIIS Project resources.

Images: Press Department (circa 1902). Image from The Indian Industrial School Carlisle, Pa. 23rd Year, 1902. via flickr Copyright All rights reserved by DickinsonLibrary. Rose White Thunder, Daughter of Sioux Chief White Thunder, in Elk Tooth Dress, Carlisle (1883 – 1887). From J. N. Choate, photographer, Carlisle, Pa., A Souvenir of the Carlisle Indian School, 1902. via flickr Copyright All rights reserved by DickinsonLibrary

Clay Shirky to speak at Dickinson

Clay Shirky, professor at New York University and one of the world’s leading thinkers on digital technology and its social and economic effects, will deliver the Poitras-Gleim Keynote Lecture at Dickinson College on April 25th at 7 p.m. in the Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium.

Shirky, who served as the Edward R. Murrow Lecturer at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2010, will discuss how Internet technologies can help improve American government and democracy. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and the Harvard Business Review, and he has given talks at Oxford University, the U.S. State Department, and TED, where his speeches have been viewed by more than a million people. He is the author of several books, including Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, which was named one of the 100 greatest nonfiction books ever written by the The Guardian. Currently an associate professor in NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, he began his teaching career as the first professor of new media at Hunter College, where he developed the M.F.A. program in integrated media arts.

Shirky’s presentation marks the 50th annual lecture funded by the Poitras-Gleim endowment, a gift from Ted and Kay Gleim Poitras. The Student Senate Public Affairs Committee, which was created to absorb the Public Affairs Symposium and expand upon its mission of cross-disciplinary thought and discussion, is pleased to host Prof. Shirky’s visit. His address will serve as a capstone to a semester-long series of events—with addresses by, among others, Kris Perry, Richard Sander, and John Lott—organized by the committee and titled “The Next Great Debates: Perspectives on Emerging Problems.”

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Digital Pedagogy Keywords

Hey Dickinsonians, please join us in the Media Center for a NITLE webinar with the great Rebecca Frost Davis!

April 10, 3:00pm – 4:00pm

Rebecca Frost Davis, one of the general editors of The Digital Pedagogy Reader and Toolkit, will give an overview of this born-digital publication. Seminar participants will contribute to the project, which is aimed at aggregating digital tools used by adventurous practitioners and presenting pedagogical projects in their original forms.(Times EDT)

Hosted online via NITLE’s desktop videoconferencing platform
Description

How have new digital methods, tools, and networks changed pedagogy? How should we define such digital pedagogy? What trends and practices in digital pedagogy cross disciplines? The Digital Pedagogy Reader and Toolkit, a born-digital publication with Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, and Jentery Sayers as general editors, will aggregate the digital tools with which adventurous practitioners are experimenting and present pedagogical projects in their original forms. As part of the project, a group of experienced practitioners will curate sections around important keywords, such as “remix, “play,” “collaboration,” “race,” and “failure.” Taken together these significant terms define a new pedagogy for a digital age. For each keyword, curators will assemble a group of artifacts of innovative teaching and learning by highlighting particularly effective tools and pedagogical strategies, while incorporating examples of the resulting student work. This seminar will give an overview of digital pedagogy organized by keyword, illustrate the concept by looking at potential artifacts for one keyword, and invite the audience to contribute to this project by suggesting other keywords and artifacts.

Suggested Reading

Clement, Tanya E. “Multiliteracies in the Undergraduate Digital Humanities Curriculum: Skills, Principles, and Habits of Mind.” In Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Principles, Practices, and Politics, edited by Brett Hirsch. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2013.

Speaker

Rebecca Frost Davis develops programs and conducts research about the digital humanities, digital scholarship, and the integration of inquiry, pedagogy, and technology for teaching and learning across the humanities. She also writes and consults in these areas, drawing on a deep background in helping faculty and staff at liberal arts colleges explore these areas via a variety of workshops and seminars. She has particular expertise in inter-campus teaching and virtual collaboration. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in classical studies from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. (summa cum laude) in classical studies and Russian from Vanderbilt University.

New Course: Writing for Digital Environments

Dickinson will offer a new course in Fall 2013, under the auspices of the Norman M. Eberly Writing Center, called “Writing for Digital Environments” (WRPG 211). It will be taught by Sarah Kersh. Here is the description:

In this course, students will think about the stakes of writing in a range of digital environments—blogs, online forums, personal collections (pinterest, tumblr, twitter, facebook, etc), as well as the politics and history of publishing, copyright, and the public domain. In addition, students will examine archives and the responsibility of “holdings” within a library or other institution. Finally, students will learn the technical skills to create a class website as they consider writing across different environments.

The course has no prerequisites, is appropriate for first-year students, and is writing intensive.

The Future Possibilities for Technology in Higher Education

A website called “Evolllution” (Illuminating the Life Long Learning Movement) has published a fine podcast interview with ed. tech. futurist and NITLE stalwart Bryan Alexander, who was on campus at Dickinson in the summer of 2012 to consult about the successful proposal we put together for the Mellon Foundation. In the interview he addresses a number of pressing current concerns, and urges those in higher ed. to think more about the medium to long term future. Here are a few choice bits:

On the coming “MOOC hype crash”:

When we look at MOOCs, what we’re beginning to see is that hype builds to really extraordinary levels; New York Times op-eds, discussions on the radio, discussions on TV news. Just in my own work, talking with campus leaders, talking with presidents, trustees, deans over the past year, I heard MOOCs come up just almost everywhere I go. And so we have to watch out for the possibility that at some point, perhaps this very year, all of that could just collapse. The faith could just dissipate or the interest could go away. And again that feeds in itself. Once people see other people leaving something, that may provoke them to leave as well — a pretty vicious circle — so MOOC providers need to really watch out for that.

I know that following the dot-com bust in 2000-01, many campuses backed away from aggressive plans for doing things with technology. They just felt, “Ah, well maybe this isn’t going to be a big deal after all.” It’s possible that if we see a MOOC hype crash, that we might see something similar to the rest of online technology. It could impact other fields like digitization of materials. It could impact the move of classes to course management systems. It could even impact the digital humanities movement.

On challenges and obstacles to the creative use of technology:

One is, especially since 2008, financial stresses. We’ve been living in the shadows of the financial crash of 2008 and it’s impacted all kinds of institutions in different ways. . . .The cuts are so large that it becomes really challenging to say, “As a campus planner, we’d like to ask for money to do this brand new thing.” That’s not always going to fly.

The second problem is that we have a huge crisis in higher education, … [with] public faith in the value of higher education. I’ve never experienced this in my lifetime, this kind of skepticism. They say that colleges costs too much, that universities deliver too little for the price, and when I talk to a campus leaders right now, they say they’ve never seen such pressure exerted by parents and students on them. “Am I really getting a good value for all of the money that we’re going into loan for?” That makes a lot of campuses want to draw in to return to their strengths, which for them are often historical strengths, rather than futuristic strengths.

Another challenge is … sociological challenges. Most faculty are trained in graduate school to be researchers in their specific field … and that’s their main focus. And when they leave graduate school and they head into a profession, their main job is to succeed at that and get tenured in that field. They are usually not trained very much in pedagogy and teaching and learning. Some are, some develop a passion for it, but most are not trained. … Their experiences in technology are often rapidly outdated, if you think about someone who got their doctorate in the year 1990. Surfing the web didn’t exist; the internet was barely on anybody’s radar at the time. What kind of training do they have to be able to teach students through social media? Through augmented reality? That’s a huge, huge gap to cross. For professional development, faculty didn’t cross that gap. But professional development has been hit very, very hard by the recession and the professional development now occurs through new technologies, through video conferencing or social media, again, which a lot of these faculty weren’t ready for. We’ve seen a huge generational divide.

Now there are all kinds of exceptions to this. There are younger faculty who don’t want to do anything with this [and] there are older faculty who are very innovative. But broadly speaking, the generational gap is very, very large. The Pew Internet American Life Project, which is a tremendous research project for how Americans actually use technology, keeps finding a substantial general gap where people over 55 are much less likely to use just any technology that they look at, from mobile devices to social media.

Check out the whole thing, in downloadable audio and in transcript, here.

 

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities at Dickinson

Please spread the word about this job opportunity! Application review begins March 15, 2013.

With generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Dickinson College invites applications for a postdoctoral fellowship in Digital Humanities in the academic year 2013-14, with the potential for an additional year of support. The Fellow will work as a catalyst for faculty innovation by planning, promoting, and implementing strategies to encourage faculty discourse about pedagogy, e-learning tools, and the integration of digital media into teaching and scholarship. The postdoctoral fellowship is an academic appointment reporting to the Dean of the College through the faculty chair of the Digital Humanities Advisory Committee, but the Fellow will be housed alongside the Academic Technology staff in the Library and Information Services division. The Fellow will a) teach one or two courses each year within his or her area of academic specialty; b) guide and participate in workshops for arts, humanities, and humanistic social science faculty regarding disciplinary use of digital tools for curricular and research purposes; and c) work with LIS staff to train students to use digital tools and technologies in order to prepare them for significant student-faculty research collaborations. The Fellow will be eligible for internal grants for pedagogical innovation, as well as standard faculty support for travel and professional development. The salary will be $50,000 plus benefits. Dickinson College is a private, highly selective, liberal arts college located within two hours of major research institutions and metropolitan areas.

The Fellow must normally have received the PhD by July 1, 2013, and within the last three years, and not have held a tenure-track position. Candidates should be conducting research that requires demonstrated expertise in the use of Digital Humanities in their scholarly field.

For further information and to apply, please visit the Dickinson HR website and click on “Faculty.”

For more about digital humanities at Dickinson, please visit: http://blogs.dickinson.edu/digitalhumanties/

 

NITLE Seminar: Teaching and Learning with Omeka

NITLE sponsors an ongoing series of videoconference seminars of interest to faculty working in the digital humanities, academic technologists, and librarians at liberal arts colleges. The next one has to do with in an important tool called Omeka, which is particularly useful for managing collections of images. The following is reposted from NITLE’s website. A group will gather to watch in the Academic Technology conference room in the basement of Bosler Hall. I hope you can join us!
–Chris Francese

Sharon Leon (Center for History and New Media, George Mason University), “Focus on the Item: Teaching and Learning with Omeka”

February 22, 2:00pm – 3:00pm

We encourage faculty, instructional technologists, librarians and others from the NITLE Network interested in building online collections and narrative exhibits with students to attend this seminar. Attendance by institutional teams is encouraged; individuals are also welcome to participate. (Times EST)

Hosted online via NITLE’s videoconferencing platform
Description

In this conversation, Sharon Leon, Director of Public Projects at the Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media will introduce Omeka, a free and open source web publishing platform for scholars and cultural heritage professionals, and Omeka.net, a hosted version of the software. Leon will offer an overview of the main elements of an Omeka site and some of the ways that the open source software’s functionality can be extended through the addition of plugins. Next, she will showcase some of the ways that faculty are using Omeka in liberal arts classrooms by working with students to build digital collections and constructing narrative exhibits, both as individual projects and as group work. Participants in the discussion will come away with an understanding of a range of constructive assignments for students that focus their attention on a careful examination of cultural heritage materials, and that result in non-traditional narrative assessments.

Recommended Reading
Speaker

Sharon Leon is the Director of Public Projects at the Center for History and New Media and Research Associate Professor at George Mason University. Leon received her bachelors of arts degree in American Studies from Georgetown University in 1997, and her doctorate in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2004. Her book, An Image of God: the Catholics Struggle with Eugenics is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press (May 2013). Her work has appeared in Church History and the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. She is currently doing research on Catholicism in the United States after Vatican II. At CHNM, Leon oversees collaborations with library, museum, and archive partners from around the country. She directs the Center’s digital exhibit and archiving projects, as well as research and tool development for public history, including Omeka and Scripto. Finally, Leon writes and presents on using technology to improve the teaching and learning of historical thinking skills.

Registration

Please register online by Wednesday, February 20, 2013. Participation in NITLE Shared Academics events is open to all active member institutions of the NITLE Network as a benefit of membership and as space allows. No additional registration fee applies.

Questions

For more information about this event, please contact Rebecca Davis at rdavis@nitle.org.

Mellon Grant for Digital Humanities at Dickinson

Dickinson has been awarded a $700,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a series of new and sustained digital-humanities initiatives. The grant will be used to further infuse the liberal-arts curriculum with the latest digital technologies; to conduct instructional workshops for students and faculty; and to create a virtual studio to publish and showcase digital projects, among other initiatives.

Coupled with a recent grant from the Henry Luce Foundation‘s Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment, Dickinson has received $1.1 million in grants for liberal-arts curriculum expansion since November 2012.

Dickinson has a rich history of launching and sustaining complex interdisciplinary digital-humanities initiatives. The House Divided research engine is an ongoing collaboration between Associate Professor of History Matt Pinsker and his students that has brought the Civil War to life for students of American history since 2005.

“The two grants are the product of faculty creativity in imagining new ways to enrich our students’ learning experience,” said Provost and Dean Neil Weissman. “They reflect Dickinson’s commitment to stay apace with the best new developments in higher education.”

According to Weissman, navigating and accessing digitized information is a critical component of research and other scholarly pursuits and is vital to career preparation. “Digital literacy is a key dimension of students’ 21st century skill set,” he said. “To that end, we must continue to enhance our digital resources and emphasize the library as the central focus of campus intellectual life.”

For decades, Dickinson faculty and staff have developed and used digital technology in both scholarship and teaching. Longstanding digital projects in the humanities include The Mixxer, a site similar to Facebook that enables language classes to converse with native speakers using Skype; House Divided, a research engine for K-12 educators that brings the Civil War era to life; Dickinson College Commentaries, a project that employs digital tools to enhance Greek and Latin texts with notes, graphics, video and audio elements; and Romantic Natural History, an online tool that surveys and organizes texts, images and scholarship that link Romanticism and natural history.

Grant funding will help create and encourage further faculty-student collaboration in the digital humanities. Internal faculty grants will support significant expansion of existing digital projects and pilot the use of new tools in teaching and research, including additional student-faculty research opportunities. An intensive summer digital bootcamp will better train students for robust collaboration with faculty on complex digital projects and Dickinson will annually award students with monetary prizes for the best new-media work.

The digital-humanities initiative will be overseen by an advisory committee with the assistance of a grant-funded postdoctoral fellow in the field. Classics Professor Christopher Francese is chair of the advisory committee.

Since 2007, Dickinson has received more than $2 million in grant support from the Mellon Foundation, leading to the establishment of Dickinson’s Center for Sustainability Education and, most recently, a Dickinson-led civilian-military project between select liberal-arts colleges and neighboring military institutions that identifies opportunities for long-term collaboration.

Source: http://www.dickinson.edu/news-and-events/news/2012-13/Digital-Dickinson/