Ashieda McKoy ’14 (left) and Assistant Professor of History Emily Pawley discuss McKoy’s project: a timeline of the African-American student experience at Dickinson. Photo by Carl Socolow ’77.

by Tony Moore 

The digital age is thoroughly upon us, and students eager to tackle it recently took part in Dickinson’s Digital Bootcamp, where they got their hands on some shiny new tools.

THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES NEVER SLEEP

The first of its kind geared toward undergraduate students, the boot camp offered students a full-speed-ahead regimen of ArchGIS mapping, Drupal and WordPress site management and media development focused on Audacity, podcasts and iMovie work. All over the course of three months. Wait, check that.

“It usually takes 15 to 16 weeks just to get a taste of what it’s about,” said Matt Kochis, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities, who mapped the project’s curriculum and ran the boot camp’s day-to-day operations. “The online and on-campus portion of it was about two weeks. The actual work—they did it in five days’ time.”

Funded by a Mellon Foundation grant and part of Dickinson’s ongoing efforts in the digital humanities, the Digital Bootcamp enrolled 17 students (of 26 applicants), among them Frank Vitale ’16.

“When I applied for the Digital Bootcamp, I was hoping to expand upon skills I’d learned during my time as an intern for the college archive’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School project,” said the history major. “It did that and more, and I walked away with greater technical know-how for using a lot of powerful digital tools.”

WHAT CAME OUT OF IT ALL

After two weeks of instruction focused on building a sample digital project (an approach Professor of Classical Languages Christopher Francese, who helped spearhead the boot camp, described as “less yak, more hack”), students were set loose to create. And create they did, with multimedia projects emerging on topics ranging from Dickinson’s Kade House to Three Mile Island to a timeline of the history of African-American students at the college.

Vitale created a deeply personal project—a multimedia Drupal site called Invasion From the Front Lines, which detailed his grandfather’s World War II experience.

“From the time my father was young, my grandfather told the family that he was a typist during the war and had never left Paris,” Vitale said. “We’ve discovered he was on the front lines for the majority of the European theater and received five Bronze Stars for his bravery during the conflict. Needless to say, this came as a shock to all of us, even my grandmother, and uncovering this history was an incredibly moving process.”

The Digital Bootcamp ended with a digital poster session, which Francese had hoped would function as a job fair, facilitating future collaboration between students and faculty members. And it looks like it worked.

“Bootcamp students will be helping me research and design exhibits for a new online museum of Dickinson’s history, currently called the Dickinsonia Project,” said Emily Pawley, assistant professor of history, who notes that some of the student projects from the Bootcamp might themselves be incorporated into the Dickinsonia Project.

Already looking ahead to next year, Francese said that faculty members have a queue of projects ready for future Bootcampers to tackle, and he sees this need propelling both faculty and student interest. If this year’s success is any indication, though, he might have more campers than he knows what to do with. Which is a good thing.

After the Digital Humanities Advisory Committee breathed life into the Digital Bootcamp, and Francese and Kochis got it off the ground, the program was additionally facilitated by Daniel Plekhov ’14 and Michael D’Aprix ’14—both of whom took on ArcGIS and online mapping duties. Also on board was the Waidner-Spahr Library’s Don Sailer ’09, digital projects consultant, who worked with students on Photoshop, iMovie and Audacity and assisted Kochis with teaching Drupal and WordPress.

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See a selection of this year’s Digital Bootcamp projects (all students are from the class of 2016, unless otherwise noted):

Frank Vitale’s Invasion From the Front Lines

Barrett Ziegler’s Place and Identity: Stories of Russian Citizens in the United States

Ashieda McKoy ’14’s Digital Timeline: Dickinson’s African-American Student History

Santiago Princ and Rachel Schilling’s Department of German Kade House site

Jaime Phillips’s maps and timeline of the Joseph Priestley Award at Dickinson

Published on the Dickinson website Feb. 14, 2014

The Digital Boot Camp @ Dickinson College is an intensive 10-day training course to help students develop skills to produce and manage digital media content. During the program, participants learn about the basics of how to manage and display content in WordPress and Drupal, edit audio and video content, use Geographic Information Systems to create custom maps, and more. The poster session on January 27 will allow students to showcase their digital projects to interested faculty. Please stop by next Monday anytime between 12:00-1:30pm in one of the Social Hall sections in the Holland Union Building to see what the participants have digitally created. Food and beverages will be provided.

2014 Digital Boot Campers

• Santiago Princ (Computer Science)
• Barrett Ziegler (Russian Studies)
• Chloe Miller (Archaeology and Anthropology)
• Frank Vitale (History)
• Laura Colleluori (Theatre Arts and Italian Studies)
• Zha Xueyin (History and Sociology)
• Colin Tripp (English and Creative Writing)
• Rachel Schilling (English and German)
• Allison Charles (English and Creative Writing)
• Max Rubinstein (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology)
• Rachel Kruchten (Psychology)
• Ashieda McKoy (Political Science and Creative Writing)
• Amy Hudock (undeclared)
• Benjamin West (Archaeology)
• Xiang Wei (undelcared)
• Caio Santos Rodrigues (Psychology)
• Jaime Phillips (Environmental Science)

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

Today marks the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln delivering his Gettysburg Address at the dedication ceremony of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in 1863. Containing only 10 sentences and delivered in an elegant two-minute address, this speech is an enduring emblem of American culture. In celebration of this momentous event within the Civil War, Dickinson’s House Divided was asked by the Google Cultural Institute to curate an exhibit that brings together for the first time high resolution scans of the five known copies of the Gettysburg Address written in Lincoln’s own handwriting. These online versions of the speech that the Google Institute has uploaded were taken from copies submitted by the White House, the Library of Congress, Cornell University, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. On the site, Matthew Pinsker, the director of the House Divided Project and a history professor at Dickinson College, states that the story behind Lincoln’s speech begins on a Tuesday evening, July 7, 1863. For more information about the project, read the following article published today in The Washington Post.

Or better yet, visit the official site: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Addresses.