{"id":602,"date":"2014-02-25T18:43:34","date_gmt":"2014-02-25T18:43:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/?p=602"},"modified":"2014-02-25T18:43:34","modified_gmt":"2014-02-25T18:43:34","slug":"digital-bootcamp-prepares-students-for-a-future-thats-already-swirling-around-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/2014\/02\/25\/digital-bootcamp-prepares-students-for-a-future-thats-already-swirling-around-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Bootcamp Prepares Students for a Future that’s Already Swirling around Us"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"student<\/a>

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.<\/p><\/div>\n

by Tony Moore\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The digital age is thoroughly upon us, and students eager to tackle it recently took part in Dickinson\u2019s Digital Bootcamp, where they got their hands on some shiny new tools.<\/p>\n

THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES NEVER SLEEP<\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt usually takes 15 to 16 weeks just to get a taste of what it\u2019s about,\u201d said Matt Kochis,\u00a0Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities, who mapped the project’s curriculum and ran the boot camp’s day-to-day operations. \u201cThe online and on-campus portion of it was about two weeks. The actual work\u2014they did it in five days\u2019 time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Funded by a Mellon Foundation grant and part of Dickinson\u2019s ongoing efforts in the\u00a0digital humanities<\/a>, the Digital Bootcamp enrolled 17 students (of 26 applicants), among them Frank Vitale \u201916.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I applied for the Digital Bootcamp, I was hoping to expand upon skills I\u2019d learned during my time as an intern for the college archive\u2019s Carlisle Indian Industrial School project,\u201d said the history major. \u201cIt did that and more, and I walked away with greater technical know-how for using a lot of powerful digital tools.”<\/p>\n

WHAT CAME OUT OF IT ALL<\/h3>\n

After two weeks of instruction focused on building a sample digital project (an approach Professor of Classical Languages\u00a0Christopher Francese<\/a>, who helped spearhead the boot camp, described as \u201cless yak, more hack\u201d), students were set loose to create. And create they did, with multimedia projects emerging on topics ranging from Dickinson\u2019s Kade House to Three Mile Island to a timeline of the history of African-American students at the college.<\/p>\n

Vitale created a deeply personal project\u2014a multimedia Drupal site called\u00a0Invasion From the Front Lines<\/a>, which detailed his grandfather\u2019s World War II experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the time my father was young, my grandfather told the family that he was a typist during the war and had never left Paris,\u201d Vitale said. \u201cWe\u2019ve 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\u00a0uncovering this history was an incredibly moving process.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cBootcamp students will be helping me research and design exhibits for a new online museum of Dickinson\u2019s history, currently called the Dickinsonia Project,\u201d said\u00a0Emily Pawley<\/a>, assistant professor of history, who notes that some of the student projects from the Bootcamp might themselves be incorporated into the Dickinsonia Project.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s success is any indication, though, he might have more campers than he knows what to do with. Which is a good thing.<\/p>\n

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 \u201914 and Michael D’Aprix \u201914\u2014both of whom took on ArcGIS and online mapping duties. Also on board was the Waidner-Spahr Library\u2019s Don Sailer ’09, digital projects consultant, who worked with students on Photoshop, iMovie and Audacity and assisted Kochis with teaching Drupal and WordPress.<\/em><\/p>\n

READ MORE<\/h3>\n

See a selection of this year\u2019s Digital Bootcamp projects (all students are from the class of 2016, unless otherwise noted):<\/p>\n

Frank Vitale\u2019s\u00a0Invasion From the Front Lines<\/a><\/p>\n

Barrett Ziegler\u2019s\u00a0Place and Identity: Stories of Russian Citizens in the United States<\/a><\/p>\n

Ashieda McKoy ’14\u2019s\u00a0Digital Timeline: Dickinson\u2019s African-American Student History<\/a><\/p>\n

Santiago Princ and Rachel Schilling\u2019s Department of German\u00a0Kade House site<\/a><\/p>\n

Jaime Phillips\u2019s\u00a0maps and timeline of the Joseph Priestley Award at Dickinson<\/a><\/p>\n

Published on the Dickinson website<\/a> Feb. 14, 2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Tony Moore\u00a0 The digital age is thoroughly upon us, and students eager to tackle it recently took part in Dickinson\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}