at the College of William & Mary
When I conducted my first oral history project back in 1999, I used a cassette recorder to tape the interviews, and a 35 mm camera to take images on slide film. The materials were deposited in a library archive, only available to users on-site. Advances in technology over the past decade, particularly with digital audio recorders and video cameras, have reshaped the options and opportunities for collecting, archiving, and providing access to oral histories.
The educational blogosphere has definitely been abuzz about e-learning in the last year. One part of the conversation has turned to leveraging technology to develop alternatives to the term paper. Assigning different kinds of writing assignments can hold students to the rigorous research standards of traditional long papers while also helping students gain skills in different writing and presentation styles as well as bringing new kinds of technology-based blended learning to the classroom. In this post, Arts Librarian Kathleen DeLaurenti shares some of her experiences helping to develop alternative assignments.
Cued-up audio files of film commentary are becoming more popular. Independently recording audio commentary for a film avoids copyright issues and could let you provide students with pre-recorded information they can listen to along with an assigned film. In this post, Kim talks about the ways that the idea of independent audio commentary could help instructors use media in the classroom.
Of all the things Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have to offer, their potential to spread digital humanities work beyond a single campus, library, or museum is possibly the most exciting to Evan. In this post, Evan considers three reasons why incorporating digital humanities projects into a MOOC would be an excellent idea.
What does the writer/director of Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim have to show us about writing and publishing collaboratively on the Web?
Many books are presented in a digital form that attempts to mimic the traditional experience of their paper predecessors. When thinking about how to present scholarship on the Web, I am left with a problem. I am not all that interested in creating an archive, and I am not interested in simply distributing a book-like object online. Instead I would like to see something in between these two models–a monograph that allows for a participatory narrative. Scholarship on the Web doesn’t have to conform to something that has a counterpart in the analog world. The issue: what might this look like?
Designers, writers, and developers have the challenge of finding the right balance of interaction among sources, interface, and user, and “virtual tours” are no different. My favorite digital humanities projects are those that get this balance right. They draw me in and allow my imagination to go anywhere. By looking at three examples of virtual tours, we can start to see the ways in which sources, interface and users interact to produce moments of interest and imagination.
What does historical research look like when using GIS?
Evan admits to being confused by the spatial turn, but hopes to fix that with a series of posts.