Monday November 13, 2006
Monday November 13, 2006 Time, Space, History - Digital History Projects
At this year's Educause conference Dr. Edward Ayers (University of Virginia) and William Thomas III (University of Nebraska) gave a great presentation about digital history projects they are working on. You can watch their presentation on the Educause conference website. It's very engaging and informative.
They reported on some very interesting digital projects including visualizations to explore the movement of ex-slaves across different areas following the end of slavery and to trace how the development of the railroad system impacted communities in Nebraska and other western states.
One of the most interesting projects they describe focuses on how they worked with groups of students to use the UVA library's special collections to research social history issues. The project is called The Southern History Database. The students were assigned different geographic areas in the South, researched themes in social history, wrote narrative accounts, and populated the database with content. Students then used the entire collection of narrative histories in the database to look for commonalities in social issues across different geographic areas. The project is designed to grow over time with students being the central researchers. It sounds like an incredible opportunity to engage students with historical documents while deepening their connection to the materials through digital technologies.
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This presentation was so refreshing it practically brought me to tears. It emphasizes several exciting principles that I hope we can foster here at NCSU. Ayers and Thomas talk about engaging students with actual historical research, with particular focus on archival material. They talk about capitalizing on this work by collaboratively integrating it with other student research, so the work is not lost when the class is over, thereby creating a more robust historical picture. And they talk about taking advantage of new technologies such as GIS, with allows historical data to be viewed in ways that brings special and temporal elements together revealing new insights into the past.
Posted by Cindy Levine on November 14, 2006 at 10:11 AM EST #