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JANNEKEN SMUCKER

teacher, historian, digital specialist, writer

Discovery, Pressure, and Serendipity – Handling Expectations in the Digital History Classroom

February 6, 2016 by Janneken

We’re one week in to the second iteration of the course Great Migration and Digital Storytelling, trying to figure out what went well the first time, what to change, and what we know will transpire differently. When my colleague Charlie Hardy and I first taught this course in Fall 2014, we didn’t know what to expect. We aimed to kick-off the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Great Migration of African Americans to Philadelphia, now officially beginning in 2016. We wanted our students to resurrect old oral history interviews with those who came north as part of the Great Migration, while working with other primary sources. But we didn’t really know what the end product would look like or feel like.

Durham School
Getting ready for the the semester. Students at the Durham School, June 1914, Courtesy of PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records.

Actually, I sort of expected variations of tech fails and disappointments, having muscled my way through several digital history courses, serving as my own IT and dealing with the inevitable shortcomings of both my own technical abilities and the infrastructure in which I attempted to teach. Case in point: the Fall semester when students didn’t get access to our Omeka instance in which they were creating their semester-long project until after Thanksgiving Break. So, back when we embarked on the Great Migration course in 2014, I was admittedly skeptical about what we could pull off.

I learned OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer, created by our good friends at the University of Kentucky Libraries’ Nunn Center for Oral History) two weeks prior to the start of the semester so I could demonstrate how to use it to our students. But I had not come close to mastering it. I didn’t yet have a good sense of the workflow required to build a website integrating multiple opensource platforms and archival items from over a dozen regional and national collections. Needless to say, Charlie and I made it up as we went along, sometimes to our students’ frustration.

But in many ways this iterative process of discovery and problem solving on the fly resulted in the creative work ultimately generated by our students. We instructed them to “amaze us,” as Charlie has repeatedly said. And they did. Through fits and starts, revisions and tears, this group of students created 6 compelling digital storytelling projects which combined audio, video, primary sources, maps and good stories. And the students—as frustrated as they may have been from the lack of deadlines and rubrics—left the course with an immense sense of satisfaction, which only grew once Goinnorth.org went live in February 2015, going on to win awards at university, regional, and national levels.

Berean School
Female Students at The Berean School of Philadelphia, c. 1933, courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvnaia

We started this semester building on to Goin’ North without a blank slate. Now, students have successful models of biographical sketches, Dublin Core metadata, OHMS indexes, and digital storytelling projects on which to model their work. Rather than creating a keyword thesaurus from scratch (of over 1000 terms!!)—the controlled vocabulary that allows users to find themes and subjects in the oral history indexes in a consistent way—this group of 25 students will merely be adding to it. They will know that a useful OHMS index has a perfect balance of metadata and emotion, because when they explore Kristin Geiger’s index of Ruth Wright Hayre’s interview, they will experience it firsthand.

But what will change in this iteration of the class when we all know what we’re doing and are no longer making it up as we go along? Will Charlie’s and my expectations of students’ work be different? Too high? Too narrow? Will our own vision of the final product change the way we give feedback? Will the lack of serendipity and discovery result in stifled creativity?

I don’t know the answers yet. We only met our students a week ago. I’m excited about their potential. Charlie pointed out to me how unusual it is that a significant number of these students have had or are planning internships, demonstrating commitment to getting hands-on experience. While on this first night of class many were likely overwhelmed, they were also motivated and inspired, ready to jump in. Our friend Doug Boyd from the University of Kentucky, who created OHMS, came to introduce the platform on our first day of class, explaining—using the great metaphor of the mix tape of my youth—how a good index changes the way we interact with an interview. We no longer are dependent on the written word of the transcript to find the precise section of the interview we want to hear. We can experience an interview in a multisensory way. He left the students understanding the significance of their mission in this class. And made sure they knew that people—all over the world, according to Doug—were paying attention to their work.

I think this extra attention changes the nature of what we’re doing in the classroom too. No pressure, right? I will keep telling that to our students. And I’ll keep repeating it to myself too. The first time we taught the class I didn’t feel pressure, except to not let the students down through tech fails, false starts, and disorganization. The lack of expectations and the yet unimagined end-product meant that whatever we created would be just that. Now whatever we create must fit into this existing thing.

This semester, I am going to strive to be extra observant and aware of the differences in the process, noting how adding to an existing project is a much different endeavor than creating one from scratch. I know I’m going to be much more organized: my style guides and rubrics are already cleaned up, waiting for students. You will laugh at the excessive number of spreadsheets I’ve created to track our progress. But I want to be sure I still am ready for the process of discovery and willing to let serendipity intervene.

Goin’ North Update

October 7, 2014 by Janneken

It’s October, and our students in HIS 601/HON 452 are continuing their progress on our Goin’ North project focused on the first Great Migration of African Americans to Philadelphia. Last week they submitted their OHMS Level 3 Indexes, adding chapter segments to each of their assigned oral history interviews. For each chapter segment, they created metadata including title, segment synopsis, keywords, and a partial transcript. And then they layered in media–images that appear in a lightbox, hyperlinks to resources for further reading, and GPS coordinates to the places the narrators describe. As William Steffens recalls sneaking past the white workers at the shipyard in Jacksonville, Florida, as he attempted to hop a ship north, we see a vintage postcard of the Jacksonville docks. When Ruth Hayre recounts how her grandfather helped start one of the first African American owned banks in Philadelphia, we see a 1929 article from The Philadelphia Tribune titled “Negro Banks Great Help to Business Man.” When Walter Gay remembers the first house his family moved to in Philadelphia, we can open a Google map showing the address.

Merchants and Miners Docks in Jacksonville, Florida. In his interview, William Steffens explains how it was from a dock adjacent to these that he escaped North by boat.

These indexes are still a work in progress. We knew we needed a controlled vocabulary for keywords since we have 21 students working individually, so we spent many hours honing our list of terms. And then we realized we hadn’t developed a standardized mode for crediting the images used in the lightbox. So we’ve determined some best practices for style. Some interviewees, like Ruth Hayre, have donated their family’s archives to local repositories and have an abundance of primary sources to which students can link. Others moved north to work as domestic servants, earning money to give their children opportunities, but leaving behind little paper trail. Students working with less documented interviewees have to be more creative, uncovering sources like newspaper articles with tips for housekeeping or GPS coordinates to their employer’s home.

Up next: we’re creating short exhibits on each interviewee in Omeka. The challenge is brevity. We’ve asked students to write a biography of their interviewee in 500 words or less. Writing in tight, accessible prose, they will find, can be harder than churning out a 15 page term paper at the end of the semester. But I suspect those 500 words will be much more satisfying for our students to write and for me (and you) to read.

Goin’ North

August 22, 2014 by Janneken

header image_02I have a mild case of the beginning of semester jitters. But mostly, I’m excited. My one new course for Fall is what we’ll call an experimental course. By contract, professors at West Chester University can’t team teach. So Charlie Hardy and I are doing what I’ve affectionately started calling “tandem teaching.” We’ve arranged for my graduate seminar in Digital History to meet with his Undergraduate Honors Seminar on the Great Migration to Philadelphia (in celebration of its almost 100th anniversary). And we’re going to make stuff.

We are conceiving this as a multi-step process, in which we first create a digital archive of amazing primary sources tied to the Great Migration–photographs, letters, advertisements, ephemera, you name it, all generously lent to us due to affection for Charlie (thanks to Temple’s Urban Archives and Blockson Collection, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Hagley Museum and Library, the Philadelphia History Museum, and the African American Museum). We’re doing this in Omeka. Students will each upload and create metadata for a number of items. Then those items will serve as resources for their Level 3 Oral History Metadata Synchronizer indexes, created in the mind-blowing tool developed by Doug Boyd and his team at the Louie B. Dunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky.

And then (wait for it), we’re going to create digital stories utilizing this wealth of primary sources. Students will use a variety of multimedia tools–timelines, video, the plethora of proprietary storytelling platforms (especially the ones that will let us export or save our work without continuing to pay endless subscription fees) to creatively and critically engage with this material.

I must say, I don’t know how the semester will turn out, but at this point, I’m proud of our syllabus. To me, it embodies one of the defining aspects of the digital humanities: collaboration. I could not have created this course on my own. Neither could Charlie. But we could together. And our students likewise will create some pretty fantastic things together. I’m pretty sure of it.

Not Fade Away: Sharing Quilt Stories in the Digital Age

June 21, 2013 by Janneken

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Please join me for the nonprofit Quilt Alliance‘s one-day educational conference sponsored by Handi Quilter, Inc.,called Not Fade Away: Sharing Quilt Stories in the Digital Age on Saturday, July 20 at Floris United Methodist Church in Herndon, Virginia.

My keynote address, “Quilt Stories/Storied Quilts,” will explore how and why people who love quilts – the makers, the owners, the users, the preservers – continually layer new meaning onto these objects.

During the demonstration portion of the event, pioneering fabric designer and award-winning quilter Jinny Beyer will be interviewed for the Q.S.O.S. project by Luana Rubin, veteran quilt world designer, writer and entrepreneur.

Workshops will share techniques and strategies for documenting and sharing quilts using digital technologies and social media.  Presenters include Kyra Hicks, Pat Sloan, Meg Cox, Leslie Tucker Jenison, Michele Muska, Pauline Macaulay and Emma Parker. A panel discussion titled “Patching the Holes: Curators Reveal How They Solve the Mysteries of Unlabeled Quilts and What They Wish Every Quilt Could Tell Them” will feature prominent textile curators Nancy Bavor, Marin Hanson, Suzanne McDowell and Mary Worrall.

Sign up now for this special event, which includes same-day admission to the Sacred Threads Exhibition. Read the press release here.

 

About Janneken

Janneken Smucker is a cultural historian specializing in digital, public, and oral history. A Professor of History at West Chester University, she integrates technology and the humanities to create engaging, high-impact experiences for her students. She also knows obscure things about quilts. Read More…

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