Digital Humanities Archives

Austin Historical Atlas: Mapping Austin’s Historical Markers

(Preview of our first page: “Austin Development During World War I”)

In recent years, discussions of Confederate monuments have dominated narratives of public memory in the United States. As important as this discussion is, however, Civil War monuments make up a relatively small percentage of historic markers in American cities. Although less contentious, state and national historic markers polka dot our city-scapes, quite literally inscribing in bronze information about the city’s past on our buildings, street corners, and in our urban parks.

Often these markers seem inconspicuous. Many list the names of long dead citizens, or remark on the importance of architectural styles far beyond the working knowledge of casual perusers. However, these marked places do not exist in a vacuum. Their importance relies on their relationships to other buildings and to the city at large. Yet, that relationship is hidden. The markers speak, when we learn their language, about important aspects of a city’s collective history, even about histories that the marker makers never intended to reveal. Our hope, at Not Even Past, is to make these connections visible through a series of maps which we are calling a digital atlas. In the process we will see what unexpected information might be revealed by the historical markers in our home city of Austin, Texas.

A black and white map of Austin, Texas focusing on the city's downtown area — Map of Austin in 1920 (via Wikimedia)

This will by no means be the first digital map of historical markers in the city of Austin. The Texas Historical Commission offers its own map of markers, which naturally include our city. Google Maps has a limited version, along with Stopping Points, and numerous other websites. These maps tend to be thorough, covering relatively reliably the markers they promise, and usually offering addresses, marker titles, and occasionally the marker text (as well as limited and unreliable descriptive metadata). In the case of the Texas Historical Commission they even offer thematic maps (i.e. Women’s History, African American History, Education, etc.).

The Austin Historical Wiki, from the UT departments of Architecture and Historic Preservation, take on important issues in the field of preservation. How do places get preserved, and how can open sourced maps (in this case a Wiki) help to utilize historical markers more effectively? How can we discover what the community wants from their markers, rather than reflecting the desires of a wealthy, motivated, and organized few? (To read their fascinating reflections on the project click here.) Their goals are both admirable and important. Nevertheless, the Austin Historical Wiki, much like these other mapping initiatives, fail (or perhaps more accurately do not attempt) at our goal of providing historical context to often bland and obtuse historical markers scattered throughout the city.

A contemporary map of the City of Austin, Texas — Contemporary Map of the city of Austin (via Wikimedia)

Historians are slowly learning from geographers, anthropologists, architects, and many others how to mine historical information that can be found in landscapes. Geographers and architectural historians are especially good at finding and relaying information on materials, whether it be the type of granite used for the Texas Capitol Building, or the way in which the Balcones Escarpment provides Austin with reliable water during dry seasons. Historians, in contrast, specialize in creating narratives out of historical information. By combining these methodologies of space, data, and narrative voice with technologies such as GIS (Geographical Information Systems), historic markers can reveal a more interesting and comprehensible history of Austin that is already written onto the city.

The goal of our Digital Atlas is a map that can be viewed in layers, allowing connections to be drawn between different markers. This may involve comparing a number of markers that occur in the same year (our first post will be about three markers related to 1917), or it may be something more familiar, in that markers are arranged and colored to allow us to see how women’s lived experience has changed over time. We will release these layers slowly, month by month. Some may include only a few historical markers, while others could utilize ten, twenty, or thirty.

To begin, the maps, while interactive in a limited capacity, will not necessarily help people make connections between markers on their own. However, as layers increase, and more and more markers are entered in our Digital Atlas, we hope to create a map large enough, and with sufficiently searchable metadata, so that the map could be used as a teaching tool in classrooms, as well as a way to discover more about Austin for the curious reader.

An image of the Texas Historical Commission Plaque for the First Classes of the University of Texas Law School — Example of Texas Historical Commission Plaque (via Wikimedia)

The goal of this mapping project is not fully formed. We want to visualize the cityscape, historically contextualize existing markers, challenge existing narratives, and identify events and people who deserve to be commemorated with historical markers, but we expect the project –and our readers—to take us in additional directions.

Building useful digital humanities and public history projects can be difficult and confusing at the start. Despite enthusiasm on the part of departments or faculty, there is little in the way of formal training for graduate students in digital methods and tools. In this project, we are learning by doing, and expect to adapt and change as our needs change and follow the twists and turns it takes us on. What we can promise is transparency in our struggles and our accomplishments, honest reflection on the conflict between our goals and the reality of digital mapping, and the hope that such transparency will help others digital humanists considering such projects.

Read our first edition now: Development During World War I

Austin Historical Atlas: Development During World War I

(This is the first of a series that will explore creative ways to think about historic markers in Austin.)

By Jesse Ritner

1917 marked a turning point in the history of Austin’s development. A large donation and the dismembering of a family estate spread the city west and north, resulting in dramatic increases in public spaces, urban housing, and wealth for the Austin public schools. Yet, Austin’s growth came at the expense of one specific neighborhood. The story is already written onto the city, if we know where to look.

The Andrew Jackson Zilker marker (placed in 2002), the Clarksville Historic District marker (placed in 1973), and the Crusemann-Marsh-Bell House (placed in 2009) seem to be about distinctly different historical events. Zilker’s, located in front of the Barton Springs Pool House, informs us about the life of Austin’s “most worthy citizen” in basic outline, emphasizing his rags to riches story, and his generous philanthropy. The Clarksville marker, on the other hand, recounts a story of survival. It details the resilience of the black community of Clarkville, founded by freed slaves in 1871, who refused to move for over a century, despite repeated pressure from the city of Austin. Last, the Crusemann-Marsh-Bell House marker comments on the architecture of this 1917 home, built by the “granddaughter of Texas Governor E.M. Pease.” By themselves, the three markers recount one story of wealth, one of poverty, and one involving the American Dream. Collectively, they tell a dramatic geographic history of urban expansion into west Austin in 1917.

Although the date is missing in the Zilker marker, it notes that Zilker “indirectly funded school industrial programs when he sold 366 acres of parkland, including Barton Springs, to the city.” The sale occurred in 1917. The same year the heirs to the Pease estate, which spread from 12^th street to 24^th street and from Shoal Creek to the Colorado River, decided to split the estate and develop it, dramatically spreading the city of Austin north and west (marked in black on the map). This house was one of the first homes built in what would become the Enfield development. Comparing the map above to the historic map below (although it is a few years newer), it is easy to see that the black neighborhood of Clarksville (marked in red and bordering the new development), sits precariously between the new park and the burgeoning neighborhood that spread Austin west of Lamar Boulevard.

Map of Austin, Texas depicting the city's various neighborhoods

In 1918, as the Clarksville marker notes, the Austin School Board closed down the Clarksville public school in one of the first attempts to move Clarksville residents east. The decision by Austin’s school board, only a year after the single largest donation in their history, was not accidental. The absorption of what is now Zilker Park and the Pease Estate into Austin pushed city borders westward, pulling Clarksville undoubtedly into the urban sphere. The presence of a black neighborhood on the border of the soon to be wealthy and white neighborhood north of 12th street with the easy access to Zilker Park made their movement politically imperative in Jim Crow era Austin.

While the two years of 1917 and 1918 seem almost happenstantial in each individual marker, when read together they mark a significant turning point in Austin’s growth, as well as a distinct moment in Austin’s history of segregation.

Also in this series:

Mapping Austin’s Historical Markers

Similar series:

From There to Here

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)

by Christopher Rose

Can the microbe speak?

It’s 5:30 pm, and I’ve been staring at my computer screen for over eight hours. There’s a crick in my neck, my breathing is shallow, my blood pressure has elevated, and the entire Giza governorate has just disappeared off of the map the instant that I finished tracing its borders—for the third time. I take a deep breath, utter a few choice unpleasant words under my breath, make sure to save my work, and turn off the computer. Today, the dragon has won.

I am two weeks into what I had originally, and naively, thought would be a one-week project to map the outbreak of epidemic and epizootic diseases in Egypt during the First World War, which comprises a subsection of my dissertation project. It’s not a great time to be working on Egypt, as it’s become nearly impossible to get research clearance from the Egyptian government. Funding has also become a near impossibility: my optimism at being named a finalist for a Fulbright in early 2016 was short lived; the program was suspended due to security concerns before awards were announced.

While online resources are scarce, I did find that the Egyptian government’s official gazetteer has an online index of its entire run since the 1870s. Over the course of several days, I discovered that the gazetteer was a virtual treasure trove of exactly the sort of data I’ve been looking for: reports of disease outbreaks in detailed locations up and down the Nile Valley. Over a week, I compiled a spreadsheet of almost 800 records for the period between late 1914 and mid-1919.

The question, of course, was what to do with this data. I was certain the diseases would tell me something, if I could just figure out how to get them to speak.

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose)

It was Julia Gossard, a UT alumna now teaching at Utah State University, who pointed me in the direction of the Programming Historian, a website dedicated to helping historians use digital tools to process data through modeling, mapping, and other methods. I didn’t have time to learn a programming language, but mapping was an idea I liked. The site has several columns about creating maps, using open source mapping software. While I’m a big fan of open source, especially when it replaces costly technical software, I was a bit uneasy about the lack of support for the platform – in short, I foresaw the ability to get myself into trouble, but not out of it.

A little digging around led me to the unexpected find that UT has an institutional subscription to ARCGIS, which is the (otherwise very expensive) industry standard mapping platform. Using UT’s institutional subscription to Lynda.com, I started training myself to use ARCGIS.

Had I known what I was getting myself into, I probably wouldn’t have dived right in.

Mapping the data required me to tag each record with the latitude and longitude of the reported location. This led me to one of the key stumbling blocks for all scholars of the Middle East who’ve dabbled in the digital humanities—so much data is out there on the web, but much of it is transliterated from the original language. There is no universally recognized Arabic-to-Latin transliteration method, and the potential inconsistencies are well on display in the web’s largest open-source geographic database, Geonames.org. While some of its Egyptian entries contained the original names in Arabic script, most did not, leaving me to guess—frequently incorrectly—how they might have been rendered. Since Geonames is open-source, I added the names both in Arabic and one of the more commonly recognized transliteration systems to Geonames’s database as I went, which will hopefully make someone else’s life a little easier.

People fleeing a cholera outbreak at the port of Boulaq (near Cairo) in 1883 (via Wellcome Collection)

Finally, it was time to start mapping, and herein lay another challenge. ARCGIS has an expansive built in library of open source data, which included, as I had hoped, administrative maps of Egypt. I very quickly realized, however, that the administrative borders of the early 21c did not correlate directly to those of the early 20c. At least one governorate has since been split into three and there were a lot of unfamiliar names on the maps. I discovered that the UT Libraries has a copy of the 1917 Egyptian census, which has a big fold out map of the country. I scanned it, brought it home and compared it to the current maps … and realized that it was probably going to be easier to draw the 1917 map in ARCGIS rather than try to adapt the contemporary maps.

The process took nearly two weeks, employing long forgotten Photoshop skills (yay for bezel curves!), tracing a century old map and rendering it onto a satellite image of contemporary Egypt. The resultant map is, as they say, “good enough.” It’s probably got a distortion of around 2 miles, but it’ll never appear in print at that level of detail. Maybe when my monograph becomes a best-seller, I’ll hire someone to re-draw it.

I learned that ARCGIS has some quirks. It has a tendency to freeze up every 60-90 seconds. I quickly learned to save my work every time I did anything, a lesson that came in handy when, for some reason, the entire Giza governorate vanished inexplicably … three times … after I drew it. (The following morning, I discovered that the governorate hadn’t vanished, it was just invisible. I still don’t actually know why).

Finally, the big day came. After the blood, sweat, tears, swearing, and yelling at the cat, the map was finished. I overlay my disease data, and sat back to look at the results.

Children playing in a poor neighborhood of Alexandria under quarantine during an outbreak of typhus, sometime around WWI (via Wellcome Collection)

Have the microbes told me a story? They have. As I set forth on the next phase of my project, I have clusters of locations and specific dates to look for. But the maps have also given me more questions—Is there a correlation between a two-year outbreak of cattle plague and the rampant inflation in the cost of food during the war? Does the death of 139,000 Egyptians due to influenza at war’s end have anything to do with the eruption of a populist uprising just six weeks later? And why is this most deadly epidemic absent from the press and the pages of the official gazetteer?

I also realized the importance of presenting my data in this visual form. No one is going to go through all 800 records on my spreadsheet, but the map provides a clear snapshot of my subject and the questions it raises, and it makes a visual case for the argument I’m laying out in my dissertation. In this form, it will make my modest contribution to this field of study more convincing and accessible.

The New Archive series highlights various uses of digital tools in humanities research. More from the series:

Charlie S. Binkow explores Honest Abe’s Archive
Joseph Parrott highlights the digitalized political posters collected by archivist and artist Lincoln Cushing
Maria José Afanador-Llach discusses her experience at a Digitilization Workshop in Venice
Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

Digital Teaching: Mapping Networks Across Avant-Garde Magazines

By Meghan Forbes

In “The European Avant-Garde in Print” (REE 325), students explored the unique and vibrant print culture in Central Europe between the two world wars and the social and political context that produced it. I sought to expose students to the networked qualities of magazines that were published in Czech, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, and German. We examined contributor lists, the aesthetic qualities of the “New Typography,” and the way that the magazines cross promoted each other through advertisement.

Students discovered the transnational and multilingual interconnectivity of these magazines through the use of various digital mapping and open source publishing resources, such as Kumu and Scalar. Using Kumu’s Social Network Analysis tool, for instance, I could help students visualize how one figure, such as Karel Teige, the leading member of the leftist Czech avant-garde group Devětsil, leveraged his connections with editors elsewhere to make magazines that facilitated relations with major figures of a pan-European avant-garde. To offer just one example, through the Brno-based magazine, Pásmo, the Czech avant-garde actively collaborated with the Russian born and Berlin-based artist El Lissitzky, the German Bauhaus director Walter Gropius, and French-German correspondent Yvan Goll.

(via author)

I used digital mapping in my lectures to make this fluid exchange more concrete and dynamic for students. Then, a major component of the class was built around students developing their own digital mapping and visualization group projects. In this way, students had the opportunity to engage critically and interactively with the materials covered in the course.

One group drew on our extensive discussion of Dada periodicals published both in Europe and the United States—which we had the opportunity to view in person at the Harry Ransom Center—to reveal how some prominent artists appeared in Dada publications on both sides of the Atlantic. They also used their map to comment on who did not figure in these publications—namely, women, with the exception of the New York-based 291 contributor Agnes Meyer, whom they featured.

(via author)

Another group of students chose to document connections across a series of publications not via their contributors or geographic locale, but rather in relation to shared principles of design, such as color, shape, and textual form. This group even built their map to visually reflect in its own design the various components that they chose to highlight.

(via author)

Another project focused on a single magazine—the Italian Poesia—to make manifest the various personal connections between the leading figure of Italian Futurism, F.T. Marinetti, and other artists and authors related to the movement.

(via author)

The digital mapping component of the course was largely made possible with the assistance of UT’s Slavic and Digital Scholarship librarian, Ian Goodale, who made multiple class visits in which students had the opportunity to workshop their digital projects, and who also held weekly office hours in the Slavic Department. Ian also created a Scalar platform that holds all the mapping projects in one place, with the Kumu maps embedded, and includes other analytical content generated by students, allowing for further connections to be drawn across the group projects.

I observe in my own classroom, and in the work of my peers both across UT and at other institutions, the need for universities and colleges to commit to allocating funding for their libraries so that they may train and hire staff who are able to support digital pedagogy. For example, this past semester, Ian Goodale also helped my colleague in the Slavic Department, Vlad Beronja, create another digital project, Yugoslav Punk, with students in his course on Punks & Divas in Southeastern Europe.

Another aim in teaching “The European Avant-Garde in Print,” was to expose students to non-European periodicals, to explore the variety of responses to inter-war social and political conditions, and also to find actors outside of a European male cohort largely not represented in the Central European set. By giving students the opportunity to create their own mapping projects, I hoped to reveal unexpected connections between these cultural products. There is more work to be done in achieving these goals in a future iteration of this course, and data visualization and digital mapping tools will facilitate students’ active learning towards this end.

You may also like:

Digital Learning: Starting from Scratch, by Joan Neuberger
Media and Politics From the Prague Spring Archive, by Ian Goodale
The Prague Spring Archive Project, by Mary Neuburger and Ian Goodale

History of Modern Central America Through Digital Archives

By Vasken Makarian

What happens when historians take a pause from using archives to write history and instead delve into the science of producing digital archives? If you are a traditional historian, you might cower at the bombardment of technological know-how that comes your way. Look a little closer however, and you soon find that archival science is an intellectually and theoretically rich field. Engaging with digital archives and digital history is a great way for scholars to re-think how they and archivists alike, select, categorize, and publicize historical data for educational and scholarly purposes. As historians increase their use of digital platforms, it can be helpful for all historians to take a step in the archivists’ shoes.

In the spring of 2016, students of Dr. Virginia Garrard’s course, “History of Modern Central America through Digital Archives” had this opportunity. The course bridged traditional historiography with an introduction to digital archives and digital history. Students came from a wide array of disciplines, from Information Studies to History. For their final project, they could choose between writing a traditional research paper or designing a digital history project, or both. This mix of both worlds allowed for a hybrid conversation that melded traditional historical debates with sensitivity to the way scholars and archivists produce and organize knowledge.

Biblioteca_Nacional_de_Guatemala_Luis_Cardoza_y_Aragón

The National Library of Guatemala, a more traditional place for historians to conduct research (via Wikimedia Commons).

Students eager to get up-to-date with newer digital history platforms were not disappointed. Homework assignments ranged from digital primary source scavenger hunts to analyzing pre-established digital scholarly interfaces, such as the Latin American Digital Initiatives Collection (LADI). The class introduced students to up-to-date digital projects like interactive maps, self-correlating databases, and archival metadata. Students also worked in groups to grapple with the challenges of making digital archives more accurate and efficient.

One of these challenges involved selecting the right “subject terms” that help users search for content in digital databases. To facilitate the search process, students needed to produce terms that were neither too narrow nor too broad, and that represented the “aboutness” of their subjects. Just how efficient, accurate, and unbiased these terms appeared influenced the way users would receive and write about history. In one instance, I had to produce English subject terms for a short and vague Guatemalan newspaper about a desaparecido or forced disappearance. Choosing between terms like “assassination,” “murder,” and “homicide” prompted me to scrutinize the meaning, political implication, and contextual relevance of each term. These questions added a nuanced perspective to my research as well.

Forced disappearances were common during the Guatemalan Civil War (via YouTube).

A less somber yet strangely satisfying task involved creating a sound bite archive from Radio Venceremos—an underground anti-government radio program from 1980s El Salvador. Here, students created an archive of background noises: shouts, singing, frogs, birds chirping, gunfire, alarms, helicopters, and static. Rather than paying attention to content, they recorded language dynamics, the environment, and materiality. This innovative way of organizing data allowed them to get at more subtle information, such as timing, emotion, background events, secrecy, and level of danger. This was detective work at its finest and “tech-savvyist.”

Outside of the Radio Venceremos studio (via Wikimedia Commons).

Of course, walking away with new skills in digital media was not the be-all and end-all. Thinking more deeply about digital archives illuminated urgent theoretical questions relevant to scholars and archivists alike. To whom do historical records belong? What biases do archivists and scholars convey when presenting data? Do living (or even dead) historical actors want others to publicize information about them? How do we reconcile the desire to uncover histories, with the risks and inconveniences public knowledge poses for historical actors and their communities?

Personally, this course contributed to thinking about my dissertation on Guatemala’s recent civil war, which spanned from the 1960’s to the 1990’s. The legacy of the civil war carries over to present-day Guatemala and presents political and ethical roadblocks to the publication and presentation of records. Emerging data may appear rich for archiving, as the recent Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive demonstrated. However, historical records are living things that carry emotional, political, and economic consequences for present-day actors. As this course demonstrated, archives are anything but a mere compilation of sources. They require much human configuration, strategic organization, and logistical coordination. On the other hand, they demand sensitivity to the ethical, political, and intellectual problems of producing knowledge.

Virtual Auschwitz

By David Crew

Ralf Breker wearing the VR headset in front of his VR view of Auschwitz (via BBC News).

The Bavarian State criminal office (LKA) in Munich, Germany has developed a 3D virtual reality model of the infamous Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp to be used in trials of Nazi era war criminals who still remain alive. Drawing upon original blue prints, laser scans of remaining buildings and contemporary photographs, this VR model allows prosecutors, judges and lawyers to view Auschwitz from almost any angle. The digital imaging expert, Ralf Breker, who developed this technology says that it can be used, for example, to determine whether someone who was a guard in Auschwitz in a specific watchtower could or could not see crimes committed in another part of the camp. Breker thinks the technology he developed will soon be used in other types of criminal proceedings because it allows investigators to re-create crime scenes that no longer exist as they were when the crime was committed. He hopes, however, that when the German legal system no longer needs his 3D model of Auschwitz, it will be given to a museum so that it does not fall into the hands of anyone wanting to turn it into a computer game.

For further details and an interview with Ralf Breker, see

Marc Cieslak, “Virtual reality to aid Auschwitz war trials of concentration camp guards”

Also by David Crew on Not Even Past:

The Normandy Scholar Program on World War II.
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer (2007).
Normal Pictures in Abnormal Times.

The Prague Spring Archive Project

By Mary Neuburger and Ian Goodale

The Prague Spring Archive project, a collaboration between the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and UT Libraries, is now live. This open access online archive is the first step in a longer-term initiative by CREEES Director Mary Neuburger to digitize significant collections of primary documents from the the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library that shed light on the Cold War. While select documents from the LBJ collection can already be found online, CREEES is working to digitize National Security country files from the former Eastern Bloc in their entirety. Because these documents are open record, the LBJ Presidential Library has allowed unlimited scanning and open access presentation of such documents. The hope is that they will appeal to a wide and inclusive audience of students, instructors, scholars, and the general public.

Phase One of this project, largely comprised of National Security Files on Czechoslovakia, is nearly complete. The bulk of the documents in this collection focus on the so-called “Czechoslovak Crisis,” otherwise known as the Prague Spring, and its aftermath. The Prague Spring was one of the most dramatic and popular experiments in Communist Party reform, which took place in Czechoslovakia beginning in January 1968, only to be crushed by an invasion of Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops on August 21 of the same year. This event was a major turning point in the Cold War and the history of communism more generally as the wave of reforms brought such a high degree of hope and enthusiasm and its suppression precipitated such deep disillusionment in the region and among the global left. It was the end, in a sense, of any hope for the communist system to be reformed and as such could be seen as the beginning of the end for the system itself.

The LBJ Library documents on Prague Spring are a treasure trove for historical research as they chronicle the event through detailed intelligence reports and day-by-day commentary by US policy makers. They include briefs on global reactions to the crisis, which many at the time thought could precipitate World War III. These documents are valuable both from a US policy standpoint and for a deeper understanding of the events and developments within the region itself. As the documents are all in English, they have the potential to be used for everything from academic historical research to student research.

Helsinki demonstration against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ian Goodale, the new Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies & Digital Scholarship Librarian, worked closely with graduate students from the School of Information at UT Austin and undergraduate students from CREEES to photograph the documents in the reading room at the LBJ. He then collaborated with the UT Libraries to process the images into archival-quality PDFs for ingestion into Texas ScholarWorks, the university’s digital repository. These PDFs were made machine-readable so that they are full-text searchable in the repository and Ian worked to create extensive metadata for each document to make the collection more discoverable. Finally, the students in Mary Neuburger and Vlad Beronja’s Graduate Seminar on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies worked with Ian over the last semester to create a guide to the collection. Ian did an amazing job of building a Scalar website as a portal for the guide, which provides summary descriptions of most of the folders and specific links to some of the most interesting documents.

Careful attention was paid to making the site accessible both to academic researchers and to patrons conducting personal or non-academic research, with additional features planned that will extend the breadth of the site’s audience. A module that will include materials aimed at high school and middle school teachers and students, including sample lesson plans and educational activities, will be added in the future. For researchers who would like to explore what is available in the physical collections of the LBJ Library, the finding aid for the entire archival collection is also available on the site.

UT CREES is located in Burdine Hall (Zug55 via flickr).

The Prague Spring Archive portal is a resource that will continue to grow, with new content and features continually added and expanded upon. By providing open access to important primary source materials, the project will continue to contribute to international scholarly communities, utilizing practices and tools of the digital humanities to freely share its content in an attractive, easily navigable portal.

Digitization work on the larger Cold War project is ongoing, with new materials currently being photographed, processed, and added to Texas ScholarWorks by graduate student Nicole Marino and Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies and Digital Scholarship Librarian Ian Goodale.

More by Mary Neuberger on Not Even Past:
Balkan Smoke: Tobacco & Smoking in Bulgaria.
The Museum of Sour Milk: History Lessons on Bulgarian Yogurt.

Digital Teaching: From the Other Side of the Screen: A Student’s View

By Abigail Griffin

When most college students think of online courses, they often imagine basic, boring classes that are convenient and easy A’s. Online classes often require little effort and minimal time commitment, while still satisfying a graduation requirement. So, students drudge aimlessly through the mandatory course, get their completion grades, and move on with their lives, without actually gaining anything from the experience. Dr. Suri’s online course, however, is so much more than a mark off of an undergraduate’s to-do list. Professor Suri revolutionizes this old, bland style of online coursework and provides a unique and active learning experience to students anywhere—from the comfort of their own beds to a quaint coffee shop down the street to the studio classroom in Mezes.

Going into the course, I was skeptical. Not because I didn’t have full faith in Professor Suri’s ability to make the course the best it could be, but because I was worried that even the best online class could not beat traditional, classroom-style learning. I had been unimpressed by the reputation of online classes in the past, and I never previously had the desire to take one. I always preferred a classroom setting because it just seemed more “right.” But boy, was I wrong.

Not only is Professor Suri an incredibly energetic and knowledgeable professor, but he makes his lectures engaging, informative, and entertaining. The online setting does not take away from the education at all, in fact, I think it enhances the learning environment. Students are more willing to participate in class through applications like “Class Chat” and “Ask the Professor,” and the TA’s and Prof. Suri actively respond to their comments, which would be nearly impossible in a huge lecture hall. When students take an active role in their learning like this, they benefit significantly more from the lecture. I know from experience that there is practically no class participation in a 300-500 person lecture hall, but having the same class size online encourages significantly more student involvement.

For example, Dr. Suri uses images in his lecture every class period, and the pictures pop up on our video screens so we can easily see them. When he asks us to comment on the images, students begin contributing to the discussion in a matter of seconds. In a normal classroom setting with the same number of students, almost no one responds to the professor’s questions, and never that quickly and eagerly. So the online forum actually makes the lecture easier for the students, the professor, and his assistants. It is also wonderful because the slides and images that come up on our screen are clear and easy to understand and interpret, whereas, it would be more difficult for some of the students to evaluate the images in a lecture hall.

Overall, I am incredibly impressed by what Dr. Suri has done with his online course. Obviously, it isn’t perfect. Sometimes the technology doesn’t work correctly or people get off track in the class chat. But as a whole, the class is a lot of fun. I think that the online and in-person office hour options are great, the class pings ensure that students are paying attention (and are super easy participation points), and the lectures are always interesting.

Plus, I have never been a morning person, so it’s great to be able to wake up 5 minutes before class and still make it on time.

Abigail Griffin is a second-year Plan II Honors and Government double-major with a minor in Arabic. She graduated high school in St. Louis and her family currently resides in Elizabethtown, KY. She is an Arabic Flagship and Forty Acres scholar at UT , an Agency Co-Director within Student Government, and a Camp Texas counselor to incoming freshman. Abigail also volunteers as a KIPP tutor and as an AISD tutor to Arabic-speaking students. Additionally, she is passionate about sports and has played on the Women’s Club Soccer team In the future, she intends to pursue a career in foreign service and counterterrorism.

Digital Teaching: Blending the Old with the New: In-Person Studio Attendance

Every year thousands of students take introductory courses in U.S. History at UT Austin. This spring Prof Jeremi Suri is experimenting with an online version of the U.S. History since 1865 survey course. He and his teaching assistants, Cali Slair, Carl Forsberg, Shery Chanis, and Emily Whalen will blog about the experience of digital teaching for readers of Not Even Past.

By Cali Slair

Students typically watch our online course from home, a local café, or at various locations on campus. In order to make the course more interpersonal, each student is also assigned two dates when he or she is required to attend class in the video production studio in Mezes Hall, where we film the live lectures.

Students attending a lecture. Courtesy of the Author.

Studio attendance is similar to taking a course in a classroom or lecture hall, but it is also quite different. Similar to a traditional lecture course, the students listen to a live lecture and take notes surrounded by their classmates. They also arrive to the studio approximately thirty minutes before the course begins which gives them time to ask questions and interact with their classmates, teaching assistants, and Professor Suri before class starts. A great feature of the in-studio attendance dates is that the twenty to twenty-three students who are assigned to each date are all in the same TA group. This allows the students to meet and interact with peers whose weekly response essays they have access to read online. The TA in charge of going over the studio rules and taking attendance for that day is also the TA for the students who are assigned to attend in person. This allows the studio TA to put faces with the names of his or her students, and vice-versa. While some students feel more comfortable taking the course through the online setting, there are also many students who feel more comfortable in the studio and prefer meeting and interacting with their TA and classmates in person. We have even had a few students request to attend more than the two required in-person studio attendance dates.

A main difference between our online course and courses held in a classroom or lecture hall is that having access to a computer is integral to being successful in this course. Despite being in the studio, the students cannot raise their hands and ask questions like in a typical lecture hall. The students still use their laptops to communicate through the Chat and Ask the Professor functions. The Ask the Professor button still functions as the equivalent to raising a hand during lecture. The Pings are another reason the students still need laptops for their in-person studio attendance dates. Students watch the lecture live, and at the same time keep the lecture video open on their laptops to watch for and respond to Pings. This allows the students to earn their attendance grades by demonstrating that not only did they show up to the studio, but they have also been actively listening to the lecture.

Cali Slair in the studio. Courtesy of Joan Neuberger.

We have found the students’ ability to multitask during lecture especially impressive. This is a generational phenomenon that our online course taps into and utilizes for rigorous learning purposes. While the in-person studio attendance dates are based on some traditional classroom learning styles, the studio still requires students to use technology in their learning. The technology encourages active participation during attendance, encouraging students to listen closely to the lecture and integrate what they hear with their reading.

Early in the course some students found the in-studio attendance dates to be a little challenging. Some students had difficulty finding the studio and others found the studio itself to be somewhat distracting. At this point in the course, the number of students who have difficulty finding the studio has declined significantly. For the students who find the studio itself distracting, one of the great things about this course is they can watch the recorded lecture online. As a TA, I value the opportunity to meet all of the students in my group in person. I hope these meetings help students feel more comfortable asking their TAs and Professor Suri questions and attending office hours online or in person. The in-studio experience is an innovative component of our course that helps us achieve our goal of making the course as participatory, engaging, and stimulating for students as possible. Come visit sometime!

Digital Pedagogy: THATCamp Comes to UT Austin

By Ece Turnator and Hannah Alpert-Abrams

Logo courtesy of Melany Klopp, St. Edward’s University.

More than eighty librarians, digital scholars, technologists, and administrators convened at the University of Texas at Austin in January to address the question: how do digital tools affect teaching and learning in today’s classrooms? The THATCamp on Digital Pedagogy took place on January 5-6, 2016 in University of Texas at Austin Libraries’ newly opened space, the Learning Commons. The organizers were digital humanists and librarians from St. Edward’s University, Southwestern University, and The University of Texas at Austin. The attendees hailed from various parts of the country, benefiting from the presence of the annual conference of the Modern Language Association in Austin this year.

A THATCamp is an “unconference” in which “humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.” Our THATCamp on Digital Pedagogy included sessions on a wide array of topics ranging from student involvement with digital tools to the evaluation and publication of public-facing student work. All in all there were about 25 sessions over the course of two days, as well as three workshops: one on Omeka, a tool for creating digital exhibits; one on Digital Pedagogy as it relates specifically to the Humanities; and a third on Social Annotation, or group markup of shared documents. The THATCamp sessions were devoted to discussions about best practices and the evolving landscape of tools for digital pedagogy.

Most sessions produced an extensive set of notes and resources that the reader can find by clicking on the session notes on the schedule here.

Photo of the participants of THATCamp. Courtesy of Elon Lang, Lecturer in Humanities at UT-Austin.

A number of sessions were devoted to the challenges and advantages of digital projects assigned as student group work. For example, “Teaching Digital Humanities in the Online Setting” underscored the value of thinking long-term about student work and giving students the opportunity to create their online presence. By using platforms such as Domain of One’s Own, for example, students can create a portfolio of their college work that can follow them into life after college, thus raising the bar for student responsibility and for the quality of the work completed. The portfolio gives students some concrete work-products that they can show to prospective employers. Other sessions touched on the management of interdisciplinary or collaborative projects, evaluation of student work, training instructors and students to use digital tools, managing the level of expectations of teachers and learners, as well as the difficulty of keeping a constant and open feedback loop in a classroom from the beginning to the end of the digital learning experience.

The challenges of assessing the quality of student work and of making it public – challenges exacerbated by complicated rules about student privacy in FERPA laws – were discussed in a number of sessions. Attendees found that various kinds of literacies that are involved in the creation of digital projects and discussed the importance of communicating the intended learning outcomes of class projects to students from the start. Students’ fear of failure, the session participants argued, sometimes gets in the way of the learning experience. Instructors discussed various ways to give students control over their work, to train them to become active learners and to incorporate a sense of play in teaching. They also emphasized the need to teach –and learn for themselves — comfort with failure. The session “Fail Stories” demonstrated that faculty comfort with failure can have mixed results: “productive discomfort” may be reviewed in a negative light by students, which might in turn have a negative impact on tenure decisions for faculty.

Ece Turnator speaks at THATCamp. Courtesy of Fatma Tarlaci, Student Affairs Director at UT-Austin.

The importance of building accessible digital projects was the subject of the “Access and Inclusivity” session, which sought to address the needs of everyone from blind users who depend on screen readers to students who lack computers in their home or whose racial, sexual, or gender identity comes into conflict with an interface design. A challenging session for all involved, it was apparent that underlying assumptions about the needs of end-users (whether they are students, faculty, or the general public) have a significant influence on scholars’ ability to reliably create accessible projects. The session produced a list of resources, including the Kairos special issue on web accessibility.

A number of sessions were dedicated to skill development and digital tools. These sessions highlighted important resources like DIRT and GeoDIRT (registries of digital research tools), as well as lesson plans, self-help articles, and detailed course syllabi for introductory-level Digital Humanities courses to help instructors, departments, and institutions forge their own paths in teaching with digital tools and creating more integrated learning experiences for their students.

Crowdsourcing and collaboration, especially student collaboration on digital projects, were discussed in multiple sessions. Along the same lines, “Networked Pedagogy” discussed networked learning environments, such as federated wikis and peer-review, especially in large classroom settings, as well as the challenges of providing structure to networked learning environments when the goals and outcomes are not well-communicated and understood. Whether active learning techniques such as the ones used in Reacting to the Past — a role-playing history curriculum — could be considered part of the networked pedagogy ecosystem was one of the interesting questions discussed in this session.

Other topics that produced lively and fruitful discussions included:

Digital Humanities and the Sciences
Gender, Diversity, Engaged Scholarship and Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities and the City
Metadata Training / Game Brainstorming
Digital Humanities and Entrepreneurship
Forming Productive Partnerships between Archives and Classrooms
Creating a Community of Practice on Digital Scholarship at UT

The Digital Pedagogy THATCamp offered scholars and teachers new to the field of Digital Humanities opportunities to share ideas and resources and network with others working in the field. It brought together a very active group of practitioners who focus on many facets of digital pedagogy and gave attendees a solid overview of the rewards and challenges of active student engagement in a classroom setting. If pedagogy in general is essentially about students becoming active learners, creators of scholarship, and critical consumers of information, the journey to reach these noble goals has advanced, thanks in no small part to digital tools and methodologies currently available and we all took several big steps toward those goals during our two days together.

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