Digital pedagogy Archives

Native Literatures and Indigenous Peoples’ Day: A Brief Historiography

October 14th is what most people know as Columbus Day. However, for many Indigenous peoples, the celebration of Christopher Columbus is a reminder of the generations of trauma and settler conquest of Native nations and lands. For that reason, several states, including Alaska, Minnesota, Vermont, and South Dakota (and cities like Austin), have chosen to rename the holiday Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Native activists have been at the forefront of this movement. Here is a twitter thread discussing the global campaigns to reframe the day:

I'm going to be tweeting about #IndigenousPeoplesDay a lot this weekend. I think about it a lot since I've been working on multiple #IPD campaigns during the past 4 years. pic.twitter.com/73jk2IHt3J
— UAINE (ndnviewpoint) (@mahtowin1) October 12, 2019

It is difficult to study or teach American history without including Native peoples. That said, many historians limit mention of Indigenous peoples to the period before 1776 or even 1840, but the narrative that the cultures died or were replaced by the United States relegates Native peoples to the past, furthers the colonial project of erasure, and simply does not do enough scholarly diligence. There is a difference between talking about Native peoples and teaching Native histories. “Decolonizing your syllabus” by including one Indigenous, Black, or POC scholar is not sufficient either.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I’d like to suggest some easy additions to your syllabus, playlists, and bookshelf. This is a brief review of some seemingly untraditional academic works by Native authors, scholars, artists, and creators. My reflection on Native literature here includes scholarship in a number of forms that could easily be incorporated into a syllabus or added to your Comprehensive Exam List. This list is a starting point and I’d encourage readers to go further by listening to Native leaders, scholars, and artists.

ART

Images via Blanton Museum of Art and FrankWaln.com

The Blanton Museum of Art recently featured the work of Cherokee and Choctaw artist, Jeffrey Gibson in an exhibit called “Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day.” Gibson’s art was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation when he was awarded a 2019 MacArthur Genius grant. The exhibit was celebratory, sincere, and visually stunning. Gibson’s talent was on full display in a wide range of pieces. They included sculptures, textiles, paintings, film, even several boxing bags. Descriptions of each piece were written by Gibson himself. (They are generally written by exhibit curators so to have Gibson’s narration was an honor!)

View of Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day at the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, July 14, 2019–September 29, 2019 (via Blanton Museum of Art)

A room of the exhibition hall was dedicated to the ghost shirt, a garment used by ghost dancers during the ceremony but reinterpreted here by Gibson. Each ghost shirt carries its own symbolism and messaging. Gibson’s use of a wide range of materials, textiles, prints, and textures allows his work to explore ideas of race, sexuality, gender, and religion. Gibson’s perspective bridges cultural practices and modern art forms and visualizes coalitions in the global struggle for Indigenous rights. Gibson wrote, “A garment acts as the mediator between the wearer–myself in this case– and the rest of the world. It can protect me, draw attention to me, celebrate me, allow me to be another version of myself.” The exhibit closed on September 29th, but you can find out more about Gibson’s work on his website.

Frank Waln’s “What Makes The Red Man Red” and “AbOriginal” are must listens. The music video for the former shows imagery and lyrics from Disney’s Peter Pan (1953). Scholars and social commentators have observed the obvious racism in the almost 70-year-old animated film, however, Waln’s work includes both audio clips and an answer to the question “what makes the red man red”?:

You made me red when you killed my people
Made me red when you bled my tribe
Made me red when you killed my people
(Like savages/ Like savages)

In “AbOriginal,” Waln goes home. The lyrics talk of life in his reservation— the pains, protests, and resilience that comes from his tribe.

I got this AB Original soul/ I got this AB Original flow
I got this pain that I can’t shake/ ties to my people I can’t break
Got this history in my blood/ got my tribe that shows me love
So when I rise/ you rise/ come on let’s rise like

Similarly, the music video pays tribute to Waln’s tribe and hometown in Rosebud, South Dakota. (ALSO–today he is releasing “My People Come From the Land,” a track that he worked on in collaboration with a Lakota language teacher and is his debut of playing the Native flute.)

PODS

Cherokee scholar Adrienne Keene (@NativeApprops) and Swinomish and Tulalip photographer Matika Wilbur (@matikawilbur) host the All My Relations Podcast. Their podcast bridges Keene’s expertise in the history of appropriations of Native culture and Wilbur’s interest in the modern for a truly delightful podcast. Their guests include academics, tribal elders, creatives, aunties, and artists. Their latest episode, “Beyond Blood Quantum” features Charlotte Logan, Gabe Galanda, Tommy Miller, and David Wilkins, and discusses the tribal implications, legal basis, and colonial origins of blood quantum.

Rick Harp (Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation) hosts Media Indigena, with regular roundtable guests Candis Callison, Brock Pitawanakwat, Kim TallBear, and Kenneth T. Williams. The scholars, journalists, and policymakers discuss the latest developments in North American news and the direct impact on Indigenous peoples in the 21st century. The conversations are pointed and nuanced. Each guest brings their expertise and insight into the complex issues facing Indian Country. Their latest episode, which was recorded live in Edmonton, Alberta, is called “Is the Green Movement Still Too White?” and looks at the global green movement, the media attention that propelled Greta Thunberg into the spotlight, and some of the pushback from Native Twitter.

This Land, a Crooked Media podcast hosted by Rebecca Nagle (Cherokee Nation) is especially timely. Nagle unpacks how a 20-year-old murder case in Oklahoma made it to the Supreme Court in 2019, the history of land divisions in Indian Territory, the Trail of Tears, and the long-term ramifications for tribal sovereignty and Native land rights.

BOOKS & BOOKLISTS

Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers (2019) is edited by Elissa Washutta and Theresa Warburton. This is one of the best books I’ve read as a graduate student and holds a permanent place on my shelf. The collection was composed with care and intention. As the editors described it, Shapes of Native Nonfiction is meant to hold structure throughout like a basket. The collection is structured in four terms based on the basket metaphor: technique, coiling, plaiting, and twining. Each represents a different style of non-fiction writing The editors and contributors are speaking directly to the idea that the academic essay is the only valid form of nonfiction. Form here is critical to the decolonial process. The editors write, “our focus on form-conscious Native nonfiction insists on knowledge as a resource whose coercive extraction is used to narrate settler colonialism in order to normalize its structure.”(11). It is a phenomenal collection specific to individuals, peoples, and places.

Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter calls into question basic assumptions about what makes up Indigenous literature and, as the title states, why they matter. Justice’s work urges readers to expand their view of what should be considered “Indigenous Literature.” This work is accessible to the generalist and the specialist, yet acknowledges their added significance: “our literatures are just one more vital way that we have countered those forces of erasure and given shape to our own ways of being in the world…they affirm Indigenous presence– and our present.” (xix)

The Elizabeth Warren Syllabus, which seems to become timelier every year, combines the specialties of several scholars already mentioned and citizens of the Cherokee Nation: Adrienne Keene (@nativeapprops), Rebecca Nagle (@rebeccanagle), and Joseph M. Pierce (@pepepierce). The syllabus was meant to not only address Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s claims to Cherokee ancestry but to contextualize the history of such claims by non-natives to Native ancestry. The Syllabus is structured by theme and topic and generally touches on the ideas of DNA and genetic testing, Indigenous citizenship, Cherokee history, erasure, cultural appropriation, blood, and tribal sovereignty. The syllabus was published in the Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies.

Finally, one way to observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day is to support the UT Native American and Indigenous Studies program and institutions that support Native students. Show up to events. Rally around causes. The NAIS Program provides an undergraduate certificate and graduate portfolio for UT students and also hosts a number of speaker series and workshops. This semester’s lineup includes Angelo Baca (Hopi/Diné), Tiya Miles, Héctor Nahuelpan (Mapuche), and Roxana Miranda Rupailaf (Mapuche). Consider attending one or several of these events.

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day!

Building a Virtual City for the Classroom: Angkor

By Adam Clulow and Tom Chandler

The Virtual Angkor project aims to recreate the sprawling Cambodian metropolis of Angkor at the height of the Khmer Empire’s power and influence in the twelfth century. A collaboration across disciplines and technologies, it has been built from the ground up by a team of Virtual History Specialists, Archaeologists and Historians at Monash University in Melbourne, Flinders University in Adelaide and The University of Texas at Austin across a period of more than ten years.

Although it has been used for research, Virtual Angkor was constructed specifically for the classroom and can be used at both secondary and tertiary level. It deploys advanced Virtual Reality technology, 3D Modeling and Animation to bring a premodern city to life, to place students on its streets and allow them to interact with a historical environment.

Angkor and the Khmer Empire

For approximately 500 years from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, the Khmer empire dominated the politics and economy of Southeast Asia. Located in modern day Cambodia, it was unique in the history of the region, extending direct influence across a vast swath of territory, encompassing most of present-day Thailand and the southern provinces of Laos and Vietnam.

Today, the Khmers are most famous for the remarkable architectural sites they left behind. Stretching over some 400 square kilometers, the Angkor Archaeological Park in Cambodia contains the remains of successive capitals of the Khmer Empire including an extensive network of stone temples. Together, these form one of the most important archaeological sites in Southeast Asia. At its peak in the twelfth century, the city is estimated to have been home to around three-quarters of a million people. This means that Angkor was, in the words of one archaeologist, “the most extensive city of its kind in the pre-industrial world.”

While the name Angkor conjures up immediate images of crumbling stone temples in a verdant jungle, reconstructing the city represents a huge challenge. Apart from inscriptions on temples, no written records from the period have survived the ravages of time and the monsoonal environment. The more important source comes in the form of extensive archaeological surveys of Angkor undertaken by the French School of Asian Studies (École française d’Extrême-Orient), the Greater Angkor Project, and the Khmer Archaeology Lidar Consortium. Together, they have produced detailed, multilayered maps of temple complexes, rice fields, roads, canals and settlement mounds throughout the Angkor Archaeological Park. These surveys provide the spatial foundations for any subsequent reconstruction of the city’s architectural and environmental landscapes. For written sources, historians rely especially on observations made by Zhou Daguan, a Chinese official dispatched to Angkor in 1296 by the Temur Emperor, who produced a detailed account of the city and its inhabitants.

Teaching

Most Asian history survey courses make reference to Angkor but the standard black and white illustrations contained in textbooks make it difficult for students to gain a sense of the scale and grandeur of the city. The Virtual Angkor project allows educators to place students inside the Angkor Wat complex, to view the famous bas-reliefs first hand without leaving their seats, to sail down one of the hundreds of canals crisscrossing the city, to inspect a marketplace selling goods from across Southeast Asia and to watch as thousands of animated people and processions enter, exit, and circulate around the complex.

The project, which went online in January 2018, can be experienced in multiple ways, through Virtual Reality headsets, online 360° videos that provide a glimpse into the city, short animated scenes that highlight episodes in the daily life of Angkor, and interactive teaching modules.

The most immersive experience comes via a Virtual Reality headset combined with earphones as the project includes multiple soundtracks of the environment complete with music, snatches of conversation, and sounds of daily life. The experience can be dizzying for students who jump to move aside as processions pass, who experience vertigo as they look down from elevated structures, and who become aware of the sun slowly rising in the sky above them.

While such equipment is usually available in university laboratories, it is also bulky and expensive. As a result, Virtual Angkor is designed to be accessed using student’s smartphones. In History classes, with their focus on close analysis and discussion, the phone is often seen as the enemy of the instructor, a source of distraction and diversion from the material at hand. But it can also be turned into a key educational tool. In this case, Android phones can be paired with relatively crude headsets such as Google Cardboard, which can be purchased for less than $20, to create an immersive environment. In addition, students can interact with the project via 360° panoramas which enable them to look around the city from the particular stationary point or by watching short 15-20 second animated scenes.

The site also includes a series of interactive modules focused on three themes: Architecture and Power, Water and Climate, and Trade and Diplomacy. These use the technology as a jumping off point for more conventional historical enquiry. To cite one example, students can look around a thriving marketplace in the city before making use of primary and secondary sources to consider how Angkor was integrated into wider networks that stretched across the region. For this particular week, the site combines a visualization of the marketplace with Zhou Daguan’s description of “sought-after Chinese goods” and an important article on Chinese ceramics in Angkor. These combine to push students to reassess the place of Khmer merchants and consumers in regional networks of trade.

Viewed as a whole, the Virtual Angkor project represents an attempt to harness advances in technology to create an immersive environment that allows students to use their phones to experience one of the great cities of Global History. Moving forward, its broader goal is to take the site and its underlying technology to new audiences via a partnership with Ubisoft, a video game company famous for its construction of elaborate historical environments, and a traveling IMAX exhibition that will move between multiple cities.

Further Reading

David Chandler, A History of Cambodia, 4th Edition (2008).
The definitive general history book on Cambodia from ancient times to the 21st century written by the foremost scholar in the field.

Michael Coe and Damian Evans, Angkor and the Khmer Civilization (2018)
A concise survey of Cambodian history from the beginning of recorded Khmer history to the expansion of French colonialism into Cambodia in the 18th century.

Damian Evans, Christophe Pottier, Roland Fletcher, Scott Hensley, Ian Tapley, Anthony Milne and Michael Barbetti, “A comprehensive archaeological map of the world’s largest preindustrial settlement complex at Angkor, Cambodia,” Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences of the United States of America 104, no. 36 (2007): 14227-14282. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0702525104
The most extensive exploration of the geography of Angkor, which was developed through a combination of decades of on-the-ground mapping surveys with cutting-edge remote-sensing technologies developed in conjunction with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA.

Adam Clulow and Tom Chandler, “Modeling Virtual Angkor: An Evolutionary Approach to a Single Urban Space,” IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, Volume 40, Issue 4 (2020), 9-16

Roland Fletcher, Damian Evans, Christophe Pottier, Chhay Rachna, “Angkor Wat: An Introduction,” Antiquity 89, no. 348 (2015): 1388-1401. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2015.178
A brilliant introduction to a special series of articles dedicated to exploring the latest developments in archaeological research on Angkor Wat and its surroundings.

Ian Mabbett and David Chandler, The Khmers (1996).
An authoritative monograph covering 2,000 years of the Khmer people and their culture.

Zhou Daguan, A Record of Cambodia, The Land and Its People, trans. Peter Harris (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2007)
A first-hand account written by the Chinese diplomat, Zhou Daguan, describing his stay in Angkor from 1296 to 1297. Offers a tantalising glimpse into the intricacies of Khmer society from the eyes of an outsider.

Andrew M. Koke, “Virtual Reality in the Classroom: How Historians Can Respond,” Perspectives on History, Oct. 1, 2017.

Virtual Angkor images: Tom Chandler and Mike Yeates, SensiLab, Monash University

Teaching with Wikipedia

When Public History is done so well, we want to celebrate it! In Fall 2018, our colleague in Art History, Dr. Stephennie Mulder, had her students rewrite articles on Wikipedia to be more accurate and based on up-to-date scholarship. To be honest, I’ve thought about doing something like this in my classes, but I would never have done such a creative and thorough job. Now the instructors among us have a model and a roadmap we can all use. And the rest of us can sit back and watch some great teaching unfold because Dr. Mulder recently recounted the process on Twitter. Enjoy! ~ Joan Neuberger

by Dr. Stephennie Mulder

Read on Twitter

This semester in my Arts of Islam survey, I decided to scrap the research paper and have students collaborate to re-write @Wikipedia articles. It ended up better than I could have imagined & transformed how I think about teaching #StudentsOfIslamicArt #IslamicArt #MedievalTwitter

I was hesitant about shaking up a popular class that had worked well for years, but one statistic finally convinced me: 90% of Wikipedia articles are written by men – and largely by men from Euro-American contexts.

Female scholars are marginalised on Wikipedia because it’s written by men | Victoria Leonard

The oft-maligned #Wikipedia is the now the world’s most frequently-consulted source of information & fifth-most visited website. Because anyone can be an editor, it’s on us to make it the best resource it can be. If you think Wikipedia is bad, look in the mirror. Wikipedia is us.

So this assignment quickly took on a much deeper significance than a research paper. It required them to develop many of the same research and writing skills as a research paper, but it also came to have a strong #civics and #SocialJustice component, and the students responded.

To emphasize the collaborative, real-world applicability of the assignment, I set it up as a partnership with a museum and another Islamic art class via my brilliant

colleagues @lk_michelsen @hi_shangrila and @AlexDikaSegg @Rutgers_Newark shangrilahawaii.org

The assignment asks them to imagine they’re hired as consultants for a major museum to improve the public’s knowledge on Islamic Art, in advance of an exhibition. Their task? To assess an article for the quality of its sources and content and then research, write, and improve it.

I have almost 50 students enrolled in the class, so I made the assignment collaborative and divided the class into 15 groups of 3-4 students. I then preselected #IslamicArt articles I knew were important but underdeveloped on #Wikipedia. They had 3 weeks to research & 3 to write.

The assignment was set up on @WikiEducation‘s terrific website. Students had to complete a training module/week. Through this and discussion in class they learned how to determine quality of sources, the value of peer review, and improved research methods.

Wiki Education — Connecting Higher Ed and Wikipedia

In addition to the online training modules, @WikiEducation mailed me hard-copy pamphlets to give the students: one general one on Editing Wikipedia and another new one on editing Art History topics. These were super helpful.

New Resource Helps Art History Students Improve Wikipedia

I also drew on @artandfeminism‘s amazing quick guides which are brilliant for edit-a-thons.

But on top of these crucial online resources, I wanted to highlight continuing value of analog sources so students could gain experiential knowledge of benefits of both types of sources. I pulled in our brilliant #librarians Becca Pad and Gina Bastone from the UT Fine Arts Library @UTFAL and UT Libraries @utlibraries

Becca and I created a research guide for the assignment that pointed students to both digital and hard-copy sources within @UTFAL and @utlibraries.

I also spent a day in the library with students, walking them through basic research methods. I thought this might be too basic, but the day walking them through the physical library was inspired by a comment made by one of our brightest Honors Art History undergraduates in a meeting of the UT Provost’s Libraries Task force (on which I currently serve):

“Many faculty and librarians don’t realize that it’s not that undergraduates don’t *want* to use the libraries, it’s that we are SCARED of the libraries.” She explained that many students no longer receive the basic training needed to know how to use the libraries. So they don’t.

Here’s Eleanor Garstein’s and Dea Sula’s revamp of the Pyxis of Zamora

The UT Library system is one of the United States’ great research collections, but the vast majority of undergraduates test out of basic Intro to Rhetoric and Writing-type classes that used to train them in basic research methods. So the libraries just look intimidating and baffling.

Just getting them physically in the library was revelatory. They were astonished at the range and quality of sources that did not turn up on a Google search. It really lit a fire under them, sparked their curiosity and made them want to dive in. This was revelatory for me too!

We talked about what a privilege it is to have access to depth and reliable quality of knowledge in a top research library. We talked about how access to knowledge controls the way we see the world and our place in it. Again and again, students spoke about feeling empowered.

Zain Tejani and Tarik Islam improving the article on Islamic Gardens by replacing some of the more subjective aspects of the pages on the Islamic gardens with entries on the surviving gardens and sensorial experience. They later found their edits reverted by another editor – a valuable lesson about how to work within Wikipedia’s editor community (they’re still in negotiations on the Talk page!)

Yesterday [December 12, 2018] we met for an upload party. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but it turned out to be one of my favorite days as a teacher EVER. I am so proud of my students and of their hard work. I am amazed at how seriously they took the assignment and what a terrific job they did.

There were challenges: the sometimes-difficult collaborative aspect of a group assignment, the fact that some topics had few sources, the challenge of learning to write in a neutral, unbiased style. But they had something real on the line: an article out there in the world.

And in the end, these smart students have now contributed 15 better-sourced, better-written articles to the most frequently-consulted body of knowledge in the world. And they’ve learned key research and writing skills that will be applicable in a range of fields.

And of course, they’ve deepened their knowledge of #IslamicArt. Just listen to my student Gabrielle Walker speaking confidently about the complex history and historiography of Raqqa Ware, a type of medieval Islamic fineware pottery.

There is room for improving even important and significant topics on Wikipedia. Carla Bay, Sukaina Aziz (@SukainaAziz), and Yasmeen Amro (@TheYasmeenAmro), made major improvements to the article on Muqarnas, perhaps the most distinctive form of Islamic architectural ornament:

In short, this assignment did all a traditional research paper does: deepening knowledge, research, and writing skills – but it also left them feeling empowered to be active contributors: shaping global knowledge and redressing imbalances that shape the way we see the world.

So if you’ve ever wanted to have students do a Wikipedia article writing project, I would encourage you to jump in and follow Wikipedia’s motto: #BeBold. Your students will learn, and you will all feel like you made the world just a tiny bit better place to be.

And super grateful to the fabulous @LaurenMacknight, our hardworking and incredibly on-it communications director @UT_AAH, for enthusiastically promoting our project on multiple platforms! You’re incredible. 🙂

Digital Teaching: Mapping Networks Across Avant-Garde Magazines

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.

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.

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.

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

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Digital Teaching: The Stalinist Purges on Video

This short documentary film was produced by a team of 5 students in Introduction to Russian, East, European and Eurasian Studies (REE310) — Ben Randall, David Elliott, Jennifer Hairston, David Spector, and Ben Rettig. In this interdisciplinary course, co-taught by Mary Neuburger and Christian Hilchey, student teams spent the semester working together in stages that culminated in the presentation of their films during the finals period. We found inspiration and models in similar projects assigned by Erika Bsumek, Robert Olwell, and others in the UT History Department.

In our course, students were encouraged to define a sufficiently narrow topic so that they were able to compile primary and secondary audio and visual material–film clips, photos, interviews, music, voice-over narration, etc–and construct a coherent and meaningful narrative in 5 minutes. Not all projects were history projects though all were related to Russia or Eastern Europe.

As instructors, we worked with them closely on the various stages of the project including a preliminary proposal, a storyboard, and preliminary script, and a trailer. We generally encouraged narrowing and focus of topic, and directed students towards possible sources, including interviews of relevant UT faculty for on camera expertise. This group’s project on one aspect of the Great Purge of the 1930s used amazing historical footage to tell the story of one of its victims, the great theater director, Vsevolod Meyerhold. One of the highlights of the film is the interview with Dr. Charters Wynn in his office in Garrison Hall.

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.

Digital Teaching: A Mid-Semester Timeline

By Chris Babits

Last March, students in Dr. Erika Bsumek’s Introduction to American Indian History took their midterm exam. Most students earned good grades, but on a mid-semester assessment, a large number expressed interest in some form of extra credit. Students also indicated that since the material was very new to them (secondary curricula rarely emphasizes the American Indian past), they felt that they didn’t have a good grasp on the sequence of events covered in the class. Although Professor Bsumek, the other teaching assistant, and myself were shocked at the overwhelming request for additional work, we thought we’d try something new: a digital timeline in order to improve students’ research and writing skills.

A screenshot of the timeline.

Digital history projects have grown more popular over the past decade. Professors, instructors, and history educators have increasingly recognized the limitations of traditional assessments. Exams, quizzes, analytical essays, and book reviews — each of these can measure student learning. Exams and quizzes, for example, challenge students to recall a wide-range of information. This can include students crafting and proving original arguments, using the course’s source material in order to support one’s position. Writing essays, on the other hand, provide students the opportunity to work on their writing skills. Recent reports show how this crucial part of literacy is lacking in the workplace. History papers can play a crucial role in developing students’ analytical and writing skills, preparing them to be better in the business world and as engineers.

What these traditional assessments are missing, however, are the twenty first century skills our students need. The teaching team for Introduction to American Indian History wanted to create an extra credit assignment that combined the best parts of history education with the core components of digital humanities pedagogy. When we reflected on the midterm exams, we noticed a few things that were lacking. Most importantly, the students were right. They lacked a strong sense of chronology. How would we better equip them to understand sequence and change over time? They needed some tool to help them see these important parts of historical inquiry. A digital timeline seemed like the best way to go. Utilizing course development funds, Dr. Bsumek agreed to compensate me for the extra time this would require.

The initial step was determining which online timeline generator to choose for the project. With the growing interest in digital humanities, there are many timeline generators. After less than an hour of research, and after further consultation with Dr. Bsumek, I decided on Knight Lab’s TimeLineJS because of its user-friendly interface. My former colleague, Dr. Julia Gossard (now an Assistant Professor at Utah State University) helped me make this decision as well since she had successfully implemented several assignments in her courses with the program.

Knight Lab has created a template from which one could create their own timeline. I was initially wary of the template but, as one can see below, Knight Lab describes what type of information should be placed in which column.

Knight Lab Template (click to enlarge).

After deciding on the digital tool for the timeline, we created the instructions for students. Students could write a 150-200 word timeline entry for any person, place, event, movement, or piece of legislation from the midterm on. Before writing an entry, students had to write to me to receive approval for the entry they wished to write. Upon approval, I then asked students to find and email me an outside academic source. Only after clearing this hurdle were students approved to write their extra credit timeline entry.

The result was a collaborative study tool that students could use on the final exam. Thirty seven students out of the 156 registered for the class contributed to the timeline. I proofread each entry not only for content accuracy but also for writing style, proper grammar, and spelling errors. If students wanted the full points they could earn for extra credit, they usually had to revise one or two times.

Most students earned additional points that were added to their final grade. Twenty one students submitted two entries, markedly increasing their chance of earning a better grade in the course. More importantly, they collaborated on a project that addressed the weaknesses they identified when studying for their midterm exams. The final exams displayed a much more sophisticated understanding of sequence and change over time. Students crafted better in-class exams that highlighted a more nuanced interpretation of the history of American Indians.

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.

A Revolting People: Three Lesser-known Makers of the American Revolution

By Robert Olwell

Last spring, I divided the students enrolled in my course on the “Era of the American Revolution” into groups of four and assigned each group the task of researching, writing, and then producing a four-five minute “video essay.” (For more on the video essay form see “Show & Tell: The Video Essay as History Assignment.”)

I called the project “A Revolting People” playing off a line from the Marx Brothers’ film “Duck Soup.” Someone tells Groucho that the “peasants are revolting!” and he replies, “They certainly are, and they’re rebelling too.”

Each group was given the name of a lesser-known participant in the events of the American Revolution. My teaching assistants, Ms. Signe Fourmy and Ms. Jeanne Kaba, and I sat together and watched all of the thirty-three video essays that were submitted. We were pleased with the quality of research and creativity that most of the student groups achieved.

Now, in the spirit of this summer’s Olympics, I would like to present (with the permission of the students producers) the three video essays that we deemed to be worthy of the “gold,” “silver,” and “bronze” medals.

Bronze Medal
Topic: Jemima Wilkinson
Produced by: Nancy Trinh, Rebecca Swan, Noah Villabos, Albert Zhao

Silver Medal
Topic: George Robert Twelves Hewes
Produced by: Emma Meyer, Garret Mireles, Letitia Olariu, Nikole Pena

Gold Medal
Topic: John Laurens
Produced by: Jordan Gamboa, Logan Green, Nicholas Klesmith, Alexandria Lyons

Digital Teaching: Behind the Scenes in the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio

The Liberal Arts Development Studio has served as the production force behind the development of live-streaming and other online courses at The University of Texas at Austin since 2012. The Development Studio is an integrated team of professional and student staff assembled to work with faculty to create rich and effective online courses. Software development professionals create tools to support student/professor interaction online. Audio, video and graphic design experts recruit top-notch UT student staff to create high-quality multi-media experiences for students. Project management professionals work with faculty and technical staff to coordinate the production and delivery of multiple courses each semester, including the summer terms.

Credits:

Interviews conducted by Teaching Assistant Shery Chanis.

Musical intro prepared and performed by Natalie Suri and Zachary Suri.

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