As Bethany Nowviskie has already announced, I’m going be a visiting scholar for Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia for the Fall semester. To say that I’m honored would be an understatement. The work that comes out of Scholars’ Lab is incredible, and having opportunity to work along side the folks here is really a privilege. What’s great is that I’ll be working on a project that utilizes tools that both Scholars’ Lab and the Center for History and New Media have been working on the past several years. I’ll be using Omeka and Neatline to create a digital archive and scholarly exhibit on residential segregation in Richmond, Virginia in the early 20th century, and along the way explore some issues in doing scholarship in the digital humanities.

A little background: From about 1910 to 1929, both the city of Richmond and the state of Virginia passed and amended several ordinances that established racially-segregated residential areas. These ordinances basically determined whether a street was a “white” or “colored” street, and hence restricted residence based on those designations.

My interest in this topic was sparked by a controversy I stumbled upon while doing research for my Master’s thesis. In July 1914, the congregation of Emanuel Baptist Church in Richmond sought to sell its church property to a black congregation from Leigh Street Methodist Church. Emanuel Baptist sat on the northeast corner of 5th St. and Leigh St (a corner that no longer exists, thanks to the convention center in Richmond). According to Richmond’s 1910 residential segregation ordinance, the block of Leigh Street where Emanuel Church stood was a white block, while the block of 5th Street was black. Because the address and front door of Emanuel Church was on Leigh Street, the parties involved decided that, to circumvent the segregation ordinance, they would move the front door and address to 5th Street, and thus still adhere to spirit of the ordinance.

Of course, this “solution” didn’t fly too well with city government, or with a hundred or so white residents near the church who created and signed two petitions asking the city to halt the sale of the church. So, the city passed a new ordinance in October 1914 that contained language to redefine the section of 5th Street on which Emanuel Baptist Church sat as a white street. Even though the 1914 ordinance was passed specifically to prevent the sale of Emanuel Baptist Church, its definition also applied to the rest of the city, thus potentially changing the racial designation of other streets in Richmond. Residential segregation ordinances across the US were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1929, but their effects certainly continued beyond that.

I’ll use Omeka to create an archive of primary sources related to Emanuel Baptist Church, and Richmond’s residential segregation laws in general. I’ll also use Omeka’s ExhibitBuilder plugin to create the essay. I’ll use Neatline to display GIS data collected for this project. I’m particularly interested in how the residential designations of the city changed with each ordinance. So I plan to map how the drawing of segregated streets changed over time with each new ordinance. I also hope to create several other maps, including a map of the addresses for each person who petitioned the city to prevent the sale of Emanuel Church, and a map for each case brought before city courts that violated residential segregation ordinances.

In addition to the specific historical research, I’ll also be exploring some issues in digital history/humanities:

• Potential uses for HTML5 for digital humanities projects. I’ve been eagerly reading about developments on HTML5 for some time now, and am interested to see how it can be used for digital humanities work. I plan to use HTML5 for my project’s site, and explore as much of the spec and its features as I can. I’ve got a post series outline just for this, and plan for my work at Scholars’ Lab to contribute to those posts. I’ll also develop an Omeka theme that uses HTML5, and release that to the public sometime this Fall.
• Potential uses for Omeka and plugins as platforms for digital scholarship. This is a topic we discuss occasionally among the Omeka team. Even though Omeka is designed as an archiving and exhibiting platform, and marketed mainly to institutions instead of individuals, I think it has lots of potential as a platform for publishing scholarship. So I hope my work on this project will help to flesh out that potential.
• Design approaches for digital scholarship. I’m keenly interested in how we can better use design in humanities scholarship, digital or other wise. I think it’s important for the DH community to discuss this more, and hope I can contribute something to this while I’m at Scholars’ Lab. For folks following recent conversations on Twitter and blog posts about user testing in DH, I’ll be making plans for user testing, but also thinking/writing about how digital scholars can and should integrate user testing into their scholarly work. I’ve had a post still in draft with thoughts on this from last week that I hope to publish soon.

I’m incredibly grateful to Bethany and the rest of the folks at Scholars’ Lab for giving me this opportunity. I’m also grateful to Tom Scheinfeldt and CHNM for letting me spend some time in Charlottesville. I just arrived at Scholars’ Lab yesterday, and will be in Charlottesville for the next two weeks. Then I’ll spend some more time here this Fall. At the end of this, in December, I’ll give a presentation about my research and the final product. All the work I do on this project will, I hope, contribute in positive ways back to Omeka and Neatline. And of course any code I create will be open source.

When Brian Croxall asked about advice to give to new grad students, I tweeted “Do everything you can to do work you enjoy, and enjoy the work you do. Otherwise, it truly is not worth it.” I’ve been doing work I enjoy, and enjoying the work I do, for so long now I forget that I’m a grad student. This, what I am doing right now, with Scholars’ Lab and with CHNM every day, is truly worth it.

1. Make sure students graduate as skilled, thoughtful consumers and producers of digital media

Several smaller goals fit into this:

• Learn how to search – Read Bill Turkel’s blog. If you’re not convinced search is important, READ IT AGAIN. There is more to search than Google, and learning how various searches work—and, more importantly, how to make search for work you—is an incredibly valuable skillset beyond college.
• Learn how to manage information flow – For better or for worse, the information age is in overdrive, and all is in flux (thanks again, Bill). But there are tools and services to help you manage that flow, and it should be one of the goals of any university to help students learn how to manage that information. If we want to encourage students to expand their learning beyond the classroom (and I really think we should), then universities need to prepare students for managing the mass of information that comes with it.
• Learn how to produce meaningful, well-composed content and share it with others – Rob Wall argues that, in the 21st century, “creativity is the new technology.” Its incredible to think of the various ways people can produce and share content for equally various purposes. Anyone with an internet connection can sign up for a weblog right now, and begin producing and sharing content, right now. Anyone with an internet connection can produce and share data visualizations. Anyone with a computer and webcam can record and share video. Anyone who can search the web can find audio content, and create a podcast with it. With all of this opportunity for new ways to create narrative and share ideas comes a real need for universities to teach students new ways to compose those narratives and share those ideas.
• Learn how to critique content and methodology – Along with providing the ability to produce content in a variety of media, universities must provide the tools and skills to help students critique content, and discern the effectiveness and usefulness of particular technologies and media. One of the tenants of Mason’s PhD in History and New Media program is “critical optimism”. So, while we are optimistic about the changes that new media can bring to the practice of history, we’re critical about the specific methods that particular media employ. This is an approach that, I think, is already common in most classrooms. In my history course, I teach students how to critically read primary and secondary sources, and how to discern other methodological approaches to a particular issue. These skills are equally important—if not more important—when using and producing digital media.

2. Use free, open-source, and/or extensible tools whenever possible, and encourage faculty, staff, and students to do the same.

Universities spend countless millions on closed, proprietary systems like Blackboard and WebCT, systems that are very overbearing in their pedagogical approaches. In contrast, signing up for a weblog like WordPress is free (and there are plenty of other free options), and the uses for blogs in classes are limitless. While a little more difficult for the average instructor, Moodle is a free, open-source alternative to other learning management systems, and boasts a significant developer community contributing plugins and modules for extended functionality. There’s more this, though, than learning management systems: web browsers, word processing, screencasting, image editing, audio/video editing, to name a few. The specific tool, of course, should be chosen based on need and goals, but opting for extensible, open-source, and free alternatives will save universities money, provide more flexibility to instructors, and encourage the university community to do with software what it already tries to do with teaching and research: Contribute knowledge and resources back to the world.

3. Foster academic use of technologies that breaks down boundaries of the classroom, and the university as a whole.

As academic departments face budget cuts and lose staff positions if their enrollments are down, this may be the most difficult, but I think the most potentially beneficial, of all the goals. At the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in January, I presented on how I use technology to break down barriers to learning in my courses. Mills Kelly has written extensively on the future of the course, and argues that positive change in learning on university campuses will happen when students take individual responsibility for their own learning. Mills is particularly keen on the ideas of an iTunes-like class, where students can choose specific bits and pieces in a course that interests them. Others have spoken of the networked learner, and of learning environments that are not isolated from the rest of the world, but rather expand through a bottom-up approach. While I really like the potential for learning in a world without walls, I think there are some uses for the “artificial community” that is the classroom; Namely, that courses bring together people who would otherwise not talk to each other, and potentially allow for more diversity in perspectives. Learning based purely on social networking brings with it the danger of learning only inside the enclaves we create for ourselves based solely on who/what we like or who/what we’re comfortable with. But I think a balance can be struck, and I think universities should employ academic technologies to find and encourage that balance between classroom and independent learning.

So, there are at least three goals I think academic institutions should try to achieve regarding academic technology. Its certain good food for thought, and I’ll continue thinking about these goals for my own teaching and research. I imagine, though, that there are plenty more goals to add. So, lets help Jeff out. What would your academic technology goals be?

• Mills uses blogs instead of course management systems because its something he can set up, modify, and control. He doesn’t have to rely on university tech support, or work through the university. Was dissatisfied with systems like Blackboard and WebCT because the interfaces are clunky, have lots of features he didn’t need/use.
• After switching to blogs, Mills was surprised that students actually wrote more on blogs than on forums in WebCT. Students told him this was because blogging appealed to them more; it was something they may actually use or do outside of class.
• Forums = Socratic model. Blogs = Conversational model. With forums, Mills would ask a question, and students would respond. With blogs, students took more initiative to respond on their own, ask their own questions, approach the topic in their own way.
• Mills uses blogs to get students prepared prior to class, for the work they’ll do in class. So, once class starts he can drop straight into conversation by pointing out posts from students. Breaks the ice, and gets conversation in class going much easier.
• What doesn’t work: 1) Students don’t really take off with blogs as much as he’d like, to make it “their” space to explore and do whatever they want with. Wants more spontaneous participation. 2) Students don’t like to critique other students’ work. They’re reluctant to criticize other students.
• Add a link to your own blog to the course website. Students will read it, because some students are interested in what professors think or are working on. Gives students access to the professor that’s different than in the classroom, and shows them that professors are thinking about topics outside the classroom.