www.le.ac.uk

Manufacturing Pasts:Making the history accessible

London Digital Humanities Group, 30 April 2013Terese BirdLearning Technologist and SCORE Research Fellow

What will we talk about?

• Making the history accessible

• Audiences

• Evolving needs for digital humanities

Photo by esrad on Flickr

Making the history accessible

• No historiography of British industrial decline

• Dead zone: 70s – 90s

• Locked away

• Open materials

• Capture it now

• Not didactic but context

• AccessiblePhoto by Wesley Fryer on Flickr

Fires – the need to capture now

Accessible – how?• Saw connections, made the

mashups

• Created a website on top of the database

• Used social media

• Visited classes, groups, record office, libraries, conferences

• Made everything downloadable, mobile

• iTunes U

On the website you can listen to the professor…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVN4OOpKGMQ

Social Media: everyone joins in(Flickr, Prezi, Youtube, Scoop.it, Twitter)

Mobile

Audiences

• College librarians

• College students – extended project

• Currently-enrolled university students

• Local community

• Local historians

• Digital humanities scholars

Evolving Needs for the Digital Humanities Toolkit for researchers:

• Using visual sources in historical research

• Using oral testimony in historical research

• Provenance, judgement

Tools for students & teachers:

• Glossary, reference

• How to make your own

• How to reference

Key SkillsAnalyzing and drawing conclusions from primary sources, including image-based sources, is a key skill for historians and specialists in many fields, and utilising digitised primary sources has been effective in building such skills (Tally & Goldenberg, 2005)

The storyso far…

Any questions?

www.le.ac.uk/manufacturingpasts

Embedding in learning

• Gobbet papers

• Seminars around some of the materials; group work

• ‘Transformations’ module assessment will be built around

• PGCE Geography assessment will be built around

• PhD and Masters students will be introduced to these as research sources

References

• Beyond Distance Research Alliance, University of Leicestere. (2010). OTTER: Open, Transferable and Technology-enabled Educational Resources — University of Leicester. University of Leicester website. Retrieved March 12, 2012, from http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-research-alliance/projects/otter

• Beyond Distance Research Alliance, University of Leicester. (2011). OSTRICH: OER Sustainability through Teaching & Research Innovation: Cascading across HEIs — University of Leicester. University of Leicester website. Retrieved March 12, 2012, from http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-research-alliance/projects/ostrich

• Tally, B., & Goldenberg, L. B. (2005). Fostering Historical Thinking With Digitized Primary Sources. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 5191, 1-21. Retrieved from http://students.stritch.edu/dlcaven/Article2/DigitizedPrimarySources.pdf

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