I hope you’ll read the perspectives here, and offer your own.

Even though this course is numbered as an upper division class (390), there are absolutely no prerequisites for registration. That means that the majority of students are not history majors and in many cases they have not even taken other history courses. When I started the semester, I did not fully grasp the implications of this situation. I figured on having to do some refresher work on disciplinary concerns and methods, but I had no clue that this material would be brand new to so many of the students. It shouldn’t have been a surprise after so many years of No Child Left Behind, but it was. Thus, I’ve found myself trying to teach them what history is, what historians do, and how to use digital tools in the service of that work. Turns out, it’s a tall order.

So, I’ve found myself thinking about “threshold concepts”* and how the course would benefit from some very modest and clear assessments tied to those concepts which are central to history. Jan Meyer and Ray Land that there are some concepts that are gateways for learners, and that once they master those concepts learners have an “a-ha” experience that changes they way the approach and make sense of the world. I’ve mentioned before that I think the first six or seven pages of Bill Cronon’s “Getting Ready to Do History” (pdf) is a very good, concise articulation of some of the things that historians care about and I read and discuss it with my students, but the question is:

What are those key activities that move students from reading about what historians care about to understanding why those concerns are important and how they shape what we do when we do history?

I will definitely spend some of the summer trying to devise those activities.

Oh, and then, after we get through that, students need to be able to work in a digital environment.

The current crop of (non-Senior, non-major) undergraduates is in the process of working in groups of four or five to build digital history sites in Omeka.net. Those sites should work to respond to an inquiry question by selecting, editing, and analyzing primary sources, and then using those sources and additional contextual scholarship to offer an answer to the inquiry question. Again, it’s a tall order, and I’m not at all sure how the projects will turn out. Will students be able to recognize the threshold concepts that we’ve talked about in class and apply the historical thinking skills that we have reviewed in the service of answering their questions? Will the burdens of learning new content management systems and geospatial tools overwhelm the analytical concerns?

I’ll let you know as the projects start to come together.

* See Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land, “Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge (2): Epistemological Considerations and a Conceptual Framework for Teaching and Learning,” Higher Education 49, no. 3 (April 1, 2005): 373–388. doi:10.2307/25068074. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25068074

The report characterizes history as a discipline in transition, and it is–both in human and institutional senses. Historians, graduate students, archivists, and librarians are each in their own way coping with the “problem of abundance” created by the digital turn. The recommendations are addressed to a range of stakeholders, but I find that the group that is most in need of a reorientation here are the academic historians themselves.

Avoiders

In my reading of the report, I was struck by the general reluctance of the historians in the sample to try new approaches and learn new skills. Digitizing sources in the archives is not really a new approach; it’s an upgrade from the photo copy machine.

The unwillingness of the interview subjects to invest the time in learning and using citation management tools was particularly disturbing, and yet totally unsurprising. Granted, this is a difficult transition to make in the midst of an ongoing project, but as historians launch new projects, these are exactly the tools that can help them organize and manage the materials that they digitize during their archives visits.

Gaining intellectual control over source materials is a central part of our work as historians. The scale and format of those source materials have changed over the past thirty years, and somewhat dramatically over the past dozen as archival digizitation projects have begun to hit a critical mass. As a result, practices are going to be forced to change or we will no longer be able to say that our work represents the best reading of the existing evidence.

Digital Skills

The report characterizes digital historians as a minority in the profession is certainly true. We are. And, we are primarily self-taught, but we are not self-taught in isolation. There is a community here on twitter and blogs–history done in public, if not public history. And, there are a range of ways that that community supports its members in learning new skills, building new tools, and producing new research.

Generally, these folks are at home with the sense of uncomfortableness and risk of learning new methods and approaches. This sometimes results in a feeling of being at sea while figuring out something completely new means accepting and embracing failure and frustration–you are no longer an expert; you are a novice.

I suspect that this kind of discomfort is simply to overwhelming for historians who are defined by being the expert in their field, being the most knowledgable, being the person who critiques the shortfalls of the work of others. As a result, we are seeing this community grow most rapidly amongst those willing to take the risks — those not under the tenure clock, and those not lulled into the complacency of the security that comes after.

But, the fact of the matter is that to be responsible guides to their students, mid-career historians desperately need opportunities for training in information managements and digital tools. The faculty who are teaching the current crop of PhD students are woefully unprepared to assist their students in surveying and analyzing the vast field of source material that they have access to at this point. Well-trained in the skills necessary to closely read and corroborate sources as they build answers to historical questions, these historians would benefit from knowing more about how text-mining, visualization, and geospatial tools offer ways to see new things a larger aggregate of sources.

Over the past seven to ten years the range of tools available for use in historical research that don’t require anyone to learn a programming language or to build anything from scratch has skyrocked–Voyant, ViewShare, WordPress, Omeka, Zotero, Paper Machines, etc. These “software as service” tools are a place to begin. So are periodic gatherings like THATCamps with workshop sessions.

But, really, we need something more concrete: a several week summer workshop for digital history novices who want to build a baseline of skills and learn how to learn new ones in a discipline-specific context. (The Digital Humanities Summer Institutes don’t fit the bill here; they’re just too advanced for this crowd.) Endorsement and promotion from the AHA and its Research Committee would go a long way toward making this kind of professional development viable.

Of course, first we need a field of participants who are willing to enter into a community of novices and risk takers who are willing to be uncomfortable as they learn new things and help one another.

Methods Across the Curriculum

Reaching this reluctant and unprepared middle of the profession is the only way that we can really answer the alarming sense of unpreparedness that report surfaces from the graduate students. We would do well to begin to take a “methods across the curriculum” approach to training graduate students, that includes both analogue and digital skills.

One semester of methods training frequently positions students to rehearse the history of the profession, and to identify the characteristics of a range of methodological approaches. This semester is usually eventually followed by a dissertation seminar that comes far too late in the game. The result is a growing number of students who languish at the ABD stage while they figure out how to do their work.

Readings courses that focus solely on mastering the existing range scholarship only begin to scratch the surface of preparing graduate students to contribute to that scholarship. Each and every topics course should to some degree offer additional methods work and guidance in forming research questions, locating and organizing materials, and applying analytical tools–analogue or digital.

But, this can only happen when the skills and knowledge about working in this digital environment is shared across the faculty.

No one will argue that the current state of graduate education in the humanities is without its problems. There are significant challenges posed by changing employment opportunities, communication practices, and information access. We can meet these challenges, but we need to base our responses on a shared understanding of the goals of graduate education. Though this is a thin description, students pursue graduate education to achieve mastery existing scholarship and methods so that they can produce new scholarship that adds to our collective understanding of the world. Once this basic goal is achieved, students need adequate preparation to enter the world as teachers and/or public humanists. Both of these elements require attention to and adaptation for contemporary conditions.

What is going well?

Perhaps the most traditional element of contemporary graduate education is that students are required to gain control over the existing scholarship in their field. Unfortunately, I am certain that without some significant investment in updating our research methods courses, we are going to fall behind in preparing students to participate in the creation of new knowledge. They will simply be unable to cope with the scale of data available to them—what Roy Rosenzweig termed “the problem of abundance.” We need to prepare students to use the new digital tools (text-mining, visualization tools, geospatial tools) to work with the ever-expanding deluge of materials available for study.

At George Mason, the History doctoral program has required students to take both a traditional methods course and a pair of courses that deal with new media. Through the course of the program’s ten-year history the content and focus of those new media course has changed with technological and methodological developments (See this Zotero group for links to the range of syllabi.). Currently, I talk with students about the first semester of the course—-Clio Wired I: Theory and Practice of Digital History-—as being an extension of their traditional methods course. During the semester, we try to focus on using the available research tools to ask and answer questions that are important to historians. William Cronon’s essay “Getting Ready to Do History,” (pdf) from the collection, Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline (2006), is an excellent summary of the disciplinary commitments of historians. He offers a long list, but some include forming conclusions from evidence, an attention to the particularities of context, and a recognition of multiple perspectives and multiple causation in our efforts to understand the past. All of these elements contribute to the doing and teaching of history, and they need to remain central to our graduate curriculum and professional development.

Furthermore, the GMU history program has an emphasis on open scholarly communication and attention to audience that offers some lessons that more traditional programs would do well to take to heart. Students in the program have the opportunity to pursue a PhD with an emphasis in one of four areas of career focus: college and university teaching, new media and information technology, public and applied history, and professional development (for those already established in a career). Three of these four areas might commonly be considered alternative career goals for the PhD candidate, but at GMU these have been standard and equivalent from the beginning. So, in theory, the majority of our students should be thinking about how to address a public audience with their work from the start, and training that focuses on new technologies paves the way for success in that arena. These structural differences in GMU’s History PhD make it successful at addressing the changing landscape of graduate education, but my sense is that other programs are not moving forward with similar options that validate advanced scholarly work outside academe.

What is going less well?

Despite the promising signs of progress and adaptation in programs like Mason’s, we’re doing less well in other important areas.

Collaboration

We’re not actively creating experiences that allow students to learn to collaborate. Collaboration is especially important to those students who are pursing careers outside of traditional academic positions, but even those who land in tenure-line jobs will increasingly be called upon to work intensively with other faculty and staff. In particular, digital projects almost always require a team of collaborators. The problem is that collaboration is remarkably hard to teach with out hands-on experience and modeling. As a result, we need to consider implementing more experiences that imbed graduate students in functioning teams, through apprenticeships, internships, residencies and mentoring programs where this cooperative work is already taking place. We have lots of effective models for this work from non-humanities departments (science labs; medical school internship, residency and rotation programs, etc.) and from more humanities-based ventures like Preparing Future Faculty program. I think we need to think seriously about building on these models as we work to create opportunities for graduate students to participate in collaborative work, digital and otherwise.

At GMU, we offer these opportunities for graduate students in two ways. First, each year a number of students serve as graduate research assistants at the Rosenzweig Center. This means that for twenty hours a week, they actively work on digital history projects. As much as possible, the faculty and staff at the Center try to integrate the GRAs into the project teams so that they do meaningful historical work, learn about the digital tools that we use, and experience the ways that we work together to product projects. Some of the GRA positions are funded by the History Department, and some of them are funded through sponsored research funding. Often this work leads to summer wage positions for the students, so they get an even more thorough immersion in our process. Second, we are in our first year of an experiment with a Digital History Fellows program. For three years, a cohort of three graduate students will receive fellowship funding to pursue Digital History work at GMU. These students participate in a credit-bearing internship course for two years that allows them to learn about the Center and work intensively with one of the three divisions (education, research, or public projects). If all goes well with this initial cycle of funding, we hope to make it an established feature of the History PhD program.

Unfortunately, even with these programs, we don’t have the funding or the capacity to offer everyone a spot at CHNM who would like one. Only with more stable institutional support would a more broad-based integration of these experiences be possible. Obviously, not every humanities department is going to have a center like CHNM within its purview. More often than not these centers are external to departments, either standing as independent units within a college or as part of a library. That makes the question of capacity even more pressing, since those centers would be hoping to work with and train students from many humanities departments.

Teaching

We’re not doing nearly enough make sure that students become effective teachers. Open access and public humanities venues increase daily and each one of them offers a staging ground for formal or informal education. This focus on teaching might seem misplaced given the narrowing possibilities for employment in traditional academic jobs, but I actually think that a focus on teaching is more important in the current conditions. Not only do our graduate students need the tools to create new knowledge and contribute to humanities scholarship, but they also need the tools to communicate that work, and on most days this takes the form of some kind of teaching. They need a much better understanding of the cognitive science on learning so that they can work to create more effective teaching and learning experiences, both in formal and informal learning settings.

I see this focus on effective teaching as intimately related to core disciplinary principles. Some of the best cognitive science on how people learn is generalized, but in order for it to translate into effective teaching and learning the work needs to be communicated in disciplinary specific terms. In my opinion the key starting place here is How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (2000) from the National Academies because it offers both general principles of cognitive science and specific disciplinary examples. This initial research has been followed upon by a great deal of exciting work, both disciplinary and interdisciplinary. Graduate programs need to consider implementing teaching practicum and course work on the scholarship of teaching and learning that will provide their students with the tools to craft effective pedagogical strategies that build on the existing cognitive science.

What’s Next?

Moving forward to addressing all of the difficulties with the current state of graduate education, we need to be building on insights from the range of good work done under the aegis of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, especially that which came out of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate. Taking this work into account, individual graduate programs have a responsibility to address the gaps in their program planning and curriculum. However, they will be unable to do so without significant support from administrators. Resources need to be allocated to train mid-career faculty in new methods, to create lab environments for students to work collaboratively, and courses need to be redesigned to account for not only new methodological approaches, but also for the scholarship of teaching and learning.

PWD has been the primary testing ground for our work on Scripto. Though the article voices some concern about the ability of community transcription to add efficiency to the documentary editing process, it nails the important benefits for community building and user investment.

What happens when graduate programs require digital humanities courses and the graduate students don’t really want to take them?

Since the History doctoral track at Mason launched in 2001, students have been required to take two semesters of new media training. The first semester is an introduction to the theory and practice of digital history, and the second semester focuses more on the technical skills of designing and building history projects on the web. (Now the Masters program in Art History requires students to take one of the courses.) For years and years, Roy Rosenzweig taught the first semester of the sequence, and we have a nice archive of previous course sites that shows how the focus and work has changed through the year.

This is my second year teaching the course, and I learned some very important things the first time around. Much to my dismay last year, the course was almost evenly split between students who were eager to be there, and those who were either terrified or openly hostile to digital work. To some degree, this blew my approach to the course because I could not count on everyone to look at the syllabus and engage equally with the tools and websites on the syllabus as they did to the reading. Moreover, I had some students to absolutely refused to run with my very vague guidance to “play” with the tools and “explore” the sites, as well as doing the reading for each week.

Fail, on my part.

So, this year, I’m thinking hard about how frame this course better for the less enthusiastic members of the group. Last evening was our first meeting and I pitched the course in a slightly different way. I suggested that students needed to think about it as a second semester of the required methods course, which deals with more traditional issues of historiography and interpretive approaches (HIST610). In doing so, I argued that we would spend the semester learning to use tools to ask historical questions, to present our scholarship, and to teach. In the midst of this conversation, I tried very hard to dispel the notion that what we were doing was some how an adjunct to the real work of history. I’m not sure how successful that was, but so far, so good. Second, I tried to emphasize the importance of taking a metacognitive approach to the work. We constantly need to be assessing the demands of the task at hand (our historical questions and our historical sources) and adjusting the ways that we mobilize digital tools to do our work. Failure is fine, and, in fact, useful. We need to learn from it, and then move forward to do new work. I see this all as play, and hopefully I can bring the whole crew (all 20 of them) around to my point of view on this.

Of course, all of this would be a lot of hot air if I hadn’t adjusted some my approach to course design. To push reluctant students into active engagement with the tools and resources of the course, I’ve added a practicum activity to each week. They are required to complete the practicum and reflect on the process, in addition to reflecting on the reading for week. My hope is that these activities will result in tinkering and play at an earlier stage in the semester. I also want to work hard to maintain an environment that honors persistence and self-reflexiveness in the face of failure. (You’re not going to break the internet; what can we learn from what didn’t work.)

We’ll see how this all goes. I’ll keep you posted as the semester continues.

But, more importantly, I’m interested in what strategies others have devised to bring along reluctant DH’ers.

The increasing interest number of courses and concentrations focusing on public history suggests that we need to have a serious conversation about what are the skills that are necessary for students to pursue careers in public history in the 21st century. In his presentation for our panel on the future of public history instruction, Steven Burg from Shippensburg University offered preliminary survey results that suggested that digital history is a core interest for course development in a of public history programs. Those results lead to questions about what kinds of digital history training these programs are offering.

The NCPH Curriculum and Training committee works hard to offer guidance on these questions by producing a series of recommendations for best practices in graduate and undergraduate education, and for internships and certificate programs. The document focused on masters programs [PDF] offers guideposts that address the need to train students to be effective research historians, but also to provide them with practical skills in an area of concentration, hands-on experience through internship work, and an in-depth capstone project of some sort. Despite the fact that the document was adopted by the NCPH Board of Directors in October 2008, there is almost no mention of digital skills or digital public history work in the recommendations.

While I don’t have any concrete data on what kind of digital skills individual public history programs are teaching to prepare their students to do public history in a digital environment, I do know what is being taught in the required set of digital history courses for candidates in the PhD program at Mason. We cover a range of areas that engage theoretical questions, methodological approaches, and practical skills. This approach helps graduate students begin to enter into the major conversations in the field of digital history and to start to conceptualize and produce their own digital projects. Based on this teaching and my experience collaborating with cultural heritage organizations on digital projects, I have some recommendations on the skills public historians need to demonstrate to claim competence in digital history.

First and foremost, students need to use digital technology to do good history and to model that practice in public. Of course, this is not really about the technology, but more about carefully considering the framing of historical questions and demonstrating the elements of historical thinking skills such as effective contextualization, and considering multiple perspectives, causality, and shifting interpretation. Engaging in this type of authentic work in public raises all sorts of questions about authority and expertise. In the digital space the public has so many venues in which to respond, question, and challenge based on their existing knowledge and assumptions. The trick is to meet these users where they are and bring them along through the process of inquiry so that they arrive at more nuanced understandings of the past. Done well, this dialogue can lead to deep attachment and investment for the public, so public history programs cannot neglect the central communicative aspects of good digital work.

Focusing on the ways that student can communicate the stuff of history and the practice of doing history in a rich context inevitably should lead to a conversation about disaggreggating the far-too-vague concept the “audience” or the “user.” Being able to identify and target specific audience segments will be essential for doing good digital public history work. There is no single or general user profile. Students need to know how to identify and assess the needs of their core constituencies. Retirees with an interest in local history will have vastly different concerns than middle school history teachers, who in turn will have different needs than scholarly researchers.

Next, students need an introduction project development and planning that embraces agile development. Most history majors never consider issues of collaboration and management in their course work, but public history is about project work. Students need to learn what it takes to plan a collaborative projects and see it to completion. In the digital realm, this will be both a question of clarifying intellectual goals and creating technical work plans. I have written elsewhere about teaching project management, but it’s worth emphasizing here why agile principles are important. Agile development began as a movement to resist the heavily managed and bureaucratic methods of software development. Based on the notion that frequent builds, assessment, and correction allow for more nimble and responsive development, agile methods offer a model for digital public history too. Projects can start small with existing tools and resources. From that base the project team can gather information about audience response and content framing that can then be rolled into the project work flows. The emphasis here is on moving quickly and learning constantly. These practices are particularly well-suited to small organizations with slim technical infrastructure and staffing.

Turning to the technical front, students also need a sense of sound design and development practices, including the basic forces that make the web work: HTML, CSS, content management systems, etc. It is too much to expect that students would graduate with deep knowledge of these building blocks, but they need to be familiar enough with the structural elements that they can interact with developers and designers who do possess the technical knowledge to build customized sites and applications.

Despite the need for this general technical knowledge, students must have a sense of how effectively to use existing software and services to stand up quickly a digital project. In some cases this will be as simple as meeting audiences where they are already gathering on the web by sharing collections and expertise on HistoryPin or Wikipedia. In other cases, it will mean using existing outreach and communication venues such as Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr or WordPress to share the exciting work of public historians and their organizations. Furthermore, students need to have a sense of how to use software-as-service tools such as Omeka.net, Drupal Gardens, Dipity, Viewshare, and GeoCommons to produce narrative exhibits and data and geospatial visualizations that can communicate historical complexity and can engage audiences with historical questions and materials.

These are just the basics, but I don’t see how we can ask anything less from our public history students if we are to claim to send them out into the world with training in digital history.

Recently at RRCHNM we’ve been having a lot of discussion about why some of us offer much less in the way of public commentary on the field, our work, and the various and ongoing controversies, such as the relationship between “Maker DH” and “Theoretical DH.” As someone who is a little bit on the quiet side of this divide, I have been considering how I got there. It’s not as if I’m not deeply engaged in the work of DH–and here I mean Digital History, not Digital Humanities, because that is the primary work I do. In fact, I think that the deep engagement with work, DH and otherwise, is the reason for the quietude.

Let me explain.

As the director of the public projects division at RRCHNM, I am currently responsible for the forward progress of nine projects (soon to be ten — Thank you, NEH Division of Public Projects, for funding our mobile site on the history of the National Mall). That means nine work plans, nine sets of reporting requirements, and nine sets of deliverables. None of that work would be possible without the incredibly hard work of the twelve people who make up the public projects team (if you don’t know them yet, you should). Together, twelve months a year, we do the work of digital history, producing websites, software, implementation guides, and whitepapers. It is tremendously fulfilling work, but it is a lot. And there will be more since we are grant-writing non-stop (two major applications in the last 6 weeks).

Then, I have my own commitment to teaching, which is not part of my job at RRCHNM at all. For someone who is not a natural in the classroom, I love teaching. I love interacting with students and helping them develop the skills they need to pursue their own interests. That is why I have taught each semester for the last seven years. In addition, I usually find myself with a senior thesis or two to advise or a directed reading to oversee, or both. Again, this is tremendously fulfilling work, but it is a lot.

As for my own work, I have a book manuscript slowly grinding through the process of becoming one of those old-school traditional monographs. Since, my work on that is basically done (I hope), I am hatching another project in the back of my head. I’m reluctant to let it come to the foreground because I don’t really have the time to dedicate to it, and I could do without the distraction of a project that I can’t realistically pursue. And, then, there is the article for the edited collection that is three weeks overdue.

While this may sound like an extended whine about my work load or a covert call for help in learning how to say no, my real point here is to suggest that with all of these balls in the air, my brain doesn’t rest long enough for me to do nearly as much productive, innovative, and creative work as I would like. If I worked less, I would blog more. Sad, but true.

And I know that there are many many more like me–inside DH and out. One way I know is that we’re beginning to see more and more research telling us that we need to slow down in order to be more productive (See this article urging a return to the forty hour work week, or listen to Krista Tippet’s interview with neuroscientist Rex Jung).

So, as an experiment in April, I’m going to try to heed this advice to slow down some in hopes of thinking more, and being more creative.

Anyone care to join me?

(But, for now, I’m gonna go do that work for the kids….)

Public Projects @CHNM
• Jon Barth
• Sheila Brennan — @sherah1918
• Megan Brett — @magpie
• John Flatness — @zerocrates
• Lee Ann Ghajar — @leeannghajar
• James Halabuk — @JamesHalabuk
• Ron Martin
• Scott Miller
• Patrick Murray-John — @patrick_mj
• Kim Nguyen — @kimisgold
• Jim Safley — @jimsafley
• Roberto Sanchez

First, some background….

As an undergraduate at Georgetown University, I had the good fortune of working for and with Randy Bass, who even in the very first years of the web was leading the charge to encourage faculty to use technology to improve their teaching. (It is no surprise for those of you who read his blog and Profhacker posts that Mark Sample, aka “The Naked Professor,” then a masters student in the English Department, was also an integral part of those conversations and that work.) Randy often used to begin conversations with teachers by asking them what kinds of things they would like to change about their teaching. What would you like to do better? And, what tools can we use to help make that happen? To me, this is the essential heart of the right approach to using technology in teaching. It begins with an issue with the teaching and learning and then turns to the the task of implementing an appropriate intervention. These are the basic building blocks, regardless of the content focus or the digital tools at hand. What could be going better in your teaching? What do you wish your students would do more of? Do better? What do your students need to improve their learning?

These conversations coincided with work on several really important efforts at Georgetown. Mostly, I was marking up things in HTML, but Randy and Mark and other were working with faculty around the country on Engines of Inquiry: A Practical Guide for Using Technology in Teaching American Culture (1997), published through the American Studies Association’s Crossroads Project. (Sadly both of those projects are no longer available on the web, but Mark is working to resurrect the essays from Engines of Inquiry.) This work rolled into the first summer gathering for faculty interested in technology and pedagogy, where the main conversation was about deepening student engagement and increasing their ability to communicate the complex ideas that might result from that deepened engagement. That meeting has continued to be held summer after summer, eventually coming to be institutionalized in the Teaching, Learning, and Innovation Summer Institute. So, as I was making the transition from being an undergraduate who worked on some basic web projects to beginning a graduate student who was developing my own approach to teaching, my thinking was infused with the findings of these scholars who were committed to doing research on how to improve teaching and learning.

In Fall 1997, I arrived at the American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota with a graduate research assistantship that called for me to help implement some web elements for the department, particularly with respect to the core curriculum. Over the course of that year, I built a bunch of websites (by hand, using tables) that offered support for those courses, some of which had six recitation sections. That spring we installing threaded discussion boards to support the small group work in a large American Indian Studies course. I wasn’t in the classroom on a regular basis to see how the asynchronous discussion supported engagement, but from what I did see students seemed to be in conversation with one another and the materials. It was a good lesson about priming the pump, but in my own teaching at the UofM I mostly used websites as a way to deliver the syllabus and course materials.

I returned to the DC area in the August of 2004 to start work at CHNM. That return coincided with the closing meeting of the Visible Knowledge Project, begun by Randy Bass and his colleagues at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship in 1999, to encourage research on teaching and learning. So Roy Rosenzweig and I spent several days absorbing the research and work that the project scholars had been conducting on the pay off of asking students to externalize their cognitive processes. My own thinking on teaching has been heavily influenced by the project’s resulting findings, which eventually were published in January 2009 in a special issue of Academic Commons: “New Media Technologies and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.”

The biggest take away for me from the VKP research was that students need to see their own process in order to repeat it in an independent way, and that the more they can think of themselves as being part of a larger public conversation the better their work will be. I took these two principles into my teaching with undergraduates and graduate students in subsequent semesters. To this, I added the goal of having the students significantly process and question the course materials before they came together for our face to face meetings. Unlike most teachers, I have only very rarely taught classes that met more than once a week, so making the most of a single almost-three-hour block is essential to running a successful course.

Now, onto the details…..

I have approached using blogs as a way to encourage engagement with course materials and peers in two ways over the last five or six years: with a network of individual blogs, and with a single place for shared writing. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages, but generally, I find that using a single blog with lots of student authors works well with undergraduates, and that asking each individual to create an separate site works better for graduate students.

Regardless of whether the students each have their own blogging space, I always set up my course materials in WordPress. I provide the course schedule, required readings, general procedures, and a description of major assignments. For several years, I used the ScholarPress Courseware plugin to facilitate the mechanics of plugging the readings into the schedule, but for the last couple of semesters I’ve been using a newer version of WP, so I just created pages using basic HTML.

One approach to integrating public writing with a course is to ask each student to set up an individual blog. This has the advantage of assuring that they leave your course with the skills necessary to set-up and use a blog should they need to do that for another situation. While there are many platforms available, including Blogger and TypePad, I usually suggest that students go to WordPress.com for an account. It doesn’t get much simpler than that, and they learn the administrative interface for the most common stand-alone blogging software. Once the students have set up their sites, I use Google Reader to create a bundle of their RSS feeds so that I can follow their work through a single feed rather than having to check many different ones (thanks to the PressForward staff for the tips on doing this). Then, I post the bundle to the main course site so that everyone can subscribe to it. I find that this method is good for the graduate students who seem to have more willingness to maintain their own space over the long term, and to put a little bit more effort into the interaction of commenting. I ask the graduate students to blog each week in response to the major questions raised by the assigned materials.

Alternately, everyone can blog in the same site. This has the advantage of making for a single source of work. When asked this semester if they would rather set-up their own blogs or work within the course site, my undergraduates opted for using the main blog suggesting that a stronger sense of conversation was easier when everything is together. I generally agree with them. The only exception may be for undergraduates who have established an e-portfolio for their major and who might want to concentrate their writing in that space. When we all work in the same blog, I set up categories for each major author or thematic concentration so that we can easily navigate the large quantities of writing produced during the semester.

Whether using a network of blogs or a single course site, I don’t ask the undergraduates to blog each week. I divide the students into groups of four or five. Each week the students in one group are responsible for writing a blog post that engages the reading for the week and the larger questions of the course, which is due by 5pm two days before class. Then the rest of the class is responsible for commenting on at least one post (due by midnight the day before class). This results in students having to write at least two major reflections and to comment six or seven times during the semester. By requiring comments, I am forcing conversation and a sense of public accountability. Some semesters students do get into the spirit of conversation, but even if they are just fulfilling the requirements, we end of with a solid base for a conversation when we get to class. I’m happy to enter the conversation at that point, but I very rarely enter the space of the blogs, in part because I would like the students to feel like they can offer their thoughts and engage with one another without the sense that I’m waiting swoop in and turn the conversation or correct them. I do, however, read all the posts and the comments, and that writing significantly shapes the approach I take to the materials when we get to class. Finally, I grade all the main posts, and two randomly selected comments from each student. The random selection process of grading was suggested by Mills Kelly many years ago, and has, as he promised, generally guaranteed a reasonably high quality of response from the students. That isn’t too much writing for them, and it isn’t a ton of grading for me.

Of course, I’m neither the first, nor will I be the last, to write about this. One good place to start are the many useful posts on Profhacker in the teaching category.

In the very useful survey of the “history web” in their 2005 book Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web , Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig identify the range of genres that encompassed the historical content on the web: archival sites, exhibits and scholarly essays, teaching and learning sites, and discussion forums and organizational sites. Even though Cohen and Rosenzweig failed to account for the way that blogs, YouTube, and social media would eventually permeate the history web, I like their categories because they continue to the give us a way to think about what we do when we create public history online. We tend to provide access to collections, to offer interpretation, to offer instruction, and to offer a forum for conversation, both general and professional. So, as I began to think about the critical issuing in effectively using data visualizations in public history, I wanted to consider them in relationship to the activities above. Since Sheila has already written a great post on collections and enhancing access with visualizations, I’d like to focus both on their interpretative and instructive use, building on Trevor’s thoughts from his last post on discovery and communication.

For public historians, the mode of online outreach that has the longest history is that of interpretative exhibits, whether as companions to a physical exhibit or as independent works of scholarship. Despite the liberating possibilities for disjunction, many of exhibits hue very closely to the linear narrative structure of traditional narrative history. In doing so, they have demonstrated varying degrees of success in offering the public a glimpse of the richness of the past. Two sites from the National Museum of American History demonstrate the wide range of approaches. Both “The Price of Freedom” and “A More Perfect Union” are beautiful sites, but one presents a linear and reductive narrative of military history and the other presents the difficult topic of Japanese internment during World War II with a range of voices and perspectives that highlights historical complexity. The difference here is in the effort to bring together evidence in a user interface that allows for the consideration of many perspectives and multiple causality, as opposed to offering a single perspective that simplifies the past.

Successful or unsuccessful, most exhibit sites have the benefit of offering visitors a range of contextual information in both the text of the basic narrative and in the descriptions that accompany individual artifacts, images, or documents. This contextual information is essential for a public who may not have a deep background to bring to their encounter with primary historical materials. Data visualizations can short circuit the tendency to present simplistic narratives about our collections. Unfortunately, however, data visualizations that concentrate the user interface into a single interactive screen can also significantly reduce our ability to offer the public necessary historical context if we’re not careful.

Take, for example, the great interactive correspondence visualization created by the historians and computer scientists at Stanford for the Mapping the Republic of Letters project. This complex interface really only makes sense to individuals who are content experts, and sometime then only after they’ve read the accompanying pdf explaining the different facets of the tool. For a content novice, the tool is little more than a colorful toy because it links to primary sources in a subscription database, and because it lacks the biographical data on the correspondents that might make their network connections intelligible. If the visualization included access to a larger context of the enlightenment and background on the individual correspondents, it could be a powerful and concentrated way for the public to learn about the development of this period in Euro-American intellectual history. To some extent, we can excuse the Stanford project because it is explicitly a research venture targeting scholars of the enlightenment, rather than members of the general public

The Digital Vaults site from the National Archives and Records Administration, on the other hand, was created precisely to engage the public. Unfortunately, the project is completely hampered by its abstraction. The Flash version of the site gives users access to a seven randomly selected sources from a database of over 1,200. Clicking on a document, the user enters a web of connections to other documents based on shared tags. (The HTML version simply offers an alphabetical list of tags.) The sources have minimal accompanying metadata–usually title, date, and a brief description. While this environment is attractive and fun to play with, it fails to offer users enough context to make any historical sense out of the materials they encounter. Rather than offering and entree into NARA’s rich collections, the site leave users at sea with only their pre-existing historical knowledge to support them.

Unlike Digital Vaults, visualizations that make use of geospatial and temporal cues offer users more necessary orientation. One successful example is Minnesota Historical Society’s True North project, which offers users the ability to layer information in space in time to glean some understanding of the state’s history. While the interface does not link out to individual primary sources, it manages to offer enough cohesiveness that users can start to construct their own narratives of change. The National Museum of Australia’s History Wall is even more successful. Built on the backbone of a flexible timeline, the interface allows users to explore the lives of Irish in Australia between 1770 and the present, drawing on, among other things, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and amazing Trove database that aggregates over 280 million sources from National Library of Australia. Together these elements let a user to explore within a much more deeply layered context that can push them to use heuristics that are important to historians as they make sense of the evidence from the past.

Considering this range of examples, I hope that we can begin to have a conversation about how to create and frame data visualizations that provide the public with new ways to access our content but also offer them enough context to help them begin to make sense of those materials in meaningful ways.