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Announcement Undergraduate Fellows

Call for Participation: Undergraduate Fellowship Program

Call for Participation

DH @ WLU seeks applications for two Mellon Digital Humanities Undergraduate Fellows for the 2016-2017 academic year.

We’re looking for students who are curious about the ways that technology affects the world around them. You don’t have to be a software engineer to build a website or visualize data, but comfort around technology can set you apart in the job market or graduate school. The goal of this fellowship program is to give students the opportunity to develop technology skills and share what they’ve learned with others. This fellowship is broadly-defined and flexible to meet student skills and interests. Applicants without prior DH coursework are welcome to apply, but they will be encouraged to undertake a practicum project during the first semester of the fellowship to develop their technical skills in consultation with the digital humanities faculty.

Fellows will receive $10/hr and are expected to work 4-8 hours per week. Fellowships last one academic year but may be renewed. Fellows will report to Mackenzie Brooks, Assistant Professor and Digital Humanities Librarian.

Applicants should submit a statement of interest by May 31, 2016 to Mackenzie Brooks at brooksm@wlu.edu.

Position Description

Depending on their skills and interests, students will be expected to perform some the following:

  • Serve as lab assistants in DH courses with lab components or DH studio courses.
  • Staff the future DH Space (potentially after working hours) and serve as tutor/mentor for students seeking assistant on DH assignments.
  • Participate in outreach activities with and without DHAT/DHWG members (ex: visiting classes, connecting with student groups, presenting at conferences).
  • Contribute to the DH @ WLU blog on a regular basis.
  • Develop personal DH research projects or contribute to library DH projects.
  • Collaborate/mentor with other fellows or student groups on specific projects.

Qualifications

  • Willingness to engage with technology (prior experience not required).
  • Interest in humanities and social science-based research questions.
  • Comfort with independent research and skill development.

Statement of Interest

Your statement of interest should include the following in one page or less:

  • Your (prospective) major(s).
  • Your fall term schedule and availability.
  • What you hope to gain from this fellowship experience.
  • Your interest in digital humanities methodology, as it relates to your scholarship and your own skills/experience.

This fellowship program is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Undergraduate Fellows Winter 2016

Categories
DH Project Update Undergraduate Fellows

Lasso-ing the Laisses: A Digital Journey Through Annotations, Javascript, and More!

Guest post by Sarah Schaffer ’16

Introduction

Hi, my name is Sarah and I am a senior Business Administration major with a French minor. This past semester of independent study I worked with Professor McCormick on his current Huon d’Auvergne project. You may be wondering: “What is a business major doing here?” but in the spirit of a liberal arts college I’ve taken advantage of the wide variety of classes offered here. My journey with Digital Humanities began Winter 2015 when I registered for Professor McCormick’s class French 341: La Legende Arthurienne, which included a Digital Humanities lab. It was in this class that I became fascinated with TEI and how Digital Humanities have transformed our interactions with various works.

Before Digital Editions

The first step of research was to understand the importance of the work itself, before it becomes a digital edition. Through reading both the books Introduction to Manuscript Studies and On Editing Old French Texts, I began to better understand the work that Professor McCormick was doing. As someone without much background knowledge of historical manuscripts, it had never crossed my mind to consider even half the elements discussed. Each element, such as the writing support it’s written on, the manuscript errors, corrections made, and annotations, add to the way the document is understood and interpreted. Every new edition of the work needs to take into account the editor’s personality and what they chose to include or exclude. Each component plays such a huge role in editing and choosing what to display on the digital edition that is being presented. This makes choosing what to include even more important in the way that the text is being displayed and available for interpretation.

Theory of Digital Editions

As I moved from my readings about the physical documents themselves, Professor McCormick and I discussed Peter Robinson’s article “The Theory of Digital Editions.” Digital editions in their infancy tried to include everything, but quickly found that resources are limited which restricted what could be included. However, what digital editions can do is include a new level of involvement with the document between both the reader and the editor, something that is not possible with a printed document. Unlike a primary document or editorial text, a digital edition allows the reader “to see the text of the document construct itself, layer by layer, from blank page to fully written text” (Robinson 110). The article and discussion with Professor McCormick opened my eyes to the idea that the text-as-document is intimately linked to the text-as-work within the digital edition.

Putting Ideas Together

While learning about digital editions, I researched the different ways other digital editions included annotations, the platforms they used, and the way their works were displayed. I spent a large amount of time looking through various digital editions and searching through DIRT for tools we could use for the final website. We looked into using Hypothes.is as an annotation tool, but it didn’t quite provide the functionality that we were looking for. Eventually after researching and working with various different platforms, we decided to build our own system, using Ruby on Rails. Instead of trying to tailor an already made platform to the project’s needs, creating a new system allowed for the upmost customization.

Prototyping

If I could look at different examples of digital editions and click through them all day, I would, but at some point I needed to come up with some ideas on my own. Based off of various other editions, understanding the history and theory of digital editions, and being aware of what Professor McCormick was looking for I got to work. The best way to begin prototyping is just sitting down with some blank sheets of paper and a pencil and draw out what to design. So, I got to work sketching out several ways the website could be organized. Once I had one or two ideas down, I found more ways to organize the various laisses and show functionality as well. A laisse is best defined as a narrative unit, similar to a stanza but varies in length. Each version of Huon d’Auvergne has a large number of laisses, which makes the organization and display of them even more important. Below you’ll see some basic prototypes created for the display of different versions of Huon d’Auvergne laisses and the annotations.
Screen Shot 2016-04-11 at 9.56.27 AM

Coding

The final step of my project was to begin building the prototypes that I had created. Luckily, I’ve had some experience coding in Professor McCormick’s class before, as well as during some business classes so the task didn’t seem too daunting. I got to work on learning javascript and jQuery through the courses on Codecademy – a website I highly recommend if you’re trying to learn a new coding skill. Once I learned the basics, I did a quick review of HTML and CSS to prep myself for creating a mock-up website. I forgot how intimidating it is to stare at a blank text editor, but once I got started it didn’t seem nearly as daunting.

Gif of frustrated woman staring at laptop

I worked with basic text generated from Lorem Ipsum in order to more easily put my new coding skills to work. After setting up basic structural parts of the website to work with, I added some CSS styling. I then continued with the javascript portion of the website and worked through hiding and revealing the different laisses. I struggled with this part the most because it was such a new skill. Much like learning a foreign language, every new programming language takes time and effort to work through figuring out a solution.

Reflecting on the Semester

Overall, this past semester has been a great learning experience. Beyond the new skills that I learned, this opportunity allowed me to take my liberal arts education beyond the classroom and apply it to a really unique project It was an honor to work with Professor McCormick’s team and be a part of such an incredible project.

Work Cited:

Robinson, Peter. “Towards a Theory of Digital Editions.” The European Society for Textual Scholarship 10 (2013): 105-31. Web.

Categories
Undergraduate Fellows

Reflecting on the Fellowship  

The culmination of my time under the Mellon Digital Humanities Undergraduate Fellowship semester has been my website titled Refugees of Germany. This process has…

Given me space to design something from scratch (i.e. Ruby on Rails and Python). Not having studied computer science formally since high school, it has been incredibly formative to learn about the process of website design, and even get my feet wet in learning some code. In doing so, I was able to collaborate with friends in the computer science department who were extremely helpful in the structuring of the back end. I attribute my basic HTML and CSS familiarity and knowledge to a crash-course provided by Mackenzie and Brandon, and I was able to subsequently take advantage of
Codecademy, which I highly recommend to anyone trying to learn programming.

Allowed me to delve into the Syrian refugee crisis and better understand its history, magnitude, and implications. All of this was accomplished in the research that led to the creation of the digital timeline now featured on my website. Approaching my summer with this perspective is something that I can now reflect on as a crucial step in preparation for my time in Berlin.

Prepared a skeleton that will alleviate my work in Germany: I can wholly focus on conducting interviews, analyzing major themes, and representing these online. The weeks and months spent this semester have allowed me to accomplish the goal I set out for myself at the onset of the semester. I now have a container that I can fill with data I acquire this summer. The website can now serve as a platform for all of my research, and can be easily updated in real time!

Endowed me with respect for the power of images and storytelling via an online media. Reading and learning about the Syrian Civil War and the stories that accompany those who experienced it have had a profound impact on me. It has reinforced my motivation and endeavor to get to know those who have been personally affected by projecting their voices and stories, getting to know them better, and hearing their side of the story.

Humbled me with the recognition of the way the virtual can impact reality, and how we all can have an active part in telling history. Ultimately, what we experience through a website can fundamentally change how we behave and perceive reality. I believe that the information filtered through Western media has been incredibly one-sided and “self”-oriented. Hearing from both refugees and Germans on the ground and portraying those experiences on my website so that they are perceivable to all is a fascinating concept, and one that I believe to be increasingly important. We all have a role in telling our own history and understanding others’ histories as subjective truths.

Due to a technical glitch, the live site is no longer available. I have pasted below some screen shots including a brief glance at my summer’s work. Please feel free to contact me (carlm17@mail.wlu.edu) if you have any questions or would like to hear more!

homepagemahmed_1nalah_2timeline1

Categories
Incentive Grants Pedagogy

Michelle Brock on “Choose Your Own Witch-trials”

Enjoy this post by Michelle Brock, Assistant Professor of History and DH Incentive Grant Awardee 2015-2016

The Idea:

My course on the Age of the Witch-hunts is designed to introduce students to one of the most fascinating and disturbing events in the history of the Western world. Between 1450 and 1750, at least 100,000 individuals, mostly women, were accused of witchcraft in Europe and North America. Of these, roughly half met their demise at the stake or in the noose. A variety of social, religious, judicial, and political causes, none of which is singularly responsible, lurk behind this tragedy. Over the course of the semester, this class examines the litany of complex reasons for the witch-hunts, asking why they occurred when and where they did, why certain people were accused, why the trials finally ended, and how scholars from a multiple disciplines continue to grapple with this topic.

In designing a final project for teaching this course in Winter 2016, I kept thinking of the Choose Your Own Adventure gamebook series that I loved as a child. In these short, interactive works, the reader plays the protagonist of the story, making choices that lead down surprising paths, ultimately shaping the plot and the ending. I knew I wanted to create a similarly interactive assignment for my Age of the Witch-hunts class. With the help of the Mackenzie Brooks and Brandon Bucy at the W&L Library and Academic Technologies, I designed the “Choose Your Own Witch-trial” project to allow my Age of the Witch-hunts students to explore regional differences in the European witch-trials in a fun, collaborative, and informative way.

The reasons for using the Inklewriter interactive format rather than assigning a traditional research paper, were threefold. First, this method encouraged students to pay close attention to historical detail and contextual specificity, and to recognize the difficulty in forming broad causal explanations for such phenomena. Second, I suspected this project would be interesting and collectively engaging in ways that an individual, traditional research paper would not be. Last, the textual gaming method allowed students, as both creators and players of the games, to place themselves in the shoes of those who observed, orchestrated, and, most important, fell victim to the witch-hunts. This, I hope, helped to build empathy and understanding of world-views profoundly different than theirs while also providing an opportunity for reflection about our own belief systems and choices. Throughout, I reminded my students that while these games were supposed to be fun to create, any entertainment factor ought not obscure the fact that the witch-hunts were a genuine human tragedy that claimed tens of thousands of innocent lives.

The Project:

For this project, students worked in pairs to create text-based games using Inklewriter, a free tool that allows users to write interactive stories with twists, turns, and a variety of possible endings. Each pair was assigned a region in early modern Europe that experienced significant levels of witch-hunting. Despite important shared themes, there existed remarkable variety in the nature of witch belief and witch-hunting in different areas. For example, while 85% of those tried for witchcraft in Western Europe were women, the majority of the accused in Russia were male. While the use of torture during trials frequent in the very decentralized Holy Roman Empire, it was illegal in England, where the courts were tightly controlled. In Calvinist Scotland, possession cases rarely attended outbreaks of witchcraft, while the two were often linked in France. Students were accordingly asked to conduct significant historical research into the witch-trials in their specific region. They turned in annotated bibliographies of their sources early in the semester, as well as papers explaining the historical background of their games at the end of the term.

When creating their “Choose Your Own Witch-trial” game, each pair of students made their game model the nature of the witch-hunts in their specific region, paying close attention to the types of people accused, the chronology of the trials, the standards of evidence, the religious climate of the area, the types of punishment doled out, etc. Their games began with the initial accusation and continued through to the ultimate verdict. Groups had the option to write from the perspective of a third party observer, a jury member (if applicable), the orchestrators of the trial (often a clergyman or a local magistrate), or the accused witch. All but one group chose the perspective of the accused witch. At the end of the semester, the class collectively played all of the games over the space of two class periods (each pair taking 20-25 minutes for their game and following Q&A), after which each student wrote a final essay noting the regional variations they observed and examining what factors seem to have most shaped the course, chronology, and severity of the trials across Europe.

Assessment and Evaluation:

The project was assessed in three ways: the quality, accuracy, and creativity of the final games; the annotated bibliographies and historical background essays turned in by each student; and the response essays to the class gameplay. While I set minimum parameters for sources, the length of the games, and the attendant papers, the students were otherwise left to determine the content and course of their games. I did not want to give so much direction that it would stifle creativity; really, I just wanted to see what the students would come up with. I required each pair to meet with me no later than the week before the games were due in order to assess their progress and catch any potential technological or content issues in their games. Much to my surprise, not one group had any trouble using the software after it had been explained by Brandon Bucy at the start of the project. The lesson here, of course, is that my students are much savvier with technology than I am!

The overall quality of the games was generally quite high, and students reported that this was one of the most engaging and informative assignments they had encountered in their college career thus far. Next time I assign this project, I plan to increase the minimum length of the games by requiring students to include more background and more choices for the player, as some games were noticeably longer and more detailed than others. Other than this, however, I was thrilled by the results and would highly recommend the use of Inklewriter for the creation of text-based games in the college classroom.

The Games:

France

Scotland

Poland

Denmark

England

Russia