Visualizing Roman History: Scaffolding for Success
This website shares the collaboration between a History professor and a Digital Humanities librarian to scaffold a series of low-stakes digital humanities workshops and projects into an upper-division Roman History course in order to prepare students to create a high-stakes DH project of their own by the end of the semester. We'll describe the various stages of the process from earliest planning, to the creation of help-sheets and assignment directions with clear learning goals, in-class workshops, and final products. DH tools showcased include TimelineJS and StoryMapJS.
Pollard teaches students in HIST503 about mapping in the Roman world. Mapping the Life of Augustus onto a map with Roman origins (Tabula Peutingeriana) layers modern DH-mapping skill on top of Roman-era technology, encouraging students to think about the meaning of space.
Lach leads in-class workshops in HIST503, during which students work in small-groups to apply what they learn about DH tools. Immediate experimentation reinforces the skills and trouble-shoots potential problems.
Lach shares with HIST503 students an example of a StoryMap to illustrate the potential for sharing many types of media.
HIST503 students visit the DH Center in the SDSU Library in order to brainstorm, storyboard, and code their timeline and storymap entries.
About the Authors
Elizabeth Pollard first engaged with Digital Humanities while a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1990s, coding Tobit for Bob Kraft’s innovative Computer Assisted Tools for Septuagint/Scriptural Study and participating in Jim O’Donnell’s experimental Apuleius Project (“Marriage and Money”). Since coming to SDSU in 2002, Pollard has experimented with a range of digital pedagogies including using Wikipedia to teach historiography [“Raising the Stakes: Writing about Witchcraft on Wikipedia,” History Teacher 42 (2008), 9-24] and Twitter to engage world history students in the process of collective learning [Tweeting on the Backchannel of the Jumbo-Sized Lecture Hall,” History Teacher 47 (2014), 329-354]. When she is not experimenting with digital pedagogies, Pollard researches women accused of witchcraft in the Roman world and Mediterranean – Indian Ocean exchange networks. Pollard has co-authored two textbooks: Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, Concise (W.W. Norton, 2015) and Worlds Together, Worlds Apart Companion Reader (W.W. Norton, 2016).
Pamella Lach is the Digital Humanities Librarian and Director of the Digital Humanities Center in the San Diego State University Library. She is the Co-director of the Digital Humanities Initiative and a member of the "Digital Humanities and Global Diversity" Area of Excellence. Pam's work explores how new and emerging technologies transform humanistic scholarship and pedagogy. Her areas of interest include data visualization, information retrieval, user experience design, and digital pedagogy. She is currently studying how folksonomy, or user-generated social tagging, can enhance and disrupt traditional authority-driven classification schemas. She previously served as the Head of the Center for Faculty Initiatives and Engagement at the University of Kansas Libraries, and the Associate Director of the Digital Innovation Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has a PhD in U.S. Cultural History with an emphasis on gender and film history from UNC and a MS in Information Science from UNC's School of Information and Library Science.