Blog Posts

We've been blogging about our processes for the Spring 2019 offering of HIST 503: Ancient Rome. Click on any of the links below to jump down to that particular blog post.

Here we go again… but in reverse, using “Backward Design”

Preparing anew this Spring 2019 to teach HIST503, with a #digitalhumanities focus, I opened my syllabus from Spring 2018 ready to revise. My primary goal? Get better results on student final projects --- better researched, better coded, more creative, more extensive use of the digital platform, all with less stress from students about the tech aspects (with them feeling more fully prepared as they completed their final projects and experiencing more celebratory closure and engaged reflection at the completion of the work). I knew from the course’s previous iteration that the pacing of the assignments (especially at the end of the course) was hectic. Disappointingly, students had not had the opportunity to showcase their work publicly. While in Spring 2018 the scaffolding of low-stakes collaborative digital assignments had done the job of familiarizing students with the different DH platforms --- Timeline and StoryMap --- they could use for their solo digital projects at the end of the course, student comments on end-of-semester reviews and my own evaluation of student work (both the group projects and the final solo work) made it clear that additional instruction and activities were needed to achieve maximum benefit. In particular, students needed more work with reading and analyzing sustained ancient source material in a more substantive way; more practice with undertaking productive research in a range of media (from scholarly books and articles to museum catalogs and on-line videos); and more practice with html.

Having overcome the extreme inertia that accompanies any attempt to revise a course (can’t I make the syllabus work just one more time?), I began to re-work the document (date-stamped 1/17/2018) to build in additional readings and activities that would address the issues I knew needed attention. More comprehensive readings in ancient sources and an html workshop here. Some practice with research and even creating an html-coded bibliography there.

The syllabus, already an accretive mass of years of revision, became even more bloated. A lot of good stuff… but too much work for students (especially readings, readings, and more readings) that was not directly focused on the desired product, namely a digital micropublication that visualized Roman History by showcasing the analysis of historical developments, interpretation of ancient sources, and the exploration of scholarly arguments.

Consequently, I began again from scratch. I stripped out all the readings. All the assignments. And started with a blank course calendar. The first item I wrote on the syllabus? The due date for the major solo digital project (that manifestation of everything I hope the students will take from the course), a week prior to the final exam date set by the university. Student concerns about hectic end-of-semester addressed. The next item? A week of poster presentations in the Digital Humanities Center. My concern about students not having a chance to showcase their work publicly, addressed. Then, midterm and the final (which I’ve retained to address and assess another learning outcome --- IDENTIFY and EXPLAIN major people, concepts, and events in Roman History). Next, came the scaffolding of the assignments and activities that needed to happen to get students to that digital project, beginning with the two low-stakes collaborative projects (Timeline and StoryMap). A process similar to the previous iteration of the course, but paced in a way that there was ample time for skill-building and reflection.

What is new this time around is what I’d call “micro-scaffolding”… even smaller assignments and activities to build competencies for the collaborative Timeline and StoryMap. These include a series of mini-research assignments that students will submit via a group googledoc (as well as time in-class to reflect on the the research). First a bibliographic list of different kinds of sources --- scholarly books and articles, ancient sources, videos, and museum catalogs --- properly cited and formatted in html; then an annotated bibliography, with additional html; and finally a coherent paragraph describing the range of sources, scholarship and argumentation on a topic, with embedded links, video files, and html footnotes… but more on that --- and my collaborations with Digital Humanities Librarian Pam Lach --- in a future blog post!)

Once the assignments and activities to build the skills for the assignments were measured and paced across the semester, only then did I begin to back-fill with the Roman History content that would enliven the process. The entirety of Book One in Livy’s History of Rome; five Lives (in full) from Plutarch; six separate imperial biographies from Suetonius; and a number of long inscriptions; the martyrdom of Perpetua (in graphic novel form!). All this in addition to the textbook I had used for years that also contains a range of source material. Oddly enough, designing the class in this way means that I will actually have MORE time to dig deep into the content whose richness I enjoy sharing with students year after year! And, with the benefit that students will have more guided practice with doing so, such that when they are working with sources for their final project they will be better equipped to sift through the evidence and make meaning of it.

There’s a name for this mode of curriculum development… “backward design” [from Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design (1998)]. The three stages of “backward design” involve “identify[ing] desired results… determin[ing] acceptable evidence… [and then] plan[ning] learning experiences and instruction” (see, for instance, the articulation of McTighe and Wiggins’ model at Ryan Bowen (2017) Understanding by Design. Vanderbilt Center for Teaching. Retrieved 21 January 2019, from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/understanding-by-design/). Essentially, one flips the usual curricular model… from ‘here’s all this content I want students to know and I’ll assess it with tests and a research paper’ to what is the outcome (knowledge and skills) I want students to reach at the end of the course… what evidence from (i.e. assessment of) the student would demonstrate they “got it,” and finally, how do I get them there. By applying backward design, students not only acquire a range of content and skills, but they can begin to “make meaning” from that knowledge and even, ideally, “transfer” that learning into new situations (McTighe and Wiggins, Understanding by Design Framework, p. 13; available online @ https://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/siteASCD/publications/UbD_WhitePaper0312.pdf).

And that’s my goal with the series of #digitalhumanities assignments in HIST503. Yes, I want students to enjoy the Roman History content as much as I do; but more than that, I want students to be able to do something with their experience of the course long after the semester is done.

Rebooting the tech … by slowing things down

Pamella R. Lach (27 January 2019)

Gearing up for the Spring 2019 semester, I was excited to build on the success of our previous digital interventions. But I didn't simply want to replicate what we had done, I wanted to upgrade our efforts (okay, enough with the corny tech puns). I spent Fall 2018 going through the reflections our students provided when they turned in their final project last year, which confirmed many of the things I observed while they were working on their projects in the DH Center last year (spoiler: much of this qualitative assessment will appear in a forthcoming article Professor Beth Pollard and I recently drafted). I was pleasantly surprised to see that students by and large understood the relationship of the digital platform to the historical methodology, and I was encouraged to see how many of them were proud of the visualizations they had created. But their feedback also confirmed many of my initial suspicions about the tech side of the class. Most students lacked a conceptual grounding in coding, and found even basic HTML elements utterly intimidating. Many looked for shortcuts, using HTML generators that often created problems when pasted into the tools. And because they didn't understand HTML, they were at a loss for how to troubleshoot. Equally problematic, several students managed to evade the early group micro-assignments, leaving them completely adrift when the time came to complete their final projects. Beth and I discussed these issues at length, and developed solutions to address some of these problems. As she redesigned the course, we devised ways to better scaffold the technology to align with her learning outcomes. Our aim was two-fold: 1) to better prepare students for the technical aspects of the course, and 2) to even more seamlessly integrate the digital with the historical.

Rebooting the Digital

More than anything else, I wanted to take the time early in the class to step back and slow things down. I knew I needed time to explain the logic of coding, to break things down so students would be able to recognize the key components—elements, opening and closing tags—and key functions—nesting and loops. In short, I wanted to build in some code literacy. And I wanted to make sure that coding tutorials were not one-offs or add-ons. The plan: combine the HTML training with the training in research skills. That is, combine coding literacy with information literacy.

We agreed on two HTML trainings. The first would cover the basics: how code works, how to read code, and how to write our four required elements: <b>bold</b>, <i>italics</i>, <p>paragraph breaks</p>, and <a href=”...”>links</a>. Students would have to apply these elements to their mini-research assignments, building them up to writing a complete bibliography in HTML, as is required in the final solo digital project.

The second HTML tutorial would focus on more advanced skills: adding aesthetic formatting, working with media objects (videos and images), modifying YouTube embed code to improve display or to embed a clip of a larger video. These latter techniques are not required, but many of last year's students wanted to learn these skills to enhance their projects.

We also wanted to improve group accountability this time around. Beth wanted all group work to take place in Google Drive so that we could see the document history and who contributed what. This afforded me the opportunity to incorporate some online collaboration skill-building. Previous classroom experiences taught me that while students may be comfortable in virtual spaces, they don't always know how to optimize online tools in their group work. Beth and I created a shared Google Drive folder for each group (students will only have access to their assigned folder). When we begin the HTML + research training, I will take some time to go over some of the basics of working in Google Docs: file naming conventions, document formatting, tagging each other in comments (a handy little project management function that will also allow them to tag us if they need help or have questions), and utilizing the in-document chat function.

Rebooting the Analog

I've also been thinking about some analog improvements that I can bring to the class. Late in the game last semester, I decided to hold office hours to assist the students in their final projects. This time around, I established upfront office hours for each digital assignment, and asked Beth to share those hours with her students. I also invited Beth to hold some of her office hours in the Digital Humanities Center, which she has agreed to do (we attempted this once or twice last year on the fly).

Last Spring I hosted a last-minute refresher workshop on TimelineJS and StoryMapJS, but none of the HIST 503 students could make it. This year, I worked with Beth to schedule the workshop at a time that she thought would work for her students and be appropriately timed in the semester; she added that workshop to her syllabus, encouraging students to attend.

We also wanted to incorporate the DH Center more purposefully into the class. We decided to bring the class to the Center for the StoryMapJS workshop in February, and built in two class sessions for students to present their projects in advance of submitting their final projects. We are also encouraging them to participate in our annual Digital Humanities Spring Showcase, which is scheduled for the day after their projects are due (unlike last year). We hope these last enhancements will serve as reminders and encouragement for the students to work together in the Center throughout the semester. In short, we hope that integrating the DH Center more intentionally into the class will enhance our efforts at developing communities of practice in the class—an unexpected and unplanned positive intervention in Spring 2018 that we hope we can recreate in Spring 2019.

“Mini-Assignments” to Micro-Scaffold Research and HTML

E.A. Pollard (15 February 2019)

In my last blogpost, I mentioned that I was building into the course in Spring 2019 “micro-scaffolding;” namely, what I described as “even smaller assignments and activities to build competencies for the collaborative Timeline and StoryMap.” When I last taught the course in Spring 2018, I was struck that students’ facility with research was uneven and not what I thought/hoped it might be for students in an upper-division history course. Students needed practice both with formal search engines such as JSTOR, ProQuest, etc, AND with broader searches on the web for objects held in museums, classical texts, videos, and podcasts. Additionally, when it came time to render their research on the collaborative Timeline and StoryMap, as well as in their individual projects, students were stylistically and functionally hamstrung by issues related to citation conventions (especially proper deployment of Turabian/Chicago Style citation for a range of different source types) and html to render their work either as aesthetically pleasing as they might like (style) or as effectively as they might so as to maximize the interactivity of the medium, with links to museum holdings, texts supporting their arguments, etc. (function).

As a result, Pam and I decided that we would introduce and re-enforce these skills early and often in Spring 2019. To establish an informal base-line, we captured students’ comfort levels with research and html through a GoogleSurvey conducted in the first week of the class (n=53). On the question that asked students to rate their skill level with locating books and articles via the SDSU Library search engine, 47.2% claimed to be “pretty good at that,” while 33.4% rated themselves as “dabblers” or as having “heard of that.” Only 3 students in 53 ranked themselves as “pro.” When it came to locating reliable videos, museum collections, and other research materials on the web using search engines such as Google, 43.4% described themselves as “pretty good” while 47.2% described themselves as “dabblers.” This survey confirmed in Spring 2019 what I suspected based on evaluating student work in Spring 2018… in short, research skill-level and comfort was uneven (across students and across types of research) and more practice with research was needed. [Pam will address html and on-line collaboration issues in a separate blog post!]

To create an opportunity for student skill and comfort with research to build over a series of low-stakes assignments, I created a series of “Group Research Mini-Assignments” [and Pam created a series of tutorials to support that instruction]. The first mini-assignment --- asking students to use the topic we were focused on in class (Etruscans) to create, in a shared googledoc with a few other students in the class, a properly formatted bibliographic list including two articles, a scholarly book and reviews of that book, ancient sources, museum objects, and online videos --- was due just eight days into the class (just after the third class meeting)! The second --- asking students (in the same groups) to use the topic they were working on for their TimelineJS entry to create an annotated bibliography of the same kinds of items --- was due just two weeks later. [A third assignment --- asking students to compose a paragraph that makes an argument about an individual from the mid- to late-Republic, complete with bibliographic citation to their research and html links to supporting materials and footnotes --- is due soon!]

So, what’s working and what is challenging? As for what is working, having students complete these assignments so quickly at the start of the course has allowed me within the first couple of weeks to diagnose and give feedback on students’ research and citation limitations, addressing problems that I did not even realize existed until after the first collaborative Timeline entry was posted by groups almost eight weeks into the course in Spring 2018. Problems identified in the first Group Research Mini-Assignment included confusion not only about what a bibliographic list was but also about how to find and cite objects in museum collections, how to locate and cite videos and podcasts, and how to clarify what portion of a classical text is relevant for a topic. Asking students to function in their groups so soon in the course has manifested problems in group dynamics well before the Timeline entry is due (only one group needed to be dissolved, and its members redistributed across other groups). Requiring that students take different roles on the Mini-Assignments (and include a list of credits at the end of each assignment) not only has encouraged individual accountability within the group but also has ensured that each student is trying their hand at a different aspect of the research and html coding, so that they will have a sense of every aspect of the assignment in order to be better equipped when the time comes for their individual project.

As for what is challenging, the timing of factoring in the mini-assignments (especially the in-class instruction about research and tutorials for the digital) has been tough and has created what I’ve experienced as a frenetic pace to the beginning of the course. In past iterations of the course I’ve felt that students slowly settle into the mindset of antiquity, bonding over a shared fascination with the Romans and the source material. Students in the past had more time to “buy in” to course content before learning a language – html --- they did not expect (my frequent dropping of Latin and Greek phrases are challenging enough!). This semester I feel like I’ve “ceded” more class-time to research and to coding workshops. Pam visited the class during the third, fourth, and sixth class-meeting, to lead tutorials on beginning, intermediate, and advanced html, Google collaboration and TimelineJS. These workshops were the right choice and are crucial to students’ being able to do the research and Timeline entry (and to students’ recognition of how central these skills are to the SLOs of the course), and yet it made it difficult --- though not impossible --- to establish a rhythm with engaging the course content. Next time around I’ll need to be more purposeful and disciplined about course content from minute one on day one!

At the start of this blogpost, I referred to these research mini-assignments as “micro-scaffolding.” The term scaffolding has become commonplace in the description of pedagogy, usually referring to the idea of building, from the start of the class, skills and content required for the completion of a larger assignment by the end of the course. Since scaffolding, as the term is commonly used, was how I envisioned the collaborative Timeline and StoryMap work in Spring 2018 to have worked to build competencies for the solo projects, it seemed fitting to use a more diminutive term to describe breaking down this skill-building into even smaller chunks. As I set out to write this blogpost, I explored whether others had written on this concept that I was calling “micro-scaffolding.” To my surprise, I’ve not found much literature on the concept. Pedagogy blogger Darryl Yong has described his own use of microscaffolding, using “such fine granularity that students almost don’t even notice that they’re moving up from one level to the next,” in the context of teaching Algebra I (Darryl Yong, “Microscaffolding,” Adventures in Teaching blog (March 12, 2010) @ https://profteacher.com/2010/03/12/microscaffolding/; Accessed 12 February 2019). Yong credits the Kumon franchise with introducing him to the idea. A 1997 dissertation mentioned “micro-scaffolding” in the context of literature classes (Irene Pompetti-Szul, Differential Instructional Scaffolding in the Teaching of Second Language Literacy, PhD Dissertation, SUNY Albany, 1997). I also learned that there is a body of literature on “Scaffolding in Technology-Enhanced Learning Environments” [Priya Sharma and Michael Hannafin in Interactive learning Environments 15.1 (2007), 27-46] and reflections on the efficacy of varied scaffolding models [e.g. Janneke va de Pol, Monique Volman, and Jos Beishuizen, “Scaffolding in Teacher-Student Interaction: A Decade of Research,” Education Psychology Review 22 (2010), 271-296].

It’s exciting to see the impact of this micro-scaffolding in HIST503 (Spring 2019)… and to see that there is clearly a body of scholarship into which we might situate this micro-scaffolding approach to visualizing Roman history that Pam and I are developing!

Scaffolding HTML: A Closer Look

Pamella R. Lach (19 February 2019)

I’m all about learning from my past missteps. Namely, my inability to follow my own advice about digital pedagogy. Relatively early in our first HIST 503 collaboration (Spring 2018), I realized that I assumed a high degree of student knowledge and comfort with HTML. I was terribly wrong. And it was too late to adjust course.

• Sidenote: I was surprised in my first visit to the class last year when less than five students said they had prior HTML experience. This despite the fact that I spend a lot of time pushing back on the assumption that our students are “digital natives” (I hear this from a lot of colleagues and faculty). Yes, many of our students are comfortable with devices and the Interwebs, but they often lack a meaningful understanding of how those devices operate or how the Internet functions (for better and worse). Many other students reject things like social media, and some refuse to use (or cannot afford to use) smart phones. In short, we cannot assume our students possess some inherent digital literacy that comes from being born with technology practically in their hands.

My sheepish realization was confirmed as I watched students struggling to code their final projects last year (or avoid coding by using HTML generators, which often created more problems for them). Their final reflections further confirmed the problem.

This time around, Beth and I were determined to do better. As we’ve already noted elsewhere, we wanted to slow things down and build in more opportunity for students to practice their research and coding in low-stakes ways. We also wanted to integrate the coding with the research mini-assignments, rather than engage in one-off HTML work, to reinforce the relationship of the historical method and the digital method. And so as Beth designed her “Mini-Assignments” to scaffold research skills, I developed a similar approach to HTML. My goal was to develop a scaffolded and iterative approach that would gradually build up students’ skills and comfort with HTML.

The results of our newly-introduced pre-test this semester underscored the importance of taking time early in the semester to explain HTML coding, get students comfortable with the coding (not just writing it but deciphering it), and provide them with low-stakes opportunities to hone their skills. When asked about their knowledge of and experience with HTML, 60.4% of students had never heard of HTML, while another 26.4% had heard of it but lacked experience. Only seven of 53 students (roughly 13%) reported either dabbling or being pretty good at HTML.

To address this deficit, I developed and delivered a three-part HTML tutorial in the first few weeks of the semester. The goal of these tutorials was to iteratively introduce students to HTML logic and rules, and slowly work them up to increasingly complex coding. All of the tags I taught were actual HTML elements required for the final projects -- paragraph breaks for the Timelines, bibliographic formatting, embed code for images and videos. My tutorials were broadly informed by two data points: 1) areas where I saw students struggle last year, and 2) areas where I observe students struggling this year.

I built the tutorial incrementally, timing the release of the three sections with my in-class visits. The goal was to keep students focused on the relevant subset of HTML for each mini lesson, and keep them from getting distracted (or freaked out) by more complex code. This approach enabled on-the-fly adjustments informed by what was happening in the classroom. It also allowed me to be more responsive in my tutorials -- responding in real time to student questions or areas of confusion -- rather than having to wait to update everything afterwards for future use.

My tutorials consisted of two components: an in-depth and ever-growing Google Doc with plenty of screenshots and links, and a higher-level Google Slideshow presentation for the in-class sessions. The slides offered a slightly more zoomed-out view of HTML coding, while the Google Doc could be used for future reference to help the students in their Mini-Assignments.

HTML: Basics (January 31, 2019)

The HTML: Basics tutorial emphasized HTML coding at the conceptual level: the ways in which the set of rules, syntax, and operations function as the/a language and roadmap of the web, and why following those rules matter. We covered the notion of opening/closing tags and nesting, and I shared the four basic tags/elements we would be using (our “building blocks”): bold, italics, paragraph breaks, and links. Students then applied those building blocks to their first Mini-Assignment.

This initial tutorial also covered online collaboration etiquette and pro tips for powering up their collaboration in Google Docs. I included this because I did not want to assume this time that students were comfortable working in Google Docs, or that they were familiar with many of the more useful features -- tagging each other in comments, adjusting sharing permissions, checking revision history (a handy tool for building in greater accountability), using suggestion mode (track changes), and in-doc chat. We reinforced this lesson by requiring students to use Google Docs for their group Mini-Assignments.

HTML: Intermediate (February 5, 2019)

The Intermediate HTML tutorial included basic HTML formatting -- headers and HEX code colors, as well as working with images and videos. Based on where I saw students struggle last year, I also included details about how to derive an image URL (necessary for their timelines) and showed them how to grab HTML Embed Code from YouTube. I also showed them how to read that code -- the first step to tweaking it.

Since the intermediate tutorial came after they had turned in their first Mini-Assignment, I began the intermediate in-class tutorial with a review of the basic building blocks, incorporating the commonly-occurring problems from the first assignment. By and large students struggled the most with the <a href> links, so I included additional discussion about that. This allowed me to be iterative in my tutorial design, and reinforce earlier learning. Beth and I also showed the students the timeline our Spring 2018 students produced to help current students understand why we were asking them to code HTML in a history class. (Unfortunately we didn’t have time for hands-on work in the TimelineJS template, though I was able to show them how it functioned).

HTML: Advanced (February 12, 2019)

The Advanced HTML tutorial had less, but more complex, HTML coding. First, I showed them how to adjust YouTube embed code, starting with reviewing how to read the code. We covered how to change the size of the <iframe> embed window and how to specify a start and end time. Second, I showed students how to create linked footnotes (following the Chicago Manual of Style) using the anchor link element <a name=...> and modified <a href> link. By this point, I could really see it starting to click with the students. Rather than tell them how to adjust the code, I asked them to make an educated guess. Because we spent time deciphering the code, they were able to figure out how to adjust it. This was a critical outcome for the tutorials: getting the students comfortable enough with HTML that they wouldn’t be afraid to play around with it. This, we hope, will make the final digital projects less intimidating for them.

Equally important, by my third visit, the students were starting to see why they were doing this and how it all fit together. This last point is the necessary foundation for the digital history work to come. As I’ve reviewed their Mini-Assignments for the code (letting Beth handle the content), I have seen improvements between the first and second bibliographies, and anticipate further improvements as we continue. Since the students are working in Google Docs, I’m able to comment directly in their bibliographies, pointing out issues and encouraging them along the way.

Building these tutorials required quite a bit of upfront planning, but I anticipate that we’ll see marked improvement in their timelines and storymaps compared to last year. Separating out the HTML from the tool-based tutorials I created last year (TimelineJS and StoryMapJS) is helping me refine those tool tutorials and, I think, is helping the students become more digitally literate. I am deeply appreciative to Beth for opening up her classroom early and often to me, and for rolling up her sleeves and diving into the world of HTML coding with me.

Taking stock of the tech interventions

Pamella R. Lach (10 March 2019)

Even though we’re not quite at the halfway point in the semester, I’ve been reflecting on how the tech side has been going and contemplating future changes. To date we have accomplished the following:

• Three HTML-infused research bibliographies (new)
• The low-stakes group timeline project
• The low-stakes group mapping project introduced in a hands-on session (projects due March 21)

Assessing students’ coding skills

Overall, I have been impressed with the improvements to HTML coding I’ve seen across the board in the class. Between the first and third bibliographies, the groups have become much stronger with their HTML. Students also seem much more comfortable coding, ready to dive in and write in HTML even when it isn’t needed. It appears that our efforts to scaffold HTML as an early building block of the class seemed to have worked, and that pairing it with the research micro-assignments (eventually) helped students see the tech+historical research in a holistic way.

In a recent conversation, Beth mentioned that she’s receiving a lot of research-related questions from the students. That makes me wonder if we introduced HTML too soon. True we wanted HTML to be a foundation for the digital projects -- big and small -- they’d be developing. But we have to remind ourselves that those tools -- from HTML to the timeline and storymap -- are just that: tools to help them learn how to do history. So I’ve been thinking that we might need to change the pacing next time around. Research of ancient and primary sources, as well as cultural heritage and popular culture objects, is the core foundation to the course. Without strong research and information literacy skills, the digital projects would be less meaningful and impactful. We’re now contemplating a reorganization: students should complete at least one research bibliography before we introduce the HTML. It might mean that we compress the three HTML tutorials (basic, intermediate, and advance) into two tutorials, but this would be fairly painless to revamp.

Assessing the Timeline

Students completed their group timeline entries on February 21. In a brief collaborative session (followed by asynchronous collaboration), Beth and I managed to aggregate all of the entries into a workable timeline (link forthcoming). We only cleaned enough to be able to render the timeline, and decided to leave the various “warts” in tact as a teaching tool for students to identify the problems and learn from them. Compared to the creation of the aggregate timeline last year, this was a much smoother process, with far fewer errors, particularly in the HTML department. But I also noticed some problems.

For one, many of the groups struggled with how to parse their information into the TimelineJS Google Spreadsheet Template. I suspect that this was due, at least in part, to a lack of hands-on time with the tool in class. Unlike last year, we ran out of time for the hands-on portion of the TimelineJS workshop this semester. Beth spent subsequent time in class showing them the front- and back-end of a fantastic timeline she had developed, which helped them see how to use the tool for present a media-rich and interactive argument about change over time. But seeing is not the same as doing.

I also noticed that many of the groups did more HTML coding than was necessary. This suggests a comfort level with HTML as a result of the earlier tutorials and workshops (recall that about 87% of our students lacked any experience with HTML before this class). But the flip side of this comfort is that students tried to insert HTML into fields that don’t support HTML, particularly the main media field. This field asks for either an image URL or a YouTube video link (or similar). Many students coded their links with HTML, as they had been asked to do on their bibliography assignments. I need to do a better job explaining when it is or isn’t appropriate to use HTML in the visualization tools (we’ll see if I did better with my StoryMapJS tutorial once the group maps are submitted on March 21).

Most importantly, I’m realizing that I made the same mistake with the timeline that I’d made about HTML in Spring 2018: namely, I assumed a comfort level with spreadsheets that likely wasn’t actually there. Over the years, I’ve seen many humanists struggle to translate their rich narratives and arguments into the logic of a flat spreadsheet (this was the way we ingested data into the visualization tool I had built at UNC many years ago). It’s a conceptual leap to make, made all the harder when someone isn’t comfortable in the land of spreadsheets. I’ve seen this mistake play out in other history courses at SDSU. In the much smaller HIST 496A: Introduction to Digital History, I asked the students about their comfort with spreadsheets a few weeks ago. Only a few students indicated that they worked with spreadsheets on a regular basis. Fortunately, I had enough time in that session to walk them through the TimelineJS spreadsheet before they started working in the template.

In short, I need to think about the spreadsheet as a tool, and revamp my timeline tutorial in a way that slows things down and deconstructs the tool as I’ve done with HTML. This would allow me to take the time to explain the logic of the spreadsheet -- of columns and rows -- and how historical narratives might be parsed into little boxes. Since all of my tutorials are dynamic Google docs, I could easily begin revamping the tutorial now to assist students with their final projects. What I’m envisioning is a way to break down the spreadsheet, explain how it functions, and show the students how the timeline fields map to the columns of the spreadsheet. Even though the TimelineJS template provides explanations and hints directly in the spreadsheet, I still need to do more work to make this legible to students who are still learning how to make historical arguments about change over time and space. Just as I took the time to show them Google Docs (although I realize now I did not show them Google Sheets), I need to take the time to get them comfortable working in the spreadsheet environment. This will, I hope, help them as they begin work on their final solo digital projects.

One final thing I’d like to adjust for next year: make sure there’s sufficient in-class time for the timeline tutorial. Having time in class to start working in the spreadsheet is an incredibly powerful way to learn, as Beth and I observed last Spring and saw when the students came to the DH Center last week to begin work on the mapping component of the class. Having the time to work -- and struggle -- with a new tool, with the two of us on hand to help troubleshoot, helps them learn the tool. And seeing where they struggle helps the two of us to course-adjust, modify our tutorials on the fly, and plan for the future.

Clarifying Expectations, Assessing Individual Performance, and Evaluating DH Efficacy in the Aggregate --- All with the Aid of a Handy Rubric!

E.A. Pollard (26 April 2019)

Most paedagogues will attest that rubrics offer an excellent opportunity to clarify what is expected of students and what you imagine might be possible … despite what I see as misplaced concerns about undermining student inspiration by concretizing the allegedly ineffable outcomes of original work in the arts and humanities. The pragmatically-minded will also confirm that rubrics offer a clear set of standards for grading fairly and expeditiously. But beyond individual student performance (setting the bar and standardizing equitable grading), rubrics provide a model for systematically assessing student learning outcomes in the aggregate, in such a way that the efficacy of a digital intervention can be more clearly tracked. Or, at least, so we hope to show at the end of this semester!

In Spring 2018, I had written clear and thorough directions for the assignments (collaborative Timeline and StoryMap, as well as Solo DH Projects) and had described --- in class and in one-on-one meetings with students --- what was possible with the digital. Nevertheless, with no clear bar for student performance articulated and even though we had discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the collaborative products, students could think that they were doing what was described in the assignment but fall short of excellent or even adequate work. In the absence of a clear articulation of what constituted excellent work, not every student challenged themselves as fiercely as they might. Additionally, the lack of a consistent rubric meant that the grading process was laborious and had the potential for unevenness. I found myself rethinking my expectations across every project I reviewed at semester’s end and it was easy to be seduced by one aspect of a student project (flashy use of media or good historical argumentation) to the point of overlooking its more problematic aspects. Finally, efforts to assess aggregate student performance and hence the efficacy of the digital intervention, in the absence of a standard rubric became necessarily qualitative and impressionistic.

That’s why, here in Spring 2019, it was so important to design a rubric for evaluating digital work. While in the best of all possible worlds the formal rubric would have been available while students were working on the collaborative Timeline and StoryMap, it was actually discussions with students about expectations --- mine and theirs --- and their performance on those two projects combined with the evaluation of student work in Spring 2018, that informed the delineation of the individual skills assessed on the rubric and the articulation of the performance level descriptors (needs improvement, good, and excellent).

Harriett Green’s, “Fostering Assessment Strategies for Digital Pedagogy through Faculty-Librarian Collaborations” [In Laying the Foundation: Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries (Purdue, 2016), pp. 179-203] offers a rubric that served as a useful starting point. Green makes the point that “a rubric can be a valuable contribution to the scholarly communities that are implementing digital pedagogy, because rubrics are a step toward the coherence and normalizing of shared expectations for student scholarship on digital platforms” (Green, 196). Agreed… and I was grateful for that contribution! What I appreciated about Green’s rubric as my starting point is that it was built out of, and refined by examination of, student work in media studies. Her areas of analysis --- use of visual media, written content, use of sources, site structure and organization, coherence of online presentation --- got me thinking about how to delineate expectations for the digital aspects of the project in HIST503.

My own rubric (available in the Spring 2019 "Project Design" area of this googlesite) picked up on many of those same areas of evaluation --- use of media, written content, organization of site --- but then added areas specific to the history-focused skills and content, such as argument, use of ancient sources, use of modern scholarship, style consistent with historical writing and argumentation, as well as the primary digital humanities learning goal of the history course as I am teaching it (namely, choosing and implementing a digital platform that effectively visualizes the argument about time or space the student is making in the project). Instead of Green’s four performance level descriptors ranging from needs improvement to excellent, I opted for three (needs improvement, good, and excellent). To articulate descriptions of what I expected for each area of evaluation, I imagined C-level passable work for “needs improvement”; better than average (B-level) work for “good; and the highest quality (A-level) work I could imagine for “excellent”. I found myself scrutinizing the assignment directions for what I had specifically asked the students to do, thinking carefully about whether I had provided for students the instructions (and instruction!) to achieve what I hoped to see. Especially when it comes to digital humanities and especially at a school like SDSU where there are so many first-generation college students, I wanted --- through clear descriptions of expectation --- to make visible the “hidden curriculum” of academia.

What is most exciting for me about this rubric is that students now hold in their hands a clear set of expectations. Having now operationalized via rubric the thorough assignment directions, I could kick myself for not creating a rubric for DH work sooner! But better late than never… and better before their digital poster presentations and final submission of projects than not at all. When the end of the semester rolls around, even the most outside-of-the-box-thinking students want some concrete sense of how their innovative work will be marked. Just the process of articulating expectations on the rubric has helped me to talk with the students about their final projects and has reified for them what it means to bring these projects across the finish line. I’m glad to have gotten the rubric into their hands before the in-class digital showcase, as they will be able to evaluate one another’s work with a clearer eye to offering rubric-based formative feedback to one another. I’m confident that the time put into developing the rubric will more than pay-off both in how deploying it will assist on the front-end with students finalizing their work and on the back-end of evaluating that work to determine their grades.

More importantly for mine and Pam’s longitudinal study of student outcomes with respect to digital humanities, the rubric will provide systematic data for the purpose of assessing the efficacy of the Solo DH Projects (and related tutorials and micro-scaffolding) in helping students engage and produce digital work. While there is, of course, a degree to which the evaluation of the student projects will always be subjective, the rubric allows for quantifying evaluation on a three point scale (1=needs improvement; 2 = good; 3 = excellent) the constituent skills that the final digital project comprises. This quantification could allow us to isolate aggregate student performance on a particular aspect of the digital humanities projects and examine how student skills with different aspects of the project correlate with one another. Actual evidence for student performance that is NOT just the grade of the assignment but rather layered and descriptive data. Yay! Bring on the spreadsheet.

Visualization Three Ways

E.A. Pollard (7 May 2019)

While previous iterations of my HIST503 used Timeline and StoryMap to visualize the stretches of time and place across which Roman History played out, what was completely new in Spring 2019 was the addition of readings and assignments to evoke the visualizing of people on that landscape. What better way to achieve that visualization of lives lived than with ancient biography in general and a modern graphic novel (Perpetua’s Journey, by Prof. Jennifer Rea) in particular? Although students in Spring 2018 created a collaborative Timeline and StoryMap, I undertook some changes in Spring 2019 to give greater logic and coherency to each. The visualizing of the peopled past through graphic novel worked together with visualizing time and space in ways I could not have predicted!

Visualizing Time: In the case of the Timeline, instead of allowing students to select their own events to mark on a Timeline, I pre-selected a set of events and the groups chose their topic randomly from the pre-selected options I provided. The events I selected were weighted toward the monarchy and earl(ier) republic, not only in order to coincide with the content we were covering in class while students were working on their collaborative Timeline contributions but also to offset students’ tendency to speed through the early Republic to get the more familiar events (like the dictatorships of Sulla and Caesar… or, more commonly, events from the time of the Empire). On this iteration of the collaborative Timeline, students explored such topics as the Rape of the Sabine Women, the Struggle of the Orders, the 12 Tables, the Pyrrhic War, the lex Oppia, the Bacchanalian Affair, the Jugurthine War and various slave wars. Pam and I made the decision to leave the final timeline we assembled with the groups’ contributions to the googesheet that created the Timeline both “dirty” and messy, as a way to show the difference between plotting events on a timeline and making an argument about events over time and how they relate to one another. While I was satisfied this semester that students were thinking in more complex ways about an earlier span of Roman history (thanks largely to the events I pre-selected), I still need to formulate a strategy to maximize the pay-off in terms of what happens when more events associated with a non-elite, non-male, more-than-purely-political perspective are emphasized (as compared with the traditional male political narrative) and how to build a temporal arguments that emphasize such issues as change over time and cause and effect.

Visualizing Space: Whereas in Spring 2018 students explored events of Augustus’s life mapped onto the Peutinger Table, in Spring 2019’s StoryMap (as with the Timeline), I tightened the focus, this time geographically, to have students map the construction of several buildings on the cityscape of the city of Rome itself across more than 600 years. As with the Timeline, I pre-selected the topics that students then mapped onto Lanciani’s 1901 map and encouraged students to think about its overlap with the Severan Marble Map of the city dating to around 200 CE. The goal, of course, was to get students to recognize how to make a spatial argument. And in this case, with the buildings I pre-selected, students were set up to see the types of buildings constructed, and the regions of the city where that construction took place, over time. From the Temples of Vesta, Diana, and Concord, to public buildings like horrea (storehouses), basilicae (assembly halls), and the theater of Pompey, to various constructions by Augustus (his forum, the ara pacis, and the horologium), students got a good idea of how building projects were a way of claiming space --- religious, practical, political --- and asserting particular ideologies. And, that there is a difference between plotting sites (what their groups did individually) and mapping an argument (what we saw when all the sites were described on the map).

Visualizing a Peopled World (across Time and Space): The biggest revision to the course in Spring 2019 was revamping the readings so that the ancient texts the students were encountering all had a biographical component to them. I wanted students to enhance their visualization of the Roman past by populating the stretch of time and place with humans whose actions, motivations, values, relationships could be imagined. Beginning in Week 2 with Book One of Livy’s History of Rome, students got to know the kings of Rome but more importantly students learned the concept of the exemplum … the person whose life for good or ill, sets an example of behavior that is elucidated through rhetorical strategies amplifying virtue or vice. As the late first century BCE historian Livy wrote in the Preface to his work: “There is this exceptionally beneficial and fruitful advantage to be derived from the study of the past, that you see (intueri), set in the clear light of historical truth, examples of every possible type. From these you may select for yourself and your country what to imitate, and also what, as being mischievous in its inception and disastrous in its issues, you are to avoid” (Livy, History of Rome Preface 10)

That beginning laid the groundwork for meeting a series of Romans from the Republic via the biographer Plutarch… folk like Coriolanus, Fabius Maximus, Cato the Elder, and the Gracchi (and while the biographies are focused on elite men, the narratives of their lives are replete with non-elite men and women, as well). Students met Romans via epigraphy… Augustus’s Res Gestae inscription describing his own reign and the so-called Laudatio Turiae, in which a husband describes the domestic virtues and political actions of his wife in the late Republic. We met emperors through Suetonius (Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Vespasian), the Historia Augusta (Caracalla), and Eusebius (Constantine). And we met a martyr named Perpetua.

In fact it was this encounter with Perpetua that offered the best opportunity for visualization in that the students read not only the martyr account, but they also engaged the graphic novel Perpetua’s Journey (Oxford 2018). Trevor Getz, author of the graphic history Abina and the Important Men (Oxford, 2011) has recently discussed the value of good graphic histories and yet how hard good graphic histories are to come by, for the very reasons I wanted to encourage my students to engage one. In a recent OUP blog post about Abina, Getz writes: “Historians, unfamiliar with graphic novels, often create graphic histories with cramped, text-crowded panels and pages because we lack the skills to let the images do the work.” Getz continues, reflecting on “just how difficult it is to create a graphic history that is both a meaningful interpretation of the past and a masterful employment of the comic form” (T. Getz, “The challenges of representing history in comic book form,” January 29, 2019 @ https://blog.oup.com/2019/01/the-challenges-of-representing-history-in-comic-book-form/; the American Historical Review, December 2018, includes an entire section devoted to graphic history reviews).

Put another way, historians are rarely taught to visualize. Prof. Jennifer Rea, author of the graphic history Perpetua's Journey (illustrated by Liz Clarke), agreed to Zoom! with the students in HIST503 to discuss her process in visualizing the martyrdom account to make it come alive in graphic novel form. Rea eloquently described how to storyboard and how to describe to an artist everything from details like the size of bricks in a wall to the ethnicity of the heroine. She explained what she had learned about the distinction between showing and telling; and her desire to take a musty codex sitting in a Monte Casino library and bring it to life in a way that 21st-century readers (students especially) could connect with. Students noted that what was particularly great about Perpetua’s Journey as retold through Rea’s graphic novel, from their perspective, was that it supplied a visual register that removed some of the impediments to connecting with the distant past (namely their ability to imagine what was going on). Consequently, the graphic novel gave students a chance to dig deeper into meanings they would not have otherwise seen. One of the students even noted how the story-boarding that Prof. Rea undertook to create her graphic novel carried over into their own DH projects in that similar kinds of choices had to be made in how to provide the steps to visualize their argument playing out over time or space.

There is, of course, always more to be done to maximize the pedagogical benefit of a set of lessons, and I am sure that I’ll keep chewing on the problem (especially with the Timeline). Hands down, however, the addition of visualizing lived experience via biography and graphic novel was most definitely the high-point for me this semester. Visualization via the graphic novel offered the opportunity to incorporate other graphic storytelling from Roman antiquity, from Trajan’s column to the arches of Severus and Constantine… and the efforts via digital humanities to bring these to life with virtual reality and digital scrolling. There is clearly more visualization to be done!