Death, Data, & Local Cemeteries

This is a thematic course with special consideration given to student-driven data collection, fieldwork in local cemeteries, and the learning of new software for data analysis and communication. I was awarded a Teaching and Innovation Project grant to purchase iPads and a large format scanner for this course and its future offerings. This course is part of a larger research project: Past Spaces and Places of Oswego.

By integrating public history, digital humanities, and local history, this course offers students the opportunity to train as digital historians and cultivate data analysis skills which are highly sought after in today’s job market and in academia.

Through a multi-primary and secondary source approach, the major course research project will develop highly transferable analytical, critical thinking skills that will serve you outside of a history classroom. In addition, this course will provide you with skills to do the following:

• Critically analyze a range of primary and secondary sources.

• Gather and analyze your own datasets.

• Develop communication and storytelling skills through written research and through data visualization.

• Learn digital survey skills.

• Develop artifact photography skills.

• Become proficient using Microsoft Excel and basic descriptive statistics.

• Become a Responsible Digital Citizen and publish content on social media.

*This course is taught in-person and requires fieldwork. It was formerly entitled "The History of Death".

The analysis of funerary rituals, burials, and associated primary sources, presents the historian with a unique opportunity to observe past people’s relationship with death. Consequently, these resources are also a powerful lens through which we can examine their attitudes and expressions of power, identity, gender, religion, ideologies, and more. This class is an exploration of such ideas as they have manifested in cemeteries and monuments in our own community of Oswego as well as through case studies of death and burial from around the world. By the end of this class, you will have the theoretical tools necessary to complete a major research assignment based on the data you have collected from local cemeteries and students will be able to better understand their own attitudes towards death as they are historically contingent.

To accomplish these learning objectives, this class is organized into two halves: in the first half of the semester you will learn how to analyze the local funerary monuments of Oswego and then you will focus on collecting data in the field, from our local cemeteries. You will be using a range of programs, platforms, and instruments for collecting data including mapping and survey software produced by Esri, social media, photography, and iPads.

In the second half of the semester, students learn current and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to death and burial through readings and through the analysis of historical case studies from around the world. Additionally, they focus on analyzing the data collected as a class from Oswego cemeteries. To explore this dataset they learn about and then employ descriptive statistics through the use of Excel and the digital visualization software, Tableau.

The culmination of classwork and shared experiences is a conference that is open to the community, plus a final research paper that presents an analysis of our past Oswego communities and their relationships with the dead.