Case Statement - National Council on Public History

<strong>Case</strong> <strong>Statement</strong>
NCPH Working Group on “Teaching Digital History & New Media,” 2013
Anne Mitchell Whisnant, UNC-Chapel Hill
January 21, 2013
I’m participating in this working group at the 2013 NCPH meeting in hopes of
getting help in thinking creatively about how to improve my current Introduction to
Public History course at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since 2009,
I have incorporated significant digital component into this class by having students
work on a digital history project for which I have been the scholarly advisor since
2009: Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway. This project,
supported initially by funding from a two-year grant from the State Library of North
Carolina under the Library Services and Technology Act and hosted at the UNC-
Chapel Hill Libraries, has digitized and put online hundreds of historic photographs,
maps, documents, newspaper clippings, oral histories, and other materials
pertaining to the history of the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina (1933-
present).
The central project for students in my course has been to develop illustrated
interpretive essays for the collection, some of which—in the longer term—have
been edited and published on the live Driving Through Time site. Because digital
skills and awarenesses are now vital to all historians, I have urged them to employ
digital tools at every stage of their work—from research materials management
(Zotero), to development of interpretive visualizations (Google Earth), to final
presentation of their essays (WordPress). They have also conducted site usability
reviews and have also, on two occasions, mined our raw digitized materials to
create descriptive metadata to be entered into the site’s Django-enabled back-end
database or (later) in a Google Doc form that, in turn, was used by the site planning
team to work on the live site. The course is designed so that students see and
experience how digital tools are now braided into all stages of historical
scholarship: from research to final presentation and use.
Yet, sometimes, squeezing digital history into a course that has other primary goals
(namely, introducing them to the field of public history more generally) makes the
students (and me) feel as though we are doing two courses at once, especially as the
technical aspects of working with metadata, Zotero, Google Earth, and WordPress
can quickly become overwhelming. Many of the students are surprisingly lacking in
proficiency and self-sufficiency in using their computers. Many do not read
instructions carefully. Even though this is a senior- and graduate-level course, I find
I cannot assume even a basic level of technical capability on the part of most of my
students.
Additionally, I struggle with bringing the students sufficiently up to speed on the
content (Blue Ridge Parkway history) and, frankly, on the basics of doing quality
historical research (with digital and analog sources) and interpretation, and often
end up frustrated with the poor quality of the final essays—which also, rarely go