x-post by josh honn, digital humanities librarian & technology consultant for digitizing folk music history seminar.
Josh Honn
As my internship at Northwestern University Library’s Digital Collections winds down, another part-time position at the university has been gearing up. Until June, I am working with Prof. Michael Kramer of Northwestern University’s Department of History in a hybrid position as an embedded librarian, teaching assistant, and technology consultant for an upper-level undergraduate research seminar titled “Digitizing Folk Music History: The Berkeley Folk Festival.” In this course, through the process of digitizing and interacting with items from an archival special collection, the students’ “goal is not only to document the Berkeley Folk Festival, but also to interpret the American folk music revival through digital media.”
This past week I began holding office hours in the library, making myself available for several hours a week until the completion of the course in order to assist students in thinking about, experimenting with, and creating digital history projects. Along with seminar sessions twice a week, the class is happening in a digital environment on a WordPress MU install, with both a collective class blog and individual student blogs, or what Prof. Kramer is calling “student project canvases.” The former is for facilitating open discussion in a popular digital media format (we ditched Blackboard), allowing the professor, students, guest speakers, myself, and others the ability to make observational blog posts, post digital media, and interact with each other online. In the collaborative spirit of both the class and the folk music history it studies, the WordPress MU install was an experimental collaboration between several NU departments (Special Collections, Digital Collections, Academic & Research Technologies, IT, and the Department of History), Prof. Kramer, and myself. Because this project is fraught with copyright issues, the digital class environment is password protected, though here is a screenshot (below) of the collective blog we work on.
In addition to class discussion, guest speakers, lectures, readings, and final projects, students get firsthand experience in visiting Special Collections, researching and selecting archival materials that will then be digitized by librarians from the Digital Collections department. These digital pieces will then be made available for the students to begin to further study through digital means, practicing digital history through investigating copyright issues, creating timelines and visualizations, manipulating and remixing multimedia content, etc. While technological experimentation is at the heart of the course, the goal always remains to practice history in the digital age, or, at the very least, to explore what that means.
This endeavor is the first of its kind at Northwestern University, and I am more than thrilled to be a part of it. To me, it is essential that academic librarians begin to take on stronger collaborative roles with faculty, particularly when it comes to enabling scholars to participate and practice in experimental digital learning environments. This quarter, Prof. Kramer and I are definitely experimenting, finding our way, navigating uncharted digital waters; no doubt, this class, in the future, will look much different (and better!), but the lessons we are currently learning are valuable ones, and we hope to pass on our experiences with our colleagues (students, librarians, professors) in the hope of moving learning and research at Northwestern University forward, embracing and engaging new and progressive modes of scholarly digital praxis.
If you’d like to follow along with us, there are a few ways you can do so. First of all, please feel free to make comments to this post below and add to the discourse. Secondly, Prof. Kramer has posted the course syllabus, example ideas of final projects, and continually updates his blog, Issues in Digital History, with detailed class notes and multimedia from the course. In other words: Please collaborate with us! We’d certainly love for you to follow along with us and to hear your thoughts, feedback, suggestions, and any similar experiences you may have had in practicing digital [insert academic field here].