This site is moving

I am no longer regularly updating this blog. Instead, I am placing all of my work and blog posts on my personal website at http://wcm1.web.rice.edu.

If you have been reading this blog by subscription in a feed reader, please subscribe instead to my new RSS feed. You may also want to check out two posts on the new site that you may have missed, one on two simple timers, and one containing my recent lecture on Dick Dowling and Sabine Pass: The View from Emancipation Park.

I will be leaving this website and all of its posts here in order to maintain the permanence of URLs. However, I have also cross-posted the essays here on my new site, with the exception of the first post introducing this blog.

Announcing the Dick Dowling Digital Archive

It gives me great pleasure to announce the unveiling of the Dick Dowling Digital Archive and the related exhibit, Dick Dowling and Sabine Pass in History and Memory. The collection and the exhibit, both proudly powered by Omeka, were produced by myself and undergraduate students in Civil War history at Rice University in collaboration with the Woodson Research Center at Fondren Library, the Houston Area Digital Archives, and the Humanities Research Center.

Dick Dowling was an Irish American Houstonian most famous for his role in a Civil War battle fought at Sabine Pass on September 8, 1863. Beginning in the Spring 2011 semester, Rice students in HIST 246, “The American Civil War Era,” began locating, scanning, describing, and writing about historical documents related to Dowling which were then uploaded into an Omeka collection. Students also produced four interpretive digital projects that also now reside in the collection. The Movie Group produced an introductory video (group blog and video). The Map Group produced several maps with ArcGIS showing the past locations of Dowling’s statue in the city (group blog, map, and map guide). The Timeline Group used SIMILE to produce a dynamic timeline of events (group blog and timeline). And the Podcast Group created several audio tours meant to be heard at various Dowling-related sites in Houston (group blog and audio tours).

Other students in the spring and fall semester of 2011 worked to draft, organize, and lay out the exhibit pages for The Afterlives of Dick Dowling, the first major section of the Omeka exhibit featuring items in the Dick Dowling Digital Archive. Students in the fall semester also helped me to think through the other major section, Slavery and the Battle of Sabine Pass, which I composed in bits and pieces over the last several months.

In a future blog post I hope to say more about how this project developed. For now, I’m happy to announce its existence and invite you to take a look around. Please feel free to leave comments, questions, or corrections here or at dowling-archive AT rice.edu.

Methods in U.S. Cultural History

Today I started teaching my semester-long graduate seminar, HIST 587: Methods in U.S. Cultural History. The syllabus I will be using is very similar to the one I used in the Fall 2009 semester, in that the major objective will be to produce a draft of an article-length essay based on original research. But I am also going to be trying at least two new things this time around.

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Google Docs and Group Work

Mark Sample recently had a great post about reading aloud in the classroom, in the course of which he also briefly revealed how he uses Google Docs as a sort of digital whiteboard for collecting responses from students. I’ve also sometimes used Google Docs in the classroom for similar purposes. The advantage of doing this, of course, is that the Google Doc created during class can later be shared with students online. And because Google Docs can be edited collaboratively by several users at once, it also makes it possible to reproduce the old pedagogical technique of having students "go to the board" to write down responses without ever requiring that they leave their seats.

Here’s a quick example of a lesson that I’ve done twice now, with pretty good results. In my course on the American Civil War Era (current and past), I devote several of my classes to discussing the consequences of emancipation for freedpeople. One of my major goals is to help students appreciate the range of different circumstances in which freedpeople found themselves. In one class, I do this by distributing a packet of four primary sources, all of which are available online, and then break students into groups to discuss the four sources.

So long as at least four students in the class have a laptop with them, I can also do this next step: I direct students to this Google spreadsheet, whose settings are usually such that anyone with the link can edit the sheet. I ask each group to answer a series of questions about the document–when and where the episode described took place, the circumstances under which laborers are working, and so on. Each group edits the document simultaneously, and I have it displayed on a screen in the classroom so that everyone can see everyone else’s edits as they happen.

At the end of the exercise, we "rank" how well each case met the expectations and desires of freedpeople (which have been discussed in previous classes). And by having the spreadsheet before us, we are then able to have a discussion about which variables seem to correlate most strongly to situations that benefited freedpeople’s interests. In this case, what I want them to see is that the date (during the war, or after), the state, and the presence of the military helped determine the nature of the post-emancipation labor contracts that developed.

That’s one way I use Google Docs in the classroom. Please share other tips if you have them!

Applescript and Notational Velocity

In an earlier post, I explained how I use plain text files and Notational Velocity as a task-management alternative to the GTD program Things. Towards the end of that post, I also hinted that I have been able to automate parts of my system by using some Applescript and Automator tricks. Most of these tricks depend on using an apparently little-known feature of Notational Velocity, which is the ability to perform the "search" command on your notes using Applescript.

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