Graduate Student Reflections: Teaching DH

This 2024 spring semester at George Mason University, I was an instructor of record of HIST 390 “The Digital Past” course. This course satisfies the university’s Information Technology and Computing (IT) requirement and aims for undergraduate students to learn how to use digital tools to study the past. As a PhD history candidate at GMU and former digital history fellow at GMU’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), I have strong experience in the field of digital history, and was excited for the opportunity to expand my research and technical skills through practical application and instruction in the classroom. Following university parameters around learning outcomes for this course, I designed my own syllabus and taught specific digital history topics regarding primary source research, the ethics of Artificial Intelligence, project management research workflows, and how to write historical analysis. Overall, teaching HIST 390 provided me an opportunity to reflect on what I have learned as a PhD student of digital history and develop a curriculum to instruct these skills to undergraduate students new to the field. 

Specifically, I taught the open-source software tools Tropy, an archival research management software, and Omeka S, a web-based content management platform system. Both Tropy and Omeka S were initially built at RRCHNM, and I’ve led training in both platforms for different projects at RRCHNM. In 2021, I trained several undergraduate research assistants in Tropy as a graduate research assistant for the Mapping the University project with Dr. Jessica Mack. Teaching Tropy in HIST 390 proved to be more time-consuming on my end in preparing training materials and lectures. But the preparation was worth it; my students learned how to analyze primary sources first-hand by inputting metadata fields and typing transcriptions in the software.

In 2021-2023 at RRCHNM, I served as the Omeka S Trainer and one of the lead Project Coordinators on the History Culture and Access Consortium (HCAC) project, led by the National Museum of African American History & Culture’s Office of Strategic Partnerships. I developed, facilitated, led, and executed over 10 training sessions in Omeka S to over fifty project stakeholders including museum curators, archivists, and digital humanities managers. During the spring of 2023, I was a PhD fellow at the University of Luxembourg’s Centre for Contemporary Digital History (C2DH). At C2DH, I participated in discussions about pedagogy and a research methods seminar related to the development of the project management software Digital History Advanced Research Projects Accelerator (DHARPA). Based on these experiences, I coordinated a group project in Omeka S between my HIST 390 class and a digital humanities class at the University of Luxembourg, led by Dr. Tugce Karatas and PhD student Eliane Schmid, in the spring of 2024. I learned many pedagogical and project management lessons through partnering and co-teaching with my Luxembourg colleagues, as well as different potential and pitfalls of using Omeka S in the classroom. I will present about this process with my Luxembourg colleagues in a panel for the DH2024 Conference this August 2024 titled: “A Teaching Toolkit for Digital History: Omeka S, Tropy and ChatGPT in the Undergraduate Classroom.” 

Omeka S is an easy to use tool in the classroom, especially for group projects, as the software was designed for researchers to create public exhibits with collaboratively curated archival items and their metadata. But detailing specific guidelines in project assignments, being available for live time troubleshooting, and setting up the technological infrastructure beforehand are all crucial logistical steps to plan ahead of time. The preparation and coordination time is almost double fold for a trans-national remote collaboration. However, the experience was rewarding, as students positively reported they enjoyed working with students from another country. 

Overall, I highly recommend using Omeka S and Tropy in any digital humanities classroom. Assigning a group project in Omeka S helped students work out troubleshooting technology together and promoted deeper thinking around website design and public presentation of primary sources. Pairing this with Tropy provided more practice for students to create metadata and more deeply engage with primary sources. I am thankful for my different experiences at RRCHNM that helped me build this toolkit to utilize in the classroom setting.