Building maps: GIS and student engagement
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/LHTN-12-2017-0089 |
| Pages | 9-12 |
| Published date | 04 June 2018 |
| Date | 04 June 2018 |
| Author | Emily McGinn,Meagan Duever |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Librarianship/library management,Library technology,Library & information services |
Building maps: GIS and student engagement
Emily McGinn and Meagan Duever
The University of Georgia is not
unlike other academic institutions in
their quest to define expertise in the
digital humanities (DH). We have a lab
space, support from the Libraries and
the Willson Center for the Humanities
and Arts and interest from the faculty.
Yet we are not a lab that builds projects
or has active developers. Nor do we
have a large number of DH practitioners
on campus. Our growth comes not from
the creation of long-term research
projects, the focus of many DH labs and
initiatives, but instead through our
pedagogy. The creation of “digi-
inflected” classes, or classes that
include a digital project or
methodology, has greatly expanded the
reach of DH on campus and has reached
a wide swath of students.
These students are, by design,
undergraduates rather than graduate.
This approach is twofold. First, it
introduces the concepts and methods of
DH into the undergraduate classroom,
at a time when students are just
beginning to become scholars and are
learning how to ask scholarly questions.
Our undergraduates encounter DH not
as something foreign or isolated from
humanities work in general, but as
integrated into the curriculum.
We work directly with the instructor
to design and scaffold an assignment
that meets the learning objectives of the
class. In this way, we are aligned with
Diane Jakacki and Katherine Faull, who
believe that the difference between DH
pedagogy and the use of technology
more broadly in the classroom is in “the
intentionally of course learning goals;
in other words, how we lead students to
new forms of understanding through the
methods of the digital humanities”
(Jakacki and Faull, 2016). Connecting
DH directly to the content of the class
places DH on a more equal standing
methodologically to the methods of
traditional humanities. At the same
time, DH analyses are normalized and
legitimized in a course in which DH is
presented as a mode of analysis.
The integration of DH is at the core
of the course – whether when designing
a new course or restructuring an
existing one – requiring that the teacher
pays particular attention to course goals
and learning objectives. This form of
pedagogical intentionality may surprise
instructors who have taught a particular
subject using more traditional methods
in the past, but is crucial to the
implementation of a course that
establishes sound learning framework
and ensures the successful pedagogical
coalescence of DH into a humanities
context (Jakacki and Faull, 2016).
Pushing the boundaries of pedagogy
not only introduces the students to new
methods of analysis but also these
classes build DH capacity at the faculty
level. For many faculty members,
particularly those who are not yet
tenured or find themselves in otherwise
precarious roles, building out a long-
term digital research project is simply
out of reach, not just technically but also
logistically in terms of time and
institutional support. Yet, many of these
faculty members have a deep interest in
learning more about DH and thinking
about how they might apply it to their
research. The classroom then becomes
the space of experimenting and learning
for both the faculty member and the
students.
To support these experiments, we
work with the instructor to identify tools
and methods that are accessible to the
instructor and that teach the students a
new way of looking at the class
material. Rather than simply creating a
project for a class, we address what the
instructor wants the students to learn or
how he or she would like to think about
the materials from a new vantage point.
For example, if a class is looking at a
collection of records, we might find a
way to visualize those records in the
aggregate thereby giving the students
the space to ask new questions than they
were able to see from a single record, or
a handful of records. In some classes,
the object of study is the information
itself, in which case we work with the
class to interrogate the data. When they
are collecting data together, the students
make a “data dictionary” in which they
decide what information to collect, how
to format it and implicate these data.
We have also done experiments in
deconstructing infographics, finding the
data and making alternate arguments
from the same data. Each of these
experiments is custom designed for the
class and aligns with the learning
objectives set by the instructor.
In the past year, we have worked
with 14 classes across the humanities
curriculum from project scoping and
syllabus design to guest lectures. We
offer training for the instructor and will
also work directly with the class
offering instruction or simply open
office hours for students during the
course of the semester. The projects are
small enough to accomplish in the span
of a semester, yet are more than a
beautiful visualization. The output is
not the end, but the beginning. The
projects are rigorous enough to expose
the students to DH as a research
method, as a way to ask new questions
of the course material, to find new
methods of analysis.
Our history faculty were among the
first to embrace this type of DH
instruction, and are also currently those
with the most experience in DH in their
own research, most often in the form of
digital maps. Therefore, they were the
first to welcome this kind of
experimental pedagogy. As Edward
Ayers pointed out, history is well suited
to the application of geographic
information system (GIS) methods and
tools. The disciplinehas already adopted
the spatial turn that has appeared in a
number of disciplines spanning the
social sciences, geography and others
and historiansare already closely aligned
with geographyand cartography. Yet:
LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 4 2018, pp. 9-12, V
CEmerald Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/LHTN-12-2017-0089 9
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