Teaching with #DigHist

Teaching with #DigHist is an AHA Today series geared toward instructors at every level who are thinking about using digital history projects in their classrooms. Each month, John Rosinbum, a high school and college instructor in Arizona, will review a digital history project, explore what sorts of historical questions it could help students answer, and provide learning-outcome driven, ready-to-use assignments.

Zotero

Andrea Davis (Arkansas State Univ.) repurposes Zotero—a popular research and citation management tool—as a course platform to teach historical research and writing skills to undergraduates.

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Decolonizing the US History Survey

John Rosinbum explores a plethora of digital history projects that can help teachers integrate native voices and experiences in their US history survey classrooms.

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Voyant Tools

Students in Max Kemman's digital history course at the University of Luxembourg use Voyant Tools to analyze a large dataset, in this case, the Hillary Clinton Email Archive from Wikileaks.

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TimelineJS

Students in Julia M. Gossard's Western Civilization course use Northwestern University Knight Lab's TimelineJS to create a digital chronology of the history of food.

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Operation War Diary

Susan Corbesero (The Ellis School) discusses using the crowdsourcing project, Operation War Diary, to help students learn about the First World War. The project contains over one million digitized images of war diaries from British and Indian troops.

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Teaching with Digital Archives

John Rosinbum looks at a spectrum of digital archives available on the web today and explores how teachers can use them in the classroom.

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Google Maps

Julia M Gossard (Utah State Univ.) uses the widely available Google Maps to assign a mapping project to her students. The assignment allows students to think carefully about the economic, political, religious, and ideological connections between Europe and the rest of the world in the early modern period.

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Carto

Lindsey Passenger Wieck (St. Mary's Univ.) explains how students in her history classroom use Carto to create maps. The exercise helps students become critical consumer of maps and media, while designing and implementing digital projects that communicate historical content.

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American Panorama

John Rosinbum uses American Panorama, a digital atlas created by the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab, to teach students about the economic, cultural, and territorial transformations that changed America during the 19th century.

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Gapminder

John Rosinbum uses Gapminder to help students review broad historical trends, hone data literacy skills, interrogate the primacy of the nation state, and reflect on the ways they learn.

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SNCC Digital Gateway

Lauren Tilton (Univ. of Richmond) uses the SNCC Gateway to teach students about grassroots organizing during the Civil Rights Movement.

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Viral Texts

John Rosinbum uses Viral Texts to teach students about how newspapers can function as sources, not just for important historical events, but also for gaining an understanding of the broader cultural context in which those events took place.

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The Making of Charlemagne's Europe

Guest contributor Kalani Craig uses the Making of Charlemagne's Europe to teach medieval history through historical charters.

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The Colored Conventions Project

The primary goal of the Colored Conventions Project is to recover an understudied aspect of the 19th century reform movement—Black conventions. Rosinbum uses the resources available on the project's website to teach his students about activism and the lives of African American men and women in the 19th century.

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Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database

John Rosinbum uses Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database to teach students visualization, contextualization, and other historical thinking skills.

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ORBIS

John Rosinbum uses ORBIS, a program that allows students to interact with maps of Ancient Rome, as an easy entry into digital history projects for students.

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Teaching with Food History

John Rosinbum discusses how when combining economic, cultural, and social histories in an engaging way, food history shines during year-end reviews.