The COVID-19 Oral History Project has teamed up with the Journal of the Plague Year (JOTPY) project to make these oral histories about the experience of COVID-19 available to the public. Among the items created through this collaboration is our Oral History Training Module. The first version of this module is available in Canvas through Indiana University.
Read MoreWe developed The COVID-19 Oral History Project to allow professional researchers and the broader public to create and upload oral histories about the lived experience of COVID-19 to an open access, open source database.
Read MoreThis post provides ten tips on how to create and manage an effective online discussion forum for students. I’ve also included an example assignment for an intro level course.
Read MoreThis tutorial builds upon our teaching modules that explored Google My Maps and Google Earth. In it, I will introduce Leaflet.js—a javascript-based program for hosting maps on your website.
Leaflet.js is open source and provides quite a bit of functionality that goes beyond the basic features of Google Maps. And, for those who wish to host maps on their own websites, it’s a relatively simple and low-cost option.
In this tutorial, we walk through a series of steps to understand the basics of Leaflet.js. The tutorial provides an example of how to create a basic map using a georectified historical map from MapWarper and a kml layer that we create in Google My Maps.
Read MoreThis post introduces teachers and students to the process of georectifying maps so that historical maps can be used in programs such a Google Earth, QGIS, and ArcGIS. It provides a step-by-step tutorial on how to find historical maps, georectify them, and output them for use in research and in the classroom.
Read MoreThis post teaches you how to embed responsive YouTube videos into your web page.
Read MoreToday, I am going to work with you on some basic audio editing techniques. As you will remember from class, we could use any number of programs to edit, such as GarageBand or Audacity. Since we all have a free subscription to Adobe Audition, I am going to demonstrate with it.
While the techniques that I am showing you today look different in different programs, all audio editing programs have the functionality that I am demonstrating.
Read MoreWe’ve finally gotten to microphones. A quality microphone might be the most important factor in creating a good recording rather than a bad recording.
I have already talked about onboard microphones a bit in the first entry in this series on recording devices. That’s pretty much all I have to say about built-in mics. They’re fine for getting the job done—if content is more important than quality.
For many public history applications, we would much prefer to have great content and a quality recording. To do this, we need good microphones that are set up so that they record what we want them to record and ignore what we want them to ignore.
Read MoreIn this second installment for “Digital Audio for Public Historians,” I want to have a look at one of the basic recording options available on mid-range recorders: the option to have a mono or stereo recording. We will use sample recordings from the 1960s to illustrate a few key principals, including recordings of James Baldwin, The Beach Boys, and The Beatles.
Read MoreAs we discussed in yesterday’s class, public historians might use audio recordings for a number of different projects: oral histories, podcasts, audio clips for exhibitions, documentaries, among other things.
We were able to play a bit with different recording devices—from smartphones, to computers, to low and and high end voice recorders.
It became obvious very quickly that both the equipment we used and the recording conditions had a huge effect on the quality of our recordings.
Over my next several posts, I am going to review some of the things that we discussed in class as well as go into a little bit more detail about how to use the hardware and software for public history applications.
Today, I want to talk a little bit about recording devices.
Read MoreAn infographic explaining how podcasts work.
Read MoreUsing An Anthropocene Primer as our case study, this essay is organized into three sections. The first section introduces the primer as a tool that bridges disciplinary boundaries to advance critical and timely sociocultural research examining changing earth systems and the human experience. The second section examines the ways that anthropologists might productively engage with the dominant interdisciplinary debates and metanarratives about the Anthropocene and the role that tools such as the primer might play in this. The final section reflects on how the primer is one model of multimodal pedagogy that answers the needs of formal, informal, traditional, and continuing education in relation to serious play. In part, then, An Anthropocene Primer is one form of anthropological educational practice that might be used to prepare the next generation of researchers and partners with frameworks to pursue ethnography in the Anthropocene that is truly applied, interdisciplinary, and multimodal at the outset.
Read More41 Tweets on the Centenary of WWI
Read MoreThis presentation covers the basics of cinematography. It offers some basics about the technologies of filming (e.g. lenses, aperture). If you're teaching your students about film and its history, you may find some of this material useful for your courses.
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