Project Overview
Thank you for choosing to lead your class through this project. You need not be a web developer or particularly technically inclined to run this class! Instructions for setting up the project and working on it with your class are here to help you and your students walk through the process of creating a digital exhibit of oral histories or interview transcripts.
Learning Goals for Students:
- Learn how to to transform humanities textual content into data
- Learn how to develop and apply a controlled vocabulary of subject terms to a transcript
- Learn how that controlled vocabulary creates connections and enables inquiry and discovery across a collection.
- Learn the basics of working on GitHub, including the ability to navigate directories and subdirectories
- Learn the importance of metadata, correct file naming practices, and attention to detail for publishing websites and building applications from data
Estimated Time to Complete this Section: ~1 Hour+ (depending on how much work you do with your class to create the controlled vocabulary)
Standards Alignment:
This module aligns with the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) standards for students, particularly standard 1.3: Knowledge Constructor. –> “Students critically curate a variety of resources using digital tools to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts and make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others.”
Section Overview
To set this project up, you will be asked to set up a github repository, edit a text file, invite your students to contribute to the repository, create a controlled vocabulary, and publish your site on GitHub Pages.
If you need a gentle introduction to GitHub, we created the Learn Static GitHub Foundations Module to help you and your students better understand the basics of Git and GitHub. Since you will only be using GitHub via a web interface, however, you may not need much help, as the interactions will be very similar to those you might do with files on your computer.
If you do run into trouble, please feel free to reach out to the Learn-Static team by submitting an issue on the Learn Static - Oral History as Data project’s Issue Board
A Note on Controlled Vocabularies
While most of these simply require that you step through the instructions listed here, creating a controlled vocabulary will likely be the most conceptually and technically challenging.
The intent with this exercise and project is to see how subject tagging via a controlled vocabulary can help users discover patterns across a collection. You can think about the tags and descriptions you’ll create as working similar to the hashtags in Twitter, Instagram, etc. You’re essentially going to create a little ecosystem of categories that will help contextualize and connect your collection.
Take a look at some examples of other project’s vocabularies and the visualization pages that feature them:
Technically, we recommend you create the initial spreadsheet file with your students in a Google Sheet, using the blank starter we provide and an example as a guide. Once finished, you’ll need to download it, rename it filters.csv, and upload it to the _data folder in the GitHub repository. This is all laid out in the instructions!