Project Overview - For Instructors

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.

This section provides information for instructors regarding how to incorporate the Writing with Visualizations tool into the classroom or workshop setting, including an example assignment and learning objectives.

Estimated Time to Complete this Section: ~1 Hour+ (depending on whether you generate topics for your text beforehand or later with your students)

Project Overview

Who is this project template for?

The Writing with Visualizations learning sequence is intended for an audience of undergraduate and graduate students or faculty, and may be taught in an extended workshop or classroom setting.

What will students create?

Following the instructions on this site, students will learn to navigate GitHub, gain an introduction to Digital Humanities (DH), text analysis, and topic modeling, and produce a multi-media essay via a GitHub Pages website that incorporates text interwoven with images, pdfs, videos, and DH visualizations.

What will students learn?

  • Copy a GitHub repository and turn on GitHub Pages
  • Navigate directories and subdirectories on GitHub
  • Write and format content for the web using Markdown
  • Create, copy, and paste Liquid “include” code to incorporate images, documents, and visualizations into a multimedia essay webpage
  • Analyze historical texts using distant reading methods

Steps for Instructors

  1. For ideas on how to incorporate “Writing with Visualizations” into the classroom as an assignment, see this section’s Example Multimedia Assignment.

  2. Since this project’s instructions ask each student to create their own multimedia essay website, your job as an instructor is to familiarize yourself with the steps that this documentation presents to students.

  3. (optional) This project asks students to incorporate supporting evidence into their web essays in the form of embedded images, documents, and visualizations. Often, these supporting objects will be primary sources. While the Including Primary Sources section of this site contains suggested websites where students may find primary sources, you may want to curate your own list of sites that you’d like your students to use when looking for digitized primary source content.

  4. (optional) If you’d like to tailor this documentation site to your class and project, you’ll need to make a copy of this site’s GitHub repository and customize your version of it. You may also find you need to customize the project template that your students copy their projects from, so that it contains prepped or customized data for analysis (note this is especially true if you are using the text analysis or topic modeling features of this module). If this is the case for you, follow the instructions on this section’s Create Template page.

  5. (optional) The Digital Humanities section of this site uses demo data comprised of 20th-century State of the Union Addresses and Party Platforms. If you decide to use the Digital Humanities section, you will likely want to exchange the demo data for your own data. Instructions to do so may be found on the Voyant Data and Topic Modeling Data pages of this section.

  6. (optional) For additional learning resources see this section’s Resources page.

Aligned Learning Standards:

INSTRUCTIONS: It is optional and suggested to identify standards/frameworks/competencies that align with your learning sequence and define what learners should know and be able to do within a content area at specific stages in their education (for example, the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education or ISTE Standards).

About Learn-Static

Learn-Static is an NEH-sponsored effort to develop static-web-based tools for creating free and sustainable Digital Humanities web projects.

We want to demonstrate that beyond being a viable option for DH projects in general, the methodologies behind static web development are especially well-suited to enhancing DH pedagogy, and make it easier for students and instructors to start incorporating this style of development into the classroom.

To this end, we’ve created the following tools:

5 Foundational Learning Modules covering basic introductory concepts in static web development:

  • GitHub
  • HTML/CSS
  • Markdown
  • Data
  • Computational Methods

5 DH classroom static web project templates and accompanying documentation:

  • Digital Collections
  • Digital Oral Histories
  • Text Analysis
  • Digital Project Recovery
  • CollectionBuilder Workshop
Topic Modeling Create Template