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2013-2014 Year-in-Review

The first full academic year of the Aurelius Digital Humanities Initiative was a great success with two classroom-based projects and their respective launch parties.

Ardmore Project logoOn Tuesday, March 11, we launched our first digital humanities project, the Ardmore Project. Looking at “Suburban Life in the Early 20th Century,” this project profiles the town of Ardmore, PA, through an interactive map and case studies. Students in Dr. Craig Bailey’s junior research seminar for History majors learned how to conduct historical research by accessing primary source materials available through local archives and special collections. In addition, students got hand-on experience in editing a website as they compiled their research into biographies and case studies for inclusion in the project website.

El Peru project logoOn Wednesday, April 2, we launched our second project, a digital edition of El PerĂº en sus tradiciones, en su historia, en su arte. This project is a digital edition of a Spanish-language manuscript from the Special Collections of Falvey Memorial Library. Students in Dr. Chad Leahy’s special topics Spanish class learned about the process of creating and editing digital scholarly editions of texts and got hands-on experience in compiling a digital edition of their own. Students transcribed the text and added light annotations and Dr. Leahy provided the final textual review and corrections.

Both classes had an additional assignment of digitizing materials for Villanova’s Digital Library. In small groups, students made appointments to spend about an hour scanning documents with Digital Library staff. This gave students first-hand experience in how rare and fragile materials are handled and made available to a wider audience through digital copies. Students in Dr. Bailey’s class scanned issues of the Ardmore Chronicle from 1905 while Dr. Leahy’s students scanned Los dramas de la guerra, a serialized account of the First World War published in Barcelona during the war years.

We are really proud of both of these projects. Special thanks go to our faculty collaborators, Dr. Bailey and Dr. Leahy, for recognizing the value of getting digital skills into the classroom. These students now have high-quality digital projects with their names attached that they can refer to as they enter the job market or apply to graduate school. The digital humanities continue to grow and it is important to train the next generation of scholars in the tools and concepts that will become standards.

For the coming year, we are already planning a series of DH workshops for graduate students in the fall semester, putting together more classroom-based projects, and compiling an online exhibit of graduate History students’ research. There is already much to look forward to, so stay tuned as we continue to grow our DH community here at Villanova.

If you have a project idea or would just like to chat about anything digital humanities-related, please get in touch! digitalhumanities@villanova.edu


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Last Modified: May 15, 2014

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