About jmcclurken

I am a Professor of History and American Studies & the Special Assistant to the Provost for Teaching, Technology, and Innovation at the University of Mary Washington.

Criteria for Digital History Projects

Featured

Group Contract criteria:

quality of original proposal, need to make changes

Group Grade criteria:

cohesion of different elements, ease of navigation (UX — information architecture), citations, appeal to target audience, accuracy, met the terms of the contract, creativity, proofreading

Individual Grade criteria:

contribution to project (perhaps in relation to other), enthusiasm/passion/engagement, quality of contributions, play well with others, growth, willingness to learn, timeliness

Reminder

Remember that Tuesday we’ll be discussing “Text Mining, N-Grams and Searching in History”.  Come ready to talk about these ideas.

Reading/Viewing: Peter Norvig talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4 – Skim); Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid? (2008); Dan Cohen, “From Babel to Knowledge” (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march06/cohen/03cohen.html); William Turkel, “Searching for History,” Digital History Hacks (12 Oct 2006). “Applying Quantitative Analysis to Classic Lit,” Wired, Dec. 2009; Cohen, Google Books, Ngrams and Culturomics; Rob Nelson, Mining the Dispatch.

Posting and comments

For those who have been asking about my expectations for posting and comments:

  • Post at least once a week.  Sometimes there are specific prompts on the syllabus for topics, but most weeks you should write about your projects and how they’re going.  Problems and successes, areas of interest, serendipitous discoveries all are fair game.  Individually these blogs posts are a project/research log of your semester.  Collectively, the class’s blog posts contribute to a community of experimentation and creativity and shared process.
  • Comment on at least two of your classmates’ blogs each week.  Part of being a community of practice is offering support, advice, and even constructive critiques.

Feel free to post and comment more often and more broadly.

Welcome

This site will be the home of the Spring 2012 iteration of Adventures in Digital History, a senior seminar at the University of Mary Washington taught by Jeff McClurken.