Katherine Holt

So far, I’ve been (sporadically) using this blog to talk about my research on Brazilian social history.  Discussing my research will still be part of my focus, but I want to try blogging more frequently about my experiences integrating digital humanities tools in my courses at The College of Wooster.  I hope to start a conversation about my pedagogical goals, my selection and implementation of web 2.0 tools, and the successes and failures I have using digital humanities methods to help liberal arts students ask new questions and apply critical thinking skills in new ways.

This fall, I’m teaching a First Year Seminar called “Mapping the Americas: Encounters & the Construction of Identity in the Americas.”  Here is the course description:

“This first year seminar will explore the history of American encounters, looking at how individuals have visually and textually “mapped” their own identities in relation to their social and physical environment over the past five hundred years. We’ll read travelers’ accounts, examine the history of map making and visual representations, and consider theories explaining how colonists as well as more modern travelers sought to fit new peoples and cultures into familiar categories.  Readings include Lewis and Clark’s journals, David Grann’s The Lost City of Z, Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps, Katharine Harmon’s You Are Here: Personal Geographies and other Maps of Imagination, Dolores Hayden’s A Field Guide to Sprawl, selections from Nicholas Feltron’s annual reports, as well as Latin American films.

In our examination of maps from a wide range of perspectives, we’ll consider how travelers and explorers do not merely present unfiltered data.  Instead, all explorers, whether they are traveler writers depicting their experiences through the written word, mapmakers visually depicting their passage through new landscapes, or artists exploring multiple facets of their identities, make a series of creative choices about their artifact’s representation of the viewer and the surrounding environment.  Travel writers draw on objects and customs familiar to their readers and use these as the basis for comparison in describing their new experiences: a new fruit is “just like an apple.”  Explorers draw maps that highlight features of interest to their sponsors: ports, mines, large settlements, tropical forests, relics of past civilizations.  Contemporary memoirists use data mapping tools to visually depict their relationship to the larger world by tracking subway routes, international calls received, their attendance at baseball games.  Taken together, these maps provide insight into larger questions about what it means to be “American” and how notions of community, identity, and belonging have changed over time.

Together we will examine the long history of maps and map making, consider how scholars use digital mapping technologies to ask new questions about patterns in their data, and produce our own maps of social and intellectual networks.  As a final project, students will create their own portfolio of maps to visually display their engagement with the “new world” of the larger Wooster community and their lives as college students.”

As the course description states, I’m trying to get students to think about “mapping” both through the critical analysis of historical maps and through the creation of their own data visualizations.  The course unites first year students with a wide range of academic interests (potential Chemistry, Geology, Religious Studies, and History majors) and extra-curricular pursuits (varsity athletics, knitting, movies, meditation).  While it is intended to develop first year students’ research and writing skills, we don’t hold back on the intellectual content.

Thus far, the students have been very adventurous about experimenting with new DH tools and forms of communication. I have them doing a lot of blogging: the night before each seminar, each student responds to the day’s readings, or shares his/her responses to the speakers in our fall Forum.  This has been a good way for me to tailor the discussions to the students’ interests.  It gives them a lot of practice with informal writing.  And it alerts me to methodological or content questions to address in class.

This week they are reflecting on their posts for the first half of the semester.  I got this idea of a meta, reflective blog post from ProfHacker and have found it very productive.