Assess one of the secondary sources related to your local history project in the bibliography you created in Assignment

The Digital Past—Digital Local History

Final Assignments are required to be completed using this Word template –  attached

• Download the template and save it as <LastName_FirstName_FinalAssignment>. This is the document you’ll submit in the #final-assignment channel on Slack.

In Module 4, you were introduced to the idea (really, the requirement) that your primary sources need to be understood within a broader historical context. It may be useful to think of context in three parts:

Each of these types of context should be combined with the others to make sense of the events and figures of the past. If we use only one form of context to study history, we fall short of answering important questions about the people and events we study.

Final Assignment, Part 1: To which local, regional/national, and thematic contexts do your primary sources connect?

Using the questions to consider in the above table, create a list of questions related to your project for each level of context (local, regional/nation, subject/thematic). See the example list  https://digitallocalhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Sample-Context-Questions.pdf of context questions to get an idea of the types of questions you should ask.

REMEMBER: Your list of questions should go in Part 1 of your Final Assignment Document.

Evaluating Secondary Sources

In Assignment 11, you identified secondary sources and entered their bibliographic information into Zotero. Now you must determine whether those sources are credible and useful.

Each secondary source should be evaluated according to the following criteria:

• What is the author’s narrative?
• What primary sources are used as evidence to support the author’s narrative?
• To what extent do the primary sources support the author’s account?
• Does the author consider other historians’ interpretations of what happened and why?
• How does the source compare to other secondary sources on this subject?
• How credible is the author?

Even after you’ve evaluated a secondary source, it may be useful to consider how other experts have responded to the work. There are a number of online networks of historians within a specific subject or region that can offer nuanced insight on secondary literature. Often, these communities create free online reviews of new texts while also discussing and evaluating established historical interpretation. See this resource list of online networks for historians https://digitallocalhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/OnlineNetworksInHistory.pdf

Final Assignment, Part 2: How credible and useful are your secondary sources?

Assess one of the secondary sources related to your local history project in the bibliography you created in Assignment 11. That means you’ll need to read it (If you’re not familiar with reading a historical text for information, click here http://northwesthistory.blogspot.com/2010/04/how-to-read-book-in-one-hour.html

) Write an annotation for the source that does all of the following:

-Briefly summarizes the information that answers your context questions

-Assesses the text using the questions introduced in this section:

• What is the author’s narrative?
• What primary sources are used as evidence to support the author’s narrative?
• To what extent do the primary sources support the author’s account?
• Does the author consider other historians’ interpretations of what happened and why?
• How does the source compare to other secondary sources on this subject?
• How credible is the author? How have other historians reviewed or responded to this source (in order to answer this question, you’ll need to consult one of the networks in the linked resource list)?

REMEMBER: Your annotation should go in Part 2 of your Final Assignment Document.

Developing a Local History Narrative

READ: Sheila Brennan, Sharon Leon, et al. “Explorations” in Building Histories of the National Mall: A Guide to Creating a Digital Public History Project, 2015. http://mallhistory.org/Guide/content-development-and-interpretative-approach/explorations/

READ: Larry Borowsky, “Telling a Story in 100 Words: Effective Label Copy.” AASLH Technical Leaflet, 2007. https://gpmproject.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/6-borowsky-telling-a-story-in-100-words.pdf

The practice of history is, ultimately, the act of making a narrative about the past. People engaged in historical work bring together primary and secondary sources which illustrate and support their narratives. At this point, if you have worked through the previous modules, you have a collection of primary and secondary sources related to the research question you posed in the early modules. Using these sources, you will craft an answer to the research question, which you will present in digital form in an Omeka exhibit.

A narrative has a structure (it is organized) and it has a purpose (to communicate a point or points to an audience). It can also be made up of smaller parts (questions, evidence, and conclusions), that are linked together, each of which is connected to a larger overarching idea or question.

Before you can begin to craft your overall narrative answer, you should understand how the smaller parts – your primary and secondary sources – contribute to the narrative as a whole.

Think about what answers each source provides for your overall research question. For example, the Explorations on Histories of the National Mall first provide an overall answer to the question, and then use individual items and their contexts to answer specific pieces of the question. Using this framework as an example, consider whether any of your primary sources could be interpreted as answering the question in different ways, even if those differences are more about approach than outcome.

This analysis can be completed in a variety of ways: in a list, a mind map, a running text document (like in OneNote), or in a spreadsheet. In this module, we will use a table. The table below includes the steps for assessing a source’s relationship to the research question and the narrative:

Final Assignment, Part 3: How will you answer your question?

Begin crafting an answer to your question. For each part of the answer, explain the sources for that information, both primary and secondary. You should return to the work you’ve done so far to help you create the connections between your sources. Here is an example  https://digitallocalhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/ComparisonSynthesisInterpretation.pdf of what this work looks like in finished form.

REMEMBER: Your answer should go in the corresponding sections of the table in Part 3 of your Final Assignment Document.

Planning and Building an Exhibit in Omeka.net

Building an Omeka exhibit, like curating a museum exhibit or writing an essay, requires thoughtful planning. Unlike a collection, which brings items together as independent units, an exhibit involves placing those items into a particular order and putting them into conversation with other primary and secondary sources.

REVIEW: Miriam Posner and Megan R. Brett, “Creating an Omeka Exhibit,” Programming Historian. https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/creating-an-omeka-exhibit

An Omeka exhibit is a presentation of your items, with customized layouts and added text. An exhibit can have multiple pages, and you can make a page into a subsection of another page. With this amount of flexibility, there are a number of different ways to organize and display items and other content in your site. For instance:

The NAACP in Texas https://mansfieldcrisis.omeka.net/exhibits/show/naacp-texas exhibit, part of the Crisis at Mansfield project, combines secondary and primary source materials on exhibit pages and utilizes different types of page layouts to display and discuss items in the collection.

The Athletics and Physical Education at Bryn Mawr College, 1885-1929 exhibit http://greenfield.brynmawr.edu/exhibits/show/athletics-and-phys-ed/the-context/fears created by the Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education http://greenfield.brynmawr.edu/

offers a narrative about the importance of education (physical and mental) for women. Note how the exhibit pages combine broad national and regional contexts with the policies and practices at Bryn Mawr College.

Histories of the National Mall uses exhibits to create Explorations http://mallhistory.org/explorations, question-based examinations of historical features of the National Mall. These single-page exhibits combine items (primary sources) with secondary sources and interpretation to answer questions.

In each of these examples, the creators of the project have considered the best way to present the collections to create a narrative. Take time to think through the ways in which you might present your narrative online. The form that this take will depend on your question, your narrative answer, and the audience – the people who you hope and expect to read it (these may be two different groups).

The process of planning and building an exhibit can be intimidating for many reasons. However, breaking the project into several steps will help to make the work more manageable. The workflow for this project is visualized below (click on the image to see a larger version): <insert image; create page for larger image>

You have already gathered materials for the exhibit: a collection of items and some ideas from secondary literature. And in part 3 of the Final Assignment, you developed a narrative for the Exhibit that draws on both primary and secondary sources. Next, it is important to think about how to present that information in a meaningful way.

Here are some questions to think through as you draft the plan of your exhibit:

1. Consider your audience
   • Is your audience composed of experts on your subject or will visitors need you to provide background information and definitions of terms?
   • How do you want visitors to use your site?
   • Take time to map out some of the visitors you expect, and think about how they might each use the site differently.
2. Organize primary and secondary sources into groups
   • Which pieces of evidence relate to which portions of your narrative?
   • How might these pieces be introduced to visitors to support your narrative?
   • Which pieces of evidence belong together?
3. Map out each page
   • Where should visitors start in your exhibit?
   • How should visitors move through your exhibit?
   • In what order should your sources be introduced?
   • Draw out an outline of your site, known as a wireframe. Think about how you want visitors to move between pages and items.

Final Assignment, Part 4: What would your perfect Omeka.net exhibit look like?

https://puertoricansinnewyork.omeka.net Site

In this part of the Final Assignment, you will familiarize yourself with the process of creating an exhibit in Omeka using the items that you have described and uploaded, and the information available in secondary sources. Remember that you are developing a plan–as noted at the beginning of the module, it is highly unlikely that your site will be complete at this point. Follow this tutorial, refer to the documentation for Exhibit Builder at Omeka.net, https://info.omeka.net/build-a-website/manage-plugins/exhibit-builder/ and review the reading by Brett and Posner from Programming Historian.

A tip before you begin: read through the entire tutorial and be sure to click save as you make changes and navigate between pages.

1. Create a plan for your exhibit
   • Using the questions above as a guide, create a plan for your exhibit. This can be a written outline, a sketch, a wireframe, or whatever format makes sense to you.
2. Create an Exhibit
   • An exhibit combines your primary and secondary sources through a series of pages.
   • Add an exhibit to your Omeka site.
3. Add a Page to your Exhibit
   • Each page is made up of one or more customizable blocks of content. As we described in Module 5.1, narratives can be made up of several sub-sections. It may be useful to frame the pages of your exhibit around these narratives and their components.
4. Add Blocks to your Exhibit Page (at least one of each type)
   • Consider how you may use the blocks within a page to tease out the connections between primary and secondary sources, and how pages can be used to make specific points which contribute to the overall narrative of your exhibit.
   • Be sure to experiment with different types of layouts and avoid creating pages of long text. Readers online prefer short text blocks enriched with visualizations.
   • Even if you intend to use one or two block types for most of your exhibit, try out all possible block types to get a feel for what is possible.
   • Add additional pages to discuss other aspects of your narrative using items and context briefs.

Write out the plan for your ideal exhibit detailing which components of your narrative and which primary and secondary sources appear on each page.

REMEMBER: Your exhibit plan should go in Part 4 of your Final Assignment Document.

Subject: History

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