We are delighted to announce that researcher Laura Brannan Fretwell from the Roy Rosenzweig Centre for History and New Media will give a presentation "Teaching Digital Tools Transnationally: Tropy and Omeka S in the Undergraduate Classroom” at the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities.
When? 3 December 2024, 10 - 12am. UFO Building, History Department, 3rd Floor, Malpertuis.
No registration required.
Abstract: This presentation analyzes the author’s experience teaching and evaluating student engagement with digitized sources and their metadata through students’ uses of digital tools trans-nationally through a recently coordinated group project between students at the University of Luxembourg and George Mason University. Omeka S expands on skills gained from Tropy by facilitating a shared digital workspace where students can learn by collaboratively uploading, publishing, editing, and connecting digitized historical sources to one another. The presentation compares the skills students learned across tools, continents, and assignments, and analyzes how Omeka S and Tropy expanded students’ traditional understandings of how historical research works while Omeka S promoted skills of digital curation, collaboration, website user design, and project management.
Presenter bio: Laura Brannan Fretwell is a PhD candidate in the History and Art History Department at George Mason University. Her dissertation research focuses on issues over race, commemoration, and public space in the nineteenth century American South through a case study of a municipal park developed in the Reconstruction era and today managed by the National Park Service’s Richmond National Battlefield Park in a historically African American neighborhood. She has received fellowships at both George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and the Center for Humanities Research, the University of Luxembourg’s Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, the HASTAC Scholars Program, and the Cosmos Scholars Program. Laura served as Project Coordinator and Omeka S trainer for two and a half years for the History Culture and Access Consortium (HCAC) project, led by the National Museum of African American History & Culture’s Office of Strategic Partnerships to digitize and increase equitable access to archival and museum collections of a cohort of five American Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).