GIS

Southern Trails and Digital Early American History

brittenhouse6 — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 14:50:35 +0000

Southern Trails and Digital Early American History

“Southern Trails” is a digital portal for Georgia Tech students to present work that explores early American history through the lens of digital technologies. Our goal is to create learning spaces for students to explore the history of the South, while using new software to collect, read, map, visualize, describe, and analyze historical records.

The United States, the South, and Georgia have a rich, if troubled, early history. Georgians participated and experienced European settlement, the Institution of Slavery, and the forced removal of Indigenous peoples; indeed, Georgia and Georgia Tech stand on former Creek and Cherokee lands. Georgians also helped develop novel forms of government as they participated in the creation of new states during the Colonial, Revolutionary, Republican, Civil War and Reconstruction Periods. This portal provides a space for students to examine this rich and complicated history with digital technologies that provide new pathways to reframe the past.

For our first inaugural project in Fall 2021 students explored American Revolutions using StoryMaps, analyzing four distinct primary sources. In addition, the “Southern Trails” team created a portal map to search for projects by place and added previous exhibits about women during the American Revolution and Atlanta City History.

In Spring 2022 we will continue to work with digital mapping and create a podcast to coincide with an exhibit about Oakland Cemetery’s early history.

Play Video

brittenhouse6 Tue, 07/13/2021 - 10:50

Project Year

2021-22

Project Leads

Carla Gerona

Students

Ashley Cain

Alejandra Ruiz-León

Elise Li Zheng

Surabhi Shetty

Genre Tags

Digital History

Digital Storytelling

GIS

Project Site

Contact Email

carla.gerona@hsoc.gatech.edu

Understanding the Syrian Refugee Crisis

morangi3 — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 02:04:42 +0000

Understanding the Syrian Refugee Crisis

This grant aims to use the Syrian refugee crisis as a case study to both educate Tech students about a particular global problem and to empower them as producers (rather than consumers) of pedagogy and scholarship by generating projects about the Syrian refugee crisis using the tools and innovations of digital humanities. Ultimately, these projects will be made available as resources that can be used as lesson plans about the Syrian refugee crisis in Georgia public middle school classrooms. Additionally, lessons learned from this early start up phase of the project can hopefully be leveraged into a larger grant to develop a comprehensive resource on the Syrian refugee crisis for educators.

Results of Phase I

The first part of the project was implemented in July as part of HTS 2041 History of the Modern Middle East. We devoted the last week of class to the Syrian refugee crisis, including bringing in guest speakers from New American Pathways, a refugee resettlement group headquartered in Atlanta and an Iraqi refugee who now works helping to resettle more recent Syrian arrivals. The initial assignment was to complete group timeline project on the Syrian refugee crisis using JS Timeline, an open source tool for creating multi-media timelines. However, some of the groups wanted to pursue topics we had covered during earlier parts of the course and I allowed them to do that.

I also asked each group to write a short essay reflecting on the process of constructing their timeline including an evaluation of the JS Timeline tool. In many respects, this proved the most interesting part of the assignment as it showed students grappling critically with the challenges and possibilities of using Timeline JS and provided a window on the analytical choices they made in order to construct a historical narrative. Here are some of their comments:

“Timeline JS was an interesting medium for portraying information, but it limits the amount of resources that can be used to support the arguments or information. Timeline JS only allowed for one media source to be used per slide, and it also made it difficult to use interactive sources or statistics tables in tandem with media. The timeline also forces the events to be described in a brief, concise manner, which can be disadvantageous when reviewing important and in-depth events or figures that require context or analysis along with basic descriptions.”

“When using Timeline JS, we found that it was fairly easy to use, and the setup of the spreadsheet made it clear where all of our information was supposed to be placed. Timeline JS is a very useful software due to its capabilities of creating the timeline for you. For the most part we had no troubles with the program…Overall, our experience with Timeline JS was a very good experience as the program was easy to use, and it definitely helped make this project a lot easier than it could have been.”

“We found we could have done a lot with this project given more time and a different format in which to present it….The issue of the timeline was having to put everything in with a specific date…..We also felt the use of a timeline for this project hindered our ability to talk about the more interesting points of this conflict and the varying opinions on what happened, which side was more legitimate in their fight, and other points of historical disagreement surrounding the conflict. By using the JS timeline, we had to abide to a set of instructions that restricted our choices. Therefore, our narrative ended up being fairly broad, simply outlining the conflict more than analyzing it instead of including more information on differences.”

morangi3 Wed, 10/05/2016 - 22:04

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Project Year

2016-17

Project Leads

Laura Bier

Genre Tags

Digital Storytelling

GIS

Contact Email

laura.bier@hsoc.gatech.edu

Exploring Data and Documentary with the Latino Community in Buford Highway

morangi3 — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 01:37:18 +0000

Exploring Data and Documentary with the Latino Community in Buford Highway

This work of mixed-media scholarship will bring together not only documentary and data visualization but also multiple authors and languages in order to illuminate facets of life and work as experienced by Latinos in a section of the city too often overlooked by Georgia Tech.

Currently, ML and LMC students are working independently to gather promising footage and data sets for the project. The ML students—focused on documentary—are conducting interviews with a range of community members, starting with students at Cross Keys High School. The LMC students—focused on data visualization—are developing “data biographies” that speak to the social lives of data sets that highlight various dimensions of Buford Highway.

morangi3 Wed, 10/05/2016 - 21:37

Play Video

Project Year

2016-17

Project Leads

Yanni Loukissas

Juan Carlos Rodriguez

Genre Tags

Digital Storytelling

Civic Media

GIS

Contact Email

yanni.loukissas@lmc.gatech.edu