Southern Trails and Digital Early American History

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

“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

Computing: History, Society, and Ethics

brittenhouse6 — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 19:34:37 +0000

Computing: History, Society, and Ethics

We are developing a course module for LMC 3304: Science, Technology, and Gender that includes readings and assignments promoting student learning about historical, social, and ethical dimensions of computer technology and computing, with particular emphasis on gender and race issues. In addition to accessing library digital archival materials, students will read and discuss scholarship in the history of science and technology, the social sciences, science and technology studies (STS), and media studies to analyze computer science practice, education, and product development and reception through a gendered lens. A gendered lens includes a focus not only on gender, but on race, sexuality, (dis)ability, economic structures, citizenship status, and any other categories resulting in marginalization. Students will examine the historical exclusion of women from computational fields, as well as the ways that masculinity and femininity are performed with and through design and use of computational and digital technology.

Readings and graded assignments will raise awareness of ethical social justice issues such as disparate impacts of algorithms, the digital divide, social media disinformation, and electronic waste and will ask students to consider these in relation to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and to principles of anti-racism. A digital assignment rubric will be developed over the summer that will ask students to create a visualization regarding issues of equity in computing. The digital assignment will call for each team of students to collaborate on developing a website component such as a timeline with dates of computing achievements significant for marginalized groups, a map outlining how e-waste moves around the world, Wikipedia-type entries related to equity issues in computing, a mind map presenting unethical social media interventions in politics, or an e-children’s book about diverse figures in computing history. Course resources and projects will be archived as a model for other instructors.

brittenhouse6 Wed, 06/02/2021 - 15:34