In this special team-taught, jointly-offered course, advanced undergraduate majors will work directly with the professors and community groups to organize, promote, and coordinate a public digitization of family and community history for The History Harvest project in Lincoln. Students will also develop software applications to enable the project.
The History Harvest has been featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Omaha World Herald, and serves as a national partner for the Digital Public Library of America.
Students will have the opportunity to work with satellite History Harvest classes at Chadron State College and the University of Nebraska-Kearney where similar family and community digitization harvesting will take place.
This course is a unique opportunity for students to gain real-world experience, contribute to an ongoing national digital history project, develop leadership, communication and career building skills, as well as to serve communities in Nebraska.
The History Harvest course will work together in cross-disciplinary teams to develop software artifacts and corresponding historical analysis of harvested materials. With guidance and support from the instructors, project teams will pitch ideas for special projects, such as rendering and visualizing data, mining and analyzing data, and enhancing the existing platforms to support the History Harvest.
Throughout the course, the combination of computational thinking and historical thinking will be emphasized through brief readings. Grading for this course will be based primarily on participation in discussion, contribution to teamwork, and individual student portfolios.
History Harvest will be taught during the Spring 2014 semester on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:30 a.m. until 10:45 a.m.
Permission of the instructor is required. Please contact Professor William G. Thomas (wgt@unl.edu) or Professor Ian Cottingham (ian@unl.edu) with any questions.