DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2013
Volume 7 Number 2
Volume 7 Number 2
Traveling the Silk Road on a Virtual Globe: Pedagogy, Technology and Evaluation for Spatial History
Abstract
This article describes the authors’ experience teaching college students how to use Google Earth to create atlases of historical Silk Road journeys. It argues that a digital humanities classroom, with clearly defined assignments and extensive evaluation, is an exemplary setting for establishing and verifying genre conventions and review standards. Approaches that are developed for the classroom can be modified for professional settings. The authors introduce criteria for evaluating digital historical atlases as works of humanistic scholarship, and suggest that digital humanists do the same for other disciplines and genres as well.
I. Introduction
This article is inspired by Ruth Mostern’s experience teaching an undergraduate
history course about the Silk Road using spatial history principles and methods.
Half of the classroom time in this Spring 2010 course at the University of
California, Merced was a conventional history seminar. During the remainder of
the class meetings, Mostern, along with graduate research assistant Elana
Gainor, taught digital map design and development using Google’s popular virtual
globe application, Google Earth. Integrating these two practices, students
produced gazetteers, descriptions of historical places, interactive maps, and
term papers about historical Silk Road travel itineraries.
This article offers advice and lessons to others who wish to attempt such a
course. However, it is also an article about reviewing and evaluating digital
scholarship beyond the classroom. Mostern and Gainor sptook advantage of the
structure and highly specified assignments of an undergraduate classroom to
design and implement clear and actionable standards for digital historical
atlases. The standards shaped student work and allowed a reviewer – in this case
a professor with grading authority – to evaluate the results of their efforts
and to distinguish in a fair and systematic way between more and less effective
digital atlases. Classroom work and professional scholarship are not identical,
but many of the same review principles apply to both. Since scholarly review of
digital scholarship is still at an early stage of development, classrooms are a
valuable and accessible venue for testing and evaluating review standards. We
used our expertise in spatial history methods, theories and exemplars to
introduce the digital atlas genre, set standards for student work, and grade
student accomplishments. Based on our experience, we propose that our classroom
standards can be modified and utilized by digital atlas developers and reviewers
in the profession.
The first two sections of the article offer suggestions about spatial history as
a research and teaching practice, based on the proposition that spatial history
is not simply a set of techniques, but an informed approach to understanding
past geography. The next two sections of the article are about the Silk Road
class content and its implications for the digital humanities. The article
concludes with one section that introduces recent writing about scholarly review
of digital work, and another proposing guidelines for digital historical atlas
review informed by classroom experience and professional good practice.
II. Interpretation and Analysis in the Spatial Humanities
Instructors who grade student work, as well as editors who review authors’
submissions, are explicitly conducting evaluation. At the same time, scholars
who assess how a given work contributes to their field are also engaging in
assessment. That is particularly true in the digital humanities, since peer
review and third-party publication are still rare. Putting aside technical
review, evaluating digital scholarship is no different than assessing any other
work. Those who do it recognize a work in its genre context, compare it to
analogous works, and determine what it adds to its field. The task implies an
intellectual agenda, but this has not yet been well articulated in the field of
digital spatial history. In the following section, we survey the intellectual
state of the spatial history field and propose a way forward.
We use the term digital atlas to refer to the typical genre of
spatial history work. The term is shorthand for a multimedia project based upon
a mapping platform, integrating spatially referenced features with non-spatial
resources such as embedded or hyperlinked text, images, or video, organizing
spatial information into layers by category, and filtering visible display by
means of a time-slider for temporal scale and pan-and-zoom controls for spatial
scale. Digital atlas users can turn layers on and off, control visibility, and
explore hyperlinked data associated with georeferenced locations. Each atlas
depicts a topic or theme; it has a coherent spatial and temporal premise like
that presented on a single page in a paper atlas or a single map in a textbook.
However, the advantage of a digital atlas is that it is backed by a database
holding all the geographical information, map layers, and other resources from
many atlases, and the same content can be reused for multiple thematic
maps.[1]
Humanities scholars using methods from cultural geography and geographic
information science have styled their practices as “geohumanities” and
“spatial humanities,” two names for a field that has emerged in the
last decade.[2] The field involves a range of more
and less computational approaches. Among them we are most interested in those
that involve producing digital maps of historical phenomena and using them for
analysis and communication. Barriers to entry for geographic information systems
(GIS) software and methods have declined, and historians, archaeologists, and
literary critics have, often in collaboration with colleagues in other fields,
developed exemplary projects. There are a number of books and articles about
methods and results; and conferences, workshops and opportunities for funding
have all proliferated. Stanley Fish, humanities blogger at the New York Times, devoted a column to the field in
summer 2011 [Fish 2011].
The quantity of activity in this area is impressive. However, in lieu of careful
development of theory, a critical apparatus, and standards of rigor and
excellence, advocates of the field too often rejoice in its mere existence and
engage in evangelism for it. The editors of the GeoHumanities volume, for instance, celebrate the fact that “a kaleidoscope of intellectual and
artistic outputs” is leading to “excitement breaking out across the intellectual
landscape”
[Richardson 2011, 3]. Thus, although numerous methods for
spatial analysis and spatial representation in the humanities have been
proposed, implemented, and reported, there has been only limited critical and
comparative evaluation of what approaches are most appropriate for accomplishing
particular ends. The authors assembled in the GeoHumanities volume, for example, include proponents of animation
(Ayers), gaming and immersive visualization (Harris et al.), “quantitative techniques combined
with hermeneutics” (von Lünen and Moschek), integrating disparate
sources (Schwartz et al.) or analyzing one difficult source (Hillier) using GIS,
and gazetteer development (Bol).[3] All of the authors make excellent cases for their
approaches, and all of them describe successful applications of the methods in
question to their own projects. None of them, however, assesses which research
and/or visualization problems other than their own are most suitable for the
method in question, or whether their method is the most appropriate among a
range of possibilities. Finally, none of them suggest criteria by which
reviewers or readers should judge the quality of work produced according to the
method in question, or, in most cases, the suitability of the particular method
in question. This omission explains why we advocate reviewing and critiquing
spatial humanities works, a practice for identifying how they help to frame and
address questions in the humanities and for permitting developers to select a
suitable method for a given purpose.
The current state of affairs is understandable for an emerging and rapidly
evolving field. Nevertheless, scholars have a hard time engaging critically with
one another’s work because they lack generally accepted shared language and
shared standards of evaluation and comparison. Moreover, without community
standards there is no foundation for the peer review or assessment of spatial
humanities applications. For these reasons, developing theory and common
methodology for the spatial humanities is not simply an intellectual exercise;
rather it is essential for the maturation of the field. The remainder of this
section proposes criteria for such standards.
Mostern has already written an article that reflects earlier stages of her
thinking about this matter. Her 2010 article “Putting the
World in World History” was an initial effort to articulate a
theoretical grounding for the spatial humanities, specifically with reference to
her field of world history, and particularly in the context of pedagogy.[4]
That article was inspired by the work of geographer Doreen Massey. While Massey
is not a historian, the question with which she opens her book For Space is fundamental to the field: “What might it mean… to question [the]
habit of thinking of space as a surface? If, instead, we conceive of a
meeting up of histories, what happens to our implicit imagination of time
and space?”
[Massey 2005, 4]. Using Massey’s work to insist that the
relationship between history and geography is more than the sum of “time”
plus “space,” Mostern argued that practicing critical and temporally minded
geography means describing, mapping, and analyzing the spatial intersection of
multiple narratives rather than simply producing singular histories of change
over time; in particular by investigating the ways in which such intersecting
historical events and processes create space and place. Mostern’s article
concludes that studying the geography of connections among peoples – whether
structurally á la world-systems theory, or empirically á la world history –
offers a way for historians to develop a more theoretically informed and
analytically agile spatial humanities practice.
The current article is still not intended to articulate a complete theoretical
foundation for spatial history, but it proposes four propositions that can
support digital spatial visualization and analysis, permit the framing and
resolution of interesting and unique historical questions, justify the adoption
of particular methods, and assist in review and comparison. This is an
intellectual basis for critiquing and evaluating spatial history work.
- “The landscape is constituted as an enduring record of – and testimony to – the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves” [Ingold 1993]. Spatial history should detail how landscapes (a term that overlaps with the concepts of both space and place) are constructed by human action.
- People move through space and create narratives that describe the relationships between places. Topos, the most widely used geographical term of the Mediterranean classical era, referred to progress along an itinerary and (as in the related term topology) the relatedness of a given place to others which are proximate to it [Curry 2005].[5] Spatial history should not only be about space and place, but about the semantic relationships among places and the itineraries connecting them as well.
- Spatial arrangements, like other human phenomena, sometimes emerge gradually and evolve slowly. However, change can also be abrupt, even violent, and refracted through power relations. “Eventful” spatial history needs to account for contingency as well as structure [Sewell 2005].
- Historical events and processes may or may not be visible , either to historians or to people living through them, depending upon temporal and spatial scales of reference [Braudel 1980].[6] Scale in social process is like a recording in which musical instruments play at differing turntable speeds. Scholars of the past need tools to spin the vinyl variously at 33 1/3, 45, and 78 revolutions per minute in order to hear the whole work [Hull 2005]. Digital spatial history methods should be used to integrate multiple scales into historical analysis.
Douglas Richardson in the GeoHumanities volume
claims, typically for the field, that GIS offers historians the “ability to combine time and space
in one integrated system”
[Richardson 2011, 210]. Many advocates assert this, but it is
not clear what the statement means, or how it can inform theory or method. The
four concepts we have proposed are intended to offer a more detailed foundation
for spatial history practice. Integrated together, they form a statement like
this: Landscapes of varying size and duration emerge and endure
as people move around them performing activities, as processes connect and
modify them, and as events occur in them. Digital works should identify,
depict, and analyze the dimensions of landscape emergence, persistence, and
change.
[7] History and geography are both
particularly capacious disciplines, and it would be pointless to be
proscriptive. Still, if practitioners of computationally oriented spatial
history improve its theoretical grounding, we can better design and evaluate
atlases that contribute to humanistic scholarship and are not simply innovative
works of GIS implementation. In the concluding section of the article, we will
suggest review standards for spatial history works that are consistent with this
proposition.
III: Spatial Literacy and Spatial Thinking
Since we intend this article to inform peer review and critique, it may seem
counterintuitive that the next two sections of it concern pedagogy. However,
given the nascent state of scholarly review for spatial history, at present
there are effectively no professional platforms for reviewing digital atlases.
By contrast, any instructor with training in the field and the opportunity to
design an appropriate course can assign students to create such works and
complete them in the course of an academic term. Moreover, good teaching and
fair grading compels instructors to precisely dictate the components of the
atlas and the standards for its successful accomplishment. For these reasons,
the classroom is an ideal location for learning to specify genre characteristics
and review criteria. It is true that scholarly critique is a different task from
grading and that analogous scholarly works differ from one another more than
student projects do. We will discuss these matters in the last section of the
paper. Nevertheless, we contend that it is precisely the controlled atmosphere
of a classroom that makes it a good place to begin the neglected practice of
describing digital atlases as a genre, determining whether individual exemplars
are consistent with the aims of spatial history, and comparing them to one
another.
Following from our emphasis on improved intellectual grounding for spatial
history, our first proposal is that a historian teaching spatial approaches to
the past should teach history, albeit with an understanding of disciplinary
geography and interdisciplinary approaches to spatial theory adequate for
introducing relevant concepts and methods. There has recently been extensive
advocacy for the notion of cross-disciplinary “spatial literacy” or
“spatial thinking” as a goal in its own right. However, spatial
reasoning in support of spatial history is only a specialized portion of the
domain of spatial reasoning. Indeed, in its focus on historical processes and
human agency in landscape formation and transformation, spatial history is at
the margins of the spatial literacy field as it has been articulated to
date.
The notion of spatial literacy embraces some modes of thought and practice that
are not at all relevant to the issues raised in the first section of this paper.
According to an influential 2006 National Research Council report entitled
Learning to Think Spatially: GIS as a Support System in
the K-12 Curriculum, spatial thinking can be equally applied to
spaces both abstract and concrete: life spaces, physical spaces, and
intellectual spaces. Its disciplinary heritage emerges from math as much as
geography. It includes thinking in space, or proxemics, which
measures the kind of reasoning that allows people to efficiently load a truck,
find their way, or park a car. These skills are not relevant to the spatial
humanities, though they may be the kinds of competencies that the authors allude
to in terms the relevance of spatial thinking to cognition and life skills.
However, spatial thinking also involves thinking about space, which
is the primary objective of the spatial humanities as well as many other
academic domains, and thinking with space, or working with maps and
spatial data.[8] Initially, one goal of the Silk Road class was to improve
spatial literacy among history students, following the National Research Council
recommendation that spatial literacy does not belong under the ownership of
geography departments, but should be instructed throughout the curriculum [National Research Council 2006]. It is reasonable to believe that, similar to such
established interdisciplinary fields of instruction as writing, critical
thinking, or quantitative reasoning, spatial literacy is mastered through
courses both within and beyond a discipline. Nevertheless, students most
effectively and meaningfully filter these kinds of learning experiences through
the conventions of a given discipline, as noted by a longitudinal study of
undergraduate learning at the University of Washington [Beyer 2007]. The lead author of this study, Catharine Beyer, suggests that instructors
need to think about improving student attainment of broad, interdisciplinary
learning outcomes in the context of majors and disciplines. By analogy with
professional spatial history practice, historians who design atlases should be
articulating how they are relevant to their fields.
However, the National Research Council report also notes that it is still not
clear how to incorporate spatial thinking into existing curricula or how to
measure student proficiency in spatial reasoning outside of disciplinary
settings. Indeed, most spatial literacy and spatial thinking websites do not
promote curricula, learning outcomes, or assessment criteria. One representative
initiative, Spatial@UCSB, has developed a website that includes a page of
Learning Resources, prominently featuring a list of “spatial concepts as the driving force for spatial
thinking.”
[9] However, it does not detail any objectives
that would represent the attainment of spatial literacy, or suggest any
instruments that would indicate whether students are becoming spatially literate
or not.[10] This critique
reinforces the need for teaching spatial thinking in disciplinary context and
for designing criteria targeted to given disciplines. Outside the classroom it
points toward our proposal to define an intellectual agenda for spatial history
and to evaluate the technical accomplishments of its works in its context.
In the end, because of the conceptual breadth of the field, the difficulty of
gauging student success in it, and the marginality of historical analysis to the
geography mainstream, we came to criticize teaching or evaluating spatial
reasoning per se as a spatial history objective.
Nevertheless, there are specific concepts associated with spatial literacy,
primarily drawn from disciplinary geography, that can help undergird spatial
history practice. The Learning Spatially (LENS) initiative at University of
Redlands defines spatial thinking as “the
ability to visualize and interpret location, distance, direction,
relationships, movement and change through space.” This competence
overlaps with the theoretical propositions that we introduced in the first
section of this paper, though it does not embrace the notions of landscape
creation, transformation and occupation that we consider fundamental to spatial
history.[11] Likewise, Spatial@UCSB offers a list of spatial concepts that
are meaningful across disciplines.
| Location | Understanding formal and informal methods of specifying “where” |
| Distance | The ability to reason from knowledge of relative position |
| Network | Understanding the importance of connections |
| Neighborhood and Region | Drawing inferences from spatial context |
| Scale | Understanding spatial scale and its significance |
| Spatial Heterogeneity | The implications of spatial variability |
| Spatial Dependence | Understanding relationships across space |
| Objects and Fields | Viewing phenomena as continuous in space-time or as discrete |
Table 1.
Spatial@UCSB List of Spatial Concepts All of these have some relevance to theory and practice in the spatial history
profession and classroom and to a research agenda for spatial history.
Nevertheless, this list does not conform to the spatial history conceptual
agenda, since it does not focus upon social processes and changing phenomena
over time, but rather emphasizes spatial geometry. For these reasons, we only
implicitly instructed the Silk Road students about spatial thinking. Since
competence in spatial reasoning for history is not the same thing as spatial
literacy considered as an autonomous field, it was not feasible or desirable to
design assignments and assessments for evaluating history students’ proficiency
in these areas. Likewise, the quality of spatial thinking in spatial history
scholarship should be reviewed according to its contribution to history.
IV. Traveling the Silk Road on a Virtual Globe
In Spring 2010, as a professor of history and an expert in spatial history,
Mostern taught a class on the history of the Silk Road using digital history
methods. By the end of the semester, students were expected to be able to
describe how Silk Road travelers represented routes and places according to
particular historical and cultural circumstances; to communicate about
historical phenomena using integrated images, digital maps, digital timelines,
text, and hyperlinks, and to explain how long-distance Eurasian movements of
microbes, people, ideas, goods, and population shaped world history. By
producing atlases using Google Earth, they practiced many of the spatial
concepts included on the Spatial@UCSB list reproduced in the last section of
this article. However, they did so in the service of learning about the history
of the Silk Road and the experiences of its travelers.
The Silk Road can refer to the steppe lands that stretch across Eurasia from
Hungary to the Pacific; or to the land and sea routes by which traders moved
goods and ideas between Africa, Asia, and Europe; or even to the broader notion
of cross-cultural exchange in the Old World. The content covered in this class
about the history of travel, exchange, and politics across Eurasia incorporated
tens of thousands of miles of territory, many of the world’s religions, dozens
of languages, and the entirety of human history from hominid migrations to
contemporary conflicts in Iran and Afghanistan.[12]
The vast scope of a Silk Road class lends itself particularly well to a spatial
history approach focusing on the production and reproduction of landscape, the
geo-semantics of travel, and the notion of scale. Owing to constraints of
climate and topography, the travel routes that constituted the Silk Road were
limited and discrete, and amenable to reasonably accurate mapping. On land, Silk
Road travelers traversed some of the world’s most arid and high-altitude
terrain. On sea, they were at the mercy of particular ocean currents, wind
patterns, and safe harbors. Therefore, although routes changed over time, Silk
Road geography is organized around particular mountain passes, desert oases,
entrepôt cities, and ocean ports. Silk Road travelers exchanged goods — from
pepper to porcelain to lapis lazuli — that were mined, harvested, or
manufactured in distinct locales. Many travelers — Marco Polo is the best known
— wrote narratives about their journeys or became the subjects of biographies.
It is possible to reconstruct and trace the routes of Greek generals, Tibetan
foot soldiers, Khotanese dancers, Chinese monks, and Persian sailors, and to
study their experiences.
Once a week throughout the semester, the Silk Road course was a conventional
history seminar, and once a week there was a lab session. There were no special
prerequisites for the 18 upper division history students enrolled in this
course. Students learned to use spreadsheet applications to organize
georeferenced information about Silk Road history, to write enough HTML code to
format attractive pop-up boxes that included images, captions, and text with
multiple colors and fonts, and to use Google Earth to create maps that depicted
historical narratives, including the modification of KML code to support
time-stamping. They used the History Engine episode format to describe events in
spatial history.[13] At the end of the
semester, each student completed a digital atlas depicting the journey of one
Silk Road traveler.[14]
Figure 1.
A screenshot from an atlas by Silk Road student Patrick Swisher. The
student used Google Earth’s overlay feature to incorporate a title and a
legend into his atlas. His atlas includes points of interest, routes
depicted as vectors, and regimes depicted as polygons. The film projector
icon on the left hand side of the map links to a fly-through animated
version of the map and to the student’s term paper. Customized map icons
distinguish locations associated with different events in the traveler’s
journey, and link to pop-up boxes that describe the episodes that occurred
at each place.As the basis for their research and atlas development, the students each selected
a Silk Road travel narrative to study during the semester.[15] They
wrote ten-page research papers about their chosen narratives, and in addition,
they mined them for spatial information. They researched the contemporary
equivalents of historical names in order to create gazetteers of the places the
travelers visited, determined the travelers’ routes from place to place, and
wrote short descriptions of the travelers’ experiences at particularly
significant places. They created interactive maps that integrated all of this
material, including even thumb-tacking their term papers, which focused on the
geographic aspects of their travelers’ narratives, to their maps. At the end of
the semester, with the permission of the students and the assistance of the UC
Merced library, Mostern created a video showcasing their accomplishments and
depicting the features of the maps they created. It played on screens in the
library throughout the Fall 2010 semester, and is available on YouTube and on a
public website about the class.[16]
In addition to the sources that we have mentioned thus far, Edward Ayers’ use of
the History Engine collaborative database authoring tool at the University of
Richmond was another inspiration for the class. Ayers’ students use the History
Engine to integrate primary source interpretation and historical research to
create temporally and spatially referenced content. Like the digital atlas
assignment, teaching with History Engine is grounded in theory as well as
embodied practice. As he explains: “The episodes in the History Engine embody the
principles of practice theory. …The History Engine shows that, at base,
history is where singular events and larger patterns intersect…The History
Engine shows how pattern, structure, event, and change are embodied at the
local and personal level, in a collage of moments”
[Bodenhamer 2010, 8–9]. Just as we did in the Silk Road
class, Ayers used digital tools because they helped him teach historical
principles, not because he wished impart technical mastery for its own sake.
Support from the UC Merced Center for Research on Teaching Excellence (CRTE)’s
“Educating Future Faculty to Engage with a New
Demographic” grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post
Secondary Education (FIPSE) allowed Elana Gainor to work as a graduate research
assistant embedded in the class to evaluate teaching materials, assess student
learning, and identify relevant literature about active learning and evaluation
in a spatial history classroom. During the semester, with assistance from CRTE
staff, Gainor designed and conducted two focus group interviews, one online
survey, and one written survey of the students enrolled in the class. The
surveys included open ended as well as scaled questions. The scaled questions
offered quantifiable data, and the open-ended questions provided insight
pertaining directly to the students’ thoughts and ideas. Gainor administered one
survey halfway through the course and one at the end. The first survey focused
upon students’ understanding of the learning outcomes of the class and their
general response to Google Earth. The second survey asked them to reflect on the
original survey questions once they had completed their projects. The
discussions in the focus groups were based upon the survey responses, but they
also gave students the opportunity to speak directly with Gainor and allowed her
to assess student progress.
We used the survey and focus group results during the semester to make
adjustments to the class, especially when they indicated the need for further
instruction. That data is also the basis for the claims regarding the success of
the class that we will make in the next section of this paper. There were 18
students in the class: too small a sample to establish statistical significance.
Nevertheless, the survey data establishes a baseline to use as a benchmark for
future comparison, and it is qualitatively meaningful. Moreover, the act of
creating the survey allowed us to consider what information would best reveal
student learning and accomplishment. For that reason, the surveys were essential
for determining and testing review criteria.
Support from CRTE was critical to the success of the course in another respect as
well. At present, humanities instructors are inhibited from designing
assignments that utilize new technologies. One significant factor is that, as is
equally true in the profession at large, standards and rubrics for evaluating
student work in digital media have not kept pace with changes in technology.
Instructors cannot design digital assignments if they cannot determine how to
grade them, just as peer reviewers cannot assess their colleagues’ work. In
addition we worried about grading students on the basis of work submitted in a
medium that they had never used before. Since this was a history class, we did
not want to unduly penalize them for lack of aptitude with the tool if their
conceptual grasp of spatial history and Silk Road history were good. Few of them
had ever been graded on any history assignment other than papers and exams.
Moreover, even outside the classroom, although interactive digital maps are
widespread, no standards or guidelines have been developed for them, either for
students or for professionals. We knew that it would be particularly important
to design and communicate clear standards and expectations. In order to
accomplish that, we employed three approaches.
First, we created short assignments, due throughout the semester, that led up to
the final digital map submission. The digital atlas project constituted 65% of
the semester’s grade, but it was assembled additively from multiple assignments,
none of which was individually worth more than 30% of the grade. In addition, we
developed and circulated very detailed lab slides and held extended office
hours, particularly before the final due date. Finally, and of most significance
for this article focused on review and assessment standards, we developed a
detailed rubric that listed the components of a digital map project, explained
our expectations about each component, and provided advice. Appendix 1 is the
rubric that we developed. Our objective in designing the rubric was to clearly
and comprehensively list the components that the atlases should contain and the
standards by which we would evaluate each component. Our intent was twofold.
First, that students should understand what they were being asked to accomplish:
what we meant by a digital atlas, and how we were measuring success. Second,
that each atlas should have a very similar structure so that in spite of the
complexity and novelty of the atlas format we would be able to compare students’
accomplishments in a fair and reasonably objective way.
We opted against using a standard grid-based rubric. The atlases required an
unusual and paradoxical degree of both creativity and standardized structure. We
developed the rubric according to Bob Broad's guiding concept from What We Really Value: moving students towards
“self-authorship” and supporting our ability to evaluate their “ability to collect, interpret, and
analyze information and reflect on [their] own belief[s] in order to form
judgments”
[Broad 2003, 3]. We wanted to ensure that the rubric
constrained the atlas structure without inhibiting creative accomplishment.
Thus, we structured the rubric as an outline that detailed the elements each
atlas had to include, set standards for each element, and explained how each
element would be evaluated. The rubric was like a journal’s style guide, in that
it allowed authors creativity and flexibility in content while imposing a
standardized format. In keeping with Broad’s concept of “dynamic criteria mapping”
[Broad 2003, 41], we described exemplary accomplishment for
each element, but we did not develop a formula to match descending grades with
particular deficiencies.
The rubric had three categories that reflected the range of historical analysis,
spatial thinking, and technical accomplishment required to create a successful
digital atlas. As we will discuss in the final section of this paper, these
categories collectively represent the mission of a digital atlas in the
profession as well as the classroom. Digital atlases, like the pages of print
historical atlases, include significant written elements, which usually include
an overview as well as commentary about particular map elements. Print atlases
also rely on cartography to illuminate the theme of each atlas page. Finally,
the graphic and written elements of an atlas reinforce one another.[17]Reflecting that analogy, the
categories of the rubric were Writing, Spatial Reasoning and Visualization, and
Storytelling and Integration. Each of those areas had subcategories, and each
subcategory detailed specific benchmarks. For instance, because place and
itinerary are so important in spatial history, the rubric explained that every
atlas was intended to include a gazetteer with at least 15 georeferenced
locations and descriptions of them, with locations connected by routes depicted
as lines. The cartography for every atlas needed to demonstrate a communicative
visual style (which we defined as clear and consistent iconography, objects
distinguished from one another by category, and a title and legend), incorporate
contextual information (such as the boundaries and extent of regimes, important
cities or ports near the traveler’s route, and overlaid maps), zoom and tilt
settings that controlled visibility in an appropriate way, and an animated tour
or flythrough. The rubric explicitly enumerated all of those facets. We
circulated a draft of the rubric to the students, then scheduled a lab session
to walk through the draft point by point, and we encouraged students to ask
questions for clarification and to offer feedback, which we incorporated into a
revised version. The process granted the students some ownership over the format
of the work they would submit. As the students embarked upon their atlas
designs, our vision and grading standards were clear to them – and to us as
well.
All of the atlases were intended to illustrate a clear historical argument about
a single personage based upon one primary text, and to this end, the students
were required to finish a draft of their term papers prior to embarking on their
atlas designs. This helped to ensure that students were good historians first,
and that they were using spatial reasoning and digital tools in support of their
work as historians. The atlases themselves reflected core humanistic practices
of research and communication. The rubric and course goals could have been more
explicitly spatial, but they were not, because we were not teaching spatial
literacy as such. Rather we introduced spatial reasoning in the context of
spatial history. We advocate the same approach to evaluating the technical
aspect and the intellectual content of digital atlases in a professional
context.
VI. Lessons Learned
Both the quality of the work the students submitted and the experiences that they
shared through surveys and course evaluations reveal that they learned a great
deal about spatial history reasoning, Silk Road history, and digital atlas
development. Their growing competence in each of these areas reinforced their
capacities in the others, and their performance and satisfaction exceeded that
of students in other classes. However, as we will discuss in more detail below
and as other recent research on the topic affirms, they were not the “digital
natives” we had presumed before the semester began.[18] We had
to instruct them in technical skills external to spatial history per
se, such as file naming conventions, effective web searching, and
routine editing tasks, but the time students devoted to those tasks paid off in
the form of more sophisticated understanding of spatial and Silk Road history.
Student Learning
Student learning in the course exceeded our expectations. The students’
atlases are direct evidence of their ability to reason about historical
geography and use multimedia spatial visualization to communicate about it.
When we circulated the rubric to the students, we guaranteed them that any
atlas that met all the benchmarks it enumerated would receive at least a B
range grade. The grade breakdown was as follows:
| Grade | Atlas | Term paper |
| A | 6 | 3 |
| A- | 3 | 2 |
| B+ | 1 | 2 |
| B | 1 | 4 |
| B- | 5 | 3 |
| C+ | 0 | 3 |
| C | 2 | 0 |
| C- | 0 | 0 |
| D | 0 | 1 |
Table 2.
The grade distribution for Silk Road atlases and term papers. Numbers
represent the number of students who earned each grade.Sixteen out of 18 students in this course met or exceeded the standards we
set for a complex multimedia project that involved short and long form
writing, visual storytelling, map design, georeferencing, and even simple
coding. Half of the students exceeded our minimum standards for success and
earned A range grades. None received grades below C. By comparison, the
grade breakdown for the students’ research papers about the travel
narratives they selected is a more typical range of grades for students
enrolled in one of Mostern’s upper division courses. Fewer than a third of
the students earned A range grades, and almost a quarter earned grades in
the C range or below. Half of the students in the class clustered in the B
range. Counterintuitively, students less successfully demonstrated
proficiency at writing research papers, a core competency of the history
major, than at developing atlases, which involved multiple novel skill sets.
The surveys that Gainor conducted with CRTE support also offer evidence of
their accomplishments, and they help to explain the seemingly incongruous
results presented above. The surveys reveal that almost 80% of the students
felt that they learned more about history in this course than in a standard
history course, though half of their class time was occupied by computer
labs. This is a noteworthy finding, since the class involved less assigned
reading and less time for discussion than a more orthodox class. A large
percentage of them also felt that they worked no harder than they would in
another history class, although we assigned more work, requiring more
disparate skills, than in most of Mostern’s other courses. Students doubted
their capacity to work with the technology at first, but took pride in their
proficiency by the end of the semester. Appendix 2 is a series of charts and
analysis of survey results. The most salient details are gathered here:
- 75% of the students found Google Earth a useful tool for learning about history, 75% of them “loved” using it, and a majority of them rated the workload for the class as below average in spite of the fact that we demanded more of them than Mostern does in her other classes.
- Their feedback included comments like “It allows us to view different regions and see how cultures spread out through history,” “It’s more interactive and forces the student to be more engaged in his/her work,” “The spatial approach helps put history into perspective,” “When I become a teacher, I will definitely use tools like the ones we have learned this semester in my own classes-they help put a physical location with historical texts,” “It is sooooo nice to use Google Earth in learning about history and to see locations visually. It helps to make the ideas easier to grasp,” and “It was one of my favorite courses to date. I have shown my finished project off to many friends and family and when I teach in the future I want to do something similar.”
We did not develop instruments for measuring spatial literacy per
se. Moreover, students could not consistently articulate their
spatial thinking in language familiar to geographers, and they were not
adept with a wide range of tools for spatial analysis and visualization.
Nevertheless, by the end of the semester, they had completed sophisticated
spatial history projects that exceeded our expectations. Spatial reasoning
need not be framed as a new kind of literacy. Rather, it may best be
characterized as an approach that engages with capacities that many students
already possess. They can learn skills and procedures that allow them to
articulate what they know and incorporate it into other kinds of academic
reasoning. More advanced techniques and precise concepts would best be
instructed in a different class, most likely in geography rather than
history.
Teaching with Digital Tools
This was a rewarding and enjoyable course to teach, but it was time
consuming. We had not used any advanced Google Earth functions before the
semester began, but as people with backgrounds in spatial history and a high
comfort level with digital tools in general, we found the application
intuitive. The tutorials on the Google Earth website were particularly
helpful. However, the students did not all share our facility with the
software. In general, they did not demonstrate a “digital native”
advantage. Certain skills that we considered to be matters of basic user
technique were new to many of them: right-clicking to see properties (for PC
users); copying, cutting, pasting, and dragging objects efficiently, and
understanding file structures and file suffixes. They were most challenged
by interacting with code, which most of them had never done before, and some
of them found intimidating. They had to write simple HTML in order to format
Google Earth popup boxes, and they had to write simple KML to time-stamp
objects in Google Earth. It was difficult for some of them to understand
which editing platform and which commands governed which behavior in the
application. Some students were extraordinarily adept at some of these
tasks, and one was a former computer professional. However, the baseline of
computer knowledge and comfort for the class was low overall.
In order to teach Google Earth labs that were targeted to their level, to the
discipline of history, and to the Silk Road in particular, Mostern spent
many hours developing slides that used Silk Road geography examples to
demonstrate step-by-step techniques for completing each of the tasks for
which we would later hold them responsible. She also scheduled extended
office hours near the atlas due date to tutor any student who needed
assistance, to troubleshoot their atlases, and to check for compatibility
problems as she downloaded the atlases onto her computer. Preparation and
grading took more time and more creative effort than a conventional course
would have, and this approach is best suited to a small, upper-division
course.
There were also challenges inherent in the decision to use Google Earth, a
free but commercial tool that was not developed specifically for classroom
use, historical content, or publishing authored works. The choice between
community-built and commercial tools in humanities computing is a common
trade-off, and Google Earth – accessible, intuitive, feature-rich,
well-documented, and integrated with the whole Google ecosystem – had plenty
of advantages over any other viable option. Still, it was not ideal. The
template for exporting georeferenced content from a Google Docs spreadsheet
into Google Earth was difficult to use; and this made it hard to work with
gazetteers, which are an essential part of digital atlas infrastructure.
Moreover, Google Earth lacks a time-stamping interface, which is why
students needed to write a few lines of KML code in a text editor in order
to time-enable their data; and it lacks a GUI editor for pop-up boxes, which
is why they had to write HTML to create appealing placemark pop-ups that
included images and formatted text. It also lacks a publication layout mode,
so students had to handcraft legends and titles for their atlases outside of
Google Earth using image editing software, and import them as overlays.
While these procedures were not difficult, some students found them daunting
or confusing, and even for the most adept students, it was not ideal to be
required to manage and use so many tools. Finally, because Google Earth
Community, Google Earth’s public data repository, does not have a provision
for creating closed groups, there was no way for the students to share
content with one another short of making it public to the world. That would
have been an unreasonable and unethical requirement, so we asked students to
submit their digital map files using UC Merced’s course management system.
Although that was feasible, it meant that we were not able to fulfill one of
our original goals. We had hoped to permit students to compare their maps to
one another and to reason about their differences. For instance, if they had
been able to evaluate how different atlases located the “same” place at
somewhat different points on the map, it would have been a powerful lesson
in the spatial ambiguity of historical maps.
The Silk Road class included instruction in multiple software tools and
applications, spatial thinking and visualization, computer wrangling, and a
relatively abstruse historical topic. It demanded that students complete a
research project that demonstrated their proficiency in all of those
domains, in spite of the fact that none of them had with experience with
more than a few of these areas at the beginning of the semester. Many
factors contributed to the success of the course. Among them, we
particularly credit our insistence upon clear standards for the digital
atlas. This permitted students to focus on communicating about spatial
history without having to invent unique digital formats. We are convinced
that the development of structures and criteria for digital atlases in the
profession would have a similar benefit for authors and developers in the
profession. For that reason, we turn next to review criteria in the digital
humanities.
VII: Evaluation and Review in the Digital Humanities
As we have argued, pedagogy is a useful point of entry for contemplating issues
of authorship and assessment that are significant throughout the digital
humanities and spatial history in particular. We taught the Silk Road course in
part to determine whether a digital atlas could be reviewed effectively as a
work of history. Student work may be simpler and more standardized then
professional work, but it need not differ categorically. A history student’s
research paper adheres to the same format as a journal article, and the student
author aspires to excellence according to the same criteria as the professional.
We believe that the same is true of digital atlases, and therefore that it is
reasonable to develop digital atlas style guides and evaluation criteria to
guide developers and peer reviewers.
A recent special issue of MLA Profession devoted to
digital literary and media scholarly evaluation is germane to these issues. An
Inside Higher Education article about the
Profession issue notes that although humanities
disciplines have acknowledged “to
the point of redundancy” the need for a system of reviewing digital
scholarship for publication and evaluating its practitioners for tenure and
promotion, “practical change has
come more slowly,” and “while the work of digital humanists increasingly is seen as indispensible,
it also remains impenetrable to most of their colleagues.” Although
digital humanists have largely persuaded colleagues and professional
organizations that digital scholarship needs to be taken seriously, the field
has not yet provided direction about how to evaluate it. As Geoffrey Rockwell
explains to Inside Higher Education, digital
humanities scholarly review is neglected “not for lack of will, but of methodology.”
[19] In Profession, Rockwell distinguishes
between digital research, which is an activity, and digital scholarship, which
is an outcome that can be shared [Rockwell 2011, 152]. When
we asked the Silk Road students to produce term papers prior to embarking upon
atlases and then graded the atlases for their capacity to enrich the papers, it
was because we were teaching them to produce scholarship. That is also why we
designed learning outcomes that were specific to history rather than basing them
upon spatial literacy criteria.
We developed the rubric for the Silk Road student atlases with the conviction
that the digital atlas was a coherent genre that reflected spatial history
theory as well as digital technique. Likewise, several Profession authors explore the attributes and taxonomies of digital
works, recognizing that determining a set of features for authors to master and
for reviewers to evaluate is essential for review. For instance, Steve Anderson
and Tara McPherson specify the elements of multimedia scholarship: multiple
media, user interactivity, a networked or database structure, nonlinear
components, and “a heightened
attention to aspects of design, aesthetics, or form,” along with
infrastructure or systems development when works require new capacity in those
areas [Anderson and McPherson 2011, 137]. Rockwell proposes a typology of
digital scholarly works. Some of them, like online journal articles, can be
reviewed using established procedures, while others, like blogs, may not be
amenable to review at all. Some contributions, including tools and software,
scholarly editions, and multimedia works, are creative works that require new
methods for appraising scholarly significance [Rockwell 2011].
Jerome McGann contends that “It’s
important to remember that information technology has not altered the
fundamental mission of the humanities: to preserve, investigate, and rethink
our cultural inheritance” [McGann 2011, 184]. The
task of evaluation is to identify how creative works in particular digital
genres accomplish that goal.
We concur with Anderson and McPherson and with Rockwell that multimedia works
have genres and identifiable conventions. A digital atlas has little in common
with a network visualization or a portal into a document collection – no more so
than a critical essay has in common with a short story or a library catalogue in
the print domain, for instance – except that all of the former were created
and/or disseminated using computer assisted methods. The review standards for
various types of work will differ considerably. So, as we did with the atlas, we
advocate that digital humanists identify genres within their own domain
expertise, distinguish them from one another, determine the suitability of
particular techniques for achieving specific scholarly goals, enumerate the
elements of successful accomplishment, and define standards that can be used to
evaluate each element. That is the work that the rubric performed in the Silk
Road classroom.
We celebrate scholarly and creative work that crosses boundaries, undergoes
continuous modification, and requires collaboration – in text, visual culture,
and performance as well as digital modes. However, it cannot be reviewed
effectively, at least not until after we learn more about how to assess less
experimental accomplishments.[20] In the meantime, many digital
humanities practitioners are completing works that meet existing criteria for
humanistic scholarship. They can be evaluated based on whether their content
contributes to humanistic colloquy.
The introduction to the Profession forum on digital
humanities evaluation notes that not all work in the digital humanities adheres
to established academic modes such as criticism and analysis. Thus some authors
advocate that we “shift our notions
of humanities scholarship away from a fixation on product and even
publication”
[Anderson and McPherson 2011, 141], that we abandon “an outmoded and sometimes patently incorrect
vision of solitary scholarship” in favor of implicit and ongoing peer
review via collaboration itself [Nowviskie 2011, 170] and
that we conduct review by assessing the community’s engagement with a work
through comments and hyperlinks rather than via anonymous evaluation by subject
experts [Fitzpatrick 2011]. These recommendations for new
practices in the humanities are ingenious and bracing, and they may represent a
possible future. At the same time, as McGann says, “while digital technology is introducing new critical
methods and procedures, it does not fundamentally alter the sociologies of
scholarship and education or their institutional mechanisms”
[McGann 2011, 192]. Taking an experimental and open-ended
approach to digital humanities scholarship and review ensures that it cannot be
effectively ingested into actually existing academic institutions. As a
practical matter, that will keep digital work isolated, if not marginal. It is
problematic from an intellectual point of view as well. As long as we treat
digital works as if they are all idiosyncratic and incommensurable, we cannot
improve our practices, we cannot put our accomplishments in conversation with
one another, and we cannot use them to expand and enrich our understanding of
the world. In the end, we contend that while form is important to the digital
humanities, it should be assessed based upon its appropriateness to the content
and argument in a given field, and not simply its elegance or novelty. We
advocate assessing and critiquing digital works with respect to their
effectiveness for scholarly communication.
VIII: From the Classroom to the Profession
At the beginning of this article, we proposed four propositions for enriching
spatial history. First, landscapes are constructed by human action. Second,
itineraries create spatial relationships. Third, both processes and events
transform landscapes. And fourth, spatial and temporal scale determines whether
a landscape and its changes are visible to occupants and/or scholars. A
successful digital atlas is a scholarly work that illuminates one or more of
these concepts using methods appropriate to its topic and purpose. The Silk Road
student atlases, for instance, were cartographic narratives of long-distance
journeys based on works of travel writing.
The criteria we developed for the student atlases apply to atlas developers and
reviewers in the profession as well. A digital atlas, an integrated multimedia
work of scholarship with a map interface, should include:
- Long form writing that makes a spatial history argument.
- Short form writing and illustrations that explain the significance of specific locations and geo-located events to the overall work.
- A map interface that includes the places, routes, fields and other spatial objects that comprise the landscape in question.
- User control of spatial and temporal visibility and scale.
- A clear, attractive, coherent and intuitive user experience.
- Effectively integrated written and cartographic components.
For authors and developers, these guidelines support both consistency and
creativity, while readers and reviewers can use them to judge and compare a wide
range of works and assess their contributions to the spatial history field. The
profession is a less constrained environment than the classroom. Nevertheless,
an academic field like spatial history is still a distinct milieu, and the
conventions that guide peer review are always quite specific. The review
standards we are proposing here are intended to be suitable for spatial history,
and not to all work in the digital humanities. The classroom experience is
relevant to evaluation criteria in the profession. This article explains how we
defined the intellectual terrain of a digital humanities field, created student
assignments specific to it, and used that experience to propose standards for
professional developers and reviewers. We urge specialists in other digital
humanities fields to do the same.
In Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to
Come, historian Robert Darnton offers a rare and noteworthy critical
review of a digital atlas: The Grub Street Project,
a depiction of the publishing world in eighteenth century London. Darnton
praises the project for its maps, its visuality, and its efforts to approach an
ideal of histoire totale through a spatial interface,
extensive context, and hyperlinked text. In its form, it is consistent with the
criteria we introduced above. However, he additionally interrogates its
contribution to history. In his view, the atlas comes up short by that standard,
for conceptually it does not go beyond a 1972 print article on the same topic
[Darnton 2010]. Our point here is not to stake a claim about
the atlas in question, which concerns a topic about which we have no expertise.
It is rather to applaud Darnton’s insistence on asking humanistic questions
about it and not only praising its rich detail and technological accomplishment;
and to commend the editors of the volume in which the review was published for
soliciting a response to the digital atlas from a leading cultural historian who
is not a digital humanities practitioner. We reiterate, and we concur with
Darnton, that a digital atlas needs to be critiqued for its contribution to the
field of spatial history, and not only as a formal accomplishment.
In the end, we propose to hold digital atlases to existing standards for
humanistic scholarship and to emerging genre conventions. The classroom, an
ideal site for sustained, fair and actionable evaluation, can also serve as a
laboratory for the development of digital humanities standards. Although the
Silk Road atlases that the students produced are yeoman work, they exemplify a
space in the digital humanities for projects which are creative but
self-contained, and which use standard and tested technology. The Profession contributors insist that digital humanists
need to educate outsiders to the field about our practices. We contend that we
have work to do internally that is even more important: to value – and to
evaluate – finished work that contributes to the disciplines.
Acknowledgements
This article is dedicated to the creative and hardworking students of the HIST
108 class, without whom it would have been impossible to conceive and write this
piece. The UC Merced Center for Research on Teaching Excellence was an
invaluable source of funding and advice, particularly CRTE staff members Anne
Zanzucchi and Mike Truong. Anne Zanzucchi and Karl Grossner read the article in
draft and offered helpful comments. Archaeologist Kathleen Hull and graduate
students Christine Clarkson and Michael Eissinger joined Ruth Mostern in a
“Time, Space and Process” graduate seminar where
she articulated many of the ideas in the first section of this article.
Appendix 1: Digital Map Rubric
1. Writing
A. Paper
| Ten page paper |
|
| Based on a travel narrative and course themes |
|
| Focused on geography |
|
Table 3.
B. Episodes
| Six episodes |
|
Table 4.
2. Spatial Reasoning and Visualization
A. Gazetteer/Point Locations
| At least 15 placemarked locations along your traveler’s route |
|
|
| Descriptions of each placemark |
|
|
| Routes of travel |
|
|
Table 5.
Google Earth Cartography and Visualization
| Communicative visual style |
|
|
| Contextual information |
|
|
| Zoom/Tilt |
|
|
| Animation |
|
|
Table 6.
Storytelling and Integration
| Integrated Map and Paper |
|
| Intuitive User Experience |
|
Table 7.
Appendix 2: HIST 108 Student Survey Analysis
Figure 2.
The digital and spatial focus of the Silk Road class influenced students’
perception about how much they learned. While there is no actual way to
measure learning by way of quantity, the responses to this question accord
with Bob Broad’s notion of learning via self-authorship, fostering agency
and independent thinking. [Broad 2003]
Figure 3.
Students learned to reason spatially about historical phenomena by
learning to use Google Earth and other tools. These results show that
students felt that the use of Google Earth assisted them in learning about
history. In addition to their overall sense of satisfaction and high level
of learning in the course, over 75% of survey respondents were happy with
the appearance and functionality of their Google Earth project and 80% of
students said that they enjoyed working with Google Earth. 
Figure 4.
Students found the rubric useful. Students were involved with the creation
and implementation of the rubric, and they attributed their success in part
to the rubric. We infer that the rubric helped them to understand the
project and to recognize what was required for a successful final project.
The success of the rubric helps to explain the high final project grades for
the course.Notes
[1] The term digital atlas is inspired by the work of the Electronic
Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), which is the best known research program
to use the atlas metaphor to refer to interactive digital maps of historical
and cultural phenomena. ECAI, now largely dormant, was influential between
about 1999 and 2005. See http://ecai.org.
[2]
GeoHumanities is the title of a book edited by
geographer Michael Dear and several colleagues, and Spatial Humanities is the title of a book edited by historian
David Bodenhamer and two colleagues. The spatial humanities book focuses
particularly on the use of GIS, while the geohumanities book, a conference
volume, covers a wide range of other topics as well, including speculative
mapping, and literary criticism informed by cultural geography. The term
spatial history dates to Paul Carter’s influential The
Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History,
published in 1988. In contrast to the term historical GIS, it refers to a
methodological stance more than an engagement with particular technologies.
Judging by conference attendance and book and journal publishing profiles,
there is remarkably little overlap between the digital humanities community
and the spatial history community.
[3] All of these authors are from the final
section of the volume, which is about history. Other sections of the book,
concerned with art, representation, and literature, are less involved with
spatial analysis and visualization technology, and are less pertinent for
this discussion. The Spatial Humanities
features articles by many of the same authors and reflects a similar range
of approaches.
[4]
[Mostern 2010]. That article was preceded by a related work
that had less of a pedagogy focus but was also an effort to engage digital
practices in history and geography. That article [Mostern 2008] argued for the utility of including information about events in spatial
humanities databases in order to engage more effectively with contingency
and change, the core points of analysis in the discipline of history.
[5] Similarly, [Mbembe 2000]
introduces the notion of “itinerant territoriality” to connect the
idea of travel as a place-making activity to the concept of
(precolonial) political authority
[6]
[Christian 2004] also offers tremendous insights about
temporal scale.
[7] Ian Gregory’s article in the Spatial
Humanities volume [Gregory 2010], drawing on some
of the same theorists, comes to a related conclusion, colored by his
background as a geographer rather than a historian. “In an ideal world we would use spatial and
temporal data to explore how a phenomenon has evolved over time, not by
comparing two snapshots but by looking at continuous change. In doing so
the aim is not to identify the story of how the process evolved but to
use different places to explore the different ways in which the
phenomenon could occur differently”
[Gregory 2010, 66].
[8] University of Saskatchewan geographer Scott Bell helpfully
introduced these distinctions at a Learning Spatially (LENS) Mapping People
workshop at the University of Redlands that Mostern attended in June
2010.
[9] Spatial@UCSB (http://www.spatial.ucsb.edu/index.php). Another visible
initiative, the Spatial Literacy in Teaching (SPLINT) Centre of Excellence
in Teaching and Learning, developed by a consortium of British universities,
likewise presents a variety of learning resources without defining the
domain or including tools for assessing competency in it http://www.le.ac.uk/cetl/splint.html. TeachSpatial teachspatial.org is the site that most
appears to be taking on a mandate of developing practical classroom tools,
but it also falls short.
[10] See also Nora Newcombe, “A Plea for Spatial
Literacy,” linked from the Carlton website.
[11] Various other spatial thinking and spatial literacy
initiatives are underway as well as those we have noted here. They include
the teachspatial.org site at UC Santa Barbara and the Spatial Intelligence
and Learning Center (SILC) at Temple. No participants in the field have
developed curriculum or learning outcomes for spatial literacy yet, though
discussions on the topic are underway. A book entitled Ontologies for
Spatial Thinking is under development based on a 2011 workshop at UC Santa
Barbara. Thank you to Karl Grossner for updating us about the state of the
field.
[12] A website about the
course, including the complete syllabus, is online at http://crte.ucmerced.edu/mostern.
[13] See http://historyengine.richmond.edu.
[14] For a good introduction about issues to consider
regarding the use of virtual globes in the classroom, see Andrea
Nuernberger, “Virtual Globes in the classroom”
http://www.csiss.org/SPACE/resources/virtual-globes.php#GISdata
(first published 2006, last updated; UCSB Center for Spatial Studies,
2009).
[15] UC Merced was
founded only in 2005, and the library has limited print holdings. Students
selected the travelers they wished to study by consulting Silk Road websites
and then ordered print copies of the narratives and appropriate secondary
works using interlibrary loan, which provides UC Merced students easy access
to the entire ten-campus University of California collection.
[16] The YouTube video is available on the
course website at http://crte.ucmerced.edu/mostern.
[17]
[Grossner 2010] includes an excellent review of the
characteristics of print atlases.
[18] A November 2011
special report from the Chronicle of Higher Education
concludes that although today’s college students use digital
technology for many purposes, they are not necessarily “digital
learners” who know how to work with their technology, and they do not
necessarily prefer to learn with technology or in online environments. As we
learned in the Silk Road course, the Chronicle of
Higher Education advocates much more study about what technology
in the classroom works, and what does not. “Online
Learning”
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2011
http://chronicle.com/section/Online-Learning/491/.
[20] As Jerome McGann points out, collaborative
and socially authored works are difficult to review, and the ones most
familiar to the humanities academy are “fundamentally stand-alone operations”
[McGann 2011, 192].
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Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
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DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2005 -
Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
