Assignment: Write a reflection paper on your experience with History 390 over the semster.
Though I feel like I’ve grown in a lot of different areas over the semester, I think the biggest growth for me has been in using technology for the benefit of history. Previously, I’ve been familiar with digital library tools (ex: JSTOR, National Library of Medicine) due to research projects I’ve done before, but this semester I learned a lot beyond that. For one, I learned new techniques for finding information. When doing any research before, I always avoided blogs, Wikipedia, and pretty much any other website that’s not a government organization or database. But this semester, a lot of our in-class activities dealt with analyzing information from many different forms of data found on websites, one of my favorites being maps. This has really opened my eyes in terms of how to approach research, which is something I’m going to have to do a lot of in college.
At the beginning of the semester, the scariest thing to me was all the projects we had to do. As a freshman just trying to get her IT credit, I was taking a considerable risk in choosing an upper-level history class over an intro-level IT, and I started to doubt my decision a little bit when I saw that we had a bunch of projects to do over the semester. Luckily for me, I’m a natural scholar and I was up to the challenge. And also the projects weren’t that bad lol. Another thing that helped was that my professor was super cool and understanding! But honestly, there were a few bumps in the road when It came to a few assignments, especially in the beginning (Zotero), but it was never because the projects were hard, only that they took a long time and I got sleepy. By the end of the class, I was definitely a pro at getting the projects done though, both because they were more fun and cause I got better at knowing how much time it would take me to do a project.
While I discovered a lot of cool things about my topic over the semester, the most interesting thing I learned about was how passionate and involved George Washington was in the founding of D.C.. Before my research, I didn’t really think a lot about how much it would take to actually start a city, let alone build it up from nothing. When searching though, I discovered that George Washington (among others) not only had a large part in the founding of D.C., but also every aspect of its early building. In fact, Washington actually spent a lot of his time and energy as president on building D.C., and had a part in selecting many of the essential workers who contributed to the city’s creation. Looking back, it absolutely makes sense that Washington had a lot to do with the founding of D.C., especially considering his social and political status at the time, but I still think that it’s really cool that from the very beginning, D.C. was built with care. It makes me very happy to be a native Washingtonian!
Out of the last three projects, I think that the timeline was the best way for me to tell the story of D.C.’s founding. Though I very much enjoyed working on the Podcast and Twine projects, they each had their limitations. Podcasts are a great form of storytelling, and maybe doing a whole series would be the best way to share my research, but when just thinking about the project, which was only one episode, it’s just not enough to share everything I wanted to. Maybe if it was like one of those hour(s) long deep dive videos on YouTube I would have thought it was better 🙂 (they’re addicting, what do you want from me?). As for the Twine, which I did have the most fun creating, having to focus on a single moment in a years-long process makes it really hard to tell the story of my research. Furthermore, since it’s a game, the Twine has to be somewhat entertaining, which means that the story can only be so accurate and that I can only share so much information before it gets boring. That being said, the timeline was a great way to give an overview of the whole story, while also highlighting important moments and giving enough details so that if the viewer wanted to, they could do some searching of their own about a specific aspect of the story. Additionally, I feel like the way I was conceptualizing the research in my head was very similar to how it’s visualized in the timeline, so I liked that my brain clicked with the form of presentation!
If I had to describe Hist 390 to a student in one sentence, I would probably say something along the lines of, “historical research meets digital resources and presentation.” I feel like this is a pretty good summary of the class because even though a lot of what we learn in class has a lot to do with digital literacy, when we do get around to talking about history and historical research, analysis, and presentation, the connections between the digital world and history become really clear. Plus, it might convince the student that the class has a lot of useful skills to teach (because it does) and that it won’t be entirely uninteresting (because it isn’t!).
One skill that I learned in this class that will carry for my entire academic and professional career, will be that one class we had on how to search using the library website. I know this may sound kinda insignificant, but that one class actually helped me a lot! I used the methods I learned pretty much the entire semester as I continued my research, and in my other classes when I needed to find a source I would use the methods again. As I said earlier, I learned that there are a lot of ways to gain information on the internet beyond library resources, which is also something I’m going to keep in mind moving forward. But at the same time- you can’t go wrong with a good library database search. Especially when you’re just starting research, it’s a good way to kick off a search on a topic and is really helpful in navigating through all the info the internet has to offer. Honorable mention to that one class where we learned how to screenshot using command+5/ctrl+5, before I only used command+4 which got tricky if I accidentally clicked wrong- but command+5 makes things easier sometimes.
OK Bye 😀
