Category: Live

Digital Archive Black Belt 100 Lenses creates opportunities for high school students from Alabama’s Black Belt to comment on the region’s unique histories and cultures through photography. The project, started in 2007, has collected more than 7,000 images to date. Working with the Alabama Digital Humanities Center, the Center for Community-Based Partnerships is building a digital archive of its images. This archive will lay the groundwork for the images’ incorporation into the University of Alabama’s library collections and will also form the content for a redesign of the project’s website in Omeka.

Project Owner(s): Heather Pleasants

Tools: Omeka Classic

Methods: Documentary, Photography

Topics: Black Belt, Alabama History, Alabama Culture

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Professor Rachel Stephens (Art History) partnered with the ADHC to allow her ARH 374 class to create a series of online exhibitions about various historical southern art topics. Each project on the site was researched, written, and curated by a student, and as new iterations of the course take place this digital resource documenting a wide variety of subjects in the history of southern art will grow, becoming a valuable point of reference for students and scholars in the field working nationally and internationally, as well as the general public.

Project Owner(s): Rachel Stephens

Tools: WordPress

Methods: Historiography, Documentary

Topics: Southern United States; Art History

Erin O’Rourke’s Spanish 485/585 class analyzed the changes in the Spanish language through recording themselves speaking the old pronunciations and annotating their own pieces to demonstrate where changes occurred. 

Project Owner(s): Erin O’Rourke

Tools: WordPress

Methods: audio recording

Topics: Spanish Language

View Bringing the Past to Life

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This oral history archive has been created by students in Dr. Sarah Steinbock-Pratt’s class on the Vietnam War.  The course explores the long history of the Vietnam War, beginning with early Vietnamese history and colonization. Over the course of the semester, students have explored different perspectives on the wars in Vietnam, American and Vietnamese notions of freedom during the Cold War, the intersection of domestic and foreign policies and politics, the construction of ideas about race, gender, and national identity, the politics of memory and the conflicted ways that the war has been remembered and commemorated. They then conducted oral history interviews and crafted websites to places these interviews into historical context.

Project Owner(s): Sarah Steinbock-Pratt

Topic: History, Vietnam War

Tool: WordPress

Methodology: Digital Pedagogy, Oral History

Project Status: Active

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Dr. Karen Gardiner’s EN 455 (Advanced Studies in Writing) course has students recovering family stories from the Great Depression, contextualizing the person they study into their historical and cultural context, and then writing essays that convey that information to a wider audience. The class website maps these stories, as well as archiving the essays the students crafted about their family members to serve as an archive of their lives during the Great Depression.

Project Owner(s): Karen Gardiner (Retired)

Tools: WordPress

Methods: Advanced Writing, Primary Source Research

Topics: Great Depression

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