Knitting History is the result of a collabortive effort of the students in Professor Kopelson’s history class titled Handmade Nation: Knitting and History. Students compiled a timeline of significant moments in the history of knitting, as well as moments in which knitting impacted history. Additionally, students put their own knitting skills to the test, creating an exhibit of their own projects tied to history.
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This project is a collaboration between the ADHC and the St. Louis Public Library which aims to digitize the extremely rare newspaper publication Hobo News from the early twentieth century, and ultimately to make this digital collection available to the public. The Hobo News was created by and for hobos, including a gregarious variety of materials from reports from workers’ societies and conventions to creative re-writings of hymns and popular tunes aiming to propagate socialist ideals, as well as adverts placed by families seeking lost or missing relatives who they hoped might be known among the travelling community. There is only one known complete run of the Hobo News extant to us today, housed in the Special Collections of the St. Louis Public Library, and they are graciously partnering with us to create a proof-of-concept site which we hope will later grow and be available publicly. Ultimately, we aim to incorporate not only scans of the publication on the site, and to make these fully searchable via OCR and detailed metadata, but also to create visualizations showing the geographic range and spread of the publication and its contributors which will highlight its very specific relationship with St. Louis and other key hubs in the early twentieth century.
UA Genealogies: Historical Archives and Storytelling is a digital archive of the extraordinary family histories discovered by students in Lauren S. Cardon’s EN103 Advanced Composition course. Using a variety of digital and archival resources including the W. S. Hoole and A. S. Williams III Special Collections, students explored their genealogies, creating written narratives documenting particularly significant people or moments in their family histories. UA Genealogies showcases students’ findings about their heritage: in the Narratives section users can browse full-length stories, whilst the Map section displays these stories geographically to give a sense of the global origins of our community at the University of Alabama. Over time, this project will be added to by students participating in future iterations of this course to build a rich narrative documenting the history of the UA student community.
Grammar-land is a digital version of an exhibition of materials from the W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library. It chronicles the various trends and techniques of grammatical education in America from 1700 to 1930, encompassing subjects ranging from sentence diagramming to children’s textbooks or pedagogical aids for grammatical instruction, as well as investigating the role played by grammar in the founding of American democracy.
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This site is the work of Lauren Cardon’s students in EN 455: Advance Studies in Writing. The theme of the course was Global Foodways. Each student chose a regional, national, or cultural cuisine to research for the entire semester. Their projects included oral histories, landscape analyses, informational overviews, recipe blogs, restaurant reviews, food memories, and literature reviews. The best part of this class? Getting to sample all the cuisines!
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Professor Erik Peterson (History) assigned his students to make a digital resource about the history of games and gaming in course HY300-001. The games considered range from the Royal Game of Ur (2500+ BCE) to Monopoly (1933), to video games such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and in the course of a compact May-mester, students wrote session reports documenting the experience of game play which they posted to this online archive. Research and Instructional Services Librarian Brett Spencer collaborated with Professor Peterson and the ADHC, furnishing a tailor-made bibliographic instruction session which taught students how to find appropriate secondary sources about different facets of the history of gaming.
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This website is the first iteration of a project exploring early modern epic writing from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In this first incarnation, the project focuses on commonplaces, scrutinizing Spenser and Milton’s engagement with these as a way of understanding how they are structuring their epics, and in turn, how these are crucial components defining what it meant to write epic in English. The site will house a digital commonplace book documenting Spenser and Milton’s use of recurring literary touchstones including images, rhetorical and logical structures, and lexis, and visualizations of these commonplaces, the first of which are being forged by Dr. Emma Annette Wilson and her graduate class, EN668, at the University of Alabama in Fall 2015.
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This project engages students from English 205 (English Literature I) and English 215 (Honors English Literature 1) with Dr. Cordelia Ross to create contextual timelines for their course to better understand events surrounding the publication of works they read.
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Headed by University of Alabama graduate students in the Department of English, in partnership with Dr. Emma Annette Wilson and the ADHC, the Early Modern Network Of Networks, EMNON, uses Digital Humanities techniques to visualize the intricate network of relationships connecting key figures in early modern literary and intellectual culture. Centering on the networks belonging to and shared by poets and politicians Andrew Marvell and John Milton, EMNON offers a new understanding of how early modern writers and thinkers related and interacted. An ongoing project, the site will continue to grow in coming years as students and researchers here and further afield contribute to it, allowing us gradually to visualize the social network of key early modern writers and thinkers.
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Heather Miyano Kopelson is creating a pedagogical project with her students in repeated iterations of HY107 American Civilization to 1877, exploring America’s history before permanent European settlement. The website houses student video projects on a particular facet of early American history, in addition to a student-generated webliography on different important topics in this field for use by other students and scholars in this field. Students have also taken a creative approach by designing their own historical monuments commemorating moments in this period of history which they determine to be of particular historical significance, and these are also displayed within this digital resource, and will continue to be augmented by students in future semesters.
