This paper was presented to the London Digital Humanities Group on 30 April, 2013, at University of London.

1. www.le.ac.uk
Manufacturing Pasts:
Making the history accessible
London Digital Humanities Group, 30 April 2013
Terese Bird
Learning Technologist and SCORE Research Fellow

2. What will we talk about?
• Making the history
accessible
• Audiences
• Evolving needs for
digital humanities
Photo by esrad on Flickr

3. Making the history accessible
• No historiography of British industrial decline
• Dead zone: 70s – 90s
• Locked away
• Open materials
• Capture it now
• Not didactic but context
• Accessible
Photo by Wesley Fryer on Flickr

4. Fires – the need to capture now

5. Accessible – how?
• Saw connections, made the mashups
• Created a website on
top of the database
• Used social media
• Visited classes, groups,
record office, libraries,
conferences
• Made everything
downloadable, mobile
• iTunes U

6. On the website you can listen to the
professor…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVN4OOpKGMQ

7. Social Media: everyone joins in
(Flickr, Prezi, Youtube, Scoop.it, Twitter)

8. Mobile

9. Audiences
• College librarians
• College students –
extended project
• Currently-enrolled
university students
• Local community
• Local historians
• Digital humanities
scholars

10. Evolving Needs for the Digital Humanities
Toolkit for researchers:
• Using visual sources in
historical research
• Using oral testimony in
historical research
• Provenance, judgement
Tools for students & teachers:
• Glossary, reference
• How to make your own
• How to reference

11. Key Skills
Analyzing and drawing conclusions from primary sources,
including image-based sources, is a key skill for historians and
specialists in many fields, and utilising digitised primary
sources has been effective in building such skills (Tally &
Goldenberg, 2005)

12. The story
so far…
Any
questions?
www.le.ac.uk/manufacturingpasts

13. Embedding in learning
• Gobbet papers
• Seminars around some of the materials; group work
• ‘Transformations’ module assessment will be built
around
• PGCE Geography assessment will be built around
• PhD and Masters students will be introduced to
these as research sources

14. References
• Beyond Distance Research Alliance, University of Leicestere. (2010). OTTER: Open,
Transferable and Technology-enabled Educational Resources — University of
Leicester. University of Leicester website. Retrieved March 12, 2012, from
http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-research-
alliance/projects/otter
• Beyond Distance Research Alliance, University of Leicester. (2011). OSTRICH: OER
Sustainability through Teaching & Research Innovation: Cascading across HEIs —
University of Leicester. University of Leicester website. Retrieved March 12, 2012,
from http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-research-
alliance/projects/ostrich
• Tally, B., & Goldenberg, L. B. (2005). Fostering Historical Thinking With Digitized
Primary Sources. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 5191, 1-21.
Retrieved from
http://students.stritch.edu/dlcaven/Article2/DigitizedPrimarySources.pdf
•