TEI Assignment for history undergrads

I saw this innovative assignment using archival sources in the classroom whereby students collaborate on digital history projects…Kathryn Tomasek, Associate Professor of History at Wheaton College as part of the abstract to this poster session writes, “Pedagogically, transcription and coding projects expose students to both the physical experience of handling original primary sources in the archives and some basic practice using the underlying language of digital media. For teaching, collaborative contributions to the digital archive offer instructors opportunities to help students understand mediations that are intrinsic to the archival, research, and editorial processes. As students transcribe, code, and proofread documents, they learn about the nature of historical sources, and such lessons evoke theoretical questions about the nature and purposes of archives.” I can vouch for this assignment; last year, I attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Summer Institute for Humanities Data Curation and was assigned a similar exercise to learn TEI. I hadn’t thought about it in terms of undergraduate history curricula, but there it is! Definitely worth thinking about.

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