Sponsored by the Digital Liberal Arts Collaborative and the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment, this year’s DLAC Teaching With Technology Fair features a wide range of digital projects.
“Crowdsourcing the Archives at the Grinnell College Libraries” and “Salisbury House Library Collection at Grinnell College Special Collections & Archives”
Christopher Jones (Libraries), Allison Haack (Libraries), Laura Michelson (Libraries)
Grinnell College Special Collections & Archives began two different WordPress sites as a method of outreach in two very different ways. One is a blog following the progress being made as the Salisbury House Library Collection gets processed, and the other is an interactive crowdsourcing page to help the staff identify photos from the college archives.
Yusen He (DASIL), Xavier Escandell (DASIL)
DataSpace is an interactive website with resources for learning statistical methods and applying them to specific problems and case studies. The site includes several stats games, narratives that incorporate data analysis and visualization, data sets available for download, and further resources for the study of data science.
Developing a Corpus and Textual Analysis With Gale Digital Scholars Lab
Liz Rodrigues (Libraries)
Liz Rodrigues and Chris Jones worked with Eva Hill ’22 on a project to curate, digitize, and begin textual analysis of mid-twentieth century domestic manuals. This demo will go over process of identifying titles, extracting full text, and doing preliminary textual analysis with the Gale Digital Scholars Lab suite of tools, now available campuswide.
The Grinnell Multicultural Campus Archive
Sarah Smith-Benanti (DAR), Claire Burns ’23, Christopher Jones (Libraries)
This project is a virtual archive in the form of a WordPress website. It is an interactive space containing memories from Grinnell’s multicultural alumni, primarily in the form of photos.
Caleb Elfenbein (History and Religious Studies)
Interactive website featuring original datasets documenting anti-Muslim activity in the United States as well as public outreach efforts undertaken by Muslim communities in the United States. The site enables varying levels of engagement with the data, from guided maps through more complex web apps.
Open Anthology of Iowa’s Literature
Phil Jones (Libraries), Tara Rawlings ’23, and Alexander Sun ’23
The goal of this project is to make available to Iowa’s secondary teachers and students selections from our state’s rich literature that capture and reflect Iowa’s history. During the summer of 2021, Tara Rawlings and Alexander Sun researched and wrote anthology chapters exploring the lives of women and immigrants in the mid-19th to early-20th centuries based on two novels written by native Iowan authors. Each anthology chapter is comprised of a novel excerpt, a contextual essay, and an in-depth biographical entry. To aid secondary teaching and learning, each excerpt includes textual annotations, a glossary, reading prompts, and discussion questions.
“Podcast: Making the Strange Familiar and the Familiar Strange” & “Infographic: Primate Species”
Joshua Marshack (Anthropology), Yuina Iseki ’25, Sydney Marin ’25, Carter Ottele ’25, Allison Wightman ’25, Elise Clayton ’23, Dean Burrell ’22, Winnie Commers ’22
“Podcast: Making the Strange Familiar and the Familiar Strange” – Your podcast project is a short audio examination of a topic or issue within the general theme of alien ethnography—making the familiar strange or the strange familiar. For brevity, your discussion should be grounded in a specific case study or vignette—an individual, place, mundane everyday object, or event—the narrower, the better. You may choose to craft your recording as an audio essay or monologue, an interview, etc. The goal is to be engaging, but succinct. The podcast should be 5-7 minutes in length.
“Infographic: Primate Species” – Using scientific posters and illustrations from scholarly and popular scientific sources as a guide, you will work in groups of three or four to create an illustrated, annotated bibliography, i.e., infographic, on a species or genus of interest. All group members should be involved with the research, the writing, and the artistic process to some degree—overall, work should be split evenly. You will discuss both older (classic texts) and modern research on your chosen primate, give a summary of its distribution, habitat, physical characteristics and adaptations, social and sexual behavior, and other characteristics, as well as consider whether studies of the species have or might shed light on human evolution. You will also include any relevant conservation issues.
Remedying an Institutional Absence: The Edith Renfrow Smith ’37 Website
Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant (Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies)
Born and raised in the town of Grinnell, Edith Renfrow Smith ’37 is the first Black alumna of the College and at 107, its oldest living alumnus. Despite her proud and enduring connection to Grinnell, she has not received the institutional recognition she deserves. As a result, Prof. Beauboeuf-Lafontant sought to create a website that would draw on the interviews Mrs. Smith has given as well as the family photos she has made available to the Poweshiek History Preservation Project. Working closely with Tierney Steelberg, Prof. Beauboeuf-Lafontant utilized the Omeka platform to convey Mrs. Smith’s biography. In words and images organized into thematic sections and chapters, the site aims to invite interest into the pioneering experiences, labors, and wisdom of a remarkable Grinnellian.
Research Article Annotation with Hypothes.is
Paula Yust (Psychology)
As part of a 200-level psychology course, students are collectively annotating research articles online using Hypothes.is, a collaborative digital annotation platform. The practice of social annotation facilitates understanding of key concepts, helps students make connections among ideas, and identifies issues for in-class discussions. Hypothes.is promotes close, active, and collaborative reading of texts.
Vivero Digital Scholarship Fellows Program
Feven Getachew ’25, Tanmaie Kailash ’24, Liz Rodrigues (Libraries), Tierney Steelberg (DLAC)
The Vivero Digital Scholarship Student Fellows Program is a training and mentorship program that seeks to grow the diversity of the digital liberal arts community at Grinnell and beyond. Vivero Fellows support faculty and staff-led digital projects, and provide drop-in peer support for digital liberal arts assignments. Current Fellows will share their experiences this semester, and showcase how Vivero can support digital projects on campus.
WordPress for Classroom Discussion
Todd Armstrong (Russian)