Week 1
T 9/11 Intro and Organization
Th 9/13 Looking at Images

• Reading: Jules Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17:1 (Spring 1982): 1-19 (pdf in our class google drive). Focus your reading on the methodology Prown outlines starting on p. 7.
• Mini-project: Find two images from any issue of Vermont Life and attach seven annotations to each of them. Each annotation should observe a detail. You’re not looking for meaning but detailed observations about parts of the picture. You can annotate PDFs using Acrobat reader. If you prefer to work with image files (jpeg, tiff, etc) most drawing and image editing applications will also work.
• We’ll share the images and annotations in class, so be sure you have access to them.

Week 2
T 9/18 Text Mining: Possibilities and Pitfalls in Voyant

• Reading: From From Blake Harrison, The View from Vermont: Tourism and the Making of an American Rural Landscape, 2006, Introduction and chapter 3 (pdf in google drive)
• Mini-Project: Each student should run one year (all four issues) of Vermont Life through Voyant, an open-source text-mining tool. You don’t need to read the text of the magazine for this assignment.
• Reed College’s Instructional Technology group has posted a brief (one page) and useful introduction/ to using Voyant in the classroom, Text Analysis Using Voyant.  It will be helpful to you.

o You’ll have to copy and paste your input from the plain text format of the magazine.
o Voyant will create a word cloud and generate other data from this input.
o You should also search for three words that Harrison claims are important in making the meaning of Vermont (e.g:“unspoiled”, “tradition/traditional”, “rural/country/countryside”). Where and how do they appear in your year? Take informal written notes on your thoughts and bring them to class.
o Think of another two words that seem to be important in the word cloud and note how and where they appear.
o What might you be learning or missing with this kind of research, which Harrison surely would not have done? Again, make some informal notes to organize your thinking on this subject.

Th 9/20 Reading the Tangible Magazine: Distant Reading and Close Reading

• Reading: Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (1994), ch. 3, pdf in Google drive.
• Reading: One hard issue of Vermont Life from the year that you previously ran through Voyant.
• Write 1-2 pages comparing reading and text-mining. People sometimes call text-mining “distant reading”.

o How would you compare the potential advantages and disadvantages of “close reading” as opposed to “distant reading”?
o What is something that jumped out at you in Voyant that you might have otherwise missed in this close reading? A particular word or pattern of word usage?
o What is something that jumped out at you in the close reading that Voyant seemed to miss or underemphasize? You might think about how sustained narration creates meaning, the absence of images in Voyant, or the impacts of holding a physical object.
o Are these distortions of meeting? How should we understand or use tools like Voyant and what is worth spending the time to read?
• Be ready to present to our group and talk about a specific image or passage that illuminates the advantages of close reading or its failures.
• Brief talk about timelines for next time.

Week 3
T 9/25 Visualizing Change on TimelineJS

• Reading for Class: Samuel B. Hand, et al., Philip Hoff: How Red turned Blue in the Green Mountain State (2011), chapters 1-2 (pdf in Google Drive).
• Timeline JS is a pretty friendly, open-source tool allowing users to place various sources, including text, on an interactive timeline. You’ll need to have a Google account to use it.
• Look through these timelines on the TimelineJS home page: Women in Computing, Mandela: A Life of Purpose, and Beyond the Seal: A Brief History of the Banana Business.

o Where do you think these timelines succeed or fail? What do they do well? What do they ignore or do badly?  Take written notes on your thoughts and bring them to class.  We’ll talk about the usefulness and shortcomings of these timelines in class.

• Read this brief essay about a class that used TimelineJS in a class: Food in the West: Using TimelineJS in the Classroom
• PICK ONE ARTICLE OR IMAGE from the issue of Vermont Life  that you read for last class that you might discuss with a small group bearing in mind questions raised by Kozol’s approach to Life magazine.
• IN CLASS: Begin building your own timeline.

o Your timeline should document a change (and possibly response to it) in Vermont between 1955-1975. You’ll need to have a specific idea to work on, so bring that with you.
o You could look at the building of the Interstate, the life of a political figure, changes in legislation, changes in population/demographics, or many other topics.
o You will have to do light background research on your topic to get a sense of its development over time. We don’t expect comprehensive knowledge, but, for example, you would have to know something about the building of the Interstate to make a timeline on the subject.
o At least 3 of the entries on your timeline must include images or text from Vermont Life.
o Your timeline should have only seven entries.
o Strive to tell a story. Avoid listing five mostly unconnected points across time.
o Think carefully about economizing on your words and the relationship between your text, sources, and background images.

Th 9/27 Share Finished Timelines

• Everyone should have a completed version of a timeline ready for class.  We’ll spend most of class talking about your finished work.

o Ask yourself where you think your project succeeded and how it might be improved if you had more time to work on it.
o Do you think you were limited by the platform or that it helped to organize and strengthen your presentation?
o What’s the difference between a timeline, an essay, and a Powerpoint presentation??
o Try to tell a story about change and development that has beginning a middle and an end.

• Time permitting, we’ll look at timelines created on other platforms.

Week 4
10/2 Story Maps: Burlington’s Lakeside Neighborhood–either group or individual assignment TBA

• Reading:  Akerman and Block, “The Shifting Agendas of Midwestern Official State Highway Maps,” Michigan Historical Review 13:1 (Spring 2005); and Griffin, “Mapping an Imaginary Arizona,” Journal of Arizona History 52:3 (Autumn 2011) (both pdfs in Google drive)
• Project: Build a story map using arcgis storymaps platform from Sanborn fire insurance maps and other sources related to the emergence and growth of Burlington’s Lakeside neighborhood.
• Reading: Lakeside Avenue Manufacturing, at:
• https://www.uvm.edu/~hp206/2013/pages/obenauer/index.html
• Examine these examples and think about what works (or doesn’t) as they tell their stories:
• Legacies of Labor: Lebanese Factory Workers in Lawrence, Massachussetts, 1890-1950 at o https://ncsu.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=1ef4e3f14c8b45f59346dc3ab34d870d

o The Fight for Fair Housing in the United States at:

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=53f6f3030af94e609af5b7ea4066f68a

The Collinwood Fire at:

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=27cf80f8bcd94bee8f47fe02f2598cc8

• Browse through the arcgis gallery and find one example that strikes you as particularly compelling. Be ready to tell the class why it drew you.
• https://storymaps.arcgis.com/en/gallery/#s=0
• In-class: Begin working with story map tool and primary sources.

o Story map templates are something like a slide show centered on understanding maps and geography and combining images with words.
o You should tell a story about change over time in the Lakeside neighborhood. It should have 5 or 6 entries, each one of which makes a particular observation that moves forward your narrative of change in the Lakeside neighborhood. As an alternative, you could focus on one map and highlight what that map reveals about the neighborhood at a particular moment in time.
o We’ve given you several maps ranging from 1890-1942 and some census forms from the early twentieth century. You don’t need to cover the entire 52-year period of the maps. It might make more sense to concentrate on a shorter period of time. (Google Drive)
o Feel free to find and use other documents.

10/4 Story Maps 2: Draft of your Story

• Be ready to share a draft of your project.  It should have at least 5 images/entries.
• We’ll share about half of the in-progress projects in class and think about what is and isn’t working in them. Be prepared to share yours, thinking about its strengths and weaknesses.

Week 5
10/9 Story Maps 3: Final Projects and Industry in Vermont Life

• You final story should include at least 7 and no more than 9 images. Any text should be concise and carefully proofread.
• We’ll share some final versions of the projects.

Find at least one article in Vermont Life that talks about a factory, quarry, mine or other industry in the state at some point in the 1940s or 1950s. Write one paragraph about how that article or an image in it portrays industry in the state.

10/11 Podcast about an Image in Vermont Life or an Object on Campus

• Listen to two podcasts:
• From The Memory Palace:  http://thememorypalace.us/2015/08/notes-on-an-imagined-plaque/
• From This American Life: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/644/random-acts-of-history

o In class we’ll talk about what makes these podcasts successful (or not).

• Before class find one or two images from Vermont Life or a publicly visible object on campus that made you curious and would give you something to interview others about. Write down and bring to class at least two questions that you would ask as part of an interview about the images.
• In Class: Interview one or two class members about your image(s).
• Transfer the interview to the cloud and play some examples.

Week 6
10/16 Draft of Podcast on Vermont Life image

• Using Audacity as an editing tool make a short podcast (3-5 minutes absolute maximum) about your image.
  o Don’t worry about perfect production quality, sound effects, and so forth. DO think carefully about building a narrative and a voice, about telling your story and that the story makes thoughtful points or raises questions about the possible meanings of your image.
  o There are thousands of video intros to Audacity on line. The basic cutting and pasting of audio isn’t much more complicated than it is in word processing software. Media tutors in the lab are all trained in the use of Audacity.
  o You must include at least two voices other than your own.
  o The challenge is to create harmony and/or contrast between the voices and to offer a story about an image from the past.
  o You will, of course, have to edit these interviews and splice them together. If the cuts aren’t perfect, that’s ok.
  o You must write out your part of the narrative. The examples you listened to were elegant in part because they had carefully composed scripts.

10/18 Final Version of Podcast.

• Revise the text of your podcast and re-record. Also try introducing audio effects.
• There are many short “music (or other effects) behind voice in Audacity” tutorials online. I’ve used this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8g9vtQ9-D0. Tutors in the media lab are also trained in the use of Audacity.
• In class we’ll listen to student podcasts and possibly others.

Week 7 BEGIN WORKING ON GROUP WEBSITES about Vermont and Vermont Life.  
10/23 How to Read a Magazine Historically.

• • Reading: 3 readings:  Wendy Kozol, Life’s America, 1994, ch. 5, “Resisting the Domestic; ”  Blake Harrison, “Tracks Across Vermont: Vermont Life and the Landscape of Downhill Skiing, Journal of Sport History 28:2 (Summer 2001); and Jan Cohn, “Introduction” in Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and The Saturday Evening Post (1989) (all pdfs in Google drive).

10/25  Organizing and Examples

• • We’ll develop a list of possible topics for the webite over the previous weeks of the semester.  Come to class having chosen three topics from that list that you would like to work on.  We’ll build groups from these lists/choices.
  •  A class at the University of California made The Berkeley Revolution website: http://revolution.berkeley.edu/about/
  • They took a bit more time than you’ll have on your projects, but look through their work.  What are strengths and weaknesses that you see in it?  Is the Berkeley site a useful model or not?
  • Find two other historically-oriented websites that you think are particularly well done.

o Make notes to yourself about what they do well and be ready to share the sites and your thoughts on them..
o You should be specific. Comments must go beyond: “The content is good.” Think about the visual design of pages, the relationship of pages to one another, the way that various sources contrast or connect.

Week 8-Week 11 (further weekly details below):

• Overall goals and specifications for final projects:
  • any form, but some connection to Vermont Life magazine–either a focus on the magazine or use of the magazine as a source
  • necessary critical/verbal element–no straight video or sound without  words in some form (some sort of written script)
  • aimed at public audience NOT equipped with previous knowledge of Vermont Life
• Possible forms:  archive, audio, collective research (illustrated essay), series of Story Maps; a mixture of several media on a given topic, etc….other options?
• We expect work equivalent to minimum of 3 hours in class per week + 3-4 hours outside class–enough to show significant work (comparable to a 20-page paper for an upper-level seminar
• In-Class meetings, workshops, consultations, discussion on building your websites.  Expect to work on your project with other members of your group, to share sources and thoughts on your progress, to let the class know what you’re working on and how your evidence and argument are evolving.  Professors Morse and Newbury will suggest readings and sources (or methods for seeking them out) with each group over this time.
• In theory, you could use any number of the tools that we’ve explored over the course of the semester within your site.

Week 8

Tuesday Oct 30

• Meet or communicate in some way with your team.
• Locate five sources for research on your topic—at least three of them from Vermont Life. Note that from the front page of the digital archive (go/vermontlife) you CAN search the whole digital archive by keyword and the results will highlight where the word appears in each issue.   We just tried “beer” and got plenty of hits (see image below from Spring 2016).  Such a search is a good start.  In our google folder under Possible Readings for Projects are some sources—three more chapters of Harrison’s book (key for the ski group, including ch. 4 on the creation of a four season tourist economy) AND Vanderbeck’s analysis of Vermont’s “Imaginative Geographies of Whiteness,” which might be helpful for the group working on race.
• Set up a WordPress site for your team—pick a title, a theme, etc.  That can change later.  See below for Midd’s website on using WordPress and a Lynda Tutorial—there are LOTs of such tutorials, so you can search up another if you prefer.

http://www.middlebury.edu/offices/technology/ct/tools/wordpress

https://www.lynda.com/WordPress-tutorials/WordPress-Essential-Training/372542-2.html?org=middlebury.edu

Week 9
Tuesday  Nov 6–Election Day!

Goal for class:  Have your WordPress site up and running with a  working title AND with an introductory paragraph stating your topic (that may change) and your key goals/questions for your project.

Th Nov 8–Workshop

Week 10

T 11/13–Evaluate progress on previous management form
Complete form with New Goals for 11/20

Th Nov 15–Workshop

Week 11
T 11/20–Evaluate progress meeting previous goals–For each group at least one person must attend class or email a brief progress report.
Th 11/22 THANKSGIVING

Week 12
T 11/27
Complete new form with goals for 12/4
Prepare to share with the whole class one key question/problem your group is encountering and puzzling over.  Show the part of your site where this question matters. 

Th 11/29  Workshop

Week 13
T 12/4 Present/Discuss final work of your group

Th 12/6 Present/Discuss final work of your group