Digital Posters

Kathe Lehman-Meyer, Cathy Whitlow, Mary Lynne Hill, Teresa Van Hoy, and Kathleen Gallagher (St. Mary’s University)

This presentation will share how faculty have engaged students in social justice issues such as the global food shortage, immigration rights, natural disasters, and asylum while teaching them core competency skills like language (speaking/writing) as well as digital literacy and research. Each presenter will be able to provide show and tell of student media projects that have resulted in students learning media production skills as a tool for cementing the knowledge required to achieve the course learning outcomes. In addition, step by step instructions for integration and creation of similar assignments will be provided.

St. Mary’s University has a long history of integrating service learning within the curriculum and has won national awards for doing so. Located in San Antonio, Texas, St. Mary’s University is a Hispanic Serving Institution with more than 70% of students being minorities and the majority are first generation college students, and are pell grant eligible.

Cathy Whitlow teaches ESL Courses integrating media assignments as a way to cement the language knowledge that International Students must have to succeed within an American university. Prior to joining St. Mary’s University Cathy taught middle school special education for more than 20 years.

Mary Lynne Hill is a linguist and teaches within the English Communication Arts program. She integrates media related real world assignments within courses to engage students in social justice while learning the basics of rhetoric and composition as well as grammar.

All of Teresa Van Hoy’s history students are required to create a 6 minute documentary about some aspect of their own personal history as one of the first assignments in her courses. Along with her students, she has won several awards for her work which has also resulted in a local film festival.

Kathleen Gallagher is a cultural anthropologist teaching Graduate International Relations courses focusing on human rights, asylum and international development. She specializes in the Himalayan region and military anthropology. Her students get hands on experience creating NGO’s, and media in support of furthering global understanding.

Kathe Lehman-Meyer is currently Director of the Academic Media center, promoting the development of student media skills for academic and professional benefit.

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Tom Beasley and Sune Swart (Bucknell University)

Visualizing Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean (VNAM) is a web-based application for creating dynamic visualizations of political, economic and religious networks in antiquity, and displaying the primary evidence (whether literary, inscriptional or material) on which those visualizations are based.

Developed over the course of two summers by an undergraduate Computer Science major and a member of the Classics faculty at Bucknell, VNAM is a collaborative endeavor in both its creation and its applications.

VNAM has taught its creators how the process of designing a digital humanities project confronts one with authentic methodological problems in both the humanities and computer science. Consider, for example, a question that arose when we were creating the functionality to store and display ancient inscriptions: what is the evidential value of a treaty that purports to belong to the 5th century BCE, but which most scholars believe to be a 4th century forgery? Under what circumstances should VNAM display it, and how should its date be presented? To answer these and similar questions we had not only to approach them with the disciplinary tools of classics, but also to craft data structures and code that would realize our solutions. In this way VNAM turned out to be more interdisciplinary than we had anticipated, demonstrating how computer science can offer a productive means for learning about the discipline of classics, and vice versa.

VNAM also crosses boundaries in its applications. Designed to be both a resource for scholars and a pedagogical tool, it offers students the opportunity to make research contributions that both experienced scholars and other students will use. In the summer of 2016 we worked towards this goal by designing a contributor’s page. Now the project’s classroom utility extends beyond students’ ability to overlay different visualizations so as to, e.g., compare Apollo’s travels in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo to a map of temples to Apollo. Now, in addition to using VNAM, students in Bucknell’s fall 2016 Classical Mythology course will be adding to it. By being invited to generate their own metadata for mythical narratives and their real-world referents, student will have the opportunity to confront issues similar to those with which we ourselves dealt. By blurring the lines between learning and scholarship in this way, VNAM aims to turn even novice learners’ classroom experience into an authentic encounter with real problems and real research in classics.

Thomas Beasley is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Bucknell. His digital interests include data visualization, text analysis and digital game design.

Sune Swart is an undergraduate Computer Science major (class of 2017) at Bucknell. As a collaborator on VNAM, she has developed the project by employing HTML, CSS and Javascript.