Katherine Holt, Anna Claspy, Brandon Bell, and Colleen Gilfether (The College of Wooster)
For three summers teams of undergraduates from the College of Wooster have been at work on Wooster Digital History (www.woosterhistory.org), a project that has grown from curated exhibits to more mature collections, mapping exercises, and web-based town tours. The project began as an exploration conceived by Dr. Gregory Shaya, Department of History, and has since been guided by a handful of Wooster History faculty and Dr. Jon Breitenbucher, director of Educational Technology. The project has grown, however, from an exercise occupied in large part by the building of technical infrastructures and community relationships to a platform through which students may conceive and explore their own research questions related to the history of the town of Wooster.
This presentation, introduced and briefly contextualized by Dr. Katie Holt, prof. of History at the College of Wooster, focuses on the work done by four students. These students represent the evolution of the project and suggest the ways in which incremental and guided work might grow into relative low barrier-to-entry ways for students to build digital exhibits around their own Wooster-related research interests. Brittany Previte and Anna Claspy, members of the 2014 team, will talk about these details of summer two. Brandon Bell and Colleen Gilfether will talk about these details of summer three.