Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Contextualizing Performers In Circus Route Books: Linked Data Entities And Open Data, Angela Yon

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

The presentation will discuss the final phase of the 4-year project Step Right Up: Digitizing Over 100 Years of Circus Route Books made possible by the Digitizing Hidden Collections program, a national grant competition administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources and supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This segment of the project concentrated on making data open and reusable to aid in optimal discoverability and create data relationships with the collection. The culmination of these efforts resulted in the digital humanities project, Agency through Otherness: Portraits of Performers in Circus Route Books 1875-1925. This exhibition …

Layer Upon Layer: Starting Small, Thinking Big, And Building Sustainable Digital Projects, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

While many digital scholarship tools and computational methods can play an important role in digital humanities research at all stages, it’s usually the final output that is the most visible element of these projects. This talk will explore exhibits built using the Omeka platform with a particular focus on incorporating the Neatline plugin to create interactive maps. Continuing with maps, we will look at some possibilities for including these in projects built using the Scalar platform. We will also talk more generally about getting started with digital humanities projects and planning for sustainability.

Underpinnings And Equal Terms: Using An Exhibit As An Entry Point For Engaging Undergraduate Students In The Research Process, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

Studying exhibits offers students many entry points for critically evaluating information and images. They are also effective tools for engaging students in research to better understand how to refine their research questions and construct compelling narratives. This poster focuses on the use of the online women’s suffrage themed exhibit Underpinnings and Equal Terms to teach undergraduate students visual and information literacy skills and engage them in archival research. Using this exhibit curated from archival and special collections materials as a starting point, students in an introductory Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course explored how the overarching theme and subnarratives were …

Sideshow Sounds: Black Bandleaders Respond To Exoticism, Elizabeth C. Hartman, Angela Yon

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

Everyone knows P. G. Lowery, broadcaster of African-American music. Less known are those whose sideshow leadership predates that of Lowery. The pioneering entrepreneurial-entertainment legacy of bandleaders like Solomon P. White, J. 0. McNutt, and James Wolfscale set the stage for Lowery's phenomenal success. This presentation investigates their personal histories in the context of mainstream and circus cultures; their indispensable contribution to the success of the circus and the popularization of African-American music; and their role as the sinew of African-American communities through newspaper distribution and correspondence.

Black sideshow bands-first documented in 1881 within Milner Library's Circus Route Books Digital Collection, …

Native Performance And Agency In The Wild West Show, Mariah Wahl, Angela Yon

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

"The Wild West" has been romanticized and criticized as historical American trope. Much of this idea is based on the Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill, Pawnee Bill, and other traveling circus shows throughout the late 19th and early 20th century. Often these shows functioned as propaganda for American imperialism, condoning and perpetuating cultural genocide against Native American populations.

The presentation will use autobiographical information to explore how many Native American Wild West performances and exhibits worked subversively to critique racist American institutions. Exhibits like the 1904 World's Fair placed Native performers of the Wild West show in stark contrast …

Gathering Online: Leveraging Tools For Instruction And Group Work In The Classroom And Beyond, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

This talk focused on the librarian-led activities for the course Community Engagement Seminar, highlighting collaboration, teaching and learning, outcomes, and other uses of Scalar. This course focused on ways that K-12 school personnel create successful learning environments. Incorporating mapping, data visualization, and digital publishing, we taught students how to use several online tools and create a Scalar book that presented their research. Through a mixture of Zoom instructional sessions and personalized consultations, we helped students use Scalar to collaborate with their group members and build skills to successfully communicate goals, strategies, and outcomes to a broader community.

We also focused …

Curators And Active Participants: Archives, Exhibits, Engagement, And Outreach Through Teaching, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

This presentation focuses on how a set of digital humanities workshops offered to university faculty helped them incorporate new resources and methods into their teaching. The first workshop was an overview of digital tools that focused on getting started without feeling overwhelmed, ways to incorporate art and archival resources into projects, and approaches to facilitating meaningful experiences in the classroom. The second workshop refined this material by focusing on how the same idea and content could be used to create three different digital humanities projects—a collection database and map, an online exhibit, and a digital publication. The exhibitions and digital …