Class Instruction

How can SC&A help you navigate Online Learning?

We are available to help you design engaging and meaningful synchronous and/or asynchronous classroom activities and assignments that make use of digitized and born-digital collections in order to meet a wide variety of learning goals, as standalone resources for your course or integrated with in-person use of collections.

In addition to traditional projects, SC&A can support a wide variety of public engagement projects including curating a digital exhibit, creating a blog or website, livestreaming events, transcribing and annotating historical documents, and more. We are committed to creating student learning experiences that are equitable and accessible.

Understanding Digital Collections, Images, and Facsimiles in Context

Introduce your students to Special Collections & Archives and primary source research online. Use digital collections and surrogates to help students understand the context of a digital source, engage with data, and make connections between digital materials and course themes.

• Incorporate a classroom activity, such as Exploring Bowdoin’s Digital Collections or Defining Digital Images
• Read about Teaching with Digital Primary Sources: Literacies, Finding and Evaluating, Citing, Ethics, and Existing Models and Digital Facsimiles
• Think about the questions to consider when engaging with a digital collection

Book Studies

The study of the book, book history, and book arts intersect with many disciplines. Use the book to introduce your students to bibliography, the dissemination of text, materiality in a digital environment, and hands-on, creative experiences.

• Explore book history readings, such as Johanna Drucker’s Book History coursebook and Archaeology of Reading project, digital materials for teaching book history and other pedagogical tools
• Watch book studies video content, including lectures, book-making tutorials, and books in motion
• Access artist’s books online

Primary Source Literacy, Document Analysis, and Transcription

Use primary source sets for students to interpret and engage in document analysis, build narrative between sources, and contribute to scholarly communications through transcription, annotation, and other activities.

• Explore examples of primary source lesson plans in Using Primary Sources: Hands-on Instructional Exercises and at TeachArchives.org, many of these are easily adaptable to an online environment
• Consider the Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy
• Engage with available crowdsourced transcription projects, including: Zooniverse People-Powered Research Projects, Smithsonian Digital Volunteers, LOC’s By the People Project, DigitalMaine Projects, UIowa’s DIY History or contact Marieke Van Der Steenhoven for options from Bowdoin’s collections—and don’t forget these useful tips for reading old handwriting

Data and Digital Humanities Tools

Using data visualization and textual analysis tools students can create interactive methods to learn from collections, leverage voices often lost in the archive, and foster better understanding of the context of a collection.

• Explore sample data set from the Oliver Otis Howard Papers: index of correspondence with data points including date, location, sender, and recipient
• Read more about ways to use Library data to support your course objectives
• Contact Marieke Van Der Steenhoven for more information and other available data sets