"Introduction to Omeka: Lesson Plan"

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: A student-curated digital exhibit is a foundational and flexible archival exercise. This lesson plan introduces one digital exhibition platform: Omeka. The lesson provides useful background information, such as definitions of key terms in digital content management and links to Omeka projects and resources. It takes students through the different stages of building an exhibit, from selecting items to identifying them to arranging them—what French describes as a “multimedia essay” that intimately links the exhibition narrative and display to the archival collection. It thus serves as a general introduction to the storytelling and argumentation skills that students develop through the exhibition curation process

"A Guide for Using Primary Source or Original Source Documents: Origins, Purpose, Values, Limitations"

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: A basic object analysis exercise can turn a student’s initial wonder about an object—“What is it?”—into a foundation for further research by providing a scaffolding for observation and the pursuit of evidence. The resource models how much students can learn about an object through careful examination of its paratexts and bibliographic information. Although the “original source document” is presumed to be paper-based, the origin, purpose, value, and limitation (OPVL) exercise is easily adapted to digital materials, just as the analog exercise can be extended by digital means, such as a class blog or online annotation tool. In our own classes, we have supplemented the exercise with specific questions about a textual object’s materiality: packaging, design, evidence of use, and more. Teachers can find similar pedagogical resources within some digital collections, such as the National Archives’ DocsTeach that offers a suite of educational activities

"Commonplace Book Assignment"

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: A commonplace book is a form of personal archive, a means of recording and arranging textual passages of particular value to the collector for future use. This exercise, which has students create a traditional, analog version of the commonplace book, can be productively adapted to digital platforms. Andrew Goldstone, for instance, has an online version, and Alan Jacobs has written provocatively of the similarities between the commonplace book and microblogging platforms like Tumblr. Valuable as a stand-alone exercise, as a way to support attentive reading and textual analysis, it can also serve as a springboard for other activities: collection-building projects that develop principles of selection and organization, discussions of the subjective and affective aspects of archiving (Benjamin), or essay assignments that address the selected passages

Designing Object-Based Experiences: A Prototyping Game

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: What kinds of experiences can archival materials generate? Students get to play with this question in this game, in which players stage a range of archival encounters. The game includes “object histories,” with detailed information about six specific objects, and three sets of playing cards: one set that describes possible audiences (e.g., “a college student who is deaf”), one set devoted to presentation formats (e.g., “mobile app”), and one to presentation values (e.g., “shareability”). Participants draw one of each card, then “prototype an experience” with the selected object that fits the parameters. Teachers could develop their own object histories and cards to fit their course themes and media; the game could also help students brainstorm possibilities at the start of an archive- or exhibit-building assignment. The game helps students experiment with the variety of meanings artifacts can accrue through different kinds of mediation and curation

Digital Texts and Textual Data: A Pedagogical Anthology

This collection features pedagogical artifacts created by the participants of the 2018-2019 NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, “Textual Data and Digital Texts in the Undergraduate Classroom.” The artifacts--assignments, syllabi, sample student work, rubrics, workshops, and more--are grouped thematically in four sections: digital exhibits and narratives, textual analysis, distant reading and data visualization, and data-driven research. Each artifact begins with an overview in which the creator summarizes the artifact type, the intended audience, the time required, and the DH method and tool used, and provides a brief description of the artifact

Effects of a high-dose 24-h infusion of tranexamic acid on death and thromboembolic events in patients with acute gastrointestinal bleeding (HALT-IT): an international randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial

Background: Tranexamic acid reduces surgical bleeding and reduces death due to bleeding in patients with trauma. Meta-analyses of small trials show that tranexamic acid might decrease deaths from gastrointestinal bleeding. We aimed to assess the effects of tranexamic acid in patients with gastrointestinal bleeding. Methods: We did an international, multicentre, randomised, placebo-controlled trial in 164 hospitals in 15 countries. Patients were enrolled if the responsible clinician was uncertain whether to use tranexamic acid, were aged above the minimum age considered an adult in their country (either aged 16 years and older or aged 18 years and older), and had significant (defined as at risk of bleeding to death) upper or lower gastrointestinal bleeding. Patients were randomly assigned by selection of a numbered treatment pack from a box containing eight packs that were identical apart from the pack number. Patients received either a loading dose of 1 g tranexamic acid, which was added to 100 mL infusion bag of 0·9% sodium chloride and infused by slow intravenous injection over 10 min, followed by a maintenance dose of 3 g tranexamic acid added to 1 L of any isotonic intravenous solution and infused at 125 mg/h for 24 h, or placebo (sodium chloride 0·9%). Patients, caregivers, and those assessing outcomes were masked to allocation. The primary outcome was death due to bleeding within 5 days of randomisation; analysis excluded patients who received neither dose of the allocated treatment and those for whom outcome data on death were unavailable. This trial was registered with Current Controlled Trials, ISRCTN11225767, and ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT01658124. Findings: Between July 4, 2013, and June 21, 2019, we randomly allocated 12 009 patients to receive tranexamic acid (5994, 49·9%) or matching placebo (6015, 50·1%), of whom 11 952 (99·5%) received the first dose of the allocated treatment. Death due to bleeding within 5 days of randomisation occurred in 222 (4%) of 5956 patients in the tranexamic acid group and in 226 (4%) of 5981 patients in the placebo group (risk ratio [RR] 0·99, 95% CI 0·82–1·18). Arterial thromboembolic events (myocardial infarction or stroke) were similar in the tranexamic acid group and placebo group (42 [0·7%] of 5952 vs 46 [0·8%] of 5977; 0·92; 0·60 to 1·39). Venous thromboembolic events (deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism) were higher in tranexamic acid group than in the placebo group (48 [0·8%] of 5952 vs 26 [0·4%] of 5977; RR 1·85; 95% CI 1·15 to 2·98). Interpretation: We found that tranexamic acid did not reduce death from gastrointestinal bleeding. On the basis of our results, tranexamic acid should not be used for the treatment of gastrointestinal bleeding outside the context of a randomised trial

Media, Materiality, and Archives Syllabus

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: This course integrates literary study of contemporary texts with archival theory and practice. The course texts include a pulp thriller, a work of “serious” literary fiction, a graphic novel, and an ephemeral electronic book; embodying a variety of forms, they address and enact the “concept of ‘the archive.’” As students interrogate the relation between archival formations and textual materiality, they gain fluency in a set of questions which they then transfer to digital projects: a class blog and a digital archive of sci-fi fanzines made from a library collection. Students thus engage with the challenges of mediation and curation both as consumers of literature and as producers of literary history

Data, Archive, Infrastructure Syllabus

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: How do we teach students to recognize and navigate the structures that shape information—structures that produce absence as well as excess—with critical implications for our possible accounts of the past and what is possible to know in the future? Shannon Mattern’s Data, Archive, Infrastructure course tackles this challenge by drawing attention to different information ecologies and how they are constituted by materials, spaces, technologies, histories, and people in dynamic, political interaction. The strength of this approach is its balance of an expansive theoretical frame that models conscientious and energetic cross-disciplinarity with equally wide-ranging attention to praxis. Each week’s thematized readings bring together a range of perspectives, from archivists, historians, artists, cultural theorists, librarians, literary scholars, and more. Students explore how different knowledge infrastructures are created and deployed through a range of real-world case studies

"Your House or School in One Hundred Years"

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Will the future care, or not, about the things the present holds dear? What objects will be preserved? This “long-term thinking” activity makes the stakes of these archival preservation questions immediately apparent and personal (Kraus, “DUST”). In this exercise, students imagine how a familiar “physical structure might] change, decay, age, and adapt” over the course of a century and represent its future state in a drawing, model, or description. The activity is part of [DUST, an online, educational alternate reality game in which teen participants imagine the future and build research and analytic skills. The exercise could be adapted to focus on various materials. For example, students could explore One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, a blog that resurrects and remixes old GeoCities Web sites from the 1990s, and then imagine the fate of their own born-digital materials

Panama Silver, Asian Gold: Migration, Money, and the Making of Modern Caribbean Literature Syllabus

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: In this class, students read early twentieth-century and contemporary Caribbean novels and short stories in tandem with archival materials in the Digital Library of the Caribbean. The course positions the archive both as a means of historical and cultural recovery and as a symptom of colonial power that frustrates the act of recovery. Students create collections of textual annotations, reading guidelines, explanations of historical references, and digitized primary sources on their own home pages and in a class wiki; successful projects may be added to the Digital Library of the Caribbean. But these projects also probe archival distortions and absences. Rather than “reinforc[e] the damaging notion that . . . [some] voices . . . are silent, and irretrievably lost” (Klein, “Image” 665), this class, as stated in its syllabus, trains students to scrutinize and counter “the colonial structure of existing historical archival materials.