Class on the River

As Bucknell welcomes students to campus this month, Stories of the Susquehanna associated faculty and staff will be teaching courses related to SSV, while they mentor student researchers on special projects.

Katie Faull (Comparative Humanities) is teaching a new course, HUMN 100, “Digging into the Digital” in which her students will engage in research-based learning focusing on the Shamokin Moravian Diaries using the latest Digital Humanities tools and approaches. She will also be working with Henry Stann ’17 and Alexa Gorski ’17 as they continue to map the West Branch and experiment with new forms of visualization and augmented reality.

Alf Siewers (English) is leading a group of students as they complete work on a documentary on Joseph Priestley and French Azilum.

Next spring Faull and Siewers will teach an Integrated Perspectives course entitled “Digitizing the River,” a completely redesigned course based on Susquehanna Country

Take a look back at previous curricular work associated with SSV:

 
Also, here’s a peak at the kind of unique experience students enjoy in SSV-related courses.


Video produced by Bucknell Video Specialist Brianna Derr

Curating the Cold Spots…

In his opening talk of the Herrenhausen conference on the Digital Humanities (#dighum1213), Jeffrey Schnapp  proposed that the future of the world as a hot spot might be one that is punctuated by increasingly sought after cold spots, places where we are not connected by the digital transfer of data, where we as humans can trust our own senses to make decisions about what it is we see, hear, smell, feel, and express verbally.  Rejecting the curation of nature as one that might involve pinning QR codes to trees, Schnapp instead called for another way to make data matter in the human weaving together of narrative to make places meaningful.  Digital ecologies, as he termed them, might consist not of us experiencing nature mediated by the digital (sorry, no Google Glass on the Buffalo Valley Rail Trail!)  but rather by the human observer using the digital device to collect and record data that later is uploaded in what he termed a crowdsourcing of the environment.  Citizen science produces knowledge, much as for Luis von Ahn, human computation digitizes millions of books through the use of that annoying Captcha. Continue reading “Curating the Cold Spots…”