Public Digital Projects for Courses

Podcasts can be a way of presenting class work to a wide audience. It’s most useful when there’s good audio available: oral histories, interviews, and the like. 

Examples:

Public Works: A Public Humanities Podcast (podcast produced by the Public Humanities program)

Now Here This (Brown student-run audio storytelling collective) 

Studio 395 (undergraduate history course podcast from JMU)

Further reading: 

• Diy: How To Make A Podcast

• Starting Your Podcast: A Guide For Students 

• The Podcast host

• Podcast Resource Guide

• Beyond the 5 W's: What should you ask before starting a story?
  From NPR -- explores questions to ask yourself before starting a story: What is my story’s driving question?; What is the story not about?; How will I ensure my story is fair to the people and ideas it represents?; How will I engage my audience — and hold them?; What are my dream ingredients?; What will the audience remember when it’s over?

• Podcast Structure: The 3 Acts Of Every Great Podcast Episode
  Covers the 3-act structure: “you should plan every episode with an end in mind. You should always know where you’re going. Most importantly, you shouldn’t reveal the climax early in the episode, otherwise you’ll never build tension.” Also includes a podcast episode on this topic 

Panopto is a media hosting and streaming service offered through Brown. You can record lectures, audio, video, screens and individual applications; upload video; edit video; and caption videos. You can share entire folders or individual videos with a group of people. Panopto might be useful if your class is creating video or collecting interviews as part of the course and needs a place to store, share and edit them. Panopto also integrates with the Brown Digital Repository. 

Further Reading:

Panopto Documentation: How to Edit

How to Share Content in Panopto

Omeka, an open-source program supported by the nonprofit Corporation for Digital Scholarship,  is an excellent tool for sharing digital collections and creating simple online exhibits from them. Omeka is a metadata-forward platform that focuses on the digital objects as the building block. It uses standard metadata such as DublinCore or you can upload your own metadata. Plug-ins allow for integration with oral history metadata (more details here), maps, and timelines. 

There are several versions of Omeka to choose from. Omeka.net is a paid, hosted site, managed by the Corporation for Digital Scholarship. Details here. Omeka.org requires you to use your own hosting; one option is Digital Scholarship @ Brown. For more complicated Omeka sites - if you want to add plug-ins or have more control over the design, for example, you might want to install Omeka on your own device; it’s a push-button install on Digital Scholarship @ Brown.

Examples:

Brown Undergraduate COVID-19 Archives (class project using Omeka.net)

Philadelphia Immigration (oral history project)

Further Reading: 

Up and Running with Omeka

Creating an Omeka Exhibit

University of Chicago Omeka site

Mukurtu, “a safe keeping place,” is a ‘free, mobile, and open source platform built with indigenous communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage.” It is designed to foster “relationships of respect and trust” by including Traditional Knowledge Labels, cultural protocols that allow differential levels of access to materials, and multiple descriptions of each object. 

To run Mukurtu you need a server; the Library’s “Domain of One’s Own” is a good choice for Mukurtu. Establishing protocols and defining roles makes Mukurtu better for a longer-term research project, not a semester class project. 

Examples:

    Passamaquoddy People: At Home on the Ocean and Lakes

    Tayôshq Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head –Aquinnah Tribal Digital Archive