Category Archives: Course Mechanics

Project Planning?

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My move into digital humanities work has taken the usual route. I began a traditional teaching project–having students write about landscape, urban history, and place. Gradually, I moved toward having students make their work available to the community. After public presentations and radio broadcasts, I began to explore having students create web materials, which led to the cultural gardens site. That process began with me doing the design on a server, using static pages. Gradually, we began to work with a local web design firm, and then I found blogging. And, more recently, we have begun to integrate tools, especially thinking about Omeka from the Center for History and New Media. But, even as we have expanded tools and rethought how we use them in the classroom and for public outreach, we have not addressed what I see as a more fundamental strategy. Namely, how do we create a package of sites and materials, without each time reinventing our projects and having to do back end maintenance on technical infrastructure? Or, perhaps, this is the nature of the beast? Would a strategy at the infrastructure level, have led us to better solutions, earlier in the process? Is it possible to begin with technology and work to a project or is it preferable to work from project to technology?

Reading Landscapes

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Reading urban landscapes and places takes years of practices but usually begins with the ability to observe simple aspects of the landscape. Rather than learn architectural terms, which are useful but highly specialized, we focus on developing a basic vocabulary and set of categories. By thinking about these basic categories, we begin to unearth relations between elements of the landscape and other elements, between structures and infrastructure, and between structures and everyday life, including social historical change. Our goal is not to become experts in one course period, but to become more informed consumers of the landscape, with the ability to make judgments about the landscape from what we see.

To that end, we read an excerpt from urban theorist Kevin Lynch, from a systems approach taken by an environment journalist, Stuart Brand, and from an experimental sociologist, William Whyte. Each looks at different aspects of the landscape, from different perspectives. What do they study; how do they explore landscape; what can landscape tell us; and how can we redeploy the landscape? In addition, we should think about these readings in terms of Italo Calvino’s metaphorical approach in the brief chapter we read from Invisible Cities.

Below is a worksheet, a microsoft word document. Print it out. Use it to guide your reading. Answer the questions (handwritten is fine) and bring it to class. After class, place it in your reading journal.  Preparation Worksheet for Brand, Lynch, & Whyte