About
This Omeka website features projects students have undertaken in a diversity of history courses with Professor McCutcheon and with the support of teaching partners and digital scholarship colleagues Sarah Simpkin and Roxanne Lafleur. This website is a reflection of the important partnership with Morisset Library. Through in-class presentations introducing students to tools to digitally enable their projects and research, Digital Humanities librarians (Nancy Lemay), History Liaison Librarians and former students have supported student learning outside the classroom. Their work is featured annually in April at a Digital History Open House. Their work and enthusiasm demonstrates their work to enhance the Digital Humanities at the University of Ottawa.
HIS 3375 (Winter 2017) Digital History in Canada
This course was team taught with Dr. Alexandre Turgeon who has been a Post-Doc in the Department of History since 2015. Together, we explored skills, tools and resources for critically engaging with historical sources and considered a diversity of platforms and tools used to communicate history to diverse audiences. Students also looked at the challenges and opportunities historians will face in the future using digitally born sources like Twitter, interactive sources like Wikipedia and dealing with 'fake news'. Critical thinking and contextualizing sources regardless of the tools used were central to each discussion.
HIST 3812 (Fall 2016) Digital History/Digital Humanities
During the fall term, students in this course have explored plug-ins like neatline, neatline time and worked with maps and simple pages to create and engage the public with their work that includes both primary and secondary sources.
HIS 1101B (Winter 2016)—The Making of Canada
This course looks at themes in Canadian history from the time before contact to the present, with an emphasis on learning to identify, critically evaluate and interpret a diverse range of primary sources. The final project for this course enables all students to work with a variety of digital primary sources as the basis for their research. Students also have the opportunity to produce a final project using one of three digital history tools: Omeka, Textual analysis, or an animated presentation on a platform such as YouTube.
HIS 2151 (Winter 2016)—American History 1776-1877
HIS 2151 is a general survey of American History from the American Revolution to the Civil war. The course aims to consider how history is constructed and how specific historical events have been commemorated and depicted over time.
Students are introduced to the research and analysis of web-based primary sources using a variety of digitized primary sources. Students are also given the opportunity to use digital history tools for their assignments, allowing them to produce digital exhibits, historical timelines, image collections, or social media campaigns [displays?].
HIS 3375 (Fall 2015)—Digital History in Canada
This course explores the current and potential impact of the use of digital media on historical analysis, practice, research and presentation. Students will learn how to construct, post, maintain and implement new media, as well as learning how to evaluate, interpret and create history using digital tools. Coursework allows the students to think critically about how history is presented in an online context, and gives an opportunity for students to use a broad range of current digital tools for their own work. Students have the chance to work with Omeka and complementary tools in-depth, and produce their own Omeka website to showcase their primary and secondary research.
HIS 3397 (Winter 2015)—History in the Digital Age
This course is aimed at introducing students to the study of history as it is being presented in the digital realm. Students will be introduced to and encouraged to use digital history tools in their coursework to evaluate and present primary sources to “do history”. An important element of the course is to critically evaluate how history is being presented by others who are also using these digital tools to interpret the past. The entire class participates interactively with their colleagues to act both as consumers of history and as active participants in the conversation about the construction and presentation of history that they are all undertaking.