Request for Proposals:
Digital Humanities Workshops

A Midwestern university, in partnership with a state historical society, offers an intensive four-day summer workshop for thirty school teachers on the life and times of Abraham Lincoln before the onset of the Civil War. Among the major themes the workshop addresses are Lincoln's role in frontier development, the Midwestern Indian wars, the party system of antebellum Midwestern America, and the gathering storm over abolition. Prior to the workshops, participants are asked to read David Herbert Donald's Lincoln. Participants explore a variety of digital resources found on EDSITEment, which serves as a portal to websites such as the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project, the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History, HarpWeek, History Matters, the Abraham Lincoln Papers section of the Library of Congress American Memory Project, and others. Participants meet in the mornings for lectures and discussions related to the project themes and readings; in the afternoons, participants create lesson plans on the workshop topics utilizing online resources. Project faculty includes archivists, historians of antebellum America who are experienced in using web sources in the classroom, and master teachers.

Working with a local university that has a research library and a digital humanities center, a large urban school district conducts a workshop on Shakespeare's Macbeth, a required text in the district's language arts curriculum for high schools. Over two full-day and four half-day sessions during the school year, the twenty teachers meet with scholars from the literature and drama departments of the university to explore literary and performance approaches to teaching the play. This study includes locating the play within the Shakespearean canon and critiquing various stage and film adaptations of the play. At sessions held in the university's digital humanities center, the participants and workshop scholars consider various strategies for integrating the large numbers of resources on Shakespeare and his works available for both teachers and students on the Web. One session provides an opportunity for the teachers to discuss the Web as a teaching tool, including the use of online textual materials, virtual re-creations of Renaissance-era theaters, and digitized versions of scenes. A second workshop meeting concentrates on the resources offered by EDSITEment, including its lesson plans on Macbeth, as well as resources from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the British Academy. Another session includes an introduction by the librarian to the research library's holdings related to Shakespeare and the English Renaissance. During the final session, the teachers present the lesson plans on Macbeth that they have developed during the semester to their fellow participants. The teachers incorporate the feedback from this session into their final curriculum materials, which are then made available on the district website and on the individual schools' departmental webpages.

A state college in New England organizes a regional workshop for sixty teachers to strengthen their understanding and analysis of American visual culture in the Colonial period by studying and interpreting materials in relevant online visual archives. In four day-long meetings held during January, teachers work with an art historian, historian, and two curators from a nearby museum with related collections. Teachers explore project readings and websites that give access to images in a variety of media illuminating the artistic and cultural contributions of people of Native American, European, and African descent. As they immerse themselves in the relevant online resources of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, and sites such as American Centuries and others, the participants consider guiding questions about who created the images, how particular images are presented, and what historical contexts are necessary to understand these images. Participants are encouraged but not required to apply to the workshop in partnership with another teacher or teachers from the same school, who will be able to participate in a distance learning component. Following the workshop, participants develop ways of incorporating visual materials into the classroom teaching of early American history and culture, and receive additional guidance from project scholars in integrating visual resources into their teaching of significant historical topics and themes