As students increasingly draw upon digital content as a primary source of information, how might they be taught to be both discriminating consumers as well as producers of online information? Doing history rather than teaching history is not a new approach, but the “doing” part of researching, writing, and publishing now includes drawing upon and creating digitized resources. In this NITLE Shared Academics seminar, NITLE subject-area specialist Michelle Moravec, Aaron Cowan, assistant professor of history at Slippery Rock University, and Kathryn Tomasek, associate professor of history at Wheaton College, provided concrete examples from their own work, and examined the opportunities and challenges of integrating digital humanities into the undergraduate curriculum. These are Dr. Aaron Cowan's slides about using HistoryPin for teaching and learning.

1. Teaching Digital History
with HistoryPin
Dr. Aaron Cowan
Slippery Rock University
Email
aaron.cowan@sru.edu
Twitter
@aaronbcowan
Project Guidelines:
https://www.evernote.com/pub/abcowan/hist
orypinassignment

2. What is Historypin?
Historypin.com “is a way for millions of people to come together to share small
glimpses of the past and to build up the story of human history.”

3. What are Historypin’s aims?
• To get as many people as possible taking part in the history of their family, streets,
country and world.
• To bring neighborhoods together around local history and help people feel closer to
the place they live in.
• To get people from different generations talking more, sharing more and coming
together more often.
• To conserve and open up archives for everyone to enjoy, learn from and improve.
• To create a study resource for schools and universities.
• To be the largest global archive of human history.

4. Why HistoryPin?
• Accessible interface
• Platforms (web, mobile apps)
• Collaborative/crowdsourcing
http://www2.archivists.org/sites/all/files/HistoryPin.pdf
“With its geospatial focus, HistoryPin allows users to view content across archival
collections, revolutionizing the discovery process...HistoryPin brings the DJ into the
archives by enabling archivists and their user communities to mashup photographs,
videos, audio clips, descriptive text, and map data.”
– Abigail Nye, Society of American Archivists Reviews Portal, May 1, 2014

5. Historypin Project
Slippery Rock University & Lawrence County Historical Society
SRU students enrolled in Intro to Public History course
Basic tasks
• Select images from LCHS digitized archives
• Research subjects and pin images with 150-200 word “exhibit labels”
• Create thematic tours linking content
Benefits for SRU Students
• Experience in digital history, historical research, and curating
• Practice in local history research
• Model & practice of community service/engagement
Benefits for Lawrence Co. Historical Society
• Free resource for engaging the public and especially “digital natives”
• Aid in advocating for preservation & building sense of community
• Better fulfill mission “to preserve and display the heritage of all our citizens”

8. Student Reflections
“Perhaps the most important lesson learned from this project is the value of local
history resources at the local library or in the historical society’s archives; not everything
is available on the Internet.”
“I think this project made me more sensitive to how people of a community may not be
in touch with its history, and why they should be.”
“In most classes your work is not seen by anyone but the professor, but in this project
the whole world can see our work and benefit from our research.”
“This project pushed us out of our comfort zone – in a good way. We had to take what
we learned through our research and connect it to the audience. We had to make
choices about what to include and what to omit, and think about what our audience
needed to know, and what would hold their interest.”
“Historians need to do things like HistoryPin more often; they need to spark interest in
the common person for history, and keep history relevant to modern society.”