Workplace Learning: Rural Diary Archive (HIST*3480)

Code and section: HIST*3480*02

Term: Winter 2021

Instructor: Catharine Wilson

Details

Method of Delivery: 

You will be conducting independent work and attending class meetings. The course and your workplace are all online. Four scheduled class meetings (their day and time to be determined during the first week of class) will take place remotely in a synchronous environment, which you can access through courselink. 

Course Synopsis:

Would you like to immerse yourself in daily life in the past?  The Rural Diary Archive website showcases over 180 diarists and is a crowdsourcing site.  Your experiential learning opportunity will involve transcribing diaries online.  You will also help develop content for the website by selecting tweets for posting and contributing to a glossary of nineteenth-century terms.  Your volunteer work will make these hard-to-use but highly useful documents more accessible for researchers now and in the future. In connecting this work experience to your academic discipline you will write a series of short critical reflections and a research paper which includes an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of diaries as primary sources.  

Interested students should contact Dr. Wilson.

Learning Outcomes:

By the successful completion of this course, an assiduous student will have learned to:

1. identify and critically assess diary writing and keeping practices;
2. read and understand 19th-century handwriting & vocabulary;
3. transcribe;
4. research; 
5. assess the strengths and weaknesses of diaries as sources;
6. communicate compelling history for use in a social media platform; 
7. identify and explain daily life in 19th-century rural Ontario;
8. know the value of public engagement; 
9. reflect upon their work in a critical manner.

Methods of Evaluation and Weights:

Transcriptions - 30% 
Weekly Critical Reflections - 15%
Contributions to the Glossary & Tweets - 20%
Final Essay/Document Analysis - 35% 

Texts and/or Resources Required:

No Required Textbook

Project Timeline 

Week 1: Pre-arranged group meeting with Professor Wilson to view the diaries.  Instructions will be established and training started for reading cursive, transcribing, researching the diarist, and selecting tweets and glossary items.  You will also learn about the questions/tools with which to mine diaries of meaning.  You will start with a moderately easy diary for the first five weeks.

Week 3: Meeting. Dr. Wilson will review your transcription work 

Week 7: Meeting.  First collection of weekly Reflections is due covering weeks 1-6, and you will raise your transcribing skills by advancing to a more difficult diary.
Week 10: Meeting. We will discuss your progress on the final essay. 
Week 11: Your complete sets of tweets and glossary items are due. 
Week 12: Your complete set of transcriptions is due. 
Week 13: Your essay is due and your second collection of weekly Reflections covering weeks 7-13. 

*Please note: This is a preliminary web course description only.  The department reserves the right to change without notice any information in this description.  The final, binding course outline will be distributed in the first class of the semester.