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.

Course Format:

Independent work with scheduled meetings

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 19^th-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 19^th-century rural Ontario;
8. know the value of public engagement;
9. reflect upon their own 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

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.