Digital Scholarship and Timemaps

04 Aug 2022

Here are activities we will do today to learn about digital scholarship.

Activity 1: Notable IU Attendees

Today we'll each do some tiny research projects about notable IU Attendees.

Step 1

Pick an individual from this list:

  • Avery Brooks
  • Joe Buck
  • Suzanne Collins
  • Laverne Cox
  • Mark Cuban
  • Kevin Kline
  • Oksana Markarova
  • Sylvia McNair
  • Victor Oladipo
  • Ryan Murphy
  • James Watson
  • Mike Woodson

Step 2

See which of these questions you can answer in 10 minutes of searching:

  • How is this person best known?
  • When and where were they born?
  • When did they go to IU (your best guess)?
  • Where did they go after IU?
  • Where are they now?

Step 3

Can you find times (years are okay) and places (cities are okay) for the above?

Activity 2: TimeMapper

TimeMapper uses Google Sheets to publish interactive time maps, which position individual events on a map.

To get started, let's look at my example.

Here's my spreadsheet data behind it.

Here's the spreadsheet template.

My example map uses a map I published to my account and embedded on this site. You can get a free account by logging in with your Twitter account. You can also publish anonymously, as long as your Google Sheet is published to the web.

Here's the same map as above, published anonymously.

To find a couple images of your alum, you can try Arbutus Yearbooks or the IU Archives Photographs websites.

Once you find an image, you'll need to right click and "Open Image in New Tab" to see it full size and to see its full URL in the browser bar.

The proper URL to use includes the file extension at the end, in this case .jpg:

https://www.insidethehall.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/03282021hha-600x420.jpg

Once you want to see how this looks as a TimeMap, you'll need to follow the TimeMapper Instructions.

Activity 3: Retrospective and Project Planning

Now we will reflect on what we've done today and review the effort we spent building these miniature research projects.

Consider these activities:

  1. Selecting a topic
  2. Researching events and locations
  3. Finding images
  4. Adding your data to Google Spreadsheets
  5. Making design decisions
  6. Troubleshooting problems

I'd like you to rank each of these activities in two ways:

  1. Order of difficulty: easiest to most difficult
  2. Time spent: least time to most time