Orientation Session:
During Week 1 of the program (June 26-30), a welcome session will be held to orient participants to the program schedule, check in with students about their individual learning goals, and introduce issues surrounding digital collections and archives that will be discussed throughout the program.
Cohort Check-ins:
At the beginning of each week, a 30-minute meeting will be held over Zoom to check in with students about their progress, questions, and concerns, and to introduce the schedule of activities for the week.
Workshops:
A total of six, 90-minute morning workshops will be held over the course of the program.
Encountering Archives: Materiality and Space
- “Encountering Archives” is an introduction to conducting research with archives and special collections. Students will learn how to navigate archives and analyze primary sources using a critical lens that emphasizes materiality and space. Students will practice finding, requesting, handling, and analyzing archival materials.
DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Imaging in the Archives
- This workshop will prepare students for an independent visit to an archive where you can capture reference images for your own research. We will discuss best practices for taking photos in an archive or special collections. We will also share some tools for 2D and 3D image capture as well as tips for photographing in archival settings.
Metadata & Data Management for Digitized Archival Materials
- Metadata, or “data about data,” plays an important role in our ability to preserve, organize, and find library and archives materials. In this workshop, we will introduce the concepts and principles behind metadata, explore how we can use it in archives research and digital exhibits, and practice creating our own metadata to describe and organize digitized images.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition): Turning Digitized Documents into Searchable Texts
- This workshop will introduce students to the importance of human decision-making in the process of turning images of text into fully searchable documents. We will discuss what OCR is, and will look at how different software programs can produce different results from the same digitized documents.
Close and Distant Reading: Quantitative Text Analysis for Archival Materials
- This workshop is a basic introduction to quantitative text analysis. We will discuss critical definitions and spend time getting familiar with the interface for a particular program called Voyant Tools, which allows users to compare the actual texts in a corpus of documents (“close reading”) to visualizations and statistics about the words and phrases in those documents (“distant reading”).
Curating Digital Exhibits
- This workshop will introduce students to the basics of curating digital exhibits. We will discuss decisions that need to be made when selecting archival materials in order to create a narrative with them. We will also compare a couple tools for creating a digital exhibit and consider why you might choose one tool over another when curating a particular kind of exhibit or working with particular kinds of research materials.
Lab Sessions:
Following each workshop, participants have the option of attending either or both of two related afternoon lab sessions, held in-person at Orbach or Rivera Library. Each lab session will include a short, self-directed activity that enables participants to practice applying the knowledge they gained during the related workshop. Instructors will be present at all lab sessions to answer participants’ questions and support their work on their assignments.
Assignments:
Required
- Each participant will be required to keep a “failure log” during the program and submit it as either a final, cumulative reflection essay or as a series of shorter reflections written throughout the program, describing what the participant learned from their experiences of failure.
- Over the course of the program, each participant will assemble a selection of digitized archival materials (2-5 items) that are connected by a particular theme or narrative they identify. In week 6, participants will have the opportunity to attend lab sessions dedicated to working on their final assignment: submission of a short, 3-minute video or audio clip in which they present their selected archival items and describe the theme or narrative of a digital exhibit they would like to make comprising those items.
Optional
- Students will have the option to assemble their items into a small digital exhibit, to be hosted in Omeka S by UCR Library, should they wish to do so. This component of the program is entirely optional; creating or not creating an exhibit will have no bearing on the awarding of the program’s Certificate of Completion.
Certificate Ceremony:
Week 6 of the program will wrap up with a final cohort check-in, including a guided reflection exercise to help participants summarize and consolidate what they have learned. Following this reflection session, all participants are invited to participate in a celebratory lunch that will include the certificate award ceremony.