Victoria Landry

Jana Remy 

Intro to Digital Humanities 

COVID-19 Remote Learning Archive 

The COVID-19 Remote Learning Archive is an initiative to curate an archive that will act as historical data from college students’ individual or shared academic-based experiences during the 2019 Coronavirus pandemic that carried over into 2020 and 2021. This archive will be available to access by all college students who attend universities within the United States to share how the pandemic directly affected their educational experiences. Participants will be encouraged to share these experiences through an archive that is based on featuring  personally narrated blurbs, videos, voice recordings, hyperlinks and imagery. The archive should be built upon by future students as universities continue to make adjustments and changes in an academic setting as we are gradually coming out of the pandemic. The collected narratives provide future generations of students, professors and scholars with rich first-hand historical data from individuals directly impacted from remote learning and academic adjustments. 

The intended audience for this project is college students who are enrolled in schools within the United States as a way to narrow the focus. This archive is not meant for students who graduated pre-pandemic, but rather for students who were already enrolled during the emergence of COVID-19 and for college students post-pandemic. This audience also includes international students who currently attend universities within the United States or who were attending a college in the United States during the start of the pandemic. 

This archive will utilize a technology, ArcGIS StoryMaps, which is a “web-based software that allows you to share your maps in the context of narrative text” and other multimedia content (ArcGIS StoryMaps, 2021). This content includes imagery, video content, hyperlinks, text, and other embedded media content to tell an overarching story. No datasets will be requested, as this project is meant to create a new historical data set. 

As there is limited access to student records and contact information due to “Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act laws”, this archive cannot deliver guaranteed responses from students (FERPA, 2020). While we hope that our contact within Universities across the United States will encourage the participation of responses for the project, it is not required and is solely a participation based archive. Additionally, this archive cannot deliver guaranteed responses from already graduated college students who may not have access to their school emails to receive information about the project. 

This team will consist of professors within the Humanities field at Universities across the United States. If there is not a humanities program at a college with potential participants, then the dean of the college will be used as a substitute to share the project with its student body. It is necessary that the team has a direct relationship to the students participating in order to maximize response rates.

The schedule for this project would be rapid. The ArcGIS StoryMaps webpage would be developed in a three-week time frame, and dispersed the following week after development in order to ensure accessibility to current college seniors who would access their student email for information directing them to the webpage. After the webpage has been shared with students who fit the criteria, response time-frames are optional. There is not a designated time-frame for the end of the project, as it is meant to be built upon over time by students who are documenting their past or current experience in relation to the objectives for this project.  

Appendix A: Mockups of Interface

Mockup 1:

Mockup 2:

Appendix B: Environmental Scan 

The humanities places a huge emphasis on collecting and displaying data, especially that of historic data. For the last two years we have all been living through a historical event, the Coronavirus pandemic. While there are several projects that utilize archive based data regarding COVID-19, there are very few resources that highlight student experiences in an effective way based on geographic location. This gap in effective data collection from the proposed audience creates an opportunity to utilize an available resource, ArcGIS StoryMaps, to capture memories from arguably one of the largest historical events during our lifetime. Existing projects in their field with comparable subject matter and approaches have been examined to provide this project with a basis to grow and expand from. 

The first identified digital humanities project is similar in approach, and was a memory based archive curated from ArcGIS StoryMaps titled COVID-19 Memory Archival Project. This project was developed at The Duke Kunshan University in Jiangsu, China and was a professor run initiative sent out to students to encourage “reflection on how the pandemic affected their livelihood” (Zhang, 2020). However, the reach was only within that one University and responses primarily contained information about how the pandemic affected their personal lives. There was little to no information about the students academic experiences. A con to this project is that the aim and audience did not quite match. By only requesting responses from students and staff within the university they were unable to accurately meet their objective of documenting how the pandemic affects the livelihood of ‘people’. The project I am proposing has an aim directed towards university students and is academically driven, thus focusing the responses specifically to how the pandemic altered their academic life, not personal life. This project also did not showcase the map in its presentation but was more narrative focused because all of the students were in the same location, creating a gap in the capabilities of the resource they utilized.

Various other organizations utilized ArcGIS StoryMaps as a way to connect people who had valuable resources and stories to share with others. The RedCross created a StoryMap to highlight their mission activities and document their work. They successfully “utilized the platform to showcase the scope of their reach” while volunteering by highlighting the stories on the map itself (Bell, 2020). My proposed archive will use the map as a core element to highlight the narratives being displayed, as ArcGIS StoryMaps key component is how the geographic location represents the narrative intended to be told. The home page will feature the map and make the stories accessible per college location. 

Another digital humanities project similar in subject matter, is the “San Diego State University COVID-19 Memory Project” which requires you to fill out a questionnaire that is then compiled into an archive of memories specifically for the SDSU community (SDSU, 2021). The project asks questions related to how the pandemic has affected students in their academic life, however, there is nowhere to view the archive and it is limited to that campus in particular. There was a large gap in resources for this project, being that there was nowhere to view the responses and the responses were contained to that particular community. In my proposed archive, all responses will be viewable to the public so that the project reach is large and available to the general public. 

Developments within the software I plan to use, ArcGIS, make focusing on the map element of the software easy to use and add to. Multiple people can edit a StoryMap by co-authoring a collection. These permissions are accessible by “updating sharing capabilities and publishing the collection” with a group update capability (ArcGIS, 2021). The alternative to this is to publish the content with the Everyone setting and emailing it to the account holder to be added. Both options make the reach of this project feasible. This proposed project would contribute to the humanities by utilizing ArcGIS software to reach a large audience and display a relatively new historical database collection in regards to geographic location. 

Funding is essential to obtain the reach for the desired proposal. The NEH, National Endowment for the Humanities, would be a perfect fit for this type of project. The NEH has twenty-four million dollars to allocate towards 225 digital humanities projects nationwide. The NEH gives grants to support the preservation of “historic collections, documentaries, and scholarly research”, all of which fit the criteria for the proposed project (NEH, 2021). 

From the academic reading, What is Spatial History, we can learn that ArcGIS forces individuals to think about different kinds of representational space. Seeing how the space correlates to the data being displayed is essential for “revealing historical relations that might go unnoticed otherwise and it generates questions” for future historians (White, 2010). By utilizing ArcGIS, we will be able to see how the narrative of students correlates to their representational space as a historical archive to draw questions from later. Another course reading, Humanities Approach to Graphical Display, discusses how graphic display can often cause us to participate in “interpretation bias” (Drucker, 2011). To avoid this, ArcGIS acts as a tool that both displays the graphic data while also prompting the desired interpretation with its text based applications to avoid misconstruing the information that is visually displayed. 

I curated a ArcGIS webpage for a practicum project that helped me explore how to correlate a topic to a geographic location. I was able to map filming locations for a TV show that was set in one town, but the actual footage was shot in a variety of cities all over the United States. The project taught me how visual representation is essential to understanding an overarching theme. This proposed archive should accomplish a similar goal of tying in the historical recollection of events from college students to the geographic location of where they went to school. This may open up dialogue for further analysis in the future, and provide an immediate resource for students to connect with people from all over the country who may have shared academic experiences. 

Link to Adobe Spark Video “Pitch”

https://spark.adobe.com/video/Ymu1r9ERdcfnD

Bibliography

Drucker, Johanna. (2011). DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html. Accessed 19 May 2021.

White, Richard. (2010). Spatial History Project. http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29. Accessed 19 May 2021.

“The National Endowment for the Humanities.” The National Endowment For The Humanities, https://www.neh.gov/home. Accessed 19 May 2021.

Coauthor a Story or a Collection—ArcGIS StoryMaps | Documentation. https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-storymaps/author-and-share/co-author-a-story.htm. Accessed 19 May 2021.

Bell, Michelle Bush, Chris Nickola, Jennifer. “Connecting People with Lifesaving Resources Across the Globe During COVID-19 | Storyteller Role Enables More ArcGIS StoryMaps during COVID-19.” ArcGIS Blog, 3 June 2020, https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/story-maps/mapping/storytelling-with-maps-supports-users-across-the-globe-during-covid-19-2/.

SDSU COVID-19 Memory Project | SDSU Library. https://library.sdsu.edu/covid-19-memory-project. Accessed 19 May 2021.

Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). US Department of Education (ED), 15 Dec. 2020, https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html.

“ArcGIS StoryMaps.” ArcGIS StoryMaps, https://storymaps.arcgis.com. Accessed 19 May 2021.

Zhang, Chi. (2020). Call for Participation: COVID-19 Memory Archival Project – Duke Kunshan University Humanities Research Center. https://sites.duke.edu/dkuhumanities/call-for-participation-covid-19-memory-archival-project/. Accessed 19 May 2021.

“Do Your Research!” The National Endowment for the Humanities, https://www.neh.gov/blog/do-your-research. Accessed 19 May 2021.