Putting Primary Source Material Online: A Case Study from New York University
February 10, 2012
I. Introduction to ENGL-GA.2957-1- Topics in Literary Theory I: Literary Archives and Web Development, Fall, 2011
II. How this course came about - an interdisciplinary approach
III. Collaboration between the Computer Science Department and the New York Universy Library and Archives departments
Computing in the Humanities in the Arts is an undergraduate course in the Department of Computer Science which is offered every other year to Computer Science majors and Web Programming minors. This course has been offered three times to date (Fall, 2007; Spring, 2009 and Spring, 2011). The capstone project in this course is an on-line digital archive based on primary source materials. Many students have elected to use source materials in the NYU University Archives collection (http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/arch/index.html) although some students have used materials that they personally own (e.g. historical collection of 19th century family photographs, a family collection of rare American crystal goblets, an early 20th century family-owned stamp collection and other projects).
Topics in Literary Theory I: Literary Archives and Web Development is a graduate course given in the fall, 2011 semester by the English department. This course covered topics specifically related to working with digital literary texts such as Text Encoding (using TEI/XML - see http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml ) and working with primary sources materials from the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University.
Copyright issues permitting, students are encouraged to post their final archival sites to the Computer Science Department webserver for permanent storage. The NYU University Archives links to their sites (http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/arch/digcomp.htm) and I provide a list of sites as well for the undergraduate students at http://cs.nyu.edu/~deena/DSE_DH_studentPages.html
IV. Where to go from here
V. Introducing the students