CML pedagogy was the topic last week when three scholars from the Center for Mason Legacies and an archivist peer presented at the Iona University Institute for Thomas Paine Studies conference, "Teaching American and Digital Revolutions." Their presentation, “Reimagining Teaching Historical Methods Through Exploring the American Revolution,” discussed probing early American documents using digital methods. The panel included two George Mason faculty members, George Oberle III, associate professor of history and history librarian, and Alyssa Toby Fahringer, digital scholarship consultant, and two alums, Anthony Guidone, PhD History ’23, and Georgia Brown, MS History ’19 and MLIS Drexel University.
Brown today assists CML scholarship in her role as lead archivist and manager at the Fairfax Historic Records Center. Guidone, whose dissertation was directed by historian and CML faculty partner Rosemarie Zagarri, was instrumental in foundational CML work like the Mason Family Papers project (an ongoing prototype). Now an assistant professor at Radford University, he is helping build that school’s digital history program.
Oberle opened by explaining how he has been using eighteenth-century Mason family wills and account books to train undergraduate majors and honors students in historical methods, teaching them to turn questions about original documents into full lines of inquiry about debt, slave-system wealth, women’s property rights and related topics. Oberle shares with them his librarians’ ease with historical databases, secondary sources, timelines and, leading into Georgia Brown’s area of expertise, Courthouse archives.
Brown presented on “Access and Utilization: The Role of Local Archives in the University Classroom,” covering her office’s unusually robust collections and accessibility. She explained her leadership, as the nation’s 250th anniversary approaches, to enable online public search of more county documents, including its vast cross-indexed directory of residents to 1880 and a similar “Slavery Index,” both painstakingly assembled on index cards decades ago by archivists and local volunteers.
In response to a question raised after her talk—“Out of all the counties in Virginia, why are Fairfax and Mason always producing such valuable resources?” —Brown reflected on her office’s success. In addition to having “some pretty cool Americans” in its records, she said, the courthouse repository benefits from having “a network of institutions—the library, the county and court archives, and the local university—working together and sharing information,” as well as the financial and practical support it receives for “preserving, studying, and innovatively sharing” its resources.
Guidone’s talk, “From Account Book to Dataset: Global Trade in Salem, Massachusetts,” covered how he uses merchants’ logs to help undergraduates perceive an interconnected eighteenth-century world and “conceptualize global trade as a network, not a single voyage.” As he directs them in collaborating to create datasets from the logs—learning key tools like standardization of terms—digital history methods lead to fruitful research questions.
Fahringer’s presentation, “From Sources to (Digital) Exhibit,” addressed the practical methodologies and web platforms used in CML teaching. Working on the Omeka platform, students have helped in recent years to build out rich CML resources and narratives like the Mason Family Papers and Black Lives Next Door, which includes multiple exhibits like Geographies of Inequity. Fahringer sees the process as enabling students to “make their scholarship digital, public-facing, and interactive, learning to use the software in innovative ways.” Students further learn to enhance those exhibits using research and embedded content they create with other digital tools, such as TimelineJS, StoryMapJS, and ArcGIS Storymaps, for which Fahringer shared examples of student uses, including interactive annotations on documents tied to a local “Children of the Confederacy” youth club’s “John Mosby” chapter and another project, from CML’s Black Lives Next Door, using maps to document Black students’ isolation in the early years of George Mason College, when they constituted less than one percent of its student body.
October 03, 2024