Eastern Illinois University Homepage

This brown-bag forum, organized by Debra Reid, professor in the Department of History, will launch Digital Humanities Teaching Talks, a new feature of Eastern Illinois University's new Center for Translational Humanities.

Reid will briefly describe the ways she has used Ancestry.com in history courses (including sharing the assignment sheet and grading matrix), and then will open the floor for discussion. Brown bag participants will identify the relative merits and strengths of digitized collections such as Ancestry.com, but will also identify potential misuse and pitfalls students may encounter when they rely on digitized collections to access primary documents.

Participants can peruse the following sources in preparation for discussion of the uses and misuses of digital sources:

• Public records: http://www.Ancestry.com
• Private publications/newspapers: Prairie Farmer via Farm, Field and Fireside, University of Illinois - http://www.library.illinois.edu/news/FFF.html
• Monographs/Special Topics: The Core Historical Literature of Agriculture, Cornell University - http://chla.library.cornell.edu/
• Digitized Oral History Interviews: Audio-Video Barn, Illinois State Museum - http://avbarn.museum.state.il.us/

For additional information, please contact Dr. Reid at 217-581-7272 or dareid@eiu.edu.