In class on November 1st, students presented their group project proposals. Each group created a PowerPoint presentation to describe their project overview, sources, tools, and timetable. The purpose of these presentations was to demonstrate to Dr. Levy and the class the groups` ideas for the final project, while practicing public speaking and teamwork skills. There are five groups, and each presented on a different topic. Within each group, one theme was chosen based on the topic of their Scranton papers, that merged topics of different group member`s papers together. The presentations demonstrated this collaboration by each team member discussing their contribution to the project. When each team was discussing their use of different digital tools, many of the same tools were being discussed in different presentations. This showed that these digital tools can be used to visualize many different topics and can be used in many different ways. For example, Allie and James discussed making a timeline to demonstrate the correlation of World War II and the Jesuits taking over the University of Scranton. The group presenting on diversity explained that they will be creating a timeline as well, but to show the specific statistics of campus diversity over a certain period of time. The same tool being used for two different themes shows the versatility of digital tools, and shows how useful they can be to historians.
Julia Hack
