Virtual Guidebook to the History of New York City

2016 Seed Grant

A virtual guidebook to the history of NYC will be developed using WordPress and integrated into a Fall 2016 history course. As an assignment for the course, each student will research and contribute an entry for the site, finding primary sources and writing captions and analytical text. Visitors to the site will be able to view entries on a map, as well as sorted by category (such as events and landmarks). Students will also create their own tags (for example, “civil unrest” or “Robert Moses”), allowing them to design new ways of sorting content themselves.

This site will provide students with hands-on training as historians as they research and analyze primary sources and write narratives that explore the history of various New York City landmarks, events, and neighborhoods. The project will also encourage students to think like curators, as they consider how to present complex information for public consumption. Finally, students will gain exposure to the growing field of the digital humanities and gain fluency in WordPress. Each year when I teach the course, students will contribute a new set of entries and further fill in the map, making this project very fluid and collaborative.

Fieldston, Sara, “Virtual Guidebook to the History of New York City” (2016). Digital Humanities. 9.
http://scholarship.shu.edu/dh/9