Teaching Atlanta: Using local projects to bring digital heritage into the classroom

Summary

How do English, History, and Archaeology professors begin collaborating? In our case it was our mutual interests in the history of Atlanta and incorporating digital methods into our courses. In this paper we discuss our intertwined collaborations at Georgia State University. These involve Wharton's incorporation of archaeological materials from the MARTA archaeological collection in her Expository Writing course. Students in this course take advantage of the computing resources in the library's Collaborative University Research and Visualization Environment (CURVE) and prepare 3D digital models and material culture studies analysis of objects from the MARTA collection. Similar projects using the MARTA collection are occurring in more traditional archaeology classes as well. Eventually, the models, object descriptions, and historical analyses created by students will be integrated into the 3D Atlanta Project, an effort to create a digital, three-dimensional, interactive view of a city block in the heart of GSU's downtown Atlanta campus as it looked in the 1920s-1930s. Paralleling these student-focused efforts is an effort to build pedagogical infrastructure for local instructors. In general, we have found that local projects are an easier way for faculty to get students involved in hands-on research, and the local lens inspires students’ excitement and curiosity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Methods and Models for Teaching Digital Archaeology and Heritage

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16987