Step 3: Explore examples

Invite your students to think about DHSS by looking at finished DHSS projects. You can use our students’ exhibits, or individual pieces of their exhibits, as models for their own DHSS projects:

• Denise Challenger (Harriet Tubman Institute): “Playin’ Mas, Play and Mas: A pedagogical Journey of children and caribana, 1970-1974”
• Juan Pablo Pinto Mendoza (CERLAC): “Popular Education in Revolutionary Times: Reflecting on Nicaragua’s popular education program in the 1980s”
• Robyn Le Lacheur (CRS): “Looking Back: Temporal and spatial connections of post-war migration and displacement through the eyes of the Toronto Telegram”
• Wendy Alejandra Medina De Loera (YCAR): “The Making of a Digital Archive, By a Non-Archivist: The David Wurfel Fonds”

You can also explore other projects we liked:

• York University Libraries was also involved in the creation and curation of the Scalar exhibit Yorkville and the Folk Revival in Toronto (written by undergraduate public history student Michael Primiani under the supervision of Stacy Allison-Cassin, the W.P. Scott Chair in E-Librarianship).

• The Portuguese Canadian History Project | Projeto de História Luso Canadiana (PCHP | PHLC) worked with the York University Libraries to create an exhibit that traces the community-based history of the Portuguese in Toronto.

• Digital Paxton: Digital Collection, Critical Edition, and Teaching Platform is a Scalar exhibit supported by The Historical Society of Pennsylvania and The Library Company of Philadelphia that our project team often used as an example of showcasing how Scalar could be used to host a digital collection, or digital archive, with historical material.

• Queen’s University Library has a collection of Virtual Exhibits hosted through WordPress and developed by undergraduate students. Our project team often used these exhibits as examples of scale and scope of an undergraduate exhibit, focusing the most on The Young Ladies’ Journal and Stereoscopic Views.

• Members of our project team were drawn to maps as ways to exhibit their digitized material. Both the Negro Travelers’ Green Book and OldNYC are large examples of exhibiting digital material through maps. See also Digital Harlem, which maps and presents information drawn from legal records, newspapers and other archival and published sources, about everyday life in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood in the years 1915-1930. Toronto the Bad is another example of mapping on a smaller scale. Toronto the Bad was designed as an undergraduate project in the “Development of Toronto” course taught in the Department of History, York University by PCHP | PHLC’s Gilberto Fernandes. Each “node” on the map was a contribution of one student.

• In building archives, we were inspired by Michelle Caswell’s article “Inventing New Archival Imaginaries: Theoretical Foundations for Identity-Based Community Archives” (2017), based on the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). As well as K.J. Rawson’s article “The Rhetorical Power of Archival Description: Classifying Images of Gender Transgression” (2017) based on the Digital Transgender Archive and the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University Library.

• Dear Sadie: Loves, lives, and remembrance is an exhibit directed and managed by Samantha Cutrara in her work at the Archives of Ontario. It is not a “flashy” exhibit but it demonstrates a good ratio of interpretive text to digital images that may work for an undergraduate assignment.

Compiled August 15, 2018