I am very interested in data curation skill sets required by the historian: What does data curation mean for the humanist? What do humanists need to know to work with data effectively? What skill sets are needed by the historian that analyzes and shares their data in digital form? What skill sets does the “average” historian need to have in dealing with data in digital formats (ex. .tiffs of rare texts from an archive, oral histories, pdfs of articles, video)? How do historians create effective research workflows? How does the historian effectively “archive” data in ways that can be shared in collaborations with other scholars? How do historians compartmentalize and standardize the collection of data for projects with their students?

There has been a great deal of discussion in the news lately about the cost of colleges texts and rightly so.  But not all Open Educational Resources are created equal, and most have been aimed at introductory classes or at replacing textbooks.  That can be quite helpful, but that doesn’t always meet the needs of upper-level undergraduate or graduate history classes.

I propose a session in which we talk about existing openly available resources for teaching history, identify the key components in good resources, discuss the possibilities of working with students to create openly available resources of our own, and collaborate on a Google doc to share those ideas.