Courses

The following courses were developed with support from the EPI Grant and continue to be taught periodically.

GEOG170/HST170 Historical Geography: Mapping American Childhoods

Professor Meghan Cope (Geography) with support from Daisy Benson (Library Faculty) teaching the 1-credit GEOG195/HST195.
Students learned to access historical materials and to visualize their independent project data and analysis using Social Explorer (US Census data mapping), Hathi Trust, Ancestry.com, WordPress, TimelineJS, StoryMapJS, and Excel. Drafts of the final projects in the form of posters were shared in an interactive exhibit in Nov. 2017 in which 40 students from a “Sociology of Childhood” (SOC128) class, as well as other guests, attended and gave feedback to the Historical Geography students through comment cards, in-person questions, and discussion of results. Final projects were websites which can be seen on Professor Cope's Mapping American Childhoods Website.

POLS095A & POLS095Lab01, “ISSP: Global Gender Inequality”

Professor Caroline Beer (Political Science)
Students chose different indicators from the World Bank’s Databank to measure gender inequality across countries. They mapped these data and also used Excel to display them in different types of graphs. Then they developed hypotheses to explain why gender equality varies across countries and collected data to test their hypotheses. Each final paper included correlation coefficients between their dependent and independent variables and scatterplots to visually display the relationships. Professor Beer covered the 1-credit visualization lab herself, using the functionality of Excel.

HST295C/HST395B, “Visualizing America”

Professor Melanie Gustafson (History) with support from Hope Greenberg (Center for Teaching and Learning)
The laboratory component of the class allowed students to critically evaluate digital projects while learning and practicing digital skills (ThingLink, word-clouds, PDF annotations, WordPress, TimelineJS) that were structured around a set of readings and assignments about histories of the built environment. The capstone group project, chosen by the students, was the building of an Omeka exhibit investigating the culture and politics of Burlington’s Memorial Auditorium in the 1980s. It included digitizing and providing metadata for primary source documents, then writing a framing narrative.

GEOG061, “Geography of Vermont”

Professor Cherie Morse (Geography) with support from an undergraduate TA
The visualization lab taught students Illustrator in projects constructing ‘broadsheets’ to demonstrate Vermont themes. Prof. Morse found the visualization lab to be an effective ‘equalizer’ in the course, whose students ranged from first-years to graduating seniors with a range of experiences with Vermont and the discipline of Geography. The TA was paid by the EPI grant and trained in Adobe Illustrator by the Media Lab.

REL196B, “Religion, Sound, and Space”

Professor Vicki Brennan (Religion) with support from the Media Lab. Andy Kolovos (Vermont Folklife Center)
Students learned basic ethnographic methods and mapping techniques, and then how to create and edit soundscape recordings using Audacity and generated short documentary videos; they also learned to analyze and present their findings in a variety of digital media formats. The Media Lab provided support for using WordPress, Google Maps, Audacity, and several other digital tools. Thanks to funding from the EPI grant, the Vermont Folklife Center taught two workshops on how to conduct interviews and create archival-quality recordings. See final projects.

GEOG 273/ENVS 295 J: “Advanced Topics in Political Economy and Ecology: Making Southern Africa”

Professor Ingrid Nelson (GEOG). Using digital mapping, material production, and critical visualizations, students explored multiple dimensions of real and imagined spaces of Southern Africa through multi-media approaches. The students initiated and executed an exhibit at the Student Research Conference in April 2018 that showcased the five group projects based on themes: popular economies, controlling water, fashion, processing gendered traumas, and perceptions of Southern Africa.