Edward Ayers

As this conference has made clear, the benefits of incorporating research into undergraduate education are rich and manifold. There is nothing like sharing a lab bench or poring over a shared text to bridge the roles of teacher and student. These kinds of intense and personalized experiences embody education at its best.

But what do we do when we cannot afford one-on-one experiences, or even small classes? It is simply a fact of higher education, especially in our larger public institutions, that most teaching and learning takes place in groups—sometimes in large groups. Having experienced the satisfactions of working personally with undergraduates, I knew what I was missing when I taught my large class on the history of the American South. More important, I knew what my students were missing: the excitement and experience of original research.

I’ve struggled against that constraint throughout my teaching career and have devised several strategies to overcome it. Because I have taught at a place with rich collections in the subject I teach and because I have found great allies in our library, since 1980 I have sent over a hundred students each year into microfilm and manuscript collections where few undergraduates usually venture. Students have consistently reported that their discoveries in the newspapers, diaries, and letters were thrilling. The very resistance of those primary sources, with their broken fonts and inscrutable handwriting, made their secrets all the more precious when they came to light.

This kind of independent original research worked well for two decades, but something increasingly troubled me about it. All that work, all that discovery, and only the student and the professor or teaching assistant ever saw it. Wouldn’t it make more sense if that effort and its results could become collaborative and cumulative? Rather than simply writing papers, getting them back with comments, and then filing them away (or worse), wouldn’t it be great if we could use that work to create something for others to use?

This had never occurred to me back in the analog days, of course, because there was no alternative. But in the era of Wikipedia, this dissipation of energy seemed a waste. I wondered if it might not be possible to build a moderated wiki, a database for which the entries would be carefully vetted? And could those entries be shared, within the same semester, so that even a class of 180 could engage in collaborative research?

I sketched a plan on a napkin in the Detroit airport—at a burrito place, I think it was—and asked my young, energetic, and talented collaborators at the Virginia Center for Digital History—Andrew Torget and Scott Nesbit—to see if they could design a database that would permit moderated entries to be entered despite the narrow window of time in a crowded class schedule. I asked my friends in the special collections, microfilm, reserve, and reference sections in Virginia’s libraries if they would be game for even greater burdens than I’d asked of them before. I asked my teaching assistants if they would be willing to be pioneers in a process that promised to be quite labor intensive. They all proclaimed themselves ready to tackle the new challenges and so off we went. All that remained was to enlist the innocents who had registered for my class and showed up on the first day expecting something like what their friends had taken the year before. I was honest, both in my descriptions of just how weird this would be and how excited I was by the prospect, and so most of them stayed with us.

You’ll hear in a moment what this harrowing experience looked like from the viewpoint of Scott, who served in both the technical and teaching trenches for this experiment. And you’ll hear what it looked like from the viewpoint of Murre Martindale, an undergraduate student who found herself swept up in the enterprise as well.

As you can see on the Web site for the course (at http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/HIUS323), we constructed a tightly choreographed syllabus that introduced students to each of the skills and each set of information they needed to participate in this enterprise. My colleagues came up with a database for southern history that we called, imaginatively enough, the Southern History Database. Students received random assignments for six-month periods in the nineteenth-century American South and were told to document twenty events in both secondary and primary sources. They pored over every kind of reference book and then plunged into the primary sources. The students turned in drafts and discussed their trials and discoveries in discussion sections. They received instruction from extraordinarily patient librarians in dealing with forms of knowledge storage few undergraduates confront.

After six weeks of intense activity, the students were ready to upload their vetted, edited, and revised event entries into the database. They copied and pasted text from Word files into windows on the Web browser and watched as their words became part of a large and complex organism. Twenty events times 180 students multiplied geometrically because the events could be searched for many different purposes and arrayed in a number of ways. Our allies in the library’s Digital Research and Instructional Services division devised strategies for these events to be mapped on to maps of the South, despite the complications of continually changing county boundaries. Students, able to search and sort by place, keyword, date, title, and scope, wrote papers based not only on their own research but on the research of their colleagues, seeing patterns that would have been invisible only weeks before.

The students worked remarkably hard on these nested assignments because they knew their work would be shared with the world as well as with one another. They worked hard because they had never written database entries before and because there were absolutely no models for this kind of history.

All of this complex machination, miraculously, seemed to work so I decided to change it for this fall. Instead of events, students would now write “episodes,” new forms of brief historical narrative. Whereas events looked like encyclopedia entries, episodes would look like very short stories, moments in time that revealed something about the larger patterns in which they were embedded. The processes of research would be similar, but instead of being assigned a relatively brief time in the South students were assigned a place in the South and told to study it for five years. They would have to master not only a particular era but also a particular locale, ranging from a single well-documented county to a large area of a poorly documented state. They would have to dig deeper for these episodes, burrowing beneath public events to private experiences.

My new set of teaching assistants pulled this off with remarkable good will, but also with considerable exhaustion. I think I over-reached this fall, intoxicated with the boundlessness of a database and last year’s success, and would recommend that others who use this strategy do fewer entries as well as possible.

Despite my miscalculations, both the teaching assistants and the students tell me the model works. The idea of collaborative and cumulative research takes advantage of a large class, building something big enough to be of use to the class itself and to others in the world who are interested in the same subject. It uses technology in a powerful but unobtrusive way, concentrating the technical matters in the hands of experts and presenting a familiar face of web-browser and word processor to students who might otherwise be threatened by the idea of taking a class built around technology. It integrates the resources of the library into education in a systematic way and enlists as allies people skilled in managing information.

This model of collaboration carries another advantage as well: it permits different institutions to build on the work of one another. Thanks to a grant from the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, the Southern History Database is currently being refitted and renamed to serve more general purposes. It will soon become an American History Database, as schools in different parts of the country take advantage of their own particular strengths in sources and student interest. Beyond that, it could be extended into any kind of course in which cumulative and collaborative discovery might take place. And that, of course, could be every kind of course.

All that sounds pretty good from my telling, but now I turn the lectern over to Scott Nesbit, a key ally in this entire enterprise, to hear something closer to the truth.

Scott Nesbit

Thank you, Mr. Ayers. I would like now to address the problem of how we were able to create such a project. The simple answer is that we partnered with existing groups at the University of Virginia. Under the auspices of the Virginia Center for Digital History, the teaching associates for “The Rise and Fall of the Slave South” course pursued relationships with institutions within the University of Virginia Library system. First, the Library’s Digital Research and Instructional Services provided valuable programming expertise. Staff members created the database, mapping tools, and search engine for our class, as well as much needed technical support and troubleshooting. We also worked intimately with staff in the Small Special Collections Library, who generously devoted time and resources to our class. Before the class even began, members targeted holdings within the collections that they thought would be especially useful for the students to use. They worked to provide extra staffing for the times that students were sure to invade their beautiful reading room. Special Collections gave its full cooperation, including feedback on how to improve students’ research experience in the future. Likewise, the Periodicals and Government Documents departments of Alderman Library provided their expertise to train students to use microfilm. Lastly, the project depended on graduate teaching assistants and undergraduate students’ willingness to devote their energy to the project, for it turned out to be quite a lot of work.

But in the end, it seemed to me, as an instructor and developer of the database, to be worth the significant effort. We came closer than we otherwise would have to our goal: To recreate for our students the kinds of engagement in which we ourselves participate-- the back and forth between our primary sources and the scholarly conversation that has taken up the task of interpreting those sources. In the words of one of my students, who was reflecting on the project, in that semester they “became historians.” And is not this the goal of undergraduate education at a research university? Modeling engaged scholarship and incorporating students into that work, so that they might become more informed and more humane members of society? To further this goal, I would like to introduce one of my students from the course, Murre Martindale, who will talk about her experiences as an undergraduate user of this class project.

Murre Martindale

I took Mr. Ayers’s class, “The Rise and Fall of the Slave South,” last Fall. It is perennially popular at UVA, which I’m sure he would be too modest to tell you. I have been asked by Mr. Ayers and Scott to give you all a little of the student’s perspective on the actual creation and use of the database. I will quickly tell you a little bit about the research my fellow students and I did for the project, and then attempt to frame that research as part of a larger story about the nineteenth-century South in particular, but more generally about the ways we learn about history as undergrads and the possibilities a project like this one provides for contextualizing your average specialized research project and making it into something much larger. Finally, I’d like to share my experience with the database – playing around with it, using it for research – and particularly using it to harness my fellow students’ research not only to form a larger narrative about the nineteenth century South, but to learn from it as well.

First, just a bit about the research we did. My assigned time period was the second half of 1873. I spent the bulk of my time combing primary sources, mostly microfilms of every old Southern newspaper I could find – everything from the Richmond Dispatch to the Montgomery Advertiser – looking for events that might have been overlooked by the history books but that said something important about daily life in the South. One example of an event I found came from an August 13, 1873 article entitled “The Black Prophet,” in the Charleston News and Courier. The article reported a massive religious revival, “one of the greatest religious demonstrations ever seen in this country,” an exodus led by a former slave named Bobo, who brought his congregation out of the land of their enslavement and into Tennessee on foot. A relatively peaceful event like this one never made Mr. Ayers’s class lectures nor had any books written about it, but in the context of other events scattered throughout the 1800s – like Nat Turner’s violent rebellion in 1831 – this small-town account of one particular religiously-based uprising takes on a new, and much broader historical significance.
I know you all did not come here for a history lesson, but I used that example to try to show how the database allowed us as students to put all the arcane newspaper articles and plantation owners’ diaries we read into a cohesive story with a multiplicity of perspectives and variation that would be impossible to achieve in a typical history paper. The sheer size of the class and scope of the project – 150 students researching 100 years of Southern history - meant that our collective efforts created a much richer portrait of what constituted “the rise and fall of the slave south” than simply reading a secondary source or going to Mr. Ayers’s lectures could provide (though his lectures are very engaging and informative!). The information that shaped the database’s picture of the South, once processed and uploaded onto the internet, made the complex dialectic between general and particular views of the South’s history visible, accessible, and even searchable. The keywords and maps make it easy to trace changes in certain major areas, like race relations or education, from year to year and county to county.
This is where I think the database’s real strength lies: It provides instant access to both the particular and the general, with supporting primary research cited and readily available for each instance. I think any student of history – Southern or otherwise, undergrad or graduate – can benefit from a few minutes online with the database for this reason. For me, it was a vivid illustration of the point good history teachers (and TAs) always try to impress upon their students: That history itself is not on a predetermined, cohesive trajectory. Rather, it is the sum of thousands of variegated and often inconsistent local events which come together over time to form a pattern, however checkered, that we can and should analyze for ourselves.

References

Web site for the course: HIUS323: The Rise and Fall of the Slave South (http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/HIUS323)