Taught by Professors Joy H. Calico and Peggy Setje-Eilers, with vital assistance from Lindsey Fox, GIS Coordinator (Heard Library) and Clifford Anderson, Director of Scholarly Communications (Heard Library)
Vanderbilt University’s Commons Seminars are experimental 1-credit courses offered to first-year students each spring semester. In S15 this seminar did two things, and the final project was a synthesis of the two. One of those things was cultural history: we surveyed the culture and geopolitics of twentieth-century Berlin by focusing on several events since 1900. The other was an introduction to some of the questions and tools of the digital humanities based on the premise of HyperCities, “a collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment” http://hypercities.com/. Students learned to use several digital tools (GitHub, Atom, TileMill, Mapbox, GeoJSON) over the course of the semester and worked on group projects in time travel, curating tours of Berlin at particular historical moments since 1900 built on historical maps. The tours include still and moving images, audio, historical documents, and prose. This website features the students’ final projects.
Special thanks to Professor Todd Presner, Faculty Chair of the Digital Humanities Program at UCLA, and Albert Kochaphum, GIS Assistant at the Institute for Digital Research and Education at UCLA, for all their help!