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Code4Lib Presentation: “The Possibly Impossible Research Project”: Using Digital Research and Social Media to Teach Archival Research Methods SLIDE 1: Cover slideHi! I am Dr. Rebekah Fitzsimmons from the Georgia Institute of Technology. My presentation today will detail an undergraduate student research project that I designed last spring titled “The Possibly Impossible Research Project.” Before we get started, I want to recognize that because I’m using a lot of screenshots from Twitter, the print gets pretty small on some of these slides – I’ve uploaded the whole PPT to my website so you all can have the chance to zoom the text to your own comfort level. In my presentation today, I will discuss how this multimodal digital research project provided Georgia Tech students with in-depth instruction into digital research processes in order to produce public facing digital artifacts and improve the Baldwin’s “Guiding Science” annotated bibliography. I will walk you through the assignment’s components in the hopes that this project can serve as a model for engaging undergraduate students with archival research and digital methods of presenting their findings. QUESTIONS AT THE ENDSLIDE 2: Collaboration PartnersThis assignment was made possible by a collaborative effort between the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida, the Writing and Communication Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Georgia Tech Libraries. As the instructor of the Georgia Tech Writing Course, I worked closely with the curator of the Baldwin, Suzan Alteri, on designing and executing the assignment. Additionally, the Georgia Tech subject librarians instructed students on research methodologies and Georgia Tech digital resources to aid them in their research process. SLIDE 3: Academic context for ProjectSo I want to step back and give you a little context for the project. The contributions of women to early scientific discoveries and dissemination of international scientific theory are still largely unknown outside of the fields of children’s literature and the history of education. SLIDE 4: Contributions of Women to ScienceThe work of women to promote scientific invention, discovery, and the development of the scientific method during the Victorian era especially is often neglected in both science and history fields. At this time, scientific discovery was often made in the home by amateur scientists, which provided women opportunities to engage in scientific research and discourse, including publishing instructional materials for children. However, the professionalization of the sciences shifted this work from the home to the academy, and women’s contributions to the existing base of scientific knowledge was often left out, ignored and, in some cases, maligned. SLIDE 5: Guiding Science ProjectIn response to this lost history, the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature embarked on a project to recover and make public the contributions of female writers from the long 19th century. In 2014, the Baldwin was awarded an American Libraries Association Carnegie-Whitney grant to develop a digital annotated bibliography of women-authored science books for children during the long nineteenth-century. As an ancillary to “Guiding Science: Publications by Women in the Romantic and Victorian Ages,” the George A. Smathers Libraries digitized 200 titles from the project to provide context to the bibliography and encourage use of these texts in teaching and research. Since the project was rooted in the idea of discovery, or uncovering the hidden work of these women, Alteri also felt it was important to add biographical information on these women, so readers would understand the time period and constraints under which these women were writing. After three years of research, Alteri was able to compile biographical information on 73 of the 123 women authors included in the project, but was unable to find sufficient information on 50 women, or about 40% of the included authors.SLIDE 6: SyllabusIt was with this research deficit in mind that Suzan and I collaborated to design an ENGL 1102 course that would provide Georgia Tech students the opportunity to contribute original research to this ongoing recovery project. The resulting course was titled “The History and Rhetoric of Science Writing for Children.” The course theme asked students to think through the ways rhetorical communities of science writing, especially those focused around education, changed given various historical moments. The course touched on the historical transformations of “scientific” ideas about race, gender, evolution, astronomy, mechanics, physical and mental health, professionalization, and science education from the Victorian age into the 21st century. If you’re interested in learning more about this course, I’m happy to discuss it more, or you can see the syllabus on my website. SLIDE 7: Project HeaderThe first unit of this course was built around the previously mentioned research question with an assignment dubbed “The Possibly Impossible Research Project.” This assignment asked the students to assist the curator of the Baldwin in researching the 50 female authors in the “Guiding Science” annotated bibliography about whom she had been unable to locate sufficient biographical information. So, now I will talk you though the main points of the final project assignment as well as the smaller scaffolding assignments. SLIDE 8: Assignment SheetEach student was assigned one author and asked to research and compile enough information to complete either a multimodal Wikipedia article or a short textual biography to be posted on the “Guiding Science” website. Each student was given all the information Alteri had already compiled as a starting point, which might include lifespan dates, family information, known pen-names, or nation of origin. However, this assignment acknowledged from the outset that the chance of authoring any kind of public-facing biography might not be achievable. From the very title of the assignment, it was important for students to understand that the ultimate goal of the project might well be out of reach (as it was for the curator.) Therefore, the assignment was structured to help students learn good research practices, engage with various digital learning communities, and document their work with an eye towards process over final product. SLIDE 9: Mix and Match portfolio The final project deliverable was a research portfolio, which permitted students to mix and match at least three elements based on the information they found. (CLICK) Students were aiming to include one of the public facing biographies, (CLICK) but if they were unable to complete one, (CLICK)they could include an archived version of their Twitter research journal, a research narrative describing their research process, or archives of correspondence with experts. (CLICK) Most students opted for different combinations, such as a Baldwin bio, a research narrative and an MLA work Cited. SLIDE 10: Failure built inFrom the very beginning, the assignment warned students that their task might be impossible. As the instructor, knowing that the information the students were looking for might be impossible to find, given the age of the material, the limited digitization of those materials, and the historical lack of records about women in the Victorian age, I structured the assignment so that students could fulfill the required learning outcomes of the assignment and earn an A even if they could not complete one of the biographies. (CLICK) Ultimately, the assignment sheet instructed: “Students should approach this project as a journey into the unknown. They should be prepared to make mistakes, get messy, and potentially come up empty handed. A large part of the project will include figuring out how to make failure and frustration productive, how to document a research process so that future researchers might benefit, and how to enjoy the research rabbit holes.” Therefore, while this assignment offered students an opportunity to uncover and make meaning as researchers in their own right, it also functioned as an introduction to the process of “real” research, including the mental and emotional labor of failure within research.SLIDE 11 Twitter Research JournalSo that is the main gist of the assignment. Now I’ll talk about the two scaffolding assignments that supported that larger project. In an attempt to emphasize the concept of research as a process, I asked students to keep a public-facing research journal using Twitter. Over the course of the month-long project, students were required to send 30 original tweets about their research process and 10 reply tweets that included the course hashtag (#1102kidsci) and the assignment hashtag (#RJ). Students were encouraged to send their tweets about their ideas, successes, failures, frustrations, questions, search terms, and correspondence in real time, as their research unfolded. The informal nature of Twitter, along with the multimodal components like images, links, and videos, allowed students to share a wider variety of information with peers and the public, regardless of the character limit. As a result, this form of a research journal recorded the ups and downs of the research process and made the usually invisible labor of research visible, tangible, and human. SLIDE 12: Progress Reports via WordpressThe students also wrote blog posts on the course blog as a public facing progress report, which detailed the work they had done so far, their methodological approaches, and their successes and failures at the midway point of the project. This scaffolding process served a couple of functions; first it ensured that students had at least started their research process three weeks before the project was due. Second, it gave students who were less comfortable with the short form of Twitter an opportunity to gather their thoughts in a longer, more traditional format. Third, it opened an additional avenue for feedback both from the instructor and the other students in the course. Many students also pointed to these progress reports as a motivational jumping off point; this was where many students admitted they were struggling and where many others admitted to having just gotten started. Overall, this progress report helped open the floodgates in terms of peer-to-peer interaction and supportive collaboration. SLIDE 13: 4 Major GoalsMoving from the assignment structure to the pedagogical goals, I’m going to outline the 4 major goals I had going into this project, followed by some of the major outcomes for the students and for myself. I had four major pedagogical goals that all worked together. I want to talk through these goals in order to give you a sense of how the project functioned and also how you might use this structure as a model for future archival research projects. SLIDE 14: Goal 1: ContentThe first pedagogical goal was to have the students engage with historical records and rhetorical spaces of eighteenth and nineteenth century science as I previously mentioned. Given that this course was taught at a technical institute that only began accepting women into classes in the 1950s, and given the current social and political movements within the STEM fields and the #metoo movement more broadly, this seemed an important and relevant concept to engage with deeply. Obviously, this content goal would shift depending on the course and content under discussion in your own classrooms and libraries. SLIDE 15: Goal 2: Digital ResearchThe second goal was to help students move beyond Google and to harness digital research technologies, including social media, to find information. I’ve talked a little about how we used Twitter and Wordpress but a third form of digital networking included encouraging students to reach out to experts via email communication. An option for the final portfolio included an archive of correspondence with librarians, curators, publishers, archivists, or other scholars and I gave students an in-class tutorial on how to compose a polite, professional email asking for information or research assistance to complete strangers! This is the goal that seems most widely applicable when adapting this assignment for your own classrooms.SLIDE 16: Professor Doesn’t Know EverythingThe third goal was to undermine the expectation that the professor already knew all the answers and it was the students’ job to re-discover the “right” answers. This assignment especially nullified the concepts explicated in Paulo Friere’s (1970) “banking” model of education that asserts “the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing” and “the teacher talks and the students listen — meekly,” (23). This is the part of the project that, I think, made the students the most uncomfortable – so much so that early on, many of them believed I was feigning ignorance when I would tell them that I honestly didn’t know which of these women would be the easiest to research or which had the most information out there to find. SLIDE 17: No Correct AnswerIn undermining the top-down banking model, this project further emphasized the concept of research and discovery as a process. Both the instructor and the Georgia Tech research librarians who instructed the class on digital research methodologies and available library resources, reiterated that the research students would likely be engaged in as civil engineers, computer-science developers, or architects would likely reflect this same kind of open-ended problem solving. These students are likely to find themselves in industries where they are asked to create a solution to a problem that has no preconceived “correct” answer. The exposure to this kind of problem, paired with the opportunity to conduct original research in a first year composition class where the stakes were relatively low, thus allowed students to embrace the challenge and reorient themselves towards a new way of thinking about research and their own educations. SLIDE 18: “Real Research”The fourth goal was intimately tied to the third; in asking first year students to engage in difficult, original research without the promise of results, the assignment actively set up many of these high-performing students to fail in order to teach them to cope with and work around setbacks. As many of you may have experienced in your own classrooms, contemporary students who face frustration or difficulty in completing a project may shut down, give up, or blame the instructor for a lack of clarity in directions or expectations. Therefore, the structure of the assignment was built around the risk of failure as a regular part of original research, thereby emphasizing the need to develop good research habits, such as recording and documenting the steps of a research process as well as on creative problem solving in the face of setbacks. SLIDE 19: Brick WallsManaging the risk of failure took the form of a five minutes check-in at the start of each class period; students were asked to discuss what they had or had not found, what resources had been useful, and where had they gone astray in the last few days. Early discussions were hesitant and limited, likely due to the fact that many students had not really started their projects yet. However, after the blog progress report (and the flurry of research and tweeting that took place the weekend prior), students became far more willing to admit to running into brick walls. Once the students were willing to share these failures with their peers, a focus on creative problem solving emerged. For example, as some students began to hear back from archivists and librarians, more students were willing to reach out via email to outside experts. As students reported success with specific digital resources available through our library’s subscription services, other students began to work with the librarians and databases to find archival records, images, census data, publication information and more. In asking students to confront these brick walls and frustrations, then move on to new approaches, this project mimicked likely scenarios researchers face in both academia and industry. One of the many threads of conversation the class repeatedly revisited during the project was how to manage frustration and failure from both a productivity standpoint and an emotional one. SLIDE 20: Digital CoachingThe constant discussion and reinforcement of the assignments ups and downs in class was also echoed in our digital interactions. The #RJ scaffolding component allowed for real time feedback and “coaching” from both myself and the Georgia Tech subject librarian, Karen Viars. We found ourselves responding frequently to students’ tweets with encouragement, reassurance, or the gif equivalent of a high five. These tweets allowed us an opportunity to give feedback at the same level of irreverence, humor, and emotion as the students engaged in research and to acknowledge and validate both the substantial work and emotional labor of the research process. SLIDE 21: Outcomes So, as we’re coming to the end of my talk, I’d like to point to some of the outcomes from this project, in terms of research output, student learning outcomes, and faculty take aways. SLIDE 22: Gif Game!First, and obviously most importantly, I really improved my gif game, after so much interaction with students on line via Twitter. That seems really important to mention. SLIDE 23: New ResearchBut seriously, at the conclusion of the Possibly Impossible Research Project, students submitted 28 short biographies for authors in the “Guiding Science” bibliography. A further nine authors now have ‘leads,’ or at least some information gathered by the students that can be used to conduct further research. Out of the 50 authors assigned to the students at Georgia Tech, only eight have no new additional information. (CLICK) In addition to the information contributed to the Baldwin, 11 students completed either new Wikipedia articles on their author, or edited and made significant improvements to their author’s existing Wikipedia pages. Ultimately, the students viewed the Wikipedia article as the pinnacle of achievement in this project, owing to the high standards for “verifiable” sources required by the Wikipedia community and multimodal components, such as images of the author, that they felt made a Wikipedia page “complete.”SLIDE 24: Unexpected DiscoveriesAs with any original research, the potential for unexpected discoveries made this project especially exciting. A few lucky students uncovered scandalous content about their authors that directly defied the stereotypical image of a children’s literature author they held in their minds. One student discovered evidence that her author had been sentenced to hard labor after being arrested for stealing; another student found newspaper articles accusing her author of adultery. One student uncovered a lead that indicated that Mary Trimmer might have been a fake name used by American publishers to capitalize on the success of the British author Sarah Trimmer. As students shared these discoveries via Twitter and during class discussion, their enthusiasm and surprise provided their classmates with both motivation and entertainment. SLIDE 25: No results still meant learningRegardless of how much information the students were able to locate, even the 8 students who turned in portfolios with “no results” reported feeling they had learned a significant amount from the project. While some reported a good deal of content knowledge acquisition, specifically about their author, the topic(s) on which she wrote, and Victorian-era society, most reported a new appreciation for “real” research, an expanded understanding of the resources available to them through the Institute library, and a growing appreciation for professional networking via digital platforms. Finally, the students had the opportunity to learn about the challenges, pitfalls, joys, and productive processes associated with original research in a relatively safe, low-stakes environment. The focus on process and documentation as the graded requirement of the assignment helped the students re-focus on methods rather than the final product. In classroom reflective discussions, many of the students reported that they felt far more confident to approach their research-driven major courses now that they had a more solid grounding on how to do “real” research. SLIDE 26: Student collaborationWhile one of the goals of the assignment was to teach students how to use social media to develop professional collaborative networks, the supportive and positive community that developed among the students within the #RJ hashtag discussions went far beyond the my expectations. In her reflective portfolio, Annie Lee wrote: “Slowly but surely, Twitter became the place for collaboration. Between following accounts that may have been of help and exchanging ideas with my peers, we were able to create a community that was constructive and rewarding.” SLIDE 27: Expert collaborationAs a result of the emphasis on digital networking, many students made contact with professors from other institutions, archivists, museum curators, and other researchers. Many expressed surprise at how helpful and responsive these professionals were, rather than being bothered by their requests for assistance. Many students cited the class lesson on writing audience centered professional emails (and sending thank you notes!) as one of the most beneficial parts of the project. While a large number of students ultimately received email responses that in essence read, “Sorry I have nothing for you but cool project!” a few did connect with professionals with a wealth of information that helped them further their research. SLIDE 28In fact, a number expressed the idea that until this project, asking for help had felt like a last resort or an admission of failure. Perhaps because failure was an expected part of this project or because collaboration was actively built into the project requirements, many students described a new outlook on asking for help. In his final portfolio, Zong-Rui Wee wrote that this project:Opened up a new side of research that I had never really explored – it is okayto reach out to authorities on a given subject to ask for help and to be pointed in the right direction. . . . I had struck a goldmine by reaching out to the museums and archives, and even when they had no physical resources for me, they had pointed me in the right direction. If reaching out to professors or archivists for information was not one of the few suggested options for the project, I would probably never have found as much information than I actually had. Teaching students how to approach fellow scholars in a collaborative spirit as a valid form of research thus became a major unexpected outcome of the project’s focus on networking and social media. SLIDE 29I hope that in outlining the structure, scaffolding, pedagogical goals and outcomes of this project, you have a sense of how the project emphasized process, collaborative networking, and digital technologies to engage undergraduate students in original research projects. I’m happy to take the remaining time to answer your questions or discuss sections of this project in more detail. Thank you!SLIDE 27Works Cited ................
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