Project-Based Learning, Undergraduate Research, and Digital Methods in the Wheaton College Digital History Project

While Robert Townsend's 2009 survey of the profession suggested that adaptation to digital tools had had the least noticeable effects on historians' teaching, some historians in liberal arts colleges and colleges of arts and sciences at research universities around the U.S. have been offering undergraduates opportunities to "do digital history" for at least the past ten years.  At Wheaton College, we began collaborations among a faculty member, the college archivist, other staff members in Library and Information Services, and students in a U.S. Women's History course in 2004.  Students in the methods course for History majors and other courses have been at work transcribing and marking up nineteenth-century financial records from the institution's founders since 2009.  Students who work on such transcription and markup learn some of the challenges of reading and interpreting primary sources as well as a minimal level of comfort with some of the basics of coding for computers.  Our work on financial records at Wheaton College has led us to a growing community of scholars in Digital Humanities in both the United States and Europe who are interested in developing guidelines for markup of financial records using eXtensible Markup Language (XML) conformable to the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative, which is the international standard for markup of sharable/harvestable textual data for linguists, historians, and literary scholars.