As part of the new TPS Collective Teaching Tools Library, we’ll be offering periodic feature reviews of specific items in the library that may be of use to those who teach with primary sources.
Our first featured item is the #DLFTeach Toolkit 1.0, first released in September 2019. Filled with path-breaking, highly imaginative instruction strategies from a wide range of practitioners in the Digital Library Federation, the content in this robust toolkit is particularly inspiring as we plan for all-digital or some-digital fall terms. The section on Data and Maps presents easy ways to teach (and learn!) practical skills and tools such as geocoding in Google sheets, data visualization with RAWGraphs and Tableau, and ArcGIS, and includes Sarah Hoskins’ thoughtful activity for mapping social inequality for a quantitative sociology class using ArcGIS. The toolkit section on Project Development and Management includes essential lessons on accessibility, computational analysis for humanities data, and metadata. Mackenzie Brooks’ critical introduction to metadata concepts for undergraduates learning Dublin Core may be of particular interest to the TPS Community. In the extensive Text Analysis and (En)Coding section, authors present lessons on named entity recognition, music encoding, textual data analysis, and web scraping. And in the extraordinary Digital Exhibits and Archives section, several creative and comprehensive lesson kits for helping students and faculty translate visions and concepts to tools and platforms are found; the contribution from Greta Bahnemann and Jeannine Keefer on Thinking about Digital Archives: One Tool at a Time may present crucial help to some during this challenging fall 2020 planning period.