Teaching with Digital Collections: A Collaborative Design Sprint

Thursday, March 12th, 1:00pm - 4:00pm 

4th Ward

Across the web, historians and students now have access to a profusion of digitized primary sources.  As a case in point, Duke’s John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History has made thousands of items available digitally. As yet, however, we have very few readily available plans for how instructors at different levels might structure research exercises to make use of this wealth of easily accessed evidence about the past.

This workshop is for teachers and instructors at any career stage, including graduate students,who are interested in shaking up current lesson plans.  Participants will have an opportunity to learn from each other’s experience using digital collections in the classroom and then work in small teams in a design sprint to develop ideas for teaching modules that may be further refined and adapted, drawing from the Hartman Center’s voluminous digital collections.

In the last phase of the workshop, each team will present their ideas to the group. Participants will have access to subject experts during the workshop to address any questions that might arise about the collection materials and about possible teaching strategies. We will publish the resulting modules on the Rubenstein Library’s website with appropriate credit given to the creators. Once published, modules will be available to educators beyond Duke.

The John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History is part of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University. The Hartman Center’s digital collections feature print advertisements and photographs from the late nineteenth century to the present:

• Medicine and Madison Avenue: This collection includes 600 health-related print advertisements from the 1910s – 1950s, for products including cough and cold remedies, laxatives and indigestion aids, vitamins, and tonics.

• Ad*Access: This collection includes over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian advertisements covering five product categories - Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II propaganda - dated between 1911 and 1955.

• Emergence of Advertising in America: This collection includes over 9,000 images from 1850-1920 that illustrate the rise of consumer culture and the birth of a professionalized advertising industry in the United States.

• Ford Motor Co. Advertisements: This collection includes advertisements and promotional material created by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency for Ford Motor Company's lines of cars, trucks, vans, and SUVs; Ford Farming line of tractors; Genuine Ford Parts; and dealerships and automotive services from 1945 – 2008.

• ROAD (Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions):  ROAD offers a portal to more than 30,000 images of outdoor advertisements from five different source collections. These outdoor advertisements promoted a wide variety of consumer goods, including sodas, cigarettes, automobiles, and alcoholic beverages.

• AdViews: This collection provides access to thousands of historic commercials created for clients or acquired by the D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B) advertising agency or its predecessor during the 1950s – 1980s.

While these collections have broad thematic relevance to the work of many business historians, this workshop will be the most relevant for scholars whose teaching or research interests focuson U.S. business history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

To allow for adequate planning and assignment into research teams, registration for this workshop will close on Feb. 21.

Contact Joshua Larkin Rowley (joshua.larkinrowley@duke.edu) for more information.