This organizational repository is the landing page for Dr. Gillian Macdonald's HST 251: Doing Digital History class for Fall semester 2025. The repository contains a rapid development activity. It was designed for a college digital history course, but it has applications across a variety of humanities and data-oriented courses. The goal is for students to think about developing digital projects from a machine perspective (being able to build without so much hard "coding" exprience) and from the humanistic perspective (interrogating how our data shapes interpretation). Feel free to adapt and circulate!
I wanted students to think critically about artificial intelligence, its limitations and potential for the field of digital history. I set up this organizational repository to hold their small three page sites that they rapidly developed with the help of either ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot. In this class, I structure everything around using tools for digital history. We structured the class around four units: data management and biography, data visualization, digital storytelling, and the future of digital history. Here is the challenge outline that I gave to the class:
For this challenge you’re going to assign a few roles in your groups including:
- Researcher - who reads primary sources and writes notes
- Writer - writes the interpretive material for the project site. Makes an argument about what the sources tell you about the topic.
- Developer - works with the ai to make your project, you will need to refine it a few times.
- Editor - creates a README + puts all the work together in a doc and sends it to Gillian.
I then directed students to use a prompt similar to this one:
“I want to rapidly develop a small digital history project centered on 4 historical sources. I want it to be a small three page website that interprets the sources”
We are going to build small rapidly built projects with AI for the rest of class - either with Chat GPT or with Microsoft Copilot. The parameters for the topic are:
- Digital Project Landing Page (with pictures and text - an about page essentially)
- Sources page with interpretation (put your argument here and the sources)
- Authors page - with bios (you can include avatars or pictures)
For this project you will need to make an argument about 4 sources and what they tell you about a one of these options:
- Indian Removal (docs found at National Archives and Library of Congress)
- Mark Twain Letters (docs found on Mark Twain Project)
- Slave Ads (docs found at Freedom On the Move)
The developer on the team then had to upload all the material into their Tech Pod repository on this site.
READMEs are useful for trying to recreate a project and include an explanation of the project, its structure, and how to reuse it.
- Markdown: READMEs use Markdown for formatting (headings, lists, links, images, code blocks).
- Clarity and Conciseness: Clearly explain your project or profile information.
- Structure: Organize your content with headings and subheadings for readability.
- Visuals: Consider including screenshots, GIFs, or badges to enhance your README.
Once you've edited your file, you're ready to publish it as a live page.
Go up to Settings at the top of your repository. In the left-hand menu, select Pages.
In the dropdown under Branch, change "None" to "main" and hit Save.
Your precise URL will depend on what you've named your repository and your username. You can find it by going back to your repository's main page (click "Code" at the top of the page) and scrolling down. In the right-hand column, there should be a section called "Deployments" with "github-pages" underneath it. Click on "github-pages" to access the link to your site. You can also display the link from the description bar on the right hand side.
It might take a minute or two to show up, and changes you make to your code might also take a couple minutes to reflect on the map. When you add or update data in your spreadsheet, that generally reflects on the map immediately but will require you to refresh your browser. Be patient, but if you run into issues, please feel free to reach out. There are also lots of good tutorials on GitHub Pages if you want to go deeper.
- MIT Technology Review: How AI is helping Historians
- Historica: AI in Historical Research
- IHR: Doing History in an AI World
- Royal Historical Society: Challenges and Opportunities with AI and GenAI