Using technology, making history: a collaborative experiment in interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship1

Abstract

Since the summer of 2002 the three of us—a historian, a computer scientist and a software architect—have been devoted to an attempt to combine teaching and scholarship in history and computer science. This effort involves a course that enrols both history and computer science majors who work together in teams as part of an effort by the class as a whole to do original historical research and present their findings on the Internet in a way that uses the dynamic capabilities of the Web. The historical topic of the course is the noted Plan of Chicago of 1909, a major document in American urban history. This course is part of a collaboration between Northwestern University and two nearby cultural institutions, the Chicago Historical Society and the Art Institute of Chicago, which have digitized relevant holdings for use by the students. One of the class’s goals is to develop a prototype for an entry in the forthcoming online version of the Encyclopedia of Chicago.