In an effort to highlight the diverse range of scholarship at the upcoming annual meeting, we’re highlighting different sessions here on the blog each week.

Close Encounters of the Social Media Kind: Mining Online Content for Primary Sources, Part 2: Navigating the Profession when Bits Rot, MOOCs Attract, and Social Media Become History

In this fishbowl session, the panelists, sitting at the center of the room, will have eight minutes each to present their research and ask a question. After presentations, audience members will take turns joining the panelists in the center, and can choose to comment on a panelists’ question, or develop their own thoughts. Handouts will be distributed for people to note down their ideas, and offsite audience participation through twitter will also be encouraged.

Following the session “Unmediated Voices, Mediated Platforms: Seeking the “Other” through Social Media,” this session continues the dialogue on the theme of social media content providing new primary sources for historical research, explores related digital preservation and curation issues, and opens the floor to discussion with the public.

E. Friss will discuss how Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) challenge traditional pedagogical models, but at the same time can inform history through the archival footprint that students and instructors leave while interacting online. R. Dunley will explore the often uneasy relationship between history and journalism and what they can learn from each other when it comes to new technologies. D. VandeCreek will outline issues of long-term preservation of digital objects and present findings and lessons learned from an IMLS-funded multi-institutional study. Finally, Amalia S. Levi will examine how practices in memory institutions (libraries, archives, museums) affect scholarly communication and how they can involve historians in the process of enhancing the contextualization of cultural heritage holdings.

Culminating the multi-session workshop, this session is intended to be highly interactive, and audience members are invited to contribute their ideas and suggestions.

AHA Session 178

Saturday, January 4, 2014: 11:30 AM-1:30 PM

Thurgood Marshall Ballroom East (Marriott Wardman Park)

Chair: Amalia S. Levi, University of Maryland at College Park

Papers:

Journalists and Historians: The Unlikely BFFs
Ruth C. Dunley, independent researcher

The Future History of MOOCs: Archivists, Historians, and the Digital Classroom
Evan Jay Friss, James Madison University

Redefining Primary Sources for Future Historical Research
Amalia S. Levi, University of Maryland at College Park

The Challenges of Digital Preservation
Drew E. VandeCreek, University Libraries, Northern Illinois University

This post first appeared on AHA Today.