9.8 Student Sample Digital Project: Maria Dzurik’s St. Augustine’s Confessions

Maria (yes, another Maria!) is a student in an interdivision course taught by Ryan Cordell, an English professor at St. Norbert College and one of the authors of this textbook. In this course, “Technologies of Text,” students built digital projects as their final assignment. These projects made use of materials available in St. Norbert College Library’s special collections, which primarily hold texts related to St. Norbert’s Catholic and Norbertine heritage. For her project, Maria chose to digitize several rare translations of St. Augustine’s classic text, Confessions.St. Augustine, Confessions, ed. John Fabian (Commodius Vicus, 2010). These editions were published over several hundred years, from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century. Maria made high-quality scans of each book’s cover and introduction. She then used Omeka (discussed in more detail in Section 9.4 "Creating a Thematic Research Collection") to publish her images and create interpretive exhibits to help visitors to her site better understand the nine translations she digitized.

Maria’s project provides a wonderful example of how digital projects enable students to find and make significant use of materials unique to their schools. Not only does this result in interesting projects for students, but those projects can also prove useful to other scholars who do not have access to those local resources. You probably don’t have materials quite like these at your college or university, but you may have other resources that would be perfect for digital archival projects like this one. You can find Maria’s work at http://mariadzurik.omeka.net.Maria Dzurik, ed., “St. Augustine’s Confessions,” St. Norbert College, http://mariadzurik.omeka.net.