Upper School librarian Kate Brooks will be taking on a role in the history department for the 2013-14 school year. Brooks will be pioneering the Digital Humanities and the Archive senior spring elective.

In this class students will visit the St. Paul Academy and Summit School archive at the Lower School to find aspects of the school’s history that they find interesting and digitize it in some way. “The hope is that students will learn the skills of project management and what happens when analog goes to digital, how it is preserved,” Brooks said.

Students will learn about SPA’s history and how it ties in to private school history in general, while creating a digital historical narrative from the documents they find. A large part of the focus of this class will be to learn how electronic media formats change the way information is absorbed. “We can look at a newspaper from the time it was published, and read it just like they would back then. But we also have new electronic methods that are only 15 years old, so we need to learn how these can be used” Brooks said.