Congratulations to On the Book Teaching Fellows 2022-2023:

Ellie Campbell, Eleanor Rambo, and Seth Kotch!

Each fellow will develop and deliver college-level instruction modules featuring materials from On the Books. Ellie Campbell, Clinical Associate Professor of Law, will be creating a module for the course Advanced Legal Research. Seth Kotch, Associate Professor, will be creating a module for the course Historical Analysis of the American South. Eleanor Rambo, Graduate Instructor, will be creating a module for the course Composition and Rhetoric. The modules will be taught in courses during the Fall 2022 Semester.

Call for Proposals (CLOSED)

Teaching Fellows ($2,000 award)

Three teaching fellows from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are being funded.

On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance (OTB) is a project from the University Libraries that has created a text corpus of NC General Statutes from 1866-1967 and used text analysis and expert assessments to identify laws likely to be Jim Crow laws. The Jim Crow laws identified by the project are available as a plain text corpus and can be searched from the OTB website. The project website lists and contextualizes the Jim Crow laws and provides educational resources. A GitHub repository provides documented scripts generated by the project team.

The OTB project team invited proposals from instructors at UNC-Chapel Hill to become teaching fellows. Teaching fellows will create an education module using products from On the Books and will teach the module in a course. The module will be made publicly available in the Carolina Digital Repository for others to adapt and use. The three teaching fellows will form a cohort for idea sharing. The funds are to be used to compensate the instructor’s time spent developing the module.

Teaching fellows can use any of the products from the OTB project.

OTB Products include:

A searchable database of all North Carolina Session laws between 1866-1967.
A searchable database of North Carolina Session laws likely to be Jim Crow laws between 1866-1967.
A text corpus of all NC Session laws between 1866-1967 (available as plain text files or XML files with metadata).
A text corpus of NC Session laws identified by OTB as likely Jim Crow laws between 1866-1967 (available as plain text files or XML files with metadata). 
A training set of NC Session laws labeled by experts as either Jim Crow or not Jim Crow, used to train algorithms how to identify Jim Crow laws using supervised classification.
An analysis workflow with an algorithm for identifying likely Jim Crow laws, and documented scripts that create text files using images from the Internet Archive using Tesseract Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Python.
An Open Educational Resource (OER) that introduces OCR, textual data, and algorithms, aimed at advanced undergraduates. The OER could serve as an example, or parts of it could be repurposed.

What is being asked of the teaching fellows:

Participation in a kick-off event co-sponsored by the University Libraries and the Center for Faculty Excellence (May 2022).

Creation of a teaching module featuring (an) OTB product(s) during Summer 2022. Module to include:
- Lesson plan, which outlines purpose of the module, provides background information and instructional resources such as lectures, readings, videos, or podcasts, and activities to be done
- Assignment or exercise that incorporates OTB products
- Instructions provided to students and either a grading rubric or a sample of a completed assignment

Present the module at an August 2022 teaching fellow cohort meeting (attendees will include teaching fellows, the OTB project team, and a CFE staff member).
Teach the module to undergraduate or graduate students during Fall 2022 or Spring 2023.
Student feedback will be gathered via anonymous surveys.
Report back to the teaching fellow cohort at a discussion session to be held at the end of the semester the module is taught.
Deposit the teaching module in the Carolina Digital Repository.

Support will be provided

At the kick-off event in May 2022, the OTB team will present the products available from OTB. Staff from the Center for Faculty Excellence will be available for pedagogy consultations. Librarians from the OTB project team will be available to answer questions about the OTB products and will provide consultations to assist with module creation. The OTB team can assist with teaching the module if needed.

Project Initiation: May 2022

Project Completion: May 2023

Award to be provided after project completion: May 2023

Contact: Contact Brianna Nuñez with questions: bynunez@unc.edu