What is a Digital Exhibit?
A digital exhibit is an online collection of curated content - text, images, videos, maps, and interactive media - designed to tell a story, showcase research, or present historical and cultural materials. Unlike physical exhibits, digital exhibits provide greater accessibility, allowing audiences to engage with materials from anywhere. They can range from simple webpages to complex interactive experiences with multimedia elements and embedded data visualizations.
Common Types of Digital Exhibits:
- Thematic Storytelling: Presents a narrative around a historical, scientific, or cultural topic
- Archival Collections: Showcases digitized primary sources with metadata and descriptions
- Interactive Story Maps: Uses geospatial tools to connect places, data, and narratives
- Data-Driven Visualizations: Uses maps, timelines, and chats to analyze trends
Why Digital Exhibits?
Digital exhibits offer a dynamic way for students to engage with course content, develop research skills, and communicate their findings in an interactive format. They encourage critical thinking, digital literacy, and storytelling, making them valuable across disciplines.
Integrating student-created digital exhibitions into course assignments provides valuable learning opportunities including:
- Fostering active learning and collaboration among students
- Developing analytical skills through identifying and contextualizing objectives within specific themes or arguments
- Improving students' ability to effectively present their work to diverse audience
- Cultivating digital literacy through strengthening students' skills in digital curation, writing and data visualization
Before integrating digital exhibits into your curriculum, consider the following questions:
- What is the learning goal of this assignment?
- What type of digital exhibit best fits your subject?
- Which platform best suits the assignment?
- How will students structure their content?
- What technical or digital literacy skills will students need?
- What is the learning curve for using the selected platform?
- How will the exhibit be assessed?
- Who is the intended audience?
Disciplinary Examples of Digital Exhibition Projects
- Creating digital fashion gallery inspired by trends in culture, environmental sustainability or technology.
- Students can create digital exhibition to showcase startup ideas, prototypes, and business models.
- Mapping a global supply chain on specific business, industry or goods.
- For foreign language classes: create digital exhibition on the culture and linguistic aspects of certain world region.
- Designing digital exhibition on the intersection between math and art and interactive geometric patterns.
- Documenting the history of educational reform across specific timeline or social movement.
- Mapping spread of certain disease overtime, explaining its cause, spread, and implication on health care system.
- Creating digital exhibition on history of medicine.
- Mapping the migration patterns of a historical group.
- Creating "cultural heritage trail" where students highlight important landmarks, historical sites and cultural institutions within specific region or city.
- Documenting a historical event through space using maps to visualize the progression of specific event.
- Creating digital repository to exhibit work on certain event, culture or figure.
- Creating digital map showcasing migration patterns of specific ethnic group in a specific country with personal narratives, videos and images.
- Mapping changes in demographics of a neighborhood over time.
- Creating digital timeline showcasing a social movement.
