Thinking about Public History Projects: A DIY history toolkit

My good friend, Leslie, begins a new tenure-track job this fall in Idaho. She recently asked for input on her next big project. If you haven't read the post yet, you should. The gist is as follows:

Whereas public historians traditionally have done history for the public--e.g. in museum exhibits or in documentary films--there's a small but growing group of public historians who want to foster and study history done by the public, by passionate amateurs and average folks instead of created for them. I'm one of those historians, and as I transition to life on the tenure track (I'll have 4-5 years to prove I deserve to be employed for the next 30-35 years), I'm searching for a project or two in which I can make significant progress in 3-4 years.

I'm hoping you can help me by telling me a bit about how you use history in your life, either everyday or on special occasions. I want to find a project that not only interests me, but that really gets people excited about engaging with the history of their family, neighborhood, house, community, hobby, or whatever else they're passionate about.

My response in her comments included two ideas, which, you'll notice, don't really answer her question. They do, however, raise a couple of ideas about ways to approach her rethinking of public history's goals:

1) Create a centralized set of resources on a topic. I'm thinking of collecting links to web-based resources, but they might just be lists of various sources/works for the topic. Gathering those together in and of themselves could prove valuable to a group that has not done that yet for its own history and would allow you to bring the experiences of a public historian to help as well.

2) Create a resource that would provide access to tools, methodologies, approaches that would help people engage in their own group/family history. This would be a kind of DIY family/group history kit. You might include advice on how to do interviews; how to scan images and documents for historical purposes; discuss using WP or other blogging software (or software like Omeka) to create exhibits; how to use wikis to create crowdsourced projects like the Davis Wiki; examples of other sites (and ones that inspire a sense of possibility, not major, grant-funded institutional projects); how to fact check family/group stories (or why those stories are valuable regardless of their validity), etc.

Here I'm thinking of initially virtual tools. But with an outside grant or support from your institution, you and your new department might become known for lending the equipment (cameras, audio recorders, scanners, etc.) and expertise needed to empower people in your area to do their own individual or group history projects.

The more I think about it, the more I really like the second notion, the DIY history toolkit. Think about the value of such a guide/checklist/resource. What would you include in a DIT history toolkit?

Good luck to Leslie with her move, her new job, and her new projects. Head on over and help her out.

Banner Lecture for VHS

I was truly honored when the Virginia Historical Society, a wonderful museum and archive, asked me to give one of the famous Banner Lectures on my book. Oddly enough, though I've presented various parts at a number of conferences, I've never done a formal presentation of the whole project. So, I had a good time putting this talk together and it turned out pretty well. I got some great questions from the audience.

Click to play

Thanks again to Nelson Lankford, Frances Pollard, and the rest of the VHS staff for all the work that they do to contribute to the history of Virginia.

Lecture: Teaching and Learning with New Media

I've not posted on this blog in a while (see ProfHacker.com and http://mcclurken.org/ for other goings on).

However, I was honored to be asked to give one of the inaugural lectures in the Teaching Excellence series begun this year by UMW's Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning.

What follows is the video and a list of the links mentioned in the talk.

Thanks to all for the opportunity and the questions. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

Overview

What is New Media?

My Goals in using New Media tools

Examples of Classroom Use

Assessing the Impact

What Can You Do?

What is New Media? – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media

UMWBlogs

Blogging – Teresa Coffman (EDUC) and Steve Greenlaw (ECON)

Blog as course management tool — Sue Fernsebner’s Freshman Seminar: Toys as History

As site for collecting hard-to-find research sources for students –Steve Harris’s Hist 485: Researching Russian and Soviet Resources

UMWers & New Media

• Skype
• Digital Storytelling – Jim Groom’s course
• Audio from the past– Marie McCallister’s 18th-Century Audio Blog
• Digital Games – Zach Whalen’s site with links to courses
• TEDTalks – For a class based on TEDTalks, see this FSEM I co-taught with Tim O’Donnell
• How-To Videos
  • See UMW library ShowMe videos
  • See Academic Services videos
• Zotero – See History & American Studies Department Zotero group library
• YouTube

Low Levels of Technology Use

Wiki for discussions in all my courses

Blogs as Individual/Group Reflections

• Veterans FSEM – http://rwelker.umwblogs.org/2008/10/
• TEDTalks FSEM – http://ted2009.umwblogs.org/

Blogs as Research Logs (Historical Methods/Digital History)

• Topic Discussion — http://eweaver.umwblogs.org/2007/09/06/my-topic/
• Research Problems — http://amandashumaker.umwblogs.org/2007/10/22/frustration/
• Lessons Learned and Shared — http://megamcdh2010.umwblogs.org/2010/03/16/week-9/

More Intensive Uses of New Media Tools

Examples of Individual digital projects — US History in Film

• Bonnie & Clyde
• Wall Street

Class Museum of history of technology projects (http://historyoftech.umwblogs.org/)

See also Krystyn Moon’s 19^th-Century Museum – http://amst312.umwblogs.org/

Adventures in Digital history course

Digital Toolkit

UMWBlogs, Omeka.org, Simile Timeline, Delicious.com, YouTube, GoogleDocs, Flickr

• 2008 Class & Projects – http://digitalhistory.umwblogs.org

• – Historical Markers Project (HMP) — [6]
• – James Farmer Project (JFP) — [7]
• – James Monroe Papers Project (JMPP) — [8] and [9]
• – Alumni Project (AP) — [10]

Adventures in Digital History 2010 — http://dh2010.umwblogs.org

• UMW Images Project
• Life and Legacy of Mary Ball Washington
• James Monroe’s Letters as Minister to France
• City of Hospitals: Fredericksburg in the Civil War

Student Impact Survey — From November 2009 — Contact me directly for details

ProfHacker.com

A new blog, but with people who actually post

This week I was flattered to join the cast of bloggers at Prof. Hacker, a site that focuses on productivity, technology, and teaching. My first post was on Deploying Students as Tech Mentors. I hope I can keep up with the productive group of people assembled there....

I've started another blog

New blog and new blog post on me "building" stuff. You've been warned.

[The new blog will not be posted to often (due to time constraints on the projects, not on the blogging). Blogging will resume in this space in the near future.]

Archiving Social Media Conversations of Significant Events

This is a rough proposal for another session at 2009 THATCamp that grew out of conversations with a number of people in my network about the role of social media in the recent events in Iran.

I propose that we have a session where THATCampers discuss the issues related to preserving (and/or analyzing) the blogs, tweets, images, Facebook postings, SMS(?) of the events in Iran with an eye toward a process for how future such events might be archived and analyzed as well. How will future historians/political scientists/geographers/humanists write the history of these events without some kind of system of preservation of these digital materials? What should be kept? How realistic is it to collect and preserve such items from so many different sources? Who should preserve these digital artifacts (Twitter/Google/Flickr/Facebook; LOC; Internet Archive; professional disciplinary organizations like the AHA)?

On the analysis side, how might we depict the events (or at least the social media response to them) through a variety of timelines/charts/graphs/word-clouds/maps? What value might we get from following/charting the spread of particular pieces of information? Of false information? How might we determine reliable/unreliable sources in the massive scope of contributions?

[I know there are many potential issues here, including language differences, privacy of individual communications, protection of individual identities, various technical limitations, and many others.]

Maybe I’m overestimating (or underthinking) here, but I’d hope that a particularly productive session might even come up with the foundations of: a plan, a grant proposal, a set of archival standards, a wish-list of tools, even an appeal to larger companies/organizations/governmental bodies to preserve the materials for this particular set of events and a process for archiving future ones.

What do people think? Is this idea worth pursuing?

THATCamp 2009 -- A Proposal

For those of you that don't know, THATCamp is an unconference on The Humanities And Technology.

This is what I posted to the THATCamp 2009 site as my proposal for a session. Join in the discussion before and after the conference!

How to get money, money, money for wild and crazy times!!

Okay, not really. But I do think this topic is particularly important right now.

This was my original proposal:

I’d like to talk about the role of faculty, IT, and administrators in collaborating to shape institutional strategic plans and planning in general for academic computing and the digital humanities. I’ve spent nearly 18 months now involved in various strategic and practical planning committees at UMW regarding digital resources and goals for the humanities and social sciences. Making sure that resources are allocated to the digital humanities requires broad commitments within administrative and strategic planning. [Not as sexy or fun as WPMU or Omeka plug-ins, but sadly, just as important....] I’d like to share my own experiences in the area and hear from others about theirs.

And today I would simply add that as UMW is closing in on a first draft of its strategic plan, I’m even more convinced that the college/university-wide planning process is something with which digital humanists need to be engaged. In this time of dwindling economic resources, however, we also need to be, pardon the pun, strategic about it. I think we need to figure out when we need to explain concepts, tools, the very notion of what digital humanities is and its place in the curriculum (something even THATCampers seem to be debating), when we need to do full-on DH evangelizing, and when we need to back off from our evangelizing in order to ease fears and/or recognize budgetary realities. In any case, who else has had to make the case for Digital Humanities or academic technology as part of these processes?

UPDATE: Of course, let's also include planning for libraries, archives, and museums in this discussion as well. (Thanks for the reminder epistemographer)