Thank you all for participating in this working group. As a final exercise, we ask that you take some time over the next week to answer the following questions. (You can leave your responses in the comments field below). Your reflections will help us plan our meeting in Milwaukee, and may eventually become part of a final “wisdom document” we create for other scholars interested in doing public history online. In a way, your responses represent a “state of the field” for public historians using the web to present research, archive, teach, and collaborate with the public. 1.) What have you (Read More…)
Week 4: Bringing Digital History and New Media into the Classroom
Hello all, Our last week is a slight change of pace. While we’ll still be talking about past projects, both successes and failures, our two contributors ask us to reflect on how we should train the next generation of public historians to take advantage of these new technologies and techniques. Kyle Roberts gives us a bird-eye view of the public history classroom, showing how he introduces his students to new media and other aspects of the digital humanities. Mitchell Koffman, reflecting on an effort to develop an online encyclopedia for the state of Arizona, reminds us that future public history (Read More…)
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Week 3: Creating a Website with a Scholarly Community
Hello all, So far, we’ve spotlighted projects that revolve around local communities or museums. This week, we’ll change gears and discuss how digital technology is transforming scholarly communities and their presence online. Although many of the questions stay the same, scholarly communities create a unique set of challenges. Most academic cultures still revolve around print journals and conferences, with rather firm hierarchies and established modes of publication; the web, conversely, creates opportunities for new kinds of scholarship and interaction, but has almost no established standards and boundaries. By extension, scholarly communities with a Web 2.0 website could either break down or reify the barriers between (Read More…)
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Week 2: Designing an Exhibition Website for Web 2.0
Hello Everyone, Thanks for beginning the conversation! This week features two reflections looking at the challenges of designing websites that incorporate the “Web 2.0″ principles of participatory information sharing, online collaboration, interoperability, and user-centered design. Examples of Web 2.0 include blogs, wikis, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Of particular concern to Catherine Lewis, Jordan Grant, and other working group participants is figuring out how best to interest, engage, and sustain target audiences using online tools, many of which hinge on Web 2.0 constructs. With that in mind, Catherine Lewis explores the challenges of converting a global partnership (Read More…)
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Week 1: Building a Digital Project with Local Communities
Welcome! This is the first in what I hope will become a series of posts and conversations about the challenges of doing public history online. For our first week, we’ll be focusing on a particular kind of activity – building a digital project with local communities. The reflections we’ve grouped together give us variety of perspectives on that difficult task. Charles Romney and Will Tchakirides introduce us to projects in development that are still searching for ways to engage with their communities – both local and national. With Baltimore 68′, Jessica Elfenbein and Tom Hollowak show how local community members (Read More…)
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Using the Public History Online Website
Greetings Working Group Participants, Jordan and I are in the beginning stages of uploading your content to the website and look forward to getting the dialogue started! Reflections/case studies are coming in steadily and can be viewed on the “Reflections” page. Feel free to comment on individual reflections or write a post in the WordPress Dashboard regarding our thematic questions and points of interest (check previous email for username and password). You have the ability to create posts and comment as contributors. If you want to make changes to your reflections/case studies, simply email an updated copy to Jordan or (Read More…)
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Guidelines for Statement
The official instructions from the NCPH read as follows: “…case statements (no more than 3-4 double-spaced pages), describing the discussant’s particular experience, defining the issues this experience raises, suggesting strategies and/or goals for resolution, and/or responding to a specific set of questions from the facilitator. “ For our group, we would like you to reflect on specific project or professional experiences where you grappled with the challenge of doing public history online.* The operative word here is doing. While we welcome descriptions of theory and personal philosophies, please balance them with accounts of the day-to-day. For instance: How did you (Read More…)
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Welcome to the Working Group
With the help of the web, our cultural institutions have grown adept at “getting the word out.” Institutional and exhibition websites, blogs, and social media campaigns have given the public new ways to access our collections and expertise. Despite these welcome changes, in too many instances, old hierarchies and one-way information streams have endured. Even with “Web 2.0″ innovations, true dialogue and collaboration has proven elusive. This working group will discuss how we can build more democratic and sustainable cultural institutions using digital technology and the web. As the questions above suggest, this working group welcomes a wide range of (Read More…)
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