Tag Archive

digital history

Crossing the line: Facilitating digital access to primary sources

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Our working group, “Crossing the Line: Facilitating Digital Access to Primary Sources,” started with a simple premise. If, as Sheila Brennan states, digital humanities projects are not “public” projects merely by virtue of their being accessible online, how then can we craft them so as to place public engagement at the center? Read More

Project Showcase: Seward Family Digital Archive Community Project Achievement

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Since 2012, the Seward Family Digital Archive Project, under the aegis of the University of Rochester’s Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation Department, has endeavored to digitize portions of one of its most utilized collections—the papers of former U.S. Secretary of State and New York governor William H. Read More

Can Facebook help public historians build community?

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Consider a public history project on a Jim Crow era black high school in North Carolina, staffed by a white professor and three dozen predominantly white students. Add a growing level of distrust between the private, rapidly expanding university from which the project emerged, and the poor, largely non-white, surrounding community that was the home neighborhood for this high school. Read More

Community of Gardens mobile app from Smithsonian Gardens

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Popular culture has recently taken a renewed interest in gardening—food gardening in particular. In 2014, Smithsonian Gardens created Community of Gardens, a crowdsourced initiative to preserve our vernacular garden heritage. Now, the free and newly-released Community of Gardens app allows people to easily explore the stories, videos, and images in the Community of Gardens digital archive in a mobile-friendly environment, as well as locate stories and gardens nearby. Read More

Project Showcase: The Semiotics of Sex

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The Semiotics of Sex: A History of Queer Identity Politics is a multi-platform digital history project that explores various methodologies for historicizing queer activism and identity for public consumption. Through a commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the world’s first queer political protest, the project demonstrates that digital tools are a vital resource for public historians interpreting queer history. Read More

Listening to witnesses: The evolving history of Hobcaw Barony

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For the last five years, South Carolina ETV, the state’s public television network, has been experimenting with ways to tell the story of a 16,000-acre undeveloped property called Hobcaw Barony. Hobcaw, from a Native American word meaning “between the waters,” has a long history of human occupation that stretches from Native American settlement through slavery and Reconstruction to the twentieth century, when it became the winter hunting retreat of financier Bernard Baruch. Read More

Project showcase: Forest History Society’s Repeat Photography Project

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Repeat photography is the practice of photographing a specific location at two or more points in time. It is a powerful visual resource for scientific study and education in forest and landscape management. To take advantage of this technology, the Forest History Society (FHS) recently started the Repeat Photography Project. Read More

S.103 threatens digital history initiatives around race

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Not so long ago, few historians knew anything about GIS, or geographic information systems. Many of us saw little need to learn complicated software built on scripting languages and databases. We retreated to the familiar environment of the archives, leaving the technical challenges of GIS to geographers and computer scientists. Read More