Digital community engagement across the divides

20 April 2016 – Lara Kelland

In 2008, the Journal of American History published a conversation among several historians regarding the future of digital history. William G. Thomas III  said, “We might imagine a more proximate collaboration in which historians team up with [community] groups. The Web 2.0 movement might allow historians and the public to make history together rather than separately. Read More

Finding the intersection of technology and public history

13 April 2016 – Deborah Boyer 1

Digital technology has enabled public historians, cultural heritage professionals, and history students to collaborate with diverse audiences and explore history’s role in civic engagement in ways previously unimagined. The partnership between the Virtual City Project and the Restoration Group described by Andrew Hurley in “Chasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology: Public History Meets the Digital Divide” demonstrates the exciting possibilities as well as challenges advanced digital tools provide, especially in the face of limited budgets, long software development cycles, and varying levels of digital access. Read More

Meeting our audiences where they are in the digital age

30 March 2016 – David Hochfelder

In his article, “Chasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology: Public History Meets the Digital Divide,” Andrew Hurley does the public history community a great service. He does more than tell us a cautionary tale about rushing headlong into digital approaches to public history and leaving target audiences behind. Read More

Audience analysis and the role of the digital in community engagement

22 March 2016 – Kerri Young

As a public historian working on the collaborative digital platform Historypin, I second Andrew Hurley’s assertion, in his article “Chasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology: Public History Meets the Digital Divide,” that introducing more traditional methods of engagement can, and most often is required to, enhance the efficacy of the digital tools within a public history project. Read More

Student project award: Reflections from Eric Gonzaba

10 March 2016 – Eric Gonzaba

Every morning, we wake up and open our dressers or closets to find something to wear. If you’re anything like me, the selection is usually the first thing you grab as you wipe your heavy eyes and question whether it was worth staying up to watch an extra hour of Netflix the night before. Read More

Access for all

02 March 2016 – Sharon Leon

Andrew Hurley’s article, “Chasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology,” begins with the launch of the Virtual City Project in 1999 and brings us up to the present moment. In that span of time, Hurley and his colleagues at the University of Missouri-St. Read More

Project Showcase: Building Histories of the National Mall

12 November 2015 – editors

Ever wondered how a digital project came to be?

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) shares how they built their NCPH-award winning project in a new free digital publication, Building Histories of the National Mall: A Guide to Creating a Digital Public History Project. Read More

Project Showcase: The Lost Stories Project

17 September 2015 – editors

The Lost Stories Project seeks out little-known stories about the Canadian past, transforms them into inexpensive works of public art installed on appropriate sites, and documents the process by way of a series of short films. Along the way, forgotten moments from Canadian history come to light, and viewers have an opportunity to see the choices made when a story transforms into a work of art. Read More

Project Showcase: The Great Society Congress

25 June 2015 – editors

On October 15, 1966, President Lyndon Baines Johnson remarked: “When the historians of tomorrow write of today, they will say of the 89^th Congress … ‘This was the great Congress.’” The president was elated that between January 1965 and December 1966, the 89th US Congress had enacted the most extensive legislative program since the New Deal. Read More

Responding to Baltimore: A role for public historians? (Part 2)

21 May 2015 – Linda Shopes

Editors’ Note: Readers can find Part 1 here. This post continues a short list of what history, public and otherwise, as well as allied disciplines, can do in the face of events like those that have engulfed Baltimore.

Third, beyond documentation, history can support change in the present. Read More