Tag Archive

digital media

Elephant in the conference room: The Public Historian

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You wouldn’t have known it from the Twitter feed over the past few days, but a steady undercurrent of the conference conversation among public historians in Milwaukee has been the situation with the field’s flagship journal, The Public Historian, and NCPH’s announcement in January that it would be terminating its more than 30-year relationship with the University of California at Santa Barbara, its partner in publishing the journal.  Read More

Lightning strikes once

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Today’s “Lightning Talk” session was a great one-hour showcase for about a dozen digital projects:

  • Larry Cebula:  Spokane Historical, a web and mobile platform for telling stories of Spokane and Eastern Washington, developed by the Public History program at Eastern Washington University using Curatescape and Omeka
  • Cathy Stanton:  History@Work (hey, that’s us)
  • Bobby Allen:  University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill’s Digital Innovation Lab, an American-Studies-based project that is developing, testing, and documenting best-practice models for faculty and graduate student work in public humanities that integrates community engagement, digital technologies, and interdisciplinary inquiry
  • Andrew Hurley:  the Virtual City Project, which uses three-dimensional imaging technologies to create electronic representations of lost historic landscapes
  • Trevor Owens:   Viewshare, a free web application developed by the Library of Congress for curators and collections managers to create and customize unique, dynamic online views of images from their collections.
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Welcome to History@Work

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Welcome to History@Work, a blog to represent the wide range of voices within the public history field. Consultants and contractors, graduate students, curators, archivists, and federal, state, and local historians, professors, and new professionals in all sorts of institutions and settings are invited here to catch up on news, weigh in on developments in the field, and share expertise. Read More

Where the universal present meets the personal past: "The Wilderness Downtown"

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For most of us, music videos don’t immediately bring to mind historical engagement. What’s more reflective of the current epoch than a viral YouTube video featuring feline euphony or Rebecca Black’s ultra-present-focused “Friday”?

But Arcade Fire’s “Wilderness Downtown” collaboration with Chris Milk, featuring their hit 2010 single, “We Used to Wait,” is a remarkable exception to this rule. Read More

Historical diaries find a new platform in Twitter

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Many unlikely and whimsical projects flourish on Twitter, the popular microblogging service just celebrating its fifth birthday. Big Ben strikes the hour (“bong bong bong”), encounters with near-earth objects are automatically updated (the most recent one missed the Earth by about three million kilometers), a parody account for a politician becomes a compelling scifi short story and the Field Museum’s T-Rex, Sue, turns out to have a wicked sense of humor. Read More

History museums in a wiki world

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This January Wikipedia will be celebrating its ten year anniversary, and it’s safe to say that in the past decade the editable encyclopedia has challenged the academic and cultural sectors in a number of ways. A recent post on Off the Wall has already discussed the shifting role that Wikipedia plays in academia, specifically noting its potential for historiography. Read More