Michael Yee, San Diego Chinese Historical Museum
PROPOSAL TYPE
Collaborative Conversation or Workshop
Seeking
- Seeking Additional Presenters
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
- Seeking Specific Expertise
RELATED TOPICS
- Digital
- Museums/Exhibits
- Public Engagement
ABSTRACT
This workshop/collaborative conversation highlights digital history techniques for public historians at a low to no-cost budget. We will be creative with digital history projects that support multiple purposes at a minimal cost and technical skill level: visitor experience either on-site or virtual, student project, internship project, education project, or brainstorming other ideas welcome. Larger organizations and museums could develop programs or engage students, interns or docents. Small museums, historical societies, and historic sites can promote their histories in a cost- effective manner. College and high school educators could integrate elements into their curriculum.
Option: A hands-on ArcGIS Storymap workshop.
DESCRIPTION
Collaborators and revampers are requested!
This session seeks additional presenters to share experiences, successful practices, and lessons learned. Is this a session or a workshop? I wish to collaborate with others or have others lead, as I have not attended a NCPH annual meeting in person. My virtual attendance at NCPH 2021 was very rewarding. Suggestions are welcome to tune or revamp this session to best interest NCPH attendees.
My specialized experience is with ArcGIS Storymaps as a public history digital project. I also taught college freshmen to use Storymaps for their digital history project.
Digital Public History techniques have been presented at past annual meetings. The primary point of this session is to emphasize free or low-cost methods to create and deliver digital public history, which can then be leveraged by many sizes of organizations or educational settings. Software such as Storymaps, Clio, Google Suite, MediaKron, WordPress, or other options could be shared, with consideration for both web and smartphone delivery. Youtube training and how-to’s could be researched and featured. Might phone audio-based solutions exist and are they practical?
This could become a hands-on training workshop using ArcGIS Storymap to create a simple digital history web project, which would require ArcGIS Storymap access.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Michael Yee, San Diego Chinese Historical Museum, [email protected]
ALL FEEDBACK AND OFFERS OF ASSISTANCE SHOULD BE SUBMITTED BY JULY 1, 2021. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
I think this is a great presentation for the conference. Many organizations do not have super large budgets and I believe this will be a great benefit. I think phone-based Public History programming would be most useful. Especially as we have students carrying out more public history projects. That would be particularly useful for community groups as well.
Thank you for comments Lopez. As a new NCPH member, I wondered about the level of interest for this. If you have something to contribute as part of the program, please reach out to me via email.
I’m glad you touched on phone-based public history. We might need to explore that more. Was that smartphone based or audio/phone? And we agree providing resources to community groups is very important! Hope to see you at the annual meeting!
Michael
This is such a great idea. Budgeting for the high-cost tools is always a problem — both for public history practitioners and public historians in the academy. The NCPH has a Digital Media Group that annually hosts a series of pre-planned and on-demand workshops. The chair of the committee this year is Adina Langer. If you were struggling to assemble this panel yourself, maybe you could plug into that group and see if you can’t join forces this year to offer more budget-friendly, tech-friendly choices.
I agree with Rebecca. I think this would make a great addition to the Digital Public History Lab Series of workshops that is offered each year.
I would also be happy to lend my voice to this discussion as needed. I’ve coordinate the review, purchase and use of many digital tools for different non-profits with small or no budget.
Thank you Rebecca for suggesting Adina. A number of contributors have contacted me and we are moving forward nicely. Making a contact is a good idea in any case, and I will do that.
Michael
This is a great idea. I have attended some of the StoryMap and ARC GIS workshops in the past, and while it is wonderful to see examples of what people can do with them, it can be even better to provide some time for and guidance through hands-on work with the programs. If that is possible, it would be fabulous to advertise this out to some local museums in the conference area.
Hi Michael! This is a great proposal and I suspect it would be well-received by the attendees. I like the idea of providing video overviews or tutorials as pre-conference material (if that’s a possibility), with the in-person session being a more hands-on workshop. It’s often easy to get excited about new digital tools when we learn about them, but harder to get started on our own once we’re home. Good luck!
Hi Joanna, Thank you for the comments. I have been in touch with Megan Smeznik (leader) as part of the Digital History Lab, which I think is the best fit for a hands-on workshop. Your point about pre-conference preparation is a good one and worth implementing. Hope to see you in Montreal.
Michael
Hi Michael,
I love this proposal! I would like to see a couple of quick introductions into some of these platforms. I know I’ve used wordpress and storymaps for past class projects and I am always looking to learn more about this. If you need someone to participate in this panel, I would love to join.
Best,
Cheryl
Hello Cheryl,
A few possible presenters are forming and I wanted to get your input on how you might add to the conversation. I could not find your name in the NCPH directory. Can you contact me at [email protected]?
Thank you