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Lineup for WHA 2014 Six-Shooters Session

This year’s Six-Shooters session is scheduled for Thursday, October 16, 2014 from 2:30-5:00 PM in Salon 1-2 in the Newport Beach Marriott Hotel and Spa, Newport Beach, CA. It offers a unique opportunity for WHA members interested in the ways digital technologies are being used in the classroom, in public history, and in research, to discover and discuss these new ideas in an “unconference” manner.

This session, sponsored by the WHA Technology Committee, chaired by Douglas Seefeldt, utilizes a lightning round format that limits each presentation to six minutes and six slides. The session will feature the following presenters and topics. Please join us for stimulating presentations, lively conversations, and valuable networking!

  • Jacob K. Friefeld,U. Nebraska-Lincoln, “The History Harvest Project” The History Harvest is a collaborative, community based digital history project and learning initiative that aims to democratize and open history. The project utilizes digital technologies to share the experiences and artifacts of people and local historical institutions. At each harvest, conducted by undergraduate students, community members are invited to share their letters, photographs, objects, and stories, and participate in a conversation about the significance and meaning of their materials. Each artifact is digitally captured and then shared in a web-based archive for general educational use and study. Overall, the History Harvest project aims to raise visibility and public conversation about history and its meaning, as well as provide a new foundation of publicly available material for historical study, K-12 instruction, and life-long learning. I will discuss the History Harvest as a concept, and explain its philosophical grounding. Then, I will briefly outline the harvest process and flexibility of the project, and conclude with a discussion of the History Harvest Archive and the future vision for the project. This short presentation is an invitation to join this growing project in increasing the availability of artifacts that help us to understand our shared history.
  • Erik Johnson, George Mason U., “Discover Historic Places Digital Project” The National Park Service, in collaboration with State Historic Preservation Officers, Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, and other local governments, administers a remarkable historic preservation program called the National Register of Historic Places. With advancements in web publishing and social media platforms, there is an opportunity to publicize the country’s historic resources to a wider audience and, in doing so, boosting historic preservation and the communities that are served by the National Register. Discover Historic Places (DHP) is a digital project that aims to work with the public to achieve a better understanding of its history by publishing National Register documentation in a highly accessible format. DHP is built using Omeka and uses the city of Philadelphia as a model for the project. The website organizes around historic themes within the city with the hope that thematic categories, along with map visualization, improve the accessibility of National Register resources for all users.
  • Robert Jordan, Colorado State U., “The Lory Student Center Project”In the midst of year-long renovations of Colorado State University’s (CSU) Lory Student Center (LSC) from the fall of 2013-2014, the history department, the Public Lands History Center (PLHC), university administrators, archivists and librarians from the Fort Collins and CSU archives, and undergraduate and graduate students worked collaboratively to produce digital, historical content to be showcased as part of the grand opening of the new student center. This digital content created by the university’s own students provides a link for past, present, and future Rams to their university, creating a sense of pride in the accomplishments of previous generations. The content is composed of twelve physical markers linked to digital, web-based “brand stories.” Working together, students in one undergraduate and one graduate history course (HIST580A1 and HIST480A5) produced narrative content for each of the twelve brand markers, as well as visual digital components for use by the LSC on a website or mobile application. Over the course of a single semester, students utilized a wide range of primary and secondary source materials and digital tools to create a dynamic, digital, public history project, learning new skills and gaining invaluable practical experience.
  • Paula Petrik, George Mason U., “Is 3-D Reconstruction Worth It?” In other words, what can we learn as historians from the laborious task of recreating a historical landscape in three dimensions, given that 3-D digital work is labor-intensive and time-consuming? Using Helena, Montana’s Wood Street neighborhood as a case study, this very short presentation illustrates what spatial analysis can contribute to historical analysis. Recreating the neighborhood adds an extra dimension to the history of “capitalists with rooms.” Not only did the Wood Street “soiled doves” create a micro-economy in their area but they also controlled its space both through the buildings’ design and location.
  • Jana Remy, Chapman U., “Digital Humanities at Chapman University” Jana will speak about two new Digital Humanities courses offered to graduate students at Chapman University, “An Introduction to DH” and “Humanities Computing.” In addition, she will share insights about serving in an “alt-ac” administrative position on her campus (as the Associate Director of Digital Scholarship), and her role in DH-related research initiatives.
  • Rebecca S. Wingo, U. Nebraska-Lincoln, “Can I Get a Witness?: Network Analysis of Homesteaders in Nebraska” In 2014, Fold3.com, a subsidiary of Ancestry.com, finished digitizing over 75,000 records of successful homestead claims for the state of Nebraska. In 2009, Richard Edwards called for a reassessment of homesteading in “Changing Perceptions of Homesteading as a Policy of Public Domain Disposal,” arguing that scholars need to approach homesteading through data analysis rather than anecdotal evidence (however compelling it tends to be). Using the newly digitized records, I sampled ten townships over two counties to thoroughly examine and document every homestead claimant, creating the most complete data set of homesteaders to date. I then used Gephi to map the social connections of homesteaders based on the witnesses they listed in their Proof of Posting. Network analysis of homesteaders indicates the prevalence of fraud (spoiler alert: it’s not as much as previous scholars have led us to believe) and traces community formation. Geolocation of the homesteaders further reveals patterns in witnessing that demonstrate the function of neighbors and neighborhoods in the rural west. Ultimately, this project merges qualitative methodologies with close-readings of the documents to produce ground-breaking research on homesteading in Nebraska.

Do you use digital tools in your research, teaching, or public history profession? If so, and you are planning to attend the 2014 Western History Association conference and are willing to share your thoughts and experiences at this session, please contact Doug Seefeldt: wdseefeldt[AT]bsu[DOT]edu and we’ll try to add you to the slate!

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Call for “Six-Shooter” Lightning Round Presentations: Western History Association 54th Annual Conference, October 15-18, 2014

Greetings! The Western History Association’s Technology Committee members are seeking proposals for a roster of presentations for their “Six-Shooters” lightning round session to be held at the WHA’s 54rd Annual Conference in Newport Beach, CA on Thursday October 16, 2014 from 2:30-4:00 PM. Each of the 8 or so presenters will have 6 minutes and no more than 6 PowerPoint slides to share topics with a significant digital history component related to research, teaching, or public history initiatives. Before the conference, each confirmed participant will post a brief paragraph to the WHA Digital Frontiers blog outlining what they plan to present. Check this space for updates and feel free to contact Doug Seefeldt via email at wdseefeldt [AT] bsu [DOT] edu if you would like to like to be considered to participate in this alternative-format session.

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Inaugural “Six-Shooters” Lightning Round Session

On Saturday October 12, 2013 seven presenters participated in the inaugural “Six-Shooters” session from 2:30-4:00 PM in the Finger Rock III room at the Westin La Paloma Resort & Spa in Tucson, AZ. This session, sponsored by the WHA Technology Committee, utilizes a lightning round format that limits each presentation to six minutes and six slides. The session was chaired by Douglas Seefeldt, the committee chair, and the presenters were:

  • Jason Heppler, Stanford U., “Spatial History and the Western Past”
  • Leslie Working, U. Nebraska-Lincoln, “Visualizing Data with Open Source Tools”
  • Sharon Kilzer, Theodore Roosevelt Center, The Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library”
  • Jeremy Johnston, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, “The Papers of William F. Cody”
  • Douglas Seefeldt, Ball State University, “Cody Studies Digital Research Platform”
  • Larry Cebula, Eastern Washington U./Washington State Archives, “Using Mobile Interpretation to Strengthen Preservation Communities”
  • J. Wendel Cox, “Shifted Research”

Do you use digital tools in your research, teaching, or public history profession? If so, and you are willing to share your thoughts and experiences with other WHA conference attendees at our 2014 meeting, please contact Doug Seefeldt: wdseefeldt [AT] bsu [DOT] edu

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See you in Tucson!

Greetings! As the 53rd Annual Conference of the Western History Association approaches the Technology Committee members are busy putting together a roster for the inaugural “Six-Shooters” lightning round session on Saturday 10/12 from 2:30-4:00 PM. Each of the 8-10 presenters will have 6 minutes and no more than 6 PowerPoint slides to share topics with a significant digital history component related to research, teaching, or public history. Pretty wide open. Before the conference, each confirmed participant will post a brief paragraph to the WHA Digital Frontiers blog outlining what they are planning to present. Check this space for updates and feel free to contact Doug Seefeldt via email [wdseefeldt AT bsu.edu] if you would like to participate in this exciting session.

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Looking forward to Denver!

We are pleased to welcome you back to the blog “WHA Digital Frontiers,” created to support the Western History Association’s annual Digital History Workshop, planned this year for Friday, October 5, 2012 (1:00-3:30 PM) in the Gates Conference Room on the 5th floor of the Denver Public Library in Denver, CO (the WHA conference program includes a general description of the digital history workshop along with walking directions from the Hyatt to the DPL on p. 28).

The workshop is an opportunity for WHA members interested in the ways digital technologies can be (and are being) used in the classroom, in public history, and in research, to gather virtually here on the blog and in person at the WHA Conference to discuss interests, concerns, and ideas.

This year the Digital History Workshop is being facilitated by J. Wendel Cox, Ph.D., Senior Special Collection Librarian, Western History and Genealogy, Denver Public Library and will include three speakers. Wendel will provide details on the speakers and their topics in a separate post.

Whether tech guru or newbie, anyone interested in hearing about/discussing the increasingly significant roles digital technologies play in contemporary scholarship, teaching, and public history is welcome to contribute. We will have free wireless in the workshop so bring your laptop or other device to click along.

This blog is a place for potential attendees to begin the conversations and exchanges of ideas that they hope to continue in the workshop; we also ask contributors to share those resources, tools, examples of digital scholarship, online exhibits,  etc., that they have found noteworthy or helpful in their own work either before or after the workshop.

We’ll see you in Denver!

Douglas Seefeldt
Chair, WHA Technology Committee

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Digital Frontiers: Public History Breakout Session

Our public history breakout group was a modest but generous band of contributors who shared a surprising array of tools and resources with each other.  Not surprisingly, one of the themes to emerge from our discussion was how the enormous number of resources available and their ever-changing nature pose a challenge not simply with how we stay current with trends, but might ever hope to find the most relevant resources for our needs.

I began with a brief discussion of the resources the vast genealogical community has created and how some of those material might be used in teaching and research. Frankly, I was intent on playing with the notion of “public history” by offering resources derived by a popular avocation that has created a truly staggering body of digital resources. Many of those resources — indexes, guides, abstracts, transcriptions — themselves derive from public records of birth, marriage, taxation, death, and probate. And in particular it was a pleasure to demonstrate a little of the Colorado Genealogical Society‘s remarkable Colorado Marriages, 1858-1939, which I described in an earlier post.  The result is a 23,417-page alphabetical index to marriages, which I think is simply waiting to support studies of marriage and community.

After my brief discussion — which also saw the patience and good humor of those present as we briefly grappled with the inevitable display issues whenever laptop, projector, and audience come together! — we heard from group members about their particular interests and  projects they especially admired or with which they’ve been associated, including:

And as we discussed these and other projects, including the Plateau Peoples’ Portal, the Bureau of Land Management’s Government Land Office records, FamilySearch, and the Wyoming Newspaper Project, the question arose as to how we learn and share these resources, as well as make them more user friendly in form. In some respects, it was a familiar topic for most of us gathered together, but it nevertheless reflects real challenges.

For my part, I think the fragmentary nature of information has long been with us, and that the very nature of our session and the continuation of this blog offers part of the solution. And I also think we may want to give users more credit for their ability to use new and challenging tools and resources — and even recognize that such a process is a part of information literacy! — rather than strive for an elusive and ultimately futile simplicity that neglects the complexity of the past and the sources we use to explore and understand it.

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Virtual Conferences

IMG_0404This year I won’t be able to attend the WHA because of a conflict with another academic conference, but I will be watching the twitterstream on the #WHA2011 hashtag to keep abreast of conference happenings–even though the 140-character soundbites will offer a small (and biased) view of what’s occurring in Oakland.  The conference I am attending this week, MobilityShifts, held a session last night that addressed the impracticalities of in-person conferences:  they’re terribly expensive, waste precious resources (i.e. jetfuel), and exclude those who can’t attend.  The speaker, Eric Kluitenberg, spoke of his attempt to create an all-online conference called “ElectroSmog:”

The ElectroSmog festival was both a practical and theoretical exploration of the idea of  ‘sustainable immobility’ – a response to global mobility out of control and the desire to use networked connections to counterbalance the exponential growth of global mobility. The aim was to investigate the possibility of staging a new type of international public gathering without the usual travel and mobility patterns attached. While the festival spurred a series of highly engaged debates, experimental projects, and remarkably few technical failures, it collided dramatically with audience dynamics. The outcomes raised serious questions about the importance of embodied encounter to galvanize public experience and exchange, and the limits of the tele-presence paradigm.

In a nutshell, what he found from staging this event was that no one attended ElectroSmog–there seemed to be a lack of commitment to an event that happened in an entirely virtual space, where “real” interactions wouldn’t occur.  Thus, he posited that for virtual events to be successful, they need to replicate the embodied experience of actually attending such an event, and the multitude of interactions that occur by virtue of being in the same space with like-minded attendees.  This hit home for me as I waited for the elevator after his talk–I struck up a lively conversation with a fellow attendee who rode down the seven floors alongside me, which extended into 15 minutes of further conversation after we stepped outside the metal doors on the ground floor.  How does one have those elevator conversations in a virtual venue?  It also brought to mind another similar experience at an art installation that I attended recently where the most meaningful interaction of the afternoon was in the bathroom line after the event.  Perhaps this could be replicated in a Second-Life-style environment, but I doubt that my avatar would tolerate a 20-minute line for the women’s bathroom (and that my avatar is gender-neutral is perhaps another barrier to such an occurrence).

Many academic conferences try to include podcasts or web-streaming to help those who can’t join in the event, but this is rarely an ideal way to attend a conference–there are often technical snafus that disrupt live-streaming, and if one is watching taped sessions of an event there’s no opportunity to engage with the material in an interactive way because you can’t join in a Q&A afterwards.  From my experience with podcasting the Past Tense seminars, I’ve found some satisfaction in seeing that there are thousands of listeners who download the podcasts even when there might only be a dozen or two who are actually seated around the table at the events–but I have little idea who’s doing the downloading of the files or what they think of the talks.  The one-sidedness of the podcasting experience often makes me wonder if it’s worth the investment of time in editing each of the recordings.

However, with the way the economy is headed, and because of the environmental toll of long-distance travel, it seems almost-necessary for organizations like the WHA to engage in some means of transmitting conference happenings to those who aren’t able to attend in-person.  In your opinion, what are the most effective means of doing so?  Are audio recordings of the sessions most helpful, or video recordings, or transcripts of the talks, or live-blogging/tweeting by attendees?

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Looking Ahead to Our Session in Oakland …

Hello!

I’m delighted that Doug Seefeldt has asked me to lead a breakout group at the Digital frontiers workshop and to serve as your humble Google-jockey* for digital materials related to public history. Last year’s session at Lake Tahoe set a high standard and was a wonder of collaboration and ideas.

For my part, I’d like to share a little of the enormous body of digital resources largely used for genealogy, and talk about their application for historians in teaching and research. Most of us are likely familiar with commercial databases such as Ancestry (which actually aggregates thousands of individual databases), but a universe of other resources exist, many of them free and created by volunteer efforts.

To take but one example, a project involving the Colorado Genealogical Society and a troop of volunteers created an index to Colorado Marriages, 1858-1939. The index in its PDF form is 23,417 pages in length, and testifies to the power of volunteer efforts. (I hasten to add every librarian in the Western History/Genealogy Department at the Denver Public Library recalls with horror the first time they clicked “print” rather than “print current page” with this database!) Colorado Marriages provides the name of a bride, a groom, a date for a license application, the county involved, and a license number. The application for genealogists is obvious, but consider how a researcher armed with a surname schedule might use this index to explore ethnicity and patterns of marriage within and amongst different ethnic groups.**

Anyone who wants to dabble in such sources before our session might want to explore the materials available online at FamilySearch, especially the materials under USA, Canada, and Mexico. I encourage you simply to play with these resources. Crossover opportunities abound, and I think the informed historian should be aware of the possibilities and challenges involved with such tools.

Thanks!

Wendel Cox

* Google-jockey (n.) [goo-guhl jok-ee]: a person who frantically uses Internet search engines and other tools to find and display websites casually mentioned by presenters or participants.

** So where’s the link to the Colorado Marriage Index? It’s not available online. Why not? For reasons that would form an interesting thread at our session: privacy, identity theft, and the public record in the digital age.

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Getting ready for Oakland

Greetings!

A brief introduction to foreground my role as session facilitator: As a graduate student at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, I have had the privilege of working for Doug Seefeldt and Will Thomas on research-based digital projects and in the development of digital projects designed for classroom teaching. Among other things, we have helped students learn how to use the web responsibly (learning to distinguish “Joe’s Civil War Page” from the “Valley of the Shadow,” for example), to build wikis to improve research and writing skills, and showed them ways to develop digital content collections.

At our workshop on Saturday (and on this blog before Saturday – hint, hint) I would like to hear how you are using digital resources in your courses – Western history or otherwise.

Some areas for thought/discussion:

  • Which types of digital assignments have you found useful and why did they work well?
  • What hasn’t worked? Why?
  • What types of sites do you use and how much guidance do you give students about web resources?
  • What kind of tools do you have students using?
  • Have the assignments in your courses changed and how have they changed with the increasing availability of digital resources?

These are just a few questions to get the ball rolling – please contribute your thoughts and ideas here! I look forward to hearing from those able to attend the workshop in person and those who will be using this blog and/or twitter to follow the Digital History Workshop.