Tag: public history

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2017 WHA Six-Shooters Session

The 2017 Six-Shooters digital history lightning round session, sponsored by the WHA Technology Committee, featured nine presenters sharing their research, teaching, and public projects at the WHA conference in San Diego, CA (photos by Doug Seefeldt, session chair):

  • Adam Arenson, Manhattan College
  • Jared Eberle, Oklahoma State University
  • Jason Heppler, University of Nebraska at Omaha
  • Jessica Kim, California State University, Northridge
  • Chris Repka, St. Mary’s University
  • Douglas Seefeldt, Ball State University
  • Jay Taylor, Simon Fraser University
  • Bryan Winston, St. Louis University
  • Linnea Zeiner, San Diego State University
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Jason Heppler: The American Indian Digital History Project

Greetings! I am Jason Heppler. I am at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where I am the Digital Engagement Librarian and an Assistant Professor of History. UNO has a major focus on community engagement and service learning, and in my role there I lead initiatives in public history and digital engagement. That mission forms a key part in the soft launch of the American Indian Digital History Project, led by Kent Blansett and myself.

The aim of our project is to develop and cooperative digital archive, seeking to partner with Native Nations and Indigenous communities throughout Native North America. Our plan is to digitize newspapers, photographs, and archival materials in order to increase access to historical Tribal documents and encourage responsible research into American Indian history. As part of these partnerships, we will also work with Tribal governments to create a digital repository for local Tribes. The initial launch of the archive has digitized the entire run of Akwesasne Notes and will soon be digitizing and releasing a Native-produced law journal, plate glass negative photographs, and material acquired through our Mobile Archives initiative.

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Jessica Kim: Form and Landscape

Greetings from Los Angeles!  My “Six Shooter” will focus on Form and Landscape: Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Basin, 1940-1990, a digital exhibit organized in 2014 as part of Pacific Standard Time Presents, a Getty Research Institute initiative designed to showcase Southern California’s impact on modern architecture and urban forms.  A corporate photography archive, particularly of a utility company, might at first sound incredibly mundane.  However, the Southern California Edison photo archive, from which this exhibit drew, is arguably the most vast and compelling visual narrative of explosive metropolitan growth in Los Angeles.

Form and Landscape was not the first digital exhibit of its type and it certainly will not be the last.  The project creators and curators, however, believe that the exhibit was remarkable for a number of reasons, almost all related to scope and scale.  The archive from which we drew contains an astounding 70,000 images.  These images were produced over almost a century (late 1880s to 1970s).  The images capture landscapes from across California and beyond, from home kitchens to the Hoover Dam.  The project involved eighteen curators and the exhibit included over 500 images.  Themes and images range from the small and intimate (text and domesticity) to the expansive and vast (landscape and technology).  And finally, we welcomed far more virtual visitors than we will ever have readers of our books or articles: 60,000 at last count.

The exhibit lives here: http://pstp-edison.com/

And you can access the archive here: http://cdm16003.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16003coll2

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Jared Eberle: Women and African Americans in Oklahoma Rodeos

Howdy! My name is Jared Eberle and I am a Ph.D Candidate at Oklahoma State University, specializing in 20th Century American Indian activism. My talk at the six shooters presentation will cover an ongoing project at Oklahoma State University directed by Dr. Laura Arata to document the participation of women and African Americans in local rodeos, largely after the 1920s. Rodeo is traditionally seen as a white, masculine sport, but this project seeks to incorporate the rich tradition of women participating in rodeos in all capacities as well as the successful all-black rodeos in Oklahoma.

This project grew out of both OSU’s push for an increased presence in digital humanities, as well as our specialization in both public history and the American West. The pressing issue for the project, and the subject of my talk, is that the department does not have a dedicated “digital” historian so those involved have had to start from the bottom, both in terms of broadly understanding the field as well as the technical aspects. So far, we have a basic site for the women in rodeo project and this semester’s digital history class is hard at work constructing the companion African American rodeo website, both of which will be long term projects that will we can use to flesh out our digital history initiatives going forward. Translating these ideas to the digital realm has involved a balancing act of producing a good product while not having the time to direct towards mastering the behind-the-scenes technical aspects that can go into a project of this nature.

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Christopher Repka: Utilizing Augmented Reality to Create a Virtual Museum at Mission Concepción in San Antonio, TX

Hello, my name is Chris Repka, and I am in my last year as an undergraduate student of Public History at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. This past summer, I was a recipient of a research grant from St. Mary’s University’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship. For my summer research project, I began the development of an augmented reality application for Android and iPhone for use on San Antonio’s Mission Trail, which was recently designated a World Heritage Site. I began constructing virtual exhibits for users of the application to experience while visiting Mission Concepcion, but the bulk of the work that was completed was developing the framework for exhibit creation.

In this presentation, I will present my augmented reality mobile application as a powerful means of experiencing and discovering the history of a place while present at an historical site. Not intended to replace or contest park interpreters, the application serves as an effective means of engaging visitors with documents, academic studies, and artifacts while remaining engaged with an historic site. In this presentation, I will also discuss long-term development goals for this smartphone application. I hope to have a fully developed beta version of this application available on the iPhone App Store and Google Play for Android devices for use at Mission Concepcion within the next year.

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Lineup for 2017 Six-Shooters Session

Here is an alphabetical list of the presenters that we have confirmed for the Technology Committee-sponsored session, “Six-Shooters: A Digital Frontiers Lightning Round”:

  • Adam Arenson, Manhattan College
  • Jared Eberle, Oklahoma State University
  • Jason Heppler, University of Nebraska at Omaha
  • Jessica Kim, California State University, Northridge
  • Chris Repka, St. Mary’s University
  • Douglas Seefeldt, Ball State University
  • Jay Taylor, Simon Fraser University
  • Bryan Winston, St. Louis University
  • Linnea Zeiner, San Diego State University

The session will be chaired by Douglas Seefeldt, Ball State University, and is scheduled for Thursday, November 2nd from 1:30-3:00 PM in the Monte Carlo room of the Hilton San Diego Resort & Spa, San Diego, California. Each presenter has six minutes and six slides (“Six-Shooters,” get it?) for their presentation. All presenters will entertain questions from the audience at the conclusion of all of the presentations. We encourage what may seem like “basic” questions as well as “shop talk” from those in attendance.

Please check this website in the days leading up to the conference for posts by each presenter introducing themselves and providing brief descriptions of the work they plan to present.

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2016 WHA Six-Shooters Session

The 2016 Six-Shooters digital history lightning round session, sponsored by the WHA Technology Committee, featured seven presenters sharing their research, teaching, and public projects at the WHA conference in St. Paul, MN (photos by Doug Seefeldt, session chair):

  • Sarah Clayton, University of Oklahoma Libraries
  • Julie Davis, University of Minnesota
  • Mikal Eckstrom, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
  • Jeff Malcomson, Montana Historical Society
  • Rob Voss, Northwest Missouri State University
  • Chris Wells, Macalester College
  • Lindsey Passenger Wieck, University of Notre Dame
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Julie Davis: Indigenous Food Wisdom Repository

Hi all, I’m Julie Davis, a public historian and digital project manager currently working as a Project Coordinator for the Research for Indigenous Community Health (RICH) Center at the University of Minnesota. In this position, I’m directing the development of an open-access, multimedia, online repository for Indigenous “food wisdom” — knowledge and expertise that foster health and well-being in Indigenous communities through relationships to food. The repository will integrate multidisciplinary, multimodal forms of knowledge and expertise, including academic scholarship, applied research, clinical practice, community-based knowledge, and grassroots projects. Its purpose is to share information and cultivate connections among those engaged in Indigenous food research and health practice, the revitalization of Native food systems, and the practice of Indigenous food sovereignty.

The repository likely will be built as a content management system (CMS); we haven’t chosen a platform yet, though Drupal currently is the strongest contender. The tagged, searchable content will include text, photographs, artwork, and audio and video files. We’ll also develop maps and other visualizations to help users see patterns and discover connections within the content. The repository will be designed for maximum flexibility, accessibility, and relevance for those working in and with Indigenous communities.

 

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Jeff Malcomson: ExploreBig: The Struggle to Develop a Mobile App for Montana History

I am pleased to have the opportunity to present in the 2016 Six-Shooters session. I am a public historian with nearly 20 years of experience as an archivist in the West. Since 2005 I’ve worked at the Montana Historical Society (MHS) Research Center where I currently serve as the Senior Photograph Archivist. I created the Society’s first blog several years ago (Montana History Revealed, which is still going strong) and have served on the very active MHS Social Media Committee. Throughout my career I’ve actively sought ways to explore and test new tools in the digital humanities. In recent years I’ve become a fairly active editor of Wikipedia articles in Montana and Western history topics, organizing edit-a-thons and trying to improve this popular platform’s presentation of history.

For my Six-Shooters presentation I’ll talk about our experience at MHS over the past two years trying to develop a mobile app for Montana history. The end result, ExploreBig, is finally coming into its own as a tool for sharing the stories of Montana’s most historic places and buildings. We ended up using the Omeka-based Curatescape to build our website and mobile app, but the path to this product was fairly unique. I hope this harrowing story of high elective office, high-tech education, lowly bureaucratic squabbling, and low budget difficulties may serve to help others avoid similar problems in the future.

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Chris Wells: Minnesota Environments

I am an associate professor of environmental history at Macalester College, where I direct the school’s Andrew Mellon Foundation-sponsored Digital Liberal Arts initiative. My research focuses on the ways that technology–and especially technological systems–have reshaped the American environment, mediating and structuring people’s relationships with the natural world.

For this lightning round, I will discuss Minnesota Environments, a smartphone app and accompanying website developed in collaboration with George Vrtis (Carleton College). Based on the Omeka CMS and its Curatescape plugin, the resulting project allowed students to research and publish material on Minnesota’s environmental history that users can explore from a smartphone, tablet, or computer.