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[Cross-posted from the Visualizing the Past blog for the NCPH2012 working group "Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Imagining the Future of Public Interfaces to Cultural Heritage Collections"]

In the very useful survey of the “history web” in their 2005 book Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web , Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig identify the range of genres that encompassed the historical content on the web: archival sites, exhibits and scholarly essays, teaching and learning sites, and discussion forums and organizational sites. Even though Cohen and Rosenzweig failed to account for the way that blogs, YouTube, and social media would eventually permeate the history web, I like their categories because they continue to the give us a way to think about what we do when we create public history online. We tend to provide access to collections, to offer interpretation, to offer instruction, and to offer a forum for conversation, both general and professional. So, as I began to think about the critical issuing in effectively using data visualizations in public history, I wanted to consider them in relationship to the activities above. Since Sheila has already written a great post on collections and enhancing access with visualizations, I’d like to focus both on their interpretative and instructive use, building on Trevor’s thoughts from his last post on discovery and communication.

For public historians, the mode of online outreach that has the longest history is that of interpretative exhibits, whether as companions to a physical exhibit or as independent works of scholarship. Despite the liberating possibilities for disjunction, many of exhibits hue very closely to the linear narrative structure of traditional narrative history. In doing so, they have demonstrated varying degrees of success in offering the public a glimpse of the richness of the past. Two sites from the National Museum of American History demonstrate the wide range of approaches. Both “The Price of Freedom” and “A More Perfect Union” are beautiful sites, but one presents a linear and reductive narrative of military history and the other presents the difficult topic of Japanese internment during World War II with a range of voices and perspectives that highlights historical complexity. The difference here is in the effort to bring together evidence in a user interface that allows for the consideration of many perspectives and multiple causality, as opposed to offering a single perspective that simplifies the past.

Successful or unsuccessful, most exhibit sites have the benefit of offering visitors a range of contextual information in both the text of the basic narrative and in the descriptions that accompany individual artifacts, images, or documents. This contextual information is essential for a public who may not have a deep background to bring to their encounter with primary historical materials. Data visualizations can short circuit the tendency to present simplistic narratives about our collections. Unfortunately, however, data visualizations that concentrate the user interface into a single interactive screen can also significantly reduce our ability to offer the public necessary historical context if we’re not careful.

Take, for example, the great interactive correspondence visualization created by the historians and computer scientists at Stanford for the Mapping the Republic of Letters project. This complex interface really only makes sense to individuals who are content experts, and sometime then only after they’ve read the accompanying pdf explaining the different facets of the tool. For a content novice, the tool is little more than a colorful toy because it links to primary sources in a subscription database, and because it lacks the biographical data on the correspondents that might make their network connections intelligible. If the visualization included access to a larger context of the enlightenment and background on the individual correspondents, it could be a powerful and concentrated way for the public to learn about the development of this period in Euro-American intellectual history. To some extent, we can excuse the Stanford project because it is explicitly a research venture targeting scholars of the enlightenment, rather than members of the general public

The Digital Vaults site from the National Archives and Records Administration, on the other hand, was created precisely to engage the public. Unfortunately, the project is completely hampered by its abstraction. The Flash version of the site gives users access to a seven randomly selected sources from a database of over 1,200. Clicking on a document, the user enters a web of connections to other documents based on shared tags. (The HTML version simply offers an alphabetical list of tags.) The sources have minimal accompanying metadata–usually title, date, and a brief description. While this environment is attractive and fun to play with, it fails to offer users enough context to make any historical sense out of the materials they encounter. Rather than offering and entree into NARA’s rich collections, the site leave users at sea with only their pre-existing historical knowledge to support them.

Unlike Digital Vaults, visualizations that make use of geospatial and temporal cues offer users more necessary orientation. One successful example is Minnesota Historical Society’s True North project, which offers users the ability to layer information in space in time to glean some understanding of the state’s history. While the interface does not link out to individual primary sources, it manages to offer enough cohesiveness that users can start to construct their own narratives of change. The National Museum of Australia’s History Wall is even more successful. Built on the backbone of a flexible timeline, the interface allows users to explore the lives of Irish in Australia between 1770 and the present, drawing on, among other things, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and amazing Trove database that aggregates over 280 million sources from National Library of Australia. Together these elements let a user to explore within a much more deeply layered context that can push them to use heuristics that are important to historians as they make sense of the evidence from the past.

Considering this range of examples, I hope that we can begin to have a conversation about how to create and frame data visualizations that provide the public with new ways to access our content but also offer them enough context to help them begin to make sense of those materials in meaningful ways.

As we approach the alpha launch of Scripto with the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 project, it seems appropriate to step back and consider why we at CHNM would be interested in building a tool to facilitate the crowdsourcing of documentary transcription.

A survey of the current landscape in public history, archive, and museum projects suggests that a tide of interest in crowdsourcing is building in the community. Just recently, the participants in the Digital Humanities API Workshop at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities produced an excellent summary of recent work and current needs. The list of projects launched recently is long and includes projects such as:

• Ben Brumfield’s FromThePage
• Transcribing Bentham
• WikiSource
• Rescript
• T-Pen
• Old Weather
• DigitalKoot

This ecosystem of relate projects all draw up on the interest and enthusiasm of members of the general public to advance the work of important intellectual ventures. In a sense, the participants in these projects work to support Clay Shirky’s thesis in Cognitive Surplus (2010) that new media is allowing individuals to redirect their free time away from passive consumption of media to active participation in social and cultural ventures that can be harness in positive ways. Shirky’s work is somewhat utopian, but we at CHNM share his enthusiasm for the possibilities that community-wide collaboration might have for our work in public history.

Our enthusiasm for community participation in public history comes from the mission of the Center, which includes using “digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.” This impulse to provide open access to historical materials and to build open source tools also includes an interest in welcoming the wider public to join us in our work. In 1998 CHNM founder Roy Rosenzweig entitled his closing thoughts of The Presence of the Past (co-authored with David Thelen) “Everyone a Historian,” in an effort to indicate the very complex interpretations individuals who are not professional historians make of their encounters with history. We wish to encourage this historical work by providing everyone with access to historical materials and opportunities to participate in the work of history.

In addition to these general goals for members of the interested public, we have several specific goals for Scripto and its role in crowdsourcing documentary transcription for documentary editors.

1. For digital documentary projects, Scripto will allow users to provide text that is essential to improving the function of the archive’s search engine and the ability for users to locate the materials they need. As such we are not looking for perfect transcriptions, but rather the progressive improvement that users can provide over time. All of the text contributed by the crowd will provide more data to search, and will allow users to pursue topics and interests that might not be represented in the metadata created by project editors.
2. For documentary projects with the fiscal resources for professional transcriptions, we hope that this initial and imperfect transcription data will provide project editors with a first pass from which they can build more robust transcriptions for scholarly editions. To some small degree, user contributed transcriptions will allow projects to reallocate resources toward the value-added materials they bring to scholarly editions in the form of annotations, glossaries, and other contextual elements.
3. The landscape of documents that user choose to transcribe will provide documentary editors with vital insights about the topics and elements of their archives that are of interest to users. This information is central to informing future efforts at outreach and to prioritizing site enhancements, such as teaching materials and digital exhibits.
4. Opening up an archive to crowdsourced transcription provides projects with an opportunity to think seriously about fostering and maintaining a vibrant community of users. Public history is meant to be public, and Scripto will help editors focus on seeking out interested users for their important holdings.

In the end, our work on Scripto and its implementation with the Papers of the War Department is an experiment in pursuing these goals. Eventually, editors from other digital documentary projects may wish to customized or extend Scripto’s functionality to serve the needs of their users and their collections, but these four essential goals will remain consistent across projects. As a free and open source tool, we have designed Scripto to be light-weight, flexible, and modular so that it represents a simple step forward for documentary editors.

[Cross-posted from the Scripto blog.]

Digital-JumpStart session at AAM2010

On Sunday, I had the pleasure of organizing and facilitating a Digital-JumpStart session with Michael Edson at the American Association of Museums meeting in Los Angeles. We were joined and assisted by 30 wonderful facilitators and well over 100 participants. For 2:45 minutes we worked together in unconference style to share our lessons learn, questions and struggles, and future plans for digital work in museums. Discussion sessions ranged from gaming to digital exhibits to social media to institutional strategy and our numbers ran the gamut from very experienced museum technologists to those working to launch new museums. In the next days and weeks facilitators and participants will be adding their notes to the wiki, forming our collective record of our time together and possibilities for our work in the coming year. Mike did a wonderful job of capturing the findings shared by facilitators with the entire group at the end of discussion period.

Those findings spoke to a variety of issues, questions, and concerns, but many of them echoed the sentiments expressed by Douglas Hegley in summarizing the discussions about institutional strategy: We all have organizational mission statements and those statements should be the starting place for our thinking about digital work and kinds of technologies we need to put into place to serve those mission goals. I think that Douglas’ statement holds with respect to our organizing and planning for the session. I view Digital-JumpStart and similar collaborative unconference ventures as specifically being in service of both the Smithsonian and the Center for History and New Media’s institutional missions. The Smithsonian Institution was famously made possible by the generosity of James Smithson’s bequest to the United States government expressly for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.” The Center for History and New Media was founded with the goal of “democratizing history.” That basic goal has evolved into an institutional commitment to Open Access and Open Source as a philosophy–a way of working that honors constructive collaboration and giving back to the community. Digital-JumpStart embodies these aims in its structure and practice by bringing together individuals who are interested in doing digital work and supporting them in moving their projects forward in practical ways. The sessions are low in overhead and high on productive exchange; anyone can come, everyone can contribute, and we all walk away having learned something. That sounds like the democratic increase and diffusion of knowledge to me.

At the close of the session, Mike urged everyone in attendance to “just go for it!”–to take the steps necessary to start innovating in their institutions and their local communities. I share his enthusiasm for pushing forward with this important work. Thus, I invite everyone who was at the session, and everyone who was not, to use the wiki and to consider running a Digital-JumpStart session at your next professional conference.

CHNM is pleased to announce an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities to support the design and development of a tool for crowdsourcing documentary transcription. The $49,215 award will enable CHNM’s dev team to to build an open source tool to enable researchers to contribute document transcriptions and research notes to digital archival projects, thus harnessing the power of the community of users to improve the discoverability and usefulness of the archive.

[cross-posted from CHNM News]

Digital archives and documentary projects need a viable solution that lowers both the cost and the investment of staff time involved with transcribing of large numbers of historical documents. There will be significant benefits for both the editorial staff and for interested users, whether they are scholarly researchers, students and teachers, or members of the general public. This tool will help to address some of the long-term resource challenges facing many digital documentary editing projects.

We will use the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 as a test case for the tool development. The end result of the project will be a generalized tool that can be modified to work with a host of different content management systems, such as Omeka, WordPress, or Drupal. Please contact Sharon Leon if you would like to volunteer to test the tool.

This project is part of the We the People program, which encourages the teaching, study, and understanding of American History and culture.

On Saturday, March 13, 2010, the CHNM’s Bracero History Archive <http://braceroarchive.org> received the National Council on Public History’s award for “Outstanding Public History Project.”

The award recognizes excellence in work completed within the previous two calendar years that contributes to a broader public reflection and appreciation of the past or that serves as a model of professional public history practice. Sharon Leon and other project staff, including Peter Liebhold (NMAH), Kristine Navaro (UTEP), Mireya Loza (Brown), and Alma Carillo (Brown), were on hand to accept the honor from NCPH President Marianne Babal at the annual awards luncheon.

The Bracero History Archive is a landmark venture in collaborative documentation. With major partners at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, and dozens of other small cultural heritage and community organizations around the country, the project has worked to collect and make available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964. Millions of Mexican agricultural workers crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the states in America.

The Bracero History Archive is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities through the Preservation and Access division.

Cross-posted from CHNM

As a follow up to yesterday’s slides, here is a link to the Omeka website that I developed to support the talk at the National Council for History Education. It’s much better than the slides because you can actually explore the resources and tools.

Have at it and let me know what you think.

The Future of Teaching the Past: Digital Technologies and History Education in the 21st Century (http://chnm.gmu.edu/staff/sharon/workspace/OmekaEd/)

Slides from a keynote at the National Council for History Education Annual Meeting, March 13, 2009.

Here are the slides and audio from my presentation at MCN Taiwan.  It was a wonderful trip full of conversations with engaging colleagues in the museum and library communities.  I look forward to future interaction and collaboration with members of the organization when they come to the US for MCN in November.

Sorry for the bad pun, but 37 Signals fans should be pleased to see that the mainstream media is beginning to recognize the popularity, if not the virtues, of simple software. They’re profiled in Time magazine this week.