[bracket]

[This post was inspired by a panel on the Envisioning the Future of Public History Training at National Council of Public History 2012 in Milwaukee.]

The increasing interest number of courses and concentrations focusing on public history suggests that we need to have a serious conversation about what are the skills that are necessary for students to pursue careers in public history in the 21st century. In his presentation for our panel on the future of public history instruction, Steven Burg from Shippensburg University offered preliminary survey results that suggested that digital history is a core interest for course development in a of public history programs. Those results lead to questions about what kinds of digital history training these programs are offering.

The NCPH Curriculum and Training committee works hard to offer guidance on these questions by producing a series of recommendations for best practices in graduate and undergraduate education, and for internships and certificate programs. The document focused on masters programs [PDF] offers guideposts that address the need to train students to be effective research historians, but also to provide them with practical skills in an area of concentration, hands-on experience through internship work, and an in-depth capstone project of some sort. Despite the fact that the document was adopted by the NCPH Board of Directors in October 2008, there is almost no mention of digital skills or digital public history work in the recommendations.

While I don’t have any concrete data on what kind of digital skills individual public history programs are teaching to prepare their students to do public history in a digital environment, I do know what is being taught in the required set of digital history courses for candidates in the PhD program at Mason. We cover a range of areas that engage theoretical questions, methodological approaches, and practical skills. This approach helps graduate students begin to enter into the major conversations in the field of digital history and to start to conceptualize and produce their own digital projects. Based on this teaching and my experience collaborating with cultural heritage organizations on digital projects, I have some recommendations on the skills public historians need to demonstrate to claim competence in digital history.

First and foremost, students need to use digital technology to do good history and to model that practice in public. Of course, this is not really about the technology, but more about carefully considering the framing of historical questions and demonstrating the elements of historical thinking skills such as effective contextualization, and considering multiple perspectives, causality, and shifting interpretation. Engaging in this type of authentic work in public raises all sorts of questions about authority and expertise. In the digital space the public has so many venues in which to respond, question, and challenge based on their existing knowledge and assumptions. The trick is to meet these users where they are and bring them along through the process of inquiry so that they arrive at more nuanced understandings of the past. Done well, this dialogue can lead to deep attachment and investment for the public, so public history programs cannot neglect the central communicative aspects of good digital work.

Focusing on the ways that student can communicate the stuff of history and the practice of doing history in a rich context inevitably should lead to a conversation about disaggreggating the far-too-vague concept the “audience” or the “user.” Being able to identify and target specific audience segments will be essential for doing good digital public history work. There is no single or general user profile. Students need to know how to identify and assess the needs of their core constituencies. Retirees with an interest in local history will have vastly different concerns than middle school history teachers, who in turn will have different needs than scholarly researchers.

Next, students need an introduction project development and planning that embraces agile development. Most history majors never consider issues of collaboration and management in their course work, but public history is about project work. Students need to learn what it takes to plan a collaborative projects and see it to completion. In the digital realm, this will be both a question of clarifying intellectual goals and creating technical work plans. I have written elsewhere about teaching project management, but it’s worth emphasizing here why agile principles are important. Agile development began as a movement to resist the heavily managed and bureaucratic methods of software development. Based on the notion that frequent builds, assessment, and correction allow for more nimble and responsive development, agile methods offer a model for digital public history too. Projects can start small with existing tools and resources. From that base the project team can gather information about audience response and content framing that can then be rolled into the project work flows. The emphasis here is on moving quickly and learning constantly. These practices are particularly well-suited to small organizations with slim technical infrastructure and staffing.

Turning to the technical front, students also need a sense of sound design and development practices, including the basic forces that make the web work: HTML, CSS, content management systems, etc. It is too much to expect that students would graduate with deep knowledge of these building blocks, but they need to be familiar enough with the structural elements that they can interact with developers and designers who do possess the technical knowledge to build customized sites and applications.

Despite the need for this general technical knowledge, students must have a sense of how effectively to use existing software and services to stand up quickly a digital project. In some cases this will be as simple as meeting audiences where they are already gathering on the web by sharing collections and expertise on HistoryPin or Wikipedia. In other cases, it will mean using existing outreach and communication venues such as Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr or WordPress to share the exciting work of public historians and their organizations. Furthermore, students need to have a sense of how to use software-as-service tools such as Omeka.net, Drupal Gardens, Dipity, Viewshare, and GeoCommons to produce narrative exhibits and data and geospatial visualizations that can communicate historical complexity and can engage audiences with historical questions and materials.

These are just the basics, but I don’t see how we can ask anything less from our public history students if we are to claim to send them out into the world with training in digital history.

Prompted by a twitter conversation with Miriam Posner about the need for a really basic introduction to using blogs in the college classroom, I’ve been reflecting on the ways that I’ve come to use public writing in my own teaching over the last fifteen years or so — both on the level of changing technology, and on the level of the scholarship of teaching and learning.

First, some background….

As an undergraduate at Georgetown University, I had the good fortune of working for and with Randy Bass, who even in the very first years of the web was leading the charge to encourage faculty to use technology to improve their teaching. (It is no surprise for those of you who read his blog and Profhacker posts that Mark Sample, aka “The Naked Professor,” then a masters student in the English Department, was also an integral part of those conversations and that work.) Randy often used to begin conversations with teachers by asking them what kinds of things they would like to change about their teaching. What would you like to do better? And, what tools can we use to help make that happen? To me, this is the essential heart of the right approach to using technology in teaching. It begins with an issue with the teaching and learning and then turns to the the task of implementing an appropriate intervention. These are the basic building blocks, regardless of the content focus or the digital tools at hand. What could be going better in your teaching? What do you wish your students would do more of? Do better? What do your students need to improve their learning?

These conversations coincided with work on several really important efforts at Georgetown. Mostly, I was marking up things in HTML, but Randy and Mark and other were working with faculty around the country on Engines of Inquiry: A Practical Guide for Using Technology in Teaching American Culture (1997), published through the American Studies Association’s Crossroads Project. (Sadly both of those projects are no longer available on the web, but Mark is working to resurrect the essays from Engines of Inquiry.) This work rolled into the first summer gathering for faculty interested in technology and pedagogy, where the main conversation was about deepening student engagement and increasing their ability to communicate the complex ideas that might result from that deepened engagement. That meeting has continued to be held summer after summer, eventually coming to be institutionalized in the Teaching, Learning, and Innovation Summer Institute. So, as I was making the transition from being an undergraduate who worked on some basic web projects to beginning a graduate student who was developing my own approach to teaching, my thinking was infused with the findings of these scholars who were committed to doing research on how to improve teaching and learning.

In Fall 1997, I arrived at the American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota with a graduate research assistantship that called for me to help implement some web elements for the department, particularly with respect to the core curriculum. Over the course of that year, I built a bunch of websites (by hand, using tables) that offered support for those courses, some of which had six recitation sections. That spring we installing threaded discussion boards to support the small group work in a large American Indian Studies course. I wasn’t in the classroom on a regular basis to see how the asynchronous discussion supported engagement, but from what I did see students seemed to be in conversation with one another and the materials. It was a good lesson about priming the pump, but in my own teaching at the UofM I mostly used websites as a way to deliver the syllabus and course materials.

I returned to the DC area in the August of 2004 to start work at CHNM. That return coincided with the closing meeting of the Visible Knowledge Project, begun by Randy Bass and his colleagues at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship in 1999, to encourage research on teaching and learning. So Roy Rosenzweig and I spent several days absorbing the research and work that the project scholars had been conducting on the pay off of asking students to externalize their cognitive processes. My own thinking on teaching has been heavily influenced by the project’s resulting findings, which eventually were published in January 2009 in a special issue of Academic Commons: “New Media Technologies and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.”

The biggest take away for me from the VKP research was that students need to see their own process in order to repeat it in an independent way, and that the more they can think of themselves as being part of a larger public conversation the better their work will be. I took these two principles into my teaching with undergraduates and graduate students in subsequent semesters. To this, I added the goal of having the students significantly process and question the course materials before they came together for our face to face meetings. Unlike most teachers, I have only very rarely taught classes that met more than once a week, so making the most of a single almost-three-hour block is essential to running a successful course.

Now, onto the details…..

I have approached using blogs as a way to encourage engagement with course materials and peers in two ways over the last five or six years: with a network of individual blogs, and with a single place for shared writing. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages, but generally, I find that using a single blog with lots of student authors works well with undergraduates, and that asking each individual to create an separate site works better for graduate students.

Regardless of whether the students each have their own blogging space, I always set up my course materials in WordPress. I provide the course schedule, required readings, general procedures, and a description of major assignments. For several years, I used the ScholarPress Courseware plugin to facilitate the mechanics of plugging the readings into the schedule, but for the last couple of semesters I’ve been using a newer version of WP, so I just created pages using basic HTML.

One approach to integrating public writing with a course is to ask each student to set up an individual blog. This has the advantage of assuring that they leave your course with the skills necessary to set-up and use a blog should they need to do that for another situation. While there are many platforms available, including Blogger and TypePad, I usually suggest that students go to WordPress.com for an account. It doesn’t get much simpler than that, and they learn the administrative interface for the most common stand-alone blogging software. Once the students have set up their sites, I use Google Reader to create a bundle of their RSS feeds so that I can follow their work through a single feed rather than having to check many different ones (thanks to the PressForward staff for the tips on doing this). Then, I post the bundle to the main course site so that everyone can subscribe to it. I find that this method is good for the graduate students who seem to have more willingness to maintain their own space over the long term, and to put a little bit more effort into the interaction of commenting. I ask the graduate students to blog each week in response to the major questions raised by the assigned materials.

Alternately, everyone can blog in the same site. This has the advantage of making for a single source of work. When asked this semester if they would rather set-up their own blogs or work within the course site, my undergraduates opted for using the main blog suggesting that a stronger sense of conversation was easier when everything is together. I generally agree with them. The only exception may be for undergraduates who have established an e-portfolio for their major and who might want to concentrate their writing in that space. When we all work in the same blog, I set up categories for each major author or thematic concentration so that we can easily navigate the large quantities of writing produced during the semester.

Whether using a network of blogs or a single course site, I don’t ask the undergraduates to blog each week. I divide the students into groups of four or five. Each week the students in one group are responsible for writing a blog post that engages the reading for the week and the larger questions of the course, which is due by 5pm two days before class. Then the rest of the class is responsible for commenting on at least one post (due by midnight the day before class). This results in students having to write at least two major reflections and to comment six or seven times during the semester. By requiring comments, I am forcing conversation and a sense of public accountability. Some semesters students do get into the spirit of conversation, but even if they are just fulfilling the requirements, we end of with a solid base for a conversation when we get to class. I’m happy to enter the conversation at that point, but I very rarely enter the space of the blogs, in part because I would like the students to feel like they can offer their thoughts and engage with one another without the sense that I’m waiting swoop in and turn the conversation or correct them. I do, however, read all the posts and the comments, and that writing significantly shapes the approach I take to the materials when we get to class. Finally, I grade all the main posts, and two randomly selected comments from each student. The random selection process of grading was suggested by Mills Kelly many years ago, and has, as he promised, generally guaranteed a reasonably high quality of response from the students. That isn’t too much writing for them, and it isn’t a ton of grading for me.

Of course, I’m neither the first, nor will I be the last, to write about this. One good place to start are the many useful posts on Profhacker in the teaching category.

[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.