In October 2007, I became Director of Public Projects at the Center. The creation of this new division recognized the significant work that I was already doing in partnership with major libraries, archives, and museums. Building on the Center’s commitment to bring rigorous historical scholarship into the public realm, I have shaped the profile of the Public Projects Division with several goals in mind. First, I am working to advance the capacity of cultural heritage institutions to communicate the complex meaning and question raised by their collections. Next, I am providing national leadership on the importance of using standardized formats and metadata when creating digital collections and exhibits. Finally, I continually advocate for open source, open access, and open content solutions for cultural heritage institutions. I have pursued these goals in three key ways: 1) by designing and directing exemplary digital projects that serve as replicable models for others in the field of digital humanities; 2) by building tools and conducting research that provides others in the field with resources to advance their own work; and 3) by publicly advocating for the centrality of interoperable, open access digital scholarship, exhibits, and archives to the future work of humanists and cultural heritage professionals.
One of these public projects is an example of the ways that the digital environment provides new possibilities for traditional public history exhibits. Martha Washington: A Life brings together archival research and material culture from the Mt. Vernon Estates and Gardens to present a biographical narrative of the nation’s first First Lady. While extensive resources exist on George Washington, Martha Washington’s story is virtually unknown. This site, which was funded by a private donor, works to remedy that oversight by presenting her life from early childhood through her death, including her first marriage, the Revolution, and her time as First Lady, while at the same time providing historical insights on the social, cultural, and political realities of eighteenth century women’s lives. The site contains a popular but deeply researched narrative written by GMU History Professor Rosemarie Zagarri, as well as an extensive archive, and a number of teaching modules that focus on key objects and themes from the narrative.
On the archival front, the Bracero History Archive breaks new ground by collecting, aggregating, and making publicly available the documents and oral histories of the bracero guest worker program between the United States and Mexico (1942-1964). The Bracero History Archive was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and was the recipient of the 2010 National Council on Public History’s Outstanding Public History Project Award. With the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Brown University as the major content partners, the project enabled the collection and presentation of a history that might otherwise have been lost. Leveraging the community ties and relationships of local partners, we were able to reach out to braceros and their families who may never have trusted an unknown academic researcher. The technical infrastructure for the site, which was built using Omeka, specifically enabled this broad-based collaboration between primary partners and local partners by creating a shared central repository that could be accessed via the web. This path-breaking work was documented and modeled for others wishing to pursue similar types of projects in “A Practical Guide to Collaborative Documentation in the Digital Age.”
Upon taking leadership of the Public Projects division, I also took on a more substantial role with the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800. PWD represents a revolution in the world of documentary papers projects, in that it has made available high-resolution digital copies of nearly 55,000 documents, with funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Since public launch of the website, the editorial staff has been working to progressively create metadata for that corpus. Thus, unlike traditional papers projects that require decades of funding and staff time before they publish scholarly editions, PWD has focused on providing immediate access to the archival materials and streamlining the editorial process, thus reducing the cost. We are continuing to innovate in this realm by pursuing the help of the population of interested users to transcribe those documents (see Scripto below). Similarly, other documentary editing projects are approaching us to solve traditional editing problems using innovative tools and methodologies. For example, the editors of the George Washington Papers, have asked us to use the digital tools at our disposal to create a fully accessible annotated bibliography of all of the literature on George Washington. Though just in the beginning stages, this project promises to provide a new model for the creation and distribution of traditional forms or scholarship.
As well as working on these content-driven projects, I have participated in the design and development of new software and tools to advance the practice of digital history. The most substantial of these is Omeka, a free and open-source software that provides museums, historical societies, libraries and individuals with an easy to use platform for publishing collections and creating attractive, standards-based, interoperable online exhibits. Omeka is designed to satisfy the needs of cultural institutions that lack technical staffs and large budgets. Bringing Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to small museum, historical society, and library websites, Omeka fosters the kind of user interaction and participation that is central the mission of those cultural institutions. Omeka is funded by a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services and is the recipient of a 2008 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award for Technology Collaboration. As co-director of Omeka with Tom Scheinfeldt, I have worked to develop a community of end-users who are creating new types of scholarly and interpretive content using the tools. This outreach work involves developing relationships with librarians, archivists, museum professionals, and scholars interested in producing high-quality digital content, including consulting with cultural heritage professionals from the Newberry Library, the Ohio Humanities Council, and countless small museums and historical societies. All of this work is centered on encouraging cultural heritage professionals to share both their collections an their expertise online. Currently, we are poised to make a leap forward in this capacity by launching Omeka.net, which is a cloud service by which users can sign up for an account rather than hosting their own installation of the software. This dramatically lowers the barrier to use and will significantly contribute to the possibilities for providing open access to cultural heritage materials and scholarship.
Omeka makes several contributions in the world of cultural heritage institutions and the realm of digital scholarship. First the software’s core infrastructure creates items with a standardized Dublic Core Metadata structure and produces a series of data feeds (RSS, XML, JSON, OAI) that enables the use, reuse, and sharing of digital archive materials. These standardized outputs encourage best practices and open access by enabling interoperability among content management platforms. Second, Omeka brings new possibilities for scholarly publishing that push beyond the traditional linear form of the monograph to enable geospatial, temporal, and interactive access to core data sets. Finally, Omeka’s easy theming capacity enhances scholars’ abilities to integrate aesthetic considerations in their arguments.
Furthermore, I am leading efforts to enlist the broad community of scholars and interested users in improving the capacity of our digital archives. Scripto: Crowdsourced Documentary Transcription. Scripto is a light-weight, open source, tool that, when released in the Summer of 2011, will allow users to contribute transcriptions to online documentary projects. Supported with grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities, and the National Historical Publication and Records Commission, the tool will include a versioning history and full set of editorial controls, so that project staff can manage public contributions. Thus, Scripto represents an intervention in the world of documentary editing. It is an effort to open the process of documentary editing to a wider range of institutions and interested users. Being realistic about the funding resources and institutional capacity of documentary projects, this tool will provide a way for user participation to dramatically increase the access to historical sources. Whereas the traditional transcription process requires intense resource dedication, Scripto offers a way to achieve the benefits of improved search and access that coincide with the availability of full-text transcriptions, without the burden of employing a fulltime transcription team. While the results might not be the flawless transcriptions rendered through traditional means, they will improve the ability of researchers to quickly locate the documents that they need from a large corpus.
While envisioning and implementing new tools to do public digital scholarship, I have directed two research projects designed to evaluate the current use of new technologies in museums and to make recommendations about best practices for future implementation of those technologies. Both of these projects have been funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. First, Mobile for Museums provided an overview of the current state of the art in the use of mobile technology by museums. The website includes a comprehensive collection of existing work on mobile technologies for cultural heritage institutions, provides a set of recommendations for moving forward with mobile work, and a set of implementation prototypes. This work serves as foundation on which other museums and CHNM projects can build, and has garnered attention from a wide variety of institutions such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art as they are beginning to plan their mobile development strategies. Second, I am in the midst of planning a Summit on Digital Tools for Museum Educators. This two-day meeting will bring together leaders in the museum education field to discuss their current use of digital technology, to examine promising examples of educational technology from other fields, and to frankly discuss the technical and institutional barriers to more effective use of technology to enhance informal learning. The result of the meeting will be a widely distributed whitepaper that summarizes the state of the field and makes recommendations on promising routes forward for museum educators, technology developers, and funders.
Building on these accomplishments, I foresee a number of future directions for the Division of Public Projects. First and foremost, I am interested in the ways that we might combine text mining software and graphic visualizations in more productive ways. In particular, I would like to experiment with graphically tracing the development of intellectual concepts across a corpus of text. For example, we might be able to visualize the ways that scientific developments influenced popular and political usage of evolutionary concepts in the early 20th century. Not only would we be able to visualize change over time, but also geographic and personal networks. Second, I am interested in doing more work on place-based computing. In this vein, I am submitting a grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund a mobile-optimized website that would deliver historical interpretation of the National Mall through geospatial, temporal, and thematic interfaces. These are only two examples of the vast number of possible new directions for Public Projects at CHNM.
In addition to the major project work that I have directed in the last six years, I have provided national leadership by publicly advocating for the centrality of interoperable, open access digital scholarship, exhibits, and archives to the future work of humanists and cultural heritage professionals. Over the past several years I have served as a consultant and advisor to a number of libraries, archives, and museums as they plan and execute new digital strategies. For example, the Naval Historical and Heritage Command needed a set of recommendations on how to improve their website’s information architecture to render their collections and resources more accessible to the general public and key audiences. Similarly, the Minnesota Historical Society required a series of facilitated strategy sessions and recommendations about content aggregation, collaborative institutional partnerships, and design and development goals as they planned for an online encyclopedia of Minnesota history. Finally, as a part of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s American Archive project to build a prototype portal for digitized historic public broadcasting sound and film footage, I consulted on standards for interoperability, content selection, and digital preservation of audio and video content drawn from station archives around the county. These varied consultations are unified by their contribution to the larger effort to render cultural heritage resources openly, and easily, accessible to users through digital means.
Also, I have had the pleasure of giving a number of invited talks that deal with the questions of access, interoperabilty, collaboration, and digital scholarship. These talks, given at the Frontiers of New Media Symposium at the University of Utah, and the Digital Archives and Digital Humanities meeting at the National Taiwan University, have centered on digital scholarship in the “Commons Era” and focused on the promise of increased innovative and collaborative work that shared digital platforms are enabling. My thinking on this grows out of CHNM project work such as the Bracero History Archive, but it is also influenced by the great strides being made around content sharing through initiatives like the Free and Open Source Software movement, Creative Commons licensing, the Open Archive Initiative, and more popular projects like the Flickr Commons. With increasing scale of digital abundance, we need to envision new forms of collaborative scholarship that can take advantage of new platforms for synchronous and asynchronous work.
My understanding of my responsibility to advance the field of digital humanities also involves leadership through service in a variety of venues. During the Spring of 2010, I organized two Digital-JumpStart (DJS) “unconference” sessions at national conferences. DJS brings together library, archive, and museum professionals with expertise and experience in digital work with colleagues just beginning to plan and implement work on digital projects. In March, with assistance from Sheila Brennan and Tom Scheinfeldt, I led a working group session at the National Council on Public History where 20 participants discussed project ideas, technology platforms and tools, funding strategies, and other issues. These participants used a wiki to being the conversation before the conference and extend it afterwards. Then in May, in collaboration with Michael Edson, Director of Digital Strategy at the Smithsonian Institution, I facilitated a DJS session at the American Association of Museums annual meeting that brought together 30 of the most experienced technology professionals in the museum world with over 100 participants for almost three hours of sharing and mentoring. These very successful sessions are working to change the professional practice of technology staff in cultural heritage institutions and to change the climate of professional conferences by increasing the amount of productive knowledge exchange. The participants leave the sessions having helped to create lasting resources and build stronger professional networks. DJS sessions are in line with the transformative work of THATCamp movement and innovative efforts at community building such as DHNow, that are being pursued by my colleagues at CHNM. In all cases, these events value informality, openness, relationship-building, and productive collaboration.
Within the larger community of historians, I have served in an advisory capacity on a number of fronts. As a member of the program committee for the 2010 Organization of American Historians meeting, in addition to the traditional duties of reading and evaluating session proposals, I developed and solicited a slate of sessions on the current state of the field in digital history and on cutting-edge digital tools for historians. Also, over the past two years I have informed and advised the American Historical Association and the Oral History Association on their website advisory committee as they work to determine the appropriate scholarly communications strategies for their respective communities of historians. Finally, at CHNM I have exercised leadership in my role as supervisor for half a dozen classified staff members and a host of graduate research assistants. This oversight is essential to the continuing success of the Center’s projects, but it is also essential to the development of a growing cohort of experienced individuals who will go on to expand the field of digital history.