I was initially planning to only carry my iPad and its keyboard case to take notes and run a spreadsheet of photos taken which I could use when I got home. However, I will now also be Skyping in to class one night, and I’m a bit concerned about backing up my photos. I know that I can download the SD card onto my iPad and then upload them to Dropbox, but I have yet to figure out a good way of selecting 50-100 photos at a time on the iPad.

I could, of course, bring my laptop. My 15 inch, 6 lb, late 2008 MacBook pro which slows down running Chrome and TweetDeck at the same time. Now that I have a desktop (long story), I’d like to replace this with something lighter and more portable that I can use in archives or around town, but which doesn’t need to be able to run large-scale software programs. If I had a fairy godmother, or a winning Powerball ticket, I’d get a MacBook Air. It’s not that I’m wedded to Apple as a company or even as an OS, it’s just that I dislike Windows OS and have been using Apple products since the mid 1980s.

A much cheaper alternative would be a Chromebook (probably the Samsung model XE303C12). It’s got a small, solid-state hard drive, only 16GB, but it also has two USB ports, which would allow me to transfer files from my SD card to cloud storage or even an external drive. In some ways, especially given the limitations of the Chrome-based OS, it might seem little different from the iPad. On the other hand, it does have USB ports and file selection using a mouse rather than a touchscreen.

I’m open to advice from computer geeks, fellow researchers and digital humanists. What do you take when you travel, and what would you take if someone gave you a winning powerball ticket?

The idea of layering is something I first consciously encountered when I attended as session at the annual meeting of the Virginia Association of Museum and attended a session given by the creators of the digital comic book “The Secret in the Cellar,” part of the Smithsonian exhibit Written in Bone. At the bottom of most pages of the comic, there are links to articles and other websites with contextual information. The speakers talked about providing these links for people who wanted to ‘dig down’ into the information.

During this past semester we’ve talked about the challenge of not only conveying history in an interesting fashion but also teaching people about historical thinking, about how historians get from a whole mess of documents in archives and books on shelves to a 20 minute tour or a 100 word label on your smartphone. You can show the process in real life, to be sure, but digital makes it possible to pack a lot of information into very little physical space. Moreover, it makes it possible for someone to go from the 100 word interpretation to the vast array of primary sources very easily and quickly. Rather than leaving the historic site, finding a library, finding books, maybe trying to locate an archive, it can be as easy as following a series of breadcrumbs which go deeper into the past with every click.

It is not that I think the only differences that digital makes for public history is to add complexity to layering and make primary sources easier to reach. These are, however, the aspects which caught my attention and I thought I could work with. Which leads me to the concrete example: the project.

The Burning of Washington is a mobile-first Omeka exhibit centered around providing a tour of key sites of destruction in the British invasion of Washington, DC, in August, 1814. Wait, I hear some of you thinking, hasn’t she done this before? Yes and no. I tried to build something like this at the end of Clio I in December 2011, but the focus of that project was entirely on the content of “what happened.”

What I’ve tried to do with this new site is limit the amount of interpretation I provide. I conceptualized the tour, which is the core of the site, as accompanying real-world signs like the various Heritage Trail signs which can be found all over Washington. Those signs are generally interpretation-heavy and not transparent about the historical process. In contrast, the website (linked by the much-maligned QR code?) would focus on the primary sources and encouraging historical thinking.

Every stop on the tour (page in the exhibit) has a brief description of what historians now know/think happened. The items for each stop are excerpts from original sources giving quotes specifically relevant to that location. I tried to keep the quotes under 100 words, so that they each one would fit on my phone screen, but 19th century writers aren’t known for their brevity. Clicking on the representative image of a text takes the visitor/user to the item record, which includes some context about the source and a link to its full text.

I wanted to provide different primary sources to show how they conflict and get the visitor/user thinking about historical sources. The most successful of the sites, to me, is the Sewall House. Every single account I have found says something slightly different about that encounter. Did the shots come from behind the house or inside it? How many shooters were there? Does it matter? Because this is the first stop on the tour, the conflicts between sources would hopefully have visitors questioning the other sources they encountered as they moved forward.

There is more I would like to do with the site, if I had the time/skill/expertise. Somehow I would like to get the tour to work with the map, which would mean adding geolocation to exhibits. Somehow. My “further reading” section is lacking in general books on the War of 1812, given that most of my reading has focused on Washington or the rhetoric concerning impressment as a cause of the war. I would probably add a non-tour exhibit discussing the ways in which the “Burning” has been described, especially the behavior of the British troops. For the most part, the British limited their destruction to public property; damage to private property was done by Americans who remained in the city when others fled, and by a tornado which struck on the 25th.

I was the kind of kid who went on a field trip or hike, learned a little about something, and spent my next trip to the library trying to learn more. With digital work, and the prevalence of digital devices, I think we can make the space between Learn and Learn More a lot shorter and the results much richer.

I mention this because one of the main impressions I got from this week’s readings was that evaluation processes need to have and be driven by Purpose. Evaluations should contribute to the ultimate goals of a project in some and not just be another hoop to jump through. The feeling of throwing data down a hole is discouraging; returning with useful data which can improve your project or show that it’s being used is rewarding. Evaluation should be a means as well as (or instead of?) an end.

That said, I don’t know that I’m ready to run complex evaluations on my own. One of the projects on which I’ve been working at RRCHNM has included periodic testing, which I count as a sort of ‘formative’ evaluation (to use a term from Birchall et al). Periodic in-process evaluation helps us make sure we’re heading in the right direction and readjust course as needed. Watching the evaluation process, sometimes participating, is helpful for me, at least. Think of it as the lab half of a science course, conducting experiments while still reading the texts.

From this week’s readings, I have an idea of what makes for good evaluations, both in development and use. Keep the goals of the project in mind, think about outcomes not output, look for your strengths as well as weaknesses when reading the data (Preskill). Bear in mind the variety of user experiences before, during, and after interacting with your project (Kirchberg and Tröndle). Consider how you’re planning to use the evaluation findings when deciding what sort of evaluation(s) to conduct (Birchall et all). Make sure the findings are readable and accessible to the people who need them, up to and including training people how to read them (Villaespesa and Tasich). These are only soundbites, obviously, but they capture some of the ideas I’m storing for future use.

Readings:

• Elena Villaespesa, Tijana Tasich, “Making Sense of Numbers: A Journey of Spreading the Analytics Culture at Tate,” Museums and the Web 2012.
• Banny Birchall, et al., “Levelling Up: Towards Best Practice in Evaluating Museum Games,” Museums and the Web 2012.
• Hallie Preskill, “Museum Evaluation without Borders: Four Imperatives for Making Museum Evaluation More Relevant, Credible, and Useful,” Curator: The Museum Journal 54:1 (Jan. 2011): 93-100.
• Kirchberg, V. and Tröndle, M. “Experiencing Exhibitions: A Review of Studies on Visitor Experiences in Museums.” Curator: The Museum Journal 55:4 (Oct. 2012) 435–452.
• IMLS’s Evaluation Resources

Obviously, one of the best aspects of mobile is its ability to explicitly link history and place. Some people, myself included, wonder about historic landscapes when we look around, whether abroad or at home. Not only can mobile-based public history answer the questions of those of us who already wonder, but it has the potential to get others to start thinking about the history of the places they see. It can ask and answer (at least in part) the question “What was Here?”

I capitalized those words not because I’ve been spending too much time reading 18th century documents but because each of them is important to the question, and, I think, to mobile public history. What (or who) asks about buildings that have been removed, landscape features built over, communities and individuals who have moved out or passed on. Here says “in this place, right where I am currently standing” and creates a connection between the past people or places and the user/visitor. The Past in Place has resonance, which is why people visit battlefields and there are so many signs that say “Famous Person Lived Here Briefly.”

Another potential for mobile, which I hadn’t thought of until this week’s readings, is providing another access point for institutional collections which aren’t on display. In the galleries, it could be a “see more items like this one” which shows you all the other teapots in addition to the one in the vitrine in front of you.¹ You can also enhance what people are seeing by giving them more information than you can fit on label text – particularly useful if your label is simply the genus and species of a plant. Even more exciting, to me at least, is taking material from archives and digitally putting it in place in a city, as PhillyHistory is trying to do. Not only does that really put the collection items “out there,” but I would hope it also lowers barriers between the user/visitor of the website and the institution or archive which contributes the material. Historical societies and archives can feel restricted and unwelcoming; putting their collections virtually into the hands of visitors/users may be a good way to lower access barriers.

There are, of course, challenges to making mobile public history. The CHNM report lays them out quite well, but I think some of them bear repeating. The major question is, of course, whether you want to build a responsive website or a native mobile app. Personally, I prefer responsive websites, at least for building, because you don’t have to deal with two (three?) different sets of specifications for native apps, nor do you have to worry about updates to the operating systems. Also, I don’t have to remember my password and type it in to get to the content. You do, however, have to make sure your design choices work as well on a full-sized screen as a mobile screen (this can be a bonus, it just takes some thought). On the other hand, there are also benefits to building native apps, and I have downloaded some apps that I enjoy. The next time I go to Baltimore I intend to try out the Baltimore Heritage app.

On the whole, I find mobile exciting. In my head, it’s like having a museum, tour guide, and history book with me at all times. I carry my smartphone everywhere and use it all the time anyway, so having historically focused content, whether native or web-based, is an added bonus.

Readings:

• Sheila Brennan, et al., Mobile for Museums (Center for History and New Media, 2008).
• Deborah Boyer and Josh Marcus, “Implementing Mobile Augmented Reality Applications for Cultural Institutions,” Museums and the Web 2011.
• Matthew Fisher, Stacey Mann, Kim Sajet, and Minda Borum, “PhilaPlace to AnyPlace: Building a Reusable Community Platform for Mapping and Sharing History,” Museums and the Web 2011.
• Natasha Waterson and Mike Saunders, “Delightfully Lost: A New Kind of Wayfinding at Kew,” Museums and the Web 2012.
• Museum Mobile

1. Yes, teapots again

I’m intrigued by the potential of the Social Networks and Archival Context project, if only because I like the idea of any database which helps track historical social networks. The prototype holds promise, especially in the multiple ways to browse and explore, but wandering through it I found I wasn’t always sure where I was going. Picking one name from a list of correspondents seems to display “what collections has this name” rather than that person’s contextual data, which I find frustrating. Still, it is a prototype, and they seem to have found a way to deal with the multiple name iteration issue (Dolley Madison vs. Dolley Payne Madison vs. Dolley Payne Todd, etc).

Names are just one of the many moving parts that I would imagine cause trouble in any sort of massive linked archival data project. Perusing a 2007 D-Lib piece written by the some of the Polar Bear Expedition team, I was pleased to see them talk about reusing metadata, but surprised at some of the challenges. They write that the flexibility of EAD ended up making it more complicated to merge collections; the solution was (inevitably) to normalize the data, and implement a controlled vocabulary. They were working from one institution, which leads me to wonder how much work it would be to normalize the data from multiple archives, not to mention get all those institutions to agree on controlled vocabulary.

Clearly, the potential of digital work for archivists is more complicated than I thought. There is, however, a great deal of overlap with the work other digital humanists are doing, and therefore room for collaboration. As archives put even some of their collections online in digitized form, it opens up the possibility for historical contextualization and even small exhibits (going back to what I talked about last time, with the link between exhibits and collections).

A final, somewhat tangential thought, brought up by the readings and a comment at the March DCHDC meetup about what is an “archive” makes me think about the difference between archives which are putting their already-organized collections online and born-digital archival collections. Can something which remixes or blends archival material from different institutions be an archive? If it’s not an archive, what is it?

For this post, I am going to take Conn’s title question, Do Museums Still Need Objects? and ask it of digital exhibits. Do digital exhibits need objects? Yes, I think so. However, I also think it’s important to define what we mean by an object. Digital exhibits don’t have vitrines to fill; Most of the time you’re dealing with a two-dimensional representation of any three-dimensional artifact you want to include, unless you’re willing to use fancy code or use a video (not always a bad choice). On the other hand, a decent quality digital image of a document or artwork might make it easier for visitors to see the details or read the very tiny handwriting than it would be in a traditional exhibit. Moreover, we also have video, audio, map, infrared scan, and other sorts of objects to use in a digital exhibit. You could undoubtedly make a digital exhibit without any historical ‘objects,’ but I suspect in that case you’d end up generating your own images or video, which are objects of a sort in their own way. I, for one, think the historical object can still be useful in a digital exhibit.

How do we display these objects? Museums in the nineteenth and early twentieth century tended towards the Large Case Full of Similar Items, still visible today in places like the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (which I have visited). Then there is the more modern approach of selecting one representative object from the institution’s collection of many. Personally, I prefer the latter, not because I like the idea of a representative object but because the Cases of Similar Items rarely had a label which described why the museum had put the object out in the first place. When visiting a museum and looking at objects, I want to know about the context of the item (the why) as much as I do the basic facts about the object itself (the what). What excites me about the potential of digital exhibits is that the limitations of a physical museum no longer apply, allowing you to combine the two styles if you so chose.

Silver Teapot made in London, England, 1798-1799. Cooper-Hewitt Museum.

Let’s say, for example, you have an exhibit about the life of a household in late 18th century England.¹ The section on Taking Tea might have the image of a tea table, a tea service, some prints depicting taking tea, and text regarding the tea table as the domain of women, concerns about tea parties as promoting gossip, and so forth. In this exhibit, you have your representative tea pot. You could link the image of the teapot to its catalog record, assuming you owned the object or you had a record for it with the right information. You could also put a text beneath its caption saying “More Teapots?”

Silver tea urn, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1719-1720. National Museums Scotland.

From the item record or from the exhibit page, you could then link to your online catalog (again, assuming we’re at an institution with a collection) showing all the teapots, tea urns, and tea containers in your collection. You have now provided the visitor with the unique representative object, the context, and the option to view the digital equivalent of the Large Case of Similar Objects.

My thinking on all of this is heavily influenced by my work with Omeka, using it on my own and for a project as part of my research assistantship. In Omeka, items have their own page in addition to their presence in an exhibit, and the two descriptions can be as similar or as different as you want. I have far less experience designing games, and I honestly think that game-exhibits are extremely tricky to do well, online or in person. They too easily become all about the game, and lose the historical context/content, or get bogged down in Lessons To Be Learned, and aren’t any fun to play. Producing a good digital exhibit requires balancing a number of factors, and I don’t know that I’m currently prepared to think about adding gameplay into the mix.

Readings

• Stephen Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects? (2010).
• Wyman, B., Smith, S., Meyers, D. and Godfrey, M. (2011), “Digital Storytelling in Museums: Observations and Best Practices.” Curator: The Museum Journal, 54:4 (October 2011): 461–468.
• Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition (2005).
• Steven Gray, Claire Ross, Andrew Hudson-Smith, Claire Warwick, “Enhancing Museum Narratives with the QRator Project: a Tasmanian devil, a Platypus and a Dead Man in a Box,” Museums and the Web 2012.
• Eric Socolofsky, “Iterating for Visitors at the Exploratorium,” UX Magazine.
• Matthew Cook, Andrew Caspari, and Katherin Campbell, “On Air, Online and Onsite: The British Museum and the BBC’s ‘A History of the World,’” Museums and the Web 2011.
• Elizabeth Goins, “Museum Games: Some Strategies for Achieving Project Goals,” Museums and the Web 2011.
• Contents Magazine: http://contentsmagazine.com/
• Susan Cairns and Danny Birchall, “Curating the Digital World: Past Preconceptions, Present Problems, Possible Futures,” Museums and the Web 2013.

1. My first graduate school class was “Gender and Material Culture in 18th Century Britain

It is important to be in conversation not only with your audience but with the staff. The organizations described in both “Navigating the Bumpy Road” and “Social Media and Organizational Change” engaged people outside the social media departments, either to create a digital strategy or to create content for social media. Not only did this allow them to better represent the institution and its mission, but it seems to have facilitated commitment to social and digital media by people who otherwise might have considered it outside the scope of their work. National Gallery (UK) staff who participated in the internal workshops said they felt “respected” and apparently the inclusive process “greatly helped to legitimise” the digital strategy (Royston and Sexton, 2012). Internal communication matters because it isn’t just the audience who will ask “Why wasn’t I consulted?” (Ford, 2007 & 2011)

Another reason to bring in various voices from an institution on a digital project is that you can tell more stories, and possibly more interesting ones. Before starting my PhD, I worked in the curatorial department of a historic house which was in the process of restoring the interiors to their early 19th century state. We had a blog about the process, with contributions from various members of the curatorial department, which eventually merged with the archaeology department blog.  It made it possible for the tour, or the visitor’s internal narrative, to shift from passive voice (“It was decided that”) to active (“curators determined through research and then decided”). I think it also may have helped visitors to see the people who made up the site, and also to think about the process as much as the end result.

The blog was mostly one-way, so it may not count as full on conversation. The readings from Letting Go? emphasized, for me at least, the importance of hearing your audience as well as speaking to them. Fisher and Adair wrote about dialog, about allowing the visitor’s voice to coexist with, but not replace, the institutional voice. McLean pointed out that conversation requires reciprocity. All of this makes me think of my colleagues who are currently in a class on digital pedagogy: They have been helping me to understand why current thinking states that lectures are the least effective form of teaching. I think about seminars, especially the small ones (like this class), where the students speak and share their ideas but the professor is able to step in and offer guidance, with their deeper knowledge of the subject at hand.

What would it take to make digital public history more like a seminar than a lecture?

I suspect that to make it happen, you would need a good strategy. You would need to know your content and you audience, and have a sense of the best way of getting the latter to engage with the former. The readings so far have been full of good ideas for moving forward, yet there must also be a point where you just have to test things out to see if they work for your specific content and audience.

Readings:

• Letting Go: Sharing Historical Authority in a User Generated World, ed. Bill Adair, et al. (Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, 2011).
• Dana Allen-Greil, Susan Edwards, Jack Ludden, and Eric Johnson, “Social Media and Organizational Change,” Museums and the Web 2011.
• Sarah Hromack and Rachel Craft, “From the Ground Up (or the Inside Out): New Approaches to Digital Publishing,” Museums and the Web 2012.
• Erin Kissane, The Elements of Content Strategy (A Book Apart).
• Carolyn Royston and Charlotte Sexton, “Navigating the Bumpy Road: A Tactical Approach to Delivering a Digital Strategy,” Museums and the Web 2012.
• Robert Stein, “Blow Up Your Digital Strategy: Changing the Conversation about Museums and Technology,” Museums and the Web 2012.

Cited:

• Paul Ford, “Launch,” April 12, 2007.
•  –  ”The Web is a Customer Service Medium,” January 6, 2011.

Ai Wei Wei installation at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C., Feb 2013

Last weekend a friend and I went to the Hirshhorn Museum to see an installation by Ai Weiwei titled “According to What?” There were a variety of pieces, but two sections features large-format photographs of construction in Beijing displayed not in frames but on the floor and walls of the exhibit space. In order to see the mounted black and white photographs (just visible on the left of my cell phone picture) and to move through the installation, you had to walk across these photographs. I took a deep breath before I took my first step onto the printed image; Even knowing it was meant to be walked on, it felt wrong somehow. After all, everything else in the installation was clearly Do Not Touch, with the beeping alarms and everything.

I wouldn’t call the installation participatory by any means, but it did make me think about expectations. When I go to an art museum, at least one of those on the National Mall, I expect the art to be on the wall, inaccessible. Standing on a photograph isn’t interactive, but it made me feel like I was in the work of art, not outside it. Somehow, walking through the photographs, looking down as well as left and right, was part of the art as long as I was there. I have no idea if it’s what Ai Weiwei intended, but that’s how I felt.

I think engaging in participatory public history, at least as an institution, is a bit like taking that first step onto Beijing’s 2008 Olympic Stadium. It’s scary, like any moment a security guard or division head is going to appear and tell you off for doing the wrong thing. You have to reevaluate how you think about the relationship between the institution and the audience  Or rather, to use a phrase Clay Shirky borrows from Jay Rosen, the People Formerly Known as the Audience.

Relationships are a key part of the process of crowd- or community-sourcing and building participatory projects. Not just the relationship between project creators and community but the relation of the community to the project itself, its goals and outcomes. If the community (not audience) doesn’t feel rewarded by their relationship with the project, they won’t engage.

The most important lesson for someone running a participatory or crowdsourced project, in my opinion, was stated by Shirky, Simone, and Stein: Be A Good Host. Running with the metaphor, it means providing clear directions on how to get to the party, what the appropriate attire is for the party, leaving the porch light on, greeting new arrivals, providing them with essential information (location of bathroom, where to hang coats), and maybe introducing them to a few other people. A good host doesn’t just let people in and leave them to wander, and if she do see someone looking lost, she helps them get back to the party.

I think some of this can be managed through scaffolding. Good scaffolding helps lower the barriers to participation, a key factor to getting participants. Have a tool which looks familiar enough, for example like Wikipedia, and that’s one less step for people to learn before they start transcribing. Clearly stated goals and expectations prevent people from flailing about confused halfway through the project. I was caught by the idea that not all projects require a place for conversation among users. While a discussion board is right from some projects, others are full of people who just want to work in relative isolation. I’m not entirely sure how you determine whether or not yours will be a chatty project.

One thing that is clear is that users need to feel like their work actually does something. As Trevor Owens points out “It would be a waste of the public’s time to invite them in to complete a task that a computer could already complete,” and most community-sourced projects don’t want to be cow-clickers, at least as far as I can tell. All of the articles about participatory projects conveyed that their users were motivated by a desire to contribute something real to scientific or historical knowledge. They participate because they feel they have a stake in the outcome. The Galaxy Zoo users even discovered a new kind of astronomical object.

The fact that the users, the community, were credited with the discovery is another key factor, one that involves the relationship between contributor and coordinator. While a formal journal article might have been published under the name of scientists working on the project, credit for the identification seems to have been rightly given to the community of users. Their amateur status doesn’t mean the staff of the project has the right to dismiss their findings, although the discovery did have to be confirmed by experts. Stein contrasts an authoritarian approach with an authoritative one; listening and speaking is better than just shouting, in most situations. Besides, as the discovery of the peas and recent revelations about Roman hairstyles have shown, the amateur can sometimes uncover things the expert doesn’t see.

Relinquishing authority might be a little disorienting at first, like walking onto a photograph in an art museum. Figuring out how to run a good community sourced project isn’t easy, but if it is the right approach for the project, I suspect the outcome is well worth the challenges.

Readings for this week:

• Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum.
• Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (2008).
• Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus (2010).
• Stein, Robert. “Chiming in on Museums and Participatory Culture.” Curator: The Museum Journal, 55:2 (April 2012): 215–226.
• Fiona Romeo and Lucinda Blaser, “Bringing Citizen Scientists and Historians Together,” Museums and the Web 2011.
• Tim Causer and Valarie Wallace, “Building a Volunteer Community; Results and Findings from Transcribe Bentham,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 6:2 (2012).
• Jasper Visser and Dennis Tap, “The Community as the Centrepiece of a Collection: Building a Community of Objects with the National Vending Machine,” Museums and the Web 2011.
• Trevor Owens’ 4 post series on Crowdsourcing
• NYPL Labs Blog and Projects

AASLH Professional Standards and Ethics, NCPH Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, and SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics. First, a mea culpa. I am a member of the NCPH and have been a member of the AASLH and I’d never read these statements before. What struck me about all three of these statements was the impression of historian or archivist as a welcoming steward of historical resources. The AASLH states that offering “non-discriminatory access to historical resources” is an essential part of the work of its members. The first item in the NCPH’s list of responsibilities of a public historian to the public is to “serve as advocates for the preservation, care, and accessibility of historical records and resources of all kinds, including intangible cultural resources.” Finally, the SAA Code of Ethics states that “use is the fundamental reason for keeping archives.” Archivists especially have to be aware of the needs of the artifact in balance with the needs of the users, but the point is to find a way to preserve a delicate book while still providing access, not to bar anyone from ever reading it.

Jon Voss, “Radically Open Cultural Heritage Data on the Web,”Museums and the Web 2012 and the LODLAM site. I admit, I’m taken with the possibilities of linked open data from cultural heritage sites and institutions. One phrase which jumped out at me was that “metadata can be licensed separately from data or assets.” Cultural institutions have such varied licensing and permissions rules that it can be a nightmare trying to bring together data for a single project. If you can license the metadata and make that open, without violating license agreements for images of a particular French Chair or manuscript letter, you can share so much of your findings! It’s not perfect, but if more institutions had linked open metadata, the remix possibilites, and thereby the possibilities for data-based discovery, seem wide open. It’s like being a NASA engineer in the 1950s, looking at the moon and thinking “We might actually get there.”

National Park Service/OAH report, “Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service.” The recommendation made by the authors of this report to the National Park Service would no doubt serve many historic sites and history museums very well. Make history a conversation, not a lecture. Stop presenting history as something static and done, but rather as a series of decisions and as something we’re constantly working to understand. Engage the local story as well as the national or trans-national one. Acknowledge that the government, people in leadership, even previous park historians have made mistakes. If all the highest priority recommendations are put into practice, the National Parks could be even more amazing places to discovery history than they already are. Given the impact of bureaucratic systems on the pace of change, it may be some time before all such changes are implemented. If nothing else, they would do well to make use of new media to increase the accessibility of some of their administrative histories, as the report recommends.

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I came to these readings after January’s DCHDC Meetup, where I heard Sarah Werner, Undergraduate Program Director at the Folger Shakespeare Library and Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian Institution, give short talks (no slides!) about the possibilities and perils of museums. I came away thinking about the role that public historians as individuals and cultural heritage institutions play, particularly about their responsibilities to the public. There is sometimes a tendency among experts, of any kind, to distrust the public’s ability to understand one’s area of study, and from this arises a desire to highly mediate the interaction between the public and history, or science, or literature, or what have you. The idea which started percolating at the DCHDC meetup has, if not fully brewed, at least started to go somewhere thanks to these readings.

History should be like a modern public library, not like a public library of the late 19th century. As public historians, we shouldn’t be separating people from history by keeping all the “books” behind a desk and telling them what they can and cannot borrow. We should encourage them to browse the stacks, make connections. We are stewards of history, providing access, and not Grand High Guardians of Culture deciding who gets to know what.

Given the above paragraph, it should come as no surprise that I’m looking forward to the readings on participatory public history.

Dr. Nenadic assigned Persuasion as one of the readings for the week we talked about shopping, specifically for the scenes where Anne and her family are shopping in Bath. Persuasion is now my very favourite of Austen’s novels. What’s more, through the course I understood why it was so dreadful that Mr. Darcy refused to dance, why the Bennet’s behaviour was so dreadful, and that visiting the country homes of wealthy gentlemen when they were away wasn’t a quirk but rather an accepted practice. The joy I feel in reading or watching Jane Austen lies in the fact that I first met her as a source of historical information, of the ins and outs of the daily life of her era. It is a brief visit to the era I study.

(I wrote this as I was watching one of the Pride and Prejudice adaptations, which would be why all the examples are from that story)