Category: Tools

New technologies and methods within Public history have begun to influence the creation of digital history projects. There are many ways that people can engage with history on the internet now. Public historians are starting to establish their digital presence. Some of the new methods of engaging with the public include social media platforms and blogs.

Social media has become incredibly important for public institutions. It has allowed museums to promote their newest exhibitions and upcoming events to entice visitors. The type of museum will influence which social media platform is best to display their information. An art museum might be interested in using a more visually appealing platform such as Instagram. An example of a project creating an Instagram account is Baltimore’s Chicory Revitalization Project. ” The page is used in ways similar to that of Instagram poets in that it allows users to directly access poetry—as both art and historical evidence—and individualize their experience with it.”[1] This digital history project has provided a unique, museum-like experience for all visitors of their account. I believe that is an important goal for digital public historians to achieve. 

Another new platform for digital public historians is blogs. Although blogs have been around for quite some time already, they appear to be making a come-back. Blogs can provide more content for a museum than a social media page. “Blogs also offer a museum with a website a valuable way to reach a wider audience through search engine optimization and, in particular, a blog’s inclusion in Google search.”[2] Museums and other public institutions can use blogs to engage more directly with users and can allow them to engage with each other. The connection between the institution and its visitors paves the way for relationships between visitors. 

I also believe that Covid-19 played a role in this transformation. It is more important now than ever for museums and other public institutions to have a digital presence. Due to the nature of Covid, people needed to stay inside and limit contact with other people. The creation of virtual tours and other digital engagements allowed museums to stay in contact with visitors. 

[1] Sydney Johnson,  “Doin’ It for the Gram: How Baltimore’s Chicory Revitalization Project Uses Instagram to Engage the Public.” National Council on Public History, https://ncph.org/history-at-work/doin-it-for-the-gram/.

[2] Bomboy, Scott, and Rebecca Sherman. “Success Strategies for Engaging Audiences with Museum Website Blogs.” MW2014: Museums and the Web 2014. Published February 24, 2014

Podcasts are a fantastic way to share information. One of the biggest reasons I love podcasts is because it makes learning feel like a conversation. When it comes to using podcasts in history, this feeling of  ‘conversation’ grows. Mainly because people tend to think of history as the collection of stories, and who doesn’t love to listen to a good story. Podcasts are a great way to convey history. Sometimes reading history can be dull, but podcasts make the words of those pages come to life. There is subtle difference between reading the material yourself  and listening to someone else read you the material. Typically, it can be easier to understand the material or context better when listening to someone explaining it. This is because you can use things such as the tone and diction of the host to understand this context better. Also, in a podcast, you can rewind in case you missed something! Podcasts are a great way to help people become engaged in historical material. The only issue I currently see with podcasts is that there could be a problem with the information provided by the host or the production of the podcast could over-shine the content of the episode.

The podcast that I found most compelling in this activity was Dig; A history Podcast. The episode I listened to was titled, “A History of Racial Passing in the United States”. I thought that this podcast was one of the more engaging ones that we had to listen to. The hosts Dr. Sarah Handley-Cousins and Dr. Averill Earls presented a podcast episode concerning racial passing. They analyzed this history by discussing the history of Black Americans who racially passed as white in order to avoid oppression from laws such as Jim Crow. However, what was incredibly fascinating about this episode, was that it was revealed that today many White Americans are trying to pass as Black Americans. This information completely shocked me. According to the podcast, this is due to what I summarized as a fear of white exclusion.

Another historical story that I think would make a great podcast is the story of treasure hunter Forrest Fenn.  There could already be a podcast created about this man that I just have not listened to yet, but I think his story would be interesting to tell.  Although I do not believe in the taking of other cultures’ objects for personal gain, I think his story is interesting because he is the closest thing we have to a real-life, Indiana Jones.

For the past week, I have been working with three different mapping tools; Voyant, Kepler, and Palladio. These three different tools have revealed a large amount of information concerning the WPA Slave Narrative Collection interviews. While using Voyant, I was able to learn about the frequency of specific words and phrases that appeared throughout all of the interviews. This illustrated the similarities and differences within the content of the interviews. Kepler was probably my favorite tool out of these three. Mainly because I found it to be the easiest one to use for this data. While using Kepler, I was able to see the locations of where the interview occurred and where the interviewee was formally enslaved. Kepler was a really interesting tool due to the variety of map choices you could create. Also, the splitting map feature was very helpful when comparing the different maps. The last tool I used was Palladio. Palladio was very interesting because of the number of graphs you could create using the uploaded data. I learned a great deal of information about these interviews using Palladio. This included the content and question asked by the interviewers, the differences in questions asked due to gender, the age of the interviewees, etc. The use of all three of these tools complements each other very well. Each information found in one is built upon in the next tool.

Palladio is a very intricate tool to use for the visualization of data. You can upload data to form various graphs, maps, and tables. Although I ran into some difficulties using it for the first time, it is still very useful, especially when it comes to graphics. My project with Palladio involved evaluating, mapping, and graphing the various relationships from a series of interviews with people who were former slaves. Palladio can be used in a few easy steps. First, you will need to upload your primary source of data when you first go onto the site. My set of data was the list of interviews, so I labeled this column “Interviews”. In your primary table, you can create other tables by simply clicking on one of your topics and selecting “add new table”. The two other tables I created were labeled “Locations” and “Enslaved”. In the “Locations” table, I uploaded information concerning the location of where the interview occurred and where the person was formally enslaved. I did this by clicking on my characteristic “where interviewed occurred”. In the “Enslaved” table, I clicked on my characteristic “where enslaved” and uploaded data about that. To create a map with this data, I selected the button labeled “extension”. The extension button allows for data to be shared between tables. When creating the map, the data that you shared through your extensions will appear under the categories “source’ and “target” when using a point-to-point map.

I felt that using the graph function of Palladio was much easier than using the map. When creating a graph, all of your characteristics will appear regardless of whether the information was placed through an extension. To create a graph, you simply just need to select which characteristic is your source and which is your target.