Hi all,

Amanda French here, THATCamp Coordinator at the Center for History and New Media. Hope THATCamp NCPH was useful and fun for you. If you could, we’d appreciate it if you could take a minute and fill out an evaluation for THATCamp NCPH, even if you only do the two required fields: which THATCamp you went to and how highly you rate it on a 5-point scale. Everything else is optional.

Thanks, and have a great, educational, collegial time at the rest of the NCPH meeting.

• Blue Ridge Parkway “Driving Through Time” project, UNC-Chapel Hill (still in beta; lots of student labor to create metadata and other contextual materials)
• House Divided project from Dickinson College:  teaching tools for civil war, etc. Ck out for ideas in re Blue Ridge Parkway project.  Used student labor.
• Seattle Labor History site (Univ of Washington) — also entirely student produced under faculty guidance.
• Brooklyn Museum of Art mobile app
• Placeography
• Cleveland history project (included sandbox for public participation).  Not sure of link.  Described by Mark Tebeau (see his blog here).
• Radical librarians movement

Here are some of the things we discussed. I added links where possible.

Budget

• Creating an iOS or Android App probably costs around $35K

Are there any grants out there that are specifically aimed at mobile?

• Some states – Virginia has done this – tourist bureau (visiting Virginia).
• Heritage tourism

What are the Platforms out there:

• Websites optimized for mobile
• Mobile Apps versus Web Apps
• HTML5 is the next big thing
• Think about iPad/Tablets – Flipboard as an example on the iPad
• Museums with under 50,000 visitors typically won’t have a mobile app
• Museums Mobile group has some data on museums who have created links to mobile museum apps and consultants
• Twitter #mtogo

Contexts

Platforms

• WordPress, Omeka, and Drupal all have plugins to help re-use web content on mobile devices

Permissions

• Difficult to get licenses for images – especially art.
• Closed app might be best platform for purchased use licenses – a one-time use licence is possible

Interpretations and Interactivity

• Don’t miss out on an opportunity – don’t just replicate an analogue idea – i.e. more text
• Ask new questions – maybe from the perspective of outside the museum – what do you see?
• Mobile platform forces designers to think more about interpretation – single objects
• Mobile Apps can help create a three step process for visiting a museum – pre-visit planning, interactive experience at the museum, and follow up on interests

Tours

• Locacious
• Broadcastr
• GeoCaching linked up with an audio tour
• Layar
• QR codes or Bar Codes linked to a website
• Google Goggles
• Wikihood – content that is around you

GIS Data – Recycling for new use

Content Creation

Non-Location specific mobile apps

• Louvre app as an example
• Draw could be in education – limits access – not the entire web.

Why Mobile?

• Demographics skewed toward poorer populations (US and Worldwide – see Nielson statistics)
• Pew Foundation – Gardner Research both have statistics
• iPad – these are different. There might be even greater potential for the iPad – has better functionality for interpretation and in-depth learning.

Games

• scvngr – scavenger hunts that could be created with historical topics.

Favorite Apps?

• Meanderthal
• Louvre
• Culture Now – monuments
• Historical NOLA
• Museum of London: StreetMuseum
• Brooklyn Museum – great post here about “lessons learned”
• Philadelphia City Archives has an app – Philly History

Topics for discussion:

• Why Maps
• Mobile
• Maps without GIS knowledge
• Free
• Google Earth
• Historical Layers
• interpretation
• User interface

neatline.org – plot archives in space and time

Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage- shift of synagogues in Cleveland over time. Not online, in the museum

philaplace.org– Explore the City of Neighborhoods through maps, stories, photographs, and documents, and share the story of your PhilaPlace.

atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/– The Atlas of Early Printing is an interactive map designed to be used as a tool for teaching the early history of printing in Europe during the second half

Redlining in Philadelphia

www.cityofmemory.org/map/index.php

nextexithistory.org/

www.locacious.net/– iPhone app geolocation recording/oral history

hypercities.com– historical layers of historic cities where the map is the interpretive tool

qgis.org- Quantum GIS- freeware program

www.pastvoices.net/brewcity/historicalgis – Mapping the Brew City

esri.com– Commercials GIS software ArcGIS

pictometry.com– orthographic map viewer

labs.metacarta.com/rectifier/– repository of rectified historic maps with current maps

www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ – Arcade Fire video that has customized video based on an address you enter and pulling data from Google maps

www.shakermuseumandlibrary.org/mtlebanon.html– Google Earth tour

www.gigapan.org/– gigapixel images mashed-up with mapping

cyark.org– laser mapping of world heritage sites

Quick Notes and Links

Questions we ask:

How do we engage a public?  Do we blog? Tweet? How do we get people involved effectively?

How doe we work with competing narratives?

How do we destabilize historical narratives? Deconstructing as we go?

How do we connect with the public to get their feedback, stories, objects/artifacts?

How do we properly gauge interest?

Who maintains a project when it’s finally created?

Classroom publics vs. scholarly publics – How do we address both of these groups?

Proper annotation for these sites? How do  we annotate for the public, “double documentation”?

Projects to check out:

IBM Prject: Many Eyes

Wordle – Aggregation of words.  How are they rhetorically constructed?

Hypercities

Many Stories 1704 – Deerfield

A House Divided

Valley of the Shadow

wordpress.org– designed for blogging/ content management

1968 Exhibit @ Minnesota Historical Society

9/11 Digital Archive

Living On – Oral History Project

Baltimore ’68: Riots and Rebirth

Broadcastr

Layar – Geo-referenced; like “Google Goggles” can actually see things and give you information for what’s around you.

Locacious – brings the complete experience of taking – and creating – audio tours to the iPhone and iPod Touch in a fully featured and travel-friendly package.

Nielsen Study on smartphone ownership – Not what we may have thought about accessibility?

Gettysburg Museum

European NAvigator

(This is Marla, via Cathy) I’m mainly looking to learn what’s happening out there in terms of interpretive technologies — QR tags, on-the-fly walking tours, apps that seem look promising, etc. Also, I’m involved in the Digital History Lab at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in June, and would like to learn of any innovative projects in women’s history out there.

Hello, all. I have to admit that I’m coming to THATCamp NCPH without a particular project in mind. I’m really interested to hear what others are working on, and the challenges they face, even though I think I may be taking more from the meeting than I can contribute. But I’m hoping to have a conversation at some point about how people manage their digital work:  how do you take notes and remember where you found things? How do you create or structure the personal library or archive that you amass? And do you do anything differently when you have to share your digital “collection” with other people and work collaboratively? To use some non-academic terminology, I’m interested in the best practices for knowledge management of personal research materials, and knowledge management for a relatively small group (under 100 people). Looking forward to Wednesday!

cheers,

Joan

I posted earlier about iPhone apps, but having just met with my students today about Omeka, wouldn’t mind some assistance with it too!

This abbreviated project abstract is from our newest participant, Jeanne Kessler of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. She hopes to discuss the project and/or some of its accessibility issues on Wednesday.

Bringing Oral Histories to Life – Unlocking the Power of the Spoken Word

The National World War II Museum (NWWIIM) is leading a project with National History Day (NHD) to design and implement a methodology enabling video oral histories to be accessed and explored in innovative ways. Content will be made available to a wider audience, who will have the ability to participate in describing and referencing oral histories in a manner not currently possible.

Conventionally, video oral histories have been organized and accessed via unit-level metadata focused on finding an individual interview within a collection. This is equivalent to having access to a book, but not an index of the passages where particular themes or topics are discussed. In oral history collection management, there has been little sub-unit access to content within and across interviews. Additionally, cumbersome large unit auditing is time consuming, resulting in the major underutilization of oral histories. Digitization and new tools make media access possible, but the absence of clear models and approaches has been a major obstacle to wider use of oral history collections. The challenge is less technological than intellectual and conceptual.

In a 3-year project, beginning in October, 2009, the NWWIIM is addressing accessibility issues by:

• Segmenting 200 digitized oral histories from World War II veterans and indexing each segment using a descriptive vocabulary. This will enable access within and across interviews, which is critical for thematic exploration of oral history collections.
• Users can access the histories in a flexible environment where exploration, tagging and annotating can be performed.  Users will be able to view and retrieve oral history segments by searching on ‘factual’ descriptors such as “D-Day” or querying thematic/abstract concepts such as “courage” or “weather”. User-added tags applied to segments will add personal meaning to the interview. This provides an interaction not currently available, and broadens search options when exploring oral history collections.
• By synthesizing professional and user-driven vocabularies, the project will consolidate what has been learned by using each method, to produce a working model of broad relevance and utility. Beyond its significance for World War II collections, the project will provide guidelines and models enabling greater accessibility and interactivity to other oral history collections.

I am interested in creating a 3D virtual model of a Civil War fort using ArcGIS v.10 and would like to explore the feasibilty of my ideas with those who have done similar modeling and expand on the scope of uses I see for this product.   The Union fort I’m working with, Nashville’s Fort Negley, is the largest inland masonry fort built during the Civil War.   The fort has three tiers, and my dream is to create a digital 3D representation of the structure to keep all the spatially-referenced information about the fort in one place including existing condition photos, repair records, archaeological excavations, and modifications to the site. When more spatially referenced data is obtained from the site, perhaps from geophysical prospection or more historic photos, I think a GIS would be the appropriate archive for storing and layering the information. I also want to recreate the 1864 engineering drawing of the fort that has relative elevations as a 3D object and compare it to a recent civil survey of the site, if that’s possible.  The reason for doing this is that the WPA reconstructed the fort in the 1930s to make a park, and we do not know where the original footprint of the fort lies.  The WPA records were lost, and the archaeology conducted at the site has not been able to answer this question. I can get LIDAR data for the site from the city and have seen it used to find entrenchments, but I’ve never worked with it and don’t know its limitations or if there is something better. The model I’m dreaming of would help interpret the site better while also being its “digital corporate memory.” Could this also be the base for building a virtual representation of the fort that could be explored online?  I should mention that the fort is owned by the city and is operated as a historical park. The park department’s budget is stressed, and their goal is keeping the park open.  For me, this project is for my research to develop the construction history of the fortification.

Thanks for reading!  Zada Law, Middle Tennessee State University

Hi all! I know this is coming in late, so I’ll be brief:

Recently, I was asked to think about how a museum could go about building a public commons — a digital project that would give museum staff and its surrounding community the ability to share news, jointly contribute objects & stories, and curate online exhibitions. I’m wondering if anyone coming to Pensacola this week is working on a similar project, or is interested in talking about both the kinds of technology (web-based platforms, CMS, etc.) and the strategies this kind of project would require.

I come to the THATCamp as a novice in the field of digital history, so even just learning the basic lingo and hearing about the range of others’ projects will be new and useful information for me.  I do however have two areas of particular interest that led me to sign up for the workshop:

 1.  Using digital software & applications as tools for the public interpretation of specific histories.

 What kinds  of digital software, applications, or other products are being used/can be used to interpret particular histories for the public?

• What are their basic features and how do they work?
• What are their relative strengths/weaknesses and possibilities/limitations for use in interpretive projects? 

 Application in my own work: 

I am particularly interested in applying digital tools to the interpretation of contested histories; indigenous, colonial, and postcolonial narratives; multidisciplinary explorations & interpretations of place; and intersections between local and global histories. 

Currently I’m interested in how the past is being interpreted & represented in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and how historical understanding might work either to perpetuate or mitigate social divisions since the end of the Troubles.  I’m especially interested in how Irish, Ulster, Northern Irish, and local histories are represented in Belfast’s public places and mapped onto the landscape of the city.  

More proactively, I want to explore how historians, community leaders, and artists in Belfast might work to reinterpret their collective past and reimagine their historical identity in ways that complicate & contextualize the simplistic & divisive narratives that have dominated public historical understanding … and how they might insert & embed such re-imagined histories & identities into the public spaces and public life of their city.  

I’d like to know what kinds of digital tools and applications might facilitate such a project.  Tools involving various kinds of mapping, layering of data, and mobile access seem especially relevant, but there might be others I’m not aware of.

  2.  Using digital tools to represent the process of historical interpretation itself, and to educate students and the public about the practice of history. 

It seems to me that digital software & applications might also provide powerful tools for representing the nature of the historical process itself, to students in our classrooms as well as to public audiences.  Trying to describe foundational concepts of historical analysis and key aspects of historical practice through words alone (whether written or spoken) has its limitations.  So I wonder, how might digital history help us, as history educators, to represent and explain: 

• the nature of historical context … and the practice of contextualization
• the multiple experiences of, and perspectives on, any single historical event
• the selectivity, partiality, & incompleteness of historical evidence … the practice of analyzing & interpreting primary sources … and the process of constructing historical narratives
• the complex relationships of historical cause & consequence
• the interrelationship of political, economic, social & cultural forces within processes of historical change 

When I try to explain such concepts & practices to those who are not professional historians, I find myself resorting to drawings and metaphors of things like overlapping circles, layers, and lenses.  I’d like to find some digital tools that might help represent and explain the historical process in more compelling & enlightening ways for those who don’t understand it. 

I’m looking forward to meeting and working with everyone next week!

— Julie Davis, Asst. Professor of History, College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University

I posted this as a comment on the original post about “we want your ideas”, but that sort of got buried, so I’ll repost and add to it:

“Hand-held computing and historical walking tours/podcasts: How can we provide a platform independent multimedia experience that can be easily adopted by historic sites and towns?”

I would like to exchange ideas and experiences people have had creating mobile apps (iPhone, Android, or a more generic WebApp) for creating walking tours. When I have students work on walking tours right now, we tend to simply create downloadable podcasts and use the cover art function to display photos or maps. This works relatively well, but I have been wondering if there was a way to make this more dynamic. I’d also like find a way that this approach could be adopted at a low cost for museums to use within an exhibition.

Some background: Last May I was in Erfurt Germany and visited the new Jewish museum, which had an excellent walking tour of the exhibit that used iPod Touches in the place of an audio wand. The problem for me, however, was that it was clearly a “hacked” iPod app – or some sort of magic that I am unaware of that does not allow you to ever access the home screen. The app was “locked” in a sense. I looked up the company that designed the app and it is an entirely proprietary product that they create for museums. As such, it would be a large financial investment for smaller museums and historical societies that would like to offer such tours.

I know that there are others interested in mobile apps (or off-the-desktop-computing as the current turn of phrase is) and wouldn’t mind combining my interests here with others who are also interested in all things mobile.

Hello,

I’m looking for what I missed in THATcampFlorence last week: an atelier about how mapping history data’s with open access layers and free programs. With Google Map/Earth ? Using Maptiler www.maptiler.org/ ? Using Georeferencer from new mapsto old maps and vice-versa www.georeferencer.org/ ? Creating Maps with batch geo www.batchgeo.com/? Looking at openly accessible historical layers ? Where ? Anywhere on the web ? Idea is not only to place historical data’s within a proper historical map but to buil historical maps where to embed multi-media documents, texts, sources and compare with different periods. What about this web site: primary-sources.eui.eu/website/regnum-francorum-online ? Are they similar scholarly examples for US History different from the use of maps within Valley of the Shadow for example, the war of secession has been scholarly mapped in digital histopry projects for example ?

Another interest would be to define more precisely the concept of Digital Public History looking at what Digital History is about: what would caracterize digital PH which would not be part of Digital History as such ? Should we use what we could say between Public History and History and apply it to the digital world ? I quote here Dan Coen’s blog defining -shortly- Digital Humanities. I substituted only the word Humanities by History. (www.dancohen.org/2011/03/09/defining-digital-humanities-briefly/)  Broadly construed, digital history is the use of digital media and technology to advance the full range of thought and practice in history, from the creation of scholarly resources, to research on those resources, to the communication of results to colleagues and students. Should we adress it the same way replacing history by “public history”  ? Any conceptual framework, literature to look at all together ?

Serge Noiret, serge.noiret@eui.eu

Am coming to NCPH this year to talk about Cleveland Historical, a smart-phone app we’ve developed at the Center for Public History + Digital History. It sits atop modified Omeka install that has been tricked out in a bunch of nifty ways. CH1 is available now for iPhone; download Cleveland Historical, it’s free.

Actually, the app is only a small part of our story–the digital in the humanities. As we’ve developed the project, we’re exploring the dynamic process of digital (his)storytelling in mobile environments. For almost a decade now, we’ve fancied our work (oral histories, web exhibits, community festivals, and street-based kiosks) as exploring the dynamic ways urban historians can curate cities. What we’ve discovered in mobile is an entirely different dimensionality, one that is hard to comprehend if you’re *not* mobile, and, not so surprisingly, most of us aren’t when we’re exploring mobile sites. But, I digress

CH2 (version 2) is imminently available (perhaps full iPhone version for conference and beta Android release) for iPhone and Android, will have social networking functionality, and enhanced tours, as well as a lovely companion website.

If you have an Android phone, by the way, and want to see the Android alpha at work, it is pretty robust, though the design elements aren’t fully in place, let me know. I will happily email it to you.

Cleveland Historical is the first instance of a broader vision, that we’re calling Mobile Historical. (Nobody has yet talked me out of that name just yet, though our design firm is testing alternatives, I’m told (and those CHNMers have cornered the Swahili market.))  We’re moving toward an open-source and/or hosted version of Mobile Historical for the fall and are working with some professional communities (scholars and museums) interested in beta testing and helping us work out the kinks.

THATCamp offers a great place to get some really sharp insights about the marketplace of needs and uses.  Also a great chance to talk about some of the intellectual challenges we’re facing in other projects at the intersection of Public History + Digital Humanities, which I will write under a different post.

At the moment, I am contemplating pulling some images off of Panoramio, taping myself asking questions, and building a quick interpretive (or more like multimedia question) walk of Pensacola, perhaps as a demo of how easy Mobile Historical will be for students and communities.

The challenge, it turns out, is both the technology and the conceptual reframing of public history in mobile spaces.

EDIT: So, as my own way of testing, I quickly added a couple narratives (too rough to be stories, more like a historical invasion) about Plaza Ferdinand and St. Michael’s Cemetery. If someone was up to it, we could take our phones and head out into the city and encounter some landscapes, take photos, and record ourselves–and create a couple new sites, thus curating together??? Very much an unconferency thing to do!

Erin McLeary and I are working on a long-term exhibit on Civil War medicine in Philadelphia, which will open at the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 2013.  The exhibit, titled “Broken Bodies, Suffering Spirits: Injury, Death, and Healing in Civil War Philadelphia,” will take a broad view of medical care and bodily experience during the conflict.

We are investigating innovative ways of presenting material on a website and perhaps also via smartphones, though we have a limited budget.  The exhibit space itself cannot easily accommodate computer kiosks, though we are planning to continue using guide-by-cell tours, which have proven popular at the museum.

A few potential projects:

1) Using technology to explore myths versus facts

I recently chaired a session on medicine at a symposium on the public history of the Civil War at North Carolina State University.  One of the speakers in a session about Lincoln made the point that dull facts cannot displace colorful or emotionally charged myths; you need to give visitors better stories than the ones they walked in with.

For our topic, the myth that injured soldiers “bit the bullet” to undergo amputations is particularly intractable.  In fact, anesthesia (ether or chloroform) was almost universally used for surgeries in both North and South, and the great majority of surgeons were not untrained hacks.

We’d like to consider constructing an interactive website or smartphone application that would enable visitors to investigate the myth of “biting the bullet” and to access compelling, true first-person accounts of anesthesia and surgery, told from different points of view (surgeon, patient, nurse, etc.).

2) Using technology to link the past and the present

In our medicine session at the NC State symposium, George Wunderlich, Director of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Md., spoke about how the museum interprets the many aspects of current medical care that originated in the Civil War period (for instance, organized ambulance services and emergency room protocols).  This is an approach to medical history that particularly resonates with present-day military doctors and other medical professionals.

We would like to find ways to help visitors of all sorts to make these kinds of connections between now and then.  On a website, for instance, we could show a period image of a wartime field hospital or general hospital, then overlay it with present-day images and explanations of the war’s medical legacy.  The challenge will be to tell gripping stories rather than simply presenting facts.

3) Using technology to build research archives

We are also interested in exploring low-cost, relatively fast ways of building rich, easy-to-access archives of documents and images for further research and study.  Since the Civil War inspires so much detailed historical and genealogical research by amateur historians/lay scholars, there should be ways to make the sources we’ve used to construct the exhibit publicly available to them. Such an archive could also be useful for teachers and students. Ideally, the archive should also let visitors add their own materials (or links to materials) and their own annotations.

We welcome your comments and suggestions!

Hi all,

I hope it’s appropriate to post this here – my conference roommate and I have just realized that we got a day out of sync with our hotel room planning, and I find myself needing to figure out accommodation for Tuesday night, when I’ll be arriving late.  I can extend my existing booking at the Crowne Plaza for that night, but would prefer to split the cost if I can.  Are there any other female THATCampers who would like to share a room that night?  Alternatively, is there anyone who already has a room but would like to share the cost for one night?

If so, please email me at cstanton[at]tiac.net.  Thanks!

I’ve got a million and one things to do before the conference, so I hope you’ll forgive me for keeping this short and sweet!

I’m interested in talking about how we can create a sustainable and accessible online community site for public historians to gather and share resources and to discuss public history practice. In this session I’d like to: 1. Figure out if there is broader interest in this idea, 2. Discuss out what platforms would work best to foster that community and allow for wide participation (a group blog? a wiki? something else entirely?), and most importantly 3. Discuss how we might get this off the ground and make it sustainable. I’m looking forward to having some great discussions with you all on Wednesday!

Recently we’ve seen number of natural disasters with heritage casualties as well as human ones, but it’s been hard to find and keep up with information about what’s happened and how we might help.  And when history organizations face a disaster, how can we best get the word out about what’s happening and what help we need? Let’s talk about how better to gather and share public history institution disaster info.

My half-formed idea is very similar to Anne Whisnant’s (not surprising, as we’re working on similar road-related projects!).  I’d love to find a way to create a good, clear online map of the whole 140-mile length of Route 2 in Massachusetts, with the potential for adding either a layer or layers for historic maps or just snippets from those.  I’m trying to develop a methodology for studying a highway ethnographically (trickier than it sounds) and would like to have this online venue as a kind of “place” that people can go to spark memories and stories of their own as part of my interviewing process, with materials from those interviews and archival research eventually feeding back into the map.  I have no idea how to accomplish this!  I’ve been thinking of using Prezi as a starting-place, since that will give me a basis for making discrete presentations from this data as I’m building it (and since I really like Prezi).  But I’m not sure how to integrate that with a basic (and loooong) map.  Looking forward to exploring this and other ideas with you all next week!

NCPH THATCampers: Please note the participants tab at the upper right of the page–this is a great way to get to know one another a bit before next Wednesday. If you haven’t already done so, please update your profile information when you log in to the site.

To add your picture, it’s necessary to sign up for gravatar.com and upload a picture, which will link to this site via the email address associated with your THATCamp participation. (By the way, “gravatar” creates a Globally Recognized Avatar that’s useful for other online activities).

We are working on creating a digital collection of art and material culture images related to Tennessee during the Civil War–housed in ContentDM, the collection will be used on a website organized by theme.   The developers are working on the best way to make these two things work together and considering using WordPress or  other existing website template.  We want to make sure that users can go from website into ContentDM database to browse it as any researcher would want to do. Would be interested to discuss ideas around working with digital humanities content library-type collections to make them user-friendly and interactive on the front end through a website interface.

Susan W. Knowles, PhD Candidate in Public History, Middle Tennessee State University

HI all,

I’m also interested in learning about how to create an iPhone app. Next year, my graduate students will be creating one for 17 historic sites and museums related to War of 1812, as part of the 4 years of commemoration of the 200th anniversary.

Does anyone want to do a quick training session/features tour at our THATCamp? Omeka? Wikis? Podcasts? I could use some advice on downloading and using Ubuntu alongside Windows. For more ideas, see thatcamp.org/help/teach/.

I work for a state-run grant fund in Colorado.  We fund development of a lot of traditional interpretive materials such as signs, brochures, and booklets.  Lately we have seen increasing numbers of funding requests for interpretive projects utilizing newer technology.  I’m hoping that through all of your projects and experience I can learn more about what is new, what has been working well, and what has not worked so well.  I would also appreciate information on start-up, implementation, and even marketing strategies.  Looking forward to meeting you all and hearing about your exciting work.

Hi everyone,

In 2009, a team of us at UNC-Chapel Hill got a grant to develop “Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway in North  Carolina,” an extensive web archive that will bring together primary source materials and interpretive essays related to the  history of the Blue Ridge Parkway.  We are to launch the site this summer.

One of the features of the database that underlies our site is that, as nearly as possible, everything presented is geo-tagged, or given a location in space as well as time.  Additionally, many of the materials we have are actually historical maps, which are being “geo-referenced” (overlaid on a present landscape).

In my dreams, I had also hoped that we’d be able to develop a dynamic main interface for the site that would be map-based.  Although we *are* going to have a map-based browse feature that will allow content to be discovered based on the location it pertains to, the geospatial dimension of our project is going to be more limited than I had hoped, due to limited funding and programming capacities at present.  Yet, I have envisioned in my own mind how my *ideal* would look.  The ideal would combine a current map of the Blue Ridge Parkway with some dynamic features that would communicate a few basic tidbits about the Parkway’s past, including pace of construction, that would be relevant to the materials being presented.

I’d like to put my ideal out there for folks to look at and help me imagine how and whether it might eventually be done.  I have ventured some in the past into the use of Google’s various tools and think they offer a lot of promise here, but don’t know enough really to propose specifically what we might do — or how.

I’m uploading an image (PDF, linked below) of my hand-drawn mockup as a basis for discussion. Look forward to meeting everyone!

20100921WhisnantMockup

Anne Whisnant

As of today, 12 of 45 participants have posted ideas for THATCamp NCPH. We’ve got some good momentum going . . . let’s keep it up! We need to hear something from all of you to make this event a success. Take a peek at the existing posts and then log in and post your own.

To create a post, complete the following steps:

1. log into the site with your username and password.  The login link is listed on the lower right of the screen in the META section, which is below the twitter feed.

2. once logged in, click on the Posts link on the left side of the screen

3. select the Add New button to create a new post

4. give your post a title (related to your interests) as well as a detailed description of your topic in the text box

5. make sure to select the \”Topics\” box in the categories menu on the right side of the screen.  This will allow users to see only the topics others post when they select the topics link on the website.

6. after you finish your post and select the topics box, preview your post and, once satisfied, select the publish button.  This will make your post live for others to see.  Posts appear on the homepage of THATCamp NCPH 2011.

I have initiated a project called ‘War in Parliament’, which entails a study of the impact of the Second World War in post-war political debates and decision-making in the Netherlands.References to the Second World War shaped political debate for many decades. However, we have no systematic knowledge of why, how often, when, by whom or from which political party, and in which context, these references were made. Nor do we know the meanings politicians ascribed to the war years, the lessons the war was supposed to teach, and how all of this influenced political decision-making. Answering these questions will help us better understand the complex legacies of the Second Wold War. With tools developed in the e-sciences we are able to research large corpora and language resources (in this case de Handelingen der Staten-Generaal (Dutch Hansard)) by creating an advanced search engine for this dataset with an intuitive and  powerful query language. However, as a historian and thus used to historical handwork, I am still curious and eager to learn more about the still uncertain path digital humanities provides.

Hinke Piersma

I’m working on developing an online presentation/website/etc. on the history of the buildings and landscape of a military installation in Richmond, VA. I have a lot of flexibility with the project and am looking for the best way to present the information. I am looking for a straightforward, flexible platform that will allow me to use text, photos, and scanned documents/maps to document the history of the installation in an interesting and effective way. I’m particularly interested in Omeka and how that might work for this project.

THATCamp NCPH will begin at 9:00 am on April 6 in the Grand Central Room at the Crowne Plaza.

The conference registration area does not open until 11:00, so your NCPH conference name badge will be waiting for you when you arrive at THATCamp.

Coffee and snacks will be provided; lunch is on your own.

I would like to learn about the different types of software available to develop digital history projects.  For my project, I am looking to create an online resource guide for the history of health and medicine in Texas.  The website would incorporate on-site materials, such as bibliographies, with external links to catalogs and digital gateways.  I also am interested to explore how digital humanities can offer greater transparency of the ways in which historical materials go through the processs of being created, retained, and used.

Our center just got funding for a three-year period to develop an online exhibit about the history of irrigation and water use on the Front Range of Colorado. We’re in the project planning phase and have several major decisions to make in the next month or so. These include interdisciplinary team development, a site design concept that is both simple and flexible, and an overall work plan for the three-year period. We’re looking for best practice recommendations, ideas for lean and effective team structures, ideal work plan scenarios, and the like. I would like to share our initial ideas about this project and hear from others with greater experience managing similar projects. I hope to get more specific information about the technical aspects of this project in other sessions of THATCamp NCPH as well.

I am coordinating a new digital history project where we’ll be digitizing, transcribing, and annotating about 300 primary source documents to tell the story of a large local bank that failed in the early years of the Great Depression. We’re coding our documents in XML following TEI guidelines, and are planning to create contextual essays and teacher resources as well.

I’d be very interested to hear about how other history projects are using TEI, incorporating interactive features along with “expert” voices, or using crowdsourcing transcription. I’d also like to learn more about creating digital resources with teachers in mind and how people are tailoring web content for smartphones/tablets, etc.

I am teaching an undergraduate history course this summer that will run parallel to a computer design course.  My students and I will create the content for three iPad apps.  We will hand over primary documents, ideas for interactive activities and appropriate assessments to the IT students who will design the free educational app.  I am hoping that the apps will contain units about artists who use history as their topic and who create art using historical methods. I think there will be a lot of balls in the air with this one, but I am hoping it works.

I am working on a independent study Public History  project with two students who  will discuss the pros and cons of working on such a project using their SMARTPHONE or IPAD . Their final project can consist of podcasts, interviews, photographs, and or a “short” film on their Public History story.  The student’s  will showcase their  findings and their “Public History” story on a website.

A THATCamp topic for consideration and also a plug for a project I’m working on…

I have a current project to collect outstanding examples of projects related to historic buildings or districts and archaeological sites that presented an innovative or creative solution to mitigating adverse effects, interpreting the history, or public outreach. We have set-up a website at www.creativemitigation.com that provides background info on the project and allows the public to submit info on projects they have worked on, or just encountered as visitors. One of the categories we are looking at is the use of new and emerging technologies (social media,  web sites/virtual tours, GPS/smartphone apps, or anything else) to more effectively interpret historic and archaeological resources and connect with and outreach to the public in interesting ways.

So if you know of or have worked on an innovative and effective project associated with a physical historic or archaeological resource, tell us about it at www.creativemitigation.com. Thanks!

The Hayward (CA) Area Historical Society is holding a History Camp this summer for 10-12 area high school students.  The focus will be on the creation of a short film, discussing current events and issues, chosen by students,  that reflect their concern.  The idea will be to create a “living history” that will be added to the Society’s archives and made available to future generations.  One component will be to research how these same (or similar) issues impacted area teens in years past, so there will be a historical research component as well.  Students will receive help from the History Department, Library, and Media resources at Cal State University East Bay, to supplement the Society’s professional staff.  I am particularly interested in how film-making can be used to teach history and to allow for maximum creativity by these students.  Any ideas?

I am very interested in learning more about documentary filmmaking and historical filmmaking in general. I have an intermediate background in tv production and preparing for a masters in Public History. I signed up for THATcamp so i could learn more about filmmaking and history.

I am particularly interested in knowing how researchers are using digitized historic newspapers and what efforts are underway at different institutions to make historic newspapers available online.

Successful THATCamp sessions all have an engaged set of  campers.  To facilitate the creation of topics to address at the camp, participants are encouraged to post topics here as well as to comment on proposals submitted by others.  THATCamp facilitators will use these discussions to set the agenda for THATCamp NCPH — so speak up

We hope this dialogue will excite campers and help us prepare for an enriching THATCamp experience for everyone involved.

9 a.m. – 5 p.m., April 6,
Crowne Plaza Pensacola Grand Hotel in Pensacola, Florida

Join us for an exciting one-day THATCamp during the National Council on Public History 2011 Annual Meeting and explore the intersection of digital technology and public humanities.  THATCamps (The Technology and Humanities Camp) are participatory events where people learn from each other and work on actual projects directly applicable in their own institutions, companies, and programs.   With a program that will emerge directly from the interests and skills of participants, the event reflects the kind of collegial spirit that public historians bring to their own work.  More details about the event can be found online at:

ncph2011.thatcamp.org

Registration is $21 and closes on March 15; to register for THATCamp and/or the full conference, visit the NCPH conference registration page at:

ncph.org/cms/conferences/2011-annual-meeting/

Started in 2008, THATCamps are becoming a worldwide movement, with more than 20 held to date.  Graduate students, scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, developers and programmers, administrators, publicists, managers, funders, people from the non-profit and for-profit sectors, and interested amateurs have all found ways to add to their skills and to push the conversation between digital technology and humanistic projects.  There are no audiences sitting and listening to presentations at a THATCamp—everyone is an active participant, helping to set the agenda, share knowledge, solve problems, take notes, blog, tweet, and collaborate with fellow attendees.  Staff from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University will facilitate the event.

Registration is capped at 65 people.  Following the March 15 deadline, registrants will be asked to provide a short informal proposal for what they would like to learn, do, or share; those proposals will help us to start structuring the event on April 6.  Interested in better ways to use social media at your institution?  Need to beef up your podcast-making skills?  Want to learn to use Omeka, Zotero, or WordPress? Confused about georeferencing or digital copyright issues? Looking for help getting a specific digital project off the ground? Tell us your idea and then come to the camp and help us figure out how to explore it in a way that will be most useful for you.

The $21 fee for registration will help NCPH cover the cost of space for the event.  If the camp is filled, some food may also be provided from the registration fees, but participants should be prepared to bring or buy their own lunch (details will be shared via the THATCamp NCPH website as the event gets closer).

Please forward this announcement to anyone in the humanities, technology, design, or related fields who might be interested in what promises to be a lively and inclusive event.

Updates will be posted on the website as the camp date gets closer:

ncph2011.thatcamp.org

Brought to you by NCPH and the Center for History and New Media, THATCamp NCPH will take place at the 2011 annual conference in Pensacola.  Please continue to check this site for periodic updates and more information about THATCamp NCPH.