THATCamp National Council on Public History 2011

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