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.

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

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