Layers
We posted historical commentary and analyses on a Wordpress site. Visitors could find more information by following hyperlinks on each page. They could leave their own comments. They could share the URL via email, Twitter, or Facebook. The project wasn’t strictly digital, and it wasn’t strictly print.
The project wasn’t perfect, either, of course. There were flaws in many of the models, which we weren’t always able to correct in the span of the course. We divided our work into several smaller sections, and sometimes took pretty different approaches. I expect in a professional version of this you’d want to make the writing and presentation a little more unified. Still, given that the idea was to present a template to the museum, I’d say the final result was, by and large, a success.
But what I want to impress upon you today is not the success or failure of our final deliverable. For me, the most exciting aspect of our course was not the product, but all the activity that went on in the process of producing it. From the get go, our work was made public.
We posted regularly on our Wordpress blog to discuss the ideas we were considering and how our work was progressing. Or not. In three months the site received over three thousand views. Undoubtedly, site visits by students in the class account for a lot of these, but that number doesn’t capture page hits received by students who used their own blogs apart from the course website. Some of those visitors left comments, suggestions or encouragement. Occasionally, those comments turned into conversations in their own right.
We also maintained an ongoing presence on Twitter, through our hashtag #hist5702x. People tweeted their research questions, thoughts about the ideas we were encountering in class, the problems they’d been having with certain models. In a large extent, this was simply another way to for students to communicate with each other, but these tweets also reached numerous people outside the immediate confines of the course.
We had a good amount of interest from various heritage institutions and professionals as well as folks from the digital humanities community. I think it’s important to note that it wasn’t just our successes getting posted. There were a lot of 3D model flops along the way, and these tweets frequently received encouragement and advice. Research problems also led to interesting exchanges. At one point I was looking for information about a designer known only as “Monsieur Dave.” Two of the responses pointed me towards archival sources I hadn’t seen before.
One of them, posted by the Mackenzie House in Toronto, was a source that hadn’t even been seen by a curator and conservationist who previously catalogued and researched clothing by Monsieur Dave.
I haven’t a clue what reason the Mackenzie House had for following our project, or how it knew about this source, but anecdotally that exchange is great example of the kinds ways a project can benefit from going public before it’s finished. The kind of interaction invited by a work-in-progress is very different from the sort you get from a finished project. Even setting aside practicalities — crowdsourcing ideas and sources, soliciting constructive criticism, etc. — I think there’s a case to be made about how doing in history in the open can become an opportunity for creating engagement. Unfinished projects can become invitations for online interaction and collaboration. In this example, my research problem became someone else’s prompt to do a little digging of their own, with fruitful results for all parties.
I don’t want to suggest that our own project was groundbreaking in this respect, but I do think it’s a strong example of the way heritage organizations could also “do history in the open.” For us, online engagement was largely limited to Wordpress and Twitter. These kinds of interaction could also be fostered on a museum’s website, Facebook page or custom mobile app. One imagines an institution like Science and Tech with an established online presence could do a lot more than a class of nine students.
The project wasn’t perfect, either, of course. There were flaws in many of the models, which we weren’t always able to correct in the span of the course. We divided our work into several smaller sections, and sometimes took pretty different approaches. I expect in a professional version of this you’d want to make the writing and presentation a little more unified. Still, given that the idea was to present a template to the museum, I’d say the final result was, by and large, a success.
But what I want to impress upon you today is not the success or failure of our final deliverable. For me, the most exciting aspect of our course was not the product, but all the activity that went on in the process of producing it. From the get go, our work was made public.
We posted regularly on our Wordpress blog to discuss the ideas we were considering and how our work was progressing. Or not. In three months the site received over three thousand views. Undoubtedly, site visits by students in the class account for a lot of these, but that number doesn’t capture page hits received by students who used their own blogs apart from the course website. Some of those visitors left comments, suggestions or encouragement. Occasionally, those comments turned into conversations in their own right.
We also maintained an ongoing presence on Twitter, through our hashtag #hist5702x. People tweeted their research questions, thoughts about the ideas we were encountering in class, the problems they’d been having with certain models. In a large extent, this was simply another way to for students to communicate with each other, but these tweets also reached numerous people outside the immediate confines of the course.
We had a good amount of interest from various heritage institutions and professionals as well as folks from the digital humanities community. I think it’s important to note that it wasn’t just our successes getting posted. There were a lot of 3D model flops along the way, and these tweets frequently received encouragement and advice. Research problems also led to interesting exchanges. At one point I was looking for information about a designer known only as “Monsieur Dave.” Two of the responses pointed me towards archival sources I hadn’t seen before.
One of them, posted by the Mackenzie House in Toronto, was a source that hadn’t even been seen by a curator and conservationist who previously catalogued and researched clothing by Monsieur Dave.
I haven’t a clue what reason the Mackenzie House had for following our project, or how it knew about this source, but anecdotally that exchange is great example of the kinds ways a project can benefit from going public before it’s finished. The kind of interaction invited by a work-in-progress is very different from the sort you get from a finished project. Even setting aside practicalities — crowdsourcing ideas and sources, soliciting constructive criticism, etc. — I think there’s a case to be made about how doing in history in the open can become an opportunity for creating engagement. Unfinished projects can become invitations for online interaction and collaboration. In this example, my research problem became someone else’s prompt to do a little digging of their own, with fruitful results for all parties.
I don’t want to suggest that our own project was groundbreaking in this respect, but I do think it’s a strong example of the way heritage organizations could also “do history in the open.” For us, online engagement was largely limited to Wordpress and Twitter. These kinds of interaction could also be fostered on a museum’s website, Facebook page or custom mobile app. One imagines an institution like Science and Tech with an established online presence could do a lot more than a class of nine students.
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