For the tagging assignment, I was given the tags “gender, race, and identity.” At first thought, I believed that theses tags would be popular on the history@work site. And two of them were, the tags gender and race seemed prevalent on the site, however, there were no articles that I could find which had tagged identity. Listed below are the articles that I chose to use for the assignment.

• July 1, 2014— Lifting Our Skirts: Sharing the Sexual Past with Visitors, by Susan Ferentinos

Tags: Gender, LGBT, Museums, Pulling back the Curtain, sexuality, visitors

• August 9, 2013— Where Is the Next Generation of Gender Studies, by Cathy Staton

Tags: Gender, Museums, Queer History, Scholarship, Social Justice

• May 23, 2014— National Women’s History Museum & Material Culture Wars, by Manon Parry

Tags: Gender, Museum, Nation Women’s History Museum

• January 8, 2015— Rethinking Diversity: Who Does History Belong To, by Angela Thorpe

Tags: Education, Employment, Profession, Public Engagement, Race, Training

• December 8, 2014— Public History Resources on Ferguson, by the Editors

Tags: Human Rights, Protest, Public Engagement, Race, Violence

• September 9, 2013— “Ask A Slave:” A Front Line Fantasy, by Amy Tyson

Tags: Digital Media, Employment, Public Engagement, Race

• August 13, 2014— Behind the Velvet Rope: Revealing Process with Museum Tours and Programs, by Ken Turino

Tags: Gender, Historic House Museums, Museums, Pulling Back the Curtain, Tours

• November 26, 2014— Beyond Fifteen Minutes of Fame, by Priya Chhaya

Tags: Ethnicity, Government, Museums, Politics, Public Engagement

• January 14, 2014— Revisiting Monterey 20 Years after “The Politics of Public Memory” By Martha Norkunas

Tags: Gender, Memory, Monterey, Museums, Politics, Preservation, Race

• February 14, 2014— The Uses of the Past at the Olympics, by Richard Anderson

Tags: Community History, Government, Media, Pageantry, Performance, Politics, Public

Engagement

The articles that I choose to use for the assignment were quite varied. Many dealt with historical context of a site or the interpretation of a historical topic, while a few dealt more with the overall nature of public history and its current themes and trends.  What I found most interesting though was the fact that gender, seemed to be the most popular tag of the three that I was assigned. I have to wonder why this is the case, it could be the gender history has become extremely popular more recently and so there is an increase in the amount of history/interpretation being studied. Or it could be that gender has become such a broad term that it can be applied to many subjects that at first glance might not seem like a gender issue or study, but underneath the surface really is. I tend to think that it is the latter of the two. Race was a bit harder of a tag to find on the History@work blog. This I also found surprising, given the recent race issues in the nation, and the 50^th anniversary of The March on Washington, I thought that there would be many more articles tagged race. In the articles that were tagged race, however, there were many things being looked at. Perhaps my favorite of all the ones tagged with race was the article on Public History resources and the events in Ferguson. An event such as Ferguson, some would argue is not history, because the events are so recent. As a historian though, I don’t believe that is the case, rather Ferguson is very much a living history. I found it very interesting that the blog worked to provide resources that people could use to learn about our race history in the nation to thus apply it to the event in Ferguson. The tag itself, helped to connect the past with the present. What I found most surprising was the utter lack of the use of the tag identity. In nearly all the articles I choose for the assignment, I thought that identity could have been used as a tag. Identity plays a huge part in both race and gender. How a group of people identify themselves and why, are interesting questions, while these articles aren’t explicitly answering these questions they are getting at similar subject matter. So why not use the tag identity? I don’t have an answer to this question. Unless of course those who are writing simply believe that by tagging identity in the articles would be redundant.

Lastly you may have noticed that one of the articles I used, did not contain any of the tags that I was assigned. I did this on purpose. I thought that this particular post, presented a situation in which the article could have easily used one or two of my tags but didn’t. I thought that it offered a good comparison to the articles that did use the tags. I believe that with the use of the tag ethnicity, that many feel that race was covered in the article. Though race and ethnicity aren’t explicitly the same, they are in many ways similar. This article also could have been tagged with identity. Identity I have always thought played a major role in the Olympics, not necessarily in the games, but rather with the abundance of audience members and which countries they identify themselves with.

Over all I found that the articles I looked at used the tags in ways which were beneficial to the reader. However, I also found that there were many times in which a tag could have been used but was left off. The use of tagging in the blog space, makes it easier for readers to pick specific articles that may be of use or interest to them. But as we have seen, we cannot solely depend on the tags to get us all the articles that we may need. In other words tagging can be both useful and frustrating when navigating the blog space.