During last night’s class, we discussed passionate history communities and ways to engage with them in a digital history setting.  We talked about the potentials and pitfalls of crowd-sourcing.  We concluded the class with an exercise establishing potential stakeholders for the Atlanta Rail Corridor Archive project and ways to reach them and engage them in the project.

Digital History Class Notes Week Twelve

April 7, 2015

4:30 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.

• Project check-in
  • Exhibit outlines
    • Everyone who sent me an outline not in Omeka has feedback
  • Exhibit design
    • Working with Chad Marchong to fix thumbnail render problems in exhibit-builder
    • Please send me your bug reports!
  • Securing rights
    • Georgia Archives
    • Atlanta History Center
  • Adding additional item
    • Please let me know when new items are ready
  • Making items public and publicizing presentations
    • I want to work on making as many items public as possible this week.
    • Please email me by tomorrow morning with a progress report on your revisions so that I can start making items public tomorrow afternoon.
    • Jeff Young is running a piece on our class project on the GSU History Department website— want there to be content on the public version of the ATL Rail Corridor Archive
    • Also want people to come to our presentations on the 28th.
    • How should we publicize the presentations?
      • Richard Laub on the ListServ
      • Joe Hurley for the Library
      • History Department Facebook Page
      • Jeff Young for all things History Department
• Quick notes on the website
  • I will be creating sign-up page on website for our one-on-one meetings on the 21st.
  • Please use the “more” button.
  • Please make sure you have categorized and tagged your posts properly.
  • I will go back through and check over everyone’s posts one more time before doing final participation grades, so you have a chance to fix any issues.  Thanks!

4:45 p.m. – 5:55 p.m.

• Creating with audience in mind
  • How do scholars imagine their audience(s)
    • Other scholars and academics
    • Repackaging content for different education levels
    • Not light reading or reading for pleasure– expecting close reading
    • Do they imagine audiences at all?
    • Small audiences with some overlap with other audiences.
  • How do public historians imagine audiences for museum exhibits, walking tours, lectures, public programs?
    • Imagine excited, eager audiences
    • As interested in history as you are
    • We break them down demographically by age, socioeconomic class, region.
    • Nuanced audience
  • What about digital history sites?
    • Can still target audience, but you also want broad appeal.
      • Think about site architecture to do this.
    • Can be a very casual experience, or very brief
    • Very individualized experience, not usually social together
    • So— distributed social experience– social media type experience
• When is an audience not just an audience?
  • How does Benjamin Filene define “outsider” history-makers?
    • Not traditionally or academically trained
    • Bottom up
    • Outside of standard institutions
    • Amateur
  • Passionate histories
    • Audiences and/or stakeholders?
      • Everybody is a stakeholder in a particular history— a personal connection
      • Part of the community being interpreted
      • Family-member of a subject of an exhibit or historical inquiry
  • Applying shared authority
    • How do public historians define the concept of shared authority?
      • Academics tend to share authority with other academics, but in many public history projects, there is a sense that the “public” can be a part of the process
      • Sticky situations can result from not including the community— or from not thinking through your process before you do include the community
      • Need to define stakeholders for any project.
    • When is it appropriate and when is it not?
      • Black Confederate Soldiers
        • Co-creating knowledge or debunking myths?
          • It’s situational– but historians should debunk myths…
          • Especially fraught in a digital environment– challenging to make arguments based on readings of evidence and sources
          • Need to try to put people at ease before you engage.
      • Women’s history on Wikipedia
        • What is the Wikipedia community like?
          • Male
          • Youngish
          • Techy or science-oriented (Nerds)
          • White
          • American
          • Hegemonic
        • Defining significance within the Wikipedia knowledge-making endeavor
          • Creating councils of underrepresented groups
          • Significance grows out of engagement– organic growth
        • Groups identify with counter-culture, independence
• Citizen Historians
  • Citizen science
    • SETI
    • Bugs, birds, etc
    • Empirical data?
  • Imagining ideal jobs for citizen historians?
    • Technical
      • Distributed transcription
      • Scanning
      • Cataloging photography
      • Measurements
    • Interpretive
      • Docents
      • Data gathering, story sharing
      • Find-a-grave — geographical help
      • Sleuth work
      • Expanded capacity for scholarship through expanded access to data– distributed data
  • Quote from Elissa Frankle in Amanda Sikarskie’s essay on Citizen Scholars: Facebook and the Co-Creation of Knowledge in Writing History in the Digital Age
    • In her 2011 blog post, “More Crowdsourced Scholarship: Citizen History,” Elissa Frankle wrote that, “In the history museum of the future, curators’ work will be driven by our audiences’ curiosity, and their preference for inquiry over certainty.”
      • Citizen History opens up a museum’s existing data to participants and, through scaffolded inquiry, invites participants to draw conclusions to answer big questions.7
      • In scaffolded inquiry, authority is not shared equally, but it is still shared.
    • Paul Levy’s concept of “collective intelligence” also quoted in Sikarskie:
      • In Cyberculture, Lévy describes the collective intelligence brought about by online communication in this way:
        • My hypothesis is that cyberculture reinstates the copresence of messages and their context, which had been the current of oral societies, but on a different scale and on a different plane. The new universality no longer depends on self-sufficient texts, on the fixity and independence of signification. It is constructed and extended by interconnecting messages with one another, by their continuous ramification through virtual communities, which instills in them varied meanings that are continuously renewed.10
      • Permalink for this paragraph0One can understand the collective intelligence of lay scholars’ crowdsourcing history in this way: No one historian knows everything, and everyone actively posting content has something slightly different to offer the community. All of the content produced and posted by lay quilt scholars amounts to the collective intelligence of the quilt world, a body of knowledge that no one individual can ever know in its entirety, for it is simply too vast.
      • Moving target– nothing is fixed in time or place
    • How does this work in digital history creation?
      • Serendipitous connections
      • Interdisciplinary connections
      • Synthesis
      • Inspiration
      • Cross-regional connection
    • What kinds of histories can be crowdsourced?
      • Experience-based history
      • History where there is a dearth of archival evidence– oral tradition
      • History as it’s being made
      • Distributed communities can be brought together virtually
      • Tapping into hobby or interest communities
      • Photo identification
  • Digital History and Social Media
    • Relationships between free-form digital history sites and contained historical experiences in Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr etc
      • Do you bring the audience to you, or do you go where the audience is already?
        • Go where they are and then get them to come to you as well.
    • Outreach via social media
      • Sikarskie:
        • The dynamic of that of a teacher and student (or that of a Facebook manager and Facebook fan) is perhaps a more apt way of describing the work we are doing on Facebook with this population of “self-identifiers.” That said, however, even this top-down model of scholarly communication is still a process of co-creation of knowledge to an extent
      • Good and bad strategies for connecting with audiences via social media.
        • You have to work at it on a regular basis
          • You have to have to have a regular presence
          • People are expecting a curation of content– it needs to relate to your institution’s mission
          • Branding is important
          • One-size doesn’t fit all
          • Connect on a personal
          • Think about the purpose of the particular social media outlet

5:57 p.m. – 6:07 p.m.

• Break

6:10 p.m. – 6:40 p.m.

• In-class audience outreach activity
• Brainstorm “passionate audiences” for our Atlanta Rail Corridor Archive project
  • Railroad enthusiasts
  • People who are involved in the making of the BeltLine
  • Atlanta progress/business community
  • Neighborhood community organizations
    • Residents of particular neighborhoods
  • Rotary clubs
  • Users– recreational groups
    • Cyclists
    • Dog-walkers
    • Joggers
  • Other cities with similar projects
  • Archives and holders of our items
  • Arts and Culture
  • Politicians and Policy-makers

• Break into groups and craft an engagement plan for a particular audience
  • Where do you find the audience?
  • How do you reach the audience?
  • Will the audience co-produce or only consume content?
  • What will come of the interaction with this audience?

6:40 – 7:00

• Present and workshop strategies
• Nathan and John-Joseph
  • Neighborhood Associations
    • Finding audience
      • Digital presence of neighborhood associations (websites and newsletters)
      • same process for Homeowners’ associations
    • Reaching audience
      • Flyers, pamphlets, website links for newsletters
      • Arrange history nights for each of the communities to coincide with regular meetings to cultivate resources
    • Co-producing
      • Opportunity to get new primary source material from the neighborhoods
    • Long-term impacts
      • Would strengthen sense of community in those neighborhoods
      • Raises stakes in these communities and their relationship with the BeltLine project
      • People often don’t react until after a project is underway– so a pre-engagement
      • Useful for historical research too– reference points (significant families, etc)
    • Tougher to reach past residents
      • Tax records
  • Susan and Kate
    • BeltLine Users Audience
    • Find the audience
      • Through BeltLine organization, neighborhood associations, business community
    • Reaching the audience
      • Through BeltLine sponsored events
      • Public radio — sounds of, for example
      • QR codes for people jogging along the trail, etc
      • Engaging with the physical space of the BeltLine
    • Mostly passive– don’t know who they are
    • But they could contribute stories through the site
    • Could include more tags in URL
  • Jennie and Chris
    • Policy groups
    • Finding them
      • City of Atlanta departments
      • Mayor
      • City Council departments
      • Parks and Rec
      • Office of Cultural Affairs
      • Library systems
    • Reaching them
      • Connecting at city planning meetings
      • Mostly publicity but potential access to archives
    • Co-producers or Passive or something else
      • Means to reach other audiences?
      • Social media, etc
    • Longer-term relationship
      • Don’t want anyone to hijack the story– they have a marketing agenda, but we want to keep our site’s mission
  • Nick, Julie, and Leslie
    • Rail enthusiasts
    • Finding them
      • Locomotive museums
      • Train shows
      • Model stores
      • Groups for reenactors
      • Online forums
    • Reaching them
      • Partner with museums and depot sites
      • Getting into online forums and social media
      • Print media at shows, stores, museums
    • Co-producers or Consumers
      • Worthwhile to have co-production– might have some valuable insights
    • Long-term relationship
      • Keeping them as part of your core constituency
  • Caroline and Becky
    • Businesses
    • Finding them
      • Social media, networking
      • Atlanta Chamber of Commerce
      • Restaurants!!!
      • Small-businesses in the BeltLine corridor too
    • Reaching them
      • Delta for transportation
      • CNN and CocaCola
      • Sears company (Ponce City Market)
      • Contact through social media, calling, letters
    • Co-producers vs. Consumers
      • Depends on the company— depends on in-depth relationship to content or not
      • Atlanta might be the extent of their relationship or it might be deepers
    • Long-term relationship
      • Interaction with these businesses might bring greater recognition
      • Networking, etc
      • Connecting with employees of these companies