Twittering the meeting

An interesting article on how we might deepen the conversation at the meeting: http://pistachioconsulting.com/twitter-presentations/

Steve (@lubar)

Integrating Graduate Students

NCPH decided to create a graduate student ad hoc committee for the upcoming annual conference in the hopes that this committee would generate ideas and programming that would pique graduate student interest. Thanks to survey data, NCPH staff have noted the changing demographics of membership and attendence at conferences. While roughly a quarter of NCPH membership are graduate students, those graduate students were roughly thirty percent of attendees at the 2008 annual meeting in Louisville. With such a large (and statistically significant) population as part of the professional constituentcy, the powers-that-be decided to give graduate students more of a voice.

I am thrilled to be involved in that effort and anyone who knows me is familiar with how eager I am to share my opinion, ask questions, or dig in and get my hands dirty. While there will be guest bloggers of various backgrounds posting here, you will see myself and a few other graduate students talking about why we go to conferences, how NCPH informs our professional development, and also some of the nitty-gritty questions many of us had when we first came to a professional conference.

My recent research into the history of tourism (and the fact that I'm rewatching episodes of Mad Men) is moving me to think about this as serving a burgeoning market segment. In terms of the academic and professional community, though, this experiment will hopefully provide another layer of perspective and that can provide us all with the opportunity to slow down and think about where the future of the field is headed from another angle. I'm always in favor of a more complex discussion.

Calling all bloggers (even if you aren't quite sure what that means!)

This year, the NCPH conference blog will be open to anyone who wishes to post reports, impressions, rebuttals, or other responses to what's going on at the conference. We'd like to hear from a wide range of voices, so if you'd like to share your thoughts or questions with others in the public history realm (at or beyond the conference itself), you're invited to participate.

To join in, you just need to let us know that you're interested, and we'll add you as an author so that you're able to post directly to the blog. Any NCPH member or conference attendee can join. Email the blog editor, Cathy Stanton, at cstanton@tiac.net to be added to the list.

Not entirely sure what blogging is all about? That's okay - this is a good chance to find out! A blog (from the term "web log") is a form of instant online publishing that people use in a wide variety of ways. Some blogs have a single author (for example, Dan Cohen's Digital History blog (see his April 2006 discussion about reasons to blog). Others have many contributors - the group blog Cliopatria, hosted on the History News Network, is an example. In general, blogging is a fast form of publishing (although there's also an emerging slow blogging movement), somewhere in between the immediacy of text messaging and the, well, stately pace of academic journal production.

At last year's NCPH conference, we had a small team of bloggers reporting and reflecting on various aspects of the conference. This year, we're opening up the floor. Please let us know if you're interested in joining in. The only requirements are that you contact us before the April 1 conference start date, so we can add you to our list, and that you commit to posting at least once during the conference itself.

WELCOME to the blog site for the 2009 National Council on Public History conference, which will be held in Providence, Rhode Island between April 1 and 5. Stay tuned for much more coming soon to this space...