Public history is happening on the web. In Friday's Digital Projects Showcase, we saw 10 presentations about web projects in various stages of development. The session was unfortunately in a small, narrow room where sounds of revelry penetrated from the reception outside, and many of the projects were presented with screenshots rather than live. A better presentation might be as a digital poster session where interested parties could explore the projects hands-on and ask questions directly. This could also help the developers evaluate usability for historians and researchers. For now, I've linked to all the projects so you can explore on your own.
CHNM's Hurricane Digital Memory Bank
Mass Memories Roadshow from UMass Boston, "a state-wide digital humanities project that documents Massachusetts history through family photographs and stories," through community scanning events, and their Mass history social network (on Ning).
Annapolis GIS, which provides access to locational data around urban archaeology in Annapolis.
PhilaPlace, about Philadelphia neighborhoods and communities, launches in September. It uses Collective Access as a backend.
Venerable community collections project Maine Memory Net has been facilitating some innovative collaborations.
Lehigh Digital Library's Beyond Steel. Want to know who lived in a particular house, what plant they worked for, if they owned or boarded? Beyond Steel can tell you.
The Knowledge Cube, still in the planning stages, from Clarkson.
Virtual tours of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, still under development.
(I regret to say that I missed the last two presentations, and can only find a link to one of them. Sorry, civil war mappers from WVU!)
Mapping Memories of Fox Point maps oral histories of Fox Point, Providence, and creates "memory maps" for each person's experience of the place.
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Thanks for posting this Suzanne.
ReplyDeleteTwo things stuck out for me from this session. The first was how many different directions there are for digital history projects.
The second was how vulnerable the funding for all these are. I was struck by the manager of the Katrina Project talking about how his support, never extensive, has vanished completely in the current budget situation, even as more material to be preserved has come forward. As a result he seems to be carrying the project on his back, as an unpaid addition to his regular duties as a faculty member.
Most of the digital projects we saw benefited from a burst of grant funding. Sustainability is the next frontier.