Many people have already blogged, tweeted, and otherwise shared their experiences already, and they’ve said some fantastic things. I tweeted my way through that conference (check out of the #ncph2010 tag over there), so this is more of an acknowledgement than anything else. I did already write up a review  for the volunteer’s newsletter at work, which talks about the issues and panels related to the work we do at Arlington House, including slavery, interpretation, competing histories, and historic preservation.   

Digital history really was a presence this year, though the lack of free Internet anywhere in the hotel made those sorts of interactions harder than last year. There was a lot of Twitter activity and a few blog posts, but I didn’t get into it past twitter, and that’s because it’s easy to do on my phone. It’s so nice to see the organization of the conference reflect the importance and growth of social media and digital connections in the field though! Museums and historic sites need to turn to the Internet to engage with visitors these days and NCPH provided workshops to learn some of the tools, such as Zotero for research and Omeka for museum collections (both produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University), and discussions about the place of these tools in public history. Jeremy Boggs, a member CHNM and a teacher at both GMU and American University, talked about the importance of public historians getting involved in the process of creating digital tools for our own work. Why, he asked, should we rely on other people who don’t know exactly what we need to build the tools we use? We need to get educated, take charge, and create what we need on our own. Otherwise, we’ll have nothing but tools that don’t get the job done. The logical place to start this is in our education, in school where we can get a solid foundation in the basics of both using and creating digital tools. I have to agree with him.  Jeremy taught the “History in the Digital Age” class I took almost a year ago, and I’ve found the skills, such as using social media, how to build a website, and even XHTML coding, I learned in his to be one of my greatest assets.  

A panel on historic preservation showed how the local community is preservation’s best friend or worst nightmare, especially when it comes to neighborhoods. Though a preservationist or other public historian can bring new information and remind towns of other histories than the one they might be most interested in, in the end, the community decides what is important to it. Sometimes history is important to these people, sometimes not, and it was a great reminder of the need to balance what the audience wants with what we want to give them.

I found the projects the Minnesota Historical Society has been working on to be a great inspiration. Public history provides more than just a one—way stream of information, and they really are creating a discussion between themselves and their constituents with programs like Write On The Record, where users can make comments to help identify materials like photographs in the Society’s collection. The exhibit focusing on telling the stories of “Minnesota’s Greatest Generation” invites people to tell their own stories of the 1920s to 1950s, and read those of others via the Internet (and phone for those who don’t want to type). The 1968 Project also asks for personal stories, and the MHS also hosts a film contest to find out what the year meant to those who lived it.

And now to brag about my classmates. One of the groups from my Practicum class spring presented the project they did as a poster session. If you were there, it’s the one with the waysides on the history of Arlington National Cemetery.  

This year’s meeting was a tremendous success, bringing to light a lot of issues and topics for public historians in all areas of the profession to think about and engage with. The idea of competing histories and telling different stories in different ways linked the sessions I attended together in an enlightening way, one that can challenge us, or at least me, to be more open-minded when it comes to alternative histories and new methods of interpretation and engagement.

And finally, I must comment on Portland, for it is a fantastic city. Seriously, I’m including it in my job hunt. Not only is it absolutely gorgeous, but the people are nice. The coffee and beer are plentiful and, like the food, delicious. Public transportation inside the downtown area is free. And even during morning rush hour there’s no traffic. Not to mention the gorgeous, if slightly creepy, gigantic mountain overlooking the city. Really, what else could a girl ask for?

Luckily, I have something to show for myself besides an exhibit review and presentation, a few papers, five book reviews, a conference experience, a stack of books as tall as me, and whatever else I did over the past semester. If you all wouldn’t mind, I’d love for you to take a look at Capitol Art: Teaching the Art of the Rotunda for 5^th Graders, a site I made with a classmate as part of a project in my Visual and Material Culture class.

Early in the semester, we read a book called Art and Empire: Race and Ethnicity in the United States Capitol by Vivien Green Fryd. If you haven’t read it yet, please do so. Not only is it fantastic, you will never look at the art in the Capitol, or even the art of the Early Republic, the same way again. For those of you who don’t want to read it, and really, it’s a school book so I can’t blame you, you can find the main argument here at the website. Essentially, it is this:

“In Art and Empire, Vivien Green Fryd argues that the art in and surrounding the United States Capitol represents a specific idea and belief within American culture. The art is not merely decorative; the pieces represent white hegemonic power, dominance over the Native American population and in the final chapter, the deliberate absence of African Americans. This absence is indicative of the political and social tensions of the time.”

It touches on ideas near and dear to the traditionalist, westward expansion and Manifest Destiny… and everything that comes along with them, such as white superiority and subjugation of the American continent. What the above paragraph (taken from our website) doesn’t explicitly say is that Congress had an agenda to create a national myth and a shared heritage, at least for white people, and did so through the art of the Capitol.

The book shocked me.  I had never thought about the art in the Rotunda in such a way before, and the very idea that in the center of democracy and equality (at least supposedly) we proudly display these ideas blew my mind. Over and over throughout the semester our class discussions returned to Fryd’s work, especially in terms of a government agenda. My mind, however, returned again and again to the idea that such works of art are still venerated in our Capitol with no explanations for visitors as to what exactly those works of art mean.

There are two ways for visitors to see the Capitol. One is a tour from the Capitol Visitors Center, the other is a tour from the office of a Congressman. CVC guides are trained in their tours. Congress tours are generally by interns and junior staffers who don’t really care about what they’re showing the family from their boss’ district visiting the nation’s capital and don’t get much training. I’ve seen both up close and personal. (I will admit that though I’ve never taken an office tour, I’ve seen them and I know a lot of former Hill interns. In my experience, they generally dislike the tours and take pride in making up information.) From personal experience, CVC guides tell you who made the art and when, but don’t go into the complicated early 19^th century social and political situations surrounding the pieces. Add in the sparse labels, and you’ve got is a lot of missing information, a public missing the point, and the nation calling (subtly?) for white superiority.

The website takes all of this into account. To be perfectly clear, our goal was not to create a lesson plan for students. Instead, we created a resource for teachers. We give them enough information to get started, in terms of the hows and whys of using visual culture and the historical material, namely Fryd and the art, and let them do what they want with it. The website also contains four in-class activities for teachers to use.  We provide them with our bibliography on visual culture, education, digital media in the classroom, and 19^th century history if they want to learn more. We left the comment functions enabled so educators can communicate with one another about the material and their own ideas for how to use it.

Personally, I was more concerned with making sure teachers knew the problems and dangers of teaching these subjects rather than giving them something to print out and use. The challenges to the traditional American myth Congress created with it have always created controversy (see the Enola Gay and West as America exhibits, and the National History Standards debates). Art and Empire was published around the same time these other controversies were making national headlines, but I can’t find much to say how much it brought to the table.

So please, take a look at Capitol Art. Pass it along to your friends in education if you think it’s any good. If you have an opinion, please let me know. I figure the site can pretty much look after itself, but I will be keeping an eye on it and am willing to put some extra effort into it if I think it will really help make a difference.

So what am I doing exactly? HES is a sit-at-the-computer all day type of job, but for now I’m working on editing the Discover Our Shared Heritage travel itineraries. When the Route 66 one comes out, which won’t be for a couple months I think, you will be able to read my words. I’m definitely utilizing those Internet skills Jeremy taught us this summer in class, I can successfully play in the code section of Dreamweaver and impress my supervisor! The people in the office are great, and I’ve now learned all about different programs NPS runs, especially focusing on historic preservation. They have so many fantastic programs that do so much!

Arlington is such a different experience. At ARHO, as it is officially designated, I’m technically a part-time “visitor use assistant” but for all intents and purposes I’m a park ranger; uniform and hat and all (if I actually wore the hat…). Part of my day is up at the house, telling people all about George Washington Parke Custis and Robert E. Lee, and for the rest I get to sit in the air conditioned office working on projects or reading/researching. My co-workers are fantastic, and I amuse myself at the house by trying to decide the silliest question asked by a visitor throughout the day and counting how many times someone asks where the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is.

I’m very glad HES and Arlington are so different. I’m not doing the same thing all day, every day, but at both I am educating people, or at least giving them the materials to be educated with. And for myself, I’m learning and improving  such two very different sets of skillls. I’m also learning what I  want to do, and what I don’t. I’m liking interacting with visitors on this level so much more than I anticipated, and what past experience had prepared me for. I love it when they ask questions about what’s in the house and I can actually educate people about their country’s history. And when kids ask questions? It’s fantastic! At the same time I love the 9-5 of HES though, when there’s no weekend work and I don’t have to wear the uniform. I like knowing that people are going to use what I work on out in the “real world.”

I’m very much looking forward to the rest of the summer, even if I’ll be starting to prepare for comp exams and writing internship papers and wearing unflattering uniforms. Oh the things we do to do what we want to do!

The really interesting part came less from the articles, however, and more from an example Jeremy brought up. He directed us to an interesting scholarly article by David Staley of Heidelberg College called “Sequential Art and Historical Narrative: A Visual History of Germany.”* Instead of a traditional written essay, as you would find in any scholarly journal, Staley tells his story of the history of Volkswagon as a series of pictures with no words. Staley’s goal, as he says, is “to elevate visual sources from the background of historical representation to which historians have long confined them, and to arrange such images prominently in the foreground.” Why, he asks, do we only use images when communicating with the public, and not inside the profession?

It’s a question worthy of serious consideration I think. Is there something inherently wrong with using pictures, only pictures, to communicate rather than words? People made arguments for both sides, though as a whole we seemed more skeptical than accepting. One person claimed that pictures evoked more emotion than words, though that statement as argued seeing as words are just as capable of pulling at our heart strings. Many of the problems people seem to have stem from the lack of direction picture-essays offer for readers. In the broadest sense, are audiences unfamiliar with the subject matter even capable of understanding such visualizations? The Staley essay, completely lacking in context until the explanation at the end, certainly asks a lot from its readers. Not knowing much about cars and post-WWII Germany, it took me a while just to figure out what it was about, and it’s easier for each reader of picture articles to reach different conclusions than if they were reading. While work frequently has different consequences than author’s intended, visual-only pieces leave far more to the imagination and to personal experience when interpreting them.

So, are visual articles worth the trouble? If it were up to my class, it’s certainly a subject for debate. I think the value of these types of articles is limited, but not they are not without merit. Right now many historians are looking for new ways to interpret information, especially on the web. For the most part, however, I don’t think anyone has considered doing away with writing. It’s always nice when authors include images with their work to illustrate text, but many are restricted to using what is available, especially for those studying the thousands of years before the 20th century. I would certainly support anyone’s decision to write an article in pictures, it’s a fascinating way to go about sharing knowledge and encourages the use of images as sources in their own right, rather than simply illustrations. I would suggest creating captions for the images, not only so they can be properly cited, but also to give readers not as familiar with the material a better chance at following the argument. Done as such, public historians especially could get a lot of use out of this medium.

~~~

*More of Staley’s work can be found in the archives of the Journal of the Association for History and Computing. All articles are listed by author’s name, and Staley is, of course, in the S section.

Last week (Thursday) I finally got to see A Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. It followed successfully in the footsteps of the first movie a couple years ago (2006 according to the Internet Movie Database), and was a genuinely funny piece of work. I loved it… as long as I ignored the actual layout of the National Mall and the horrible things being done (supposedly) to the objects, but it’s fiction and a movie and that’s what you’re supposed to do.

Treatment of objects aside, A Night at the Museum did provide some food for museum-related thought, which I tweeted on the metro back home: “Plot device: museum going completely digital/interactive except for major exhibits. Can it? Should it? Is that what people want at a museum?” The premise of the movie/how they get Ben Stiller to DC is that the Natural History Museum in New York City (the location of the first movie) is closing for two months for renovations… and they’re packing up all but the biggest exhibits and sending them for permanent storage to the Federal Archives, below the Mall. When Ricky Gervais tells this to Ben Stiller, he says that people don’t want objects, they want the next new thing. Traditional exhibits, he implies, are obsolete. The next new thing, apparently, is a digital, interactive Teddy Roosevelt visitors can question as soon as they walk in. It struck me as ridiculous.

Responses to tweets aside (from @gabsters: you mean in the movie? because that’s a bad idea and a huge lack of culture if not. ick. to a deeper discussion with @hummeline) I suppose the question really is: are objects loosing their place in museums? Lincoln Cottage, a National Trust for Historic Preservation site at the Old Soldier’s Home in DC, has proved that no,  you don’t need objects to interpret history or create a learning environment. They have little to no indication of what should be there, and decided against using random, period reproductions. Their lack of furniture and other objects (except in a couple places) opened the way for a different kind of historic house, where they use audio and visual media to tell their stories rather than what’s in the room. It’s amazingly successful.

So, do we need objects in museums? Museums are a place of learning, where we connect people with the past. They have transformed from institutions of research and curiosities into places where education of the public is a, if not there, primary goal. Would we have more success with digital media than traditional exhibits? Or even hybrid exhibits, where we integrate digital or technological components with objects? And even if media is not the way to go, is it something we might have to do to draw visitors and compete for people’s leisure time?

Personally, I believe objects will always have a special place in museums and historic houses, and loosing them is not what people want. Arlington House is undergoing renovations in the house itself, meaning that for their own good all the objects that could be removed have been. When I was volunteering there, the first question people asked was “where’s the furniture?” They usually followed  up with “when do you get it back?”

There’s something special about objects, about getting a chance to look at The Real Thing that anything else just falls short of. Whether it’s George Washington’s camp chair at Tudor Place, C3PO and R2D2 at American History, a canon that shot across the field at Saratoga, or King Charles’ execution warrant in the House of Lords (UK), just being in the presence of an object is something special, something worth remembering. There’s certainly a place for technology and media in museums, and not just on the web. Instead of, if objects themselves are not around? I suppose. But as replacements? Not so much.

Related object reading in this post by my classmate last week.

Anyway, this class is massive amounts of reading all at once, and one of tonight’s articles is truly something I’ve never encountered before. Claudio Saunt of the University of Georgia wrote a piece in the William and Mary Quarterly, the premier early America journal, called “Go West: Mapping Early American Historiography”* in which he literally mapping the “mental geography of the field” (746) from 1944, when the journal expanded from just Virginia history, through 2006. Not only did he categorize almost every single article by the author’s university and the subject matter, but he then divided them into pre-determined regions. He then created cartograms, “which display the geographic distribution of a given variable (people, automobiles, oak trees) by resizing defined units (countries, states, counties) in proportion to that variable” (750). In this case, regions with many articles written about or from them will appear larger on the map than regions with fewer articles. For example, the journal has published manymanymany more articles about the Northeast than California. Therefore, though California is geographically bigger than the Northeast, the Northeast appears larger on the map than California. It’s subjective rather than objective.

I won’t restate all his conclusions here, Saunt does that quite well himself and the article includes the cartograms he created. Actually seeing the way the field has changed over time and the patterns that emerge is really quite fascinating, though, and got me thinking. Could a project like this go digital though? In a way, Saunt’s project reminds me of projects like we looked at last week, Australia’s Mapping our Anzacs for example, where people can plot on a map where veterans of World War I came from. Instead of clusters of little markers, though, he literally changed the face of the continent using cartograms instead of the more traditional equal-area map.

I think, in the end, it’s word “traditional” that gets me. Almost everything we do with history in conjunction with the Internet and Web 2.0 is untraditional. I’d like to see a map that doesn’t use little flags, but rather one that might change size depending on what information people feed into it. In a way, as Saunt points out, it can more accurately reflect mental attitudes, a la “Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker  cover depicting a Manhattenite’s foreshortened view
of the continent” (750) because the reader can see, in this case for example, a person’s world view or how important different variables are in relation to others.

It seems to me that getting opinions and understanding where the public is coming from is part of the job of a public historian and/or museum professional, and today, much of that is done via the web. Using this kind of insight gathering can let museums know, for example, which exhibits or parts of the museum visitors like most in a simple, visual way. It would, of course, have be supplemented with a comment sheet or in-person interview, but the results might help the staff decide where to start if more than one area is up for reconsideration.

In terms of digital collections after a tragedy, I’m thinking CHNM’s 9-11 project and Hurricane Katrina websites, these kinds of maps would show where items came from or what part of the country they refer to, giving an idea of where people’s attention is focused. Since submission date is stored as well, one could look over time and find out what part of the country submitted the most at any given time, or if there were any patterns.

Admittedly, these might not be completely original data, and I’m sure something similar has been done. I’ve not seen many cartograms though (I didn’t even realize they had a name), and looking at distorted maps is far more interesting than looking at normal maps, at least in my opinion. If nothing else, it might be a fun option to explore, if only for break in monotony and the opportunity to show people how maps aren’t static truth, but merely subjective representations of the world around us.

*The original article can be accessed through the History Coopertive, which requires a subscription. If your institution has one, log into the library, then go here and access the WMQ, October 2008. AU students, that link should ask you to log into the system and will then take you to the main page. HC is particularly awesome, as it has the latest issues of journals, not just the ones from at least two years ago.

Seeing as this blog (and, well, the whole website actually) is being created for a history and digital media class, it is only fitting that it should be about History in the Digital Age. Or at least the class itself anyway. I rather like this whole idea of creating and using a blog/website. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do, been wanting to do, but haven’t gotten around to actually doing due to, well, life and the dubious pleasures of being a graduate student. So thank you, Jeremy Boggs!

But I digress, as I tend to do. Our class had the pleasure of hosting Dan Cohen, the director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University across the river in Virginia, Monday night. Topics of discussion ranged from the history of historians and technology to issues of shared authority to utilizing the Internet and non-traditional methods to the place of those non-traditional methods in the (academic) field.

One of Dan’s many quotable moments was one this class seems to have taken to heart, “Every graduate student should have a blog.” Blogs, along with other social media tools such as Twitter, mean that graduate students, traditionally not heard all that often in professional circles, get an equal chance to be heard. Although this was discussed in terms of digital humanities, there is no reason blog posts or tweeted ideas can’t be influential in other areas. The validity of an idea does not change because the author blogged it, admittedly muchmuchmuch easier to do in comparison to getting the same article published in a scholarly journal. The open nature of the Internet means that the article is likely to be put under the scrutiny of peer-review as well when other scholars see it. Blogging, Twittering, and using other forms of social media create a personal brand a graduate students can design for themselves. Writing intelligent, insightful comments gets you noticed and your ideas passed along, with which comes opportunities to grow professionally and have an impact on the field.

Well, I’m a grad student and I have a blog. And while I might not change the world in the years to come, I do hope that some of my writings, whatever they are, inspire people in their own way. (Not that a job wouldn’t be nice as well…)