Tech Trends in Cultural Heritage Institutions + Research Workshop 

HIST 295: Intro to Public History

Prof. Mackenzie Brooks

May 2, 2016

"New Media and the Challenges of Public History"

• What is "new media?" What are some examples we've seen so far? 
• What are the goals/benefits of new media in a public history context? 
• What are the challenges? 

Themes for Week 2

• The role of technology/new media/social media in public history
• Influence of technology on museum practices
• Expertise and authority - who gets to tell the story? 
• Methods of community and visitor engagement

Assignment #2: Tech Trends in Cultural Heritage Institutions

Consumers > producers 

Assignment #2: Tech Trends in Cultural Heritage Institutions

As an employee of a cultural heritage institution (especially as a recent college graduate), you will be expected to keep up with recent trends in technology. This assignment is designed to introduce you the tools and methods of digital public history. You will conduct research on a tool/methodology, experiment and engage with that tool/methodology, then present your findings back to the class. While your primary audience is your professors and classmates, you may also want to select a specific cultural heritage institution and its respective audience(s) that could benefit from this tool/methodology.

Wikipedia

• Iraq War on Wikipedia Historiography
• "The Never-ending Night of Wikipedia’s Notable Woman Problem"
• Wikipedia statistics
• Gender bias on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a pervasive source of information. It simplifies fact-checking, but it also has the potential to simplify understanding historical events. How does the public interact with Wikipedia? How do professors and students use Wikipedia? How can cultural heritage institutions use it to their advantage? What are some of the problems with Wikipedia?

Web Archiving

• “Can the Internet be archived?”
• "Gaps in the Past and Gaps in the Future"
• archive.org
• https://archive.org/web/
• https://archive-it.org/organizations/998
• https://perma.cc/

The average life of a webpage is 100 days. What does this mean for our cultural and intellectual output? Can we preserve the web for future study?

Snapchat in museums

• LACMA is the first museum to join Snapchat
• Colonial Williamsburg Instagram
• Museum Selfies Tumblr

How can museums and other cultural heritage institutions use social media, especially ephemeral platforms like Snapchat, to engage with the public? Is Snapchat just another trend? Does social media engagement increase engagement in other venues?

Crowdsourcing projects

• DIY History at Iowa
• Library of Virginia Transcribe
• Zooniverse
• "Crowdsourcing, Open Data and Precarious Labour"

Libraries and museums have turned to the public for assistance in making their holdings more discoverable on the internet. Contributors are asked to transcribe handwritten diary entries or identify people in photographs. Crowdsourcing projects not only benefit the institution, but provide paths of engagement for an interested public.

Assignment #2: Tech Trends in Cultural Heritage Institutions

Part 1: Annotated Bibliography > sources due 5/6

Part 2: Activity and documentation

Part 3: Presentation

Research Workshop!

Finding sources

• Search Everything at http://library.wlu.edu
• Google Scholar
• Blogs, Twitter, etc.

• CRAAP test (handout)
• Purdue OWL: Annotated bibliographies
• Critically Analyzing Information Sources

Evaluating sources