Month: September 2017

LinkedIn and Public History? Meh.

I’m not a big social media user. In fact, prior to this class, the only social media account I had was a LinkedIn profile. From my vantage point, public history is weak on LinkedIn. Indeed, my acceptance into the National Council on Public History’s exclusive group is still pending, awaiting confirmation of my membership. So much for “public” history.

LinkedIn was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman, a mover and shaker in the tech industry. The site officially launched in 2003, and by August 2004, the site had a million members. It has grown steadily as a platform for professional development and engagement, and today it boasts over 500 million users worldwide. In 2016, Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for over $26 billion.

Continue reading “LinkedIn and Public History? Meh.”

Constitution Day as Public History

 

Every year, many Americans commemorate the final meeting of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. This year, that commemoration is being held today, September 18. As a way to encourage honoring these men and the brilliant document they developed, www.constitutionday.com is a website that exists to disseminate information about America’s most important governing document and the people that wrote it.

As a website, Constitution Day has a professional-looking layout that is easy on the eyes. It has a good array of font colors, text, and photographs to keep the reader interested. It also has color photographs of the original US Constitution, and the site has a full transcription of the US Constitution. Full text of all Amendments are also included.

The site maintains brief biographies for every delegate to the Constitutional Convention. This section, however, is where the website could use some work. The quality of writing in these biographies is almost laughable. It appears as if multiple people contributed to writing each one, but no one person reviewed them all. Take, for instance, the piece on George Washington. The organization of this particular biography is a bit strange. It begins with his political life until his death before it discusses his birth and personal life. There are no headings at all in the text to help separate themes in the history of George Washington’s life. In other biographies, grammatical mistakes abound. Some sentences are also laughably simplistic, which often destroys the flow of the biographies. While some are fairly well written, enough are poorly written to reduce the credibility of the whole site.

In light of the mediocre writing on the site, Constitution Day is ultimately a mediocre historical website in terms of scholarship. Nevertheless, as a public history website, it is fairly well put together because it attempts to display the Constitution in the context of the people that wrote it. It also gives people the opportunity to read the text in full and see what the original document looks like. While it is probably not a heavily trafficked website (their Facebook page has just under 5,000 likes), it is still a way for people to learn about the US Constitution and the founding fathers. The transcription and photographs of the document alone make the site worth visiting. Those aspects also make the site a fair example of public digital humanities, because it presents a digital representation of the United States’ primary document.

If Constitution Day wanted to take their website to the next level in terms of digital scholarship (besides cleaning up the writing quality), they could create a critical edition of the Constitution, with commentary by political theorists and historians. References throughout the transcription to other historical documents, such as the Federalist Papers, could also add a great deal to understanding the Constitution and its Amendments. Instead of merely existing as a site to encourage people to think about the Constitution, the website could transform into a place to study the document in depth.

Additionally, the website lacks a section on its website to direct people to various Constitution Day celebrations. Since the site’s primary focus is to get people thinking about the document, as well as teach them a bit about the signers, one might naturally assume that the site would include links to other resources or have advertising for Constitution-related events. One would be wrong in that assumption, because there is nothing like that on the site.

The Constitution Day website demonstrates the democratization of the internet and digital history. Anyone can make a history website, and they can even do it anonymously (like Constitution Day). In a way, this anonymity releases the author from responsibility. The website has promise, including an aesthetically pleasing website design, but it fails as a piece of scholarship. However, its developers may not want it to be a piece of scholarship. Instead, it may simply be a commemorative website designed to get people reading and thinking about the US Constitution. If so, then Constitution Day accomplishes its goal, even if it is a bit thin in places.

Public History and Twitter: Online Promotion

Click the following link to see my original Storify article: https://storify.com/bmmediablog/public-history-and-twitter-online-promotion.

For the fields of public and digital history, Twitter is another medium in which to share thoughts, ideas, projects, articles, and news with the world. In a way, it can act as free advertising and promotion to reach larger and more diverse audiences than ever before. Both organizations and individuals within the realms of public history and digital history use Twitter as a way of promoting themselves, their events, their research, and articles.

The above tweet acts as an advertisement for the Institute for Historical Research’s Digital History seminar. In fact, the entire Twitter account is an advertising tool for IHR, as many Twitter accounts are for companies, organizations, and individuals. This particular tweet promotes a specific event held at an actual location.

Much like the Institute for Historical Research, the Lincoln Museum and Library, which is a department of the Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, often uses their Twitter account to promote their events and activities. Considering the prevalence of digital technology in the world of 2017, it makes sense that an organization would use Twitter to promote and advertise their events. If a public history organization wishes to remain relevant in this ever-changing world, they must take advantage of social media and all that it has to offer. The Lincoln Museum and IHR demonstrate that public historians and digital humanists can use Twitter to effectively promote their messages to a wide audience.

In case you were wondering, such a use of Twitter within the public history and digital history fields is not limited to the English-speaking world.

According to Bing translator, this tweet says in Italian, “Open until 6 September registrations for the advanced training course in Public and Digital History.” In this example, we see an organization advertising an educational course in the realms of public and digital history. Thus, such groups are using Twitter for more than just a tool to advertise exhibits and articles. They are using it to promote workshops and classes that teach others how to work within the public history and digital history worlds.

While organizations use Twitter to promote in-person events, they also use it to promote digital content. Take, for instance, the following digital history-related tweet from a website dedicated to exploring Washington, D.C.

While not explicitly a public history or digital history site, Curbed DC has engaged in both realms in this tweet and the linked page. The page is a fascinating way for people to interact with a map of our nation’s capital. Within the map, Curbed DC has identified landmarks where prominent buildings, that have since been demolished, once stood. As you scroll through the page, it identifies the point on the map with a brief article about the landmark. Yet again, an organization is using Twitter as a means of promoting their content.

Likewise, individuals use Twitter to promote their content. In the following Tweet, Chris Cantwell, a history professor specializing in religious, public, and digital history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, uses his Twitter account to promote his own research.

Interestingly, Professor Cantwell’s tweet embraces three aspects of the historical discipline: religious history, public history (since it is an article written for a public audience), and digital history (since the medium he used for the article was online, rather than in a print journal).

As a final example, the Latin American Studies and Collections at the University of Texas Austin neatly sums up the idea of Twitter as a promotional tool in a complete way.

This Tweet addresses public and digital history in multiple ways. Primarily, it promotes and highlights specific research and digital work done within the department of Latin American Studies. As such, Twitter is again used as a promotional tool to get people to read the linked article. Additionally, the Twitter account included a picture of digitized document within the tweet. This action causes the reader to directly engage history merely by seeing the picture. By showcasing their digital work, the Latin American Studies program at UT Austin has successfully promoted their work and engaged their audience before Twitter users even read the article.

While Twitter is used in myriad ways by people all over the world, organizations and individuals within the realms of public and digital history are using the platform to promote and advertise their events, research, and work. By engaging the reader through photographs, hashtags, and links, these groups are finding ways to use Twitter to widen their audiences. However, there are issues with presenting history in such a cursory way. The first is the possible cheapening of the discipline. Twitter is often used flippantly, so using it as an advertising or promotional tool may signal to others that the organization or individual is not very serious about their work. The second issue is Twitter is not a universal tool. Not everyone uses social media, especially older people who may have more time and disposable income to actually visit an exhibit or attend an event. Nevertheless, in an increasingly digitized world, public historians are interacting with the public in new and exciting ways. With Twitter, they can connect with their audiences anytime and anywhere. 

The Phonograph and Philology

Gregory Radick, “R. L. Garner and the Rise of the Edison Phonograph in Evolutionary Philology,” in New Media 1740-1915, eds. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004), 175-206.

Upon the initial release of the Phonograph in the late nineteenth century, Thomas Edison believed its uses were limitless. From playing music to recording dictation, many believed Edison’s new invention provided endless possibilities for myriad applications. Evolutionary amateur scientist R. L. Garner was one such individual. He believed that he could prove Darwin’s evolutionary theory that humans evolved from apes, or “Simians,” by demonstrating that Simians spoke a distinct language with vocabulary [1].

Around 1890-91, Garner used the phonograph to record Simian grunts and howls. He would then replay the noises to the monkeys to see if they responded to specific calls. He was also able to analyze the recordings in depth by slowing down the player. In doing so, Garner identified distinct modulations and tensions in the vocal chords that could not be identified prior to the invention of the phonograph [2].

Essentially, without the new medium developed by Edison, Garner would not have been able to conduct his research. Regardless of the outcomes of his research, Garner’s experiments showed the scientific community that new media could be used to conduct scientific study in ways previously impossible. Without the ability to record sound, Garner would not have been able to conduct any of his experiments, much less study the Simian noises in depth over a period of time. He also would not have been able to replay the sounds for the animals and gauge their reactions. With Edison’s so-called perfection of the phonograph, other researchers also discovered its varied uses. Most notably for the historical discipline, it could be used to record oral history and culture, such as folklore, rituals, songs, and languages of Native American tribes [3].

While new media, like the phonograph, rose in popularity within the academic realm at the end of the nineteenth century, its rise in popularity was partly due to an expansion in old media. At the time, as Gregory Radick points out, more people than ever before were learning how to read and write [4]. Correspondingly, more people were publishing books, journals, newspapers, and magazines. It became relatively easy to both learn about scientific experiments and publish scholarly articles in forums where they would actually be read. Thus, in Garner’s case, new media and old media complimented each other quite well.

As new media are developed and introduced, historians and scientists often struggle to incorporate new technologies into their work. Garner was an outsider in two ways: he was an amateur scientist and an early adopter of new technology. Nevertheless, he used old media to disseminate his research. Without the old media, the new was of no use. With the advent of new technologies, many are tempted to abandon the old in favor of the efficiency of the new. However, as Garner’s case demonstrates, sometimes new media is merely a tool for uncovering deeper understanding on a topic. Old methods can still be the baseline for the research, with new methods adding clarity and depth.

The study of R. L. Garner also points to the importance of using new media to produce empirical evidence for research. Even though Garner based much of his work upon the assumption that animals are capable of reason, he used new media in an attempt to empirically prove his hypothesis. With the advent of new media, historians are confronted with new opportunities to expand their research. However, they must decide how new media will help them produce empirical evidence in the process of writing history. In the end, new media act as a tool for the historian to use to understand the past. These new tools build upon the foundation established by old media, and when both old and new media work together, they can lead to breakthroughs in understanding and allow historians and scientists to investigate new questions previously thought unanswerable. R. L. Garner’s story clearly demonstrates this idea.

[1] Gregory Radick, “R. L. Garner and the Rise of the Edison Phonograph in Evolutionary Philology,” in New Media 1740-1915, eds. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004), 175.

[2] Ibid., 176.

[3] Ibid., 181-82.

[4] Ibid., 195.