Ohio Civil War 150
Anticipating renewed public interest in the U.S. Civil War as it approaches its sesquicentennial, the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University partnered with the Ohio Historical Society to create an online resource that would explore Ohio’s role in that war. The result of this collaborative effort is Ohio Civil War 150.
With Ohio Civil War 150, our primary goal was to create a platform in which scholars, curators, and the public could engage in a dialogue about the Civil War and specifically Ohio’s Civil War experience. To that end, the site allows users (teachers, students, and the general public) to comment on posts and resources created by the project staff, and also to initiate their own discussions in the forums, upload their own wartime family artifacts to the archive, contribute lesson plans and classroom materials, post news about community events, and submit resources and information of all kinds for review and publication on the site. Although scholars remain at the core of helping the Ohio Historical Society to evaluate content, this community-driven approach not only engages our audience on a personal level, but it also brings forward their unique perspectives, resources, and knowledge, to the betterment and use of the field and the community as a whole. One especially important outcome will be the further development of the Ohio Historical Society’s archival collection, its understanding of that collection as well as the broader sense of regional assets and collections of Civil War artifacts.
By combining the open source publishing platforms Omeka and WordPress, along with MIT’s Simile Timeline tool, we crafted a resource that is interactive, attractive, and flexible while remaining relatively inexpensive to create and maintain. While many organizations have had success in collecting and displaying historical artifacts, they have done so at great expense, using proprietary software with recurring costs and restrictions on modification. By choosing open source tools, we have retained our ability to expand and modify the resource as the public’s needs and preferences evolve over time, and as improved technologies emerge.
While our approach is not an uncommon one across the Internet, we believe it represents a new direction for digital programming in the field of Public History. High cost digitization and collection efforts have an important role in academia and are an important aspect of historical education and preservation of the historic record. However, for media projects in Public History to be competitive in the digital marketplace, we must move past only collecting and displaying artifacts and information, and begin to build genuine communities around interpretive scholarship that crosses over from new media presentation into real world interaction.
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