For more information visit:
Sounds of American History blog: sounds.clevelandhistory.org
CCC America blog: ccc.clevelandhistory.org

Or contact:
Jim Luteran jim.luteran@esc-cc.org
Nadine Grimm nadine.grimm@esc-cc.org

This event is open to the public. For more information and to RSVP, please contact Nadine Grimm at the ESC of Cuyahoga County: (216) 901-4243 or nadine.grimm@esc-cc.org.

Download Event Flier (PDF)

Bracero, which has won several awards, including a National Council on Public History Award, is designed as a collecting tool for stories of the Bracero Program, which brought millions of  Mexican guest workers to the United States and ended in the 1960s. Importantly, the site is meant to collect “oral histories and artifacts” from this era.  Clearly, the project is succeeding in collecting materials, over 3000 to date, from the community, which is remarkable, given both the date of the program from the 1940s through the 1960s and the difficulty of collecting materials from underserved populations.

Even so, the Bracero Project reveals much to us about the challenges facing digital historians. First, among them is the challenge of collecting materials from the community. Artifacts can be added by anyone and the project is clear to distinguish between contributions made by users and those items that were “curated by a project historian.” In practice, this makes great sense, as it allows users to know something about the quality of the data (especially metadata) being collected. Yet, it also undercuts the very notion of collaboration, raising questions, albeit subtly, about the veracity and/or verifiability of the materials being collection. If I am not fond of this distinction, it seems to me that it is almost unavoidable. This problem–of how to include contributions from the community broadly into a serious scholarly question is not an easy one to address. Indeed, our professionalism as historians, librarians, and digital humanists, depends in some degree on the quality of the materials–and here it is  not just the stuff being collected but the metadata being collected, archived, and presented. Confronting this aspects of collaborative collecting and community collaboration will remain a challenge going forward.

Perusing the site also reveals just how little metadata is being added with the items, which is troubling both from a digital humanities and a research perspective. The contributors are not adding much (underscoring the need for the distinction mentioned above.) This, however, is a different problem than that of “quality” of metadata. It is about the presence of metadata altogether, which makes collections searchable and sensible. Once a collection grows, the implications of collecting items that do not posses mestadata is the same as having bad metadata: the archival collections become a black hole from which nothing, or little, escapes. In this sense, digital collecting mimics the problems of traditional collecting in archives. We collect volumes of materials that disappears under its own weight.

The Bracero Project speaks to an emerging critical challenge in digital humanities, specifically how to make sense of oral history in digital collections. Putting aside the fragments and reminiscences added by contributors, the oral histories being collected appear to be standard hour-long oral history interviews. The collection consists of a .wav file of the entire interview, with a brief description of the interview in the brief view and the longer transcript in the full view. This is standard archival presentation of oral history in paper archives or some digital archives, whether it is in a ContentDM system or some other more standard library format.  Additionally, of the dozen or so interviews I perused, I did not find any tags (see above on metadata) or segmenting of the interviews. If this does not make full use of the capabilities of Omeka, it also does not live up to standard library cataloging that at least gives interviews some search terms (even if they are Library of Congress terms) or what is an increasingly common practice of offering excerpts of the interview within the body of the record or as a separate record (the Veteran’s Oral History Project has done this with subsets of its interviews.)

If the emergence of digital tools has reinvigorated the aurality of oral history, the power of the voice and its import to the field, as well as its availability through digital resources, we digital historians have not yet fully caught up with the tools for dealing with this revolution. We remain subject to the text of the interview (both for searching and for exhibiting purposes.) We continue to struggle, as the field itself does, with how to categorize interviews and makes sense of oral history across interviews and across collections. These are not inconsequential intellectual problems, and we should be confronting the intellectual problems of a field as we break into the digital age. Merely replicating the the challenges faced by archivists of oral history in a digital domain may represent a digital advance, but it does not necessarily confront the core problem.

Finally, I would suggest that crowdsourcing might not be the panacea that it is sometimes made out to be within our digital humanities community. Crowdsourcing is democratizing. That is great as an ideal and as a practice, but it demands on a crowd, which suggests a large audience. The question is how large?  From my perspective, crowdsourcing–in terms of collecting and collaborating–remains in question with smaller and largely non-digital audiences. At a macro level, for major national institutions, such as the Smithsonian, crowdsourcing may offer a different scale of benefits than it does for smaller institutions. Either way, both the Sao Tome Project (which I have not spoken abou t at all but will in a subsequent post) and the Bracero Project are pushing the boundaries of crowdsourcing as a methodology, as well as how to build robust and insightful archival collections.

I am eagerly watching them as we continue to review and experiment with many of these same issues in our work in Cleveland. With Teaching & Learning Cleveland we have confronted these same problems of metadata and collaboration as well. And, as we collect oral histories (over 500 to date) we continue to stuggle with their representation, opting in the short term for developing interpretive segments and struggling with how to represent those (along with the main interview) in digitally engaging formats.

It is exciting to see these and other projects begin to reveal best practices and confront major issues in digital history head on, in practice not merely in theory.

Anticipating renewed public interest in the U.S. Civil War as it approaches its sesquicentennial, the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities 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 (www.ohiocivilwar150.org).

Overview

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. Another especially important outcome will be the further promotion of the Ohio Historical Society’s own archival collection, improving its understanding of that collection, and giving researchers and the public a broader sense of regional assets and collections of Civil War artifacts.

Technology

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 undeniably important role in academia and are a vital aspect of historical education and preservation of the historic record.  It should be noted that Ohio Civil War 150 has benefited greatly from such initiatives, namely Ohio Memory, the repository for many of the state’s most important digital artifacts. 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. Ohio Civil War 150 is an attempt to begin exploring and enacting these new ideals.

Content Creation and Collection

The initial content on the site was created by student volunteers and interns at the Ohio Historical Society, with supervision and guidance from the curatorial staff, librarians, and scholars at OHS and CSU.  Since launch, much of the additional material has been contributed by users in the general public.  Interpretive exhibits created by the project team explore the Ohio Civil War experience, incorporating historical images and objects as both illustration and as a lens through which to view historical events and themes.  Many of the images in the archive and in the exhibit space have been posted by users.  The interactive timeline, consisting of both staff and user contributions, allows the public to browse major events in a familiar chronological order, but those that choose to dig deeper will find additional images, links, and interpretive essays accompanying most timeline events.  The wealth of lesson plans and classroom materials, again a mix of staff and user contributions, are downloadable in PDF format, bringing community and scholarly expertise into Ohio’s primary and secondary schools.

Impact

Ohio Civil War 150 has significant impact as a model for public historical scholarship on the Civil War and for exhibit development more broadly. First, the project provides a model for engaging scholars, the community, and curators in a public conversation about the Civil War. Not merely a didactic, Ohio Civil War 150 suggests the collaborative process as a core model for digital exhibition, as well as for developing crucial knowledge about state-wide holdings, for acquiring new material, and for building a more robust museum collection. It does this by opening a scholarly dialogue to the community, and building community around that dialogue.  The project offers a collaborative model for enlivening those discussions throughout. The official Civil War sesquicentennial commemorations that have begun around the nation will span several years, and will continue to endure after the commemorative period. We believe that leveraging community knowledge and enthusiasm in scholarly creation will ensure not only the continued viability of Public History as a field, but will enrich the scholarly discourse for years to come.

People

Community programming and project team management for Ohio Civil War 150 is coordinated by Jackie Barton at the Ohio Historical Society,  with design, technical training and support by Erin Bell, Project Coordinator and Archivist at the CSU Center for Public History and Digital Humanities.  The project is standards based, both in its approach to library metadata and web development. Content and design from the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities is directed by Dr. Mark Tebeau and Dr. Mark Souther.  Additional funding comes from the Ohio Humanities Council.

Inspired by similar projects at small to medium sized institutions, we have established our own DIY blog network, Cleveland History Blogs, which is built on the WordPress Multi-User (WPMU) platform. The network allows faculty, staff, students, teachers in our TAH workshops, as well as our numerous community partners, to join our blog network and create their own simple websites.

Members of the network have created sites for courses, clubs, organizations, workshops, conferences, and projects both large and small. Additionally, using the BuddyPress add-on for WPMU, we have incorporated a number of social networking features into the site to help connect our community.

To join up (you need an @csuohio.edu email account), read the latest community blog posts, or learn more about the project, please visit clevelandhistory.org.

This announcement comes a bit late considering that we have been running Cleveland History Blogs for a while now, and are well into our second semester of operation.  But better late than never.