Center for Public History and Digital Humanities

Collaboration with Ohio Historical Society leads to Ohio Civil War 150

Erin Bell — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:09:26 +0000

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.

Announcing Cleveland History Blogs

Erin Bell — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:14:02 +0000

Blogging has emerged in recent years as an important venue for academic writing, and blogs have sprung up around the country as an alternative space for online course management and other educational and academic purposes. Unlike many institutionally-maintained repositories and Learning Management Systems, blogs offer a higher level of flexibility and autonomy, allow for a variety of customizations, and provide users with a better overall experience in terms of both presentation and opportunities for participation.

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.

Holden Caufield traverses New York

Mark Tebeau — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:03:47 +0000

I have been thinking about maps, landscapes, and storytelling on the web. Mostly, as I noted at THATCamp Columbus maps don’t seem to be moving our storytelling forward. I love maps, and even think they might become the basis for Web 3.0, but how do they help us understand the past, how do they do more than illustrate a story. J. D. Salinger’s death has prompted the New York Times to share a map of Holden Caufield’s New York. Visually, it tells a story, and reconnects me to the book. Of course, the prerequisite for understanding the map and for it really to have meaning is having read The Catcher in the Rye (and remembering it.)

The Digital Museum

Mark Tebeau — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:02:46 +0000

Web 2.0 is beginning to change how museums operate–both in terms of building constituencies and collections. It is not merely about putting exhibits up, but far more complicated. Still, I wonder if museums’ understandings of the web as an interpretive tool will change how they build exhibits. Will they make full use of digital spaces? Will it reshape how they exhibit objects or store them? More broadly, is so-called “distributive knowledge collection” really the end goal? What is the role of the curator? of the scholar? I would remind us that collecting information and making it available, in massive quantities, is certainly different than interpreting collections (even if it is implicitly an approach to collecting in its own right.) Check out this New York Times story: Make History Web Site Is One of Many Online Museums.

Public Square Redesign in the Works

Erin Bell — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:10:27 +0000

Another redesign of Cleveland’s Public Square is being discussed as part of a greater plan that would rehabilitate and revitalize public spaces across Northeast Ohio. As anyone who has been around Cleveland for a while (or viewed our Euclid Corridor History kiosks) know, this has been an ongoing dialogue for decades and would not be the first redesign of the space, though it could potentially be the most impactful.

Architect Jerry Payto on the history and possible redesign of Public Square (mp3)

For a brief overview of Public Square history, check out the kiosk web view and visit Public Square at the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. For more information about the history and plan, including photo and textual descriptions, see Redesigning Cleveland at the Downtown Cleveland Alliance, Transforming Public Spaces Across Ohio at WCPN.org and Re-Imagining Cleveland’s Public Square at Cleveland.com

CSU is hosting a forum tonight (Thursday January 21, 2010) at 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. in the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, Glickman-Miller Hall, Atrium. The event, Transforming Public Square: Three Strategies for Enhancing Cleveland’s Civic Core, will feature James Corner, noted urban designer and landscape architect with James Corner Field Operations and the Kent State Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative. Three competing designs for Public Square will be presented and openly discussed. The forum is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

THATCamp Columbus

Mark Tebeau — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 14:25:29 +0000

We are sponsoring THATCamp Columbus and our Program Coordinator & Archivist, Erin Bell, has been working with Center for Public History + Digital Humanities alum, Jim Calder (now at Ohio Humanities Council) to organize and plan the event.

Great program, great unconference format, and incisive discussion.

Lancer Steakhouse was destroyed by fire

Mark Tebeau — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:18:39 +0000

I just learned via a “pingback” from the blog, Cleveland SGS, that the Lancer Steakhouse was destroyed by fire. See our May 1, 2009 featured audio about the Lancer. The images below show the fire (from Cleveland SGS) and the Lancer’s interior, circa 1970, from Cleveland Memory. It is a tragic loss for the City and the neighborhood. I hope that they’re able to reopen.

Scott Nelson lecture, Nov. 18th: “The Death of John Henry and the Birth of Rock and Roll”

Erin Bell — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:55:27 +0000

Dr. Scott Reynolds Nelson, Leslie and Naomi Legum Professor of History at The College of William & Mary, will deliver a lecture on November 18th at 6:00 p.m. in CSU’s Parker Hannifin Hall. The lecture, entitled The Death of John Henry and the Birth of Rock and Roll, investigates the life and legend of John Henry as a way of exploring the tradition of work songs and their evolution into blues and rock and roll.

The event is presented by the CSU Department of History and the Center for Public History & Digital Humanities as a component of the Teaching American History workshop, Constructing Consuming and Conserving America. The lecture is free and open to the public. Students, teachers, and scholars from all levels and fields are invited to attend.

Scott Reynolds Nelson is the winner of the Arts Club of Washington’s inaugural National Award for Arts Writing for Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford University Press). Steel Drivin’ Man has also received a 2007 Merle Curti Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction, an award that recognizes books on race and culture.

Scott Reynolds Nelson
The Death of John Henry and the Birth of Rock and Roll
Wednesday, November 18 at 6:00 pm
Parker Hannifin Hall, 2258 Euclid Avenue
Reception at 5:30 pm

For more information contact the History Department at 216.523.7190 or Dr. Mark Tebeau: 216.687.3937 or m.tebeau@csuohio.edu.

Featured Video: Playhouse Square Documentary Films

Erin Bell — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 04:00:02 +0000

In this featured video post, we bring you three short documentary films produced by Cleveland’s Authentic Films for the Euclid Corridor kiosk project. Each focuses on the history of Cleveland’s Playhouse Square, one of the nation’s oldest and largest theater districts.

If the media player is not displaying in your browser window, view here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
(requires Flash Player)

To see the second and third video using the media player, click the right arrow button. If you would like an offline copy of any of our videos for use in your classroom, contact us.

Featured Video: Rose Iron Works Documentary Films

Erin Bell — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:52:16 +0000

In our first featured video post, we bring you three short documentary films produced by Cleveland’s Authentic Films for the Euclid Corridor kiosk project. Each focuses on the history of Cleveland’s Rose Iron, one of the nation’s oldest continually-operated iron working studios.

If the media player is not displaying in your browser window, view here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
(requires Flash Player)

To see the second and third video using the media player, click the right arrow button. If you would like an offline copy of any of our videos for use in your classroom, contact us.