This schedule documents readings and projects we’ll discuss in our weekly Zoom meetings. Please visit Slack for more information on asynchronous work for each session.
Some course readings and topics are subject to change. I will update you when any changes are made.
Last updated on September 13, 2020.
T 9/15 Doing Digital Public History In Socially Distant Times (First Day of Classes)
Some Projects Discussed Today:
Mapping a World of Cities (Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library, MacLean Collection Map Library, et al; 2020)
The National Emergency Library (The Internet Archive, 2020)
“During pandemic, ‘Black Death’ scholar attracts doom-oriented fan base.” (JoNel Aleccia, The Washington Post, September 2020)
“It’s Cool To Look Terrifying on Pandemic Instagram.” (Kaitlyn Tiffany. The Atlantic, May 2020)
The Getty Museum Challenge: Blog post on initial contributions (Sarah Waldorf and Annelisa Stephan; March 2020) and “Rediscovering Black Portraiture through the Getty Museum Challenge” (Erin Migdol; May 2020)
Hello, Fellow Squids! (Monterey Bay Aquarium Twitch stream; 2020)
@nationalcowboymuseum (National Cowboy Museum Instagram feed; 2020)
@tenementmuseum_union (Tenement Museum Union Instagram feed; 2020)
T 9/22 Digital Publics
Readings for Today:
”A Society, Searching.” (Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press, 2018)
”Discriminatory Design, Liberating Imagination.” (Ruha Benjamin, Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life. Duke University Press, 2019)
”Public In/Formation.” (Shannon Mattern, Places; November 2016)
“Indigeneous Knowledge Systems and Mukurtu CMS.” (Kim Christen, The Design For Diversity Learning Toolkit. Northeastern University Library. October 2018.)
“One Nation, Tracked.” (Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel; New York Times; December 2019)
Additional Resources:
“Digital Projects For The Public” (National Endowment for the Humanities)
Docubase (MIT)
T 9/29 Data Storytelling and Digital Public History
Readings for Today:
“What Can Data Teach Us About Museum Collections?” (Diana Greenwald, American Alliance of Museums, April 2020).
“On Rational, Scientific, Objective Viewpoints from Mythical, Imaginary, Impossible Standpoints.” Katherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020)
“Collections as Data: Implications for Enclosure.” Thomas Padilla. Association of Colleges and Research Libraries. 2018
“Reading Chicago Reading: Quantitative Analysis of a Repeating Literary Program.” (John Shanahan, Robin Burke, and Ana Lučić; Digital Humanities Quarterly Vol 14.2; 2020)
Dear Data. Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec. 2015.
Additional Resources
“Web Analytics for Museums.” Devon Turner. MuseumNext. May 2020.
“Highlights of History@Work in 2018.” History@Work. January 2019.
Cool Stuff Made With Cultural Heritage APIs
T 10/6 What Can Digital Public History Learn From Digital Journalism?
Readings for Today:
“Code / Red: Baltimore’s Climate Divide.” (Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, Capital News Service, and NPR; September 2019)
“Long Island Divided.” (Ann Choi, Keith Herbert, Olivia Winslow, and Arthur Browne; Newsday; November 2019)
“The Four Days in 1968 That Reshaped D.C.” (The Washington Post; March 2018)
“Detained.” (Emily Kassie; The Marshall Project and The Guardian; September 2019)
Look at additional pieces from the resources below; choose at least one from each to read and assess closely:
“2019: The Year in Visual Stories and Graphics” (New York Times)
“2020 Sigma Data Journalism Award Winners” (Datajournalism.com)
Podcasts to Check Out (listen to at least one episode; feel free to swap in another podcast if it’s made by journalists in some capacity)
Floodlines (Vann R. Newkirk III; The Atlantic, 2020)
This Land (Rebecca Nagle and Crooked Media; 2019-2020)
Code Switch (Shereen Marisol Meraji, Gene Demby, Karen Grigsby Bates, Leah Donnella, Steve Drummond, Kumari Devarajan and NPR; 2016-present)
Stranglehold (Lauren Chooljian, Jack Rodolico, Casey McDermott, Jason Moon, Josh Rogers, and New Hampshire Public Radio; 2019-2020)
Last Seen (Kelly Horan, Jack Rodolico, Stephen Kurkjian, and WBUR; 2018)
Additional Resources
Storybench (NU School of Journalism)
The Nerd Blog (ProPublica)
T 10/13 Archivists on Archives, Digital Curation, and Digital Storytelling
With Molly Brown, Reference and Outreach Archivist (Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections)
Readings for Today:
Boston Phoenix, 1974! (NU Archives and Special Collections and Zooniverse, 2020)
Anti-Slavery Manuscripts (Boston Public Library and Zooniverse, 2019-2020).
“Archivists as Peers in Digital Public History.” (Trevor Owens and Jesse Johnston, LIS Scholarship Archive, August 2018).
“A Manifesto for Active History Museum Collections.” (Trevor Jones and Rainey Tisdale. Active Collections. Also included in Active Collections. Eds. Elizabeth Wood, Rainey Tisdale, and Trevor Jones. Routledge, 2018)
“‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering The Impact of Community Archives.” (Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez; The American Archivist, Spring / Summer 2016) and The South Asian American Digital Archive (Samip Mallick and Maryam Ahmed, SAADA)
T 10/20 Activating Digital Archival Collections
Readings for Today:
“What Readers Matter? Challenging the Disappearance of the Branch Library in Boston’s Chinese Neighborhood.” (Diane O’Donoghue, from Doing Public Humanities; ed. Susan Smulyan. Routledge: 2020) and the Chinese Historical Society of New England (CHSNE)
“Mapping a Slave Revolt: Visualizing Spatial History through The Archives of Slavery.” (Vincent Brown; Social Text 33.4, 2015) and Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761 (Vincent Brown and Charles Warren, Harvard University, 2012)
“We Came and Stayed: Coyt Jones / Ras Baraka,” “Place of Entry” (Newest Americans) and The Krueger-Scott Oral History Collection (Rutgers University Libraries)
Transcripts (Myrl Beam, Andrea Jenkins, and Cass Adair; additional episodes are available) and The Tretter Transgender Oral History Project (University of Minnesota Libraries)
Atlascope and The Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center Digital Collections (Boston Public Library)
T 10/27 Rapid Response Collections
Readings for Today:
Journal Of The Plague Year (Various Contributors; 2020-present)
Rhode Island COVID-19 Archive (Providence Public Library and Rhode Island Historical Society; 2020-present)
Mourning Our Losses (Various Contributors; 2020-present)
Design in Quarantine (Fleur Elkerton and Anna Talley, 2020-present)
Art of The March (Alessandra Renzi, Dietmar Offenhuber, Nathan Felde, et al; 2017)
“A Redemptive Model of Labor: Documenting Student Activism at Middle Tennessee State.” (Donna Baker and Sarah Calise; History@Work; October 2019)
“Responding Rapidly To Our Communities” (2018 NCPH History@Work series of blog posts; read at least one post in this series)
Additional Resources
“Whitney Museum Cancels Show After Artists Denounce Acquisition Process, Citing Exploitation.” (Valentina Di Liscia and Hakim Bishara, Hyperallergic, August 2020)
Contemporary Collecting: an ethical toolkit for museum practitioners. (Eds. Ellie Myles, Susanna Cordner, and Jen Kavanagh; London Transport Museum, 2020)
“Ethical Considerations for Archiving Social Media Generated by Contemporary Social Movements: Challenges, Opportunities, Recommendations” (Bergis Jules, Ed Summers, and Dr. Vernon Mitchell Jr.; Documenting The Now White Paper; April 2018)
Preserve This Podcast Zine (Dana Gerber Margie, Molly Schwartz, Sara Nguyen, and Mary Kidd; 2018)
T 11/3 Digital Project Development / Discussion of Student Digital Projects
Digital Project Proposals Due
Readings for Today:
“Before You Make A Thing.” (Jentery Sayers, 2018)
T 11/10 Place-based Digital Storytelling
Readings for Today:
“What is Spatial History?” (Richard White; Spatial History Project)
The Built/Unbuilt Square, Sample Philly, and other excerpts from Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia; (Eds. Paul M. Farber and Ken Lum; 2019)
Hollow: An Interactive Documentary (Dir. Elaine McMillion Sheldon et al, 2013)
Visualizing Early Baltimore. (UMBC Imaging Research Center)
“68 Blocks: Life, Death, Hope.” (Various contributors; The Boston Globe, 2015)
Mapping Indigenous LA: Placemaking through Digital Storytelling. (UCLA American Indian Studies Center)
Transit and Place: Providence In Motion (Chandra Dickey, Nina Goetzen, Aly Myers, and Meera White; 2019)
T 11/17 Augmented and Extended Reality in Museum Exhibitions, Tours and Other Programming
Readings for Today:
“The Desert of The Unreal: Inequality in Virtual and Augmented Reality.” (Mary Anne Franks. UC Davis Law Review Vol. 51, 2017).
“D.C. museum rethinks visitor tech with social distancing in mind.” (Mark Rockwell. FCW. September 2020)
“How Museums are Using Augmented Reality.” (Charlotte Coates. MuseumNext, April 2020)
“Augmented Reality is Transforming Museums.” (Miranda Katz. Wired Magazine. April 2018)
“Designing The Pen.” (Cooper Hewitt Museum)
The Parlors (Thomas Cole National Historic Site)
“‘Liberty Bell’ Tolls For Sites Where History Is Alive And Kicking.” (David Colman. New York Times, July 2020).
Microsoft In Culture Projects (Tagged “Museums”)
Additional Resources:
“Five Augmented Reality Experiences That Bring Museum Exhibits To Life.” (Jennifer Billock. Smithsonian Magazine, June 2017)
“Pokemon Go Syllabus.” (Adrienne Massanari and various authors, 2016)
T 11/24 Social Media, Memes, and Iterative Storytelling
Readings for Today:
“Memes are Modern-Day Propaganda” and “Memes Counter Disinformation, Spread Awareness of Pollution in Beijing” (An Xiao Mina, excerpts from From Memes to Movements: How The World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power, 2019)
“Meet Your Meme Lords.” (Steven Kurutz. New York Times, April 2020)
“Meme Historians Are An Inevitability.” (Justin Caffier. Vice, May 2017)
Excerpts from Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (Zeynep Tufekci, 2017)
“The short, intriguing career of Public History Ryan Gosling.” (Annie Cullen and Rachel Boyle; History@Work, 2012)
“This Is Fine: Reading, Making, and Archiving Memes After November 2016.” (Jim McGrath, October 2018)
T 12/1 Digital Public History and New England
This week’s topic was initially “TBD,” as I like to have a course at the end of the semester open to a topic of choice by the class. Below you’ll find some project links and notes I provided to students after we decided upon this particular area of interest.
Digital Commonwealth: a resource that you may already be familiar with but probably should know about. Digital Commonwealth also runs an annual conference (I’ve presented at it a few times), so you might get some value from looking at the topics and speakers from previous years. They also update their blog regularly to advertise new additions to the larger initiative.
@allstonratcity: This might be a weird one to add to the list of readings, but I think hyperlocal accounts like this one can be particular popular and many, like this one, also focus on the long history of urban space and introduce archival contexts, albeit in ways that deviate from how an academic might approach such topics. We might also think about @universalhub too.
41.8219° N, 71.4171° W: My friend Angela DiVeglia came up with this project when the Providence Public Library was closed for renovations for a year and still wanted to do some kinds of programming. This project makes use of Rhode Tour, which you’ll access via the link on that page. I think this project is a really good example of someone working within constraints and technical / economic limitations to come up with a really compelling thematic project. More recently, PPL Special Collections have been doing some short videos to show off “The King Is Dead*,” a new physical exhibition on media and misinformation whose opening was delayed and disrupted by the pandemic.
The African American Freedom Trail Project: A project from Tufts that has been active for a few years and involves collaborations with a few regional institutions.
Boston & Stonewall 50: A digital map of Boston’s LGBTQ history by The History Project: Documenting LGBTQ Boston, created with the Knight Lab’s StoryMap tool.
Early Black Boston Digital Almanac: A developing project out of Northeastern’s Boston Research Center. Be sure to click the links on this page for prototype maps and updates. You may also be interested in some of the other BRC projects. There’s also a recently-announced Harriet Tubman House Memory Project.
Bending Lines: Maps and Data from Distortion to Deception: We’ve talked a bit about the Leventhal Map Center this semester, so some of you may be interested in their most recent online exhibition (which is about a topic broader than New England culture, but may be of interest as a local institution thinking about digital exhibition contexts).
Boston’s Apollo: Another set of pandemic virtual programming, this time from the Gardner Museum.
Online Exhibitions at the American Antiquarian Society: The AAS has been interested in digital initiatives for some time now, so this resource may give you a sense of what has changed in recent years. You might also be interested in the AAS’ Instagram account, which has gained a number of followers.
T 12/8 Discussion of Digital Projects
Final Project due during Finals Week
