Author Archives: cathy

Wikipedians at the National Archives

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The National Archives at Kansas City welcomed four local Wikipedians for a Meetup and Scanathon Saturday on June 16, 2012. The meetup theme was “Between the Rivers” and focused on photos and textual holdings related to the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. This event was the first of its kind for a National Archives (NARA) regional facility, as well as a first for the Kansas City Wikipedia community. Wikipedia geo-notices and email notifications promoted the meetup, and a Wikipedia events page allowed participants to obtain further information and submit an RSVP. The full day event included a welcome by Director of Archival Operations Lori Cox-Paul, an exhibit tour by Exhibits Specialist Dee Harris, a video conference and PowerPoint presentation with NARA Wikipedian-in-Residence (Washington, DC) Dominic McDevitt-Parks, and project time in the research room coordinated by archives staff members Elizabeth Burnes and Jessica Edgar. Participants had the opportunity to work on a variety of projects including scanning, transcription, researching/editing articles, and tagging. Continue reading →

Project Showcase: Expanding Northwest Digital Archives

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With the completion of a year-long grant project this month, participants in Northwest Digital Archives’ Expanding Access Grant will have exposed almost 500 new collections in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana through NWDA’s database. The database, which offers access to more than 11,500 finding aids for archival collections at thirty-seven institutions, is an efficient means for collection discovery and exposure at a wide variety of institutions and repositories. Many collections in the region are significantly related by creator, correspondent, or subject.

Six institutions hold the regionally and nationally significant collections represented by the new finding aids: Montana State University, Western Oregon University, The Evergreen State College, Oregon Institute of Technology, Eastern Washington University, and Boise State University.

NWDA, a program of the Orbis Cascade Alliance, offers access to more than 11,500 finding aids from 37 Northwest institutions. Other NWDA members are Central Washington University, Concordia University, Eastern Oregon University, Eastern Washington State Historical Society, George Fox University, Idaho State Historical Society, Lane Community College, Lewis & Clark College, Linfield College, Montana Historical Society, Oregon Health & Science University, Oregon Historical Society, Pacific Lutheran University, Pacific University, Portland State University, Seattle Municipal Archives, Seattle Museum of History & Industry, Seattle Pacific University, Seattle University, University of Alaska Fairbanks, University of Idaho, University of Montana, University of Oregon, University of Puget Sound, University of Washington, Washington State University, Western Washington University, Whitman College, Whitworth University, and Willamette University.

The project was funded with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Jodi Allison-Bunnell
Program Manager, Northwest Digital Archives
Orbis Cascade Alliance

Project Showcase: “Our Stories” from the Australian Army

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web site image

The Australian Army has a powerful story to tell. Our soldiers have contributed to shaping the Australian nation through service in war and peace operations for over 101 years. The popular focus of Australia’s military history tends to be on World War One, World War Two, Korea and Vietnam. Modern conflict and warfare is often relegated to the realms of journalism and popular culture. As a result, the history of Australia’s modern Army is largely hidden. Our Stories overcomes this silence. Through rare oral histories, videos and photographs it captures soldiers’ voices and images; revealing a complex, emotive and captivating history. Continue reading →

HNN looks at public and digital history in Milwaukee

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From our colleagues at the History News Network comes this roundup of the public and digital history components of last week’s conference in Milwaukee. Noting the synergy between the realms of public and digital history, HNN’s David Walsh points out that the center of gravity in the conference blog- and tweet-ospheres was clearly with historians working in those realms, constituting “a monopoly of coverage…so complete it could warrant an anti-trust investigation,” he writes (we think that’s a good thing).  The article also includes a word cloud and spreadsheet of all the tweets from the conference, for you database-lovers out there.

“It’s not as if there’s an easy way to opt out of the digital age,” Walsh says, and acknowledges that those who work in both online and offline public arenas tend to be more willing to accept that fact and to find ways to work with it.  It’s a nice shout-out from one of the discipline’s premier and pioneering digital projects.

~ Cathy Stanton

Elephant in the conference room: The Public Historian

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panel of speakers

Marty Blatt, John Dichtl, Randy Bergstrom, Bob Weyeneth

You wouldn’t have known it from the Twitter feed over the past few days, but a steady undercurrent of the conference conversation among public historians in Milwaukee has been the situation with the field’s flagship journal, The Public Historian, and NCPH’s announcement in January that it would be terminating its more than 30-year relationship with the University of California at Santa Barbara, its partner in publishing the journal.  Noting that recent negotiations with UCSB had not led to what the organization’s leadership considered a viable arrangement to continue the status quo, NCPH stated its intention of relocating its publication activities to the east coast and embarking on a new partnership involving American University’s Public History Program and the Smithsonian Institution.  The initial announcement noted the hope that The Public Historian would remain the name of this new venture, but that negotiations with UCSB were continuing on that front.

The response within the public history community has been strong and sharply divided.  Some have seen NCPH’s new plans as a rash move that threatens to split the professional energies and personal loyalties of a relatively small and quite close-knit organization and field.  Others have welcomed the proposed shift as a changing of the guard in the profession after an extraordinarily long run of our signature journal at the same institution.  Many have been on the fence, waiting to see how the UCSB/NCPH discussions pan out.  Although as an NCPH board member during the run-up to this situation I was aware of the many reasons why those confidential discussions couldn’t be held in a more open way, I’m also sympathetic to the viewpoint that this crucial decision for the field deserved more transparency and consultation.

All of this has made for an interesting and sometimes uncomfortable subtext to the Milwaukee conference.  So it was no surprise that this afternoon’s membership forum on the journal was a much-anticipated and well-attended session, with more than a hundred people gathering to raise questions and hear from the organization’s leadership.  NCPH Executive Director John Dichtl, outgoing and incoming board Presidents Marty Blatt and Bob Weyeneth, and Public Historian editor Randy Bergstrom responded to concerns from the audience, after giving a brief overview of some of the backstory to the January announcement.

Noting that this was “a fast-breaking story,” Weyeneth started things off with the latest update, which is that NCPH and UCSB had agreed yesterday to a two-year timeline (still to be ratified by the two organizations) to extend the negotiations and explore various options for the future of the journal:  continuing the partnership, adding additional partners, or going separate ways in a better-prepared and–it is to be hoped–more amicable transition.  While dissolving the relationship is still a possibility, Bergstrom noted that this option actually allows the partners “to be venturesome”–that is, to look beyond the status quo in a number of directions.

Questions from the audience were wide-ranging and forward-looking, and the session generated what felt to me like a generally positive and hopeful sense that good things could come out of what has begun as a difficult conversation.  Attendees asked questions about the actual sticking-points of the past negotiations, the financial side of the NCPH/UCSB partnership and the NCPH investment in a new journal, the ways that NCPH members are currently using The Public Historian, the process by which the partners and stakeholders will work out the questions that remain on the table, what kinds of “best practices” we might learn from the editorial and structural arrangements of other journals, and how digital publication might fit into the “journal for the 21st century” that NCPH is hoping to foster, among other things.

I took two main things away from the session.  First, as John Dichtl noted, it’s now possible to talk openly about these issues and arrangements, which is infinitely more productive than having to talk around them as has been largely necessary until now.  And that feels good.

And second, NCPH’s interest in really pushing for newer forms of public history scholarship, particularly in the digital realm, seemed confirmed by my reading of the Twitter feed during the session.  It lit up around points relating to more open-access content, questions about the usefulness of the traditional journal format for newer practitioners, and the Press Forward initiative that we have been exploring with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, reflecting the grasp that Twitter-savvy public historians have of the possibilities that exist in these new media.  Laura Feller commented that she feels old when people talk about “new media,” but that she recognizes the importance of these realms for those who are increasingly stepping into the profession and the organization.  John Dichtl followed up on this with a comment that I really liked:  he noted that there are lots of great ways that we can cross-pollinate between the journal, this blog, and NCPH’s various other publications, but that we’re not sure yet what’s in “the space in between”–that’s what remains to be discovered.  And that feels good, too.

~ Cathy Stanton

 

 

Reading the convention center

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Frontier Airlines Center, MIlwaukee

It’s always a pleasure to reconnect with colleagues and friends at a conference, and to have face-to-face conversations that enrich to the increasingly digitized interactions that professional life entails.  But the conference experience is also rich with ironies for me, probably because I can’t help thinking about how the kinds of environments in which we hold these gatherings–usually big downtown hotels and convention centers–have been created, how they fit within their social, spatial, and economic contexts, and how we of the mobile knowledge classes fit within them.

This kind of irony cropped up yesterday while I was having lunch with two colleagues from New England–people I tend to see more frequently at distant conferences than in our native settings.  We all commented on that, and also on the disjunction between the topic we were meeting to talk about–our shared interest in finding a way to connect our public history work more closely with discourse and activism around climate change and environmentalism–and the fact that we were eating in a restaurant that proudly poured its imported-from-Fiji drinking water out of plastic bottles (“For the Planet” it said on the side).  Given the tightness of conference schedules and the realities of several thousand people looking for a quick meal in the same sixty minutes, we didn’t have time to follow our consciences elsewhere, which is characteristic of a lot of the ways that we end up accommodating to contemporary capitalism and its energy-intensive way of living.

The 1909 Milwaukee Auditorium on the site of the current Frontier Airlines Center (Source: http://www.midwestairlinescenter.com/galleries/8-historicimagesfromthemilwaukeeauditorium)

These ironies are easier to ignore–but all the more troubling to me for that–within the bubble that is the convention center complex where the conference is taking place.  This 1998 redevelopment on the site of an early 20th-century auditorium (itself built on the site of a late 19th-century industrial exposition building) is an immense structure whose street-level façade, shown at the top of this post, is apparently intended to evoke the German-American architecture in the surrounding downtown.  To me it evokes the kind of generic convention-center architecture that is ubiquitous in cities trying to revitalize their downtowns, and the center’s website makes no bones about its economic mission:  “to support Milwaukee’s economy by attracting visitors and wealth to the community.”  There’s lots that’s interesting and beautiful in Milwaukee’s downtown, but there are also many signs of a city core that’s struggling to attract people and businesses:  empty retail space, massive parking garages, a flagship department store converted into lofts.

painted sign on building

Ghost sign, Historic Third Ward, Milwaukee

One thing that caught my eye the other morning was a new “ghost sign” on an office building near the convention center.  Older painted ghost signs have become artifactual symbols of historical depth, but the newer ones are a bit spooky, signalling the volatility of globalized capitalism and its effects on urban places.  The name of the Frontier Airlines Center (née Midway Airlines Center) itself reflects this ephemerality.

sign-holders on concrete wall

New ghost sign, Milwaukee

And the interior of the convention center is also a fascinating study in the use of heritage display and place-making techniques to try to overcome what is essentially a “non-place.”  It’s filled with quotes from Wisconsin literature (including the wonderful one below about pleasantness being “the machismo of the Midwest,” with people letting smiles hover on their faces “like the dare of a cat”).

from "'Joy' Like Life" by Lorrie Moore

There’s a mosaic map of the state in the entry foyer, with colorful insets for various products and industries.  And alongside the escalator leading to the skywalk that connects the center with my hotel, there’s an exhibit of black and white photos focusing on polka, taken between 1976 and 1990.  There’s even a button that promises polka music if you push it, although it seems to be out of order (“Polka, y u no play?” one conference-goer tweeted plaintively.)

floor mosaic

Entry foyer, Frontier Airlines Cente

The place is, in part, a pseudo-museum, using techniques of historical display to create an aura of “pastness” and “hereness” while servicing the needs of mobile capital and people. The irony of this for me is that at least this week, quite a number of those people have gathered to talk about the constructions of memory, history, sense of place, and community, without seeming to notice the ironic erasure or masking of local history by many of the spaces in which we meet.  In inhabiting these spaces, are we accommodating to many of the kinds of conditions that we are actually critical of in our work?  It sometimes seems that way to me (although it doesn’t keep me from accommodating to them along with everyone else–it just means I spend perhaps more time wondering about it!).

display of photographs

Polka photos by Dick Blau

A timeline history of the convention center and its antecedents can be found at the bottom of the center’s “About” page.

~ Cathy Stanton

History@Work meet and greets today and tomorrow

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We’re getting ready for our closeup (whoa…maybe not that close!).  Join members of the History@Work editorial team for two “meet and greet” gatherings in the Public History Commons area of the Exhibit Hall today from 3:30 to 4:30 or tomorrow from noon to 1 p.m.  (The Commons area is on the far right side of the Exhibit Hall just after you enter–the spot with the comfy chairs and some table seating.  There are even caffeinated beverages available nearby, and this is an exciting thing.)

It may not have escaped your attention that our URL is also “publichistorycommons.”  That’s not just a coincidence–we’ve envisioned this online project as an open and adaptable space that we can turn to various uses over time.  Its primary use at the moment is as the place where the History@Work blog lives, but we’re already envisioning what might come next and how we might build out from that.  Come and hear what’s cooking, how you can propose a guest post, and other ways to connect with NCPH’s newest digital enterprise.