Late and short. That’s where I am for this year’s THATCamp. You can take that in all of the many ways that it was intended.
So, I have two sessions to propose for consideration:
1) Next-Generation Crowdsourcing: Over the last couple of years we’ve seen a number of successful projects that solicit the contributions of the user community in significant ways. Transcribe Bentham, is perhaps the most widely known, but there are a host of other, including CHNM’s Papers of the War Department project. Some of these efforts also involve the design and creation of tools to allow others to embark upon crowdsourcing (T-Pen, Scripto, etc). Now might be a good time to pause and explore the ways that we might move forward in meaningful ways: What new elements of our work can we open up to the public? What are the major barriers, technological and social, to doing so? How do we strike a balance between atomized contributions in a gaming interface, and large-scale content-driving contributions? What is the next generation of digital humanities crowdsourcing?
2) The Future of Digital Public History: Beyond the Exhibit: After almost of 15 years of online public history exhibits, it’s time to think about new ways to share history content with the public. The one-way transmission of the traditional exhibit goes against everything we know about what works in teaching and learning history. If it doesn’t work in our classrooms, why would it work in our cultural heritage institutions? Can we come up with some guide-posts about the kinds of engagement that can most meaningfully happen in a digital environment? What have you seen that really works to share both content and the process of doing history? Come brainstorm about the innovative ways that we might use digital tools and environments to engage the large public with our collections, their stories, and all of the questions those collections and stories raise for us as historians.
3 comments
Steve
June 3, 2011 at 8:05 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Late and short, but smart and important! Both are good ideas. Would be interesting to try to include the physical with the digital in thinking about the future – how can we use the spaces of museums, not just their content, to build a new digital public history?
Jordan
June 3, 2011 at 11:39 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Really excited about your second section proposal! I’ve been working on websites for a few museums over the past year, and they are constantly searching for ways to offer their visitors a more dynamic experience online.
Tonya van Dijk
June 6, 2011 at 6:05 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Great proposals! These proposals are highly essential as more and more people are harnessing the power of the Internet and the public’s eagerness. These are demonstrated in digital engagement programs such as Ancestry.com’s World Archives Program (AWAP), New York Public Library’s Map Rectifier Project, US Geological Survey’s North American Bird Phenology Program. Learn more about these programs at crowdsourcing.org/l/1620.