Author: jbrain

I really enjoyed exploring this week’s assigned reading and exploration, especially the website for the Center for History and New Media. I was not entirely familiar with this project before checking out the site. I explored some of their hosted sites, including the website featuring sources on the May 1970 “Hard Hat Riots,” and the “Greek American Stories” project. Having looked at these projects and others included in our assignment this week has given me a new, improved perspective on the importance of new media and digital history. While I won’t deny that I and many (probably most) historians still view printed publication as the highest achievement in academia, I feel that the creation of digital public history has so many positives when compared to the standard textbook.

The main positives would be the ability for users to customize their experience with the publication, and opportunities for authors to constantly add information and material. Digital projects have a “choose your own adventure” aspect that is ideal for researchers, or the curious visitor. These projects can provide links to related material, documents and photographs that are much more accessible than footnotes or endnotes in a textbook. The ability for authors to add material goes hand in hand with the opportunity for readers to contribute new information. The future of the history field is promising, and I feel that exposure to projects like these can help emerging historians to be part of that future.

I think the post titled “But I Want You to Think!” by Jeremy Boggs is an excellent starting point when thinking about our mobile public history projects. Often academics can get caught up in the “informational” aspect of a project, but with any public history project the historian needs to keep their audience in mind first and foremost, and think about what degree to which the audience will be involved.

With Sarah Kessler’s “7 Ways Mobile Apps are Enriching Historical Tourism,” I took the next step in thinking about the app project and looked at a few examples of mobile apps created for historic sites and museums. It is interesting how these applications capitalize on aspects of a city or area that will be most engaging for tourists or those using the apps (i.e. Chicago’s mobsters, Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, murders and crime, etc.) I think it is going to be important to start small when building these apps, focusing on one aspect rather than trying to cover all of Boise. With any luck it could grow into something on the scale of the London Time Travel Explorer app. In the case of the Walk of Fame, which is such a large and meandering tourist attraction, a mobile app seems necessary to have when visiting.

From the “Augmenting Archaeology” article I went on to check out “The Civil War Augmented Reality Project” at http://acwarproject.wordpress.com/. I love this project because the creators have taken a strong interest in making the app truly interactive. While we’ve seen quite a few augmented reality apps, this one places an emphasis on stories, people and allowing the reader to choose their path in the app itself. While we can hope to add another dimension to historic places in our apps via pictures, audio, etc., this app takes it a step further and uses that information as a starting point for interactive stories behind the sites.

When asked during class the first week to think about public history projects, the first thing that came to my mind was, of course, interpretive signage. While that can still be very effective, looking at what historians are trying to do through these mobile apps should inspire everyone to think about the possibilities the public history field holds.

The chapters selected for this week’s reading provided a good variety of material to think about. I got quite a bit out of Peirce Lewis’ “The Monument and the Bungalow.” I thought his two-part advice on how to begin evaluating and studying landscape was simple yet true, especially looking back at my familiarization with architectural history. Lewis suggested that we first need to be open, curious and ask unbiased questions, and to be sure to acquire the necessary vocabulary and background first. I’ve done quite a bit of work with inventorying residential neighborhoods, and too often I waited to study architectural types until after fieldwork. On another note, I had no knowledge of the Arts & Crafts style before this week’s reading.

I enjoyed Lewis’ musings on the fact that so many plantations stand while few sharecropper cabins do. The biased nature of landscape study and, often, historic preservation is an interesting aspect to touch upon. The “Great Man” school of thought is far-reaching.

I also really enjoyed Mark Fiege’s section on ecological commons. I read his book, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West when working on my senior paper as an undergrad. That book dealt with the changing of the Southern Idaho landscape due to irrigation, the degree to which man could control nature, and the ways in which nature shaped the human environment. It does go into quite a bit of detail regarding the “rabbit drives,” which I wasn’t quite ready to hear at the time.

As for the Fiege piece included in the book – I thought it added to the argument that simple artifacts (such as the “No Hunting” sign) can convey endless amounts of information on places, or at least become important starting places when trying to understand the landscape around them.

I’m looking forward to training myself to keep a blog regularly, something I’ve tried to do before. Here goes for the first week.

J.B. Jackson’s piece, “To Pity the Plumage and Forget the Dying Bird” remind historians, city planners and activists to put a human face to the problems they are working with, and to look beyond simple visual aesthetics when making liveable places. This is what I have walked away with anyway. He frequently calls for redesign of communities and restructuring of resources to better serve the citizens of a community. Communities can be consolidates to bring about a higher level of inclusiveness. Jackson notes that one of the greatest issues with the cut-off state of impoverished neighborhoods is their lack of access to public assembly. Because assembly can be a driving force for change, or at least communication, restricted access for some community members can perpetuate social and economic differences. Jackson notes that hiding electric wires and removing billboards can do a lot for a community, but it cannot solve everything.

He seems to be urging city planners to look beyond simple aesthetic or environmental changes when looking into the areas he describes, or at least to urge them to “personalize” their methods depending upon the community’s specific needs. More than that, Jackson is urging people to look at these communities period.

I liked his brief comments of the need for historic preservation. On Page 144, he mentions that “the destruction of symbols and monuments continues.” I’m sure I’m biased in saying this, but I feel he could have gone into this aspect a bit more. I have spent so much time in the past defending the idea that history can foster a sense of community, or a sense of place, which is the focus of my graduate project. When these aspects of a community are lost, it can lead to the loss of so much more– morale, communication, activity, commerce. The reading this week made me think about these things in a more well-rounded way.