Tell History

I’ve been dipping into What Poetry Brings to Business (University of Michigan Press, 2010) by Clare Morgan with Kirsten Lange and my friend and fellow oral historian Ted Buswick; this promises opportunities to reflect on life, creativity, and work. Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America profiles the project that is the model for the U.S. Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhoods initiative. Harlem Children’s Zone was featured this week on NPR. The Dayton Teachers History Book Club will read and discuss Jon Hartley Fox’s King of the Queen City (University of Illinois Press, 2009) about Cincinnati’s King Records this summer. I had the opportunity to interview Fox earlier this month. He and King Records are featured in a piece for Our Ohio on drummer and Ohio Heritage Fellow, Philip Paul.  In a similar vein, I look forward to George Lipsitz’s recent book, Midnight at the Barrel House: the Johnny Otis Story (University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Otis also recorded with King Records. I’ll get started preparing for oral history courses with the Oral History Association’s 2009 Book Award recipient, Joanna Herbert’s Negotiating Boundaries in the City: Migration, Ethnicity, and Gender in Britain and move on to other oral histories of urban life and/or gender studies. I recently downloaded (Kindle on my netbook) New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage by Yehuda Kalay, Thomas Kvan, and Janice Affleck (Routledge). Numerous friends have recommended Michael M. Kaiser, The Art of the Turnaround: Creating and Maintaining Healthy Arts Organizations; I plan to read more about the arts, culture, and community development as I work with Culture Builds Community and other projects.

I will be teaching a graduate seminar, Readings in Oral History, this quarter. We will be using the Oral History Association’s Wiki as the home for both the course and writen assignments. Please join us and share your thoughts, resources, and work as well.

I teach HST 217 Ohio History for the first time this quarter. I volunteered to teach this course both because my colleague who taught Ohio History, Harvey Wachtell, retired and because I look forward to engaging students with museums and historic sites in Southwest Ohio as well as with online resources for Ohio history. The course is designed around digital applications including WordPress, RSS, Zotero, and Del.ic.ious. I will use marjoriemclellan.wordpress.com as the online home for the course this quarter. Click on the Ohio History tab to learn more about the course.

Oral History and the Public in the Digital Age
OHA 2008 Annual Meeting
Hypothetical Case for Discussion

Participants: Marci Reaven, Patrick Moore, Linda Shopes, Alex Prim, Marjorie McLellan, Ann Valk, and Mark Tebeau

Location:
Large district in a big city, with diverse ethnic/racial/economic population. City has tradition of community involvement in local governance.

Problem:
Aggressive slum clearance, urban renewal, and public housing construction in the 1950s and ’60s transformed large parts of the district, but in this segment there was more clearance than construction. Race- and class-based conflicts have prevented development since then. Large sections of prime urban land still lay fallow or are devoted to parking lots, and the topic of development is pushed off the table every time it comes up. Some powerbrokers are happier letting the land lie undeveloped than engage the constituents and issues that building would require. Others want development to create badly needed new housing and other facilities.

Project Goals: Break the silence and impasse over the site by doing the following—
•    Serve as an information resource
•    Revive historical memory
•    Demonstrate that problem solving had occurred in the past
•    Promote mutual understanding
•    Connect current stakeholders
•    Re-connect one-time site tenants and businessmen
•    Inspire stakeholders to re-envision the site
•    Encourage decision makers to place it back on the agenda
•    Help inculcate the habits of mind and skills for ongoing engagement with the history and the present condition of the place

Project Components: Public, face-to-face programs, including—
•    Discussion and visioning sessions
•    Digital and technological interpretation
•    Exhibits
•    Extensive oral history project
•    Document and photo collecting

Project Components in Planning: Website with rich digital resources. What is needed?
•    What types of interpretive primary source materials? How will these be organized, archived, and preserved?
•    What types of social networking and information services?
•    What types of ongoing publicity and outreach to conduct to encourage visitation to the website? To encourage visitation to the actual area?
•    What kind of relationship between on-the-ground and virtual programs and materials?
•    How best to partner with the local archives to enhance access to existing oral history collections?
•    How to encourage and provide technical assistance to non-professionals to create new material for the site?
•    How interactive should it be? How much interaction to encourage between the website and its publics?
•    How to create, fund, govern, and maintain the site?
•    How to keep site fresh and changing?

I return once again to posting about some accessible and, by the time I figure it out, pretty widely used tools that I recommend to history and social studies education students. This time I recommend the tool to anyone who needs to collaborate on a project. This includes colleagues who are planning conferences or productions of any kind. The tool is Google Docs. Its also great if you are creating documents in one place that you will want to easily access in another place without carrying around flash drives or burning CDs.

Rather than explaining how it works, I suggest you watch this YouTube video, “Google Docs in Plain English”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRqUE6IHTEA&feature=related]

I co-chair the Oral History Association Program Committee this year and we used Google Docs to finalize the schedule of the upcoming annual meeting (Oct 15-19, 2008 in Pittsburgh, PA). On another committee, we are using Google Docs to discuss design features for a new organizational Web site. I’ve found that some folks have a few hurdles getting set up to use Google Docs but be patient, follow the directions, you will get it working. Some folks still email around things instead of putting these in Google Docs. Problems arise when individuals change things that don’t get shared across the whole group; changes get lost when different people are working on different versions of the same document.

I had already set up a Gmail account and that makes things easier. If you are hesitant to have yet another email address, it wasn’t a problem. I didn’t access the Gmail for months and it did not fill up with spam or misdirected email messages.

This is a press release from New York City’s City Lore (“fostering our living cultural heritage”) about the launch of their City of Memory site.

Welcome to a new, grand repository for all New York’s stories and memories

www.cityofmemory.org

Imagine gazing at a map of New York City and suddenly being able to see not only all the streets and neighborhoods, but everything that happened on them.

“The cliché,” said site designer Jake Barton in the New York Times, “is that there are eight million stories in the city. But really, it’s more like there’s eight million different cities, each created within each of our memories.” City of Memory brings these cities together into one grand, larger-than-life panoply of stories and memories. Past and present intermingle, as neighborhoods and intersections accumulate layers of memory. The site invites us into a dynamic, ever-growing, ever-changing story map of New York that explores what’s best about our city — its people, places, and stories.

As we give birth to City of Memory, visit this month’s featured story which highlights Joe Caracciollo helping a woman give birth to a baby on the C train – or take the featured South Asian tour of Jackson Heights with Madhulika Khandelwal.

Zoom In
Zoom into your own neighborhood to see the stories others have left on the very streets where you live and work. Zoom in to your favorite areas of New York City to see what others have to say about what they experienced there. After all, every event that you take part in is connected to the place where it happened. In Brooklyn, visit with Abe Lass, the last of the piano players from the silent movies, or spend a moment at the women’s powder room on the Staten Island Ferry. Take a city-wide tour of our “Local Characters Hall of Fame,” or let Rita Kagan show you a little of Brighton Beach.

Add Story
Click “Add Story” to include your own tales. This interactive site gives you the chance to contribute your own stories and images to the map, to become a part of this ongoing living archive. It’s easy to upload a story in text with a photograph.

Read About the Site
Follow this link to Jake Mooney’s wonderful essay about the site featured in the New York Times.

City of Memory is sponsored by City Lore and Local Projects. It was funded by The Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

A Working Group Session
Oral History Association 2008 Annual Meeting
October 15-19, Pittsburgh, PA

Borrowing from the National Council on Public History, the 2008 OHA Annual Meeting will introduce a new format, “Working Groups” lead by experienced practitioners. In sessions on Oral History and the Public in the Digital Age and Oral History in the College Classroom, eight participant presenters will explore in depth a subject of shared concern. In these innovative seminar-like conversations, participants will have a chance to discuss questions raised by specific programs, problems, or initiatives in their own oral history practice with peers grappling with similar issues.

Oral History in the College Classroom

http://oha2008teaching.wordpress.com

Conveners:
Donna DeBlasio, Youngstown State University
David Mould, Ohio University
Oral history is the focus of assignments, the study of historical methods, undergraduate courses, graduate seminars, professional development for educators, and summer institutes. What practical skills should students learn to do oral history interviewing? What models and methods should students become familiar with? What habits of mind are crucial to the practice of oral history? What are the benefits, beyond becoming an effective researcher, of studying oral history? What significant works of scholarship should students examine? What rubrics should be applied to oral history assignments? Should students produce interviews for ongoing projects? Is learning in oral history an appropriate basis for civic engagement? How best to arrange the oral history course and assignments? How can instructors foster reflective practice in interviewing, analyzing sources, and writing? What issues, ethical concerns, and problems enter into the design of an oral history course? How does oral history fit your institutions liberal education plan or general education requirement?
Join a Working Group of your peers with the goal of learning from each other. In this interactive session, participants will reflect upon concerns, develop strategies, and share resources oral history teaching and learning.

To Participate

If you would like to present as part of a Working Group please send both a one paragraph biographical statement and a one-page abstract of a case that you would like to discuss to Marjorie McLellan, OHA 2008 Program Co-Chair, marjorie.mclellan@wright.edu before August 15, 2008. The case should raise provocative questions or issues for discussion by the participants. Biographical statements and case studies will be shared on an OHA 2008 Working Group blog. The issues for discussions by the participants will be identified from these cases.

Others attending the 2008 OHA annual meeting are welcome to attend as the audience for the Working Group discussions.

For more information, please contact Marjorie McLellan, Co-Chair, 2008 Oral History Association Program Committee at marjorie.mclellan@wright.edu

Oral History Association 2008 Annual Meeting
Pittsburgh, PA
October 15-19, 2008

Working Groups

The 2008 OHA Annual Meeting will introduce a new session format. “Working Groups” lead by experienced practitioners, will involve up to eight participants who will allow conferees to explore in depth a subject of shared concern. In these innovative seminar-like conversations, participants will have a chance to discuss questions raised by specific programs, problems, or initiatives in their own oral history practice with peers grappling with similar issues.

Oral History and the Public in the Digital Age
http://oha2008digital.wordpress.com/

Conveners:
Patrick Moore, University of West Florida
Marci Reaven, CityLore

From digital memory banks and archival collections to online exhibits and virtual museums, public audiences are encountering oral history on the Internet and in interactive digital productions. Folklorists, oral historians, and public historians are using emerging digital technologies to convey and present oral histories in new ways. Are we achieving what we hoped? Join a working group of your peers with the goal of learning from each other. For this 90-minute, very interactive session, participants will review and discuss the issues and opportunities for Oral History and the Public in the Digital Age. Participants will explore strategies, resources, and support for digital oral history. Historian Patrick Moore, University of West Florida Public History Program director and folklorist Marci Reaven, Managing Director of City Loreand director of the Place Matters project will lead this discussion.

To Participate

If you would like to present as part of a Working Group please send both a one paragraph biographical statement and a one-page abstract of a case that you would like to discuss to Marjorie McLellan, OHA 2008 Program Co-Chair, marjorie.mclellan@wright.edu before August 15, 2008. The case should raise provocative questions or issues for discussion by the participants. Biographical statements and case studies will be shared on an OHA 2008 Working Group blog. The issues for discussions by the participants will be identified from these cases.

Others attending the 2008 OHA annual meeting are welcome to attend as the audience for the Working Group discussions.

DSC05135

Originally uploaded by Dave Lester

I’m on the left, using the One Laptop Per Child XO at THATCAMP. My pc crashed so I switched over to the XO and it worked fine for everything except my campus email’s pop up window to send messages. I switched over to using my Gmail account instead. The keys are very tiny and so I had lots of typos. My husband is using the XO entirely at his conference this week in Park City, Utah. Thanks to Dave Lester for the photo. This is from a terrific session on Vertov, the application for audio and media files in Zotero.

This past weekend, following on a year of learning from digital humanities podcasts and blogs and investigating new media resources and tools, I participated in the Center for History and New Media’s unconference, THATCAMP 2008. My thanks to Dave Lester and Jeremy Boggs for organizing the event and to the Center for History and New Media for making it possible!

Instead of a process of submitting and accepting or rejecting proposals for papers and sessions, participants sent in brief descriptions of topics that they would like to present or discuss. We shared these ideas in more discursive detail on the THATCAMP blog and others, with similar interests, responded. Gradually sessions took shape from these overlapping and shared interests. The first hour or so of the conference was spent organizing the unconference schedule. I arrived late due to a missed connection and found, quite happily, that the session I had proposed was already on the schedule. The program was so rich that there was no way to attend every session that I wanted (I never did learn about the Arduino kits but I’m bringing one back to our Jump Start student workers). I attended sessions on Omeka, Zotero, teaching, Digital Humanities at NEH, museums, civic engagement, visualizing events, and oral history. Some involved presentations in a more traditional sense because this was the best way to respond to the audience’s interests. Many sessions began with a round robin presentation of works in progress augmented by questions, discussion, comparisons, and collaborative problem solving. The conversations spilled over into all of the breaks. Over lunch, we watched “shorts” or brief presentations of digital humanities projects.

T. Mills Kelly came away from the event proposing that the AHA dedicate 5% of its conference time to unconferencing and I agree. I’ve spent much of the past eight months working on plans for the Oral History Association conference in October and carried this organizing experience with me through the unconference. I would not give up the traditional sessions with papers and roundtables but I do think future academic conference should create collaborative spaces in their schedules. For Oral History 2008, we borrowed a more open ended format from the National Council for Public History, the Working Group and we added book discussions and the Digital Showcase (sponsored by CHNM). This is a beginning but next year in Louisville, I imagine Mark Tebeau, an OHA 2009 Program Committee Co-Chair who was also at THATCAMP will have some even more innovative strategies.

See THATCAMP photographs at
http://www.davelester.org/2008/06/05/the-humanities-and-technology-camp/
and in Flickr at http://flickr.com/photos/fa/2537703427/in/set-72157605353680737/

I want to share some Web sites that do a remarkable job of sharing, and often engaging visitors with, cultural heritage and a sense of place. Please take a look and comment on the features that you find most effective in communicating a sense of place.

North Country Folklore
I discussed their Register of Very Special Places in an earlier post. Take a look at their many exhibits about place in the Aidrondacks region including “Good Food Served Right.”

Coeur d’Alene Native Names Project
Larry Cebula wrote about this project on his Northwest History blog. Omeka offers a similar capacity for geolocation.

My Brighton and Hove: a living history of Brighton and Hove
This beautifully designed site manages to convey both a sense of humor and a lot of local pride along with great details of the areas history and culture. Look at their feature encouraging ordinary folks to contribute to the site.

Virtually Dartmoor: Interactive Visits to the National Park
There are a growing number of sites integrating oral histories, shared stories, and local landscapes.

Memoryscape
Toby Butler has done something similar for everyday landscapes or “memoryscapes.” You can read an interview with Butler about these projects.

Citylore
New York City’s Citylore produced Place Matters several years ago and has recently updated the site that lets visitors nominate their favorite local attractions much like North Country’s Register of Very Special Places. Citylore is developing City of Memory a new site to share stories, images, and even digital stories of places in New York. These are more highly produced sites but Omeka will be able to share similar content linked to maps.

See previous posts for more about Omeka.