Public History and Digital Humanities

When developing a digital project, it is important to survey the existing landscape by conducting what Dr. Sheila Brennan, a digital historian at the National Endowment for the Humanities, calls an "environmental scan," or "a literature review that demonstrates your knowledge of existing projects and the field's reaction to those efforts."  For my project, I will be using Google Maps to develop a map that will document and guide users through the history of domestic and community spaces in Eatonville, Florida, so I began my scan by seeking out historic mapping projects that utilize Google Maps.  It was difficult to find many robust, active projects that use Google Maps to document historic locations, and even more difficult to find scholarly projects.  Most of the projects I found were either skeletal or abandoned efforts taken on by small municipalities.  Two examples of these are maps developed by the town of Princeton, Wisconsin (https://www.cityofprinceto...

In his book Interactive Visualization: Insight through Inquiry (2013), Dr. Bill Ferster describes a six-pronged model for guiding the development of interactive visualizations.  The model follows the acronym ASSERT, which stands for: A - Ask a Question S - Search for Information S - Structure that Information E - Envision the Answer R - Represent the Visualization T - Tell a Story I will outline how I have used this model to structure my class project on mapping and guiding users through a history of domestic and community spaces in Eatonville, Florida.  It should be noted that although I will move through each letter sequentially in order of its position in the acronym, it is not strictly necessary to go in this order when formulating a project plan, as Ferster notes that the ASSERT model “should be thought of more as a web or circle and less as a straight line” (Ferster, 42).  A - Ask a Question Ferster observes that “Good visualizations are driven ...

Digital Paxton: A Digital Archive and Critical Edition of the Paxton Pamphlet War is a collaborative online project that documents the reaction to a conflict that took place between European immigrants and Native Americans in 1763, as a result of increasing tensions following the French and Indian War and Pontiac's War, when Scots-Irish settlers encroached on Native lands in the Pennsylvania frontier. In two separate attacks during December 1763, a vigilante group that later became known as the Paxton Boys massacred all twenty members of a Susquehannock (called the Conestoga by the English) settlement in retaliation for purportedly participating in violent acts carried out by the settlement on British settlers.  The majority of the Susquehannock who died were brutally murdered and mutilated while being held in protective custody in Lancaster by the Pennsylvania government, and it was later revealed that the settlement had coexisted peacefully with Europeans for decades, and had ...

Geographies of the Holocaust , edited by Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano (2014), demonstrates the possibilities afforded by Digital History and GIS in allowing for innovative analyses of thorny yet much-studied historical topics, moving beyond well-traversed paths to open up new opportunities for historical exploration. The project hearkens back to earlier nineteenth and twentieth century ideas of history as a science so markedly that it received grant funding from the National Science Foundation, an award which the authors acknowledge “stretched the bounds of “GIScience” (Acknowledgements). The book is also the result of broad collaboration, not only among US institutions (Middlebury College, Texas State University, Stanford University, DePaul University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Indiana University) but also the University of Bristol and Victoria University, Wellington.  It incorporates feedback from scholars at conferences repre...