Public History and Digital Humanities

In the introduction to Dr. Bill Ferster’s book Interactive Visualizations , he provides a number of strategies to help me answer my research questions, and do so in a compelling manner by “letting primary sources of information communicate directly with [the] viewer.” (1)  My project most closely reflects Ferster’s observation that “historians use visualization to explain and further explore what people do.” (4)  In my case, I am seeking to explain where the citizens of Eatonville carried out the various components of their lives, and how these locations changed over time.  My project will allow users to more easily “understand complex and multidimensional relationships, prompting connections that may not have been otherwise apparent.” (9)   For example, by layering historic maps over contemporary ones, users will be able to trace connections between past and present in new ways.  I do not yet know which platfom I will be using for my project, but I kno...

In this post, I will provide a status report and general update on my class project, which is tentatively titled “Space and Community in Eatonville, Florida.”  (It’s not a very jazzy title, so I will need to find a way to make it more interesting and pull in the user!) Through this project, I will use wide-ranging data sources to build upon previous mapping projects in order to develop an interactive map that shows how domestic and community spaces have changed over time in the historically African American town of Eatonville, Florida.  I envision multiple audiences for this project, from the general public, to Eatonville residents, to researchers seeking insight into the work of Zora Neale Hurston, who spent her childhood in Eatonville and used the town as a subject and inspiration for much of her writing.  Ideally, the map will serve as the basis for a future walking tour of the town of Eatonville, which would be accessible via a mobile app.  Using VisalEyes, I wil...

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...