BUILDING DIALOGIC COLLECTIONS AND SCHOLARSHIP

Sharon M. Leon (@sleonchnm), RRCHNM-GMU

COLLABORATIVE COLLECTION

BUILDING

We pretty much know how this goes, and if you don’t Sheila Brennan and Mills Kelly have a great article on their work on the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank called “Why Collecting History Online is Web 1.5” (http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=47)Shared authority, reflective practice, co-creation

Washington University in St. Louis

UMBC — Denise Meringolo and eventually in partnership with Maryland Historical Society

Cleveland

“For us [the dialogue-driven museum] has meant engaging with our audiences in mutually exploring the memory and meaning of Chinatown’s past. It has meant learning how different people learn in different ways and helping to facilitate that process. And it has meant taking what we learn from these dialogues and further improving the planning and development of the organization. Ultimately, we week to become an ever more resonant and responsible history center in which scholarship and public programs can help make a critical historical awareness a powerful factor in improving New York and the community for the future.

- Jack Tchen, “Creating a Dialogic Museum: The Chinatown History Museum Experiment,”

in Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, 1992.

CREATING A DIALOGIC MUSEUM

WHY NOT DIALOGIC

DIGITAL HISTORY

SCHOLARSHIP?

“First, the number of scholars willing to commit themselves and their careers to digital scholarship has not kept pace with institutional opportunities. Second, today few scholars are trying, as they did earlier in the web's history, to reimagine the form as well as the substance of scholarship. In some ways, scholarly innovation has been domesticated, with the very ubiquity of the web bringing a lowered sense of excitement, possibility, and urgency. These two deficiencies form a reinforcing cycle: the diminished sense of possibility weakens the incentive for scholars to take risks, and the unwillingness to take risks limits the impact and excitement generated by boldly innovative projects.

- Ed Ayers, “Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future?” EDUCAUSE Review (2013)

DOES DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP HAVE A FUTURE?

Te Papa Museum of New Zealand

USER PERSONAS

From the most common ground on content to the least:

➤ Historian in the subfield

➤ Historian in the general field

➤ Historian in another field

➤ Undergraduate major

➤ Student in a general education requirement course

➤ [Subject-matter enthusiast]

➤ Accidental/browsing visitor

Base content knowledge; Interests and questions; Access and equipment; digital literacy/competence; Time and incentives

“A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby experienced participants pass along knowledge to novices. In a participatory culture, members also believe their contributions matter and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least, members care about others’ opinions of what they have created).

- Henry Jenkins, et al., Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture (2009)

PARTICIPATORY CULTURE

How do we build a participatory culture around digital historical scholarship?

(Culture questions are about community)

Because we have some of the tools and infrastructure right now.

CommentPress Kathleen Fitzpatrick — Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011)Jack Dougherty and Kristin Nawrotzki’s edited collection, Writing History in the Digital Age (U.Michigan, 2013)Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, and S. Weingart’s The Historians Macroscope (Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Microscope (Imperial College Press, 2015)

hypothes.is — public or private annotations on the web (using annotator.js)

Scholarly Remix (NYPL) — in isolation, or…. Hub and spoke model — a concentrated universe of materials, that a group of scholars each addresses bringing their own interpretive positions

Our content management systems are making this more and more possible everyday.

A larger linked open data network of scholarship that allows us to freely build in conversation with one another, drawing on an ever expanding range of sources, but also an expanding universe of scholarship that is publish in an accessible way on the way (preferably as machine readable text with paragraph anchor numbers).

This is harder — full scale shift, but it can happen.

WHY NOT?

➤ Focuses us on process rather than end products

➤ The process requires management (assignments matter)

➤ Incentives for engagement

➤ Resistance to agile processes

➤ Problems with pace (too immediate and too slow)

➤ Outreach and marketing

➤ Sustainability and preservation

BUILDING DIALOGIC COLLECTIONS AND SCHOLARSHIP

Sharon M. Leon (@sleonchnm), RRCHNM-GMU