Digital Humanities

In their article, “Digital Storytelling in Museums: Observations and Best Practices” Bruce Wyman, Scott Smith, et.al. ask, “But how can museums design an experience that will not only capture attention and convey complex information, but also use modes of interaction that will not seem outmoded next Thursday?”[i] I found myself asking the same question as […]

There are a variety of public history projects that having a basic digitization can enable. The temptation sometimes is to think that one can only do public history when they have vast resources like the Smithsonian. This perception is fueled by the kinds of large projects that are often sponsored by the National Endowment for the

Public historical projects by their very nature demand collaboration. Collaboration here is not simply between experts or professional historians but with the public who will primarily be the consumers of the project. I see public history as history by, with and for the public. Carl Becker, the former President of the American Historical Association said

The Heinz museum is located on the fourth floor of the Senator John Heinz History Center. The center which is located in the historic Strip District of Pittsburgh has been in continuous existence since 1879. The center chronicles 250 years history of Western Pennsylvania with particular interest in the wars (The British, French, and Indian

Digital public history has come a long way since its early years in the late 1990s. Web technology itself was gradually evolving and websites were not as interactive as they are today. The advent of mobile operating systems such as iOS from apple and android from google have pushed web development technology and have fundamentally

In his article, “Whose Public? Whose History? What is the Goal of Public History?,” Ron Grele writes that public history “promises us a society in which a broad public participates in the construction of its own history.”[1] This challenges us to look at the art of doing history from a broader perspective. There has been

The field of digital humanities is relatively new to me. My first introduction to it was in my historiography class while  a graduate student at West Virginia University, Morgantown. The professor who taught the class had done a Post-doctoral fellowship at George Mason’s Center for History and New Media. He had introduced us to platforms

Computers and search technology have changed the way we process text. Google Drive’s search is so good that it can extract key information from a scanned purchase receipt. While computer text has been growing rapidly in the last several years, we must not forget the millions of pages of hand and type writer generated text

For many years, I was conflicted about the use of Wikipedia in the academic setting. My students were strongly warned never to use it as a source in their papers. I strongly discouraged them from looking at Wikipedia as a starting point for their papers because they might be led astray by incorrect information. Looking