Week 9: Community Engaged Digital History

1. Week 9 Overview
2. Week 9 Reading and Discussion
3. Week 9 Lab: Digital Community Archive Project Management
4. Collaborative Data Week 9 NAME REDACTED

Week 9 Overview

Community Archives and Public History

The extension of oral history into the digital world generally comes with two things: digitally preserved oral histories themselves, and the community- driven/public-history archives that result. Both require us to think about the ethics of archives, of human subjects, and of academic practices that are often extractive.

Reading: Our independent reading will look at the theoretical and practical affordances of digital oral history, with an added emphasis on the rapport-building in digital community engagement and digital-oral-history projects.

Lab: Our lab this week will focus on the documentation for a community- archive project, so that you have a sense of the practical endeavor that digital oral history and digital community archives take. This documentation is under construction for an ACLS-funded grant called Archiving Out Of The Box , on which I am one of the PIs (principal investigators). We’ll use the lab to explore funding and administrative norms in the academy as well as practical community archiving needs. This week’s lab is designed for you to explore at home and troubleshoot/discuss in class. Note that the reading is shorter to make time for that.

Week 9 Reading and Discussion

Get a feel for the stakes by skimming the headers on a few of the “Getting Started” pages at Boyd, Cohen, Dewhurst, Rakerd, Rehberger Oral History in the Digital Age , https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/gettingstarted/ (about: https://oralhistory.org/oral-history-in-the-digital-age/)

• Digital equipment choices: https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/gettingstarted/playlists/equipment/
• Using digital equipment effectively: https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/gettingstarted/playlists/use/
• Legal issues and IP (intellectual property): https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/gettingstarted/playlists/legal-issues/
• Digital preservation: https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/gettingstarted/playlists/digital-preservation/

Choose 1 micro-essay in each section to read.

Explore community-partnership building. Marvin Roger Anderson and Rebecca S. Wingo, “Harvesting History, Remembering Rondo” in Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy (eds. Wingo, Heppler, Schadewald, University of Cincinnati Press, 2021). DOI: 10.34314/wingodigital.00004

Week 9 Lab: Digital Community Archive Project Management

Lab background

This week, our lab will focus on the project-management start-to-finish process of a digital-oral-history project with a web-based digital-community- archive component. We’ll come back to the web-site building portion of this more fully in Week 14 (Sustainability), so for now focus on the table of contents, what it tells you about the process, personnel and tasks in a digital-oral-history project that’s large-scale and involves many people and moving parts.

• Read the basics: https://digitalarcplatform.github.io/
• Look at the documentation in some specifically guided ways: https://digitalarcplatform.github.io/documentation/
• SKIM the ToC
• SKIM the pre-event planning section
• Read deeply in the During-Event section

Collaborative Data Week 9

NB: This week was claimed by a student who worked with the class to create timeline entries in a spreadsheet from a collection of news articles.