Week 11: Localized and Embodied Digital History

Where to go

Your house? A friend’s house? Somewhere that will feel comfortable for election night.

What we’ll do

“Digital History In Place” or what I’d call “localized digital history” extends last week’s look at digital history at museums or historical landmarks to the interactions that digital history enables in “informal learning spaces” (the phrase that describes not-classrooms and not-museums and not-libraries). Augmented reality, VR, and 3D are focused on the recreation of historical artifacts and are often done in formal learning spaces; community-driven digital history is focused on preservation in informal spaces, but not necessarily on public-facing access. What I’d call “localized digital history” is a blend of the two that puts the public into the historical narrative as the driver in an informal learning space.

Reading and lab are combined:

First, take one of the Bloomington walking tours at TheClio.com:

https://theclio.com/searchResults?find=tours&itemsPerPage=10&currentEntryPage=0&currentTourPage=0&entryTypeId=&maxDistance=3&orderBy=auto&useUserLocation=no&titleQuery=&locationQuery=bloomington%2C%20IN&infoQuery=&tourType=any . (Ideally, try to do this in person, but virtual experiences are a reasonable backup)

• What’s present in this tour that would be hard to communicate in text?
• What’s present in this tour that would be hard to communicate without the in situ nature of a walking tour?
• What is missing from this tour that would be easier to communicate in a scholarly narrative?
• If you took the tour virtually rather than walking/driving/biking, how does this format help you anchor the history that’s here in a localized environment?

Then, at some point while you’re on campus, do a medieval pilgrimage: https://medieval.indiana.edu/globalpilgrimage/

• What do we communicate when we take local history from one place and root it in another?
• How does the familiarity with a locality help communicate unfamiliar history to nascent historians?
• How does the immersive nature of the local pilgrimage shape expectations of the physical embodiment that’s present in the historical version of the pilgrimage?