old part 6 (not visible)
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 TO BE REVISED: Oscar Rosales Castañeda’s essay, “Writing Chicana/o History with the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project,” describes how students and faculty created a digital public history project to document local activism, and the vivid role it played in shaping their lives as well as historical knowledge on the contemporary Pacific Northwest. In “Citizen Scholars: Facebook and the Co-Creation of Knowledge,” Amanda Grace Sikarskie makes the case for lay historians actively contributing to research through social media, drawing on her rich experience with the Quilt Index. Finally, Shawn Graham, Guy Massie, and Nadine Feuerherm offer a behind-the-scenes look and some early conclusions drawn from their experience in documenting Canadian memories for “The HeritageCrowdProject: A Case Study in Crowdsourcing Public History.”
The focus of this section seems fuzzier to me than the others. What really links these four essays? Might not the Zucconi and Noonan essays belong in the Teaching section?
I like the title of this section. It hints towards issues of creation versus reconstruction in historical accounts which gives a good context for Zucconi et al.’s opening piece in the chapter.
I appreciated each of these essays and will not comment on them individually in part because I wonder about this section as a whole. I am not sure how these essays contribute to the collection’s purpose. They are each useful in showing specific projects, project design, and outlining some possible breakthroughs in public history, simulations, and public history.
I liked this section and found the articles within it to be relevant. It could be a question of the placing of the essays. Although I like the title for the section, maybe it would work better as Christopher Hager suggests with placing the articles in different sections.
I think that Zucconi et al.’s piece could be seen as an example of a change in the notion of ‘writing’ in the digital age – with some writing of history moving from the form of narrative (whether in text, video etc.) to being rather about writing computer programming for games. Therefore it might fit well in Part 4.
If the rest of the books layout is to remain, Judkins could fit within Part 3 close to that of Sklar and Dublin – though the section may need to change name. Alternatively if there was a section on Wikipedia (with Wolff, Graham and Seligman) it could be an interesting example of an alternative digital encyclopaedia.
Castañeda’s essay could fit in Part 1, besides essays treating of history and the public (Madsen-Brooks, Sikarskie, Graham et al.). I find this essay an important piece in this collection.
Noonan’s essay could be better suited to Part 2 as Hager suggests.
I’ll also refrain from commenting individually on the essays in this section, which each accomplish what they set out to do in a straightforward way.
I think it would make sense to move Noonan’s essay on textbooks to the section on teaching and the Sklar and Dublin essay to this “New Ways” section of the collection. It also a description of a project, albeit a longer-standing one than the others collected here, and has more in common with project summaries than with the database and content-modeling discussions of section 3.
Then I’d suggest the editors consider whether they might solicit further brief capsule summaries of projects to augment section 6 and give a broader sense of current work in digital history. With only a few projects represented, I share Will Thomas’s concern about the contribution of this section to the whole — but it strikes me that (perhaps for the online rather than the print-on-demand version of the book) a carefully-selected snapshot of history scholarship across digital media and taking a variety of approaches would serve as a useful appendix.