Narrative Interpretation Reading Response

I’ve learned from Modules 4 and 5 that it’s not about just putting historical items on a website and calling it digital public history website. It’s so much more than that.

It’s making sure that the items that you want to highlight in your project is not only digitally available but that the historical context is highlighted. In the journal article by Tim Sherratt, “It’s All About Stuff: Collections, Interfaces, Power, and People,” he describes the process of not only obtaining the data but how to get the information out of it based on the needs of his project. Sherratt created scripts or use other open source technologies to scrape out the data that he needed. Sherratt does make the point that the relationship between the project and public are important. He emphasizes at the end of his article that we should “. . . focus on the relationship we both have with the collections. It’s all about the stuff. It’s all about the respect and responsibility we both have for our collections. It’s all about the respect and responsibility we both have for people like this.” Sherratt’s argument made then reflect about my project and the way that I am constructing it. I need to keep in mind that yes, it is about my audience and how they interact with it but it’s also about the collection and making sure that I am doing it justice.

The “Exhibit and Exhibit Labels Workshop” blog by Steve Lubar made me think of not only accuracy and completeness of the metadata that I add to each item in Omeka, but also the concise nature of labels to that exhibit. To make the exhibit less cumbersome to read but more enjoyable to experience. The “Curator Rules” blog, also by Steve Lubar, expands and turns the exhibits label workshop blog’s advice on its head. The “Curator Rules” blog explains that some of the traditional rules can be broken to fit the needs of the exhibit.

The “Eavesdropping at the Well: Interpretive Media in the Slavery in New York Exhibition” by Richard Rabinowicz, expands on those concepts made by Lubar by demonstrating the process of creating an exhibit and make sure the content, labels, etc. are appropriate but also creative.

All of these lessons learned from the past two modules can be applied to my project to make sure that it is engaging and historically correct. As I move forward in my research and building my project in Omeka I will have to keep these readings in mind. See my other blog post about my digital public history infrastructure to see how I am coming along with my final project.