Minnesota’s Immigrant Stories

This week's explorations centered around the digital project, Minnesota's Immigrants. In particular we focused on the “Stories for the Classroom” page which thematically laid out several videos created with narration and photographs. After watching several of the videos I found them engaging and interesting although each was quite unique. The first video I watched was that …

Podcasting for Posterity: Storycorps

  Over the past year I have been regularly taking on speaking gigs at public libraries. My talks are usually fairly well attended (admittedly some better than others) drawing in between 15 and 50 people regularly. But, what I enjoy more than the talk itself -- perhaps this betrays my introversion-- is the conversations I …

Digital tools for Data Mining Literature

One of the first truly ghastly stories I was ever exposed to was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The product of overprotective parenting, the only way I could get away with feeding my craving for horror stories and the macabre was by reading. Shortly after, Frankenstein came, Stoker's Dracula, Leroux's Phantom and so forth and so on. …

Chicago History and Virtual Reality

This week I looked at a couple of the virtual reality experiences put together by the Chicago History Museum as a part of their Chicago 00 project. In particular, I chose to try out their "1929: St. Valentine's Day Massacre" and "1933/34: A Century of Progress" virtual reality interactive videos. Overall, I was very impressed …

Chicago Arts & Crafts in the Paris of the Midwest

  This past week I have been working with a (new to me) software, Omeka. An open-source and free database software for museums and archives. As an experiment I curated an exhibit surrounding 20th century arts and crafts in Chicago. It focuses on the 1930s and 1940s and the role that the federal government Works …

Let theFutureBeHere() {return booksOfTheFuture}

After a "relaxing week off" (because, can you really have a week off when you are in grad school...) I have returned to think about what digital storytelling in the modern age means for books. In his book, The New Digital Storytelling, author Bryan Alexander posits that technology has (and will continue to further) fundamentally change how …

Data about data about data – in libraries

Museums, archives and libraries are all repositories of information. In order to keep track of that information and make it accessible, we (the universal we in this case) use metadata. My career in museums has entailed a great deal of cataloging -- and accordingly -- a great deal of metadata. A few years ago, a …

A Look at Family History Website Geni

I've always been fascinated by things that draw people to history, especially people who claim to otherwise hate history. Genealogy is one of those things. Touted in 2014 as the second most popular pastime in the U.S., it's growth has been spurred by the rise of hundreds of genealogy websites.[1] Among these are personal websites …

History On The Web: A Review of MNopedia

Beginning in 2010, the Minnesota Historical Society embarked on a new project that would eventually become MNopedia. They hoped to create a website that would be an authoritative resource about Minnesota history available for free. What resulted is an easy to use, ever evolving encyclopedia with articles written by historians, researchers and writers, all of …

#TwitterstoriansUnite

In 2017, on an unassuming Wednesday in February, something fascinating happened: Twitter was overrun by museum people. With the ascension of Trump to the presidency, there was a new fascination on the post-apocalyptic novels - which brought forward this quote from Orwell's 1984:  “You asked me once,” said O’Brien, “what was in Room 101. I told …