Oral History Association on the Web

The Oral History Association has a new home on the Web. OHA offers new ways to share, learn from, and collaborate with others working in oral history in academia, archives, museums, government, communities, and classrooms.

We are now to be found at http://www.oralhistory.org — come and join us!

The Oral History Association offers a rich and growing variety of resources for those interested in every facet of doing, promoting, researching, collecting, and preserving oral history.

The content of the previous organizational site has migrated and can be found here, including:
information for the 2009 Oral History Association Annual Meeting, “Beyond the Interview” in Louisville, Kentucky as well as news of other Oral History events and the programs for past annual meetings;
the Oral History Awards
membership information and ordering information for OHA publications;
and the Oral History Evaluation Guidelines

NEW FEATURES include the OHA Wiki, a place to contribute and share information about oral history, and the OHA Network, a social networking space for those interested in oral history. The OHA Network is a great space to find people with common interests and to get involved with Oral History Associations groups and activities.

Please visit the new site @ http://www.oralhistory.org, join the OHA Network and get involved with the Oral History Association.

Jump Start Here and There

Our family continues to volunteer with Jump Start, an after school enrichment program and computer lab in Middletown, Ohio. The Jump Start kids get help with their homework and enjoy the opportunity to play computer games and explore the world via the Internet. They will soon be corresponding and sharing photographs and video with children in our new sister program, Jump Start Cambodia. This is literally a “sister” program — to be launched by my sister, Michele McLellan, in her home village on the Mekong River. Visit our Cambodia photo gallery. Please let me know if you would like to volunteer or to make a contribution to our Jump Start programs!

Photograph by Michele McLellan.

Oral History and the Public in the Digital Age

Oral History and the Public in the Digital Age
OHA 2008 Annual Meeting
Hypothetical Case for Discussion

Participants: Marci Reaven, Patrick Moore, Linda Shopes, Alex Prim, Marjorie McLellan, Ann Valk, and Mark Tebeau

Location:
Large district in a big city, with diverse ethnic/racial/economic population. City has tradition of community involvement in local governance.

Problem:
Aggressive slum clearance, urban renewal, and public housing construction in the 1950s and ’60s transformed large parts of the district, but in this segment there was more clearance than construction. Race- and class-based conflicts have prevented development since then. Large sections of prime urban land still lay fallow or are devoted to parking lots, and the topic of development is pushed off the table every time it comes up. Some powerbrokers are happier letting the land lie undeveloped than engage the constituents and issues that building would require. Others want development to create badly needed new housing and other facilities.

Project Goals: Break the silence and impasse over the site by doing the following—
•    Serve as an information resource
•    Revive historical memory
•    Demonstrate that problem solving had occurred in the past
•    Promote mutual understanding
•    Connect current stakeholders
•    Re-connect one-time site tenants and businessmen
•    Inspire stakeholders to re-envision the site
•    Encourage decision makers to place it back on the agenda
•    Help inculcate the habits of mind and skills for ongoing engagement with the history and the present condition of the place

Project Components: Public, face-to-face programs, including—
•    Discussion and visioning sessions
•    Digital and technological interpretation
•    Exhibits
•    Extensive oral history project
•    Document and photo collecting

Project Components in Planning: Website with rich digital resources. What is needed?
•    What types of interpretive primary source materials? How will these be organized, archived, and preserved?
•    What types of social networking and information services?
•    What types of ongoing publicity and outreach to conduct to encourage visitation to the website? To encourage visitation to the actual area?
•    What kind of relationship between on-the-ground and virtual programs and materials?
•    How best to partner with the local archives to enhance access to existing oral history collections?
•    How to encourage and provide technical assistance to non-professionals to create new material for the site?
•    How interactive should it be? How much interaction to encourage between the website and its publics?
•    How to create, fund, govern, and maintain the site?
•    How to keep site fresh and changing?

Culture Builds Community and Cityfolk News

The University of Dayton’s Raymond L. Fitz, S.M. Center for Leadership in Community launched its Graduate Community Fellows (GCF) program by choosing Cityfolk as one of the community organizations to host a fellow for two years. Graduate students gain “the opportunity to connect classroom learning to educational experiences within the Dayton community through meaningful and substantive roles within nonprofit agencies” through the GCF. Cityfolk has benefited richly from previous UD interns and I look forward to working with Tierra Blackwell on Cityfolk’s community and education initiatives. Cityfolk is committed to continuing the Culture Builds Community project, piloted for the past three years in the East End/Twin Towers neighborhood, and extending the initiative to new neighborhoods.

Dayton Coffee Roaster Boston Stoker, a great Cityfolk supporter, has launched its “Straw Poll”–an opportunity to vote with your coffee choice for a presidential candidate or “none of the above.” Uncommitted? Great. Proceeds from the “none of the above” blend will be donated to Cityfolk.

Thanks to volunteers who helped with the children’s Passport Stations, the Teacher Corner, and the “Rips, Clips, and Creases” exhibit at the Cityfolk Festival this summer. And a special thanks of my own to Wright State University for helping to support the Citfyolk Festival this year.

Read more about Culture Builds Community, the 2008-2009 Cityfolk season and other news in our e-newsletter.

Dayton Patented

This is old news, announced while I was on vacation, and others have already praised the City of Dayton’s new logo and tagline: “Dayton Patented, Originals Wanted” designed by Nashville-based, North Star Destination Strategies.

“Dayton Patented” captures a lot of Dayton’s history, while “Originals Wanted” looks forward to the progressive, inclusive future that Mayor Rhine McLin has worked for. As she said, “If locally we can acknowledge and embrace Dayton’s distinct attributes and assets, then we can better tell our story to others, which helps us compete more successfully for new businesses and residents. As a community, we are often our own worst critics. Instead, we should better promote and capitalize on what makes Dayton a good place to live, to locate a business or to visit for fun and entertainment.”

Making Progress Update

Making Progress update? What’s Making Progress?

Working with both graduate students in public history and media producers at Wright State University as well as public historians in the Miami Valley, we previously proposed an interactive Web-based exhibit project, “Making Progress: Living and Working in Ohio’s Miami Valley, 1890-1929.” Before I talk about where we might go next, let me share where we have been. I’m using “we” here in a hopeful way–this is an invitation. Please let me know if you are interested in becoming part of the “we”.

In the imagined, Web-based exhibit, visitors would explore factory spaces, follow trolleys down city streets, investigate neighborhoods, and enter shops and homes. For the Miami Valley, both optimism and fear characterized the Progressive era; our goal was to examine progress, change, and images of the good life from many perspectives. Visitors to the exhibit would learn about the aspirations and experiences of the people who built Dayton — the foundry workers and managers, African Americans and immigrants, business leaders and newspaper publishers, reformers, entrepreneurs, engineers, writers, educators, parents, shopkeepers, and consumers. As then Montgomery County Historical Society Research Center Director, Claudia Watson pointed out, as a country and a community, we are a ‘work in progress’ and we face many moments now when change feels threatening.

The project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in the planning stages, was delayed by two successful Teaching American History grant projects. With the loss of our partner the Montgomery County Historical Society (now merged into a new organization with a new mission), “Making Progress” had no institutional home.

Last winter, I signed on to beta-test the Center for History and New Media’s new online collections and exhibit application, Omeka to find out if it would be a good tool for a new approach to “Making Progress.” The answer is a resounding yes. A “powered by Omeka” production is a very different proposition from our original plan: hiring a Web design company to realize our vision for us. The designers would have taken our text, digital images and digital video, brought tremendous interactive and graphic design skills to bear on it, and produced for us an amazing digital resource. (The wireframe for “Making Progress” was very cool.) I gave a detailed explanation of how Omeka works in earlier posts. Omeka will not carry away the resources and launch a dramatic exhibit with amazing flash and interactive features for us. Instead, Omeka offers templates and tools, themes and plug-ins so that we can build it ourselves – like a Habitat for Humanity house.

Converted, I became a bit of an Omeka evangelist. Working with my friends at the Ohio Humanities Council, we have begun to introduce Omeka to cultural heritage organizations around Ohio. Managing Director of the Center for History and New Media, Tom Scheinfeldt and other CHNM staff have been racking up sky miles promoting Omeka (and their Zotero research tool). He put the Ohio Humanities Council on his itinerary last spring and they have guided us since. In Columbus, we plan to use Omeka for a collaborative, statewide photographic exhibit project (more on that later).

Work with many partners on the OHC proposal and the digital humanities un-conference, THATCAMP at CHNM, gave me opportunities to think through “Making Progress.”  With Omeka, “Making Progress” can unfold gradually and involve students and others directly over many years. I would be happy to share ideas about using Omeka with others in the Miami Valley—it would be great to be part of a local user community or to find new partners for “Making Progress.”

My Courses & Projects Page

I’ve been off to Virginia, Prince Edward Island, and Wisconsin this summer. Getting ready to go back to teaching in the fall, I set up a separate home page for my courses at Wright State University. Please check this out at http://marjoriemclellan.wordpress.com. My suggestions for history students, 23(or 43) Things, along with discussions of teaching and social studies education will move to this new home. Tellhistory will focus on public history and folklore, oral history, digital humanities, community history and other topics.

Is a blog scholarship?

Responses to edwired’s post Making Digital Scholarship Count (2) raise the question, is a blog scholarship? I worry that our efforts to open up definitions of scholarship may create checklists—this is in, that’s out—that will further inhibit creativity and innovation. A blog seems to be an excellent way to develop a train of thought, in dialogue with others, that may emerge later in a more traditional publication. There are blogs that rise to the level of a published article but these are rare. It is appropriate to recognize such sustained and original contributions to our understanding of history or to an historical perspective on the world we live in with professional awards.These blogs deserve to be reviewed like exhibits, Web resources, documentary films, and books in our professional journals. Archaeologists seem to have found a good strategy in The Past Discussed Quarterly. (Why do archaeologists and librarians seem so much more innovative than historians?) Shawn Graham at Electronic Archaeology (a great source for insights), apparently tired of the wait to see his research in print, shared “The Space Between: The Geography of Social Networks in the Tiber Valley” with us directly. The rare, professionally recognized, deep, and sustained blogs should be considered comparable to a scholarly article.

Do I consider Tellhistory scholarship? I do not consider my blog scholarship any more or less than I would count book reviews or conference presentations on my own teaching methods. With Tellhistory, I intended to share thoughts and examples of popular history, public history, folklore, and cultural heritage with fairly broad audiences. Through the blog, I participate in a conversation about the changing nature of work in the humanities. Tellhistory may offer students both a window on the work of faculty outside the classroom and a link to developments in public history, oral history, and digital humanities. Some colleagues want our work to fit into one category or another – is it service, teaching, or research? Some are wary of interdisciplinary work as well. This blog, and much of the other work of scholars engaged with their communities, does not fit neatly into these boxes. Tellhistory is 15% involvement in professional discourse, 30% service and civic engagement, 30% teaching, and 25% quirky stuff that I like and want to share. Tellhistory belongs quite legitimately in that catchall with reviews and short encyclopedia entries as tangible evidence of on-going professional and community engagement.

Thanks to the folks at Digital Campus and to Mills Kelly at edwired for sharing their thoughts on the scholarship of digital humanities.

Enough, I want to get back to fun stuff like Sanborn Insurance maps and museums on Prince Edward Island.

A Good Day on PEI

One last post before we leave for Prince Edward Island. I meant to write a review of the museum but the Cityfolk Festival, conference planning, and gardening have interfered with blogging – I’m sure that’s a good sign.

North Rustico Harbour Fishery Museum

[caption id="attachment_190" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="North Rustico Harbour Fishery Museum display"][/caption]

So, for you visiting Prince Edward Island, my favorite place to go is a few miles up the coast from our cottage. (It’s a comfortable, old-shoe of a log house but they call this a cottage in Canada…) North Rustico is home to an active fisherman’s warf that now provides boat trips for tourists with local characters like Norman Peters. A few years ago, the folks in North Rustico got together and asked the government for some money to build a new little marina and the North Rustico Harbour Fishery Museum. The museum is a real gem and its small so that visitors can stop in as part of a day full of local activities. Peters is the star of one of the museum videos, “Out On the Boat” and when we walked out of the museum onto the pier, his boat churned past and he tipped his hat to us.

Canadian flag flying outside the museum

Cross the road and follow a path over the dunes onto a Parks Canada beach to swim or just stroll and enjoy the birds and the sweeping view out to sea. You can scramble along a long, worn and broken up stone and timber barrier for an even better view. And yes, you can see one of PEI’s many lighthouses there.

The museum is at one end of a boardwalk that stretches along the side of the bay from North Rustico to North Rustico Harbour. Heron fish in the shallow waters. Along the path, stone bas-relief images with brief informative plaques describe the history and culture. The boardwalk is wheelchair accessible, there are plenty of benches, and you may also find some wild berries.

Of course, no vacation on Prince Edward Island is complete without good food. The Blue Mussel Café is one of our favorite restaurants on PEI. (We are also fans of the deck at Carr’s Oyster Bar at Stanley Bridge–where you can watch local kids jumping off a bridge into the river–and breakfast at the PEI Preserve Company several miles inland from Rustico.) Sit on the deck, enjoy the food, and look across Rustico Bay. Sometimes a bald eagle will fly by.

Although its 1500 miles from home, we fly into Charlottetown’s modest (tiny) international airport on a direct flight from Detroit.

Big Books for Summer

I mean big as in heavy books to lug to the beach this summer. I wrote earlier about oral history books leading up to the Oral History Association conference in October, 2008. The Dayton Teachers History Book Club is reading Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals as a companion to following the nominating conventions and presidential electioneering this summer. Fortunately, I already read that one because it weighs in around 900 pages. Let me know if you are in Dayton, Ohio and want to join us for this discussion come September.

I recently finished three novels—Noah Charney’s The Art Thief, Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero. All three are good reads that I recommend. Charney’s is a debut novel and it’s a kind of mash-up of sociologist Howard Becker’s Art Worlds and mystery writers Janwillem Van de Wetering and Georges Simenon (“Maigret” for PBS watchers). Now I realize that I read the short, easily portable books first and have the weighty tomes to carry on vacation. By the way, if you haven’t read Van de Wetering–take one of his mysteries to the beach.

What I want to haul around, to the dismay of my husband, are John Mack Faragher’s A Great and Noble Scheme: the Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland and Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. I noticed that a Canadian blog, Gen X at 40, linked to my earlier piece on the Acadian Bank Museum in Rustico and I was embarrassed because a local historian in Rustico had to correct so much of my first draft. I want to get the Acadian story right. I also liked Faragher’s Daniel Boone a lot. Some how the lottery of books on hold at the public library landed the second big book in my lap this weekend – Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. I know there will be a hold on this when I get back so I’ll try to shoe horn it into my suitcase as well. Perhaps I should just download the audio book? I’m also taking Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven because recent events in Texas have so many people talking about it.

I’m saving Elliot Jaspin’s Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America and Christopher M. Kelty’s Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software for my return. Kelty’s book is available free online but I couldn’t seem to wean myself off of a book to hold in my hands. Perhaps the new One Laptop Per Child computer that also functions as an ebook will solve that problem. These two did not sound like vacation reading. Looks like I’ll facilitate a Center for Teaching and Learning book discussion of Two Bits at Wright State in the fall.

If you like photographs, I recommend a book that is both beautiful and serious. Gary Harwood’s Growing Season: the Life of a Migrant Community will remind you where your fresh vegetables come from this summer. You can see many of his photographs online but buy the book.

I find myself eagerly awaiting the next addition to Louise Erdrich’s children’s book series (The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence). Some adults got hooked on Harry Potter but not me. I should go back and read more of her adult novels but I don’t think there’s room in my suitcase or my two-week vacation.