Digital Public History Begins
This semester I’m taking some very exciting courses: Museum Studies, Mason Legacies, and Digital Public History. While last semester my classes felt like preliminary or credit courses, now I feel very excited about the course materials. I’m getting my Master’s in History, specialized in U.S History and Applied History and a New Media focus, which is a fancy way of saying I want to do digital public history in U.S. museums. So these classes on museums, digital history projects, and public history, are fitting.
Before starting this program and taking Intro to Digital Humanities last semester, I had very little experience with Digital Humanities. Of course I used a computer for most of my research, but that’s very surface level. I also did some work with museums and local history companies during my undergraduate to think of digital programming the museum could host, but even then a lot of these programs were limited to powerpoints, videos, and zoom lectures. Now I know of a handful of new ways to display information for museum guests, but there’s still a long way before my student projects begin to look professional in any way.
One of my chief interests in Digital Public History is that it can help to make the history more accessible. Accessibility can take many forms, and my usage here includes a few of them. Online history programs are often more affordable for the audience, in many cases free, and don’t require transit to the museum which is often a roadblock faced by low-income museum visitors and even teachers trying to take students on field trips. Digital programs can also be more accessible for people with disabilities. For instance, many historic site museums are not mobility-inclusive and require visitors to use poorly paved pathways or lots of stairs, which isn’t feasible for many. In other cases less funded museums may only have signage which is not accessible for the blind, or only docents with verbal tours which is not accessible for the deaf. Another way that digital public history can become more accessible is through search engines, someone may be interested in learning about a founding father, google them, and discover they have a historic house museum which begins to answer questions that the visitor hadn’t even thought of. This greater reach is one of the primary reasons why I enjoy digital public history.
Some of my learning goals for this course:
- Learn more tools and techniques for disability-inclusive programming.
- Learn more tools and techniques for interactive and customizable programming.
- Learn about strategies and tools for developing educational video games.
- Learn something I didn’t even know existed but changes my viewpoint.
I look forward to seeing how much my knowledge of digital humanities grows in the next fifteen weeks!
