How Twitter helped me write exhibit labels

This post is part of a blog celebration of two-year anniversary of the #twitterstorians community, organized by the indefatigable Katrina Gulliver.

I’ve spent most of the past two years working on a very large automotive history exhibit. 80,000 sq ft, to be exact–bigger than most museums and probably the biggest exhibit I will ever have the opportunity to help develop. Besides vehicles, the exhibit includes 65 exhibit cases, which are thematic and put automotive history into a broader cultural context. I curated 21 of them.

To avoid museum fatigue and to try to ensure that visitors would read some of the text, we had very severe word limits. I found myself explaining the importance of the Erie Canal in 20 words in a caption to a commorative medal, the entire career of Andrew Riker in 40, the immense importance of kerosene in the 19th century in 20-some, and how a Stirling engine works in a frequently-rewritten 25. And while I was writing, I turned to my experiences—and community—on Twitter.

I’m often asked (and often asked on Twitter) if Twitter has changed my exhibit writing. It has. I live on Twitter and have become very comfortable talking about my own experiences—work, food, bike rides, friendships, religion—140 characters at a time. When I was stumped in label-writing–for instance on that kerosene paragraph, in an exhibit case about American experiences with petroleum–I started breaking my labels up into tweets. When I fatalistically believed I could never fit the content I thought vital for visitors into 45 words, I had to reframe my thinking: this label is three tweets long. I know instinctually how much content can fit in three tweets. These are constraints I understand, constraints that work. And it worked. The words and concepts fell into place in my newly-conceptualized mental space.

Besides reframing my writing into tweets, I benefited from my community on twitter. This includes stalwart historians who tend to use the #twitterstorians hashtag, as well as museum professional colleagues, but it also includes the scientists, writers, journalists and miscellaneous friends who found my process interesting and worth cheering on. Whenever I needed encouragement, syntactical help, or just to complain a little, someone from my extended Twitter community was available. This ambient support and critique helped make my writing possible. Thank you, Twitter, and thank you, #twitterstorians.

 

Roundup for 8/12

Since I seem to be blogging again, here’s a links post on recent topics in publichistoryland.

Various reports, updates and roundups on the document thieves who targeted historical societies, archives and presidential libraries.

 

A costumed first-person interpreter at Plimoth Plantation has a piece in The Hairpin entitled The Ladies of the 17th Century Were Way More Hardcore than You.  The comments alone are priceless, ex:  ”Old Sturbridge Village or gtfo.”

Just released by Left Coast:  Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, edited by Bill Adair, Ben Filene and Laura Koloski.  It’s full of pieces by fabulous museum, history, tech and education people. I will certainly pick up a copy.

The UMass Amherst public history program is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a two-day conference about the future.  Public History 2036 (pdf) will take place on campus Sept 23-24 and features lots of great folks.

Rebekah Higgitt, intrepid historian of science, has branched out from Whewell’s Ghost with a new blog, Teleskopos.  Highly recommended.

Historian of geology Naomi Oreskes has been using history for good to intervene in climate change debates.

Citizen History at the Holocaust Museum.

Forecasting the future of museum ethics, a project of AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums and the Institute of Museum Ethics at Seton Hall.

Have a wildfire?  Call a historian.

A new exhibit space for Harvey Cushing’s collection of brains.

The “Three Societies”–the History of Science Society, the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science and the British Society for the History of Science–meet together every 4 years.  Next July, they’ll be meeting in Philadelphia.

 

Public History of Science and Technology

Remember this conference?

This great event about the Public History of Science and Technology will be happening September 11-14 at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC.  The program is up and registration will soon follow. I’ll be talking about cabinets of curiosity and contemporary museum practice on the 13th, and the program is filled with great colleagues.  Hope to see you there.

 

#alt-ac

Last week the open access book project Alt-Academy:  Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars was officially unveiled by our fearless facilitator and editor Bethany Nowviskie.  In it are lots of thoughtful, challenging essays about careers, identities, labor and respect in fields allied to humanities scholarship from colleagues across the world.  There’s a strong showing from digital humanities folks and academic and special library librarians.  I contributed a piece on public history (natch), and a number of other history colleagues also wrote essays.  Do go read and comment on our lovely book.

 

On disasters

I was about to write a post on libraries and museums in Joplin and across the recent tornado and flooding zones–but it seems useful to take a step back.  I want to understand why I’m so drawn to reflection on cultural heritage responses and recoveries in the face of disasters, both natural and human-made.  There are two ideas here to tease out, I think–the vulnerability of collections to water and fire and earthquakes, and the place of cultural heritage institutions in community recovery.

For the first, many institutions are unprepared for sudden disasters.  We often have disaster plans, but they may not be well-distributed or well-publicized, and staff may not know what to do.  Or the scale of the disaster is beyond staff ability to remediate.  May 1 is a time where we’re supposed to raise awareness about these issues, so here’s your obligatory MayDay for Collections link, with connections to resources. 

Disasters also remind us of our stewardship responsibilities.  At collecting institutions, part of our job is to ensure that the stuff outlives us, so that future visitors can encounter and learn from and wonder at it.  Artifacts like huge pieces of machinery dwarf us and by their sheer bulk may convince us that they are not vulnerable.  But of course they are.  And if/when we let them fall apart, we become part of a story about hubris, and ruins, and the dustiness and incommensurability of the past with the present.  Is this the story we want to embody? 

For the place of LAMs in disaster recovery, I always wonder what I can do as a historian and museum person–as opposed to an EMT–in the face of disaster.  And I’m drawn to the idea of cultural heritage institutions as places of hospitality.  The library in Joplin is open and took no damage, though some staff had their homes destroyed. It’s both service and hospitality to provide a free warm place with electricity and internet access, as well as access to other resources. That’s not nothing in a disaster situation.  Museums are not so good as this, though some have been imagining them as places for community, food, resources, learning and wonder in response to both current challenges and post-apocalyptic scenarios.

I think I cover these disasters, then, in that they affect cultural heritage institutions, because they are opportunities to help both people and collections.  To help people by providing them with space and resources and an assurance that their stories are important; and to help collections by an increasing attention to their physical vulnerability.  And because it’s worthwhile to publicize opportunities to help.

 

THATcamp NCPH

We had a fun, thought-provoking THATcamp unconference today in conjunction with the NCPH annual meeting here in surprisingly beautiful and charming Pensacola.  It was less technical perhaps than some other THATcamps, but it was great to be rooted in public history mindsets and methodologies, and to meet some passionate colleagues.

A few standout sessions and moments:  To start off the morning, I went to a session addressing the tensions around crowds, experts and shared authority.  We had a great discussion about setting up frameworks for participation in UGC and crowdsourcing projects, as well as training.  Mark Tebeau (a colleague I was delighted to meet IRL) talked about how a user in his 70s became a prolific blogger for a local history project.  Anne Whisnant was insightful about crowd/expert issues in her project as well.  I also found myself invoking Nina’s ideas about participatory projects many times over the course of the day.

After attending sessions on maps, building public history community online and oral history, we ended the day with a discussion on “Digital Public History–what is it?”  This is the kind of definitional discussion I usually have limited patience for, but we had an interesting, wide-ranging discussion on DH, public history, and where we fit as a field.  Serge Noiret made a case for why definitions could be useful, especially in European public history contexts:

@sergenoiret:  @publichistorian @amwhisnantdefinition needed because positioning yourself vis-a-vis peers academy historical science #thatcamp #ncph2011

But of course we don’t have a definition for public history, and we don’t have a definition for digital history. (And we spent some time on the equally unanswerable tangent:  is all digital history public history?)  And we don’t need one, I think.  We don’t have a checklist of characteristics that make a history project “public history.” We’re drawn together, instead, by resonances between our institutional missions; our shared values bring us together.  The values of DH are not necessarily the same as those of public history, but they certainly overlap. NCPH’s code of ethics is a good articulation of public history values.

Many thanks to all who attended and who tweeted from afar, and to the NCPH and CHNM folks who helped make it happen.

 

From Off the Wall: historical diaries on twitter

Crossposted from NCPH’s Off the Wall blog, for which I wrote this post under the benevolent editorship of Cathy Stanton.  I’ve closed comments–do comment over there. 

Many unlikely and whimsical projects flourish on Twitter, the popular microblogging service just celebrating its fifth birthday. Big Ben strikes the hour (“bong bong bong”), encounters with near-earth objects are automatically updated (the most recent one missed the Earth by about three million kilometers), a parody account for a politician becomes a compelling scifi short story and the Field Museum’s T-Rex, Sue, turns out to have a wicked sense of humor.

Twitter’s constraints—140 characters per post, period—and affordances—those 140 characters can be filled with anything, communication can be synchronous or asynchronous, anyone can follow a twitter account—have boosted its popularity to around 190 million users. They also give us an opportunity to reflect on its resonances with the past. There is a strong community on Twitter of historians, cultural heritage professionals and genealogists—as well as historical characters tweeting for themselves.

Many have pointed out the connections between the terseness of Twitter and that of the telegrams, and the “telegraphic” language both require because of space constraints (luckily we don’t pay by the character on Twitter). But another familiar connection is with diaries. The factual, semi-public diary entries of line-a-day diarists of the 19th and early 20th centuries are short and pithy enough to make excellent tweets (pdf). Like the tweets of our friends, we follow them for frequent, short updates, enough to get a sense of the rhythms of their lives, what on the web we call “ambient intimacy.” Not every individual tweet will be a masterpiece, emotionally compelling or even interesting. But they help us understand the person who tweets them. The updates of historical diarists enable, not the immersion we desire from living history museums, but the ability to take a brief drink from a river that flowed long ago, and to dip in again whenever we like.

The historical diary is a thriving genre of Twitter performance. There are around a dozen historical diaries currently being tweeted, daily or sporadically. Some are produced by historical organizations and some by descendants of the diarists. There are famous diarists (yes, even Samuel Pepys is on Twitter) and everyday people. In 2009, for instance, the Massachusetts Historical Society started tweeting a diary of John Quincy Adams’ trip to Russia in 1809. He talks about travel, who visited, what he read. And @genny_spencer is the diary of a teenage girl in rural Illinois, tweeted by her descendants. Her great-nephew David Griner posted about the project: “Looking at the terse journal, my sister quipped, ‘This is the Twitter of the 1930s.’ We…immediately began planning the Twitter account…”

For tweeted historical diaries, what started as an imagined resonance between past and future communication technology—the observation that short diary entries feel like Twitter—becomes a real daily connection with people from the past. By reanimating and historical actors, we make this connection between historic communication platforms and Twitter real, and we also make this connection between us and historical characters real. Emotional connections make it real. And that’s a key insight for public history practice in less than 140 characters.