The Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879-1918), the first government-run off-reservation boarding school in the U.S., is a major site of memory for many Native peoples, as well as a source of research and study for descendants, students, and scholars in the U.S. and abroad. The Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center (http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu), supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, represents a collaborative effort to aid the research and teaching process by bringing together online a variety of resources that are physically preserved in various locations around the country. Through this project, we seek to increase knowledge and understanding of the school and its complex legacy, while also facilitating efforts to tell the stories of the thousands of students who were sent there. Begun in 2013, the project includes more than 100,000 pages of documentation from the U.S. National Archives, and has already been used by a wide variety of audiences.
Through this interactive presentation we will demonstrate the current website tools and capabilities, we will discuss the implementation of interactive tools/crowdsourcing for users to share their own material, and we will talk about some of the logistical challenges of this large collaborative undertaking. We will also address the important roles of our undergraduate interns in this effort and talk about how the project has already been used for individual research and in the classroom. Finally, we will discuss some of the unique challenges of digitizing and presenting complex and emotionally charged historical material online.
In this work-in-progress session, Susquehanna University faculty, students and staff will explore how a new campus-wide Omeka program transformed a Pennsylvania history course. The faculty member will discuss the origins of the project as an exercise to change students’ perception of local history as a quaint and pleasant pursuit lacking a critical edge by highlighting the role of violence in threatening or supporting imperial power relations. He will also explore the implications of changing the course’s final project from an offline exhibit presented to a hypothetical public to an online exhibition that students present to community members. The students will discuss how their research and interpretive skills are shaped by encountering community members who live in the spaces they are researching and sharing their work online. The University’s instructional technologist and digital scholarship librarian will discuss creating a sustainable digital exhibition program that includes effective Omeka training and support.
Team members will seek attendees’ thoughts and ideas on next steps for the project, such as incorporating community feedback into the repository and making connections with heritage tourism. If there is time and interest, the team and audience will also discuss collaboration with area high school students working on National History Day projects.
History Harvest (http://historyharvest.unl.edu) is a collaborative, team-oriented, student-centered and community-based project that contributes to the democratization and accessibility of American history by collecting and sharing the experiences and artifacts of everyday people and local historical institutions in an open web archive. Working with local history organizations, undergraduate students conduct each harvest with the support of graduate students and professors. During the harvest, community members are invited to share their letters, photographs, objects, and stories, and participate in a conversation about the significance and meaning of their materials. Each artifact is digitally captured and then shared in a web-based archive for future use and study. The History Harvest project aims to raise visibility and public conversation about history and its meaning, as well as provide a new foundation of publicly available material for historical study, K-12 instruction, and lifelong learning.
The History Harvest also provides students a unique and often transformative hands-on experience with historical work. As a digital initiative, the project takes advantage of innovative new technologies to engage students in building history, reflecting on historical change, collaborating to create interpretive accounts of the materials they collect and sharing what they find with others.
This presentation focuses on the History Harvest as a pedagogical process that utilizes student interaction with the public to engage with larger historical concepts.
