Hot Brainstem

Heritage Philadelphia Program – 8 Sites, 1 Bus, 100s of Stories
Virginia Trip June 9-11, 2010
Matt Herbison’s Raw Notes

Matt’s main topics for follow-up meeting June 28

-If HPP’s goal is to ask people to think beyond the obvious when it comes to public history, to develop meaningful engagement strategies in the 21st century, it is naive to not discuss online engagement and how to tie it to in-house/onsite interpretation
–How does an institution/site/museum engage and interpret in an online environment?
–Is online approach standalone, an alternative, an extension, a primer, or a carrot to come to the site?
–It is a mistake to not incorporate a online interpretive plan into overall (see DUCOM planning grant)…but not unexpected since tech incorporation is unfamiliar, all over the map, and expensive
–Will sites be in trouble if they can’t start creating a tighter connection between online and on-site offerings (especially as money for field trips is shrinking). Is it possible to move the initial engagement to an online setting?
–What are the digital humanities trends that can be applied to historic sites and institutions?
–Would be a good exercise to assess each site’s website (see links in site-specific notes later in doc)
–Conferences like AAM online conference “Technology, Interpretation, and Education 2010″ June 22-24, 2010 — http://www.aam-us.org/getinvolved/learn/interpretation2010.cfm

-Hard to discuss what works in engaging people with history without establishing the “engagement setting” and the priority of “engagement goals,” since completely different approaches may be needed depending on the combination

Engagement Setting
1 – Guided school groups (or other kids’ groups)
2 – Guided groups of adults and kids who don’t know each other
3 – Walk-in or self-guided individuals or small groupings
(4 – Preparing teachers to take our interpretive content back to students)

Engagement Goals (how to organize these?)
1a – Inspiration
1b – Knowledge
2a – Conversation
2b – Information
2c – Critical thinking skills
3a – Relevance
3b – Novelty/Coolness/Quaintness (?)

These two variables (ES & EG) form a matrix that could help drive the designs of interpreted engagement opportunities — see draft table below.
…these goals and settings are often at odds with each other, e.g.:
-Conversation works best with people who know each other or have fairly focused interests (e.g., a K12 class where teacher knows who doesn’t speak up versus Tenement Museum discussions where very little discussion happens)
-Inspiration is hard to predict, especially in self-guided settings
-Relevance works better when interpretation is tweaked to match the audience (e.g., Monticello house guide talking about several Philadelphia connections)

(regarding this matrix)
I feel pretty good about the row-items, but the column ones need a lot more refining.

As it is, it has started to help me think about:
(1) for a particular interpretation approach, what audiences and purposes does it fit (“fitting into”)
(2) before designing your interpretation approach, figuring out what audiences and purposes you want to meet (“getting out of”)

-Considering the different requirements of combinations of Engagement Setting and Engagement Goals, how do you then deal with the inconsistent experiences of visitors?
–Even guided tours and packages can end up being quite different in focus (e.g., Bill A’s women-centric Monticello tour in 2009 versus our 2010 tour)
–Value of having a baseline-setting experience, like a 10 minute introductory movie

-What are the interpretive and engagement values of authenticity of objects and place? (A variation on one of Seth B’s questions)
–Thought and research questions:
—-What if Frederick Douglass House was 100% reproductions instead of 70% original — what if you could sit in his spot at the table? What would be gained and what would be lost?
—-What proportion of visiting audience experience a gut reaction to authentic objects? My only time has been with bits of Lincoln’s skull at National Museum of Health and Medicine (at Walter Reed) but what proportion of people get this feeling touching original documents and artifacts AND is it worth actively acquiring them (like the $50K china pieces bought by Montpelier)
—-Photocopy historical newspapers then throw out originals; photocopy 20th century typescripts then throw out; photocopy 19th century manuscripts and throw out; …what is the point it stops being OK? …and what is the original of a digital object that you print out?
–If a guide/interpreter doesn’t actually use the place, they are missing out on having a anchor to tell the stories, doing teaching not interpreting, and wasting the visitor’s time in coming to that location (E.g., the Mount Vernon slave tour didn’t use place well but the Monticello one was better; our house tours did a better job of using each room as the focus of the story/description)
–There is an assumption that individuals or groups visiting your institution are getting an experience that they can’t get from home, school, television, or the Internet. (Unless you are providing companion material on your website, but that is a separate discussion.) If you are giving them something that would work just as well if they were not visiting, why not save them the money and go to them? Read more…

I tweeted out a question last Friday:
What’s a compelling reason for an archivist who doesn’t know EAD to take a workshop, rather than just skipping the XML & learning AT/Archon?

And got some thoughtful answers (for the most part, Rebecca!):

• @helrond: AT is much easier to learn once you know EAD.
• Susan @kitschqueen: future job opportunities?
• Sibyl Schaefer @sibylschaefer: Sometimes its easier to edit the xml than work through the program. The AT doesn’t do find/replace, for ex.
• Dee Dee @DerangeDescribe: Understanding http://derangementanddescription.wordpress.com/tag/ead!
• Mark Matienzo @anarchivist: you need to understand EAD to do stuff w/ the data. XSLT, etc. also need to understand it’s limitations and how apps implement it.
• Christine Di Bella @cdibella: What, personal growth and the joy of learning ain’t enough? Also, to set ‘em up and actually make the output work, you need to understand what’s behind them at least a little.

I agree with all of these, but especially the last 4 words of Christine’s response, “at least a little.”  I also completely agree and completely disagree with Mark’s comment — I agree with the points but think need is much too strong a word in practice. (Granted, Mark had to get it across in 140 characters while here I can decree loquaciously.)

But for those archivists and librarians who are simply trying to get finding aids done and get stuff online, this could be done by entering their collection info in AT into fields that look familiar (bio, scope, bulk dates, etc.), spend some time figuring out what child and sibling mean (seems to be a tricky point for a lot of people), and clicking the Report button to spit out a finding aid in html or as a pdf.  (For the purposes of this post, I will just refer to AT instead of AT/Archon — this is actually easier to do in Archon if you would use it as a public interface.)

When I first learned EAD, I was using the UNIX vi editor with SGML EAD.  Similarly, when I first started doing web stuff, you had little choice but to write the raw code.  I still feel more assured working in the xml than in AT, the same way that I often prefer working in the html code view rather than a wysiwyg editor.  In general, knowing what’s going on with the guts means that you are more flexible and much more able to troubleshoot.

But these days, there are lots of lovely and useful webpages that have been built by people who I assume don’t know the first thing about html. They’re using existing tools and services that shift the technology burden to someone else (the nerds), thereby allowing them to skip straight to getting stuff online. I’m using WordPress here because it is dead easy, even if some of its code is a bit off.  I use Archivists’ Toolkit because it is much faster and easier than touching the EAD, even if my output is not ideal (which is more the stylesheet than the EAD itself).

To think about this issue a different way: If learning EAD stands in the way of learning a tool like Archivists’ Toolkit or Archon, that as a big problem.  Yes, the “right way” to do it is to learn EAD, DACS, XML, XSLT, and AT.  But I think if someone skipped straight to AT, perhaps taking a 2 or 3 hour AT workshop for some helpful handholding, they would get to a comfort level where they could go back to the repository and start getting stuff online.

Is it negligent to skip straight to AT?  No, and it doesn’t make someone a bad archivist. It is less than ideal and maybe even a bit risky, but it’s also a very practical approach.  And the more I think about it, the more I realize that this is the most immediate value of a tool like AT/Archon.

I welcome your comments, the more horrified the better. Although I’d love to hear from people who have taken this approach.

DisclaimerFest:

1 – If you are at an institution that has either of the following, please disregard this post and get back to submitting your reimbursement receipts for the last conference you went to: A dedicated IT person associated with the library/archives or more than 10 staff members who are some kind of archivist.

2 – This is admittedly a bit disingenuous, using a “skip straight to AT” argument, since the details of installing AT are often beyond the abilities of exactly the type of repositories that would benefit from using it for finding aid production.  I should look into this, but I bet some people are just using the AT Sandbox, exporting the finding aid as html or pdf, and mounting it on their own repository website. After AT and Archon merge, I hope someone offers hosted versions or service subscriptions (like Omeka.net or LibLime).

3 – In the interest of full disclosure, please visit the homely and overly long webpage that contains the finding aids that I have control over: www.phillyseaport.org/library. You will find pdfs, html, and more recent AT-output html finding aids.  I use AT at the Seaport Museum solely for the purposes of outputting finding aids to mount online, not in any way as a long-term archives management system.  I hope to go into why I do this in a later post.