Tag Archives: public history

Give the People What They Want

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By Autumn R. Neal

The one thing I love about education is that no matter what subject you are studying you’re learning about other disciplines at the same time. That’s something I have enjoyed most about this project. I don’t feel like I’m only working on something in history. In the last two semesters, I have learned about and worked with Photoshop, various social media platforms, HTML, and video programs. I’ve already talked about how Photoshop and HTML have changed the way I look at my work but now let’s talk about this video. The video is supposed to be like a commercial with a voice over. It is meant to present information in a certain way that will grab the viewer’s attention, hook them, and make them want to go further into the website. I’ve had to think about what a viewer might want to see. So now I feel like I’m working in marketing. It’s difficult trying to imagine something from a prospective viewer’s point of view. I keep trying to think of what I would want to see if I were browsing the Internet and came across a website like this. What would I want to see in an introduction video? What would hook me and make me want to go look at the site? At the same time, I’m also trying to imagine what might bore me and drive me away. It’s like an episode of Mad Men. Maybe I should invest in some cigars.

HTML

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By Autumn R. Neal

One of the most entertaining parts of put the Edgar Snow Project together was working with HTML. Before the course last semester, I didn’t know anything about HTML and had no idea what all those weird symbols are that show up when you copy text (e.g. Ben & Jerry’s). It seems like it would be really difficult to learn but understanding the basics and learning enough to format some text was a fairly easy and fun process. However, I wouldn’t know the first thing about building a site from scratch so I have a ton of respect for anyone who knows how to do that.

HTML

HTML With Slugs (Click Me!)

HTML

Text with Highlighted Links (Click Me!)

For the Edgar Snow Project, the main task that involved HTML was linking each exhibit item (or record) with its corresponding word or phrase within the main text. As you move through the site, keywords are highlighted and when you click on them, you’ll be moved to a certain area on the map and a box will open that contains a photo, document, or excerpt. I may be giving away some secrets here but each item has an associated keyword, or slug and this needs to be inserted into the text HTML. The keyword and the select words in the paragraph would look something like this <span data-neatline-slug=”keyword”>words in paragraph</span>. With about 65 items, it got confusing at times trying to keep the map locations and slugs organized but with the power of multiple browser windows I think it turned out well.

Narration and Music

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By Autumn R. Neal

The introduction video to the Edgar Snow Project was always meant to have narration and I knew from the beginning that I did not want to record the audio myself. It would be awkward hearing your own voice over and over as you’re trying to perfectly edit an audio track. Initially, I thought I’d ask one of my classmates to record it until I had a groundbreaking idea. Actually, it wasn’t groundbreaking and I should have thought of it long before I did. My good friend, Erika Baker, is a theatre actress in local Kansas City theatre so I asked if I could hire her in exchange for some baked goods. I already had some audio editing software and an external microphone so she came over and after a couple practice runs we had a nice audio track.

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In reality, we had some technical difficulties and, in the end, recorded one long track full of errors and laughter which I edited out later. I’ve been working on layering the voice and music tracks and attempting to artfully match them up with the scrolling photos. Over the past few weeks, I had tried to have a couple other people record the audio but it didn’t work out. Throughout those attempts though, I learned that a lot of people in their mid-twenties do not know who Mao Zedong is and don’t know how to pronounce his name. Granted, they weren’t history majors, but I think he’s a pretty important historical figure. Is this an example of why we need public history?

Music and Copyright

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By Autumn R. Neal

I thought the Edgar Snow Project intro video would be more interesting with an audio track of traditional or semi-traditional Chinese music so I’ve been looking for some recently. In Digital History last semester we learned that you can’t use just any audio track even if you give the author credit. I’ll try to explain it, but I am not an expert in this area so bear with me. The majority of music, photos, films, and any other created products are under copyright. If you want to use them you have to purchase a license which can cost a ton of money.

Foto3Foto4However, there is an organization called Creative Commons which allows people to create and share their digital products under their own terms. Some of these items can’t be used for commercial means unless you purchase a license, but some can be used as long as you don’t build upon them (using audio in a video with scrolling images would be considered building upon them) and others can be used, edited, and built upon in any way as long as you credit the original author. There are a lot of sites with CC music, but you’ll have to sort through a lot of tracks in search of the perfect one. If you’re interested in reading more about copyright, check out my blog post “No One Can Do to Disney, Inc. What Walt Disney Did to the Brothers Grimm”.

Condensing Text

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By Autumn R. Neal

When I submitted the final text for the Edgar Snow Project, I realized that I had not written about the exhibit items and how they would fit within the main text. I mentioned before that each item on the map would be linked to a word within the text. When we began the site last semester, each of us covered different years of Snow’s life so, naturally, there was some overlap between them. One challenge in this was figuring out where to place exhibit items in the rewritten text, especially where the years overlapped. I also wanted to make sure to highlight some of the most important events in Snow’s life which were listed in a pamphlet from the Missouri State Historical Society. If it sounds confusing right now, believe me, it was even more confusing trying to sort it out in my head. My solution to this was to print out the entire, unedited text from all five sections and come up with a system for keeping everything straight.

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These are two of the ten pages I worked through.

The blue words represent the significant points in Edgar Snow’s life from the pamphlet mentioned earlier and the pink words represent website links that were in the original sections. I also wrote notes on how to rewrite the text and included some info on the “slugs” for the HTML (which I’ll talk about soon). I know it looks like a confusing mess, but it made perfect sense to me, somehow. In the end, I had over ten printed pages which had multiple colors and notes. This is a perfect example of how something that looks so chaotic could actually be very organized and, if we are going by this article, my messy work habits might have some benefits. Maybe.

The Power of Speaking

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By Autumn Neal

In my last two posts I talked about the issues I ran into trying to make a video and navigating Apple products as a PC user. Over the past couple months, though, I have found a lot of things about my iPhone that I love and am so grateful to have discovered. One of those things is the amazing voice to text feature. Sometimes it seems like I can’t type fast enough before the great idea that I had disappears. One day I was messing around with my phone while working on the main text for the Edgar Snow Project and ended up using the voice to text feature to copy some quotes into Google Docs. Then I copied the text from my PC’s browser and pasted it into Word. It made the process so much easier. Let’s be honest though, the technology is not perfect and comes up with some very strange things. In one sentence, it wrote out “where I was” as “Rose”. Maybe I slur. The feature was good for this project because I was copying some quotes from Edgar Snow’s memoir to include in the exhibit. It is pretty difficult to type and hold a book open at the same time, so being able to simply read the passage and then use copy and paste saved me from a lot of frustration. It seems simple but over the past month I have used it for almost all of my writing projects. I just wish I had discovered it sooner than two months before graduation. There’s always Grad School.

#2 – Technology Solutions

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Foto 2By Autumn Neal

I may be late to the party on this one, but it is possible to get iMovie (or any new app) if you are running an older iOS. All you have to do is buy it from a different device and then download the app from “purchased apps”. As I said before, I am a PC user so this information may be common knowledge to Mac users, but I didn’t know this was possible and definitely did not want to update my old iPad to iOS8. As soon as I solved that issue, I was finally able to start some real work on the Edgar Snow Project introduction video. It was surprisingly easy to make a nice looking video and even easier to add and edit an audio track. I’ve never used iMovie and without this internship it may have been a while until I did. I feel more confident now that I have this experience because I think small abilities like this make you more marketable. I follow a lot of institutions on Twitter and Facebook and realize that social media and technology are more important than ever in public history and museum world. The ability to make simple videos goes far beyond this project and can be applied in a variety of career situations.

#1 – Technology Issues

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By Autumn Neal

This project has introduced me to a lot of new technology that I hadn’t used before. Like I discussed before I learned how to digitize and use Photoshop, among other things. In addition to that I have had to learn new things about my computer and iPad. I mentioned before that I am making a video that will play at the beginning of the website and to do that I need to combine multiple photos and audio in a video making program. I don’t think I’ve ever made a video like this before, so I wanted to use an easy program and iMovie was recommended by a few different people. The only issue is that I am a PC user. I have an iPad and iPhone, but they are few years old and the App Store won’t allow me to download iMovie unless I have iOS8. Then you get the dreaded rejection message.

FotoAs we all know, older devices slow down a lot if you put a new operating system on them and I am not excited about that. Even though I have not resolved this issue yet but I wanted to blog about it to talk about the challenges that you face when working with technology. Sometimes you don’t have the luxury of working with the newest products so you have to find some way to work around it. Right now I’m going through a list of PC equivalents to iMovie hoping that I can find a good one. We will have to wait and see what I come up with.

A Note from an Impatient American Historian

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Nothing happens fast when you are working on a collaborative public history project. There are a thousand pieces of a puzzle that must all come to together. Visits to archives, conversations with those who may know where information might be found, documents must be perused, phone calls made, emails sent, meetings attended, drafts of papers, and more drafts of papers, daydreams, lots of daydreams, favors asked, and favors called in. (Which reminds me I need to add Thank You notes to my ever-growing list of things to do.) All these things are all aimed at that magic moment where an exhibit, single artifact, or piece of writing strikes the viewer or reader with that A-ha! moment. They get it. It sticks. They take it with them down the road and they share it.

I just got back from my first Missouri Conference on History in Jeff City. It was my first conference where I delivered a paper away from the comfort of UMKC. That 20-minute paper took a year to come together and its not finished yet. If I taught and shared a tenth of what I learned it was a great trip. I participated and heard a lot of conversations where ideas and research was shared. There were authored PhDs, undergrads, grads, amateurs, and professionals all sharing their research and ideas, mingling together shaking hands, renewing old acquaintances and exchanging e-mails with the new ones. It was the most attended MHC so far and I’ve realized more than ever that creating history is all about planning and collaboration. No good project is the work of a single author, exhibitor, designer, or researcher. They’re already planning for the next conferences. In 2015 it returns to KC and I can’t wait!

Time, collaboration, planning, that’s what creates good public history. It’s an example of good old-fashioned American democracy in action and at its best. And it ain’t easy and doesn’t happen fast.