National Council on Public History Conference- Part 4

Part 4 starts off with the project Beyond Steel created by Lehigh University. It is a live project and can be found here at http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/beyondsteel/. As I am writing this, I am having quite a bit of fun exploring the different features of this site and I highly recommend that you go do the same. A grant funded project started in 2004, Beyond Steel is meant to capture the middle of the 19th century through the 20th century. In addition to Sanborn Maps of the area, extensive work has been done to find out the history of the places on the maps- heads of households, their wives and family make up, their occupations, and if there are boarders living in houses. This information is arranged alphabetically by surname and by location, so if you want to know for example who lived at 445 Vine, you can do a search and find that Clinton H Bitting lived at the address in 1900 according to the Sholes directory. Just for your information, he was a tinsmith and his wife's name was Minnie. In addition to that, you can even get an image of the source and see exactly where the information came from (in this case page 173 of the directory). During the presentation, we were told that there were 600 items on the site, which might not seem like a lot, but considering one item (the directory) has multiple pages (522), there is plenty of information to go around. There are also a multitude of essays and numerous photos. There is a comment feature on the photos, which will be extremely useful in identifying the people in them. The goal was to portray the industry and society of the area, and I feel that this project did exactly that. Again, go visit the website and explore it on your own; it really is quite something.

The presentation on the Knowledge Cube is the only one that really confused me, maybe it was because the movie about what it is didn't work or because it is still in the concept stage. I think it is most certainly a mix of both, this was one of those times when it is important to make sure that everything works on a powerpoint presentation when it isn't on your own computer, but I have to give the presenter a lot of credit for making due without it. Looking at just the presentation, she also spoke the loudest, having sat in the back for the previous projects. Anyhow from what I gathered, the Knowledge Cube is in development at Clarkson University and the project is being handled by numerous departments there. It is a project of in house collaboration, which a univerity setting is perfect for. On the campus of Clarkson is a building called Old Main; it isn't in use anymore. Knowledge Cube is bringing it back to life in a virtual sense as the setting of the project is located in it. However, the walls of the virtual Old Main are meant to melt away to present new objects, to create a dialogue about them, and history, so as not to make it seem like an alternate reality. The first run of Knowledge Cube will be static, but as time goes on, interactivity will be added. One of the more interesting aspects of the project so far (I'm sure there will be many more as the project is further developed) is that Knowledge Cube has been created completely using "off the shelf technology" such as Qlab (usually used in theatrical production). There has been no special Clarkson only programming, which is a great thing, so when Knowledge Cube is finished, it will show a multitude of universities, organizations, and locations just what can be acheived using available technologies.

I could write about the next project at this point, which is on Fredricksburg, but I feel that due to its subject matter, it belongs in Part 5 with the Civil War Mapping project. If I could have changed one thing about the organization of the session it would have been the organization of the projects, because some are similar to others. I would have had the Beyond Steel project come after the GIS in Annapolis, and the Maine Memory Network and the Fox Point project (will be in part 5) come after the Massachusetts Studies Network but before PhilaPlace. I can see the point of organizing it this way (if there was a method to its organization that is) because it prevents one from confusing similar projects together, but I just like it better when similar things are grouped more or less together.