I was actually accepted into all three graduate programs in
Public History that I applied for, and the digital history component of UNC
Charlotte’s program was one of the major deciding factors that led me to select
the program I am now a part of. I had
high expectations for the digital history class, and now that I am nearly
finished with the course I must say I am not disappointed. The entire class was structured around one
major outcome: designing an online
exhibit. We were divided into groups and
each group was required to draft a group contract for their assigned exhibit
topic. My group adhered to our contract
the entire semester, and we learned a great deal along the way to our (now
nearly completed) online exhibit.
Our
professor maintained a Moodle page for the class and we were able to view a
list of pre-approved exhibit topics before we even went to our first
class. As soon as I saw the available
topics I knew exactly what I wanted to do.
One of the topics was the Plaza-Midwood neighborhood. My mother has resided just outside the
Plaza-Midwood neighborhood for the majority of my life, and I’ve always been
enamored with the beautiful, historic homes that dot the streets there. I immediately emailed some students I knew I would
work well with to see if they were interested in working with me and much to my
delight all three agreed they’d like to work with me on the Plaza-Midwood
project. I then sent an email to Dr. Cox
who informed me that it just wasn’t fair for us to pick first, and I spent most
of the first class biting my nails and hoping we’d all be able to work together
on the Plaza-Midwood topic anyway. As
luck would have it, it all worked out and the “From Miracle Mile to
Plaza-Midwood” online exhibition was born.
Our groups
were required to draft a group contract before any of the real work could
begin. Ali, Susan, Sean, and I tend to
be verbose and very detailed, and so our contract was probably much longer and
more complicated than it actually needed to be.
It was four pages long and incredibly specific. I wrote the mission statement
portion of the contract. Our group
believes that Plaza-Midwood is the epitome of the cultural and economic
diversity Charlotte strives to embody.
Our mission, therefore, was to make the history of this incredible
neighborhood available to the public online.
The exhibit will be completed and available to the public online
Thursday, December 13th. Our
mission is thus complete.
The next
step in our contract, and also in the process of building an online exhibit,
was to decide what information we should seek out and put into the exhibit. We
visited the library together to get a feel for our subject. Each member of the
group selected a specific topic to research and agreed to locate ten artifacts
related to that topic. My topic was
building community. Having spent a great
deal of time in Plaza-Midwood myself, I was very interested in showing the rest
of the world just how tightly knit and caring this community is (and always has
been). I knew the best place to unearth
information about how Plaza-Midwood became the caring community it is now was
the Special Collections Room at J. Murray Atkins Library. Marilyn Schuster is the local documents
librarian and she pulled UNC Charlotte’s Plaza-Midwood Collection for me. I spent hours sitting quietly at a desk in
Special Collections, sifting quietly and carefully through every single
document that had been so painstakingly filed away on the history of
Plaza-Midwood. I made a note of the more
interesting items, and then I spent hours staring at each of those items so I
could narrow it down to the ten I thought best embodied the spirit of the
community.
I decided to focus upon the Midwood
Park Project and the numerous annual neighborhood events sponsored by the
Plaza-Midwood Neighborhood Association.
The park was important to highlight because some of the earliest members
of what is now Plaza-Midwood were so concerned that their children did not have
a park to play in that they took it upon themselves to raise the funds for and
build a neighborhood park. The Midwood
Park Project perfectly demonstrates the amazing community spirit inherent in
this neighborhood. It also shows that
people who live in Plaza-Midwood are movers and shakers—they make things
happen. The events were equally
important to my topic because these events really cement the bond that makes
Plaza-Midwood residents such good neighbors.
This community has events nearly every single month—from festivals to
parades, they’ve got it covered.
As a group we agreed that we should
seek to document Plaza-Midwood’s significance utilizing a wide variety of
sources and artifacts. I selected a range of Plaza-Midwood
Neighborhood Association newsletters to best display the diversity of events
present in Plaza-Midwood. The Midwood Park Project includes legal documents and
newspaper clippings. Each of our group members located, scanned, and uploaded a
wide variety of artifacts documenting Plaza-Midwood’s unique history. These artifacts illustrate the transformation
of Plaza-Midwood from a small streetcar suburb to the cultural hub it has now
become. Each artifact had to be properly
scanned and uploaded to the Omeka website.
Then we had to enter metadata into Dublin Core for each object. Dublin Core was something each of us struggled
with in different ways. I was fortunate in
that I had utilized Dublin Core previously, but I had forgotten a great deal
and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to remember how to use it. Dr. Cox arranged an Omeka workshop with
Heather McCollough, one of our university’s brilliant librarians, and I felt
much better about the whole thing.
Our group then decided that each of
us should be responsible for ensuring the success of a particular portion of
the exhibit building process. Sean
Whittaker is very tech savvy and so he was selected to serve as the website
administrator, and he was to be contacted with any technical issues that
arose. Susan Mayer was the most familiar
with Dublin Core and so she was made responsible for item processing and
ensuring we were all using the same tags for our metadata. Ali Weidrich is incredibly organized and
serves as editor’s assistant for one of UNC Charlotte’s scholarly journals,
thus she was the logical choice to supervise the input of our bibliographical
information. I attended UNC Charlotte as
an undergraduate as well as a graduate student, and I am nearly finished with
two graduate degrees so I was placed in charge of research and research related
questions were directed at me. Each of
us has different strengths and we utilized those strengths in our various roles
to ensure the success of this exhibit. Finally, we created a schedule with
deadlines for our group. I am proud to
say each and every one of us adhered to that schedule.
We were each able to locate ten
pertinent artifacts, scan and upload those items onto the Omeka website, and
troubleshoot most of our own issues without outside assistance. Our exhibit was very much an experience in
trial and error. I learned more by what
I did wrong and then had to correct than I learned by anything I did
right. For instance, I had always
listed myself as “Creator” in Dublin Core and I learned during this class that
I am not the creator because I did not actually create the object in question.
Further, while I have always known
the value of having a great group of people on your team this semester that
lesson was really driven home. I’ve had
a lot of personal issues to deal with and I have only had access to my own
transportation sporadically the last few months. My fellow group members have been amazing in
working with my schedule to ensure that we can all meet and get things
done. We’ve also communicated really
well throughout this process, and managed to always keep one another abreast of
any issues that arose. Our project went
very smoothly and I credit the talented and intelligent individuals on my team
for the successful completion of this project.
1 comment:
Yay! You made it.
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