This short guide is primarily targeted to students new to oral history, who might not yet feel comfortable reaching out to strangers, or even friends, for an oral history interview. There are a number of tips in here that will make you more effective in the process of oral history interviews, but much of this information is more broadly applicable to public history practice and community engaged scholarship.
Read MoreThis tutorial walks you through the process of taking your rectified map from MapWarper and connecting it to your ArcGIS StoryMap.
Read MoreI’ve put together a set of introductory readings on multimodality and thought that others might find it useful and/or interesting,
Read MoreAs public historians in the 21st century, a digital profile is pretty much par-for-the-course. Not only is it essential for navigating the job market, but keeping your digital profile active and updated will allow you to engage with broader publics and become more effective collaborators and communicators.
Read MoreThe COVID-19 Oral History Project is one of several research projects in which historians and museum curators are collecting stories about the lived experience of COVID-19. This important work is being contextualized by journalists, who see the importance of this archiving work for future generations.
Read MoreThis tutorial builds upon our teaching modules that explored Google My Maps and Google Earth. In it, I will introduce Leaflet.js—a javascript-based program for hosting maps on your website.
Leaflet.js is open source and provides quite a bit of functionality that goes beyond the basic features of Google Maps. And, for those who wish to host maps on their own websites, it’s a relatively simple and low-cost option.
In this tutorial, we walk through a series of steps to understand the basics of Leaflet.js. The tutorial provides an example of how to create a basic map using a georectified historical map from MapWarper and a kml layer that we create in Google My Maps.
Read MoreThis post introduces teachers and students to the process of georectifying maps so that historical maps can be used in programs such a Google Earth, QGIS, and ArcGIS. It provides a step-by-step tutorial on how to find historical maps, georectify them, and output them for use in research and in the classroom.
Read MoreToday, I am going to work with you on some basic audio editing techniques. As you will remember from class, we could use any number of programs to edit, such as GarageBand or Audacity. Since we all have a free subscription to Adobe Audition, I am going to demonstrate with it.
While the techniques that I am showing you today look different in different programs, all audio editing programs have the functionality that I am demonstrating.
Read MoreWe’ve finally gotten to microphones. A quality microphone might be the most important factor in creating a good recording rather than a bad recording.
I have already talked about onboard microphones a bit in the first entry in this series on recording devices. That’s pretty much all I have to say about built-in mics. They’re fine for getting the job done—if content is more important than quality.
For many public history applications, we would much prefer to have great content and a quality recording. To do this, we need good microphones that are set up so that they record what we want them to record and ignore what we want them to ignore.
Read MoreIn this second installment for “Digital Audio for Public Historians,” I want to have a look at one of the basic recording options available on mid-range recorders: the option to have a mono or stereo recording. We will use sample recordings from the 1960s to illustrate a few key principals, including recordings of James Baldwin, The Beach Boys, and The Beatles.
Read MoreAs we discussed in yesterday’s class, public historians might use audio recordings for a number of different projects: oral histories, podcasts, audio clips for exhibitions, documentaries, among other things.
We were able to play a bit with different recording devices—from smartphones, to computers, to low and and high end voice recorders.
It became obvious very quickly that both the equipment we used and the recording conditions had a huge effect on the quality of our recordings.
Over my next several posts, I am going to review some of the things that we discussed in class as well as go into a little bit more detail about how to use the hardware and software for public history applications.
Today, I want to talk a little bit about recording devices.
Read MoreAn infographic explaining how podcasts work.
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