A brief Wolfsonian-FIU chapter, reconstructed through surviving video work, showing early experiments in participatory storytelling, curator-led interpretation, installation documentation, and the institutional conditions that shaped what came next.
Category Archives: Case Studies
Concrete projects, experiments, and implementations examined for what they reveal in practice: the problem, the approach, what happened, what changed, and what remains useful. These case studies connect cultural heritage, technology, storytelling, public knowledge, and institutional work through real-world experience rather than abstract prescription.
Greg Baldwin Oral History: Memory and Activism in the AIDS Era
A two-day oral history with Greg Baldwin became a layered digital presentation of Miami LGBTQ+ history — video, full audio, transcript, context, and a public-knowledge afterlife. This is the story, the presentation, and the toolkit behind it.
Case Study: Yours Truly, an interactive archives project
Yours Truly transformed thousands of pieces of Vizcaya correspondence into an interactive storytelling experience built around human-centered design. Rather than simply digitizing archival material, the project asked visitors to explore James Deering’s personality and choices through letters, multimedia, QR-triggered interpretation, and a responsive content system. The result connected archival access, visitor experience, infrastructure, and storytelling in a single platform that also created a foundation for future digital interpretation at Vizcaya.
Knight Foundation makes a digital heritage dream possible
A $100,000 Knight Foundation grant gave Vizcaya the opportunity to turn years of interest in 3D documentation into a practical visitor-experience project. Working with university and technology partners, the initiative combined photogrammetry, laser scanning, 3D printing, kiosks, and virtual experiences to interpret spaces visitors could not physically access. The project illustrates how emerging technology becomes useful when preservation, interpretation, institutional support, and external partnerships are designed together.
Crowdsourcing Historical Memory with TellHistory
TellHistory combined crowdsourced video memories with themes, timelines, and maps to place personal stories within larger historical contexts. Founders Alex Whitcomb and Sarah Hayes discuss how they lowered barriers to contribution, built participation, used social media to grow the project, and shaped individual testimony into a shared public resource. The project demonstrates how digital platforms can connect oral history, geographic context, and community contribution without reducing memory to isolated content fragments.
Search engine optimization case study for heritage websites
At the Chemical Heritage Foundation, a focused SEO experiment tested whether stronger content structure could increase discovery of authoritative historical information. Ten high-traffic biography pages were enriched with video, images, internal and external links, related content, Wikipedia connections, and search-aware language, then evaluated against analytics data. The case study treats search visibility not as marketing trivia but as an access problem: valuable cultural knowledge has little public impact if people cannot find it.
Lessons Cooper Hewitt learned in the making of “The Pen”
Cooper Hewitt’s Pen looked deceptively simple: a physical object visitors could use to collect and interact with museum content. Behind it was a much larger institutional system involving collections data, APIs, gallery design, hardware development, visitor behavior, branding, and years of iteration. These notes from Museums and the Web capture the project’s less glamorous lessons—trade-offs, technical dependencies, cost, failure, and the realization that a successful interactive can touch nearly every part of an institution.
The Burning of Columbia uses digital media to commemorate history
Historic Columbia used websites, social media, and real-time historical storytelling to mark the 150th anniversary of the Burning of Columbia during the Civil War. Carrie Phillips explains how the organization defined its goals, coordinated platforms, divided responsibilities, and designed an experience that let audiences encounter historical events with greater immediacy. The project shows how digital commemoration can connect place, chronology, archival material, and public participation without treating history as a one-way broadcast.
GLAM-Wiki use case for cultural heritage institutions
At the Chemical Heritage Foundation, a Wikipedian in Residence program turned Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons into extensions of the institution’s collections-access strategy. The initiative contributed images, improved articles, trained staff, hosted edit-a-thons, and reached audiences far beyond the museum’s own website. The case study demonstrates a shift from asking people to visit institutional platforms toward placing reliable cultural knowledge inside the public knowledge systems people already use.
Museum Interactive: Alchemical Quest Rare Books Exhibit Case Study
Alchemical Quest documents the development of a digital interactive created around rare books and alchemical imagery at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. The project required choices about interpretation, interface design, content production, hardware, visitor behavior, and the relationship between a digital experience and physical objects. The case study is especially valuable for what it reveals about complexity: even a relatively small museum interactive depends on coordination across curatorial, technical, design, and operational systems.