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.
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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…
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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…
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Building a Portable Identity: Designing a Modular Trade Show Booth
A recovered 2005–2007 design project: the modular trade-show booth system I created to make NCPTT’s different preservation disciplines read as one institution—and the surviving files that document how it was built.
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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,…
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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…
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Search Engine Optimization 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,…
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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…
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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…
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GLAM-Wiki 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…