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: Portfolio
Preservation Technology Podcast: Interviewing the Field as It Changed
What remains is the belief that relationships beyond the walls matter, that cross-disciplinary curiosity matters, and that experimentation matters. Technology can extend the imagination and connect people in ways that allow a shared vision to advance further than any one person or institution could take it alone.
Before I Knew to Call It Heritage: My First Corporate Communications Job
My first job out of college began with a newsletter internship at a paper mill and grew into a regional communications role I largely invented for myself. Looking back at the portfolio now, I can see how much of my later work was already taking shape there: an interest in people, place, storytelling, design, and the connective tissue between them. Decades later, a bronze marker from that period was still standing along a rural roadside, quietly doing the work we created it to do.
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.
Toolkit for developing a community of digital history makers with your own GLAM Cyber Cafe’
The GLAM Café model was designed to give museum, library, archive, and heritage practitioners a regular place to experiment, learn, and build relationships around digital work. Drawing on models such as Wiki Salons, THATCamp, Code for America, and local maker communities, this toolkit explains how to create a low-barrier peer gathering where knowledge moves horizontally. The larger goal is not another conference, but an ongoing community capable of learning and making together.
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.
Natchitoches Historic Foundation: Community-Based Preservation Nonprofit
Board service with the Natchitoches Historic Foundation became an early laboratory for connecting communications, design, technology, and community preservation. The work ranged from newsletters, gala materials, and event displays to the organization’s website—an early WordPress experiment that occasionally provided its own lessons in digital humility. Together, the artifacts show communications functioning as preservation infrastructure: helping a grassroots organization explain its value, build participation, raise support, and connect local people with the places they were trying to protect.
Pinterest, Flickr, and the Road to GLAM-Wiki: Getting Collections Out of the Catalog
Two Othmer collection experiments—ballooning postcards on Pinterest and ceramic Christmas cards on Flickr—show an early shift from catalog-bound collections toward platform-native interpretation, GLAM-Wiki, and public knowledge infrastructure.
Heritage Education: A national model for instilling cultural stewardship
Heritage Education–Louisiana was created as a congressional pilot for a national model that would help teachers use archaeological sites, historic buildings, landscapes, and other local cultural resources in the classroom. Working across education and preservation, the program combined workshops, mini-grants, publications, web resources, and curriculum development. Although federal funding eventually disappeared, the project demonstrated a durable idea: cultural stewardship becomes stronger when heritage is embedded in how young people learn rather than treated as a specialized subject encountered later.
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.