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.
Category Archives: Public Knowledge & Culture
Work about access, shared knowledge, interpretation, institutions, communities, cultural meaning, and the systems through which knowledge becomes public.
Dale Kronkright on Shaping Georgia O’Keeffe’s Digital Image
At the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, conservator Dale Kronkright helped test computational imaging technologies while making the research process visible to the public through digital media. This conversation explores the Georgia O’Keeffe Imaging Project as both a conservation experiment and a communications strategy: sophisticated documentation technologies paired with relatively simple online storytelling to connect conservation research, collections, and audiences.
Laura Bang on classroom digital humanities projects at Villanova University
Laura Bang discusses two student-built digital humanities projects at Villanova University: one interpreting the history of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and another centered on a historic Peruvian manuscript. The projects show how relatively modest digital tools can support research, preserve cultural identity, and give students practical experience working with collections while learning that digital humanities is as much about interpretation and context as technology.
Philip Graham on partnering research with social media outreach at a national level
Philip Graham of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland describes an unusually coordinated approach to digital heritage: research institutions working across organizational boundaries to connect collections, public engagement, open technologies, and user contributions. The conversation examines Scotland’s Digital Futures work, the Canmore database, cross-institutional partnerships, and the difficult but essential work of building internal support for digital outreach.
The Earth Pyramid: Giving the world a chance to become a part of history
The Earth Pyramid project imagined a new monument containing contributions from governments, Indigenous peoples, and children around the world, sealed for a thousand years for future generations. Steve Ward describes an ambitious mixture of ancient building traditions, contemporary engineering, global participation, education, and social media. The project raises an unusually literal question about cultural transmission: what would our generation deliberately choose to preserve and communicate to people living a millennium from now?
Archaeology 2.0: Open Context Means Deeper Connections to Broader Audiences
How open archaeological data and digital publishing can connect research with broader audiences and enable reuse beyond individual projects.
Can you help this heritage project? Cahokia Mounds and the This Place Matters Community Challenge
This appeal highlights Cahokia Mounds as both a World Heritage Site and a landscape still vulnerable beyond its protected boundaries. By connecting the National Trust’s This Place Matters campaign with the need to acquire threatened archaeological land, the post demonstrates an early form of digital preservation advocacy: using online networks not simply to raise awareness, but to mobilize people around a specific action that could materially affect a heritage resource.
Can you help this heritage project? Using GlobalGiving to restore a kullë house in Gjirokastra, Albania
Adventures in Preservation used the GlobalGiving platform to raise money and public attention for restoration training at a traditional kullë house in Gjirokastra, Albania. The campaign connected crowdfunding, social media, preservation education, and hands-on conservation in a World Heritage city. More than a fundraising story, it shows heritage organizations experimenting with digital platforms to build a distributed community of supporters around work that had previously depended heavily on institutional grants and participants.
Rootstech Family History & Technology Conference – Day 1.2
Charleen Mullenweg’s field notes from the first RootsTech conference capture genealogy at a moment of rapid technological change. From portable scanners and laptops to new storage options and research tools, the conference floor made visible how dramatically family-history practice was shifting. Her account is valuable not just as a list of gadgets, but as evidence of genealogy becoming a technology-driven field while still remaining fundamentally concerned with people, evidence, memory, and connection.
Rootstech Family History & Technology Conference – Day 1
Reporting from the inaugural RootsTech conference, Charleen Mullenweg encounters a gathering built explicitly around the convergence of genealogy and technology. Her observations capture both the enthusiasm and the learning curve of a field adapting to new digital research methods, online communities, and emerging tools. The piece documents a moment when family history was moving decisively beyond archives and desktop software toward a more connected ecosystem of platforms, devices, institutions, and individual researchers.