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.
Category Archives: Tutorials
Practical guides, toolkits, primers, and instructional resources that help people apply technology, methods, or communication practices to cultural heritage work.
Developing a Community of Digital History Makers with a GLAM Cyber Café
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.
My Heritage Twitter Lists, Developed Over a Decade
After more than a decade of using Twitter, Jeff Guin explains how curated lists became more useful to him than the general feed. Organized around fields such as archaeology, archives, built heritage, conservation, and digital humanities, the lists function as a lightweight professional listening system. The post is less about Twitter itself than about deliberate information architecture: creating focused channels that help practitioners find useful people, conversations, and ideas amid the noise of social media.
Timelapse for Cultural Sites: 9 Ideas + Tools
Timelapse photography can make slow change visible, whether the subject is a blooming plant, a conservation treatment, a construction project, or a changing cultural landscape. This toolkit offers practical use cases and equipment ideas for heritage organizations interested in experimenting with the format. Its interpretive strength lies in compression: moments separated by hours, months, or years can be brought together to reveal processes that visitors would otherwise never be able to perceive.
Promote the Heritage of Your Community with Interactive Google Maps Tours
This guide shows how simple online maps can become tools for place-based interpretation, heritage tourism, volunteer coordination, and community storytelling. Using Louisiana’s Cane River region as an example, it walks through setting goals, selecting sites, adding context, and building a useful interactive tour. The central lesson is still sound: mapping works best when it does more than mark locations, helping people understand relationships among place, history, access, and story.
A 3D Documentation Primer for Cultural and Historic Sites
This primer introduces laser scanning and photogrammetry as increasingly practical tools for documenting cultural sites and objects in three dimensions. It explains how the technologies work, where their strengths and limitations differ, and how preservation data can also support interpretation through virtual experiences and interactive displays. The post marks an important convergence: documentation technology originally developed for accuracy and conservation beginning to serve public access and storytelling as well.