Rachel Penniman discusses the Emerging Conservation Professionals Network and its effort to connect students, newcomers, and early-career conservators through the social web. The conversation shows digital media being used not simply for public outreach but to strengthen a professional community from within—creating peer networks, sharing knowledge, and giving newer practitioners greater visibility and voice in a field built around the long-term care of cultural resources.
Category Archives: The Voices
Interviews, podcasts, video, oral histories, profiles, and recovered conversations documenting what other people know, practice, remember, adapt, and transmit. This lane treats interview media as folkloristic fieldwork: primary documentation of living cultural knowledge, with attention to the informal practices, cultural meanings, memories, relationships, technologies, and forms of authority that formal accounts often miss.
Meet the Blogger: Dan Cull on Conservation for the i-Generation
Conservator Dan Cull reflects on how blogging changed both his professional confidence and his understanding of conservation as a cultural practice. His writing became a way to engage with ideas beyond his immediate workplace and to argue for a more collaborative, interdisciplinary model of conservation. The interview captures the social web functioning as professional infrastructure: a place where individual practitioners could test ideas, build networks, and challenge established organizational boundaries.
Podcast: Dale Jarvis on the art of storytelling on the World Wide Web
Storyteller and folklorist Dale Jarvis explores how traditional storytelling might survive—and find new audiences—through podcasts, Twitter, and other emerging online media. Rather than treating technology as a replacement for oral tradition, he experiments with meeting younger audiences in the spaces they already inhabit. The conversation asks an enduring question for digital heritage: how can new forms of transmission expand access while preserving the power of story, place, and human connection?
Nina Simon on museum participation and curating a second life in the social space
Museum 2.0 founder Nina Simon argues that the most important lesson of social media for museums is not necessarily the technology itself, but the participatory philosophy behind it. This conversation examines audience involvement, the time required to sustain online engagement, and ways museums can redesign visitor experiences around contribution and interaction even without a digital tool. It captures an early articulation of participation as an institutional practice rather than a social-media campaign.
Voices of the Past Audio Podcast: Conducting a cultural resource survey of the UT-Austin campus (with Fran Gale)
Preservation specialist Fran Gale discusses a Getty Foundation-supported cultural-resource survey of the University of Texas at Austin’s historic campus. The project combined documentation of significant buildings and landscapes with a broader management plan, graduate instruction, professional workshops, and interpretation. The conversation offers a practical example of preservation as a system: research, planning, education, and public understanding working together to guide stewardship of a complex historic environment.
David Connolly V-log: “Tickling” the tombs
Archaeologist David Connolly reports from the first day of a survey at Jerash, Jordan, using short-form video to bring fieldwork directly to an online audience. He revisits the site, assesses the effectiveness of protective measures, and captures the reaction of someone entering one of the tombs for the first time. The piece is an early Voices experiment in treating archaeological fieldwork itself as something that could be documented and shared almost immediately.
Thanks for the Legacy
The first Voices of the Past blog post honors Natchitoches preservation advocate Saidee Newell, whose ability to recognize people’s talents and mobilize them in service of cultural heritage left a lasting local legacy. Written just after a presentation about social media and preservation, the piece connects her curiosity about reaching younger generations with the purpose of the new site: using heritage journalism and emerging media to continue the work of connecting people to preservation.