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.
Tag Archives: Design Work
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.
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.
Can you spot the historic inspiration for the Voices of the Past logo?
The Voices of the Past logo grew from an archaeological image that unexpectedly resembled the RSS symbol: a bird motif from a 1,000-year-old pot associated with Middle Mississippian iconography. The post traces how an ancient visual form became the basis for a modern digital identity—an unusually literal expression of the project’s attempt to connect heritage and networked media.
GLAM-Wiki use case 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 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.
Museum Interactive: Alchemical Quest Rare Books Exhibit Case Study
Alchemical Quest documents the development of a digital interactive created around rare books and alchemical imagery at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. The project required choices about interpretation, interface design, content production, hardware, visitor behavior, and the relationship between a digital experience and physical objects. The case study is especially valuable for what it reveals about complexity: even a relatively small museum interactive depends on coordination across curatorial, technical, design, and operational systems.
Case Study: Livestreamed Interactive Webcasts for Cultural Institutions
This case study examines livestreamed webcasts as a way for cultural institutions to extend programs beyond the building while allowing remote audiences to participate in real time. Rather than treating video as simple documentation, the approach combined live production, audience interaction, moderation, institutional expertise, and post-event reuse. The project explores how relatively accessible technologies can turn a physical program into a broader public conversation when participation is designed into the experience from the beginning.
My hipster GTD folder form for keeping projects on track
A homegrown project-management form inspired by David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. The post turns a productivity method into a simple printable artifact for keeping projects visible, bounded, and moving—an early example of translating an abstract workflow idea into a practical tool.
NCPTT Notes Issue 48: Introducing Preservation Today
This publication features the usual training and research articles. A few were written by a promising student journalist named Kevin Clarkston. I was lucky enough to teach Kevin in a Feature Writing class at Northwestern and then have him as a practicum student at NCPTT. One of his articles features the new Preservation Today social media experiment I've been working on.