TellHistory combined crowdsourced video memories with themes, timelines, and maps to place personal stories within larger historical contexts. Founders Alex Whitcomb and Sarah Hayes discuss how they lowered barriers to contribution, built participation, used social media to grow the project, and shaped individual testimony into a shared public resource. The project demonstrates how digital platforms can connect oral history, geographic context, and community contribution without reducing memory to isolated content fragments.
Tag Archives: Multimedia
The Burning of Columbia uses digital media to commemorate history
Historic Columbia used websites, social media, and real-time historical storytelling to mark the 150th anniversary of the Burning of Columbia during the Civil War. Carrie Phillips explains how the organization defined its goals, coordinated platforms, divided responsibilities, and designed an experience that let audiences encounter historical events with greater immediacy. The project shows how digital commemoration can connect place, chronology, archival material, and public participation without treating history as a one-way broadcast.
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.
iPads break digital ground in Pompeii archaeological research
Archaeologists at Pompeii were among the first to use iPads as field-documentation tools, replacing parts of a paper-heavy workflow with direct digital recording at the excavation site. Steven Ellis discusses how the experiment changed data collection, communication, and research practice while attracting attention from Apple and the wider public. The project captures an important transition: mobile technology moving from consumer novelty into the everyday infrastructure of archaeological fieldwork.
Talking Pyramids’ Vincent Brown on Managing News Content with Social Tools
Egyptology enthusiast Vincent Brown discusses using podcasts, blogs, Twitter, and other social tools to build an online community around ancient Egypt and the pyramids. The conversation moves beyond simply publishing content to questions of curation: how to find relevant material, shape useful updates, use hashtags effectively, and create a recognizable digital presence around a specialized field of knowledge.
Heritage branding, analytics and international perspective with Jamie Donahoe of Adventures in Preservation
What if you could take your vacation time to not only see a new place, but meet new friends and use your hands to preserve built heritage all at the same time? That's just the kind of unforgettable experience Jamie Donahoe facilitates around the world. She co-founded Adventures in Preservation with the mission to save the world’s architectural heritage by supporting community-driven preservation projects that seek to create economic and environmental sustainability. Jamie has a very down-to-earth personality that comes through in her communication online as well. In this interview, she talks about how she uses the web to tell the stories of heritage resources. But, just as importantly, she'll explore how the Adventures in Preservation concept came about, and hopefully give you some insight into developing and marketing your own heritage brand.
Mike O’Laughlin of the Irish Roots Cafe talks about discovering shared family history through new media
Irish Roots Cafe founder Mike O’Laughlin discusses genealogy as both personal research and public storytelling. The conversation explores how podcasting, publishing, websites, and other emerging media could help people discover shared family history, build communities around ancestry, and make specialized genealogical knowledge accessible beyond traditional research settings. It is an early example of digital platforms turning family history into a participatory media practice.
Picturing preservation tech online with Cultural Heritage Imaging
Cultural Heritage Imaging explores how photography and computational imaging can become tools for preservation research, documentation, and public understanding rather than simply illustration. The conversation looks at emerging methods for recording cultural resources and at the challenge of explaining highly technical work online, connecting preservation technology with a broader question that still matters: how do we make specialized knowledge visible and useful without oversimplifying it?