Tag Archives: socialmedia

Tutorials

A guide to my heritage Twitter Lists, developed over the past decade.

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Twitter tells me I joined up more than 13 years ago. As much of a cesspool that Twitter can be, I’ve always found a way to get better use of it by creating “lists” and I’ve been a more active user of the lists function than I have been in blasting out content to the world. According to Twitter, a list is “a curated group of accounts. Create one or subscribe to a list created by others to streamline your timeline.” I thought I’d share some of the lists I’ve built covering the the various cultural fields that you can subscribe to, or just find like-minded people to connect with.

Note that people on these lists have other interests besides the topic they are listed for, so there is a variety of content you will find in each. Social media has more noise than ever, so be prepared to skim for the good stuff. Once you get there, Twitter will have a function that allows you to follow any of these lists. When talking about tech or digital, you can engage with any of these topics using the hashtag #digitalheritage.

So here’s the list of lists …

Archaeology: This is one of the first lists I began to curate because so many archaeologists were trying out social media ahead of other cultural institutions back in the day. With more than members, it has about a post and hour. Notable tweeters there: Shawn Graham, Archaeology News Network. Sample tweet from the feed:

Archives: This 60-person list covers numerous aspects of archival practice, including digital preservation. Includes NY Public Library Labs and Paige Roberts as well as several folks I knew in Philly–Michelle DiMeo of Science History Institute and Matt Shoemaker from Temple U. Updates a couple of times an hour on average. Example of one of the tweets there:

Built Heritage: The list primarily covers historic preservation. With more than 80 members, it normally has new posts several times an hour. Notables include National Trust for Historic Preservation, Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and many local historic preservation organizations. Engage with the hashtag #builtheritage. Here’s an example of a tweet there:

Conservation:  With close to 40 members, these folks are good about tweeting what they are working on, whether it’s paper, architectural, etc., etc. A few of the members there are AIC/FAIC, Berta Blasi and AIC-Art Conservation. Sample tweet:

Digital Humanities: There are 128 very active tweeters comprising this list, covering a lot of the fields in this post. They are largely involved in digital projects. Notables include Digital Heritage Innovation Lab, Historical Cats, Tracy Jentzsch and Sarah Stierch. Sample Tweet: 

Folklife: My master’s is in folklore and oral history, so couldn’t let this be unrepresented. It only has about 16 members though, so let me now if you have any suggestions for folks who might fill it out. Tweeters: Kaitlyn Kinney, TellHistory, Dale Jarvis. Example of a tweet there:

Geneaology: A group of about 50 genealogists and researchers. These folks really tweet about this topic as a passion! Includes people like Lisa Louise Cook, Elyse Doerflinger and interment.net. Typical Tweet:

GLAM-Wiki: A list of people working in the GLAM-Wiki field, be they Wikipedians in residence, at any of the GLAM institutions, or just enthusiasts from the institutions themselves. Just a note, this is a very politically active group. Sample Tweet:

https://twitter.com/CPP_Officer/status/1497311901554024449

Heritage Influencers: Thought leaders in the heritage field who exemplify the spirit of new media. Some notables: Shawn Graham (probably half the tweets!), Nina Simon (naturally), Mar Dixon (naturally as well) and my old buddies, Past Horizons.

History: This list has 64 members and you’ll get a lot of straight history facts and “this day in” posts. Who you’ll see there include American History Association, HistoryHit podcast, and Chris Samuel. Frequent hashtags: #history #fineart #twitterstorians. Representative Tweet:

Museums: Museum Twitter accounts have traditionally been largely run by PR and marketing folks fulfilling an administrative agenda in a corporate voice. However, there’s innovation here and there and still useful and entertaining content to be found even from the traditional types. This list has about 160 members and features the MoMAs numerous house museums and Seb Chan. Hashtags to engage by: #tweetmuseums #musesocial and simply #museums combined with whatever word describes the type of museum you’re talking about. Very typical tweet:

Sites & Tourism: There are more than 60 people and organizations on this list dedicated to advancing the cultural heritage of specific sites. These are as likely to be advocacy organizations as superfan individuals dedicated to the protection and promotion of a place that holds special memories for them. Hashtags: #thisplacematters #WorldMonumentsWatch #FanPhotoFriday. Sample tweet:

Notable lists by others in the Twitterverse

Art Conservation 3.0 and Cultural Heritage Preservation by Dale Kronkright

Archaeology by Dr. Corilie Mills

Art Conservation by the good Mr. Richard McCoy

conservy/hist pres by the good Ms. Nancie Ravenel

Heritage/History people by Richard Salmon

Historytweeps by Nezka Pfiefer

General

Preservation social media leadership: The early days

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In 2009, I presented to the Preservation Technology Advisory Board for the first time about preservation social media efforts. Though it was the first time the board members really heard about social media, they were incredibly supportive of the initiative.

The presentation features images by Hunter Wilson, who had a Flickr 365 project going on at the time. He would post a self-portrait every day for one year. Many of them featured compelling Photoshop effects. As I was presenting this, Hunter was at his high-school graduation. We had been interacting on Flickr for a time, and he was gracious enough to Skype in for a PR Campaigns course I was teaching at the local university.

That prior year was magic with connections that embodied the potential of preservation social media, before it became dominated by marketers and the walled fortress that is Facebook. The heritage fields were still skeptical of social media. Out in nowhere-you’ve-heard-of Louisiana, we were pioneering the frontier.

09 Board Meeting: Strengthening NCPTT’s Leadership on the the Social Web

Presentation to the NCPTT Board, May 2009

  • NCPTT Preservation Social Media Initiative and World Wide Web Clearinghouse
  • Conversation, facilitated by online tools that are: Platform-independent Free Interactive Easy to use
  •  Ultimately, it’s still about relationships [human-centered]
  • NCPTT was one of the first preservation organizations to use social media
  • Podcasting [Preservation Technology Podcast]
  •  Social Networking
  • Microblogging
  • Online Photo Sharing
  • Online Video Sharing
  • Preservation needs online leadership. The Future is Mobile
  • Training initiative provides expert guidance, connections for NCPTT [Training staff]
  • People everywhere are connecting in cyberspace to talk about heritage.
  • In 2009, many more heritage organizations have jumped on the new media bandwagon
  • … but progress is using new media effectively has been slow and lacking direction
  • Heritage is still trying to find its voice online.
  • Preservation still needs online leadership.
  • NCPTT’s role is to help the organizations make sense of social media and use it effectively
  • Communicating ourselves on the World stage can be an overwhelming task
  • We’ve been there before
  •  The right tools, mindset and people bring the job down to size
  •  Hard work and service to others unleashes the benefits of online engagement
  •  “We need to connect citizens with each other to engage them more fully and directly in solving the problems that face us. We must use all available technologies and methods to open up the federal government, creating a new level of transparency to change the way business is conducted in Washington and giving Americans the chance to participate in government deliberations and decision-making in ways that were not possible only a few years ago.” From Barack Obama’s campaign platform on technology Monday, March 9, 2009
  •  “We need to connect citizens with each other to engage them more fully and directly in solving the problems that face us. We must use all available technologies and methods to open up the federal government, creating a new level of transparency to change the way business is conducted in Washington and giving Americans the chance to participate in government deliberations and decision-making in ways that were not possible only a few years ago.” From Barack Obama’s campaign platform on technology Monday, March 9, 2009
  • You’re our heroes [advocacy role of board]
  •  What can we do to help? [Ideas, comments and discussion]
General

#DigitalHeritage 1-2-3: APIs, Apps & Social Media Preservation

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#DigitalHeritage 1-2-3 represents news and ideas that caught my attention recently. Have any suggestions for future editions? Let me know via Twitter @heritagevoices.

1: APIs: How Machines Share and Expose Digital Collections

Finally, an explanation of APIs I can get my head around. This item from the Library of Congress blog uses examples from The World Digital Library, HathiTrust and OpenSearch to illustrate how APIs work in digital collections.

The Big Idea: “Offering an API allows other people to reuse your content in ways that you didn’t anticipate or couldn’t afford to do yourself … That’s what I would like for the library world, those things that let other people re-use your data in ways you didn’t even think about.”

The Revelation: a demo of the International Image Interoperability Framework in action as a research tool. See for yourself how to compare and annotate side-by-side digital objects from Harvard, Yale, the National Library of Wales and other participating partners.

The Strategy: Besides the API explanation, what I appreciate about this post is how LOC is using journalism practices by interviewing people who work their about their areas of expertise. A great tactic for deepening and sustaining content on an institutional blog!

2: ActionShow App Blog on Mobile Tours

For all the years I’ve worked in cultural heritage, there seems to always be one more tour app provider I never heard of. ActionShow is the latest. And though their blog looks a little spammy at first (and indeed, does sell a product), it hosts some good, clear-eyed analysis of the issues.

The post that drew me to the site was Who Wins? Mobile Apps vs. Mobile-Friendly Websites. The topics are a virtual FAQ for cultural heritage sites considering such a tool (i.e. all of them): how much does it cost, which is easier to use, what if you have inconsistent wi-fi, etc. Use them as a guide on the issues; just keep in mind they have an app service to sell.

Here’s a useful graph on their site I’m embedding from the post Custom Built Apps versus Platform Apps:

Tour Guide App Comparison

3: Preserving Social Media Tech Watch Report

This came by Twitter:

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsIf you haven’t been to visit the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Technology Watch Report page, now’s the time to discover it. DPC has published a 42-page “Preserving Social Media” report that should have a lot of cultural institutions thinking about why they aren’t preserving this growing part of their legacy. One reason is that it’s very hard, with rapidly shifting targets of technology, platforms and service agreements.

The Big Idea from this report (for now): “…the preservation of social media may best be undertaken by a large, centralized provider, or a few large centralized providers, rather than linking smaller datasets or collections from many different institutions.”

The Revelation: The North Carolina State University, Social Media Archives Toolkit is “a freely available web-based documentary toolkit that publicly documents our own effort to develop a sophisticated social media archival program in a way that may help guide cultural heritage organizations that are interested in collecting and curating social media content.”

Due to the complexity of these issues, it looks like we’re heading down a road where the archives profession will be start turning out specialists to deal with this ever-shifting landscape.

Suggestions

That’s it for today’s #digitalheritage stories. Feel free contribute your thoughts for a future edition through the comments, Twitter or email.

 

Video

Voices of the Past Video Netcast: Featuring Dave Moyer, teenage new media producer and historic preservation activist

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Voices of the Past Episode 1: Transcript

 

Coming up in this edition of the Voices of the Past netcast, we’ll meet Dave Moyer. Moyer is a new media professional and a historic preservation activist. We’ll learn how he became involved in those efforts, and how he manages his role as founding president of Bitwire media … at just sixteen years old.

 

Welcome to Voices of the Past. I’m Jeff Guin. We’ll have that interview will be coming up for you in just a few moments. But first, here are a few briefs about heritage in the online world.

ONLINE HERITAGE RESEARCH CATALOG

 

The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago is offering a wealth of downloadable research documents about the ancient Middle East at no cost. The material comes from the institute’s extensive collection which includes important academic books on the languages, history and cultures of the ancient Middle East.

 

The Oriental Institute first announced the Electronic Publications Initiative in 2004. The initiative’s mission is for all publications from the Oriental Institute to be published in print and electronically. The institute has published nearly 300 books since 1906. Topics range from dictionaries of the Assyrian and Hittite languages to oversized folio volumes that document Egyptian temples and tombs. Past volumes are being added online as funding permits.

 

Now, the Insititute says that the availability of free downloads has actually increased print sales by seven percent.

 

CONSERVATION WIKI

 

The American Institute for Conservation and its Foundation recently launched a collaborative wiki based on their conservation catalogs. The catalogs include descriptions of materials and techniques used to preserve and treat works of art and historic artifacts. These include topics such as books and paper, paintings, photographic materials, and textiles.

 

The site is based on the MediaWiki platform software that was designed for Wikipedia.org. This wiki will allow editors to work collaboratively to update the information. It will also ensure that innovative methods and materials are documented and widely disseminated to practicing conservators and conservation scientists.

 

The wiki was created with a grant from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training.

 

HERITAGE VIDEO TRAVEL WEBSITE

 

For the past three years, Michael Phillips has had a dream that he hopes will someday spread to the rest of the world: to create usense of place with video. It seems the tech world has helped set the stage for that dream, incorporating video functionality into everything from mobile phones to music players. With his heritage travel site and blog, iGuidez, Phillips provides a template for capturing and sharing special sites for netizens everywhere to enjoy.

 

I recently spoke with Michael Phillips about his dream for the Voices of the Past podcast. Phillips talks about how he developed iGuidez and the challenges of running a heritage website. You can listen to his insights by visiting our shownotes site or by searching for us on iTunes.

 

FEATURED VOICE OF THE PAST: DAVE MOYER

 

While many sixteen year olds are obsessing about their next social event or prospects for college, one young man is taking a broader view. His name is Dave Moyer, and he is the founding president of Bitwire Media. Bitwire is a digital media content network that produces a variety of podcasts, websites and blogs featuring some of the world’s top new-media professionals.

 

But beyond his work as a prodigy in social media, he is also an active proponent of historic preservation. In fact, Moyer was one of the select few chosen across the country to work alongside First Lady Laura Bush in New Orleans during a summit with the History Channel and the Preserve America initiative. Since then, he has co-chaired three local and national summits promoting youth activism in historic preservation.

 

I had the opportunity to chat with Dave Moyer during a recent meeting of WordPress users. This is what he had to say about how he first became interested in podcasting, and the importance of teachers as heritage values advocates:

 

MOYER: I was lucky. In 7th grade, I went into the normal history class idea of “here we are, we are going to get the history textbooks an learn a bunch of facts and then forget them by the time its summer.”

 

I was ready for that. Then the first day, we learned primary sources. We learned Library of Congress, American Memory. We learned all of these places to get stuff, and I am like, “OK, this is a little different. What is this?”

 

By the spring we are asked by historic Denver because its teacher, Michelle Pierson is an incredible historic preservationist and educator at the same time. And she does both very well, and she gave us the opportunity to work with historic Denver on a project for the first annual Historic Colfax avenue marathon. And they said, “Alright, make us a brochure,” and we were like, “No, we are going to make a podcast.”

 

I just learned about podcasting, and so I came up and said, “Alright, what if we tried a podcast form?” And we posted…we recorded in conjunction with the Library of Congress’s teaching of primary sources, History Channel, a few other organizations. We recorded six podcasts on different areas of Colfax so that the runners could download these things onto their iPods and listen to them while they are running. So, we got within, probably the first couple of months over 100,000 downloads in the state of Colorado alone with these podcasts. We have gotten grants from Best Buy, the History Channel, it’s been national recognized as a program, and I have had the honor of being able to go down to New Orleans to work with First Lady Laura Bush on the first annual Preserve America Summit down there. I’ve worked with a bunch of other youth from the nation. I have co-chaired, I think there have been four now, of the regional Colorado Preserve America Youth Summits that have stemmed off of that as a separate endeavor. It’s been a great, great dream…it’s all snowballed. But it’s been awesome. I’ve had all those opportunities.

 

GUIN: So, you’ve been speaking at social media conferences, obviously, and you are here at WordCamp now. Have you added historic preservation conferences to your speaking schedule? Are you in demand yet as a speaker in those circles?

 

MOYER: There’s some of that. I’ve done, I came just recently, they had the state Preserve America Youth Summit, I talk about the Colorado Preserve America Summit and I work there, I’m speaking there, it is sort of a….. I do a couple things. I’ve done the National Trust for Historic Preservation, those kinds of things. Not as much as the social media, and that’s just kind of picked up as of late. But there are occasional times where I will go out there and be requested to talk about the student side of things and the tech side of things. Because that is what I live, that is what I do.

 

GUIN: So, do you find that sometimes maybe it’s a little harder when you’re dealing with people dealing with historic preservation that they seem a little distrustful or reticent with these technologies?

 

MOYER: Oh they do. There are all sorts of…well, a lot of historic preservationists are also the teachers, they are also the educators who have learned through their years and years of teaching that tech equals bad because it distracts kids in my classroom. So the cell phones have to be put away and taken away, and iPods have to be shoved in a box that they get back when its June. And really, there’s technologies…you can’t fight ’em. They come out of the closet.. from under the table, I know that. What you need to do is take that and turn it into a tool so that it is actually being an educational thing. I keep going back to Michelle Piersen. We’ve done wikis, we’ve done blogs in her history class. There was a kid who did a Ben Franklin’s blog because he came to Denver for the Ben Franklin museum and was touring around and trying to fit into modern society. All kinds of great, great stuff, and when you are taking it out of the text book and…and textbook worksheets, they have a horrible negative connotation with kids, you get such a better connection when you connect it to something that we know. Back in the 1920s, kids read nonstop, that was their life. Either they read or they go play down in the park. Now we listen to our iPods or we go play down in the park. You have to adapt as the kids are adapting. You have to adapt as the work is adapting, and it’s hard sometimes for some of the preservationists and some of the people who are active in this stuff to do that. That’s what we are trying to work on a lot, is show them that this is kinda works.

 

GUIN: So, are you doing…you mentioned the original series of podcasts. Are you following those up in any kind of way? Do you have plans to do more work with either podcasts or other forms of social media related to heritage preservation?

 

MOYER: We recently did a big project with the local veterans museum for World War II veterans, and we did podcasts associated with that, actual interviews with some of the vets there. There are lots of things that are always being worked on. We’ve not been able to do as much as we’ve liked to because of different issues associated with the museum there, and just as we were talking about before, curators who are stuck in the days of “we need to have a wall, and we need to have the glass behind it” and that’s all we can do. And sometimes that creates a roadblock, but there’s always stuff in the works and there are many many plans in the future on this…

GUIN: Now, Dave actually hosts several podcasts, including the WordCast, The Aimless Agenda Show, and the Best of the Net. Additionally, he is one of the few recipients of MITs Promise of the Future Award, which recognizes students for outstanding work and activism in the technology world.

Well, that’s it for this edition of Voices of the Past. If you are using the web to communicate heritage, we’d like to hear from you. Share your story with us by going to our Voices of the Past shownotes site. There, you can also find links to all of today’s stories. And, until next time, we’ll see you on-line.