The people whose work helped shape Voices of the Past
Across nearly two decades, these practitioners, thinkers, storytellers, researchers, collaborators, and public voices have helped shape Voices of the Past. Some were interviewed. Some wrote for the site. Some built projects alongside me. Some were doing remarkable work in places where few people were paying attention yet.
Their contributions belong here on their own terms. Together, they also show how ideas about technology, heritage, participation, storytelling, preservation, and public knowledge have changed over time.
Featured Voices
These entries are a first public cross-section of the larger Voices roster. They are not a ranking. They simply show the range of people, fields, experiments, and relationships that have made the project what it is.
Nina Simon
Museum participation and social design
Nina’s early work on participatory museums helped Voices explore what changes when cultural institutions stop treating audiences as passive recipients and start designing for contribution, exchange, and shared meaning.
Giles Parker
Museum collections and practical social-media adoption
Giles represents the kind of practitioner Voices was built to surface: someone doing the work inside a real institutional setting, testing how new tools could support collections, staff visibility, and public connection before those practices were routine.
Explore Giles Parker’s Voice profile · Original NMSC case study
Bernard Frischer
Virtual reconstruction and 3D heritage
Bernie’s Rome Reborn work captured an early moment when virtual reconstruction was still experimental but already pointing toward a future in which 3D models could become research, interpretation, and public-access infrastructure.
Dale Jarvis
Folklore, storytelling, and the social web
Dale brought the oral storyteller’s perspective into a digital environment, helping Voices ask how networked media could extend living traditions without reducing them to content.
Lisa Louise Cooke
Genealogy, podcasting, and audience
Lisa showed what could happen when a practitioner treated new media not as a novelty but as a durable relationship with an audience. Her work became one of the clearest early examples of digital participation turning into a real public community.
John Leeke
Preservation trades and practitioner media
John was already using video to teach preservation practice when very few people in the field were. His contribution is a reminder that some of the most durable digital innovation begins with practitioners simply finding better ways to show one another how the work is done.
Angelina Russo
Museum communities, participation, and knowledge sharing
Angelina’s Museum 3.0 work documented a moment when online professional communities were becoming laboratories for shared learning across museums, libraries, archives, and cultural organizations.
Eric C. Kansa
Open archaeology, data, and reuse
Eric’s Open Context work pushed beyond simply putting archaeological information online. It asked what becomes possible when data can be connected, reused, scrutinized, and made genuinely accessible beyond the boundaries of a single project.
Josh Stull
Community preservation and hometown stewardship
Josh’s work in Nicholson, Pennsylvania, embodied the Hometown Heritage idea: local people using organizing, preservation, fundraising, and digital communication to protect a place they still felt responsible for.
Michelle Springer & Helena Zinkham
Library of Congress, Flickr, and public participation
Their work on the Library of Congress Flickr pilot showed how a major institution could experiment with public participation, user-contributed knowledge, rights questions, staff workflows, and institutional voice without pretending the answers were already known.
Claire Casey
Community archaeology and work in progress
Claire used Voices not simply to report a finished project but to expose the process of building one: forming a team, finding support, involving a community, and asking others to help shape the work as it developed.
Steven Ellis
Archaeology, iPads, and field documentation
Steven was testing iPads in active archaeological fieldwork within months of the device’s release, using emerging technology to rethink documentation rather than simply layering a new gadget onto an old process.
Michal Meyer
Interpretation, collaboration, and experimental storytelling
Michal was a close friend and collaborator whose thinking helped shape interpretive experiments around history, animation, and audience connection. Her place here honors what she brought to the work itself.
Jason Church
Preservation technology and applied field practice
Jason represents the dense community of NCPTT practitioners whose work made preservation technology tangible: testing methods, teaching skills, and translating specialist knowledge into work that other practitioners could actually use.
Explore all 97 Voices
The full roster includes interview subjects, guest authors, substantive collaborators, practitioner contributors, and foundational honorees whose knowledge, experience, practice, authorship, or perspective became materially part of Voices of the Past. The directory is presented as one roster; the short descriptions identify the contribution that brought each person into Voices.
- Aaron Lubeck — green restoration and sustainability
- Aaron Steinmann — disaster recovery and regional heritage networks
- Alex Whitcomb — crowdsourced historical memory and TellHistory
- Jamie Donahoe — heritage branding, analytics, and international preservation
- Megan Lentz — practical museum social-media strategy
- Angelina Russo — museum communities and participatory knowledge sharing
- Andy DeGruchy — lime mortar and traditional building technology
- Barrett Kennedy — rapid documentation of historic resources
- Barry Stiefel — sustainability and historic preservation
- Bernard Frischer — Rome Reborn, virtual reconstruction, and 3D heritage
- Bethany Frank — practitioner voice and blogging practice
- Carrie Phillips — digital commemoration and audience engagement
- Carla Schroer — practical digital imaging and preservation technology
- Carla Bruni — green preservation and public blogging
- Charleen Mullenweg — genealogy technology and conference field reporting
- Charlie Pepper — historic landscapes and preservation training
- Chris Wiesinger — heritage horticulture and the Bulb Hunter
- Claire Casey — community archaeology and grassroots participation
- Claire Dean — laser conservation of rock art
- Curtis Deselles — nondestructive testing and conservation science
- Dale Kronkright — imaging and Georgia O’Keeffe’s digital legacy
- Dale Jarvis — folklore, storytelling, and the social web
- Dan Cull — conservation blogging for the i-generation
- David Connolly — field archaeology and early v-logging
- David Morgan — 3D documentation and preservation strategy
- Dave Moyer — youth media and preservation activism
- Dennis Pogue — historic-site stewardship at Mount Vernon
- Dylan Staley — voluntourism and public participation in heritage
- Dustin Fuqua — Kate Chopin House salvage and community recovery
- Eric C. Kansa — open archaeological data, APIs, and reuse
- Eric Holter — flexible digital storytelling platforms
- Eric Schindelholz — conservation of waterlogged archaeological wood
- ElizaBeth Guin — heritage education and practitioner preparation
- Fran Gale — cultural-resource survey and campus heritage
- Giles Parker — museum collections and practical social-media adoption
- Graeme Earl — born-digital archaeology and 3D methods
- Greg Lemon — podcasting and storytelling traditions
- Helena Zinkham — collections stewardship and participatory access
- Jason Church — preservation technology and public how-to knowledge
- Jeremy Taylor — content-first digital installations
- Jennifer Souers Chevraux — museums and relevance on the social web
- Josh Stull — hometown preservation and rural revitalization
- Jonathan Bailey — copyright, Creative Commons, and digital identity
- Julie Ernstein — interdisciplinary preservation education
- Kaitlin O’Shea — preservation blogging, platforms, and collaboration
- Kevin Clarkston — early Voices journalism and emerging-practitioner publishing
- Kit Arrington — digitization and long-term public access
- Kimberly Alderman — cultural property and archaeology blogging
- Kurt Thomas Hunt — public-facing archaeology blogging
- Laura Bang — classroom digital humanities
- Lisa Louise Cooke — genealogy, podcasting, and audience
- Linda Kelly — Museum 3.0 and social-media research
- Lorelle VanFossen — online voice, audience, and blogging practice
- Lynne Thomas — curatorial blogging
- Maggie Struckmeier — volunteer archaeology and online media
- Marcus J Wilson — mobile web strategy for cultural organizations
- Marion Jensen — history in context through Twitter
- Mary Ockerbloom — GLAM-Wiki and open knowledge
- Matt Briney — durable visual media and search infrastructure
- Matt Thompson — membership sites and social media as support
- Milena Dobreva — digital-library user studies and scholarly collaboration
- Michal Meyer — interpretive animation and collaborative storytelling
- Michelle Springer — Library of Congress Flickr and institutional voice
- Mike Anderson — ancient-history blogging
- Mike O’Laughlin — shared family history through new media
- Michael Phillips — sense of place through video
- Moss Rudley — preservation trades and traditional masonry
- Nancie Ravenel — wikis, collections care, and collaborative documentation
- Nancy Finegood — preservation trades education
- Nina Simon — museum participation and social design
- Pete Gregory — Cane River archaeology, interpretation, and stewardship
- Philip Graham — research paired with national social-media outreach
- Rachel Penniman — giving voice to emerging conservators
- Robert West — historical writing and Paging the Past
- Robert Melnick — climate change and cultural landscapes
- Rolonda Teal — Los Adaes and recovering overlooked Black history
- Ruth Tringham — virtual environments for archaeology teaching
- Sabra Smith — personal-history blogging
- Saidee Newell — preservation leadership and the founding legacy of Voices
- Shawn Graham — digital archaeology and simulated ancient networks
- Sarah Hayes — crowdsourced historical memory and TellHistory
- Stacey Mann — needs-first digital strategy
- Stacey Kutish — digital interpretation strategy and practitioner learning
- Steven Ellis — iPads and archaeological field documentation
- Steven Beasley — CRM strategy and institutional data
- Steve De Vore — geophysics training and archaeological technology transfer
- Steve Ward — participatory monuments and future memory
- Susan Dollar — heritage education and interpretation after loss
- Tom Jones — urban ecology and green-design practice
- Tony Cagle — archaeology blogging and public practice
- Tony Rajer — folk-art conservation and cultural context
- Traci Thomas — people-centered digital strategy and co-design
- Tracy Nelson — green design and historic-building recovery
- Vern Mesler — preservation of iron and steel structures
- Vincent Brown — archaeology news and social tools
This directory will keep getting richer as Voices reconnects people to additional appearances, critical questions, and related practitioners. Inclusion here records contribution; it does not imply current endorsement, current affiliation, or equal prominence across the archive.
How to read a Voice
- Then — what they were doing when Voices encountered them
- Contribution — what they brought to the field and to Voices
- Appearances — where their work appears in the archive
- What remains — what that contribution still helps us understand
- Related questions — where their work connects to Ideas Across Time
- Related Voices — practitioners working on adjacent problems
The point is not to turn people into examples for someone else’s argument. Their contribution comes first. The larger patterns become visible only after we understand what they actually did.
Featured Voice Profiles
These fuller profiles preserve the original contribution first, then connect it to the questions that continue through the archive.
Follow the Voices through the critical questions
The same Voice can belong to more than one question. That recurrence is part of the point: people, projects, and practices rarely fit neatly into a single category. Use these paths to move from a person into Ideas Across Time, then sideways into other Voices and artifacts.
Who gets to speak, and whose knowledge is heard?
Nina Simon · John Leeke · Angelina Russo · Lisa Louise Cooke · Michelle Springer · Helena Zinkham · Rachel Penniman
How do we make knowledge more accessible without losing its meaning?
Jason Church · Dustin Fuqua · Susan Dollar & Pete Gregory · Mary Ockerbloom · Rolonda Teal · Dale Kronkright
What happens when useful tools become systems we depend on?
Giles Parker · Megan Lentz · Marcus J Wilson · Steven Ellis · David Morgan · Stacey Kutish · Traci Thomas, Steven Beasley & Eric Holter
How do we preserve memory when the systems carrying it keep changing?
Eric C. Kansa · Kit Arrington · Mary Ockerbloom · Bernard Frischer · Graeme Earl · Nancie Ravenel
What should technology strengthen in us—and what should it never replace?
Dale Jarvis · Michal Meyer · Nina Simon · Lorelle VanFossen & Bethany Frank · Saidee Newell · Josh Stull
No Voice belongs to only one path. The questions are ways into the archive, not boxes around the people in it.