Using Digital History to Record Multiple Perspectives

While I was reading the introduction to Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, by Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, I was reminded of an exciting digital history experiment that I learned about a few years ago. While attending the annual conference of the Association of Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums (ATALM) in 2016, I saw a presentation in which the speakers were discussing an interesting use of their online museum object catalog in order to collect and represent the stories and viewpoints of the Native peoples whose ancestors created the objects in their collection. Cohen and Rosenzweig list "interactivity" as one of the seven qualities of digital media that have the potential to positively change how historians operate. Personally, this is the aspect I find has the greatest potential to shift who creates history and want voices are represented in this creation.

In the presentation, museum staff and Tribal members spoke about a project that they worked on to develop an entirely new way of presenting an online museum catalog. They designed the platform from scratch, dividing each object's catalog record into sections in which both Western museum-style information and Tribal knowledge could be displayed. There was space for both the English-language museum title of the object and the Native language word for the object. Sections of each page were devoted to the museum's description of the object and to the Tribal consultants' information for the object. Within the website, Tribal members were encouraged to submit their own information or stories to the museum about how an object was used, corrections to the information in a record, etc. Most exciting to me were stories of Tribal members being able to identify people in photographs that had not previously been identified in the museum's records!

This is an example of one of the possibilities that digital history projects present for historians. However, thought has to be put into these projects for them to be effective. Today, many museums publish their catalog online. This alone does not lead to the creation of new knowledge or participation by the communities represented in the museums' collections. Partnerships have to be created for those communities to feel that their views are appreciated. The layout of the website has to show that the information the community members contribute is valued.

I look forward to using the knowledge presented in this class to think of new methods to present digital history in ways that incorporate the perspectives of individuals who were often left out of the narrative in the past. For my final project I would like to create an online exhibit. To avoid issues with copyright, I am considering using my own Native American object collection as the subject. I have an extensive collection of Eastern Cherokee wood-carved sculptures that would make an interesting informational exhibit.