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In planning my project on monuments and memorials at University of the Pacific, I have been examining some digital projects that do storytelling in a new or unique way.  This blog reviews two sites that creatively balance overview and immersion to effectively tell stories about the past.  This matters, Richard Rabinowitz writes, because “overviews create… Continue reading Exhibit Balance: Overview and Immersion

In 2009, the alumni magazine editors at the University of the Pacific called for memories of what it was like to have R. P. M., a 1970 American drama by Stanley Kramer, filmed on campus.  While many wrote in with comments about the production, Victor Ornelas, who was then a regent but had been, as… Continue reading Memorials and Monuments – Project Proposal

For my digital public history project on monuments and memorials at the University of the Pacific, I interviewed a half dozen alumni and created two personas based on the demographic and ethnographic features of Pacific alums that came through in those interviews. These are intended to reflect my audience in a simple and personal way.… Continue reading Personas

In the last several decades, public historians have theorized the importance of sharing authority with community members to develop exhibits that represent or serve them. Public historian John Kuo Wei Tchen describes creating a “dialogic museum” at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in the 1990s as a process that developed less from theory… Continue reading Audience and Content in Public History Projects

For my GMU Public Digital History course, I will create a project to commemorate University of the Pacific’s 100-Year Anniversary on the Stockton campus. University of the Pacific is California’s oldest university, founded in 1851 in Santa Clara, California. The campus then moved to San Jose and finally to Stockton in 1924. The goal of… Continue reading User Research and Project Ideas

To explore public history sites and their digital presence, I visited the Museum of the San Ramon Valley in Danville, California, and its website. The Museum’s mission is to connect the local community, its main audience, to the history of the Valley. It collects and preserves important artifacts and stories with an eye toward recognizing… Continue reading Museum of the San Ramon Valley

When I completed my PhD in history in 2005, digital humanities classes were only beginning to appear in university catalogs, but much has changed since that time. Many of us who had minimal training in digital methods have adopted them for our own research and begun to teach our students to embrace them. I am… Continue reading Doing Public History

Why I Chose this Project The Covid emergency and the ongoing pandemic prompted conversations at the University of the Pacific (UOP) about students who are going through crisis. A UOP Library Summer Fellowship team in 2022 explored an historical example of students in crisis.[1] UOP’s Japanese American students faced, first, the threat of and then… Continue reading A Reflection on Using Esri ArcGIS StoryMaps to Tell about Japanese American Students

Education researchers have found that embodied learning, especially those experiences where choices are connected to movement and visual scenes help students learn.  This can be increased through follow up activities. In addition, the “novelty and interactive possibility of VR improves student motivation and increases student recall.”[1] Two of my favorite virtual reality environments that I… Continue reading Immersive History Experiences

How should we handle crowdsourced knowledge that may be inaccurate or misrepresentative? What do we do when technology can fabricate sources that don’t actually exist? In 2006, historian Roy Rosenzweig wrote cautiously, but with some optimism, that history could be crowdsourced through sites like Wikipedia.  He notes that one of Wikipedia’s most exciting features is… Continue reading Approaching Ethical Dilemmas in the Digital Public Sphere