Meeting in the Middle: Community Engagement in the Digital World

10:30 intros

10:50 main discussion

11:35 subgroups

12:10 reunite for closing comments

Notetaker: Ash Braunecker and Angelica Bullock

Tweeters: Emily & Matthew

Follow-up Blog: Jim & Ian

Kristen: crafting in-common questions

Discussion Questions for Indy

Introduction:

Name

Institution

Project

(email this expectation today)

KBD pacekeeper

Common Questions/Themes:

1) if we acknowledge that behavior is part of the digital divide, how do we respond to this as we set forth to plan projects? especially born digital projects? we agree that build it and they will come isn’t a successful strategy, what is? perhaps more cogently: what does collaboration look like in digital work?

2) Do we as PH practitioners build digital archives for the sake of preservation? Are we expected to integrate new social media platforms or applications into the project as we go on? Do institutions look to use these tools to foster new conversations or projects? What jumping-off points exist?

3) on the part of the audience, are we expecting them to view, participate, or create with our materials? How much of their identity is carried into these projects, and do they expect it to be used in perpetuity? And why are we so often disappointed with the lack of community input or constructive criticism, when it seems to be the norm? What digital divide still exists between us and our audiences in the sense of expectation? Is it wise/safe for us to ask these kinds of investments of our participants in the long-term, given what we know about digital divides and lack of inclusivity? (I think this question is very similar to Q1; it was originally part of Q2, but I split them up)

4) Something I see as constantly recurring is the digital divide of relevancy and staying power in the digital medium (i.e the failure of the “build it and they will come” mindset).  How can we develop strategies to retain digital audiences?  In what ways do strategies of audience retention at “traditional sites” (i.e museum exhibits) hold true for the digital realm and in what ways do they need to be adapted?  Does the fast paced environment of the digital realm necessitate a shorter lifespan of our endeavors or are there ways to cross this divide?

5) It seems that most of our projects struggle with a way to find and codify our audience and related to that, we have a difficulty determining exactly what it is that our audience wants our project to do. We have to find a reliable way to answer the following questions:

a.    Who are the users?

b.    What do they want?

c.    How to create projects that build their audience?

6) Is it realistic to expect continued user engagement--pages visits, social media sharing, etc.--when limited term digital projects come to an end? Does meaningful engagement require staffers who can do outreach and reciprocate? Can we expect digital projects and digitized historical materials to generate enough interest and excitement to engage on their own?

Questions digging deeper into other issues (these often end up being "common" questions as well!):

1) implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, some of us make a very important point about the myriad goals projected onto digital projects. perhaps understanding the complex web of civic/career/funding/organization-building desires is the first step in assessing or setting goals for digital engagement? but once those goals are ennumerated, how do we strategize addressing most, if not all, of those goals?

2) what do we mean by crowdsourcing, and what does this technique do (or expect to do) for a project?

3) When compiling the project, its audience was always the core group of the Old Hemlock “family” and those already aware of the foundation and its history.  While this was due to limited budget and resources, could targeted projects have better results than those aimed at the “entire” public?  Does the seemingly unlimited reach of digital lead us to create too grandiose a vision that we cannot reach?  I wholeheartedly agree with Hannah’s comments on marketing, what ways can we better market our digital projects to attract and retain our audiences?  Is this the missing ingredient in so many of the great projects that seem to fizzle with time?

4) FRASER benefited from something that is typically unheard of in the Public History field, secure and prolific funding but hampered by specific restrictions from the nature of the institution that more traditional cultural heritage sites might not.  How do we establish best practices that can be usable to "not-quite" cultural heritage institutions that create and sustain digital projects? Or do we need to?

5) The SNCC Digital Gateway tells the stories of young organizers who knocked on doors and built face-to-face relationships to build a movement for change. Given that history, what's the relationship between digital project outreach efforts and making person-to-person and in-person connections?

6) If students create a marketing plan for small organizations, who will carry it out? How will students work with an organization to do this planning as they also are working on the digital project itself? Many organizations (pointing back to our common questions) have little idea of their requirements beyond "we need a website," much less an idea of how to measure the success of a digital project. How can we build this in?

Subgroup notes

Member at large/timekeeper: Kristen Baldwin Deathridge

Libraries/Archiving/Collections: Melissa Barthelemy, Jane Davis, Hannah Hethmon, Emily Estan

Academic/Community Partnerships: Lara Kelland, Julia Brock, Karlyn Forner, Jim McGrath,

Tools/Platforms: Matthew Barlow, Ariel Beaujot, Ian Grey, David Trowbridge

Notes from the Discussion:

* Case Statements: http://ncph.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Meeting-in-the-Middle-case-statements.pdf

* Notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DsHpfiPWQMCDLdICJlgurrasJP26uzapjl-vB2V-SMg/edit?usp=sharing

Part I: Questions and Discussion

Q1- Audience retention: Are we bound by shorter-lived projects? How do we retain an audience?

- maximize search engine

- partnering with other organizations to make information relevant/interesting

- marketing avenues (e.g. local media)

- challenging the language, introducing new perspectives; understand & develop lexicon

- promote conversation- shared authority & understanding the process of undermining historical authority - the audience’s expectations of a pyramid of authority doesn’t go away, but setting up structures where they do have a voice does matter

- “bottom up” grassroots efforts different from mainstream institutions/work?

-  recent historical tragedies are inherently connected to visceral emotions that are likely to provide an overwhelming amount of community feedback (e.g., Pulse & Boston Marathon); the emotional investment will be around for decades; the role of marginalization is paramount & leads to a rush to commemorate; challenges authority

- singular story vs. multiple narratives; how do we balance different audiences

- interpreting too quickly could hurt the narrative 20 years down the road b/c we didn’t let the narrative play out or take time to step back and absorb

- our digital manifestations of ourselves further the rush to commemorate - before the digital age, journalists rushed to commemorate & historians waited to interpret; it’s not new but the difference is the idea of preserving the commemorations is new (the early publication of photos showing the archivists’ storage of Orlando artifacts created public outrage b/c they felt the method was disrespectful & don’t fully understand the overall process takes time)

-Vietnam war memorial

Q2- How do we help our audience figure out the best ways to help?

How do we build the audience?

- people’s needs, your organization’s offerings, and other organization’s needs - understanding where the intersects exist

- 1. preservation, 2. telling their story

- when our organization does have a shelf life on a project but the community isn’t interested in assuming full responsibility, where is the balance; how does the project not fade away? Outsourcing to another group/organization that has similar interests (e.g., a relevant Facebook group); following social media conversations and injecting information to gather interest and market the project; specifically targeting the people who want the information (mission & goal must be clear)

- with shared authority, there must be a buy-in; they have to meet us where we are; they need to see it as something they want & we’re not trying to pull them up; shared authority relies on them willingly stepping up and talking about it/engaging; we must bend first (and usually more) b/c of the history of how these groups have been treated by institutions

Part II: Working Groups! 

Group 1- Collections, Archives

-it's hard!

-you cannot start engagement with your audience until you know what you have

-St. Louis library- Call to donate memorabilia (very helpful)

-Creating an accessible database to let the public know what an organization has

-what is the difference between a Librarian, and an archivist?- sharing to the community vs preserving items

-making sure we highlight everything that is important about an item

-finding the context in your “stuff”

     *The use of Omeka to highlight collections

-There is a tension of getting things out there without context- without an audience knowing how to truly use it

-OCR

-Goal- to make things easily searchable

-Goal-names to catalogue have to be in an uniformed manner

-Goal-need for collections to be accessible

-everything will not be digitalized

     there will be restricted access- copyright, etc.

-Goal- to make visible to the public the labor of the work:showing the efforts for preservation, metadata, budget, etc.

     Seen at the museum last night- the Indiana Historical Society

- Washington University- “documenting the now”: collecting tweets into a database for audience to analyze

Group 2-Academic and Community Partnership

- It’s vital for the project that the appropriate person steps up to mitigate; active management develops trust

- How do we work as partners not “with” the community but as part of the community; how is the space created? (e.g., using Curatescape); language of “we” and “they” can be problematic

- “We” is the goal but there’s hesitation on the historian’s side to wait to claim “we”; the historian doesn’t want to assume the voice of the community

- After the in-person component, how does the digital aspect continue to exist; training the community association and sharing website’s administrative privileges can be a very powerful moment; an important stakeholder in the community association can be paramount to the project’s continued life

- The classroom can be used as a prototype space, exploring ideas and connecting community members, but timeframe of a semester can be problematic

- How do we model community engagement for students when they’re not around long enough to become part of the community; professors have to assume the role as principal investigator to overcome student turnover and the dislink between the professors’ class offerings semester to semester

- When students come in halfway through the project, it’s helpful to relate it to the real world situation of starting a new job in the middle of a project when there’s already been behind the scenes work accomplished

- Loyola University created a Public History Lab to continue managing the projects as contractors instead of simply handing the project off as students to professors

- Making sure students understand that no one outside of the university lives on university time

- Further engaging students through service commitments so that it hopefully transcends the school project; ideally the us/them dichotomy goes away with further engagement

- Tensions against the academy exist in some communities and amplifies the us vs. them

- Important for the individual organizations understand their accountability and the variances in conversation requirements

- Historians are seen differently when they’re a formal extension of the institution; if they come to an event and were completely removed from the organizing then they’re more likely to be accepted within the “them” group

- Intersection of community stories & academic processes

- Baltimore has a “history of my home” project; a map of the current population’s residencies proves institutional racism when compared to population maps under historical racial covenants

- UCLA has a student bill of rights for their digital humanities

Group 3- Tools

- It’s not just the tools, but why do they work? What are the digital projects that you use in your personal life? We are the public, not different. Think about your audience and relate historians’ success and failure stories. Trust = community

- The tools work b/c we’re all in search of something; it’s a humanities based question to ponder why do we search; you can’t understand why we go to museums without understanding the nature of humanities

- How do we transform the tools to reach people on the same level?

- There’s no “homepage” anymore; audiences come to websites through different avenues

- We can’t control the way the audience will use our tools and it’s sometimes surprising

- How we frame tools affects the audience (e.g., a tool in a Civil War conversation received more hits than when the same tool was discussed alongside African American history; in this example thousands more heard the second conversation)