Author: admin

• Whose public? Audience and Public History

  In 1981, Ronald J. Grele published an article arguing that public historians needed to better define themselves and their “public” if they wanted to make it clear how they differed from academic historians (p. 41). Grele argued that the label of “public history” was part of an attempt to co-opt the state and local history…

• Physical/Digital Museum Review: The National Museum of Funeral History

  To learn more about how public history sites and their digital presences, I visited the National Museum of Funeral History (NMFH) on February 5, 2023, and its website and VR tour on February 7. I chose NMFH because it was new to me, and I had heard positive reviews from friends. It also had more…

• Reconstructing Historical Demography in New Haven

  

  A Work in Progress I want to reconstruct the historical racial demography of New Haven with the longer-term goal of connecting it with patterns in Medical Institution of Yale College student housing and the location of institutions like the hospital. (The Medical Institution has since become the Yale School of Medicine.) Today, housing in New…

• VR and the Gamification of History

  

  If you ask someone my age (rudely named “geriatric millennials”) about what computer games they remember from school, Oregon Trail is almost always the first one mentioned. Oregon Trail had been around since the early 1970s, butas I remember became a mainstay of the elementary school classroom with the wide introduction of Apple IIs. The…

• Towards a Social History of Deepfakes

  Increasingly “deepfakes” make the news. Whether Anthony Bourdain’s artificially recreated voice reading his written but likely never spoken words or Game of Throne’s Jon Snow apologizing for the series’ ending, technologies have made it easier to make contemporary, historical, and even fictional people appear to say and do things they never did. So how should…

• Digital Public History and Audience(s)

  As an academic historian who is learning about Digital Public History, I’ve had to think about the audience of my work in new ways. I can’t just rely on a shared knowledge of historiography and terminology to make my work relevant. Instead, I’ve had to consider in greater detail how much background my audience needs…

• YSM & Slavery Project Evaluation

  My YSM & Slavery website project is a prototype for an institutional website sharing the preliminary findings of research into YSM’s history with slavery and, more generally, racial medicine. It aims to educate people already connected with YSM and the wider New Haven community about our findings and promote a conversation about how to relieve…

• Project Update #4 – YSM & Slavery

  As I posted in my last update, my website design is mostly complete, but I’ve been struggling with writing the last two vignettes (“Race and curriculum” and “Black medical students”) for it. I think a subject like a medical school’s history with slavery and race – a subject that has such historical and continuing impact…

• Project Update #3 – YSM & Slavery

  I finalized the nuts and bolts of my website, wrapped up my research for the vignettes (for now), and finished a draft of my first vignette (of three) this week. To get the look and feel I wanted for the vignette links on the homepage, I had to manually add some HTML to make the…

• Project Update #2 – YSM & Slavery

  This week I focused on completing research for the planned vignette on the medical school curriculum. I thought I’d be done with that research by now, but I’m still wrapping up some loose ends – specifically, I’m reading assigned medical textbooks. I plan to write that vignette later this week and to begin collecting supporting…