How should history be written? And when we do write it, whose voices should we hear? Two of my colleagues and friends, Roy Rosenzweig and Michael Mizell-Nelson, both now sadly deceased, believed that we can only really understand the past if we listen to the voices of the too often faceless and nameless majority. It…
Tag: Collecting History
New Orleans 33 Years Ago
Today is the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s assault on the city of New Orleans. Of late there have been a lot of news stories about the city’s recovery, or lack of recovery, since those devastating weeks. Over the past several years here at the Center for History and New Media and through the efforts…
Why Collecting History Online is Web 1.5
Last year my colleague Sheila Brennan and I spent some time trying to make sense of the lessons we’d learned from several years of work on the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank–a project that Sheila did the vast majority of the heavy lifting on here at CHNM. The essay we wrote about our experiences is now…
The New Media Conventions
More than any other national political convention before it (and presumably the upcoming Republican National Convention won’t be much different), the just completed Democratic National Convention was the first full on new media convention. The speeches from the podium were broadcast live online with what seemed like some very powerful bandwidth, bloggers were everywhere, clips…