Author: F. Simpson

The Lost Museum, https://lostmuseum.cuny.edu/index.php . Created by The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in collaboration with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media George Mason University Supported by a major grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities.  The original Executive Producers of the project were Andrea Ades Vasquez, Joshua Brown and Roy Rosenzweig. Reviewed Feb. 22, 2019.  

The Lost Museum recreates the PT Barnum Museum of the 1800’s that was destroyed in a fire on July 13, 1865.  This digital project recreates the inside of the museum three-dimensionally based on illustrated guide books from the 1850’s. When you open the website, a quick two-minute video captures your attention and leads you to four basic options which allow you to explore the digital museum, attempt to solve the mystery of who set the fire, search the archive for information, or go to the classroom section to consider looking at activities to provide students.  

Exploring this digital museum is fun although the technology feels dated. This is likely a challenge that all digital projects will face. For example, you can click on an image and zoom in but when it comes to user experience, most digital natives will expect a smoother up to date technology experience. It would be better if this functioned more like an Omeka site that could then source an image and provide context instead of just a 3D rendering. In order to attempt to solve the mystery, a visitor would have to log in which is a barrier to entry. I am not sure why the creators of the site required a log-in for this portion and I know that is something that will serve to push visitors away from that function.

The archive allows the visitor to browse topics, sources and images which was the most engaging part for me. I’m not a teacher, but I liked looking at the activities and essays about PT Barnum. Although the project team has worked on updating the site for new use of technology, I am concerned that this digital project will become just as much as snapshot of early 20th century technology as much as the specific subject matter. I feel like the major collaborative piece of this project is in getting visitors to sign in and look at evidence of those who might have been responsible for setting the fire to the museum.  The audience for this project is more focused on educators and those interested in PT Barnum. It is an excellent tool for educators to refer to and utilize.  

This digital project challenges viewers to imagine what it must have been like visiting this type of museum in the mid 1800’s. I feel like the archives portion provides context to the nature of the space and times but from a 2019 perspective, I feel that it could be maintained and updated. For example, this could compare movie reviews for the Greatest Showman with actual reviews of PT Barnum’s show from newspapers to see how close the movie got to historic reality.  This project provides a successful 3D recreation of the PT Barnum Museum and serves its purpose to help educators make this topic interesting to explore.  I feel that the mystery aspect of the website could be updated and engage more of an audience on social media to determine who was most likely to have set the fire.  Overall, I rate this project a B+ with an option for an A if it were to be updated to remain relevant to collaborators for years to come.  

Imagine if this digital project or something like it became the standard for digitizing and providing resources and collaboration for digital collections for museums in the future so that no future exhibits would be lost to history again.

Which historical figure would you have lunch with? 

I love great discussions. Not discussions about the weather, but rather discussions about the great things in life like, “What motivates you and why?”, “What might have happened if…?”, “How does the study of the past help in planning for the future?”.  There are a good number of questions that are great to ask if you really want to break through the usual chit chat and really create a dialogue with someone. Unfortunately, I have seen a decline in these conversations in the last couple of decades.  One particularly fun question I have heard a few times is a variation of “If you could have lunch with any historical figure who would it be and why? What questions would you ask this person?”

Is history important? If so, why?

While the lunch question is a great question to start a discussion, I am curious about the purpose behind the question. My guess is that an honest response will give you insight into a person’s deepest held values or curiosities. We ask deep questions because we care to know the answers and in talking to others it helps us build relationships. While this lunch question is largely a way to get to know someone better it can also lead us to understand if and why history is important to others and why it matters. If history is important and we are living in a digital age, what exactly are the implications for the future? One topic that keeps coming to mind is the possibility of a future universal library and how that might affect how we study and curate history.

A universal library? 

You might be thinking that the idea of digitizing everything into a universal collection is a crazy idea but we might be closer than you think. If you look at recent history since the dot com boom in the early nineties we have been living in an age preparing us for this very idea.  Think about the way you consume music, media, even the way we turn in homework assignments. The world wide web is a relatively recent invention and still allows for the online cataloging of vast amounts of information available at your fingertips at a moments notice.  In an age where information is so readily available why does it seem that it is harder to determine which sources are reliable and which are not? A simple one word answer might be, Google.

Google and solving disagreements 

Admit it. You have had a disagreement with a friend that has ended in the sentence, “Let’s find out right now, let me Google it real quick.” The real challenge is choosing a source that you and your friend will both agree is a fair and correct answer to an important disagreement.  While that might work with a disagreement over details like plain facts, it won’t solve a disagreement over why you believe one source to be more trustworthy than another. How do we solve this problem? My best answer lays somewhere between educating more citizens to think critically and providing access to more information for citizens to more quickly research and discuss a topic. Going back to the idea of a universal library, wouldn’t it be great if you could look up all of the printed books and search through them for answers? Google has attempted and actually almost succeeded in this endeavor. 

Project Ocean? Google Books and the controversy 

While the history of Project Ocean and Google Books is less than twenty years old, it is technically at the intersection between current policy debate about copyright and historical innovation leading to new technology and new ways of accessing information. Business Insider wrote a quick blog post about the basic details in 2013 that highlights the controversy and recommends a documentary if you want more information. The Atlantic has a great article likening the Google Books saga to Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria. Fortune magazine recently highlighted Google’s twenty years of growth and provided a helpful timeline for our understanding of their growth. The Guardian offered some significant perspective on the controversy by juxtaposing two of my favorite subjects, philanthropy and piracy.  Ultimately there were challenges by major competitors as well as authors who were worried about their copyrights.

Google Books today and working with copyrighted materials

Google Books actually got around to digitizing over 25 million books before they ran into legal challenges and settled into a new plan. The idea of a digital collective providing resources available to all may not have come to completion but it got a heck of a kick start. So what kind of opportunities and tools has this digitization project created? While researchers looking for information and businesses looking to profit off of new business models are both eager to continue building a digital collaborative, the result of this attempt to digitize as many books as possible has led to the creation of the Hathi Trust Digital Library.

Hathi Trust Digital Library and analyzing copyrighted books 

Read more about the Hathi Trust Digital Library and how it provides a workaround in the form of a ‘Data Capsule’. Below is a quick explanation of how researchers can use a Data Capsule to conduct analysis of some copyrighted materials.

The HathiTrust Research Center allows Underwood and others to work with copyrighted materials. “I can’t physically get the texts under copyright, or distribute them, but I can work inside a secure Data Capsule and measure the things I need to measure to do research,” he says. “So it’s not like my projects have to come to a screeching halt in 1923,” he says. (That’s the year that marks the Great Divide between materials that have come into the public domain and those still locked out of it.)

A Data Capsule is a secure, virtual computer that allows what’s known as “non-consumptive” research, meaning that a scholar can do computational analysis of texts without downloading or reading them. The process respects copyright while enabling work based on copyrighted materials.

New tools and future conversations with history

While Google Books has an amazing history and has led to some interesting research tools in the present, what comes next?  Google just announced a search tool powered by artificial intelligence this year that will attempt to answer any question you have by reading thousands of books as a reference point as a result of Google Books. This new tool is called “Talk to Books” and I’m sure it is something that you will want to try out as it is in it’s early stages. Remember how I asked which historical figure you would have lunch with and what questions you would ask? What if Google tried to simulate that conversation? We aren’t there yet, but like I said before we aren’t too far off either. Get your questions ready. We might soon get a simulated response.

Recuerdos y fotografias de Avenida Guadalupe

For my group project this semester, I will be working with fellow classmate Geremy Landin on helping the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center coordinate a photo exhibit project.  One of the working titles for this project is ‘Recuerdos y fotografias de Avenida Guadalupe’ translated to ‘Memories and photos from the Guadalupe Neighborhood’. As we start to sort through photos, we hope to find a recurring theme to organize the future exhibit. One working idea for a topic of this project will be the photos that we can  match up to current areas of the neighborhood.  For example, we will look through photos in an attempt to recreate photos in the same or similar areas as much as possible for family.

Creating a workflow and a photo archive 

A major challenge of this project is creating a work flow and a a finders aid for those interested in looking through the collection in the future. There are multiple ways to organize the collection and this will likely take up the majority of our project time. One of the initial ways we can sort out photos is by those that we can identify coming from a particular street or house. I see two major outputs of this particular public history project and they would be the initial definition of scope and the creation of a way for future interested parties to continue to organize and catalog future photos for a rotating exhibit. The second major output would ideally be an exhibit that could be showcased either at the Casa de Cuentos or even at partner businesses in the neighborhood if given approval by Esperanza.

Timeline and future possibilities

In the future, I could see much more added to this project including helping Esperanza with oral histories and maybe even  working together on where to showcase the photo exhibit outside of the neighborhood. Based on our group conversations, we believe that it will take a least a month for us to come up with a proper finders aid for cataloging a small portion of the Esperzanza photo collection.  That means by the middle of October we will be able to start actually picking out some pictures for an exhibit. We discussed the idea of putting some of this material online although we feel this aspect of the project may be limited to what we can create in an online blog that the Esperanza website can link to if they choose to share the online exhibit that we may be able to accomplish by the end of the semester.

Sources for project and possible policy discussions 

We believe that there is enough material that a true digitization project would be beyond the focus of the scope of this semester’s project. For our sources, we plan to reach out to the Esperanza Center and work with the volunteer who has already done a lot of the work on creating the neighborhood photo project to seek this person’s thoughts and feedback on what has been done in the past and what can be done in the future. One challenge that we will face with this project is how much Esperanza already has on their plate as a non-profit organization. Our ability to reach out to sources in the neighborhood may also be an additional challenge as we are not sure how many details are known about the photos that have been accepted as donations. We hope to suggest a potential photo donation acceptance policy that will help with future additions to the photo project. We believe that the cost to complete the project for this semester will be relatively little as most of the project will be creating a structure for future neighbors to come and look through the donated photo archive.  There may be a need for a few bankers boxes and some manilla folders. We are open to the needs of Esperzana with this project and will adjust the scope and focus of the semester project as we discuss further with the class and get feedback.

 

 

San Antonio Female Academy

This week as I was searching for a public history resource, I came upon the Portal to Texas History.  This digital public history resource was created and maintained by the University of North Texas Libraries. As I was searching through the Portal, I came upon a photo that I was intrigued by and wanted to learn more about. The photo was a postcard from the San Antonio Female Academy which was also known as San Antonio Female College from 1894 until 1918. While the history of this college is interesting what interested me most was that this college was built in the Westside of San Antonio and yet seemingly had disappeared.

The first thought I had was that this must be the present day location of a current university but I could find nothing to tie the story together except for a generalized location of the Westside of San Antonio. I knew that it hadn’t been a part of St. Mary’s University ,  Our Lady of the Lake University or the University of the Incarnate Word, other local universities in San Antonio.  After a little more digging with the Texas State Historical Association online, I learned that the San Antonio Female Academy changed names in 1918 and became known as Westmoorland College and then subsequently the University of San Antonio in 1937.

The University of San Antonio?

Finding out that San Antonio established a university in 1937 was a surprise to me. I know that I had never heard of the University of San Antonio and that the University of Texas at San Antonio wasn’t established until 1969. As I started digging further, I started looking through books on old San Antonio. One such book had the answer I was looking for and explained that Protestant colleges in Texas were starting to have serious competition among themselves and were better off merging rather than competing. (City in the Sun, Peyton, 228-231) This University of San Antonio became what is now Trinity University. I was happy for a moment, but then confused. Trinity isn’t anywhere in the Westside of San Antonio so what happened? Reading through Trinity University’s website, I saw that the Woodlawn Campus was the location until 1952 when Trinity University moved to it’s present location.

1952-2000-Making historical assumptions

My next step in this university mystery was to find out what happened next. While searching for vintage photos of Trinity University, I came upon this local article online that gave me the photos and answers that I needed.  One of the photo captions the dorm at Trinity that was eventually sold to Assumption Seminary.  To verify I went to the Assumption Seminary website and read about their history. Bingo! Assumption Seminary became the site of the former San Antonio Female Academy, the former University of San Antonio, the former location of Trinity University. Case closed, or so I thought.

incorporating history in our future

I figured surely there would be a historical marker or some way to recognize this history?  I kept digging and came across this history column by Express News writer Paula Allen. The column explains the detailed history that the Assumption Seminary used the former residence hall and then re purposed for the Mexican American Catholic College until they moved their functions to a new building in 2000.  At that point it became too expensive for the Archdiocese to maintain and after a mediation with preservationists they agreed to incorporate some details of the exterior into any new building or spaces on the property. While this story didn’t end with a plaque or historical marker, it is a good story to think about when reflecting on how we can lose our own history if we aren’t careful. How can we make sure to incorporate history in our future as we grow and progress as a city and a community?

The line between history and historical fiction

As our class explores the intersections of public history and the digital humanities, I am noticing the dividing line between history and historical fiction. This week I listened  to historian Edward O’Donnell’s podcast In the Past Lane, episode 89.  It was a fascinating podcast interviewing Dr. James. E Lewis Jr. , Professor of history at Kalamazoo College about a book he wrote titled The Burr Conspiracy Uncovering the Story of An Early American Crisis. At first sight, it appears that this could be historical fiction but the book and the podcast were about the actual crisis in early America surrounding what early Americans believed about Aaron Burr.

In the podcast, Dr Lewis makes the distinction between what the facts of history show and compares and contrasts it to what citizens of the early American republic believed about Aaron Burr.  As we search to tell stories of the past, many times we will find gaps. When we find these gaps it is tempting to fill them in, but what is the appropriate way to deal with these?  I see three distinct ways that I have observed friends dealing with these historical gaps. The first way which I believe is most common recently is to fill in the gap with speculation and creative license. This is the realm of historical fiction and can be fun and entertaining but not history. The second way is to cover the gap up, as to pretend that there is no gap. This is a simplistic way to deal with history and something that I think is common as well. A third option is to continue researching and challenging what we think we know.

How does history relate to present day? 

My interest in history tugs between the tactics of guesswork and storytelling and the research and discovery of new perspectives that challenge what we can know about the past and appreciating what we can’t know. As I have been discussing the study of history with friends, often topics that are currently in the news come up.  One such topic is the Alamo and the recent Citizen Committee Approval for the Alamo Plaza Redesign. I believe that this is such a contentious issue because the way we collectively ‘Remember the Alamo’ is different.  If we are to be honest with ourselves about our relationship with history it is probably best to say that it is a complicated situation. This is especially true with the story of the San Antonio de Valero Mission, better know as ‘The Alamo‘.

The Alamo is very often at the center of how we tell the history of Texas but the story of Texas doesn’t begin with the Battle of the Alamo. While we know many details about the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, there is still much to be learned about Texas history and the mission San Antonio de Valero that became an important battlefield that defines how we tell the story of the great state of Texas. While I know not everyone is happy with the Alamo Plaza Redesign, I am excited that we are having an open discussion about Texas history and believe that this is a learning opportunity for every interested party who wants to learn more.  The best thing we can do is to continue researching and trying to do a better job of filling in those gaps of knowledge so we can tell the best and most informative story of the Alamo to future generations of Texans and visitors alike.

Important moments

I get this question all the time. There are actually many good answers but today’s answer is simple. It’s all about important moments. You have them often. Think of birthdays, baptisms, graduations, funerals. Your hope is to share these moments and keep them alive. What happens when these moments pass? Do you save photos? Do you write down your stories for the future? Where is your family history safeguarded?

House of Stories

Recently, my class visited the “Casa de Cuentos“ that is a part of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. As part of this class we began to learn the lost history of the west side of San Antonio. Much of this history is told in oral histories and photos. While some of this history is on display in a recent exhibit at the Casa de Cuentos, much of this history is lost in photos that have yet to be cataloged and shared with the greater community. As part of our class, we walked the Guadalupe area and saw large photo banners that are proudly displayed throughout the neighborhood.

Conversations about history

As people ask questions about my class, I have found myself having some thought provoking conversations. Within my own family, I was able to find out that some of my family’s genealogical history had already been dug up online at www.familysearch.org I’ll share more on this later! As I came home and shared my story about class I learned that my wife’s family grew up right around the corner from the Casa de Cuentos in the Guadalupe area and may even be in some of the photos proudly displayed throughout this historic west side neighborhood. Today, those conversations resulted in digging though photos in the garage where we found some hidden treasures. Here is a photo from the Guadalupe neighborhood of my wife’s grandmother who grew up in the Alazan Apache Courts.

As we looked over the photos today, we started the conversation over what life was like for my wife’s grandmother and great grandmother in the neighborhood and what stories have been lost and what can still be recovered. Here in this photo, she is most likely a student at Lanier High School just around the corner in the 1950’s. The place where this picture is taken remains remarkably similar to this day. This neighborhood also raises a difficult conversation between maintaining a neighborhood and gentrification.  Last year the San Antonio Housing Authority proposed mixed-income housing development to replace the original housing development.   

As we looked through these photos, many questions came up about my wife’s history and I shared the history I found out about my family.  As I talked to my Mom about my family history, she told me about the initial research she did about my maternal grandfather’s side of the family. We signed in to www.familysearch.org and found out that a distant cousin of mine in the Rio Grande Valley had continued the research back ten generations all the way back to the early 1600’s!

Random book buying

As I mentioned in my first blog post, I often pick up random books on history and decide which one to buy. This last weekend was no different. I went to the Twig Book Shop at the Pearl and while I already had multiple history books in hand, I kept walking past the front of the store where they were having a book signing. I was curious and I felt it was one of those moments that I couldn’t let pass by. I stopped and asked about the book they were signing, called the Canary Islanders of San Antonio.  As I asked questions about their book, I let them know that I had some questions about my own family history who founded current day Mission, Texas.  I decided to buy their book and add it my list of books to read during this 300th year of San Antonio history.  I’ll let you know as I read it what I think.

Three opportunities

As I started this post, I talked about important moments. You have one or rather three right now. Are you going to let this opportunity pass you by like a Delorean on the highway or are you going to chase it? Do you have photos gathering dust in a garage or storage unit right now? When was the last time you talked to your parents or grandparents and asked them ‘why’ questions about your family’s history? You can also go to an independent bookstore and pick up three local Texas history books that strike your interest and then buy just one.

If you take a few minutes out of your day, you might just find out something about your own history that you didn’t know. This was my first attempt at asking questions and I already have three great leads! I already know why I study history. What are your important moments that you hope to share or uncover?