In this blog post, I will reflect a bit about my personal experience with entering the digital history space and the new insights I gained while creating a digital component for a cultural heritage institution. One of our team challenges as a CHI fellow was to create a project vision document as a team and then transform that document into a pitch website. To complete this challenge, it was essential that I leaned upon many of the things we had previously discussed regarding digital history. Most importantly, the ethics behind cultural history production. When approaching a digital history project, it is important to consider whose history will be represented. As a digital historian, I want to ensure that I am not harming any marginalized communities when I reproduce their history. Digital projects in themselves create negative impacts on the environment, so I would never want to create something just for the sake of creating something. There needs to be intention and merit behind the creation of these projects. Obviously, funding is a huge factor as well, which brings the baggage of the politics of representation. Many funding opportunities are restricted by the ideologies of the funding bodies. All of these aspects informed me as I moved through the stages of our development challenges.
In creating our project pitch document, we looked through the list of potential cultural heritage institutions we could work with and settled on Robben Island Museum. Seeing the project pitch document and all of the elements that go into creating a pitch truly expanded my understanding of the amount of work that goes into these projects. There were many things that I would have never considered before, including the technology used, licensing issues, and funding partners. Our vision was to create an augmented reality experience that would allow visitors to access oral histories from the museum’s archive. The goal was to layer the personal testimonies of former prisoners on the island in addition to conservation workers over the physical space of the place. The hope was that visitors would use their phone to explore the island while being intimately tied to the beauty of the history of the museum through the oral testimonies. In developing the vision document, we had to make sure that we were able to express the intricacies of the project while still remaining concise and precise. This was a new exercise for me, because I had not had much experience in trying to pitch ideas to people. I have to say it is not an exercise I enjoyed, but I can see the utility of the skill. We were told to consider the potential audience and user experience of the project while outlining our imagined timeline and expectations.
One of the biggest takeaways for me was learning to work in a team environment. I have historically preferred to work individually. Although the experience was pleasant, I am definitely still a solo-worker. We were able to meet our goals and expectations due to our good communication skills and task delegation. It was interesting how each of our backgrounds added a new perspective to the project. The diversity of thought highlighted the benefits of teamwork as well. Each member of the team knew exactly what they were supposed to work on, and this made the creation process seamless and without issue. When we actually built the website, we decided to make the pitch resemble the Robben Island Museum website. We figured that if we were going to actually pitch this thing, it would make more sense to have the project fit in with the existing design style of the museum.
We spent a good amount of time looking through the assets of the museum and contemplating how we could provide a tool that would make those assets more accessible to a global audience. The museum had mentioned several times that they had hoped their archives could be an educational tool. It also mentioned the importance of tourism to the financial viability of the museum. These were things that we knew we had to include in our project. Our project then was meant to serve as an extension of the stated goals of the cultural heritage institution while respecting the sensitive history of apartheid. To circumvent many of the issues of obtaining licenses or permissions, we made the decision to incorporate the assets already held by the museum. This respected the copyright and usage rights of the museum, which made the project more sustainable.
One of the ethical concerns was how to showcase the beauty of the island, which is a World Heritage Site, while not romanticizing the absolute brutality of the apartheid regime. It was almost important to not glorify the violence of the prison system by reproducing the trauma of some of the oral testimonies. These are ethical considerations that anyone who works on a digital history project must remember. On the technical side, it was important that the project actually added something to the Robben Island Museum. We believed that AR technology could create unique insights not possible through traditional exhibits.
To create our pitch website, we were tasked with working on GitHub. As a newcomer to coding, this was a harrowing endeavor. I was initially intimidated with the blank workspace, terrified with the thought of creating something from scratch through code. I won’t lie, it was very challenging, but it felt very rewarding as our website grew. Because of the nature of GitHub, we had to have clear communication to ensure that we did not run into conflicts from too many cooks in the kitchen. We quickly learned that the key to success was to communicate when we were working on something and to save often and push those changes regularly. Once we got that down, things started to progress smoothly. It was also much easier to build the website once we found some foundational code to build off of. There are tons of resources that provide code for every function you could think of, and once we identified those resources things were better as well. It was a great learning moment.
Overall, I learned so much about the production of digital history through the completion of these initial fellowship challenges. We not only had to consider the ethics of what we were doing, but we also had to put what we had learned to practice in the creation of the pitch website. These are all skills that will be crucial in the creation of my final digital project.
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