Paper title: Mashing Up History and Teaching Our Kids—The Public Is Invited

Presenter: Ari Davidow (Director of Online Strategy, Jewish Women's Archive)

Brief Abstract:

Starting in 2009, JWA began building a new set of curricula around social justice and labor issues, along with tools to help teachers adapt, remix, and create entirely new lesson plans using existing archive content. One critical element of this plan was the creation of a presentation tool (based on the OAI-ORE format) that allows teachers and students to create presentations using archive materials, their own uploaded media, and media on other websites. By using simple, hosted presentations, teachers/students can easily share presentations, and have access to their work from anywhere that they have internet access. In addition, they are no longer limited by our exhibits and collections—the internet at large is available for remixing. A parallel piece is a Google Maps mashup enabling anyone to upload images to our site (putting Jewish women “On the Map”) and tie the images to specific locations, along with the story explaining the significance of the location. This report talks about how teachers at JWA’s summer institute used these tools, the archive’s success in exposing its historical assets and in using the map mashup to engage teachers, students, and the general public.

Abstract:

Capturing History / Building the Future: What do you do if you have heaps of oral histories, images, feature stories, exhibits, encyclopedia entries and the like? For the Jewish Women’s Archive, which has long provided curricula and lesson plans designed to engage children with history while also ensuring that the roles of Jewish women become part of that narrative, the answer was obvious: Remix. Starting in 2009, JWA began building a new set of curricula around social justice and labor issues, along with tools to help teachers adapt, remix, and even create entirely new lesson plans using existing archive content that has been imported into Drupal. One critical element of this plan was the creation of an as-yet-still-unnamed presentation tool that allows teachers and students to create multimedia presentations, saved in the OAI-ORE (Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange) format. Using OAI-ORE means that the resulting files consist of modified newsfeeds, enabling them to be easily shared, modified, and viewed on any system that has a web browser or newsreader. One key part of the remixes, supported by the presentation tool, is the ability to incorporate URLs from elsewhere on the web so that teachers are no longer limited by our collection, and to allow uploading of new objects to the website for use in classes. The final piece was put in place in March 2010 for Women’s History Month, when we created a Google Maps mashup, “put Jewish Women ‘On the Map’” enabling anyone to upload images to our site and tie them to specific locations, along with the story explaining the significance of the location. This report talks about how teachers at JWA’s summer institute used these tools, the archive’s success in exposing its historical assets to teachers (and to the general public), and in using the map mashup to engage teachers, students, and the general public in furthering our “uncovering, chronicling, and transmitting Jewish women’s history.”

Session Info

• Type: Individual Paper
• Keywords: mashup, remix, oral history, exhibit
• Relevance: A nice example of "outside in" as existing archival content is provided on the public web in remixed and remixable forms to teachers, students, and the general public, who are encouraged to add their own materials.

Presenter

Name: Ari Davidow

Title: Director of Online Strategy

Organization: Jewish Women's Archive

Physical location: Brookline, MA

Web location: http://jwa.org

Bio: Ari Davidow is focused on how small archives best make information available, findable, and engaging online. He began his career skipping high school a day a week to work on his local Dallas, TX, underground paper. He has been working on and in virtual community since 1985. That work is complemented by a parallel career in multilingual typography, and he has contributed chapters to both volumes of Computers and Typography,  Rosemary Sassoon, ed. (Intellect Press, UK, 1993 & 2002). Davidow taught typography online for a decade at the New School for Social Research Graduate Media Studies Department. He holds a Masters in IT Management from Brandeis University where he teaches courses on "Content Management Systems" and "Cloud Computing" at the Rabb School for Graduate Professional Studies. He is also cofounder and Steward of the DuraSpace Small Archives Solution Community.