Recovery and Community: Multiethnic Digital Humanities in 2022 conference is ended by the “Workshop: Hands-on History Harvest” of Rebecca S. Wingo, Assistant Professor of History & Director of Public History, University of Cincinnati. Hands-On History Harvest focuses on the case study of the Rondo community, mock interviews, user submission to the archive, and a brief tour of Omeka -S. The History Harvest Project is a community engagement model that prioritizes the depth of local memory and material culture.
Remembering Rondo: A History Harvest is a community-based project that involves local communities, students, and the university. Wingo highlighted the history of Rondo Community, a neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the people who are mainly affected by the construction of the highway. She described this project as “This is all about building the past…nothing about the present”. The students participated in this project from various backgrounds to digitize the artifacts and make them available as an online archive. The project proceeded in the following steps such as heavy reading about the history of the community, developing the materials which are collected from various sources, processing the collecting data, and finally digital exhibits of collection.
Through Reconnect Rondo Project, Mr. Anderson tried to revitalize the Rondo community with a land bridge that connects the northern and southern neighborhoods, farmer’s markets, and other nearby areas. The Mapping project gave a geographic overview to readers of neighborhood areas. The construction of the Rondo Commemorative Plaza symbolized the old neighborhood as well as reunited people of all backgrounds together. These are great expansions of the original project.
In the second half of her workshop, Wingo gave brief guidelines to Omeka S, a free, open-source content management system for online digital collections which she used for making the materials and photographs of the project easily available to the public. It also accepts user submissions such as their story with relevant photographs.
The Conference explores how digital tools and platforms advance the scholarship on race and ethnicity and connect marginalized people, histories, past events, and cultures with not only scholars but also the common folk who are interested in exploring history with new digital methods. It gives me a brief understanding of how we can connect some history or other humanities projects with modern digital technology and lab models. The Omeka S workshop introduces me to a new digital platform that I can use in my Digital Humanities project to connect humanities collections with online resources.
Having been to Dr. Wingo’s talk myself, I totally agree with your point on Omeka S. I was incredibly inspired by Dr. Wingo’s work, and having only heard of Omeka, it was really important to see how easy it was to collaborate with the community using the digital tool. I also love your point on how the History Harvest model prioritizes the depth of local memory and material culture; as we saw with the demonstration, giving folks the opportunity to digitally upload their stories/images of material artifacts to Omeka is so key in maintaining this community led archive.