Olivia’s Digital History Blog

I would be remiss if I didn’t blog about baseball. I spend a lot of time reading blogs about baseball, checking baseball scores and attempting to keep up with the current standings. I am sad to note that my “hometown” team, the Minnesota Twins are in the middle of the pack when it comes to standings. Since joining Twitter for this class I have started following various baseball figures such as MLB_Updates, a few twins writers, washtimesbb (because my friend updates it and I caved to peer pressure) and my absolute favorite RonGardenhire. Gardenhire is the manager of the Twins and all around entertaining guy. Fans know him for sticking up for his players and  because of this he gets ejected from games a lot. The reason I love his Twitter updates so much is because they are all related to being ejected from games. Currently Bobby Cox, the Braves manager, hold the record for all time ejections and Gardenhire is looking to break his record.

The importance of stats and records in baseball got me thinking about what a rich history the game has. There are the big examples, such as the Women’s League that played during WWII and Jackie Robinson breaking the race barrier. Then the are the smaller things that mirror larger history, like how the diversity in the game has increased to include more foreign players and the MLB adopting new technologies, such as the use of instant replay on close calls. Those are fairly easy to call “history,” they’re well known and have some social implications. If Gardenhire breaks Cox’s record is that also history? Carl Becker, historian and former president of the American Association of Historians, stated that any event that happened in the past is history and thus everyone who remembers past events is an historian. He uses this “everyman” as a way to remind academic historians that authority must be shared. If this is the case then I think I should get to consider Gardenhire’s quest to break a record part of history.

In other baseball news Randy Johnson, a pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks, recently won his 300th game, something only 24 other men had done in history. Due to the way the game is evolving and pitchers are being used there was talk that Johnson may be the last man to reach that mark. Does that make the event more valid history, if it is rare?

As a fan I like to consider records history, partly as a way to bring together two of my greatest interests. I also really like the idea Carl Becker proposed that everyone is in some way a historian. Plus, since I’m a public history student I know that authority doesn’t just come from one place, and in this case I’m not going to get worked up over traditional academic ideals of history. So when Gardenhire does break that record I’ll put it down in my own personal list of interesting history trivia. And of course, it’ll be on Twitter.

No Comments | In: June 2009 | tags: digital humanities. | #

I have a confession to make, I have never worked in a museum. I’ve interned at a museum and a historic site and I’m currently employed at a temporary space that is being used to test how visitors interact with exhibits as they’re being developed but I have never been an actual museum professional. This week I had the opportunity to go to some meetings that included multiple levels of staff from various departments including exhibit design and programs, external communications, and development. One of these meetings was about managing our visitors expectations when they get to our site. We want them to enjoy their experience but also to understand that what we have open now is not a full blown museum. What I took from the meetings however, will be more helpful in managing my own expectations regarding the field as a whole.

One of the biggest issues was that the external relations staff did not feel comfortable with the museum content and were nervous when interacting with families in the testing space. We have visitors ranging from young children to their grandparents and not everyone on staff has experience with kids, especially in this kind of setting. This was news to me. I was shocked that anyone working for the museum would not feel comfortable around young visitors, since they are the main audience. One person made the point that programming staff may not feel comfortable discussing donations at a gala fundraiser and said it was the same thing.

Personally, I could not agree less. When you work for a non-profit organization you need to be passionate about the mission, and that implies some level of familiarity. I am not saying everyone needs to be an expert, clearly people in the finance office of a history museum need to be focused on numbers but they should still understand the content that the  numbers are based on. The development staff at a science museum needs to be able to discuss what the museum hopes to accomplish when soliciting funds. In the same way I think staff needs to be excited about kids when working for a museum that has a mission which hopes to inspire children.

Back to the meeting, I was the only who had a real problem with the analogy and felt so strongly on the topic. It was said that the external relations staff would be given more training and would have programming staff with them to help explain the exhibit prototypes, problem solved. I can honestly say that seeing the situation handled in such a manner was a great learning experience, it gave me a dose of reality and a sneak peak of what I can expect when I do, someday, work for a museum.

No Comments | In: June 2009, Uncategorized | tags: museum, professional, staff. | #

When I signed up for Twitter one of the first things I noticed, and was most confused by, was that tweets are limited to 140 characteristics. In a world where we are texting and emailing abbreviations are becoming all too common. A friend of mine is a substitute teacher in middle school English and I have heard stories from her about student using “text speak” in essays and assignments. I was expecting to come across more of this when I did research for the digital bibliography since I was reading articles about technology in the classroom. Interestingly enough when I was looking up the use of blogs  none of the journal articles I read addressed this problem, and I read written by elementary teachers through college professors. More of what I saw praised the fact that blogs and texting got people writing at all, regardless of how grammatically incorrect it may have been. When I started looking specifically for articles on the decline of grammar, punctuation, capitalization and such most of what I found was about half and half, some saying it’s a problem and some not at all concerned. One article in particular exemplified both sides of the argument from teachers’ points of view.

My initial reaction was that students need to learn to write correctly for professional situations. Texting with your friends is very different from having a conversation with a boss. But then I realized that I have texted my boss. I’ve sent texts letting him know what supplies we needed at the off site program I was doing, because so  much of what we do is in the community cellphones are sometimes the only way we reach each other. Then it occurred to me that I joined Twitter for class, full well knowing my teacher and classmates would be reading my tweets. As I gave it more thought I realized a few more things; one, that as much as I wanted to be right in my initial feeling that textspeak was ruining youth’s ability to write as an academic I have to present all sides of the argument, even though I pretty much proved myself wrong. The second lesson I took from the articles I read and personal experiences I had was that it’s not so much about how you communicate, whether it’s in person, over the phone or electronically as it is what you communicate, especially in a professional setting. While I still get annoyed when people don’t take the time to proof read emails and leave out capitalization I am more accepting of acronyms and shortened spellings. It seems that I need to just get over my pet peeve because texts and twitter are how people will be communicating regardless of the setting, at least IMHO.

2 Comments | In: June 2009 | tags: communication, digital humanities, professional. | #