Have you been wondering what museums are on Twitter?  Looking for inspiration about how your institution might use social media?

Here’s a list for you to peruse!

Today is “Follow a Museum” Day, an unofficial–but pretty popular–attempt to publicize museum’s Twitter feeds.

What would your average Civil War soldier have tweeted about the Battle of Gettysburg?  Would he described the generals’ plans or the battle’s strategic importance?  Would he have described his reasons for fighting, his fears, his sense of camaraderie with other fighters?  Maybe he would have just reported about the beans he had for breakfast.

The creators of TwHistory have taken short tidbits from soldiers’ letters, diaries, and other written records and parsed them into 140 character tweets describing their perspectives on the major historical events unfolding around them.  The first TwHistory project follows the events at Gettysburg and the second project has followed the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Future projects will tweet the Mormon Overland Trail and the Lewis and Clark Expedition.  These choices all make a lot of sense because participants left behind numerous journals, letters, and other eyewitness accounts of complex historical events.

By creating Twitter accounts for lots of different soldiers, TwHistory found a way to deliver multiple perspectives on the same event.  If one follows multiple soldiers’ Twitter feeds, one gets a “real time” narrative of Gettysburg from ordinary soldiers.  TwHistory is currently developing a package or application that would allow scholars, students, or cultural heritage institutions to create similar projects to document other historical events.  Such a tool would allow individuals or organizations to Tweet the Boston Massacre, the Uprising of the 20,000, or the Kent State shootings.  Can you think of a project for your organization or students to create a TwHistory?  What local event might come alive by mining the archives and delivering content via Tweets?  How would your students engage with primary sources differently if they were figuring out how to synthesize a diary entry into one or a series of 140 character microblog posts?

By the way, note that TwHistory uses WordPress and other free tools to build its website; it is also being developed cooperatively, as many innovative digital humanities projects are.

Though the size and scale of the Chicago Historical Society is far greater than many of the organizations we’ve pitched the Public Humanities Toolbox to, their blog is very much in keeping with the type of project any historical organization could produce.  Here’s a description (emphasis added) from the Internet Scout Report:

The Chicago History Museum has mounted a number of popular initiatives and exhibitions in the past several years, and their new blog is something that historians, young people, and anyone with an interest in Chicago will want to check out. While the site is organized like a traditional blog, each entry contains interesting insights into Museum’s holdings, along with commentaries on the city’s cultural, social, and historical landscape. The posts are written by Museum staff members, and from time to time, there will be guest bloggers with a special insight into some subject. Recent posts have included information about tamale vendors in the city, the history of Chinatown, and the refitting of 19th century socialite Bertha Palmer’s elaborate gown from 1892. Visitors can browse through previous posts by category (which include “Film” and “Multimedia”) and also look at their Web 2.0 features, which include YouTube videos, Flickr photo galleries, and so on.

We’re particularly impressed with how the Chicago Historical Society uses its blog to probe its collections further, give members and visitors a behind-the-scenes look at the institution, and share little known facts and often playful insights into the city’s history.

The Internet Scout Report, based at the University of Wisconsin, is a weekly list of innovative and excellent internet projects for academics and librarians to keep their tabs on.

Check out the WordPress site for the Forest History Society.  This organization is really on board with the various social media tools profiled in the Public Humanities Toolbox.  Their most recent post embodies the interactive, playful, and practical uses of such tools for small organizations, too.  They’ve designed several print ads promoting the Society’s social media tools, posted all of the ads on their blog, and are allowing visitors to choose which ad should eventually be published.  As you’ll note, the organization is not without a sense of humor about itself!

See below to view or share the presentation I gave today at the Pioneer Valley History Network meeting in Holyoke, Massachusetts.  PVHN is a consortium of historical organizations including museums, archives, and historical societies and professionals including curators, educators, archivists, consultants, and other staff and volunteers.  I was deeply impressed by their commitment and enthusiasm for the possibilities in the Public Humanities Toolbox.  

Examples that I discussed in the presentation can be found in the Examples tab and the full handbook can be downloaded under the Workshop Materials tab.  Don’t forget to check out the Library of Congress’s report on its pilot Flickr project, either.  

In the next several days I’ll also post updates based on feedback during the presentation, including my attempts to respond to any direct questions.

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Thanks to our very enthusiastic audience at the Mass Humanities Conference session on June 8.  Below you’ll find the Power Point presentation that Al and I gave.  You can follow the link below (“View this document on Scribd”) to download, print, or comment on the presentation.   The handbook and other materials are all available under the Workshop Materials tab. 

In the next several days we’ll be following up the questions you asked with posts on this blog.  Several of you mentioned marketing as a concern.  If you continue reading the blog posts, you’ll find a short presentation I gave at the RICH Skill Share workshop series on applications from the Toolbox that can be used for marketing.  

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Thanks to my patient and thoughtful audience at RICH’s Skill Share workshop today.  

Here’s the presentation I gave.  You can follow the link below (“View this document on Scribd”) to download, print, or comment on the presentation.   The handbook and other materials are all available under the Workshop Materials tab.  If you have follow up questions, don’t hesitate to contact me!

UPDATE: Here’s the list of “10 Twitter Tips for Nonprofits” that I mentioned in the workshop today.  

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I’ll be presenting a quick overview of The Public Humanities Toolbox at the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities’ Skill Share series on Monday, May 18.  I’ll focus the 30-minute session on the tools that can help small organizations promote themselves and their resources on a limited budget.  

This FREE brown-bag lunch series runs from 12-1:30.  For more details about presenters, directions, and other logistics, call Sue Ellen Kroll at 401-273-2250. Please call to RSVP.

Check out Digital Harlem, Everyday Life 1915-1930, a project initiated by four historians at the University of Sydney in Australia.  The first thing you’ll notice is that they use Google Maps.  This example  is a bit more complicated that just embedding a Google Map into the host website, since users can set criteria using a drop down menu to choose which sites they wish to see displayed.  

The project combs archives of “everyday life” to represent Harlem during the era 1915-1930.  Some of the archives include the District Attorney’s Closed Case files, the Probation Department case files, a variety of newspapers and other manuscripts from the New York City Public Library’s collections, and files from the W.P.A. Writers Project now housed at the Schomburg Centre for Research and Black Culture.

This project, among other things, maps New Deal projects using Google Maps.  At a time of huge debates about stimulus spending and new infrastructure projects, it is also a very timely initiative.  Could your institution map New Deal projects in the local community?  Could you co-create (with students, volunteers, local engineers) a website and maps using tools in the Public Humanities Toolbox?