4/12/2016
Vicki Mayer
Professor, Department of Communication
Digital humanities in New Orleans sit at a crossroads for collaborative growth. The city’s various institutions for research – from library archives to university academic units – have nearly twenty years of experience with initiatives to promote access and increase connectivity with knowledge collections. Add to it the community and citizens who curate their own cultural stories and images and the digital humanities in New Orleans seem alive and well. That is, if anyone can find them.
For every new launch, there are the ghosts of the digital past: antiquated websites, nonfunctioning links, abandoned blogs. Some launched leanly but all had a relatively short shelf life, both in terms of the technology itself and in terms of the human capital needed to keep them relevant. My own experience of nearly a decade of these digital highs and lows has taught me no website can be a silo and no project can stand without mutual support.
This realization motivated the formation of the NOLA Digital Consortium, a collaboration of digitally curious stakeholders throughout the city who want to plan, coordinate, and build consensus to network our regional digital humanities projects. The group began meeting in January 2015, directed jointly by Tulane and UNO. It includes members representing these universities, the Louisiana State Museum and local archives, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and all of our community partners. Meetings have involved pitching new ideas, sharing resources, and seeking support.
Just to highlight a few interdisciplinary projects which are evolving through the process of working together:
- NewOrleansHistorical.org: A place-based website and app for student- and community-created histories that can be organized into tours. History, communication, archeology, and architecture classes at UNO and Tulane have contributed to tours ranging from the pathways of cinema production to the legacies of Tennessee Williams in New Orleans.
- Redesigning MediaNOLA/NolaVie: A community-based design-thinking project to imagine the merger of two websites into a hub for arts and humanities research and writings about the city and region. The new site will combine the existing MediaNOLA archive of Tulane student work in English, communication, digital media production, music, sociology, and business classes with the professional journalistic and creative nonfiction published in NolaVie.
In addition, we are working on developing new ideas with the State Museum for a digital jazz history exhibit, the New Orleans Video Access Center for digital archives and the Newcomb Art Museum for digital access solutions.
Most importantly, we look for strengthening our ties to faculty and students through flexible service learning opportunities tied to classroom learning outcomes. All of these projects need assistance in 2016-2017. Please contact me if you can participate.