Starting the Nantucket Audio Tour Project!

I'm blogging this onboard the "slow" ferry to Nantucket, with three of our grad students, as we head out to start our community history project with the African-American community on the island this weekend. Renee at the African American Meeting house/Museum of African American History Museum has kindly set up about five interviews for us over the course of the weekend, which is exciting. I'm really pleased that we'll get to meet members of the Jamaican-American community on the island, whom we are hoping to learn about. We've been reading the fascinating studies of the island's African-American history in Robert Johnson's excellent edited volume. Since this group of grad students (Shasha, Yaxin and Meqging) are all from China, we're also very interested in the accounts we've read of Chinese on the island during the Nineteenth century; we wonder if we'll find a way to include some of their stories on the tour.

One thing we are already wondering about is how best to incorporate music and environmental sound into the audio tour. Isabel Kalenback-Montemayor's fascinating essay in the Johnson volume gives some lines of a ballad composed in honor of Absalom Boston, the African-American captain of the 1832 all-black crew of the whaling ship Industry. We're hoping we can find some singers willing to perform the ballad, set to a plausible tune. We're also hoping to record appropriate maritime sounds, of seabirds, surf and wind to edit into various audio segments.

Thoughts on outdoor Cell Phone Audio Tours

We're currently exploring a Fall semester project partnering with the Museum of African American History's campus on the island of Nantucket. This will be based in my graduate seminar, "Making Culture: Theory and Practice" (CP 201), in which we continue to explore new uses of social media technologies in the building of community, at local and regional levels.

The museum already puts on a wonderful historic walking tour along its Black Heritage Trail, which includes its two remarkable properties, the African Meeting House and the Seneca Boston-Florence Higginbotham House. Our current plan is to help the Museum develop a digital audio walking tour, along the lines of the podcasted community history project we did several years ago in West Medford, Massachusetts, with the West Medford Afro-American Remembrance Committee. We'll also build on some of the approaches we explored in our on line oral history project in the Mississippi Delta, "Wade in the Water," several years ago, in which we tied oral history segments to a schematized map of several communities.

This time around we are hoping to make use of new telephone based technologies, perhaps working with a third party vendor, to make the tour accessible through cell phone to walkers. As with the West Medford project, we'd Like to avoid monologues or singular narration, but rather record multiple voices from the community, especially elders sharing their memories and stories that have passed down through the generations. We're also hoping to edit in local music and environmental sounds of the land and sea, and perhaps promote some forms of inter-generational dialogues through the audio tracks.

We'll spend a good deal of time listening to existing cell phone-accessible audio tours (for museum, zoos, and outdoor heritage sites) and discussing effective strategies. [A good resource is the comprehensive list of cell phone tours hosted by "Guide by Cell", one of leading providers in the field.]

In the class, we'll be reading Thoreau's classic essay on walking, as well as Rebecca Solnit's book Wanderlust: A History of Walking. One of the issues we'll be grappling with is how to promote the kinds of meditative "ruminating" called for by Thoreau in the context of cell phone-mediated audio tour. Most of the time, I realize, our ever-growing addiction to cell phones and mobile communication devices is probably eroding our contemplative and observant faculties; we engage in a great deal of largely extraneous chatter as a way of not really being any place at on time, but rather suspended between fluidly shifting virtual locations, so as to never face the weight of being truly alone with our thoughts. But might there be a way to re-capture, through these same technologies, the conversational or dialogic qualities of a great walk with a friend, or to inspire the walker, after hearing a good story or a well-edited melange of audio, to walk on a bit and think new thoughts to himself or herself? Can we encourage, even inspire, listeners not just to consume information passively but to observe their surroundings, to switch off external digital stimuli, and develop new connections themselves between what they've learned and what they are observing? [It seems to me that the most skillfully designed art museum cell phone tours do this, posing intriguing questions about a work of art in ways that encourage the visitor to linger and really look at the piece, or discover something new for himself or herself.]

A related challenge we'll grapple with in engineering the audio tour, beyond transmitting vital factual information about African-American history on the island, will be how to convey or evoke, more subtly perhaps, the rich texture of community historical experience across the decades and century. This would include experiences of slavery and emancipation, 19th century struggle of school desegregation, 19th whaling trips, and the nature of women's work on the island. Will we be able to integrate sounds of labor, protest, music-makingn and of the sea itself effectively into the presentations, in ways that enhance, rather than detract from, the stories and voices of community members? As always, we'll need to think about whether or not there is a recognizable recurrent narrator to the tour, or if there are many voices moving in and out of the tour without a specific identifiable 'guide.' Presumably, we'll have a 'core' set of factual segments, with options to listen to the more evocative or aesthetically rich segments to deepen or extend the audio experience.

We'll be conscious of the need to keep running our draft audio segments past our partners, at the Museum and in the wider community, and to modify the audio tour accordingly. We'll also need to think carefully about forms of evaluation and assessment, to get a sense of how well the tour is reaching our 'target audiences,' once it is on line and accessible by cell phone.

Community History Internship update

This week, from up here in Concord, Massachusetts, I've continued to 'co-supervise' at long distance the six community history interns down in Covington, Georgia, while Forrest Sawyer has been doing the on-site supervision. I'm really pleased at how quickly the interns have learned their way around the wiki of the African American Historical Association of Newton County--they've been updating news links and putting in historical materials on sports (including African-American women's sports in the county history). Guided by Mr. Bob Halcums and Ms. Jane Williams at the Newton County Public Library, they've been pursuing genealogical research on their own kin in the County. Yesterday, they mapped out the gravesites in the historically African-American section of the Covington City Cemetery, which date back to the late 1800s; they evidently uncovered one Masonic headstone, marked with the distinctive Masonic chains. Today, the plan is for them to map the more recent Westside cemetery on the other side of Covington.

Ellen and I are driving down to Georgia this weekend and I'll get a chance to start working with the youth on Monday. I'm pretty sure we'll concentrate on video and multimedia projects. We'll start on brief YouTube videos on the two Covington cemeteries, and perhaps include the Oxford cemetery as well. Ideally, older community members will be able to take some walks through the cemteries sharing their memories of those who are laid to rest there, and reflecting on the history of segregation in these sites. I expect the interns will video some walks with civil rights movement veterans through the Covington square, as they recall the days of struggle.

We'll also try to do some digitial slide shows on local family history, incorporating old family photographs and archival documents to tell various kinds of stories about local history and memory. We might pay a visit to Monroe and the Moore's Ford bridge site to document some of the forms of continuing 'memory work' in reference to the July 1946 mass lynching, in which four persons were killed.

Community History Interns in Georgia: African American Public History

This week, we've started up a new Community History Internship program in Newton County, Georgia. This is a partnership between the African-American Historical Association of Newton County and the Washington Street Community Center in Covington, Georgia. The program is supported by Federal stimulus funds. Six African-American teens in Newton County are employed this summer as community history interns; they've just made "Self-Introduction" pages on the wiki.

The interns are being supervised by me, Deacon Forrest Sawyer, Jr (president of the Historical Association) and Mr. Flemmie Pitts, a civic leader active in the Community Center. Emogene Williams( a retired educator who is one of the local community's leading historians) and Pastor Avis Williams are also advising and helping out in various ways.

Throughout the summer the teens will be enhancing and expanding the Association's wiki, developing links to news story on African-American heritage as well as its various sections on slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movements, and African-American artistic, musical and cultural accomplishments. We're very pleased that thanks to Covington Mayor Kim Carter several important deed books of the Covington African-American cemeteries, dating back to the 1890s, have just come to light: the young people will be mapping and documenting the cemeteries (in the Covington City Cemetery and the Westside cemetery) and tracing the stories of those who are buried there. Perhaps we'll be able to develop a brochure walking guide to the two cemeteries. There's also interest in documenting the early history of African-American schools in the area, including Washington Street School (The photograph above shows third grade teachers Ms. Eva Wright and Ms. Sarah Hardeman with their students, along with Professor Nathaniel Mitchell.)

We'll have to see what ideas the interns have for upcoming projects. It would be interesting to develop some sort of children's book on local African-American history for instance. Perhaps we'll do some sort of multimedia project, involving our new YouTube channel, documenting historical story-telling in the County.

At this point, I've only met the young people over the telephone; they sound terrific. I really look forward to meeting them in person next week when I visit Covington and we can begin the oral history, video, and archival components of the project.