Found History

In an earlier post I wrote about the early buzz around Omeka, both in the forums and among education, museum, public history, and library bloggers. One thing I didn’t mention—and frankly did not expect—was the buzz about Omeka on Twitter, the popular SMS-centered microblogging, won’t-get-it-till-you’ve-used-it social networking platform.

Twitter has been getting a lot of attention lately as a tool for use in the classroom, including an insightful blog post and front-page video segment on the Chronicle of Higher Education website by University of Texas at Dallas professor David Parry. It turns out Twitter has also been a great way to build a community around Omeka—to get in touch with possible users, to keep in touch with existing users, to give the product a personality, and to provide information and support. Among other things, we have been answering technical questions using Twitter, connecting far-flung users with Twitter, and pointing to blog posts and press coverage on Twitter. Because the barrier to participation is so low—Twitter only allows messages of 140 characters or less—people seem more willing to participate in the discussion than if it were occurring on a traditional bulletin board or even in full length blog posts. Because every posting on Twitter is necessarily short, sweet, informal, and free from grammatical constraints, I think people feel freer just to say what’s on their minds. Because Twitter asks its users to respond to a very specific and very easily answered question—”What are you doing?”—it frees them (and us) from the painstaking and time consuming work of crafting a message and lets people just tell us how they’re getting on with Omeka. And because Twitter updates can be sent and received in many different ways from almost anywhere (via text message, on the web, via instant message), the Omeka Twitter community has a very active, very present feel about it.

I’m very encouraged by all this, not just for the narrow purposes of Omeka, but for digital humanities and public history outreach in general. Interactivity, audience participation, and immediacy are longstanding values of both public history and digital humanities, and Twitter very simply and subtly facilitates them all. The experience of the last week has proved to me that we should be doing this for all future projects at CHNM, not just our software projects like Omeka and Zotero, but also for our online collecting projects like the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, our public exhibitions like the forthcoming Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives, and our education projects like the forthcoming Making the History of 1989.

For now, if you’d like to join the Omeka Twitter community, you can sign up for a Twitter account and start following Omeka. If you’re not quite ready to dive in head first, or if you just want to keep an eye on what other Omeka followers are doing, you can simply subscribe to the “Omeka and Friends” public feed. Finally, if you want to see what I’m up to as well, you can find me on Twitter at (no surprise) FoundHistory.