Who Lived Here? Using HistoryForge to Engage People in Local History in Ithaca, NY and Beyond - Ithaca Nerd Night Experience

Who Lived Here? Using HistoryForge to Engage People in Local History in Ithaca, NY and Beyond

by Dr. Eve Snyder, Historian at The History Center in Tompkins County and Project Director of HistoryForge.

Have you ever walked down a street and had something about an old building capture your eye? Perhaps an interesting architectural detail caused you to wonder when a house was built, who lived there, and what their lives were like? Ithaca’s buildings and people of the past can serve as an important entry point into this community’s history but what then? What does it take to encourage meaningful public engagement with history? Digital history projects have the potential to increase public engagement with the subject matter, but how can they avoid the trap of presenting a curated version of history that limits additional inquiry.

This talk is about HistoryForge, an open-source digital history project from The History Center in Tompkins County that aims to engage the public in historical inquiry at all levels of the project’s development: from helping to build the project’s historical infrastructure by creating map layers and transcribing census records, to querying the resulting census data to learn more about the community and exploring the results on historic map layers.

Hosted by Public Works: An Ithaca Nerd Night Experience - https://publicworks.info

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LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This event will take place in the traditional and contemporary lands of the Gayogo̱hó:nǫ' Nation (often known by the mispronunciation Cayuga), one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Learn more at thehistorycenter.net/land-acknowledgement.