Week 10 Practicum: Digital Solutions Still Require Real-Life Connections

The Center for American War Letters at Chapman University is an archive that draws in a specific segment of users already but is likely to interest a wider group with some digital humanities strategies in mind. A key principal to remember throughout these suggestions for a digital humanities approach is that: “Social media should not focus on the technology, but the activity that is undertaken.”

Scale Up Digitization Process With Help From Chapman Students and Community Partners: 

While CAWL has been forward-leaning in digitizing its collections to the degree possible, the more its collection can be digitized, the more its offerings can be made available to a wider audience than traditional CAWL consumers (likely academics/students, historians, veterans, etc.). However, staffing to meet those needs can become costly and those valuable materials cannot be entrusted to just anyone to physically work with. Chapman students, specifically history undergrads and war and society grad students, should be required to perform a set period of digitization service for CAWL as part of their program graduation requirements. As they are studying programs that make use of primary resources and are already at campus, they would benefit from learning about archival preservation and accessibility issues while providing a service to their institution. If each was asked to be responsible for digitizing one collection of letters under CAWL staff direction at a mutually agreeable time in their campus schedule, a wide degree of material could be made made available publicly. It could be worth considering whether students in other majors that have a reasonable link to this sort of effort (history, English and creative writing, computer science majors, for example) could also be considered.

Chapman could also consider a mutually beneficial public engagement partnership to have members of interested communities (local historical societies and veteran chapters) help with this process as well. This may crowdsource real labor to seemingly responsible individuals and the return might be Chapman/CAWL educating local historical societies or providing a masterclass/speaker one time a year to those groups as an incentive to participate. Given the number of military and veterans groups in Southern California alone this could be an interesting way to build bridges with the local community and draw attention to CAWL’s unique offerings.

In order to have appropriate supervision for this endeavor, it might be necessary to factor in the cost of an additional archivist at CAWL, depending on current staffing patterns.

Creatively Connect: Institutions and Individuals, Artists and Media

Without knowing the fuller context of Chapman’s affiliations already, finding ways to connect Chapman to the Department of Defense’s Office of the Historian, or to build further partnerships with military-focused museums (of which there are several locally, many of them “ship” museums) could generate renewed interest in CAWL’s collection. But, as those types of lofty-partnerships take time and dedicated personnel to build relationships, perhaps a more niche, digital solution is to find who is already “following” those types of endeavors in their social media form and then creating digital advertising campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and other popular social media targeting those same fans steering them to CAWL’s offerings. At the same time, an additional box on the CAWL website could further funnel users to a digital humanities “Engage with CAWL” toolkit where the digital user could see how to apply a built-in text analysis tool or topic modeling tool to “distantly read” a digitized letter collection so they could be “puzzled” into how we consume the past. This would complement the existing virtual museum online.

It is one thing that show what CAWL has, but if the user is also encouraged, invited, or incentivized in some way to engage the material on his/her terms of interest more freely, that could generate new artistic and media products in unexpected ways. Chapman could consider creating a small, annual prize for members of the public who utilize the letters in the collection for a creative or innovative project that provides clear benefit to Chapman, veterans, or the general public in some way. That prize needn’t necessary be financial (maybe a zoom coffee with a Chapman faculty member, a really nice article published to Chapman’s site about the winner, maybe a printed out set of the digitized letter collection for the winner to keep as a physical book), but the psychology of being recognized by an established academic institution could be a resume builder for many. High quality products (whether that be a video, a paper, a graphic novel/comic strip reinterpretation of a letter, other project, etc.) would be prominently shared on the CAWL website.

Work Cited:

Ross, Claire. “Social Media for Digital Humanities and Development” In Digital Humanities in Practice Claire Warwick et al., p. 24-25 Facet Publishing, 2012.