Beyond its function as a destination website, MediaNOLA is a pedagogic tool for
training amateur historians, researchers and preservationists. MediaNOLA permits
reflection on exceptional histories of New Orleans culture dialectically through the
websiteâs content and the pedagogy of its use as a teaching and research tool. In
other words, as participants conduct research and post more content, the collective
and additive process creates a larger mosaic for interpreting culture in multiple
ways. Specific assignments for MediaNOLA match both the reflective process and
creative engagement as proposed by the universityâs service learning standards.
The first interactions with the site involve using it to log and describe an everyday
cultural place or artifact. This process registers the historical legitimacy of the
object of study and allows the participant creative freedom to select its attributes
and connections across categories of cultural performance, exhibition, distribution,
and production. Students in classes follow this assignment with a simple reflection
describing their process and questions they have about this object in relation to
curricular materials.
Subsequent assignments may involve a number of creative engagements with the object
or the people, places, and other objects that are linked to it by category or theme.
For example:
⢠Use historical newspaper archives to find out about the places, people, and
objects found in your scrapbook for that particular time period. Create and add to
MediaNOLA pages about these items and connect to your description of the
scrapbook.
⢠Use city directories to locate other businesses like the one you have written
about. Add GIS entries to MediaNOLA to show the way your
place was either uniquely located or clustered with others during its years as a
cultural place.
⢠Present a list of MediaNOLA pages to a person who has lived in the city at least
two decades. Ask a person to describe their personal memories of any object he or
she selects from the list. With their permission, record, edit and post this memory
to that MediaNOLA page.
⢠Go to the place you have described and interview different people who work or
participate in that space. With their permission, collect at least three different
ways that people see this place as part of the cultural history of the city.
Whereas the initial interaction with MediaNOLA positions users as participants, the
second level of interaction deepens their engagement as amateur historians. The
proper use of citation and permission to use peopleâs voices is an important way
that participants, not least of all those not familiar with the city, can gain
proximity to the historical enterprise and a shared authority over historical
knowledge. The assignments urge students to reflect about what is unique or common
to local cultural products, producers, and places. The totality of locations and
people included by the collectivity of participants forces students to recognize
culture as a demotic production that spans the urban geography.
A final set of assignments encourage students to take the historical content in
MediaNOLA and rework it to adapt new evidence and perspectives. Some examples of
these assignments include or combine:
⢠Take a MediaNOLA history and rework it using five additional sources from your
library archives.
⢠Take a MediaNOLA history and rework it to include the perspective(s) of local
interviewees.
⢠Use secondary sources and course readings to give the historical context to a
MediaNOLA entry in terms of gender, race, and/or class conditions in the city.
Rewrite the history to consider the standpoint(s) of the historian in the MediaNOLA
history.
This is the most advanced stage in the MediaNOLA pedagogy. It engages participants
not only in questions of their own distance and proximity to the evidence they
encounter, but also how to balance these implicit standpoints into a unified
narrative with coherent sections. Curating in this environment becomes what Fiona
Cameron and Helena Robinson call knowledge brokering (2007, p. 185), making all
voices heard even if arranged hierarchically according to the evidence and analysis.
Group-based assignments challenge students to negotiate their own interpretations of
the materials into a narrative that allows for polyphony. Reflections about the
research and decision-making process of being an amateur historian may reveal the
tensions implicit in assuming historical authority and authorship. In a theoretical
sense, the students practice post-foundationalism, which according to Mark Bevir
(2011) prefaces the consonance between past and present, fact and narrative. From a
postfoundational model, MediaNOLA participants begin to ask different ethical
questions of historical narratives, such as: What is the legitimacy of reading our
ideas into the values and actions of people in the past? At some point, the
juxtaposition of competing accounts may indeed destabilize the master narratives
about local culture, specifically by situating different authorsâ standpoints
through and with the textual layers in MediaNOLA.
Not all classes are suitable for each stage of the MediaNOLA pedagogy. Introductory
courses may never reach the final stage of the pedgagogy. Advanced classes may focus
primarily on the final two stages. Independent studies may focus on one stage alone.
Tulane Classes
The following classes have used MediaNOLA:
TIDE-1760 Narratives New Orleans Digital Storytelling
TIDB-1010 More Than Just Business
COMM-1000 Introduction to Communication Studies
DSGN-2100 Architecture Studio
MCGS-2000 Introduction to the Music Cultures of the Gulf
South
COMM-3280 Media Histories
ENLS-3620 Workshop Creative Writing: Place-Based
Storytelling
AHST-4199 Sites/Sounds: Public History
HISU-6610 The Old South
Scholarly Articles on MediaNOLA Pedagogy
Integrating
Architecture into Digital and Public Humanities: Sites and Sounds +
MediaNOLA
By Amber Wiley
MediaNOLA:
A Digital Humanities Project to Tell Stories of Cultural Production in New
Orleans
By Vicki Mayer and Mike Griffith
Pedagogy
and Where Sh** Happens in the Digital Humanities
By Vicki Mayer
: Exploring the
human endeavor