“Tories, Timid or True Blue?” at AAM TIE

Several years ago, HyperStudio, in partnership with historian Christine Baron, educators Elisabeth Nevins and Laura Northridge at the Old North Foundation, and the web design team at Myriad, Inc., took on the task of designing a web-based platform for exploring this question. Utilizing the Old North Church’s extensive archive, the project invited students to imagine the decision-making processes of historical figures through the primary source records that track their lives. In some cases, an abundance of documentation provides a rich resource, showing how mythologies are formed and shaped across time. In other cases, as with the black families sitting in the church balconies, few written traces of their presence exist, and students are confronted with the question of doing history without an historical record. The goal of the project was not simply to provide access to these rich materials, but to guide the website user to, as Sam Wineberg puts it, “think historically,” making use of the materials available to construct historical narratives.

HyperStudio stepped in to help transform the incredible wealth of theoretical resources developed by Chris, Elisabeth and Laura — as well as the materials expertly sorted and organized by a team of historians and genealogists — into use-case scenarios or “concepts” that would drive the student user’s experience. The basic design problem is the same one the entire project faces: namely, how to build a flexible, intuitive and fun educational experience from a database of documents which, even visually, would be inaccessible to the average user.

We began with the floor design for the church (with the possibility of this becoming a three-dimension rendition in the “dream versions” to come). This links the physical museum site to the virtual space, as well as the families to their individual pews, which would be clickable “hotspots” in the virtual church space. Clicking on the Byles family pew, for instance — showing them to be in the front, and Mather to be at the pulpit — would bring the user to a biography of the family, written in media res, as if the user were assuming the “role” of a member of the Byles family. The bio would conclude with a dilemma inviting the user to think about how he or she would have aligned themselves if they were in the Byles’ position.

The dilemma then opens into the central exploration space. In the middle is a central document viewer, which includes a primary source document, basic information about this document, a transcription, and guiding questions. Thumbnails of other related documents would populate the space around this central document viewer. These documents are not arbitrary, but rather called up from a database based on the user’s selections. For instance, if the user is following Line of Questioning A, with subquestions B, then documents “tagged” as related to Line of Questioning A and B would populate the edges of the viewer. Some documents also related to Question A may also be tagged as “Question C”, introducing an element of randomness — of “tripping through the archive,” stumbling upon interesting new things. By tying all documents to a central question map, yet allowing the user freedom to make spontaneous choices within this structure, the website negotiates a flexible, unique learning experience with structured educational goals.

We envisioned other ways of visualizing the documents, as well — for instance, a timeline showing both publication date, and the related date of the content. In this way, users could visually identify and distinguish primary source materials from secondary sources, without straying from an overarching “narrative time.” A map also could be used to show how documents are produced in spaces which mark socioeconomic or cultural differences between the families. Family geneaologies, glossaries of terms and an “ask a mentor” feature could help guide users through the archive with more or less freedom, depending on a teacher’s needs.

Finally, users were not only encouraged to view, read and explore documents, but to interact with them to construct their own narrative of events. Thus documents could be “saved” by a user and, in the dream version, annotated either publically or privately. After saving several documents, the user would be taken to a space for creating their own mini-timelines of events — that is, their own unique timeline carved out of the “meta-timeline” — populated with a selection of documents, and augmented with a narrative explaining his or her choices. This user-generated document — an historical narrative, like any other presented in the secondary source documents included in the site — would then be added back into the “pool” of documents to be browsed, shared, commented on, “liked,” and so on, by other users. This social media component generates a community of different individuals, with different interpretations, around a shared set of questions.

This first phase of the project, funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Start-up Grant, concluded with a prototype version brought to working reality by Myriad, Inc. The site as-is gives merely a taste of what a fuller, database-driven site could achieve, as the team considers options for future development.

• The above comments are based in part on a presentation I gave along with Elisabeth Nevins and Chris Baron at the American Association of Museums’ recent conference, “Technology, Interpretation and Education.” The session archive is available with a log-in.
• The prototype version of “Tories, Timid or True Blue?” is available here.