Enacting Public Digital History ... / Presented by: Matthew Russell

Matthew Russell, The University of Texas at Austin

This talk will focus on a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Digital Humanities Lab and the Jewish Museum of Milwaukee to build a digital, participatory extension of their “Stitching History from the Holocaust” exhibit. When the Jewish Museum of Milwaukee first decided to mount an exhibit on the designs of Hedwig Strnad, a dressmaker from Czechoslovakia who perished in the Holocaust, they turned to librarians and scholars in the humanities to provide the broader context needed for understanding the artifacts in their possession: letters and dress designs. The “Stitching History from the Holocaust” digital exhibit creates a new context for the artifacts: one that provides evidence of Hedwig Strnad’s experience and shares those remaining artifacts with the world. Rather than simply creating a website of the exhibit, the Digital Humanities team built the exhibit around a repository structure that affords each artifact its own descriptive information and enables further research and new narratives to grow around them.