Week 6 | Preproduction
[Previously in this series, a summer internship with the LGBTQ History Museum of Central Florida: Intro/Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 7.]
DRAFTING GUIDING MEASURES
The AHA created a set of working guides for digital history projects. The National Humanities Alliance structured five goals for the Publicly Engaged Humanities. Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein designed a framework of metrics to measure their book, Data Feminism. Of significant value beyond the contribution of the work involved in writing and compiling the text, they also included an auditing process. These are among the many models for scholarship practice and project-based research.
During the preproduction stage of this series of video pathways, I recognized that my methods needed clear methodology with a set of key principles to build in accountability that is aspirational and also attainable. The work of this internship is at the intersection of digital humanities, public history, curation practice, critical making, and video content creation.
The aims of this series will demonstrate the following:
- center the experiences of people in the LGBTQ community
- foreground material objects closely linking physical experiences
- prioritize on-location filming
- direct viewers to additional sites of research
- broadly depict the histories of the LGBTQ community to expressly resist characterizing as a monolith
- take steps to advocate for accessibility: language, translation, captioning, etc.
- audit and review the series
USING EXEMPLARS
Book Riot builds pathways to invite site users to explore specific writers and genres via pathways. While not an academic site, the entries are literary and scholarly as well as accessible outside the academy. The Cincinnati Public Library created a Queer Poetry Spotlight Series. [see: Audre Lorde + Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, Elese Daniel, Tim’m T. West.] These posts were well-structured, including text and video content, an overview of the series, images and additional links. This series was the first model as I drafted my template.
SETTING THE STRUCTURE
The skeleton elements for each pathway will include the following:
- THIS SELECTION: TITLE, Subtitle, Collection link/s
- IMAGE
- PROFILE (detailed, the ‘what’)
- CONTEXT (historical)
- SIGNIFICANCE (relevance, effects, situating within the contemporary)
- ABOUT THE MUSEUM, ABOUT THIS SERIES, TAGS
- WHERE TO GO FROM HERE
PILOT EPISODES
I am drafting two pilot episodes simultaneously. One will feature The Parliament House via the program from its 1975 opening, contextualizing the historical moments of its landmark beginning and November 2020 closing. The second will center the first Central Florida Pride Picnic from 1979. The approach will foreground the cumulative history of community engagement while also addressing the challenges of documenting and preserving culture as the population ages.
