Digital humanities projects can be made interactive by allowing for contributions from the public and through the use of roleplay.
Allowing the public to contribute to a digital humanities project is a natural way for the project to grow and can give users a deeper feeling of connection. This can involve either contributing one’s own account or personal photos, such as in The Baltimore Uprising Archive Project or The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, or historical artifacts one may have access to, such as in Freedom on the Move. Baltimore Uprising embraces the sense of connection contributions give as part of the site’s identity as “a people’s archive.” In another example, Freedom on the Move, an archive of runaway slave ads, shows contribution stats on the home page, showing both how much public contributions have helped it to grow. Based on these stats, as of the publication of this post, 14,764 ads have been contributed by the public, making up almost half of the total number of ads. Clearly, allowing for public contributions has been effective for them.
Accepting public contributions does have its limits, however. For instance, Sheila A. Brennan and T. Mills Kelly wrote in their essay “Why Collecting History Online is Web 1.5” about several problems they encountered when creating The Hurricane Digital Memory bank, an archive of accounts and materials related to Hurricane Katrina. One of these problems was filtering out spam from bots. Some sites have tried to combat this in various ways. For instance, Freedom on the Move and The Baltimore Uprising both require users to create accounts on their sites before contributing. This also helps to ensure that contributions are serious and thoughtful, since providing them involves an additional step. The Baltimore Uprising site also provides lessons on how to collect oral histories in order to ensure the quality of submissions. Through these methods and similar ones, accepting public contributions becomes more feasible.
Another way digital humanities projects can be interactive is by incorporating elements of role-play. This strategy can be clearly seen in digital humanities video games, such as in games distributed by BrainPop, an educational website that includes several humanities categories. These games allow users to “play as” different people who are closely connected with an event or theme, such as a lawyer in a historical Supreme Court case, thereby developing a deeper understanding of a topic.
Video games are certainly not the only medium that allows for users to role-play as a means of connecting them with a topic. For example, Twitter was used as a way to show the events of William Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kansas in small, accessible chunks. A series of posts using the hashtag #QR1863 took users through the moments and different perspectives of the event. While this enabled users to learn about the event in an accessible way that fit in with their daily routine, some members of the public got involved by role-playing as historical figures or ancestors, according to an article by Diana Reese. This contributed to the project and encouraged personal research and deeper connections for the users involved.
When enabled effectively, interactivity can help digital humanities projects to grow and users to develop a deeper understanding of the topics.
