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The History of this History Harvest

In fall of 2018, Indiana University’s College of Arts and Sciences welcomed the inaugural Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Experience class. Our Fall 2019 HIST-H301: Digital History course took on a History Harvest, building on the lessons learned from a Spring 2019 test of the History Harvest as part of IU’s first-year-research ASURE program. This type of community-history project, which had its first iteration in the History Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, gets the public involved in the digitization and preservation of sentimental artifacts that aren’t likely to make it into museums or archives.

To kick-start that process, each person in our class started the semester by writing the history of an object of importance to us. We then invited our fellow students to bring an object that represents their identity to a History Harvest of early October of 2019, which was co-hosted by the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities and the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society. Each contributor allowed us to digitize their object, do a really short interview about it, and add it to this digital exhibit so that the object could go home with its person, leaving its digital form to be preserved here with other objects that have made their way into IUB’s history. The History Harvest took place at a First Thursday event sponsored by IU’s Arts & Humanities Council.

In addition to the digital exhibit presented here, we also designed an exhibit that would have been installed at the University Archives in IU’s Well’s Library during the Spring semester of 2020. While the novel coronavirus pandemic interfered a bit in our physical-exhibit plans, we’re proud to present this digital exhibit in its place.

Our Experiences and Methods

As digital history students, we studied three domains of methods for analysis of historical data: Text Analaysis, Mapping, and Network Analysis.

  • Text Analysis gave us a larger overview of transcripts of oral history interviews and how they relate to one another.
  • Mapping connected us spatially with the larger world, helping us to see geographic connections between Bloomington and other parts of the world.
  • Network Analysis helped us visualize the History Harvest objects and their connections to one another, broadening our understanding of how relationships among these objects are situated in a social, political, and cultural context.

I liked interacting with others in the historical process and seeing how digital modes give us a different way of looking at history. –A student who participated in the History Harvest

Explore our History Harvest stories

Special Thanks To

  • IDAH, CRRES, the Department of History, and the Arts & Humanities Council here at IU.
  • The community and student group behind Remembering Rondo for the exemplar that guided us as we did our History Harvest with our own community.
  • The History Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for piloting the History Harvest concept in 2010.
  • The folks who helped carry out the Spring 2019 History Harvest
    • Students in Spring 2019 HIST-A200 Digital Public History
    • Carrie Schwier, Outreach and Public Services Archivist at the Indiana University Archives, and the rest of the University Archives team who helped with initial research and provided space for the physical exhibit
    • Andrea Hadsell, Education Manager at the The Monroe County History Center, who opened MCHC’s doors to the class and provided guidance for the community-history aspect of the History Harvest.
    • Sarah Hatcher, Head of Programs and Education at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures, who helped the class think about exhibition and collection best-practices.
    • Rebecca Wingo, Assistant Professor of History and Director of Public History at the University of Cincinnati, who provided ethics guidance and organizational structure for the History Harvest.
    • Dean Gutjahr and the rest of the ASURE team for building the program that provided a road map for this Fall’s history harvest.