By Shannon Lausch
Welcome to the official Mapping Renewal blog! Thanks to funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Center for Arkansas History and Culture is embarking on an 18-month pilot to develop a website that visually and spatially layers our historic maps, reports, architectural drawings, and photographs on a present-day map. These archival materials will focus on urban renewal in Little Rock in the 20th century.
To kick off the project, the Center hosted trivia night at the local pub, Stone’s Throw Brewing. We based our trivia questions on a mid-20th century photographer’s work in Little Rock, whose photos are included in this project. We projected these photos on the bar’s flat-screen television.
The event, however, had a second purpose: discovering how the public describes photographic content.
While everyone played trivia, we passed around binders of historic photos. We then asked people to describe what they saw and place sticky notes on the images. (Disclaimer: no photos were harmed in this process! These were duplicates.)
While it was a fun activity to pass time between rounds of trivia, the binders helped us in carrying out a key component of this national grant. As part of our project, we aim to make our website accessible to multiple audiences: scholars, teachers, and the public.
If someone from the public was searching for a specific subject related to Little Rock history, would they be able to find it on our website? What kinds of keywords does someone use without a background in history or archives? What are they interested in?
This is a photograph of Main Street in Little Rock, circa 1890s. From the sticky notes, it’s clear that the stores grabbed most people’s attention. Another person recognized that Gus Blass was one of Little Rock’s original department stores. And yet another recognized the Gus Blass name from a Boy Scouts camp.
As the project moves forward, we aim to have more public events where we can gain a better sense of what kind of information interests the public, and the keywords they are likely to use in an effort to find this information.
Stay tuned to this blog for more updates about the project, its goals, and information about public events.
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