I had the fantastic opportunity to attend DH 2016 in Krakow this year. I had never been to Central/Eastern Europe, which, considering my ancestors come from the region, seemed overdue. It was wonderful to experience history as represented through museums and heritage sites in both Budapest and Krakow before heading to the conference itself. Hannah Jacobs and I taught an Omeka/Curatescape pre-conference workshop, and then I gave a talk, “The North Carolina Jukebox Project: Archives Alive and the Making of Digital Cultural Heritage” and chaired an additional session. What struck me about the conference experience was how much overlap there was between my concerns about creating an online archive of North Carolina mountain music and the concerns of other grappling with similar heritage projects in terms of organization, transformation, appropriation, and ethics. I look forward to continuing some of the conversations begun in one of my ancestral cities!
Now if I can just convince someone we need to do a Visualizing Krakow project…
