I’m happy to say that I have now finished my essay that outlines my historiographical traditions! This essay will be more for scholars who follow my work, my second reader, and maybe for a conference. Now that I’ve done the background research on how other historians have used digital tools, how local history interacts with public history, and how Indigenous communities can be included in digital histories, I feel better prepared to actually begin to write my content. This content will be based fairly heavily on my Junior Independent Study, which looked at local and regional Indigenous history, myths of Indigenous history, and the history of local historians writing like Ben Douglass. However, the challenge comes from converting an academic paper into a format that grabs the public’s attention and makes them care as much as I do about how local history impacts our interpretations of Indigenous people nationally.
In this project, I get to be a storyteller as well as a historian. Digital storytelling borrows a lot from the general world of writing and draws upon the thousands of years that humans have spent telling each other stories, orally, in books, on the radio, on TV, and now on Twitter. Bryan Alexzander gives a helpful overview of what exactly digital storytelling is in his book The New Storytelling. The introduction outlines the idea of what makes a good story, including a narrative structure, characters that someone can relate to, a central problem that brings tension, and an emotional throughline that makes the story compelling.
As someone who has been researching my topic for about a year now, I think the story of local history has all of these things. Benjamin Douglass is a dedicated historian who is steeped in his time, who spent years of his life tirelessly drafting and redrafting an 800-page volume of his hometown. The Delaware, Shawnee, and Wyandot people who lived in Wayne County have fewer reliable descriptions, but we can imagine them as settlers, fighting to preserve their culture, hoping that they can build a new life in Ohio. We can try and smell the wood fire as we imagine the traders that stopped off at Beaver Hat Town, excited to bring new goods back to their families and tribes. We can imagine the sorrow they felt when they realized that they would have to pick up and move again in the face of new treaties and impeding white settlers. These stories converge as we see a college sophomore trying to uncover the Indigenous history of the area and learn a little bit more about who occupied the land her college campus stands on. We can see a narrative tension rise as we juxtapose Douglass’s supposed dedication to historical accuracy with the language he uses to describe the Indigenous inhabitants of Wayne County.
However, even though I can begin to craft this story as I write this blog post, another element of storytelling must also be addressed. Although many pieces of literature are not written with a specific audience in mind, determining an audience is very important for web-based content. After all, there are so many sites on the internet, anyone can just decide to click away at any point. I began to outline my audience today, as well as what my central points and goals were for the exhibit. I based this project outline on an article titled “Planning and Outlining Your Story” by Hannah Wilbur which appears on the ArcGIS Blog. As you can see below, my audience is going to be limited to local historians, who already have some interest in the subject matter and who, in my opinion, hear what I have to say about Douglass.
After I outlined my goals, key points, and audience, it was much easier for me to make a detailed outline of my project. I first scribbled my initial ideas in my IS notebook in pencil, so that I could erase as needed.
After I did a rough sketch, I used LucidChart to make a more detailed (and legible) outline of my website, that included the overall structure and the sub-structure of each section on a single page.
I also began to think about the style of my website. I decided to base the color scheme of the site around a famous painting of the Treaty of Greenville (1795), that according to Wikimedia was painted by an unknown artist around the time that the treaty was signed. I chose this painting because the Treaty of Greenville was so consequential to Wayne County as well as the broader eastern Ohio region, and, although it is a white portrayal of Indigenous people, it also illustrates the intensity of the treaty’s signing, with the white and Indigenous subjects taking opposite sides of the canvas with the hilly eastern Ohio landscape in the background. To me, it evokes the sense that these two parties have very different conceptions of what is occuring, but both are centered on the land.
To form the color scheme, I used the Coolors website to create a color scheme based on the image. I then copied the hex codes into the WordPress full site editor to create a color scheme. From here, I will begin to go through a preliminary outline that I created over the summer, based on my Junior IS, and create my web content.
In other news, I had a successful meeting with Kim Garcia and Beci Wright from the Wyandot Nation! We set up a plan to check in monthly on my progress and discussed the importance of defining my audience as local historians who are impacted by the national mythmaking that local historians have engaged in for centuries. In the upcoming weeks, I hope to speak to historic preservationists from the Delaware Nation, and Makiba Foster, who specializes in digitizing Black history.