The digital project I propose is a series of blog posts which will expand on tweets that share historical facts with followers. When applicable, each blog post will be linked to a pin on historypin to help geographically locate the event or person within the context of the city and other history. Tweets will be a short, sentence or two long summary of an interesting story in diverse fields of history to interest a variety of people. This is inspired by some of the “this day in history” tweets, but it will provide more information and a works cited in the form of a blog post that will allow for more historically accurate facts and will provide more context for readers who are interested. There will be one a week for year, totaling 52 tweets accompanied by a blog post and history pin when relevant to the subject. For the first month or two, depending on how quickly it begins to get comments, topics will be chosen by me, then afterwards I will take recommendations and requests on topics for further study from blog comments and tweets, hopefully engaging the public and encouraging more people to think about history and feel involved in the process. This will allow the process to cover a variety of topics as chosen by the audience and will interest them, as they were the ones to recommend and vote on the subjects. Potential topics can included, but are not limited to, the history of the Second Amendment in America, the Magna Carta of 1215 in England, or book reviews of certain historical texts. All work will be under 800 words in order to keep the audiences’ attention and limit the information to the most relevant content.
I hope that through luring visitors in through sites like Twitter this project can appeal to people who know very little about history and will learn through the blog. It can also attract people who are already interested in history because it enables people who are interested to comment or request more information on a specific topic. It can also encourage people to read history that has documented sources and explore digital tools like historypin by introducing them to those aspects of history using an area they are already interested in.
This project will be finished once it reaches 52 posts, but it could be continued by someone else should there be enough demand, interest, and time to extend the project, but for all intents and purposes it will be done and finished at 52. In terms of evaluation, the project can be judged based on if posts get responses or views using functions on twitter that track views. While views may not be enough to judge whether or not people actually engage with the information beyond the blog, it will still show that they read the bare minimum amount of information.
Focusing on a digital history project like this with a regular schedule is a great way to start. With that noted, I’m not entirely sure what the focus or topic here is. From some of the topics you have listed it sounds like this is a very broad range of potential issues. It’s interesting to think about generating potential topics from your audience, but my sense is that you will likely need to have more of an idea of a focal area to build out an audience.
It might be good to look at a few different history blogs that are out there to think through how what you are proposing would be similar or different to some of those projects. Off the top of my head, Slate’s Vault blog http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault.html seems like it might be the most relevant. Along with that, you might take a look at some of the blogs in HNN’s blog roll https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/9665 . It might also be valuable to check out a blog like Nursing Clio, which has focused on a relatively focused topic area but has built out a very vibrant community of authors, readers and writers https://nursingclio.org/