cynthia heider, public historian

I’ve made straightforward Omeka repositories and exhibits before, so I wanted to get a little weird with this project. Playing with the idea of authenticity and illusion in the living world and in the digital universe, I put together my own Musaeum Clausum. I can definitely say that I achieved weird, and I hope it’s also interesting. Find it here.

In some ways I feel like the theme of this semester has been me trying to make sense of my really confusing thesis research. I’ve made a map of settlement locations in Philadelphia, designed a project to chart social networks between the million people and institutions involved in the settlement movement in Philadelphia, and for …

Summary For my final project, I will be working to create a prototype network visualization graph which can be supplemented or altered in conjunction with further research on my thesis topic and utilized for a final digital history component of my MA thesis project. The topic deals with the social connections and interactivity between Philadelphia …

For this assignment, I decided to map out sites from some of the primary sources that I have been consulting for work on a major research paper about the Settlement Movement in Philadelphia. I’m not very familiar yet with the geography of Philadelphia, and additionally, some street names and neighborhood layouts have change in the …

  For my data visualization, I made the chart I wish I’d had last semester while studying the 1918 Spanish Flu Epidemic in Philadelphia. This chart visualizes mortality rates in different wards of the city of the leading causes of death in the year 1918. This makes it easy to see that although pneumonia, for …

Review- The National Jukebox: Historical Recordings from the Library of Congress

National Jukebox: Historical Recordings from the Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/jukebox/. Created and maintained by the Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation, Library of Congress, and Sony Music Entertainment, Inc., Washington, D.C., https://www.loc.gov/jukebox/about. Reviewed Feb. 2017.

About a year ago, I found myself trying to make room for a family member’s spring-cleaning collection of old vinyl in an already-full record cabinet. Caught between a desire to keep these cool old records- for posterity’s sake!- and a pragmatic understanding that I would never, ever, throw on a 2.5 minute Dee Dee Sharp single, I eventually just left the record crate in front of the cabinet, where it has lived ever since.

The National Jukebox gathers comparable cobwebs in a similar scenario, tucked into a corner of the Library of Congress website. The project (clearly ambitious) took a lot of money, time, and effort to bring to fruition, and it has great potential to serve as a valuable educational resource. Unfortunately the seemingly-abandoned site doesn’t appear destined to achieve this legacy as things stand.
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