The most relevant, and, in many ways, most challenging skill I am putting into practice is the overall approach of telling a story to a public audience. I had not realized how different that approach really is. How to gain the audience’s attention and maintain a brevity and focus for this public audience is quite different from the academic audience I have been working with for the past couple decades. I struggled with this in the early stages of my project for Prof. Kelly’s course in the Spring, and while it’s less of a struggle, it remains a very purposeful part of my thinking now. I am constantly and consciously checking to make sure that what I am doing is geared towards that public audience. With that being said, I find it a bit comforting that the project managers and archivists at the various HBCUs with whom we are working are also struggling with that idea. They have been geared towards attracting academics to their collections, but now they are being asked to think about opening their collections to the public. I am glad we are in the boat together.

I am also getting to work with mapping and thinking of presenting history through a spatial and geographic lens. I am working with ArcGIS StoryMaps. While I did not use this in any of the course work, I did work on a small project that involved mapping data about flora and fauna described in the 17th Century Jesuit Relations. Now I am trying to show how William Lamson took racial data on school enrollments, analyzed it in relation to decisions made by the Topeka, KS school system, and displayed this information on a map, well, many maps, in order to explain the purposeful continuation of school segregation in Topeka after the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision. It is a much more complicated use of and analysis of data from what I undertook in class, and I am just trying to explain how William Lamson did it. It was like going from my class on how to lay tile, which had me lay perfectly square tiles on a perfectly flat, square board to tiling my bathroom where the sub-floor was sloped, the walls weren’t square, and I had to cut around all those pipes and corners! Nothing is ever as cut and dry as we would like. Putting the skills into practice in the “real world,” whether in public history or tiling, takes much more initial planning and preparation of goals, techniques, materials, and tools than classroom practice. And no matter what you plan for, expect it to take twice as long and cost half as much more than you initially and carefully planned.