Session Abstract

This session will feature three pioneering efforts to bring together public history with digital history in the context of post-Katrina New Orleans.  While the session is grounded in the history of New Orleans and attends to Hurricane Katrina as a spur for specific public and digital history projects, the larger purpose of the session will be to highlight several approaches to combining public and digital history that will be of broad relevance.  Mills Kelly will discuss the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank and the challenges of what he calls retail collecting in the creation of a digital archive.  Leslie Harris will discuss the New Orleans Research Collaborative that she co-founded and the possibilities and challenges of collaborative research using digital platforms.  And Michael Mizell-Nelson and Mark Tebeau will look at how historians can use mobile digital technologies to curate histories of urban spaces for public audiences, using New Orleans as one case study.  This session thus highlights how New Orleans has been a rich site for innovative projects that bring public and digital history together.