Lightning Talk
Vicki Mayer
Professor, Department of Communication
Tulane University
Biography
Dr. Vicki Mayer is Professor of Communication at Tulane University and Editor of the journal Television & New Media. She has published four books and many peer-reviewed articles on media production, cultural industries and cultural identities. She created and has directed the MediaNOLA digital humanities project since 2008.
Abstract
This lightning talk will introduce MediaNOLA (http://medianola.org), its aims, scope and organization both as a mosaic for cultural histories and as a pedagogy for training amateur historians. The project has become a sustainable model for service learning through the collaboration of Tulane students, programmers, archivists, and legal scholars, and staff working with archivists and nonprofit organizations around New Orleans.
MediaNOLA is a web portal for the collection and presentation of histories of cultural production in New Orleans. The project began after Hurricane Katrina in order to encourage the preservation of collective memory by bringing together archival resources with members of the public to produce and reflect on the ordinary people, places, and things associated with what has been characterized as an extraordinary local culture. MediaNOLA interactive map and timeline and wiki pages offer a way of comparing cultural and mediated production sites, people, and objects through time and space and according to categories of production that frequently are separated in cultural histories. Behind the scenes, MediaNOLA classes teach students about authorship and historical authority by training them to be historical authors and editors. Today, the project works with over 100 Tulane students in building preservation activities in the classroom and then placing them in the public database.