Projects
· ·
· · · · · ·
Project Requirements
Students in Public History are required to complete a capstone project in place of the traditional master’s thesis. The project is the culmination of the student’s graduate career and should reflect a strong command of academic knowledge and professional training. Students should carefully select and plan a public history project that will not only demonstrate their level of achievement, but be a significant contribution to the field. The project requires a minimum of 100 hours of work. Students may sign up for 1 (100 hours) or 2 (200 hours) credit hours for the project. Students must meet the pre-requisites for the project as listed in the catalog. The project must be supervised by the public history director or an advisor with specific training and professional experience in the field.
Recommended public history projects:
Exhibit
Digital project with outreach component
Film documentary
Lesson plans for teachers on a historical topic
Research leading to a publication of some type (brochure, article, etc.)
Event: special event created around a historical topic
Grant proposal with resulting public history product
Oral history
Artifact or archival preservation and cataloging
Archival Processing Project with resulting finding aid
Historical editing
National Register Nomination
Note: This list is not all inclusive. Think about what you are most passionate about, what area of public history interests you the most, and where you can have the most impact and make the largest contribution. Then develop a project that meets those expectations. There are many community organizations and historical groups that request assistance for projects related to their mission. The public history advisor can assist you in determining a project and/or locating an organization to work with.
Prospectus:
The student must write a one to two page prospectus for the project in consultation with the project advisor/public history director. A prospectus for the public history project should include:
- a definition or description of the project
- the organization or institution the student will be working with and the name of the onsite supervisor (if applicable)
- a discussion of the historical importance of the topic
- the research viability of the topic with an overview of relevant primary and secondary sources (Complete this section only if applicable)
- the intended audience
- how the project will contribute to historical understanding.
- A timeline for the work to be completed
- what the final product will be (how it will be distributed, used, what format will it take)
The project must be discussed and approved by the Director of Public History. The prospectus should be completed and submitted to the Director prior to the beginning of the project.
Project Report:
The student will complete a ten to twelve page report or product detailing the work performed, experience gained, knowledge learned and the contributions the student made to public history by completing the project. Students must submit a copy of the product produced by the project, such as a publication, photograph and brochure of exhibit, oral history/transcript, etc. The final project will be evaluated by the Director of Public History. The final report or product will be submitted to the History Department for review and added to the student’s permanent record.
Here are a few of the projects Wright State students have undertaken in the past few years:
Dayton Society of Natural History: Melissa Dalton, Summer 2009. Melissa acted as Guest Curator and planned and implemented an exhibit at Boonshoft Museum of Discovery. The exhibit, Earth Movers and Artisans: The Hopewell People of Southern Ohio, is on exhibit in the Fraze Gallery until March 7, 2010.
Wapakoneta Museum, Auglaize County Historical Society: Andrea Green and Daniel Schlegel, Spring 2008. Andrea and Daniel re-catalogued and organized the artifacts held by the Wapakoneta museum. They also made recommendations for deaccession and developing a new storage system for artifacts not on display.
United Theological Seminary Archives: Sam Ewing, Summer 2007. Supervised by WSU Public History alumnus Timothy Binkley (Curator of the Center for the Evangelical United Brethren Heritage and UTS Seminary Archivist), Sam conducted research and created the exhibit entitled, "From the Shirley Collection - Cloth, Clothes, and the Yarns They Tell: Fabrics of Sierra Leone," which was on display at UTS from 21 September 2007 through 21 December 2007. It was then on display at Wright State University, in the Student Union Gallery, from 31 January 2008 through 29 February 2008.
Wright State University Special Collections and Archives: Robin Hays, Summer 2006. Robin digitized and documented selected material from the Oscar Edelman collections.
University of Dayton Archives: Shannon Michalak, Spring 2005. Shannon worked with a film and video collection, creating keyword and controlled vocabulary descriptors for different segments of film stored on DVD. She then improved upon an existing database to make those keywords searchable, greatly increasing access to the archival materials. Drawing on this experience, Shannon presented a poster on the DVD as an archival medium at the Spring 2005 Society of Ohio Archivists conference at Wright State.
Making Progress Exhibit Project: Matthew Jeffrey, 2004. Matthew researched the Central Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, located in Dayton around the turn of the 20th century. To do this, he worked with numerous primary and secondary sources. Once the research was completed, Matthew wrote text and selected images to portray the Central Branch in the proposed web exhibit project, Making Progress: Living and Working in Ohio's Miami Valley, 1890-1929.
National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center: Rosalind Osinubi, Summer 2003. Rosalind conducted an oral history project with African-Americans who had served in the Armed Forces before and after the military was desegregated in 1948. After performing general research on the topic, she developed questions and interviewed nine veterans. The recorded interview and transcripts are housed at the NAAMCC, where researchers will draw on them for years to come.
|
