Microblogging

One idea that I especially like and have talked about with my colleagues is transposing a historical diary or journal with daily entries and turning them into tweets (microblogs). One example of this is Margaret Boyd's diary. Boyd was the first woman to enroll and graduate from Ohio University (1868-73). There is another diary that struck my fancy, which was written by the student Samuel Bright in 1866. While Bright is not well-known (an average Joe), it is particularly interesting and sometimes funny to read his entries. One issue with turning these historical diaries into microblogs are the limitations and restraints on characters (twitter has a 140 character limit).

Excerpts from Samuel Bright's diary

I propose to create a microblog with a historical looking theme as if it is being written by the author (Boyd or Bright). Each journal entry could be posted on the corresponding day of when the original was written (example: May 8, 1866 would be posted on May 8, 2012). However, modernize the "posts" by using txt slang such as U instead of You, 2 instead of to, or b4 instead of before. This way, the same message is getting across to the audience, but in a shorthand format.

While this idea may seem unconventional, I think that it would be a great way to interact with the younger "technologically driven" generations. While I find history interesting, most adults and children need subjects to be a bit more interesting, a bit more fun, a bit more interactive, a bit more humorous, and faster to compete with their ever wandering attention span. Another way to integrate this idea into the general public would be to allow the viewer to access the microblog from their mobile smart phone. One could either subscribe to the RSS feed manually, or subscribe to a text messaging service which would then deliver one diary entry per day (almost like a "What happened today in history?" newsfeed).

Signing off for now,
Sarah Kaplan