Playing With Technology in History

In the “making” session, we spent some time figuring out how to fabricate historical facsimiles from various things we brought with us. Mine was the angry worm graffiti tag I photographed in Vienna a couple of years ago. Bill and I turned the worm into a stencil suitable for tagging (don’t worry, we won’t be tagging). We also made mini laptop stickers from the larger stencil. So what’s the point of all this? What I’m hoping is to use technology like this to turn my students loose on the past–to make things, come up with new ways of representing knowledge that are history in the ways we understand history but that we haven’t thought up ourselves. Like Bill I think that if we do cut them loose to create they’ll be creative…something they only rarely are when writing papers. I chose graffiti because it’s been around since cave art was first created by humans. But it’s also difficult to work with because it’s often transient–here today and gone tomorrow. Asking them to work with graffiti may (I hope) get them to think creatively not only about the past, but also about impermanent historical sources.