last updated: July 2022
Picturing Urban Renewal explores the history of urban renewal in four cities in New York State: Manhattan, Albany, Kingston and Newburgh. Each city has a different story to tell and taken together, these four stories present a broad picture of urban renewal and its short and long-term impacts. In collaboration with scholars from the University of Albany, we've recently completed work on an National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Digital Projects for the Public Prototype phase to envision this ambitious website that includes a rich archive of photographs and ephemera, dozens of personal stories, immersive video and long-form, richly visual narratives.
We recently completed the planning stages of a website that explores the long, well-documented life of an African American woman whose experiences, from her birth and captivity in Africa around 1730, to her enslavement in Massachusetts, to her death as a free woman in Vermont in 1821, encompass most of the signal events of the lives of enslaved people in New England. The website is designed as an emotionally engaging, immersive personal narrative supported by contextual, historical material that users can explore in a more user-directed, interactive experience. This project is being developed with our long-time colleagues at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association and is funded by the NEH.
A major grant from IMLS (the Institute of Museum and Library Services) will make possible the full-scale reimagining and rebuilding of one of our original websites. Rethinking the user interface, feature set and underlying code will not only put this popular website on a stable, modern footing but will also provide museum staff with a user-friendly and flexible content management environment.
Funded by a grant from MassHumanities, this project seeks to bring together small historical societies throughout western Massachusetts to create a collaborative web exhibit about the American Revolution as it happened at a local, grassroots level. Each collaborating organization will contribute primary resources and stories from their collection which, when taken together will explore how the American Revolution, while globally seismic in its consequences, was at its heart intrinsically local and intensely personal. This project is in prototyping phase.
We’ve recently renovated and updated three aging but still popular websites that we developed many years ago: American Centuries, The Many Stories of 1704 and Shays’ Rebellion. We redesigned and recoded the interactive activities (using HTML5/CSS3/SVG/Javascript) that were originally created using Adobe Flash. We also reproduced the audio and video files to modern file formats. This work ensures that the websites can continue to serve their audiences well into the future.