Co-Director, 2012-2015
http://mallhistory.org
Funder: National Endowment for the Humanities, Public Programs Division
Award: Outstanding Public History Project Award, 2015

Co–authored grant proposal and provided intellectual grounding for project to tell the histories of the National Mall as a physical space with a history of its own. The project connects social, cultural, and political events, people, and places together by presenting the material using geospatial and thematic modes of access. I have been responsible for establishing and implementing the intellectual goals of the project and choosing content themes, developing content strategy, and leading the technical team in planning and implementing the mobile website design. Knowing of the wide potential audience for the project, I also designed numerous vehicles for evaluating and testing the website’s information architecture, naming schema, effectiveness of the map layers to convey change over space and time, and the investigative questions (“Explorations”) throughout the project’s development calendar, before the team implemented the final designs. To reach broad audiences, I led the content team in developing and implementing social media outreach plans and on-the-ground publicity strategies. The project launched its beta site in March 2014, and we continued to refine the content for another two years. I led the collaborative writing of a guide, “Building Histories of the National Mall: A Guide to Developing a Digital Public History Project,” written for an audience of public historians and cultural heritage professionals that was published in October 2015.