What’s in the Box: Thinking about platforms

A critical question raised by Heather and myself in the last week is how we want to go about sharing the contents of the box with audiences.

Reading my last post about the box, Heather started to question whether I’d like to actually write a biography from the journals in the box. While I’m not really interested in doing that, I do think the chronicling of the material in the box could lend itself really well to that style of storytelling. However, we’re attempting to do something a little different here.

This led to a discussion about how to present what we’ve found, and whether we want to interpret it, or to lead others to draw their own conclusions about it.

Historians and journalists share a common role in that they’re tasked with interpreting the materials they find for a larger audience. As a former journalist who actively works as an historian, I tend toward this model of storytelling. It’s the sort of approach that invites others to share in what you’ve found, and what it means, but it also can be very direct communication. By the act of offering my interpretation, I assert that mine is the correct one.

However, one point I’ve learned over time is that my interpretation might not be the best or even the right one for the materials I’m uncovering. Each of us views the world in ways specific to our upbringings, cultural backgrounds, and value structures. As the granddaughter of Wisconsin farmers, I am confident that I share a great deal in common with the author of the journals in our box. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that my interpretation would be complete.

What would be better, perhaps, for an interactive documentary, would be to share the contents of the box wholesale, and allow viewers/readers to interpret what they find through the lens of their own unique experiences.

We’ve been thinking about digitizing the materials, and then sharing them in one unique place. We’ve been considering adding the chronicles, line by line, into a searchable database of some kind. We’ve also been considering imagery and how it would fit into the larger context of the work, and we’ve been considering how to tell the story offered by the box.

We’ve also been wondering whether there are other such chronicles out there that could be added to the archive we’re apparently building.

All of these questions drive our next steps.