TwHistory

Ladies and gentlemen. The Titanic will sail again…and then it will sink again!

We are presenting TwHistory at two conferences this week (TTIX and GLS). We will explain how a TwHistory event can be coordinated, and then we will demonstrate it by asking participants to create tweets around the sinking of the Titanic.

If you would like to be updated on this event, please follow @TwHistory. This event will happen June 10th, 2010. Hope to see you there!

UPDATE: The Tweeting from the Titanic presentation was a great success! Video from the presentation (part 1) and the hands-on demo (part 2) is now online. The Prezi presentation slides and the Titanic demo materials are also available. We are planning a similar hands-on TwHistory workshop for Wednesday, October 27th at the 2010 AECT International Convention in Anaheim, CA. Participants will create tweets in a reenactment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. We hope you will join us!

PatriotCast is an eight-year online reenactment of the American Revolution via Twitter. Created by TwHistory partner Jason Phelan, PatriotCast follows the events of the war in real-time, including Paul Revere’s famous ride tonight and tomorrow’s events at Lexington and Concord. These important moments mark the beginning of the war and the first major events broadcast via @PatriotCast on Twitter. It is also a great way to celebrate Patriot’s Day! PatriotCast follower ehartmanrealtor says: “Your project is probably the best use of twitter so far. I’m really enjoying it.” For more information visit the PatriotCast blog or start following it directly on Twitter. PatriotCast is listed in the TwHistory reenactment directory. If you are organizing a historical reenactment on Twitter and would like to be listed in the TwHistory directory, please contact us.

We are thrilled about today’s announcement that TwHistory has been awarded funding from the Talis Incubator for Open Education. From the Talis blog:

As Marion Jensen, TwHistory’s creator and project manager explained, “We’ve spoken with many teachers and historians about TwHistory, and the idea has really generated a lot of excitement. But we see that excitement dim when we explain the rather difficult process involved. The generous grant from Talis will provide a simple way for students and teachers to create their own Twitter re-enactments, as well as find and follow other re-enactments on the web. We are very grateful to Talis for their support.”

The TwHistory project was one of three projects selected from a group of eight finalists announced two weeks ago. More from the Talis announcement:

The TwHistory project looks at the potential of Twitter to deliver exciting new ways to study history. Tweets are sent out at an appropriate day and time, as if a historical event were happening at that exact time. Using a group of volunteers, for example, the Battle of Gettysburg was tweeted using journals and letters from fifteen soldiers present at the battle. The project aims to simplify this process, enabling more educators, students and volunteers to create their own TwHistory events. David Wiley loved the idea, and noted that “it does seem to be gaining ground with educators. Making it significantly easier to do, as with the tools they’re proposing, would fuel the fire.” The Review Board was also excited about the potential of this idea beyond the field of history.

Heber C. Kimball (Image credit: MTPICHON) CC-BY-SA

The 1847 Pioneer Trek is under way, and it’s all happening on Twitter. The Deseret News printed a front page article on it this morning:

“Leaving Winter Quarters with 6 of my teams,” tweets Heber C. Kimball — a man most LDS know only as a faded, 1800s-era daguerreotype staring out from the pages of a church history manual.

Another well-known (but long-dead) pioneer tweets a couple hours later to report some horse trouble.

It’s not a joke. It’s the latest trend in historical re-enactment.

The article also describes the basic idea of TwHistory, which is worth sharing:

The pioneers’ posts are near-direct quotes from journals kept during the 1847 journey. Jensen and Caswell rewrote the entries in present tense and, at times, condensed the wording to better fit Twitter’s 140-character limit. They estimate, according to the activity, what time to broadcast each tweet.

“If you were just following one of the threads it would be very boring,” Caswell said. “But when you listen to them all in concert it really does paint a picture. I feel like there’s this group out there experiencing something historic, and I get to be a fly on the wall.”

We hope you’ll join us on this 4-month adventure. If you don’t already have a Twitter account, it’s quick and free to sign up for one (see our FAQ page for more info). We also have a section that explains how to get updates from the Pioneers via Twitter. Even if you don’t “get” Twitter, we hope you’ll give it a try. The pioneers are on the move, so jump in and join them!

Note: We have set up a Media Mentions page to track and acknowledge news organizations. We are excited to see so much interest in TwHistory!

Our updates have been few and far between, but that is because most of us here at TwHistory have been vigilantly working on our latest reenactment. The journals and letters have been read; the tweets have been prepared; and on April 5th, a group of pioneers are packing up the wagons, hitching up the oxen, and preparing to make the journey from Nebraska to the Great Salt Lake Valley.

Their journey will take them over one thousand miles, and across the Rocky Mountains. The group consists of 73 wagons, 93 horses, 52 mules, 66 oxen, 19 cows, 17 dogs, some chickens and one cannon. The journey begins the first week in April, and will go until July 24th, the day Brigham Young entered the Great Salt Lake Valley, and declared the journey done.

This TwHistory reenactment pulls from journals and letters from the pioneers who made this trek. We will be tweeting the trek in real time, following over 20 pioneers for almost four months. If you would like to travel with these pioneer as they  make their way from Nebraska to the Salt Lake Basin, please visit the Pioneer Trek page. You are welcome to join us on our journey.

We’ve gotten several requests from people asking how they can start their own TwHistory reenactment. While all the technology exists to run your own project, it can be a bit unwieldy. It involves using tools from several different sites, and there is no easy way to manage it. And once the reenactment is over, there is no way to set it up so that it can be broadcast again the following year.

We’re trying to create a  set of web tools that will make starting, managing, and running your own reenactment much easier. In fact we’re applying to several funding agencies in hopes of getting some money to create tools that would allow users to:

• Easily start and manage a TwHistory project
• Create a list characters
• Schedule or import tweets that would then be broadcast at a certain day or time
• Broadcast the reenactment every year

If you are interested in starting your own TwHistory project, there is a way that you can help. The funding agencies to which we are applying want to see projects that many people will benefit from. If you think that your organization would use tools like the ones I’ve described above, please send us a message. If we can show that many oragnizations are interested in these kinds of tools, we will have a better chance of getting funded.

Thanks!

The Wired Campus Blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education posted an article about the TwHistory project called What Lincoln Would Have Tweeted. We are grateful for all the attention the project is getting, and we look forward to new collaborations and reenactments in the coming year.

We are here in Barcelona, about to present TwHistory at the 6th Seminar of the UNESCO Chair in E-Learning. We’re really enjoying the beautiful weather and the excellent presentations on Open Social Learning. Here is the link to our slides: http://prezi.com/u844gbe1oi34/.

Part of our participation in the conference included helping to organize the conference Twitter channel. If you would like to follow along or add your own comments, the tag is #eLChair09. We’ve been collecting all the tweets with the conference hashtag here. You can also follow us on Twitter: @twhistory. Thanks!

Tom Caswell and I have been invited to speak at the International Seminar of UNESCO Chair in E-Learning. The seminar is in Barcelona, and the focus of the seminar this year will be Open Social Leaning. You can read our proposal over at Tom’s blog.

We will of course be twittering the event, so follow us at @marionjensen and @tom4cam.

It looks like Newt Gingrich has decided to do his very own Twitter reenactment of the Battle of Trenton. He is calling it a ‘Twitterenactment’. We are certainly fans of using Twitter to reenact historical events, but his claim at being first is a off a bit…by about 6 months.

If you’d like to follow along, you can read more about the event here, or follow General George Washington (@genwashington76), Jonathan Van Dorn, a private in the colonial army (@pvtvandornNJ), and Hessian commander Colonel Johann Rall (@colonelrall).

It should be noted that while they are going to recreate the battle in real time, the Battle of Trenton took place on December 26th, and not October, so the exact days do not match up.