These are the two personas I created for my public history project. I actually didn’t revise them because I felt pretty confident with them the first time (I had been observing/participating in the group for over a year and I’m familiar with persona construction through library usability testing/coursework).
Based on the Brennan and Kelly article, though, I want to think about adding the ability for contributors to remain anonymous, for contributions to not be publicly visible, and for contributors to map their contributions. I also might want to include a way to tag contributions, since LCSH aren’t specific enough for this project (extremely local history) and not all of the items I’ve uploaded even include LCSH. The Kalfatovic et al. article made me more convinced than ever that a lot of this work shouldn’t be done on commercial platforms. I use Flickr Commons all of the time and really appreciate all of the images it makes available, but it recently started forcing you to log in with a Yahoo account in order to download images, and that makes me a bit uncomfortable. I do appreciate that it is now connected to Internet Archive book images, because as Kalfatovic et al. point out, silos predominate. Because of this, if my project were more than a prototype, I would want to connect it with DPLA.
The other readings mostly made me feel bad about how much technical stuff I can’t do. I really appreciated Sherratt’s and Whitelaw’s arguments and think that type of work is so valuable and interesting and then have no way of doing it myself.
Descriptive Title: The Photographer
Quote: “I took this shot on 1/14/16”
A Day in a Life Narrative: Marty grew up in Old Redford, but moved to the suburbs after he got married. He still lives in the suburbs, but since he has retired, he’s been checking out the old neighborhood, taking pictures, and doing some online research about the history of Old Redford, especially its schools and cemeteries. He’s pretty good with social media and uploading pictures, and he likes to share and talk about his pictures. Sometimes he even combines his pictures and images found or taken by other group members into a short video.
End Goals: Marty would like to be easily able to upload and download photos. People have asked him for locations, so he would also like to be able to label them with locations and possibly other information. He likes to do online research, but sometimes it can be difficult to find the specific info he’s looking for.
Demographic: white, middle-class, suburban, college, 40-65
Descriptive Title: The Nostalgic
Quote: “Does anyone remember….?”
A Day in a Life Narrative: Like Marty, Carol grew up in Old Redford and later moved to the suburbs. Unlike Marty, she hasn’t been back to the neighborhood she grew up in, but she does remember her childhood friends and neighbors and sometimes wonders what happened to them. She’s a big user of Facebook and often comments on posts.
End Goals: Carol would like to be able to reminisce and reconnect with friends and neighbors from Old Redford. She likes to look at the pictures that other people post and comment on them, but probably wouldn’t drive into Detroit to take any herself. She does have a scanning app on her phone and wouldn’t mind being about to scan and post some of her print pictures.
