Episode 023 - Eric Schmalz

In this episode, we interview Eric Schmalz, Citizen History Community Manager at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Eric works with the museum’s History Unfolded project. That project aims to investigate what Americans knew about the Holocaust as it was happening during World War II, and how Americans reacted to news of the Holocaust. The museum calls History Unfolded a “citizen history” project, in the style of crowd-sourced citizen science projects like Galaxy Zoo or FoldIt. Regular people are invited to find newspaper articles from the 30s and 40s, either online or at our local libraries, ones that reference the Holocaust, and contribute them to an online database. So far, the project has collected over 8,000 articles! Eric Schmalz was on Vanderbilt’s campus for the Cultural Heritage at Scale symposium, organized by Vanderbilt and the Council on Library and Information Sciences. He was interviewed by Gayathri Narasimham, associate director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning. There’s a really interesting education angle here, since History Unfolded works with high school teachers and college professors to involve students in the project. Gayathri talks explores that educational angle with Eric in the interview. Links • History Unfolded, https://newspapers.ushmm.org/ • Above the Fold, the History Unfolded blog, https://newspapers.ushmm.org/blog/ • @Eric_USHMM on Twitter, http://twitter.com/eric_ushmm • Cultural Heritage at Scale symposium, http://heritage-at-scale.info/ • Derek Bruff’s 2013 blog post on citizen history and MOOCs, http://derekbruff.org/?p=2579