Years
2014-2022
Institution
Ford’s Theatre Society
When Ford’s Theatre redid its website in 2016, we rethought how to engage website visitors in the story of the Lincoln assassination and Ford’s Theatre as a historic site.
I led efforts to rethink our web-based historical storytelling and subsequently build a series of 10 webpages.
What I Did
Planned content for website
Served as part of the core team driving overall website redesign, including weekly meetings with the web development firm and liaising with the rest of staff.
Collaborated with an in-house digital strategist and the web development firm to develop frameworks for storytelling and thus building components and templates to allow that storytelling to happen.
Co-led workshops with colleagues to get the essential elements for storytelling and understand our potential audiences better, building on audience research conducted for the Remembering Lincoln website.
Based on Smithsonian’s IPOP framework and the “digital storytelling superpowers” that came out of a NEH-Tenement Museum Digital Storytelling in Museums workshop in which I took part, I developed a framework for visitors to learn about the Lincoln assassination through first-person accounts. This met a secondary goal of creating a constructivist learning experience.
Pitched the idea to Ford’s Theatre leadership, who approved.
Managed content creation
Outlined the webpages to be built and assigned staff to create content.
Over the course of three years, I coached and set up frameworks for interns who filled out the content and primary source excerpts. We eventually launched all of the pages, starting from the core story.