As I probably could have predicted, I was unable to finish Episode 2 by the end of the semester. That is okay, I did start editing and it is hilarious. Michael adds to the vibe so much, I can’t wait to share the finished product. When that will be really depends on my access to internet after graduation, more on that later on, but I do plan on at least trying to continue this. If not right away I will pick it back up, but I have had too much fun with it to just stop. We will see where this goes from here.
The Website
It seems pretty much done to what I can make it. I do plan on building more of that out as I keep going and find more things to talk about and share, but for now I am proud of it where it is. It was fun to learn how to build and make something worth sharing with other people. I do still need to move ownership of the domain from the school to myself, but that seems like an easy enough process. I also made copies of all the content and saved them on my computer so I now have that to rebuild it in case it does not work to transfer the ownership.
Research and Creativity Day
This was a fun presentation. I was not at all worried about it, and I wound up having a hype squad of some Preservation Major friends who wanted to see what this project was all about and one other friend who also happened to be at my Conference Presentation in Gettysburg, so that was cool to have a support there. I was the third of three presenters in the session, so I got to end it well. I did just that, opening with a quote from Moneyball (The Movie): “How can you not be romantic about Baseball?”. That got some laughs and I just fed off that energy. I talked about the project, where it came from, things I’ve learned and picked up, basically everything in these posts with some more baseball sprinkled in. It was one of the better presentations I’ve given, and I did not have notes either, just talked about what felt natural. People loved it too, I am proud of that.
Me giving my presentation, pretty fun
The End
This has been a fun project and a fun Fellowship. I learned a lot, found that I am more capable of using technology than I thought, and now have a pretty cool website to show for a pretty cool topic. I am glad I got to do this fellowship to build out the project more, so thanks to Cartland, Shannon, and the DKC for letting me do this and offering support! Thanks to everyone who has been following along too, you’re a big part of why I do this and why these stories matter, so you all rock for sticking with me! As far as the future goes, I am graduating in a week on May 10, then start a position on May 18 as a Seasonal Park Guide at Minuteman Missile National Historic Site in the Badlands of South Dakota. It should be pretty cool to interpret a different aspect of our history in the Cold War, so I am pretty excited. I’ll be living in park housing so that is why I am unsure of internet access, but even if I do not have it there, I want to continue this research and sharing after I get back. This is the last update for the DKC, but definitely keep checking preservingourpastime.com, because hopefully I’ll have some cool things coming. Thanks again, and wish me luck!
Michael Murphy has been tracked down! Huzzah! We recorded Episode 2 on Friday, April 18 in the recording booth in the basement of the HCC. It was a slightly different space but that is what worked with scheduling and Michael knew the systems well so that helped. We used Audacity to record the audio then exported it into my Google Drive so now I have it. The computer in the booth was an Apple computer, which is also unfamiliar to me so that was fun to navigate. Remind me to yell at Steve Jobs later for making things different (Just kidding, different is fine). Michael was an excellent help with all of that too. We spent like an hour talking about Preservation, and some other things. This one is definitely going to need to be cut down, but it was fun and Michael really added to the vibe, so shoutout to him for being awesome
Me and Michael Recording Episode 2, we had fun
Website Refining
I like the content on my website, but it looks slightly boring for my taste, I think it needs a little more sizzle. I also needed a logo that shows up on the web tab for it that isn’t the WordPress logo, so there’s still been a fair amount of touchup to be done, which I guess is a constant for improving anything. To try to find some sizzle I started playing with themes and wound up figuratively exploding my website into next week. That took some time to fix, which I eventually did, but WordPress is not always as easy as it seems I guess. After that I think I am going to keep what I have on that front, it is simple and easy to navigate, so why reinvent the wheel. I may change it later once I learn more but right now worrying about lots of other life things, I think simple is better for me. I did make a logo and a simpler version of it for the website icon, which I think turned out great. I used Canva to do that, it seemed the most effective way to go. That has now been added and I think the website homepage looks a lot better with just that. I also found a way to have the tagline as part of the title page, so now there is something saying what the website is in addition to the name. It is coming together nicely.
The Logo looks pretty good, at least in my opinion
Research and Creativity Day Prep – Part 2
I started making my presentation slides, and these are turning out quite a lot different than I was expecting. I am trying to have a healthy balance of process and actual research in it, because the research is the point of what the process has led to, and it has been fun to try to craft that. I think I have everything I need for them done, now I just need to practice the presentation. I am presenting Friday April 25 in the morning, so I have time. I also know enough at this point I should not need too many notes. I am excited for this, getting to share it with more people is super cool!
Next Steps
As the semester nears an end I have one ambitious goal beyond presenting at Research and Creativity Day. I want to publish Episode 2 before the end of finals week. We will see if that is doable as the end of the semester does its thing, added to the end of college and having a bunch of other life things. But all I have to do is edit and make the transcript, cite sources, and put it up. It did not take too long with episode 1 once I figured out how things work, and since I have already figured it out it makes it that much easier. I am going to try for that. Wish me luck, I’ll give one more update here later on.
The first thing I looked at on the Website is where I can add more content. An obvious spot was the main page, where I had one really bad paragraph that told nothing. I replaced that with a couple paragraphs about why preservation of baseball sites is important, and the complete quote that I bookended my conference presentation with in Gettysburg to emphasize the point further.
It also was recommended to me that I add an about me page, a lot of websites have them and they are a good way to know that the creator is legit. So I wrote up some stuff about me and my interests as it pertains to this project, some other background things like my National Park Service work, and linked the StoryMap again as well as these blog posts. hopefully that helps people take me seriously, not that they wouldn’t but it may show that my interest in the subject means I know something.
I also wanted to add pictures to the website so that it looks like something worth visiting. On the top menu, the only thing that actually had visual appeal was the StoryMap, so I wanted to fix that. I wanted to make it a more personal touch, so I used only pictures that either I or one of my parents took when going to baseball games or other places on various trips we have been on. It took a while to find the best options, I had to call my parents to see if they had some from years ago that were on an external drive back home, but I eventually got one for each page. I like how it turned out, I did have to play with WordPress to figure out how to make the picture visible, but even that was pretty intuitive and I gained something from it in terms of my knowledge of website building.
The Homepage for the website, its coming along nice
Podcast Recording Prep Work
Since this is a podcasting project, I do want to do podcasting too. My guest host for the next episode was once again busy when I was available to record, so I used the time I would have spent doing that fleshing out the outline for that episode a little more, which mostly involved polishing and clarifying a couple things in the notes, and fleshing out the outline for Episode 3 a lot more. Episode 2 is going to be the Preservation Overview to go with the baseball one that has been published. Episode 3 is where I am going to talk about baseball stadiums in various movies. While looking for things to talk about with that, I realized there are some movies that pertain to baseball but don’t actually use professional stadiums. Where do those sandlots and little league fields fit into preservation? I am definitely going to brush that in this episode, but it could be a topic for another one down the road, talking about community fields all the way up to the glamourous Little League World Series complex in Williamsport, PA.
I found movies where stadiums on my StoryMap were talked about to start the research process for this one, but then brought in some more modern stadiums later as a compare and contrast. I am also interested to look at cookie cutter stadiums to see how they are seen, and how they can fit into preservation. That could be yet another full episode too though. I have a lot of possible content for this episode, now I need to make it flow nicely in an outline that I can understand while recording.
Presentation Prep (Part 2)
The last thing I worked on this most recent stretch was the materials for Research and Creativity Day, which is coming up later in the month. I have to present for this fellowship, but I probably would anyway because its such a cool project and I want to share it with as many people as possible.
The first step to getting to present at Research and Creativity Day is writing an abstract, and luckily I wrote a few possible abstracts for the Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference that I combined for the final product, but I kept the original drafts so I can use those as a guide for my abstract for this. I picked the one that talks less about the Negro Leagues and more about baseball overall, since this phase of the project is bringing all of the things I have found about the Negro Leagues into the context of the rest of the baseball world. I am making a few changes to it to fit the scope of what this phase of the project is covering, so hopefully it winds up being good and catching people’s attention. It is a challenge to make it concise and still make sense, but I got some practice with that preparing for MAAC, so I feel confident I can do it.
The different thing about this one is that I am building a presentation off of my research materials and not so much off a paper. I did build my paper for MAAC off of the StoryMap, so I know it is possible, but it will be a slightly different approach that I am going to have to play with a little bit. I think rather than having it about the content, I am going to talk about the process and journey of the project and what I have learned through that about different tools I have tried to use. This phase of the project has been the most informative to me in learning new systems, so I think that is a good thing to have included in it. I am still going to have a lot of baseball content, as that is the point of the project and that is what I want people to take away. I will have a link to the website at the end of the presentation to allow people to access more content if they want to.
Next Steps
I don’t really have many new things to do. I am going to find a time to record episode two this round. This will happen. If it doesn’t happen, that is not ideal. So it needs to happen. Otherwise I am scheduled to record an interview for the DKC Creators podcast this week, so that should be fun, and I will be finishing up prep for Research and Creativity Day. Simple, easy (Schedule alignment permitting), and fun, until next time, wish me luck!
I have figured out how to make the top menu look the way I want it to, and link directly to the StoryMap! It now has that, and there is also space to post the First Episode of the Podcast, which operated smoothly. I went into the road trips maps page and hyperlinked actual words with the links instead of just having the links by themselves to make it easier to know which one is which, and now all I need to do after posting Episode 1 of the podcast is add some pictures to make it interesting to look at. I think I am going to use some from my own travels for the pages, at least to start. It gives a more personal touch in my opinion. I just need to go through and figure out which ones are best. It actually looks pretty good right now I think, and I am excited to see how I can make it even better!
Final Podcast Edits and Publishing
I have cleared space on my hard drive now that I have access to my external drive again, so there is plenty of computer space to save the audio files I need. I figured all of that out and put the file into SoundTrap. I also looked for some other sounds to add in as opening and closing parts, I wasn’t trying to be too fancy for the first episode, just wanted to have something to bookend it for now. I like the sounds I found, but I do also think that as I learn more with this those sounds may change from episode to episode while I figure out what I like and what listeners like too. Experimentation with that seems like a good approach. To start out I went with the classic ballpark organ cavalry charge to open and the mid inning organ sound that also plays in ballparks to close. These are both really fun to hear, so hopefully it connects the ideas to the places for people, getting that preservation vibe. With that the only thing I had left was to put citations in the transcript, which I used Microsoft Word to make. I did have to do some editing and brush up after putting the audio file in the document, but that was minor compared to having to type it all out myself, although it helped me be more conscious of enunciation, which I think helped me in Gettysburg (more on that later). Anyway, after putting all the sources with the information I got from them, I copied everything into the draft of a post on the website, embedded the audio of the episode at the top, and now it is published on website. I hope it is good, I know I can improve but it is decent I think for a first real try outside of a class assignment.
Middle Atlantic Archaeology Conference
Gettysburg, PA. March 19-23. That was a long weekend. My Paper Presentation for my StoryMap project was at 8:50 AM on March 21, so we (Mary Washington Archaeology people) got there on the evening of the 19th and explored the battlefield and town of Gettysburg on the 20th while some workshops were happening as a way to take my mind off the presentation before it happened. I woke up on the morning of the 21st really nervous, which was a common feeling in the weeks leading up to it as I prepared for it. I guess jitters are normal, but as I went into the room where the presentation as happening I could not sit or stand still until I got up to talk. I led off the session, so that was nice to get it over with, and as soon as I got up there and saw at least a hundred people in front of me, I calmed down a lot. I would have thought that would freak me out more, but seeing that manty people there to hear me talk and see what the Negro Leagues were all about and why their ballparks matter, that fueled me. I started the presentation and just rolled through it.
Me at the beginning of my presentation, that was fun!
I spoke really well, which I guess makes sense because I spent so much time on it, I knew what I was talking about. I was also reading the paper out loud instead of having talking points, because that was what was recommended as the normal thing to do and since it was my first one I thought it was better to go with that option. I did really want to talk off an outline and have more audience engagement, as I do when I lead tours for places, but I see why this one had to be done like this too. After it was done I got really positive feedback from so many people. They told me how cool it was, asked where to find more information, offered ways to improve or add to the project, and just gave so much overwhelming support. I could not have asked for a better first conference presenting experience.
The crazy thing is, all of that was not even the best of it. Saturday evening, the 22nd, there was an awards ceremony where they announced the winners of the student paper/poster contest. There were three categories, one for graduate papers, one for posters, and one for undergraduate papers. I was surprised to see who won the undergraduate category
Me with the other winners of the Student Research contest and the organizers, that was a neat surprise.
I guess my hard work paid off. I am really proud of it and definitely excited. I was told there would be an opportunity to publish the paper with some fine tuning because I won, so I am going to see where that takes me if it is something feasible.
The conference ended with a CRM Skills workshop on Sunday, we dug Shovel Test pits on American Battlefield Trust land next to the National Military Park and learned how all that worked, so a pretty fun and hands on way to finish, That was a tiring yet awesome weekend. Thanks for the wishes of luck from my last post!
Next Steps
My next steps are first to take a break from the conference stuff. As cool as it was, it took a lot out of me and I need to chill. I think for this next cycle polishing the website with more color and pictures is a good idea, and maybe seeing if Michael Murphy is available to record the Preservation Overview Episode at some point and doing that. This seems like a good way to decompress after all I just did, and definitely a way to have fun with it. Until next time, thanks again!
I spent a lot of last week working on midterms for classes, so I wound up having to do both weeks worth of tasks over Spring Break. This is not a bad thing, as I enjoy working on this project and I was mostly hanging out at home anyway. The only roadblock I hit with that is that my computer drive is too full to download the new audio file for Episode 1 and my external drive to put things on and clear space is at school in Fredericksburg, while I am at home in Fairfax. I need to be able to download it to put it in Soundtrap to add music and other transitions to the audio, so it seems like that will have to wait until the next round as the last step before publishing this episode.
I still had plenty to work on though. I built out the website more, linking the StoryMap to one of the pages and starting to make road trip itinerary maps for another page. To link the StoryMap, I could not figure out how to make the title card for that page bring me directly to the StoryMap, even Google was no help there, so I wound up writing a little bit about the StoryMap and its purpose on that page and providing a physical link. That can probably change pretty easily to make it better, but for now it seems like it will work. For the road trip maps, I used google maps to outline a possible trip and linked to each google maps page so if anyone wants to change order, add, or take away for their own use, they have that ability. So far I only have 3 maps. One is for ballparks on the National Register, one is for ballparks on the StoryMap not on the National Register, and one is for baseball related museums. I am going to add more, I am just not sure what would be good yet.
A screenshot of the map for National Register listed ballparks. This is one possible choice out of a few on the website
As far as the podcast prep, I have spent a lot of time with supplemental material. I listened to the episode again to find what I needed to elaborate on and wrote some information to go on the website for those things, and I found sources to back it up and cited them. That part was easy, but also the most time consuming. I also found the rest of the sources I need to cite in the transcript once I get to that, so that will make it easier once I get to it. I am storing everything in Zotero, which generates citations on its own. This really helps the process go quicker, and makes it easy for me to go back to different sources. I also listened to some of the stock music in Adobe Podcasts, and while some of it is okay, it is not quite the vibe I am looking for so hopefully Soundtrap will have something better.
Conference Prep Some More
Wednesday February 26 was when my paper was due for the Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference, so I turned that in then. Really it is due when I present on March 21, but I entered a student contest for it, so that is why it was due sooner. Now all I have to worry about is the presentation, and I have all my pictures, I just need to make a PowerPoint and prepare what I am going to say. I went to the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Williamsburg, VA in November, and a lot of presenters just read their paper like a script. I could do that, but as someone who does a lot of interpretive programs I would rather have an outline for myself and talk more casually about things than read a script. I feel like it makes it more engaging and a better quality conversation overall. I am going to use the paper to make that outline, but it will be more bullet points for the presentation. For the Powerpoint, I am making it really simple with just pictures to back up my talking and show the audience the ballparks, people, and other resources I am talking about. I have a lot to show, and I may have to find some different pictures to go in it, but I have most of what I need already so that should be attainable.
Next Steps
When I return to school, I am going to clear the space on my computer to download the audio and finish that, then I am going to fix up the transcript for spelling and punctuation errors and cite everything in that. When that is done I think it will be ready to go up on the site, so hopefully that will be part of the next update. The Conference will also be included though, since that is at the end of the next two weeks, so time might hold me up a little bit, but I figure I can shoot high and be humbled if needed. That is part of the fun, and I learn something regardless so I consider that a good thing. Wish me luck in Gettysburg!
Issues have been resolved! It turns out a combination of needing to clear out space on my computer because the hard drive was full (it would not download the audio and I could not figure out why, gotta love troubleshooting and independent problem solving!) and needing to change the audio file from a .WAV file to a .mp3 file were all I needed to do. I used Sound Trap to do this, just putting the .WAV in and exporting it as a .mp3 and putting that into Adobe Podcasts. It transcribed easily and now I can use that to edit. Huzzah! Now to tolerate listening to myself talk. I am thankful I could edit out all the um’s, uhh’s, like’s, and dead air space without having to listen because that would have been torture, and I cut about 9 minutes off the episode by cleaning all of that out. That is wild, I thought I was a better talker than that. Anyway, progress is being made, so now I can have some fun playing with everything.
The Editing Workspace for Episode 1 on Adobe Podcasts. It’s a pretty cool system to use.
After cutting everything that was just filler space out, I listened to it again to make sure it still flowed smoothly, and I feel pretty good about where it is at. I do have some small issues with enunciation, but that is not something I can fix with editing, I just need to work on that in future episodes, and that will come with practice.
Creating preservingourpastime.com
This is progressing too, slowly, but it’s getting there. I installed WordPress on the domain and then had absolutely no clue what I was doing. A DKC consultation appointment came in clutch there. They showed me how to add pages to the site, how embedding things works, and a basic overview of how to put other things on the site. After that I started playing with it, put in pages for the StoryMap, Podcast, and some road trip ideas, and now I need to populate these pages with content. I have some preliminary road trip maps already made for the ballparks I researched, so that will start that page. I will put the podcast up once I finish editing and making the extra content to go with it. Embedding a StoryMap gave me a challenge, so I will have to figure out how to do that too. It seems fun to build out so far, and I’m sure it will be more so once I figure more features out.
The shell of what the website will become, Seems like a good start
Side Quests for the Project
During this stretch of the Fellowship, not one but two side quests came up. The first is that I started writing a paper to present my research from the StoryMap at the Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference in Gettysburg, PA in mid March. That is pretty awesome and not at all stressful, but I have had help from my Archaeology professor to know how to format the paper and what kinds of things I should write about. Now just writing the paper with the research I have already done is pretty straight forward. I have been trying to find ways to emphasize baseball as something to care about while appealing to preservationists who may not care about baseball specifically, so that part had been a fun brain puzzle. I wrote a draft and am now working on refining the paper to make it coherent and captivating. Now that I’ve written something, I’m getting pretty excited for the presentation even though it is not for another month, but that allows me to make sure it is as good as it can be.
Side Quest number two is that one of my former history professors is teaching an American Studies class this semester called “Baseball in America” and this week is about Historic Ballparks. He asked me to come teach his class for a day (Friday, February 21 if you were wondering), so I agreed because he has taught a couple of my favorite classes in the past and it is a chance to show off what I have done so far with the project. I have been brainstorming that, and preparing ideas for how to best use it as a teaching tool in a classroom environment. Going to the actual class I just had my StoryMap and an outline of basic points, figuring I’d just talk about things and make it more of a discussion. I actually used the part of my Preservation Overview podcast episode outline about integrity as a guide for my discussion, using examples from the StoryMap of how the different aspects of integrity are used in different ballparks, and that seemed really well received by the class. After talking about integrity, I talked about adaptive reuse and how ballparks that are no longer in use can still serve a purpose for their communities. That was an even better discussion and the class had a lot of really good ideas. I am really proud of how well I did, and the professor also had positive things to say, teaching is cool, and I hope I get to do it more. I guess in a way that is what I am doing with the podcast, so that is a big added bonus.
Next Steps
For editing the Podcast, now that I have gotten all of the clunky audio jibber jabber out, I can start adding transition sound effects and other things to make it a polished episode. That should not take too long, and once that is done the audio file itself will be ready. I am going to use SoundTrap for that, since it is a little more intuitive for what I know already.
For the supplemental content, I need to put the final file into word to transcribe again, then edit it to make sure things are spelled right with good punctuation, then I need to cite my sources. I also need to write a little more context for some of the things I talked about to make it make more sense for the webpage for the episode, so all of that will take a little more time.
For the website, I need to put the StoryMap and Road Trips into those pages, and maybe write some stuff and add pictures for the homepage too so that it actually looks appealing for people that might want to use the site.
This seems like a lot, but it is manageable and I think will make it look and sound a lot better. That’s all for this update, baseball is fun.
After starting the foundation of this podcast series, the next steps clear as to what I need to do. This includes recording the first episode, which should be the most fun part. Before doing that though, the DKC requires that I do a training in the Podcast studio since I have never used it. I recorded the podcast episode for my Archaeology class in a study room in Simpson Library, which was quiet but did not have the best acoustics and used the microphone on my laptop which was really scratchy sounding, so I think for this I need better sound quality and a space to support it, which is why I want to use the studio. I guess I can appreciate that I learned from that experience, and it should be cool to try that new space and equipment. In addition to recording, I needed to brush up the outline and make sure there was enough information on it, so I did that and sent it to guest star Michael Murphy to get his input. While I did that, I also scheduled the recording date, so February 6, 2025 was what we settled on. The last step to prep for everything is to sign up for a domain of ones own. I have decided on preservingourpastime.com as the web address and name of everything, it just has a nice ring to it. Upon signing up for it, I can start building it out and making it my own, which is pretty cool. This stage is exciting, because it will have something a little more tangible that I can show off and be proud of, outside of these blog posts of course.
My Plan for the Website
I have never built a website before, so I am going to preface this with the classic “I have absolutely no idea what I am doing” and the ever favorite “this will be a learning experience”. It seems like a cool concept, but I will have to learn a lot to make it look good. My vision at the moment is to have a main page talking about what each piece does and linking to the pages on the site where I am keeping everything. One of these links of course will be the StoryMap, another will be to the podcast. At some point I may have some pages with possible road trip itineraries to various ballparks and associated sites, because that is fun and also pretty tangible, especially for me who loves planning road trips. On the podcast pages I want to have some information about each episode and the process for making them, and a transcript of the episode with sources so people can learn more if they wanted to (and also to avoid plagiarism, no one wants to be accused of that). I may also include some pictures if it fits the episode to add a visual component to those that are interested in that, so naturally the podcast pages will be the biggest piece of the website. This plan is of course subject to change as I learn more, but I think it is a good starting point for knowing what I want to do with it. “preservingourpastime.com” was available as a domain, so now I just need to start building.
My Plan for Recording the Podcast
Recording the podcast does not require as much forward thought beyond preparing scripts and outlines, but there are still some things to consider, especially between recording, editing, and releasing the episodes. For now the plan starts with coordinating with guests if I have them, and recording the audio in the studio. After recording I need to edit, so I plan to use Adobe Podcasts for that. I was recently introduced to it and it seems pretty intuitive where I can drop the audio file into it and see a transcript that I can then edit and it changes the audio to fit the edits made. I strongly dislike hearing myself talk on recordings, so not having to do that is certainly ideal. I will have to learn this system, but that is part of the process. That makes it easier to make a transcript for the episode too, since it is there already. After that, I plan to put it on the website, probably just embedding the audio into it and having all the complementary information on the same page, and having a different page for each episode. This is my rough plan for now, and it will probably require more changes but I think it is also a good starting point.
Recording!!
Actually recording the Podcast was a fascinating experience. I did my training on the studio the morning of recording the first episode. The training contained all new stuff to me that was shockingly easy and when I went to do the recording later in the afternoon I felt really confident in my ability to use the space. This is ideal, because it makes things easier for me, but not what I was expecting at all. I tend to struggle using new systems so I was happy that it was as intuitive as it wound up being.
Sitting in the Podcast studio by myself with my outline talking to nothing but a microphone was a little strange, but felt better than talking at nothing into my computer microphone like I did in my Archaeology class. I tend to do better talking to other people, so adjusting to having those people as a virtual audience that will hear what I am saying later on will be something that I will have to get used to, and is also not something I was expecting to be as small a challenge as it was. Once I started talking about things I felt better and more normal, it just took a minute to adjust to the circumstances.
Me in the Podcast Studio, A strange but fun experience that I’ll get used to as I do this more
I wound up flipping the first episode from the preservation overview one to the baseball overview one, partially because I felt better about casually talking about it and mostly because my Historic Preservation episode guest was not available for any of the times I was able to reserve the space to record. That is a nice thing about preparing multiple episodes in advance, I could adjust as needed to be able to record. I expected the audio to be about 20 minutes, and it took 41 minutes. I will definitely have to take some out and move some things around in editing, but this is still a longer episode than I was expecting. That is not a bad thing though, I just know a lot about this topic because of personal interest and it did not take a lot of outside research, so I was able to freely talk more.
Editing, A New Ballgame
I have done a little bit of audio editing before, and by that I mean I threw some audio in SoundTrap for my Archaeology class and got rid of the dead air between words. I also tried to put some extra sounds in but it wound up not sticking in the final product for that one. To say my knowledge is limited in the way of audio editing would probably suffice. That is what makes learning fun though, I get to try new things. I am trying to use Adobe Podcast this time around, and immediately ran into a problem. It has a feature to make a transcription, and that feature was not working. That makes it a slight challenge to make it accessible, but that is okay, I can use Microsoft Word to do that. Or so I thought. It turns out talking for 41 minutes takes up a lot of digital space, and the file was too big for Word. Aside from that problem, I have been playing with other features and listened to everything to get an idea of what I need to fix. I will always hate listening to myself on a microphone, but this time was not too bad. I realized that I went all over the place with tangents but that is part of the fun of an episode like this.
Even though talking about the history of baseball did not require a lot of outside research, I did have to go find sources to back up what I was saying and cite on the website after the fact, so further grounding my knowledge in that way has been fun. That was part of why I listened to it again, so I could hear what I actually said versus what I had outlined and find any changes I needed to make to source hunting. Luckily there were not too many, so it worked out well on that front too.
Next Steps
The next steps are pretty simple, I definitely need to start building out the website, and editing the audio and making the transcript and supplemental material for this episode. As far as supplemental material, I want to have some contextual information but nothing too fancy, just enough to make it tell a more complete story because I definitely left some things out in some places. As far as this phase went, I’ve had fun. I’m looking forward to making it look and sound good now.
Hi, My name is Drew Meisenheimer and I am a senior here at Mary Washington. Before I begin this phase of what has so far been a really incredible journey, there are some things you should know about me. All of this may not make any sense whatsoever at first, but trust me when I say it will all tie together. The biggest thing to know is that I love the idea of the American Road Trip. I love it so much that coming to school at Mary Washington, the First Year Seminar I decided to take was centered around the American Road Trip. An added bonus was that this FSEM was taught in the Department of Historic Preservation, which ended up being my major. I know what you’re thinking, what is a preservation major doing in a fellowship with technology? Don’t we just like old things and new things aren’t our speed? I will get to that, and it is cool how it connects. There are a lot of ways historic places and artifacts can connect to modern systems and ideas. Anyway, in the FSEM I was told one thing on Day 1 that most freshmen overwhelmed with entering college would just let go right over their heads. Not me, I took this one thing to heart as the best advice I could possibly receive and it led me to this project now, as well as many other awesome places. “Life is about the detours, let your curiosity drive you to places you never expected” were the words of wisdom from the professor of the class that influenced me so much. This is something I have always believed, and yet did not quite understand the extent of what it meant until very recently, but that approach to life changed how I look at everything now. Back to the class, the semester project was to design our own Road Trip, so it was my first opportunity to take the advice to heart. I have designed every one of my family road trips since I can remember, and this was my chance to make my dream trip. I picked as many National Parks as I could, and found every baseball related attraction between, and wrote about a trip to all of it. Not only that, but I have now been to some of the places on it, among them Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park where Hinchliffe Stadium is (National Parks and Baseball in One spot!!!!), the site of Forbes Field at the University of Pittsburgh, and the site of Griffith Stadium in Washington DC where the Howard University Hospital now sits. Yes, these places will connect to this story too, buckle in for this ride with me. We are just getting started
Me with the Outfield Wall at Forbes Field behind me in August 2023, it is a cool site to visit. Picture taken by my dad
Let my curiosity drive me, right? It was a road trip I can only take like this, in fragments not all at once, but it gives an opportunity for literal detours as well as figurative ones, and I know that will make life fun.
Future Assignments
After the FSEM, I did not expect this to grow further, and if it did I did not expect it to be because of the baseball aspect. I tend to seek out all things National Parks more, so that is where I thought it would go. But that is the thing about detours, they take you where you least expect. I did not touch the baseball aspect again for another two years, when in the Fall of 2023 I took a preservation class called Material Culture and was required to do a semester project where I analyzed any physical object of my choosing made or modified by people, and write a paper about the thing itself or how it relates to broader contexts of history. I have a baseball glove from the 1940s, and this is where the idea starts to develop into what I have now. I took this glove and started to think about how I could use it, and found a very clear answer. The 1940s were the height of the Negro Leagues, professional baseball leagues where people were prevented from what was considered the highest level of the game because of the color of their skin. I decided to dive headfirst into that. I put more work into this paper and presentation than any other assignment in my life, and it showed in the final product, which I was super proud of. I learned about people like Rube Foster, the founder of the Negro National League, and Buck O’Neil, a player for the Kansas City Monarchs whose achievements took way too long to be recognized. It opened my eyes to a glimpse of what the experience for them might have been like, and made me think that this is a story that should be told more often than it is.
Now lets jump ahead a semester to the Spring of 2024. I took an archaeology class for the first time, and my professor encouraged me to try to connect the class term project with the one I did for Material Culture. The project was to make a podcast episode about anything relating to American Archaeology of our choosing. I thought it was impossible to connect, until I thought a little outside the box and learned that archaeology is more than just digging in the dirt. It is just as much about resources from the past, and what they can tell us about the way people lived. Baseball stadiums fit perfectly into this, so I was able to make it work. One of the stadiums on my “road trip” from freshman year that I had visited a couple times already seemed to me like the perfect place to start. I decided to look at Hinchliffe Stadium, a Negro League ballpark in Paterson, New Jersey that had just finished a massive restoration project, and see if any archaeological study was done, and if not what could be done to help interpret the site better.
Hinchliffe Stadium in July 2021 while it was being restored. Picture taken by me
With this project, I looked at a lot of primary resources and resource surveys and reports, as well as reaching out to various preservation professionals in Paterson to see if they knew anything, so the research I did was way different from anything I had done before. The final product is something I was super proud of at the time especially given I hated using technology so recording and editing a podcast episode was unfathomable to me, I actually had a lot of fun. Looking at it now, the podcast episode could have been a lot better, but the enjoyment of that phase and desire to improve upon it is actually the inspiration for the current phase of the project that I am in, which I will get to. It also led to the next phase, which is possibly the coolest thing I have ever done.
Coolest Research Project Ever
After the archaeology podcast project, my professor came to me with an idea, another detour that I was not at all expecting but am so glad I took. She asked if I wanted to do an independent study class where I build on what I have done so far in the FSEM, Material Culture, and the Archeology classes and expand that work, turning it into some kind of interpretive resource. I took the opportunity and ran. After 135 hours in the fall of 2024 working on something that I sometimes could not even envision a final product, but always knew I could make it awesome, I now have a StoryMap on ArcGIS that combines every element and goes deeper. I did not want to stop at Hinchliffe Stadium, so I used that as a starting point and included 12 other former Negro League Ballparks in the StoryMap. Some of these, like Hinchliffe or Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, are still standing. Others, like Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC or Greenlee Field in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania are gone without a trace. A lot more, like Forbes Field in Pittsburgh or Bush Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana have some of it still standing or have been adaptively reused in some way. Some have higher levels of protection and standards of preservation from being listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and others were allowed to be torn down because nobody saw their importance in time. Seeing how sites were and still are similar in spite of all their differences was just as cool to me as reading the stories of players that played in these places and whose lives deserve more recognition, and what better way is there to recognize what they did than tell the story of the place where they did it? The project also gave me an opportunity to reach out to more places and make connections with places that help to tell these stories. The StoryMap might be my single proudest accomplishment so far in an academic sense, but it is still missing something. I found a lot of side tangents and rabbit holes I could go down but did not have time to in the semester I had for it. Some of these are talking about how stadiums are seen in various movies, to talking about how a lot of the spaces were shared by multiple teams and how that worked, and so many other topics. I want to dive deeper into some of that. This brings us to the current phase of this project.
A view from what I believe to be where the seats behind home plate at Griffith Stadium once were. The site is now where Howard University Hospital is, a very different feel from its baseball past. Picture taken by me in October 2024The homepage for my StoryMap on ArcGIS, definitely a fun project to work on
Podcast Time
In trying to figure out the best way to tell these stories, I realize that I have an opportunity to improve a skill that I started to build about a year ago: Podcasting. The professor I worked with on the StoryMap had the same idea, and recommended I apply for this Digital Knowledge Center Fellowship to have some more support in doing that, and build on other skills as well. I am going to create some podcast episodes, the plan currently being to publish one and have two more ready to either record or edit into a finished product. I am also going to have a domain of one’s own, or a website, to house all of this and the StoryMap in a more accessible place. While my skills for all of this are currently very slim if they exist at all, I am excited to learn about how it all works and expand what I can do. Telling these stories in the process seems like a fun way to go about that, and so begins this phase.
The first step to making this Podcast was to determine the topic of the first few episodes, of which I currently have three. Since the main ideas of the project are Historic Preservation and Baseball, I figured the opening episodes should explain what those two things are. I am planning a two part opener talking about Historic Preservation and all it entails in one, with the help of fellow preservation major Michael Murphy to add more insight, and in the other talking about the history of baseball and how it has changed, as well as implications of those changes either in the game or the world around it. The last episode is going to be about how baseball movies show stadiums, specifically the ones in my StoryMap, and how that does or does not impact how these places are preserved or how their stories are told.
The next step was to outline everything in these episodes. For the Historic Preservation one, I consulted Michael for advice, since he is helping me tell about it on the episode. He liked my ideas of a broad overview of key terms and legislation in a style that someone who knows nothing about Preservation will understand, since the target audience is baseball fans who may not know anything about it. For this one I am thinking we will just use the outline to have a conversation about it with a more laid back vibe than lecture format, but that could change based on whether it seems to be working or not. For the baseball history overview, I am digging deeper into significant periods of time, and telling about things that occurred to change the game. Of course I will emphasize the periods of social progress, and throughout the episode I will connect it to preservation and why that should exist too. For the movies episode, I found the movies that feature the ballparks in my StoryMap and those are the movies I plan to focus on. Some of the parks have been torn down, others still stand and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and others have some sort of repurposing done to part or all of it. It is fascinating, and I plan to dive into whether them being featured in these movies effects the methods of preservation, or lack thereof. Based on what I have found so far, I am hypothesizing that the two things are not connected, but more may tell me something different so we will see.
This seems to be a good start to a series, and I am formulating other ideas as I go too, so I may outline some more in the future this semester, or at the very least have a running list of ideas to go back to later.
But Wait… There’s More!
Of course, the Podcast is not the only part of this stage of the project. I am also going to make a website to house my StoryMap as well as the Podcast series. On it I am thinking in addition to the episodes, I will put transcripts on the page for each episode. This is not only for accessibility, but also because some people prefer to read and that allows them to get the content too. It will definitely take more time to make this possible, but it is a necessary commitment in my view, and I find doing transcripts fun because I can use that to reflect on how I can improve. This makes me better at public speaking, and for these purposes it makes me better at podcasting, which I consider a win. In terms of a podcast name, a website name, and a domain name, I have had some ideas. The domain name can basically be the same as the website name so that makes it a little easier. Obviously I need it to connect to Baseball and Preservation, and there are a lot of ways to go with that. I called the StoryMap “Preserving in Place: National Register & the Negro Leagues” which might be a good starting place. It feels too academic for this type of thing, and it does not encompass everything that will be in the podcast and website, so I would need to refine it a little.
For the Podcast, I think a simple title that covers everything is all I need. For now I like how “Preserving Our Pastime” sounds. Preservation is clearly there, and baseball being considered by many the National Pastime, it makes sense. This could change before I release my first episode, but for now anyway that is what I think I am going with.
For the Website and Domain, I want it to be catchy, and honestly for the domain I think preservingourpastime.com is easy to remember, and connects to the podcast in people’s heads. So I may go with that, but for the website I am not sure. I want to make it something catchy that may connect to something people know too. For a while “People Will Stay” as a reference to the famous Field of Dreams “People Will Come” speech, but it does not really stand out or feel original. At the end of the day, I think “Preserving Our Pastime” works for all three things, it is simple, to the point, and hopefully will catch some interest from people.
Next Steps
Now that episodes are outlined and a name for everything has at least been thought about, I need to make a plan for the next couple weeks until the next update. I think the biggest thing will be meeting with Michael Murphy to talk more about the first episode, and come up with a plan together for how it is going to work and when to record. If we are both able with our own time restraints, I think actually recording the audio is possible too. In addition, I think finding out how websites work and setting that up with the structure for everything to go on it also makes sense as a next step. These seem like logical next steps for now, and I feel like I am going to find more to refine as I go so I will include all of that in the next update. I hope this stage of the detour is as fun as the last, it has been so far, and I hope everyone reading about it finds as much enjoyment in it as I have. Farewell for now, its time for some fun!
