Knowledge, History, and Citizenship: Holding History 2024-2025 Year in Review

This year, Holding History continued our commitment to facilitating and creating spaces where people within and beyond the university’s borders can engage with history in a variety of ways. 

DouDou Jin making paper with student

In the fall, we expanded our signature Papermaking on Library Mall event into two parts. At our Rags

and Recycling workshop, papermaker Robert Possehl guided participants through the first steps of transforming old bedsheets into pulp. A week later, our papermaking tent, along with tubs of the pulp made from aforementioned rags, returned to Library Mall, where dozens of passersby dipped moulds into Lake Mendota water (that Cecelia and Arden bravely secured from the tempestuous waves on a windy morning) and pulled sheets of handmade paper. Participants were fascinated with the immediacy of the process: rags from local thrift stores mixed with water pulled from the lake across the street and prompted discussion about how we approach the materials that shuttle knowledge and history in new ways.

Students transcribing Revolutionary War pension documents

The spring saw our inaugural Transcribathon as we answered the National Park Service's citizen archivist initiative to help transcribe Revolutionary War pension documents. Amongst the 30+ participants gathered were Joshua Calhoun’s students, from a Constellations course titled “Archival Information & Artificial Intelligence,” as well as local Madisonians, assembling a multigenerational group to interact with these documents. Between slices of (cold) pizza and multiple screens, older participants lent their familiarity with cursive, while younger ones navigated the transcription interface, creating a space of mutual learning. This event prompted us to consider what it means to participate in the continuation of knowledge-making as a mode of citizenship and responsibility to a larger community.

At the end of the spring semester, we found ourselves facing boxes of archives once again. Research Services Archivist choaya yang walked us through an incredible trove of archival materials centered around UW-Madison experience–past and present. Together, we explored the University Archives in Steenbock Library, leafing through century-old yearbooks, examining Aldo Leopold's personal diaries, taking pictures of recipes from the archive of Carson Gulley's television show, and encountering traces

choaya yang, Cecelia, and students interacting with archival materials

of past student life. In the context of Calhoun’s class on AI and the Archives, this event asked students to think about how histories of previous UW students literally shape their campus experiences today, and how digitization might change how their own stories will be told to future students.

Thematically, these events engaged significantly with the concept of digitization and the archives and AI’s impact on information and the environment. A uniting thread across these events is the concept of citizenship, or belonging–and being responsible to–a larger, interconnected community, and how the ways we access the past have an effect on our social and material worlds.