Michael Holleran and Josh Conrad discuss the use of wikis in graduate level coursework

Summary
Preservapedia intern Stephanie Byrd interviews University of Texas at Austin professor Michael Holleran and UT Austin graduate Josh Conrad on their use of Wiki-based assignments in graduate level coursework and the Austin Historical Survey Wiki.

The interview was recorded, by telephone, on July, 16, 2013 with permission to release the interview into the public domain. The interview is posted as a part of the WikiProject Preservation Education.

Interview transcription
Byrd: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Preservapedia Talks. My name is Stephanie Byrd and today I'm talking with Michael Holleran, the director of the graduate programs in historic preservation at UT Austin and Josh Conrad, the lead programmer and designer of the Austin Historical Survey Wiki. Thanks for being here, guys.

Holleran: Happy to be here.

Conrad: Thank you very much.

Byrd: Just to start off, can you guys describe the Austin Historical Survey Wiki for our listeners?

Holleran: Sure. It is a web-based historical survey platform. It's an online database including previous historical survey information for the city of Austin and an interface for professionals and staff and members of the public to add and edit new information, photographs, and documents to the historical survey.

Byrd: Josh, anything to add?

Conrad: Each of the pages on the platform contain information about the history of the place - locations and descriptions - and, as Michael said, photos and documents, so we have an overall map where you can see the location of all the points, so it's kind of a geodatabase in that sense. We have the ability to search for places by each of the fields that each of the places contains.

Byrd: So when you guys were first starting to develop this, why did you decide on a Wiki format for the project?

Holleran: There was already a strong tradition of a volunteer-driven survey in Austin. Neighborhoods were doing their own research in pursuing local historic districts, very engaged volunteers, but without any way to gather that information and share it. Another reason, that's rooted in where preservation is going in a lot of places, is that as you get into neighborhoods, as you get into more ordinary kinds of places, the information that you need is not as often an expert evaluation of these little ranch houses, it's more the knowledge that people have of their own neighborhoods. It's a more distributed knowledge that we wanted to be able to get people involved in sharing, and I guess I'll add one more thing, which is that the very act of having people involved and sharing information seemed to be a very healthy aspect of the preservation program - a strength of having a broader involvement in the survey process.

Conrad: And I'll add something about the technical side of the Wiki and the use of the term "Wiki." It's related to sites like Wikipedia and Preservapedia in the sense that it's a user-contributed, ongoing database, but we are not using the same platform as those sites which use the MediaWiki platform, we're using the term in a broader sense of collaborative crowd-sourcing.

Holleran: What Josh has done in creating the Wiki is quite a technical project because in additional to what Wikipedia does, which is to allow people to collaborate in editing text, the Austin Wiki also includes editing of data, numerical data, it's basically each record of a place is like 50 separate Wikipedia articles pulled together into a single display.

Conrad: That's right, we actually have information about the contributor and the date of contributing, and the revision history for each one of the fields individually, as opposed to the pages as a whole, so it gets really complicated at that level, and we needed to develop a custom tool that was based on the idea of Wikipedia and what those platforms are doing, but was more refined in the way that we wanted to control how data was represented and stored and saved.

Byrd: With such a complicated process, how has the Wiki been incorporated into graduate level coursework at UT Austin?

Holleran: We have incorporated it into several courses. Our National Register course will be using it this fall, our preservation planning course has used it as a way for students to do what these courses have always done, which is to have them involved in real projects in the community. It now serves as a way for students to work with volunteers in neighborhoods, depending what the neighborhoods are up to, whether it's a local historic district, whether it's simply gathering local history for education and their own appreciation. The students have been both working with the neighborhood volunteers about their preservation planning issues and helping train them and work with them on the Wiki survey itself. One of the things that I think it does well for the students is to get them a better appreciation and some experience with data management and understanding the historical survey not just as an individualized research project on a particular property or neighborhood, but also the whole picture of how does this information come together, how can it be used, what you need to do to understand and manage it and make it useful in practice.

Conrad: Yeah, and I'll add that it's been really helpful to test the Wiki in the classroom, they're very open to giving criticism and recommendations about the user interface and other things that have helped a lot in the development in the past couple years.

Byrd: Since the Wiki launched in June 2012, where have your contributions mostly been coming from? Is it students? Is it the general public? The planning department? Who's using this Wiki?

Holleran: It's really all of the above, which is very gratifying. Several of our classes have used it, students have used it, some of that has been within the structure of the classroom. The assignments in some of this has gone beyond that as students have added and edited around their own interests. There have been several large scale volunteer efforts. Preservation Austin, our local preservation advocacy group, has organized several volunteer efforts, one, for example, was to get current photographs of the more than 500 designated local landmarks, which is something that the city had wanted as an educational and publicity feature. They hadn't been able to figure out how to do it, didn't have a budget to do it professionally, didn't have staff time to do it, and Preservation Austin, by organizing volunteers got it done in about three or four weeks, and with really high quality photographs which was something that hadn't been clear that it would work that way, but people who were very good at taking photographs went out and took photographs, and you can now give yourself a virtual tour of landmarks around the whole city. The city - city staff and consultants - have also used it as a platform for working together on current surveys. Several neighborhoods are using it to archive work that they had already done in their own survey work, and it allows people to record changes as they happen. So it's really had quite a variety of users who are able to use it for different purposes, different times, different kinds of arrangements.

Conrad: Another aspect of the data that we have that I really like is that we have a lot of survey data from even in the early eighties and nineties, we have some legacy survey data that we have uploaded onto the site, so we've been able to see how buildings have changed over time, because a lot of the survey data is outdated and we are updating it with new information and seeing how individual buildings have changed, and we have a lot more to go. It's kind of an exciting thing, to put up all that old stuff that nobody's seen before.

Byrd: Bringing this Wiki out into the public, you guys held a lot of public outreach meetings with tutorials. How did those meetings affect the perception of the Wiki, its user-friendliness, and its purpose for Austin?

Holleran: A lot of different stuff happened at those meetings. I think that the Wiki was an important part of them, but one of the things that we realized early on was that just going out an talking to lots and lots of different groups of people, sometimes neighborhood-based, sometimes organized around some particular cause, some kind of history alumni groups - lots of different people who had different kinds of heritages in mind, some of whom knew about preservation and the preservation program, some of whom didn't really. I think any kind of outreach around preservation is generally a good thing because people are usually interested, not always very knowledgeable, and often have very different goals, so the Wiki became a vehicle for us to be educators about preservation, and people educated us about what they thought was important, what kinds of heritage they wanted to record, what kinds of things they wanted to be able to look up, what they hoped to see. We also were a beta website in development, so when something didn't work they told us very quickly, and sometimes we were able to fix it quickly and sometimes we learned things that we have tried to incorporate over time.

Conrad: We made the site public very early on while it was still in development and having that feedback from the people that we were working with really drove a lot of the development and was really useful and I think we're still in that process and we're in the middle of developing a 2.0 version that we're getting ready to launch soon with the city that will be hosted on the city servers and be more of an official version with improvements that we've learned in the past year or two.

Byrd: Jumping off of that, what is the future Wiki in this 2.0 version, and how does that affect heritage conservation in Austin?

Holleran: The 2.0 version is going to be launched over the next month or two at the same time that the Wiki is moved from the University of Texas to the City of Austin. We have worked in partnership as we've developed it with UT in the driver's seat. We are now handing off the control to the city so that it would become a permanent part of the city's preservation program. I think that what it will mean for heritage, for preservation, in Austin is really going to be an evolving thing. I think, as Josh said, having all of the information accessible to people is powerful. People continue to explore it. One of the things that we didn't understand at first, but have learned, is that people using it to search and take a look at things is probably about ten times as much as the number of people who are actively contributing to it, so we know that people are learning things, we know that people are using it as preservation issues arise. We don't always know what they're going to make of it, I think that's one of the exciting things is that the information is much more accessible and that will have a life of its own. I hope that people will continue to explore new ways to make their voices heard and new ways to generate information that we may not have thought of.

Conrad: As we are developing the next version of the Wiki, we're looking forward to what the next - 3.0 - iteration would be. We have an ambition of it being something more universal that other cities can use, and that it can be migrated to other places and used in that way; strong possibility because the platform we're using is all based on open source software. We hope that this would be something that is cheap, and maybe even free, for other cities to use.

Byrd: Thank you so much for being here with us today.

Holleran: Thank you.

Conrad: Thank you.

Byrd: And for our listeners, if you would like to learn more about Preservapedia, please visit our website at Preservapedia.org.