The Past Presented Digital History Lab

When UNC History Professor Miguel La Serna decided that he wanted to assign students in his class about guerrillas and revolution in Latin American the task of creating documentary shorts, he quickly realized two things: first, he didn't really know how to make documentaries. Second, there was enormous potential in this project - for students, certainly, but for his own classroom as well. Dr. La Serna partnered with Sound & Experience Designer and Media Producer Michael A. Betts to determine how exactly they could use the art of documentary filmmaking to transform how students learned history.

In this episode of The Past Presented, we talk to Dr. La Serna and Betts to learn more about their innovative "Live Documentary" style. We talk about how the two collaborators and friends imagined this ambitious project, how they and a team of graduate students collected audio and visual materials to make the project possible - and quickly transformed it when the COVID-19 pandemic began in the middle of their first semester - and hear about how this new technique both engages and empowers students as learners and active contributors in the classroom.

The Digital History Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill presents The Past Presented -- a show about the tools, techniques, and technologies scholars use to study the past and conversations with the folks who use them.

In Episode One, "Turning the Map", PhD Candidate Nathan Gill talks to co-hosts Maddie McGrady and Sarah Miles about his research on human-environment relationships and systems of labor in the Ecuadorian Andes. In particular, he talks about how GIS mapping allowed him to turn the map - literally and figuratively - and reconsider assumptions about human relationships and the built environment around one of the oldest functioning hacienda's in Ecuador: Guachalá.

Music from this episode is "Cumbia Colombiana" from JuliusH. 

In this episode Chad Bryant, Associate Professor of History at UNC - Chapel Hill, tells the story of Jiři Smichovský. Smichovský was an interwar Czechoslovak occultist turned Nazi informant. And then Communist informant. Oh, and before that, he was almost certainly a spy. Chad tells us why this individual did not make it into his recent book, "Prague: Belonging and the Modern City." Thanks to Professor Bryant for appearing on this episode.

In the first very episode of "The Cutting Room Floor", Craig Gill tells the story of Doe Grahame and Happy Kirby, two fame hungry twenty-somethings from Mobile, Alabama. In 1927 Grahame and Kirby set off on an incredible voyage...