Looking Through the Eyes of Texas

This poster will describe the creation and advertisement of a virtual historic walking tour for the University of Texas at Austin using HistoryPin, a publicly available interactive website based on linking or “pinning” historic images to an interactive map. The project demonstrates how HistoryPin can be a powerful tool for creating meaningful, accessible exhibits; anyone with the Internet can explore the University’s rich heritage while learning more about its present. Since its founding, The University of Texas has witnessed 130 years of dramatic change. With the virtual tour, this change can be re-experienced through the juxtaposition of historic images of student life and campus architecture with corresponding contemporary images. Historic materials were provided by The University of Texas at Austin's Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, which serves as the University's archive, housing thousands of historic images, books, ephemera, and manuscripts. The curation process for the tour included selecting materials from the Briscoe Center’s vast holdings for digitizaton, assigning metadata to newly digitized items, uploading photos to HistoryPin. After creating the exhibit using HistoryPin’s tour function, it will then be promoted and presented for use during Explore UT, the University’s open house event.