Abstract

Scholars have observed that rhetorical identification is a common strategy used by both physical and virtual museums to engage the public in their narratives of civic history. This essay explores what happens when service-learning students enter this context to build digital projects as agents and as objects of identification. Drawing from my ten-year partnership with the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, I illustrate how identification can arise within a museum-based digital project, how it can enrich and complicate the project, and how my students and I attempt to balance our insider/outsider roles as authors and interpreters of community history.

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