Inside Baseball

I am madly in love with baseball. There are few things I enjoy more than a summer evening at a ballpark, although listening to a game on the radio while sitting around a campfire comes pretty close. I love the ebb and flow of the game, I love the big and little stories it can tell, and I love its deep connection with our history. So, when the Library of Congress Labs team approached us about a collaboration centering on their Baseball Americana exhibition, I could hardly contain my excitement.

For the past few months, the two Labs teams have been laying the foundation for the work of building a tool to help baseball researchers. First, both teams have been preparing the content and data that we’ll use to build a proof of concept. Second, we’ve been interviewing baseball researchers of all sorts -- including, established sports historians, cultural studies scholars, students, and sports journalists - to better understand the tasks, goals and hurdles that they face currently when studying baseball and our cultural heritage.

Now, during the week of July 9th, the two teams will meet in Washington DC for a weeklong flash build. We don’t know yet precisely what we’ll build -- that’s part of the fun of these design-thinking-based methods -- but we are planning on sharing what we come up with the world on the last day, Friday. Please join the two Labs teams for a free webinar on Friday, at which we’ll describe the process we’ve gone through, review the data and content we’ve had to work with, and unveil the proof of concept tool that we develop. Register now, here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/inside-baseball-baseball-collections-as-data-tickets-46442562956?aff=es2.

We’ll see you on Friday, July 13th. Play ball!