Pleased to meet you!

Yours truly doing research in
Port Penn, Delaware

I only recently came up to Philadelphia after living about a decade in Baltimore, where I earned my B.A. in history from Goucher College. Sometimes I feel like I’m still getting to know the city, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of the bits and pieces of Philly’s rich history that I unearth along the way.

Broadly, I’m interested in issues of access and inclusion, and I believe that public history is a public service. I think that technology has great potential to change the way we think about and create history. Previously, I’ve applied this theory in work experience in a number of public archives and history non-profits. I currently do fun things with data as a digital projects assistant at the American Philosophical Society’s Center for Digital Scholarship.

Digitizing postal records for an
open data project at APS

My thesis research centers around the settlement house movement in Philadelphia, and will feature a history project in partnership with the Lutheran Settlement House in the Fishtown neighborhood. In my free time I enjoy things like including craft beer, cats, skee ball, hiking, and British crime television, and I blog sporadically at cynthiaheider.com.

100% of the SBD rewards from this #philly5151 post will support the Philadelphia History initiative @phillyhistory. This crypto-experiment is part of a graduate course at Temple University's Center for Public History and is exploring history and empowering education to endow meaning. To learn more click here.