Handbook of Digital Public History

    This week (or rather last week's) reading was on The Handbook of Digital Public History. It is clear after reading parts of the book that it is one of the premier text if you want to dive into digital public history. The authors provide a great overview of both public history and digital history, and how these two separate fields were wedded together with the development of newer technology. The book also outlines how digital tools and media are redefining historical research, both technically and methodologically. The book, however, is also very transparent. It also highlights the challenges that DPH faces, such as the lack of preserving long-term digital resources because of the everchanging available technology, the lack of training or adaption of some historians to use digital tools, and ethical concerns of digitizing sources (see this article for one example of the ethical problems with that).

    The chapters I read from the book, however, highlight the historiography and the widespread potential of digital public history. I will begin with the historiography. My chapter was about Digital Public History in the United States, by Thomas Cauvin. The chapter begins by separating digital history and public history. Cauvin talks about how digital history got its start first as quantitative history. This was the use of computers to compute large scale numerical data to find patterns historians were unable to see before because of the sheer number of sources that were being used. The most infamous example of quantitative historical research is the book Time on the Cross (which I have also written about here). Cauvin then explains some of the major changes in technology that have occurred. That being the invention of personal computers, phones, and other digital tools. The widespread availability of the internet and the democratization of information were driving forces that brought digital history and public history together. Cauvin highlights a few major digital history projects, such as The Valley of the Shadow, a project by Edward Ayers, and Italy's MUVI, an archive that collects almost any Italian digital source, whether that be photos, movies, songs etc. Cauvin finishes his chapter by saying that the future of DPH is really in the hands of the public. Again, with almost everyone having phones and having the ability to access these projects from almost anywhere, it is up to the public to keep interest in these projects, but also actively support these project.

    The second chapter that I read talked about how people can support these projects. The chapter by Serge Noiret is about Crowdsourcing and User Generated Content. While the definition of Crowdsourcing and User Generated Content changes from historian to historian, it is clear that from its name it implies the use of a crowd for help. That help can come in the form of transcribing text, editing writing, providing sources, being sources, etc. The use of crowdsourcing and using User Generated Content is the next "big" step for DPH, though many projects have relied on the publics help in the past. The chapter has a few important things to outline. The first is the dangers of crowdsourcing. Dubbed "crowdsploitation", Noiret warns that the overuse of crowdsourcing can cause problems for the whole project. While it is not specifically mentioned what these problems are, one can speculate. The public is more than likely not as knowledgeable on the topic the project is about than the principle investigator. Letting in too much crowdsourcing may lead the project to be less academic. I believe this is highlighted later in the chapter, which is another important topic Noiret discusses, and that is the organization of a crowdsourced project. The benefit of this type of project is that you are getting sources from the bottom-up. Most if not all public history projects strive to give a voice to the unheard, and crowdsourcing allows these unheard communities immense participation in these project. The project, however, needs organization from the top-down. As the principle investigate should be one of the most knowledgeable people on the project, they should dictate what sources are being collected, what sources are being used, and how the sources will connect to a larger topic or claim. The last main point to this chapter, however, is to have these investigators be flexible. When working with the public, an investigator cannot demand things from them. The investigator should work with the public to find out what story they want to tell, and the investigator needs to be open to pivoting their original project to accommodate for that. Noiret's main point for this is that crowdsourcing not only allows the public help in some of the mundane tasks of a DPH project, but it also opens dialogue between scholars and the community and can lead to more nuanced research questions being asked.