DIGITAL HISTORY / PUBLIC HISTORYgetting started in digital history workshop

American Historical Association2016 Conference

Jason M. KellyDirector, IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute Associate Professor of History IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI

jaskelly@iupui.edu@jason_m_kellyjasonmkelly.com

#aha16 #dighist

#gsdh

• How does the practice of public history change when digital components are involved?

• How do we shape the digital sphere into a public commons, and expand the practice of public history outward from its physical institutions into virtual spaces?

• Where do we draw the line between digital public history and digital history in public?

Questions

10 minutes Introductions

20 minutes Taxonomies

10 minutes Sample Projects

10 minutes Tools

I. Taxonomies A. What is Public History?

"Public history refers to the employment of historians and historical method outside of academia.” 

Robert Kelley, The Public Historian, 1 (1978): 16

I. Taxonomies A. What is Public History?

"As public history has evolved from a quest for "alternative careers" to a way of understanding and practicing the craft of history, it has on the campuses run headlong into the sacred trinity of research, teaching, and service--with the greatest of these being research embodied in refereed publications....Despite the peer review and many other strengths, the present reward system has contributed to an unproductive "academic vs. public" debate; encouraged a trend towards co-opting public history by defining it as another specialized subfield and obscured the common ground shared by the community of professionals who practice the historians' craft. As historians, we all do research, we all analyze and interpret our findings, and we all communicate the results. The primary difference between public and academic history is in the area of communication—in the audiences that we attempt to reach and in the products that we use to convey our scholarship to those audiences.

Scarpino, Philip V., "Some Thoughts on Defining, Evaluating, and Rewarding Public Scholarship." The Public Historian 15, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 55-61.  

I. Taxonomies A. What is Public History?

“public history describes the many and diverse ways in which history is put to work in the world.  In this sense, it is history that is applied to real-world issues. In fact, applied history was a term used synonymously and interchangeably with public history for a number of years.  Although public history has gained ascendance in recent years as the preferred nomenclature especially in the academic world, applied history probably remains the more intuitive and self-defining term.”

Dichtl, J., Sacco, N. “Putting History to Work in the World” (2014).

I. Taxonomies A. What is Public History?

• preservation / archiving • interpretation / communication with public • engagement • management • consulting

Responsibilities Modes of Practice Emphasis

Low Inform Provide high quality, relevant, and accessible information

Lectures, open access websites, fact sheets,

exhibitions

Education and information delivery

Engagement Level

ConsultProvide timely, detailed analysis based

on reliable qualitative & quantitative data

Provide research and advice on public projects

Provide research-based community

service

InvolveGuarantee that all communities have equal opportunity to participate and

provide input

Design research projects in consultation with the public

to address a community problem

Community input in framing research

question and methods

CollaborateDefine and maintain structures and

processes to guarantee shared power & decision making

Partner with community to design and execute a

project

Integration of community

throughout research process

High Empower

Clearly articulate roles and responsibilities and adapt as

necessary; consensus building and joint decision making

Collaborative community-engaged research project

that emphasizes community empowerment and

transformation

Active participation in collective action

Adapted from IAP2 Public Participation Spectrum, http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0003/105834/IAP2_Spectrum.gif

Engagement and Public Scholarship

Reciprocity and Public Scholarship

Successful and sustainable partnerships are mutually beneficial.

academiacommunity

disciplinary conventions

funding mechanisms

promotion and tenure

institutional structures

epistemologies

history / context

methodologies

community needs

history / context

authority

ways of knowingexpectations

institutional structures

economies

authority

resources

ownership / sharing

ownership / sharing

I. Taxonomies A. What is Public History? B. What is Digital History?

“Digital history might be understood broadly as an approach to examining and representing the past that works with the new communication technologies of the computer, the internet network, and software systems. On one level, digital history is an open arena of scholarly production and communication, encompassing the development of new course materials and scholarly data collection efforts. On another level, digital history is a methodological approach framed by the hypertextual power of these technologies to make, define, query, and annotate associations in the human record of the past. To do digital history, then, is to digitize the past certainly, but it is much more than that. It is to create a framework through the technology for people to experience, read, and follow an argument about a major historical problem.”

Douglas Seefeldt and William G. Thomas, Perspectives, May 2009

A Digital Humanities Taxonomy

I. Taxonomies A. What is Public History? B. What is Digital History? C. Promotion and Tenure

“Giving due weight to community engagement in tenure and promotion decisions, however, requires review by peers familiar with community engagement as well as with the professional standards of the historian. The recognition of community engagement in the tenure process, as it includes professional peer review informed by the community being served, is a critical issue facing public historians in academic departments.”

Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship (AHA, NCPH, OAH), "Tenure, Promotion and the Publicly-Engaged Historian” (2010), https://www.historians.org/

publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2010/tenure-promotion-and-the-publicly-engaged-academic-historian-a-report

I. Taxonomies A. What is Public History? B. What is Digital History? C. Promotion and Tenure

"The American Historical Association’s Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct defines scholarship as a process, not a product, an understanding now common in the profession. The scholarly work of public historians involves the advancement, integration, application, and transformation of knowledge. It differs from “traditional” historical research not in method or in rigor but in the venues in which it is presented and in the collaborative nature of its creation. Public history scholarship, like all good historical scholarship, is peer reviewed, but that review includes a broader and more diverse group of peers, many from outside traditional academic departments, working in museums, historic sites, and other sites of mediation between scholars and the public."

Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship (AHA, NCPH, OAH), "Tenure, Promotion and the Publicly-Engaged Historian” (2010), https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/

september-2010/tenure-promotion-and-the-publicly-engaged-academic-historian-a-report

I. Taxonomies A. What is Public History? B. What is Digital History? C. Promotion and Tenure

Peer Review & Public Scholarship

Process

Outputs

PublicAcademia

built community networks

established networks

apply for funding

sustainable infrastructureshared governance structures

reports, exhibitions, websites, activities

design infrastructure

define public need

community transformation

articlesbooks

grants

extend discipline-specific knowledgedevelop new research methodologies

methodological models

research grant writing

community input

academic blogs, podcasts, reports

I. Taxonomies A. What is Public History? B. What is Digital History? C. Promotion and Tenure

Digital scholarship should be evaluated in its native digital medium, not printed out for inclusion in review materials.

Departments need to consider how they will deal with work in a digital medium that exists in a process of continual revision, and therefore never exists as a “finished” product.

Since digital scholarship often includes collaborations, departments should consider developing protocols for evaluating collaborative work, such as co-authored works, undergraduate research, crowdsourcing, and development of tools.

The development of tools and other significant methodological contributions to digital scholarship often require funding to enable collaborations within and across disciplines. Since obtaining funding of this kind may involve undergoing a rigorous peer-review process, departments should consider how to evaluate a candidate’s record of successful grant proposals of this kind.

Departments without expertise in digital scholarship should consider enlisting colleagues who possess expertise in particular forms of digital scholarship to help them evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the work before them.

Ad Hoc Committee on the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians, "Guidelines for the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in History” (2015) http://historians.org/teaching-and-learning/digital-history-resources/evaluation-of-digital-scholarship-in-history/guidelines-for-the-evaluation-of-digital-scholarship-in-history

I. Taxonomies II. Sample Projects

Example Projects Description Link

Low Inform The Valley of the Shadow

The Valley of the Shadow is a digital archive of primary sources that document the lives of people in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, during the era of the American Civil War. Here you may explore thousands of original documents that allow you to see what life was like during the Civil War for the men and women of Augusta and Franklin. The Valley of the Shadow is different than many other history websites. It is more like a library than a single book. There is no "one" story in the Valley Project. Rather, what you'll find are thousands of letters and diaries, census and government records, newspapers and speeches, all of which record different aspects of daily life in these two counties at the time of the Civil War.

http://valley.lib.virgini

a.edu

Engagement Level

Consult Soweto Historical GIS Project

The primary objective of the Soweto Historical GIS Project (SHGIS) is to build a multi-layered historical geographic information system that explores the social, economic and political dimensions of urban development under South African apartheid regimes (1904/1948-1994) in Johannesburg’s all-black township of

Soweto. Soweto (an acronym for the South Western Townships), a creation of state power, was developed to house low-wage workers and to segregate black South

Africans from white. The application of geographic methodologies to the study of the anti-apartheid movement reveals the complex spatial dimensions of violence,

resistance, and freedom.

http://www.dhinitiative

.org/projects/shgis

Involve United States of AIDS

The United States of AIDS (USOA) is a student-led digital humanities project tied to the Humanities Action Lab of The New School for Public Engagement. We are invested in making the oral history narratives of AIDS activists accessible and heard. Open source applications have allowed us to index and enhance interviews by applying keywords, outlining thematic segments, and embedding additional archival evidence. The interviews used are from the ACT UP Oral History Project and the African American AIDS Activist Oral History Project.

http://unitedstatesofai

ds.com

Collaborate History HarvestThe History Harvest is an open, digital archive of historical artifacts gathered from

communities across the United States. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Department of History partners with institutions and individuals within highlighted

communities to collect, preserve, and share their rich histories.

http://historyharvest.u

nl.edu

High Empower Morris Justice Project

The Morris Justice Project (MJP) was a critical participatory project in the Morris Avenue section of the Bronx. MJP participants documented community member

experiences with the police through a survey of over 1000 people. After the survey was completed and studied, the group collaborated with the Illuminator—a cargo van equipped with video and audio projection tools, born out of the Occupy Wall

Street movement— to share data on an open wall of a Morris-area apartment building. This digital data share served as an open letter to the NYPD and as a

space for community discussion and data analysis.

http://morrisjustice.org/#/id/i8622601

https://www.youtube.c

om/watch?v=mliuISC2hJk

Adapted from IAP2 Public Participation Spectrum, http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0003/105834/IAP2_Spectrum.gif

Museum of the Anthropocene

I. Taxonomies II. Sample Projects III. Beginner Tools

A. Twitter • #twitterstorians, #digitalhumanities, #dhist,

#publichistory B. Wordpress C. Online Exhibitions

• Omeka • Building Histories of the National Mall: A Guide to

Creating a Digital Public History Project, http://mallhistory.org/Guide/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/BuildingMallHistoriesGuidebook.pdf

D. Mapping • Google Maps / Google Fusion Tables • History Pin

E. Podcasting

• How does the practice of public history change when digital components are involved?

• How do we shape the digital sphere into a public commons, and expand the practice of public history outward from its physical institutions into virtual spaces?

• Where do we draw the line between digital public history and digital history in public?

Questions