who is a public historian

Cosa è(o potrebbe essere)

un Public Historian

Enrica Salvatori - Università di Pisa

domenica 11 marzo 12

Come ci vediamo noi (voi)?


Epistemology

PH is not only about poli/cal use of history (Storia Pubblica -‐ Italy)

PH is not about re-‐inven/ng history to serve a cause (Historikerstreit in Germany)

Public History (PH) generated a digital public history approach, NOW CHIEFLY because of the use of the web to comunicate “history”

PH is one of the most important innova/on in the historical profession star/ng in the 1970’s.


Brief History of PHIn the UK without using the same terminology “PH” appeared during the post-‐68 cultural movement.

Raphael Samuel a socialist “public historian” invented the History Workshops mee/ngs at Ruskin College, Oxford, to bring history outside universi/es. He used of public lectures and intellectual debates with Union and working class members. He captured individual and collec/ve popular memories and founded the History Workshop Journal in 1976 connec/ng history to recent poli/cal issues in a so-‐called “Public History Movement”.

The idea was to “democra?ze” history through all means and sources: photography (family albums as sources), cinema, theater, literature (“wri/ng myself into history”), oral history enquiries, etc..


History Workshop Journal’sPH without using the name

“like the Workshops, like the pamphlets, like the books in the Workshop series, the journal will be concerned to bring the boundaries of history closer to people's lives. Like them, it will address itself to the fundamental elements of social life —work and material culture, class rela/ons and poli/cs, sex divisions and marriage, family, school and home. We are concerned at the narrowing of the influence of history in our society, and at its progressive withdrawal from the ba^le of ideas. This shrinking of stature cannot be ascribed to a decline in popular interest. Throughout Bri/sh society a desire for historical understanding con/nues to exist; and it is only some/mes fulfilled by the manufacturers of part series, populariza/ons, television entertainment, and so forth. 'Serious history’ has become a subject reserved for the specialist.”


Birth of a University PH field in the USA

Birth as a discipline with the name PH in 1978-‐1979 at UCSB, University of Southern California at Santa Barbara.

G.Wesley Johnson founded “The Public Historian” in 1978

1979: crea/on of the Na/onal Council of Public History (NCPH)

Why ?

Lack of University jobs

Bringing history to local communi/es outside the university

Bringing history to public and private ins/tu/ons, private firms, government administra/on at all levels

To understand be^er contemporary social, economic, environmental urban problems: using the past for understanding the present

Historians should be on the “frontline” in the media to par/cipate to public debates when there’s a “need for history”


Innovating professionally in

communicating History

PH is more than 30 years old

It has become an academic discipline in many countries

Museum, archives, libraries, private and public ins/tu/ons are prac/cing PH worldwide

PH uses systema/cally all media to communicate history

Now the WWW cannibalizes all other media and is a fer/le space available to develop PH projects


The AimsMaking history for the widest public possible

Making history outside the university as professional historians (university degrees & methodological skills)

Doing history close to communi/es of people (social, ethnical, poli/cal, cultural, etc.)

Reconstruc/ng memories and iden//es at different scale

Doing interac/ve History together with common people

Crowdsourcing ac/vi/es

Performing collabora/ve and interdisciplinary histor projects in the humani/es and social sciences

Spreading History inside the society using all possible media and ac/vi/es


Public Historians should be able to

offer scholarly history essays

(re-‐) create primary sources

use professionally the media

build complex web sites to disseminate the presence of history in our socie/es

create web 2.0. invented archives

help in keeping alive our collec/ve memories

use of popular history methods and wri/ngs (“popularizing”),

research and teach history for private and public employers

collaborate with other professions to create a “collec/ve” and collabora/ve working environment.


What are made for PH projects?

Reenactment and living history

History parks and environmental parks

Memory museums, parks and exhibi/ons

Crea/on of archives and sources together with “ordinary” people

Oral history methods

Urban restora/on projects

History projects in physical and virtual spaces

Heritage preserva/on, etc..


Defining PH is possible ?

Public History in Australia has been defined as 'the prac/ce of history by academically trained historians working for public agencies or as freelancers outside the universi/es'. Public historians may work in heritage conserva/on, commissioned history, museums, the media, educa/on, radio, film interac/ve mul/media and other areas.

They are people who have asked: 'What is history for?' And they are concerned with addressing the rela/onship between audience, prac/ce and social context. Public history, however, is an elas/c term that can mean different things to different people, locally, regionally, na/onally and interna/onally. The democra/za/on of 'history making' and the rise of professional historians' associa/ons have also blurred simple defini/ons. Public representa/ons of the past, official or otherwise, which marginalize or abuse history raise other vital ques/ons for all concerned with public histories.”

Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology (Sidney, Australia):


NCPH definition of PH

A movement, methodology, and approach that promotes the collabora/ve study and prac/ce of history; its prac//oners embrace a mission to make their special insights accessible and useful to the public


Lynn H.Nelson pioneer“digital historian”’s definition

Public History in the United States means the presenta?on of History to an audience not familiar with the subject being presented. […] Public historian is the means by which historical actuality is made a^rac/ve and understandable to the American public […] that is deeply ignorant of its na/on's history and geography, and that sees li^le value in the study of, much less the apprecia/on of, History […]. People trained in Public History expect to obtain jobs as historical museum curators, managers of public archives (such as the na/onal and state archives, educa/onal consultants for History curricula at the primary and secondary level, directors of state (or large local) historical socie/es, Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force historians, managers of re-‐enactment organiza/ons and/or events, staffing the na/onal and state historic parks and cemeteries, historical monument commissions, historic preserva/on boards, and the like, or as self-‐employed historians seeking government grants or wri/ng such grants for local authori/es, or a writers of popular historical accounts.


Different sectors of PH

Wesley Johnson in 1978:

Public ins/tu/onsFirms and business enterprisesConsultancies for other professions (lawyers, doctors, public administrators at all levels, etc..)Media (and today new digital media)Heritage (“conserving” the past)Teaching local history problems through local history socie/esManaging and crea/ng archivesTeaching Public History at Schools and Universi/es


A discipline,field, movement or method ?

Working collec/vely and within groups with different professional skills and training

Combining empirical research and conceptual wri/ngs

A PH is not only a teacher but also a professional historian making original research: “historical skills are just as important and usable whether one is called educator, research director, communica/ons specialist, records manager or Public Historians”.

The methods are as any other academic historian but also using the “new media” technologies in digital history


Open problems in the PH field

What is objec/vity in PH works ?

Which kind of public should be served ?

Which kind of ac/vi/es should be performed as PH ?

In which physical/virtual spaces performing PH ?

Which appropriate media should be chosen ?

How to integrate memory and iden/ty studies?

How do develop PH in Italy? ;-‐)


WWW = Cannibal

The Web cannibalizes all other media BUT it is also a fer/le space to develop PH projects

A Public Historian should be also a Digital Historian


THE WEB AS DIGITAL LABCon/nue interac/on between our personal computer and the web through the browser for searching, publishing and teaching history The web is poten/ally a “personal digital laboratory”. The web offers interac/ve services and access to digital informa/on/documenta/on: repositories, reference managers, blogs, discussion’s lists, e-‐learning/e-‐teaching sorware’s, and now Zotero.

Digital literature is created using the web Virtual Primary sources (or meta-‐sources) are available History in the web is widely used by many different “publics”


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.

The Valley Project is a part of the Virginia Centerfor Digital History at the University of Virginia.


Podcasting


http://www.historycast.org





















































































































































































































http://itunes.apple.com/it/institution/universita-di-pisa/id394222197

http://itunes.apple.com/it/institution/universita-di-pisa/id394222197

Museum exhibitions and services


http://www.metmuseum.org/metmedia



HISTORICAL PARK AND REVIVAL


3 D visualization environment

The London Charter


Mapping History


Visualization of Historical Data -

TIMELINE


Visualization of Historical Data


http://itunes.apple.com/it/podcast/gapcasts-by-gapminder-foundation/id264528759

http://itunes.apple.com/it/podcast/gapcasts-by-gapminder-foundation/id264528759

http://www.r-bloggers.com/animated-heatmap-of-wikileaks-report-intensity-in-afghanistan/

http://www.r-bloggers.com/animated-heatmap-of-wikileaks-report-intensity-in-afghanistan/

Digital History Essaywith interactive chapters

Martha Ballard’s Diary Online


Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives

The Soviet Gulag existedneither as a single unifiedexperience, nor as a single unified ins/tu/on. Thismassive and lethal machine influenced the lives of millions of people from 1917-‐1988.Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives presents an in-‐depth look at lifein the Gulag through exhibits featuring original documentariesand prisoner voices; an archivefilled with documents and images; and teaching and bibliographicresources that encourage further study. Visitors also are encouraged to reflect and share their thoughts about the Gulag system.


Interactive digital public history

Web 2.0 tools allow a different kind of par/cipa/on in History by several different kind of community

Crea/ng sources and inven/ng archives

Commen/ng and implemen/ng digital archives

Commen/ng and sharing view about history


THE 09/11 DIGITAL ARCHIVE


Hurricane Digital Memory Bank

Arer the construc/on of the September 11 Digital archive the most recent digital history project is Hurricane Digital Memory BankThis is an invented archive: The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.The project contributes to the ongoing effort by historians and archivists to preserve the record of these storms by collec/ng first-‐hand accounts, on-‐scene images, blog pos/ngs, and podcasts.


genealogy tools and sites


Community-based socialand digital history

The Cleveland Cultural Gardens embody the history of twen/eth century America. Each individual garden is founded and maintained by the city’s many ethnic communi/es, revealing the history of immigra/on to, and migra/on within, the United States.

Web 2.0 tools allow a different kind of par/cipa/on in History by several different kind of communityThey comment on how they have built communi/es and constructed their iden//es as individuals and collec/ves.The gardens reveal the stories of the major conflicts that gave shape to the century: World War I, World War II and the Cold War.Insights into the large social, economic, poli/cal, and cultural upheavals that roiled through the na/on during the last century: the Great Depression, suburbaniza/on, the Civil Rights Movement, and the deindustrializa/on. This is a story of hope and despair, joy and sadness, conflict and coopera/on, growth and declin


Italian examplesMEMORO, LA BANCA DELLA MEMORIA

FACCIA A FACCIA, FONDAZIONE DALMINE

TRAMONTI, ITINERARI DELLA MEMORIA LUNGO I CRINALI DELLA VAL DI VARA


http://www.tramontivaldivara.it/



Digital History and Public History

Audience: New bridges between academic and popular/public

history.New Archives/New Inquiry: Digital resources are expanding

and redefining the archival base for most fields and thereby redefining the fields themselves. (This is driven more by libraries and the tech industry than by historians.)

Collabora?on: […] The best digital projects are collabora/ve, involving mul/ple scholars and a technical team, and ideally an ins/tu/on commi^ed to keeping the project alive arer its creators move on to other things…


Which skills?a “linked to the public” view of History

communication

a basic knowledge of HTML, CMS, digital video-audio, data visualization

software are becoming more and more friendly

more?

and now?


First time of DH

“So far few historians have tried to define "digital history." We were probably the first to use the term when Ed Ayers and I founded and named the Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH) in 1997–1998. We used the term in essays and talks to describe The Valley of the Shadow. In 1997 we taught an undergraduate seminar, "Digital History of the Civil War." We began calling such courses "digital history seminars" and taught seven of them at the University of Virginia over as many years.Later Steve Mintz started his site (in effect, a digital textbook) sing the name Digital History.”

from Daniel J. Cohen, Michael Frisch, Patrick Gallagher, Steven Mintz, Kirsten Sword, Amy Murrell Taylor, William G. Thomas III, and William J. Turkel: Interchange: The Promise of Digital History, in Journal of American History, 2, 2008, § 11, pp.452-‐491, URL: h^p://www.historycoopera/ve.org/journals/jah/95.2/interchange.html]


http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/95.2/interchange.html%5D

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/95.2/interchange.html%5D

Digital HistorianAt GMU's Center for History and New Media, Roy A.Rosenzweig oversaw the crea/on of online history projects (Links to Washington Post ar/cle by Adam Bernstein,Washington Post Staff Writer, Saturday, October 13, 2007)

Roy A. Rosenzweig, 57, a social and cultural historian at George Mason University […] became a prominent advocate for "digital history," a field combining historical scholarshipwith digital media's broad reach and interac/ve possibili/es, died Oct. 11 at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington County.

Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig: Digital history : a guide to gathering, preserving, and presen/ng the past on the Web., Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press,2005.


Digital World History

“…In the 1990s, world history courses went online[…]. With the use of these materials inevitably came arguments for greater interac/vity—in the form of the online documenta/on and in the underlying interpreta/on. […] Digital media have been extraordinarily helpful in spreading the word on all approaches to world history […] especially by providing online documents and interpre/ve statements on a wide range of topics. I would label the sum total of this development as "digitally assisted world history.“ For a more conceptually thoroughgoing "digital world history", one needs to see the advantages of digital technology suffused throughout the processes of research, publica/on, and teaching. One must ask what digital history can do to facilitate the construc/on of complex and mul/dimensional narra/ves….”

Digital World History: An Agenda -‐ Patrick Manning, University of Pi^sburgh, April 2007.


A METHOD OR A FIELD?

Digital History is about:

Services: technologies in the fields of humani/es compu/ng and history

Historiography: hypertextual, and expressive ways to write history

Digital primary sources (and/or meta-‐sources)

E-‐teaching/learning facili/es for history.


WHAT’S DIGITAL

“Digital history is an approach to examining and represen/ng the past that takes advantage of new communica/on technologies such as computers and the Web.

It draws on essen/al features of the digital realm, such as databases, hypertextualiza/on, and networks, to create and share historical knowledge.

Digital history complements other forms of history—indeed, it draws its strength and methodological rigor from this age-‐old form of human understanding while using the latest technology.”


WHAT’S DH IN WIKIPEDIA

Digital history is a rapidly changing field. New methods and formats are currently being developed. This means that 'digital history' is a difficult term to define. However, it is possible to iden/fy general characteris/cs.

Digital history represents a democra?za?on of history in that anyone with access to the Internet can have their voice heard, including marginalized groups which were oren excluded in the 'grand narra/ves' of na/on and empire. In contrast to earlier media formats, digital history texts tend to be non-‐linear and interac?ve, encouraging user par/cipa/on and engagement.Digital history is studied from various disciplinary perspec?ves and in rela/on to a range of interrelated themes and ac/vi/es. The field includes discussion of: archives, libraries, and encyclopedias; museums and virtual exhibits; digital iden/ty and biography; digital games and virtual worlds; online communi/es and social networks; Web 2.0; and e-‐research and cyber-‐infrastructure.

Digital methods in historical research offer new ways to record, communicate and preserve documents, ar/facts and knowledge of the past. However, there are challenges. These include: developing efficient ways to determine the authority and authen?city of digital content; shiring from long established archival preserva/on systems designed for earlier media formats to using rela/vely unstable digital preserva/on formats and standards; and ensuring be^er accessibility for those who lack access to the technology due to age-‐related or socio-‐economic disadvantage.Many online history projects facilitate large-‐scale conversa?ons (one-‐to-‐one, one-‐to-‐many and many-‐to-‐many), producing new kinds of distributed 'texts'. Further research is required to understand the significance of these texts for historical studies.


Why becoming a Digital Historian ?

“Only historians can decide whether history will par/cipate in the intoxica/ng possibili/es of a true hypertextual history, of a recons/tuted social science history, of an en/rely new kind of immersive history. Only we can decide if we want to make use of any of the tools that are being created for purposes far from our own current prac?ce. There is nothing in the machinery itself that will cause any of this to happen. [..] Digital media does not produce any par/cular outcome. It does not intrinsically degrade educa/on and scholarship nor does it necessarily improve them. Everything depends on the decisions we make. We can decide to encourage the collabora/on and risk-‐taking necessary for digital history through our selec/on commi^ees and tenure decisions, through our program commi^ees and editorial policies. We can champion the new connec/ons between professors and secondary teachers, between teachers and students, and between historians and readers already encouraged by the new media. The inven?on, development, and spread of new media are the most profound historical change of the last decade and those changes show every sign of accelera?ng. Historians need to understand the new media and its implica/ons as fully as possible, for both defensive and hopeful reasons. We need to resist the dilu?on and distor?on of historical knowledge brought by the erosion of our authority in a widely dispersed new medium. The best way to wage that resistance is to seize for ourselves the opportuni?es the medium offers, opportuni/es to touch the past, present, and future in new ways.”

In: The Pasts and Futures of Digital History, URL: [h^p://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/PastsFutures.html] Edward L. Ayers. University of Virginia, 1999 (Later, from 2002, VCDH, Virginia Center for Digital History


http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/PastsFutures.html%5D

http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/PastsFutures.html%5D

Center for Digital HumanitiesUniversity of South California


Digital History, Department of History,University of Nebraska-Lincoln


Digital Public History Project

The Geography of Slavery in Virginia, 2005-‐


EHPS - European History Primary Sources

European History Primary Sources (EHPS), is an index of scholarly websites that offer online access to primary sources on the history of Europe.

The Digital Primary Sources contained in EHPS indexed web sites, are not limited to meta-‐sources but include also invented archives and born digital sources.

EHPS was presented during an interna/onal conference organized in Florence on 15-‐16 December 2009 called Cultural Heritage on line. Empowering users: an ac/ve role for user communi/es.


DH in ItalyNon-‐professional History, Trento in Cina

Everybody’s History, Diario di un fante

Academic History (Stmoderna.it -‐ Corso di Storia Digitale, University of Pisa)

Divulga/ve History (La Torre Monalda a FI)

Memories (Memoro, l’archivio della memoria)

Online exhibi/ons (The Museum of Fascist Unforms)

Blogs (Storelint -‐ Seminari autoges// di Storia )

Interac/ve History (Dalmine: Faccia a Faccia)


From Public to Digital Public History: professional historians as mediators

“Although they trusted college professors as experts,Americans expressed a strongpreference for the direct experience that museumsseemed to offer […]. [People] preferred to make their own histories”.

William G. Thomas III (University of Nebraska)


Presence of the past in American Society

“What counts [for Thelen and Rosenzweig] is the uses of the past in the present: that is, the availability of usable pasts rather the the pastness of history”.

For doing this a PH is using the methods of any other professional historian

PHs should also be trained to use TV, radio, web and all other media’s and acquire a professional role of mediator

PHs should be trained to design complex web sites through digital history prac/ces thinking about: accessibility, interoperability, sustainability, use of specific methods for interac/ng with diverse publics.

Bernard Eric Jensen: “Usable pasts: comparing approaches to Popular and Public History.”, in Paul Ashton e Hilda Kean (a cura di): People and their pasts: public history today., Basingstoke: Palgrave
