Questions Questions
A goal of our
Managing History course, and of
Temple's Public History program as a whole, is for each of us to wrestle with and construct an informed definition and answer to the questions, "What is public history?" and "What do public historians do?" While this is an evolving process for anyone in this field, every historian must define an initial place to stand and from which to speak. This is mine:
Public history is any process through which an individual tangibly studies the past in order to understand the present and to be an informed, active participant in the creation of our collective future.
Public historians commit to creating access for all individuals and communities to the most current research on what historians know and understand about the past, presenting that information in ways that allow for direct, personal experiences, and advocating the stance that knowing and understanding how past events unfolded is critical to creating and living in a healthy, stable society.
So we have to know the history, share the history, make learning the history a tangible, livable experience, and assure that everyone in our society has access to that experience. How do we do that? As in any other trade, we do it with tools. Let's add another question to those I'll spend a career defining. "What are the tools of a public historian?" As several of our readings this week explored new media and digital technology, let me focus in this post on how these new developments serve as tools or allow us to use old tools in new ways.
Tools of the Trade
Daniel J. Cohen and
Roy Rosenzweig wrote the book "
Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web" to address the question, "What is the process of '...doing digital history, (of) making use of the new computer-based technologies?'" (
Introduction) They identify "the need 'for a guide to gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the web,'" review the "qualities of digital media" that allow historians to work, and counter with a list of dangers that the same technologies present. In doing so, they have simultaneously gifted historians with a tool (the book) and a review and analysis of the tools provided by digital media. Additionally, they have challenged an area of concern regarding access, means, by publishing the book not only in traditional paper form, available for purchase, but also on the web, available for anyone with digital access. What other tools do we use?
Information Historians work with facts, data, stories, opinions, dates - in short,
information. History can be defined as what we know about what happened that we have at hand to share with others. New media has changed not only how historians disseminate history but also how we gain the information in the first place, i.e. research. From online archives to discussion groups such as
H-Net to
Google Scholar to the ability to access
JSTOR from my home office, the access historians have to data and discussion continues to increase daily.
Interaction History is created by the
interaction of people with objects and with each other. (While an idea may be born in a vacuum, the effects of that idea ripple out beyond the individual.) One new technology offers an answer as to how to "bridge the gap between online communities and the physical world." In his article,
"Hyperlinking Reality" librarian
Nate Hill explains how a two dimensional bar code, such as your library may use to tag their books, can be placed on an object in the community. Individuals can then take a digital image of that tag, connect with a website linked to the code in the tag, and either gain or share information about the object or location. Hill explains how this might build community in cyberspace. "Now an online community can grow each time an individual happens to walk by the park bench, take a picture, and collaborate, much the way that conversation and interaction happen in a real-world community." Hill's article speaks to how technology may connect individuals and may help create sources for the recording of interactions that may eventually become history. He also shares a tool that we historians might be able to use. What if we place a bar code placed on the back of historic marker? When you take a picture of the bar code with your cell phone, a link to a website is saved. When you get home, you access the website and expand the knowledge gained by seeing the space and reading the sentence on the marker. The tag for the marker of a battlefield could lead to a map of the battle, a personal story of a soldier who fought and died there, and the coordinates of his grave back home in another state. Upon which, perhaps, is another bar code.
Objects Some will ask why we need the bar codes. One can go and see both the site of the battle and the grave of the fallen soldier. A fear raised by technological advances specific to objects is that people will content themselves with representations of things and no longer desire interaction with things themselves. However, digital media can also allow us a type of physical access to
objects. I cannot go to see this piece of
lace personally, but I can examine it digitally. Moreover, even if I was able to travel to the location where it was displayed and the lace was on exhibit, I would be limited to looking at the object through a glass case, from at least inches, if not feet away.
Spacial sites The concept of sites, physical locations of interactions of note, is a tool used frequently by historians. The attraction of historical localities as places to visit and learn is centuries long and still relevant per recent studies. The importance of spaces to the study of history is not new, and the expansion of the definition of "space" continues. Last week in
Prosthetic Memory we read Alison Landsberg's concept of transferential space - a public, constructed space "in which people are invited to enter into experiential relationships to events through which they themselves did not live." (p. 113) Digital history can take us into spaces in a way we may not be able to experience physically. Whether
a set of pictures accompanied by text, a
virtual tour or a rendering of a building that no longer exists, digital resources let us explore spaces. New endeavors in social media sites such as
Second Life allow one not only to explore a
museum but to interact with other people at the same time, adding the benefit of building community.
The Future The future itself is a tool. By considering where we as a culture and civilization may be, we can speculate about what we may need to know. We can then use that lens when deciding what to teach about our past so that we make conscious choices about our future. The
Center for the Future of Museums (CFM) is a think tank that "helps museums explore the cultural, political and economic challenges facing society and devise strategies to shape a better tomorrow." (p. 3) Its report, "M
useums and Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures" is fascinating reading. A group of very smart people,
Reach Advisors, "...poured over nearly a thousand articles, data sets, interviews and discussion forums to identify the trends that are most likely to change U.S. society and museums during the next 25 years." (p. 4) This paper should be required reading for any American with a stake in the year 2034. From an population that is increasingly multi-ethnic and aging to a society with dramatic changes in gender roles and an unprecedented divide between those who have means and those who do not to possible mindsets about energy, consumerism, technology, and globalization, the possible future painted is one we should not go into blindly. Speaking specifically about museums,
Elizabeth Merritt,
Founding Director of the Center for the Future of Museums, adds a challenge to public historians. "Working together we can help create a healthy, stable society in which every person has the leisure and ability to enjoy what museums have to offer."
What about the challenges?
While digital resources can create access by allowing one to read newspapers stored in a basement a country away or see markings on a vase only visible from one inch away, one still must have the access to a computer and the knowledge to use it. If we want to be able to teach with these resources, public historians must be committed to working towards a society where access to technology is not limited by one's class, race, or gender. Cohen and Rosenweig urge historians not to leave the issue of access "...to the technologists, legislators, and media companies, or even just to our colleagues in libraries and archives." (Introduction)
There is also the concern of translation. Cohen and Rosenweig note Gertrude Himmelfarb's dissent on the new technology. "The Internet does not distinguish between the true and the false, the important and the trivial, the enduring and the ephemeral....Every source appearing on the screen has the same weight and credibility as every other." (Introduction)
Virginia Heffernan, in "
Haunted Mouses," poses the concern that personal information added to the internet creates neither cohesive memory or tangible history. "Today's new methods of making and sharing digital images have not allowed us to see things more clearly....Rather, they've introduced new kinds of visual and auditory static." Heffernan makes a follow up comment, however, that offers a possible "in" for public historians determined to make this information relevant. "The Internet's greatest production might in fact be just this beguiling static, unpredictable bytes of sound and light that fly around in cyberspace until someone interprets them." Interpretation. That's part of what we do, right? Cohen and Rosenweig's book can be a resource here, too. The chapters of their book walk historians through how they might personally use digital resources, specifically the internet, to teach and interpret history.
The
AHA has also weighed in on helping historians use both digital media and digital history. The May 2009 issue of
Perspectives on History provided the forum, "
Intersections: History and New Media," a collection of articles on topics from teaching and research to public history challenges to information about blogs.
The response from both academic and public historians as to how all historians can use the internet and other digital media is perhaps the most important tool we all have to hand as it both explains new tools and suggests ways they can help us better use older, more familiar ones. It also suggests ways said new tools may help to further blur the line between the academy and the community, refocusing us all on our ultimate goal - the study of change over time and the dissemination of that information to others for the betterment of the whole.
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