1. Our Past is in Bits
the social use of digital history

2. digital history (Interchange: The Promise of Digital History, The Journal of American
History, Vol. 95, No. 2 (Sept. 2008))
. to do digital history is to create a framework,
an ontology, through the technology for
people to experience, read, and follow an
argument about a historical problem
. digital history makes use of sources in digital
form

3. Digital history is not only a direction in the
historical scholarship: this term can describe
also new forms of social connections to the
past

4. knowledge & heritage
outside the institution

5. Akademia Rzygaczy (The
Gargoyle Academy): an
association of amateur
historians in Gdańsk, a
grassroots and quasi
scholary project.
www.rzygacz.webd.pl, CC-BY-SA Jarod Carruthers

6. Citizen historians in action: online
discussion with historical maps,
forum.dawnygdansk.pl

7. Akademia Rzygaczy offline: Measures
of Gdansk on the day of uncovery its
reconstruction (July, 2005)
CC-BY Brosen

8. online community of citizen historians:
. they are amateurs: they have knowledge,
passion and time
. they come from the internet and use it
intensively
. they operate in digital and real world, outside
institutions
. they share knowledge and resources for free,
they do not care too much about the
copyrights
. their knowledge has a dynamic character

9. historical heritage and grassroots digitalization
. independent actions without coordination and
standards
. outside the institutions of memory
. the activity of local citizen historians
. true angels of public domain
. digital rescue history

10. the Digital Archives of Local Tradition (CATL)
. network of social digital archives based on the
local libraries
. aim: to rescue local historical heritage, to
support citizen historians by giving them
knowledge, standards and tools
. promoting the local heritage globally
(Europeana)
. use the potential of grassroots digitalization

12. the ontology of networked digital archive (James
MacDevitt, The User-Archivist and Collective (In)Voluntary Memory: Read/Writing the Networked Digital
Archive, in: Revisualizing Visual Culture, ed. Ch. Bailey and H. Gardiner, Farnham 2010, 109-123)
. networked digital archive: open up for
dispersal and aggregation
. before: the Archivist produces the Archive, the
User consumes it
. now: User-Archivist – when you browse the
digital archive, you create it

13. participatory archive (Isto Huvila, Participatory archive: towards decentralised
curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management, Archival Science,
8(1), 2008, 15-36.)
. decentralised curation - Users plan and
produce the digital archive
. radical user orientation (not only usability)
. contextualisation of both records and the
entire archival process - the importance of
other than archival and organisational
contexts of records
. more than web 2.0

14. Participatory archive: towards
decentralised curation, radical user
orientation, and broader contextualisation
of records management
saarenkartano.muuritutkimus.fi

15. Wikipedia is not only a
resource for collating all
human knowledge, but
a framework for
understanding how that
knowledge came to be
and to be understood;
what was allowed to
stand and what was not;
what we agree on, and
what we cannot.
James Bridle, On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and
Historiography,
http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/

16. new universality (Pierre Lévy, The Second Flood. Report on Cyberculture, Council of
Europe, Paris 1996. )
. old universality: excluding the alternatives,
total, connected with state, religion or
ideology
. cyberspace as new universality: rather
acceptation than domination - because all can
be published

17. commemoration
new universality

18. commemoration as a
process of unification,
supporting a dominant
narratives about the
past

19. commemoration as a process
of asking questions,
identifying with people from
history and discussing the
dominant narratives of the
pasthttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01abKAww_9k

20. new forms of commemorating
. remix and convergence (Jenkins)
. all can be discussed (new universality)
. virtual monuments and memory places
(Wikipedia)
. participation and working in communities
. niche interpretations of the past (conspiracy
theories)

21. History (19th century) digital history (now)
state institution of independent online
memory community
knowledge information
monopol in ideology new universality (Lévy)
historians citizen historians
printed digital
state locality
witness / memory prosthetic memory /
digital media

22. Historiaimedia.org
information about historical resources available online
news about digital history trends and projects
articles about connections between memory and popculture
content published in CC-BY-SA

23. thank you
marcin@wilkowski.org