A talk for AHA 2016 about bringing the public history methods of dialogue and collaboration to digital history scholarship in the academic research realm
2. COLLABORATIVE
COLLECTION
BUILDING
We pretty much know how this goes, and if you don’t Sheila Brennan and Mills Kelly have a great article on their work on the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank called “Why
Collecting History Online is Web 1.5” (http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=47)
Shared authority, reflective practice, co-creation
12. “For us [the dialogue-driven museum] has meant engaging with our
audiences in mutually exploring the memory and meaning of
Chinatown’s past. It has meant learning how different people learn in
different ways and helping to facilitate that process. And it has meant
taking what we learn from these dialogues and further improving the
planning and development of the organization. Ultimately, we week to
become an ever more resonant and responsible history center in
which scholarship and public programs can help make a critical
historical awareness a powerful factor in improving New York and the
community for the future.
- Jack Tchen, “Creating a Dialogic Museum: The Chinatown History Museum Experiment,”
in Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, 1992.
CREATING A DIALOGIC MUSEUM
14. “First, the number of scholars willing to commit themselves and their
careers to digital scholarship has not kept pace with institutional
opportunities. Second, today few scholars are trying, as they did
earlier in the web's history, to reimagine the form as well as the
substance of scholarship. In some ways, scholarly innovation has been
domesticated, with the very ubiquity of the web bringing a lowered
sense of excitement, possibility, and urgency. These two deficiencies
form a reinforcing cycle: the diminished sense of possibility weakens
the incentive for scholars to take risks, and the unwillingness to take
risks limits the impact and excitement generated by boldly innovative
projects.
- Ed Ayers, “Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future?” EDUCAUSE Review (2013)
DOES DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP HAVE A FUTURE?
17. USER PERSONAS
From the most common ground
on content to the least:
➤ Historian in the subfield
➤ Historian in the general field
➤ Historian in another field
➤ Undergraduate major
➤ Student in a general education
requirement course
➤ [Subject-matter enthusiast]
➤ Accidental/browsing visitor
Base content knowledge; Interests and questions;
Access and equipment; digital literacy/competence;
Time and incentives
18. “A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to
artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating
and sharing creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby
experienced participants pass along knowledge to novices. In a
participatory culture, members also believe their contributions matter
and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the
least, members care about others’ opinions of what they have
created).
- Henry Jenkins, et al., Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture (2009)
PARTICIPATORY CULTURE
How do we build a participatory culture around digital historical scholarship?
(Culture questions are about community)
Because we have some of the tools and infrastructure right now.
19. CommentPress
Kathleen Fitzpatrick — Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011)
Jack Dougherty and Kristin Nawrotzki’s edited collection, Writing History in the Digital Age (U.Michigan, 2013)
Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, and S. Weingart’s The Historians Macroscope (Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Microscope (Imperial College Press, 2015)
22. Scholarly Remix (NYPL) — in isolation, or…. Hub and spoke model — a concentrated universe of materials, that a group of scholars each addresses bringing their own
interpretive positions
Our content management systems are making this more and more possible everyday.
23. A larger linked open data network of scholarship that allows us to freely build in conversation with one another, drawing on an ever expanding range of sources, but also
an expanding universe of scholarship that is publish in an accessible way on the way (preferably as machine readable text with paragraph anchor numbers).
This is harder — full scale shift, but it can happen.
24. WHY NOT?
➤ Focuses us on process rather
than end products
➤ The process requires
management (assignments
matter)
➤ Incentives for engagement
➤ Resistance to agile processes
➤ Problems with pace (too
immediate and too slow)
➤ Outreach and marketing
➤ Sustainability and preservation
