Thinking over the texts and videos, I was reminded how I became interested in pursuing studies in History – my longtime love of reading was complemented with a curiosity akin to the module’s approach to historical thinking. I often wanted to know why and how books were written after I read them, and this principle extended into learning about history. Most of my textbooks that I remember attempted the omniscient perspective of narrative history brought up in the module, so I was constantly questioning why the things I learned about happened. I resonated with Brenda Santos’ criticism of lessons which “presents students with a question and sources, but simply asks them to find an answer;” classroom activities that merely involve reading sources according to a central narrative do not foster a proper foundation for historical thinking (Finding Out vs. Figuring Out). This kind of thinking, which sometimes seems woefully unpopular, is key not just in the humanities but in everyday life, as some of the videos underscore. Proper source evaluation is one of the biggest factors of historical thinking because of how much more comes from being able to parse information and its context – Wineburg, Smith, and Breakstone elaborate that on a larger scale “the study of history should be a mind-altering encounter that leaves one forever unable to consider the social world without asking questions about where a claim comes from, who is making it, and how time and place shape human behavior” (“What is Learned in College History Classes?”). Their questions of “where a claim comes from, who is making it, and how time and place shape human behavior” are fundamental parts of approaching historical study in a way that does not cloud present understanding of the past nor preclude drawing any shared meaning from it. In “Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts,” Wineburg further elaborates that the “balancing of perspectives requires us to step back from our immediate stance and see things in other ways,” even in circumstances of emotion or ignorance – not that those circumstances are invalid but that proper historical thinking always requires a balanced approach to time and place. In essence, everyone (hopefully) performs some variation of historical thinking when they evaluate a news article, attempt to emphasize with someone, or establish any similar connection between one’s experience and that of another in different circumstances. In applying this to historical study, the key is being able to step back and recognize one’s own place in historic perspective in relation to what is learned.

Although I have spent several years practicing historical thinking in the classroom, I have yet to experience teaching it to others. As many of the module’s videos explain, it is not enough to simply provide rote learning of facts – students must see meaning in the information as well as in the act of learning it. Thus, my first question would be: how does an educator best inspire this sense of meaning for students? Regarding the field of history, I found the examples given in the ‘Uncoverage’ viewing to provide a foundation for this question by emphasizing the applications of historical thinking to both historical content and present ways of thinking. This leads to my second question: how would an educator appropriately tie lessons on history to the present? In a similar vein as the Uncoverage viewing, Wineburg posits that when history is taught effectively, it helps “to know others, whether they live on the other side of the tracks or the other side of the millennium, requires the education of our sensibilities,” elaborating that “what allows us to come to know others is our distrust of our capacity to know them, a skepticism toward the extraordinary sense-making abilities that allow us to construct the world around us” (Historical Thinking). Wineburg is speaking of the overall gap in understanding between the past and the ever-moving present, but this principle also speaks to the importance of understanding both ends. Finally, I would ask myself: how would I, as an educator, establish this connection and meaning to students not familiar with historical study? Of course, I hope to find an answer in this course, but I realize that a large portion of teaching means bridging a gap with people who may or may not share interests or desire for learning. The above approaches to establishing connections and meaning are important, but I will continue to see what my personal approach would look like through this class and this project.

Sources:

Santos, Brenda. Finding Out vs. Figuring Out: A framework for inquiry-based history, 2022.

Wineburg, Sam. “Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts.” The Phi Delta Kappan 80, no. 7. March 1999. p. 488-499.

Wineburg, Sam, Mark Smith, and Joel Breakstone. “What Is Learned in College History Classes?” The Journal of American History. March 2018. p. 983-993.

My name is Luke Rodgers, and I am a graduate in History and English from Charleston Southern University. As can probably be inferred from my area of study, I have always been an avid reader and enthusiast for writing both fictional and historical. I have always loved learning and I hope to encourage that same passion in others through work, writing, or otherwise. My skills largely pertain to this field, including writing, editing, and research. I have presented undergraduate work at CSU’s student symposium twice as well as one scholarly conference with the Victorians Institute. Most of my work is done traditionally but I am steadily improving my technological skills through this course.

Most of my work experience so far comes from my time in the technical writing field, where I’ve worked with a large variety of forms, structures, and types of content. Through this program, I have expanded my range of awareness of digital tools as well as their interaction with the public history field itself. Just like with the prior two courses, one of my learning goals is to continue this growth, but I am also greatly looking forward to learning about teaching and the classroom itself. I have never taken a pedagogical class before, so I hope that the course will provide a solid foundation to any potential teaching I will need to perform, whether professionally or on my own time. In this regard, I do not particularly see myself leading a university classroom myself (although I thoroughly enjoy the setting), but I do hope to work in museum or library-type environments, which these skills will still be necessary for. I have great respect for how my professors and thesis advisor led their classrooms during my undergraduate program, so I hope to follow their example with a mixture of traditional presentation and discussion-based learning. Overall, I am looking forward to working through this course over the summer!

Throughout this course, I have been aiming to synthesize my understanding of digital public humanities with enough tangible experience to confidently move forward in the field. The first class of the program effectively built a foundation with numerous definitions of DPH complemented by introductory practice with electronic tools – in my case, with Voyant. This semester, I have continued to learn how DPH operates throughout both institutions and individuals, as well as the broader public with whom it is meant to engage. One facet of this is the important role that public historians have in not just maintaining interest in History overall but in fostering public communities centered on that shared connection. Sam Wineburg’s description of “historical thinking” in the classroom provides an applicable microcosm of public history as a whole: “The goals of school history are not vocational but to prepare students to tolerate complexity, to adapt to new situations, and to resist the first answer that comes to mind.” Having lived in several hotbeds of ‘alternative’ histories and controversial displays, I can clearly see how necessary this kind of framework is for a society at large. This also brings to mind Ronald Grele’s notes on the transforming role of the historian: one that “promises us a society in which a broad public participates in the construction of its own history,” answering the question of “whose public? whose history? With a democratic declaration of a faith in members of the public at large to become their own historians and to advance their knowledge of themselves.” Setting aside some of the idealism in this perception, the overall idea of building communities by engaging with shared history is an important aspect of the field that appeals to my own experiences.

In addition to more of the possibilities of digital public history, another important takeaway is the issues facing the field that we will be contending with, namely the communication of history, to which artificial intelligence has emerged as a troubling obstacle. Being in the public history field means being in constant contact with a broad variety of audiences that may or may not be interested in history, and the advent of A.I. and LLMs brings a similarly digital competitor to public historians’ efforts by providing more convenient access to largely unreliable and unsubstantiated attempts at information. In some ways it seems like the end result of societal pushes for faster and faster communication regardless of accuracy or context, as Adina Langer puts it: “We’ve already witnessed the ability of the internet to proliferate and perpetuate misinformation, and the challenges this poses to a novice researcher or purely open-minded information consumer,” and her subsequent point about LLMs devouring themselves through their own AI-generated text remains a salient fear when thinking about how far down its userbase could go with it. Hence, public historians occupy additional roles as stewards of history for the greater public, teaching how to think historically and discerningly in addition to the information itself. To think positively, the course also outlined some potential usages of AI models in areas like digital archives or transcription projects; while the full fruits of these attempts remain to be seen, I am more positive on merely rote uses of AI in comparison to the harmful ones. Still, it is clear from the reading how many issues public historians will need to confront in the digital and physical spheres.

Lastly, and most obviously, the biggest takeaway from this course is the practical experience of designing, researching, and operating a digital history project of my own. The numerous examples featured in the classwork, such as the Nashville Tours and Chamizal Memorial projects, offered clear demonstrations of how public history can look and function in a digital setting. Interactable maps, timelines, and images allow for new ways of perceiving history only possible with electronic tools, and even if I did not need to utilize them for my own work, I am aware of how they are shaping the field of public history. I am also aware that projects like these require specialized teams to reach their full potential, so for an individual-scale project, my emphasis was on providing effective historical information to my intended audience. As Sharon Leon explains in the reading, much of public history “is undertaken in the service of putting history to work in the world,” meaning that “no digital public project can be divorced from its audience.” With my limited time and resources, ensuring that my project can connect with an interested public was the most important goal, in conjunction with authenticity and legibility. Regarding other aspects of the project, I have certainly learned which parts of the process I am suited for compared to others, which is itself an important takeaway from trying it on my own. The intricacies of web design and digital interfaces were the hardest and least fulfilling part compared to the actual humanities aspects of reading, researching, and deliberating how to engage non-academics with the same information. All in all, I know what to expect and how to approach with such a project, and I look forward to a future career in this work.

Sources:

https://www.debbiewaggoner.com/uploads/1/2/9/9/12998469/thinking_like_a_historian_article.pdf

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3377160?if_data=e30%3D&seq=9

https://ncph.org/history-at-work/generative-ai-and-historical-authority/

https://www.6floors.org/bracket/2018/04/14/reviewing-is-an-act-of-leadership/#more-736

Reflecting across the previous modules as I near the completion of my project, this course has offered many examples of the current themes and issues of public history as well as many of the resources utilized by public historians. Thinking also of the various digital tools we used in the previous semester, this program has demonstrated how wide-ranging the field is in scope, content, form, and function. An increasingly digital society requires digital tools, and public history is a prime example of how this transformation is taking place. The biggest factor in my opinion is the multimodal nature of DPH and the plethora of possibilities it brings for the dissemination of knowledge and understanding. Among the examples seen in the program are mediums like interactive exhibits and websites, showing that the field is not limited solely to text. Simpler examples like blogs and podcasts provide extremely effective ways for groups and individuals, including those without large budgets or resources, to engage with the public. The dichotomy of traditional means of communication and new electronic forms is the crux of DPH’s value – to use podcasts as an example, Jim McGrath explains that they provide “opportunities to call attention to particular language and developing perspectives, occasions to bring multiple objects and documents into conversation with one another, and space to reimagine research recorded in metadata and exhibit labels as new audio narratives.” Although my project does not utilize tools like these, my previous experience using Voyant and other tools has shown me what these different forms look like and how they can be used effectively for alternate ways of conveying information.

Of course, at the center of this transformation is the debate around the role of so-called artificial intelligence, which ranges from text and image generation to large language models and wherever else it is inserted. Coming from an undergraduate background in the Humanities, I am still more skeptical than not at the contributions that artificial intelligence is purported to provide. I understand and appreciate the points made in articles like Alex Houston’s regarding JSTOR’s experiments with AI, where its use is meant to underscore human involvement and highlight potential weaknesses in the archival process – in Houston’s and Emilie Hardman’s words, “rather than replacing archival labor, this was a moment where AI was extending it—enhancing what was possible.” On the other hand, accounts like those of Adina Langer’s of chatbots ‘hallucinating’ information for a variety of reasons, adding such technology to the growing fount of misinformation plaguing mass communication.  Testing out ChatGPT for some assignments has not changed my outlook nor compelled me to utilize it in my project largely because it offers things I already know how to do, like research and editing, that I would prefer not to rely on an algorithm for.

This brings me to the course of my final project and how it interacts with the above examples. Despite many of the instances of multimodal mediums, I’ve chosen to build a concise text-based collection of authors and their works from my hometown, for the purpose of guiding users to online collections and archives for further information. Although it does not make use of the more elaborate tools seen in the course, it does represent the advantages of DPH by using digital tools to make obscure historical information available to the public as well as showing them where they can find more sources. The Organization of American Historians’ webpage on digital history reviews notes that “online exhibitions and essays should be judged by the quality of their interpretation,” or how effectively they present their chosen history. For my part, the limited scope means that I have tried to ensure that the information presented is clearly sourced, easy to read, and of course accurate. The degree of interpretation that I have undertaken is mostly limited to how the literature chronicled from this handful of authors reflects the broader course of Summerville history. With this in mind, my goal in the last stretch of the course is to keep improving the project’s database as much as possible – making sure that the search function works, that all the tags are appropriate, that the formatting for each entry is uniform, and making any small aesthetic change as I see fit. Thinking on long-term takeaways from this project, it certainly makes clear to me that the research and writing portions of projects like these are by far my strongest suites as opposed to the technological side of actually building a web presence. Knowing that most projects like these are done in teams, I will be well aware of what my own strengths are in comparison.

Sources:

https://ncph.org/history-at-work/podcasts-and-public-history/

Bringing hidden histories to light: An archivist reflects on AI, archives, and the future of digital stewardship

https://ncph.org/history-at-work/generative-ai-and-historical-authority/

As an aspiring public historian, it is difficult to make solid sense about the role of artificial intelligence beyond what has already been happening over the course of the past few years – namely, an unprecedented potential it brings. On the surface, my preconceived notions about AI have not particularly changed because my chosen fields, History and English, have been at the forefront of AI abuse which has caused me to regard it more negatively. However, I have never needed to utilize it for anything like what the readings mention, so while I do not discount the merits of certain tasks that can be allotted to an automated search engine, it is still difficult to focus on those aspects when the rest of the Pandora’s Box has been so fraught with controversy. Cameron Blevins’ example of using AI to undertake transcription processes illustrates both sides of my reservations: on one hand, the model’s ability to create a mostly-accurate transcription of the text is valuable, but on the other hand, the fact that every instance of automated transcription needs to be overseen and verified by an actual expert or historian seems to defeat much of the purpose of automating it in the first place. I would certainly trust the end result much less if it was done quickly through these tools. Moreover, I take issue with Blevins’ characterization of AI as a “research assistant,” not just because of the poor choice of humanizing an algorithm (when there is still so much misconceptions about how LLMs work), but because it impedes too much on what should be, in my opinion, the main human element in public history: bringing historical research and engagement into greater public access. The more historians rely on shaky automation, the less effective they will be in communicating that information to the public. Adina Langer’s point about “self-reinforcing” inaccuracy should AI models train on previous uses of AI remains extremely salient given how the technology is still a largely unregulated frontier, and in regards to the role of public historians, I agree with her position that it is an important responsibility to “extend and enhance the ways we educate our publics about information literacy” – ceding the historiographical process to unreliable automation will not help mend decreasing levels of reading comprehension and increasing levels of misinformation. I do not mean to be completely pessimistic about the use of new technology in public history, as the field certainly has new possibilities to explore with new tools and resources, but such means need to be carefully employed and evaluated on their merits and their consequences. Uses such as the ‘historical’ chatbots that Rob Nelson criticizes in his AI Log blog appear a horrendous misuse of LLM technology because of how much they dilute truth and human identity through its fundamental inability to understand context and (authentic) speech. Uses such as more advanced archival search systems and features, such as those Alex Houston mentions, seem more appropriate and measured for this technology, so long as it is reasonably implemented.

Asking ChatGPT to take those same articles and provide the same commentary (provided in full below), it came up with a substantial response that focused on the primary concerns shared across the sources as well as my own commentary, namely reliability and transparency. After asking it to write it without using bullet points, it came up with a five paragraph essay which ironically matched ‘s point that current AI models are a natural outgrowth of the “bureaucratic systems of schooling” that revolve around measured formats like the five-paragraph essay and multiple-choice exams. The rest of the AI’s commentary largely matches this description, providing a sanitary summation of the source’s overall consensus that AI cannot be used to replace human oversight, despite there being a few opportunities for AI to be used responsibly in public history, like facilitating a more inclusive historical record. It does bring up more examples of it being used irresponsibly, such as exacerbating existing public and academic biases and, obviously, spreading layers of misinformation upon itself. Regardless, ChatGPT’s answer does not deviate too much from my takeaways, except perhaps in its own positivity in itself.

Sources:

Adina Langer, “Generative AI and historical authority,” History@Work, October 19, 2023

Cameron Blevins, “A Large Language Model Walks Into an Archive,” October 25, 2024

Alex Houston, “Bringing hidden histories to light: An archivist reflects on AI, archives, and the future of digital stewardship,” JSTOR

Rob Nelson, “Banal impersonations and historical reenactment on the cheap,” AI Log, August 20, 2024

Full ChatGPT Response:

Taken together, these articles suggest that AI will not replace public history, but it will fundamentally reshape how it is practiced, especially in terms of access, authority, and interpretation. One of the clearest shifts is AI’s ability to expand access to historical materials at an unprecedented scale. Tools like large language models can transcribe, summarize, and analyze vast collections of documents, allowing historians and institutions to surface materials that were previously difficult to use or entirely hidden. This has important implications for public history, which has long been concerned with making the past accessible to broader audiences. In this sense, AI strengthens an existing goal of the field by enabling deeper and wider engagement with historical sources.

At the same time, the readings make clear that this expansion of access comes with a destabilization of historical authority. AI systems can produce highly convincing narratives that are partially or entirely incorrect, and they often blur the distinction between primary sources, interpretation, and fabrication. For public historians, who frequently present history in accessible and authoritative ways to general audiences, this creates a serious challenge. Authority can no longer rest simply on presenting information; it must be built through transparency about sources, methods, and the limits of AI-generated content. In an environment where misinformation can be generated at scale, trust becomes a central concern.

Rather than functioning as independent historians, AI tools are better understood as collaborators that require careful oversight. The articles consistently emphasize that these systems are most useful when treated as assistants that can help process information but not replace human judgment. They remain limited in their ability to interpret context, nuance, and historical significance. As a result, public history is likely to become a more hybrid practice in which AI handles large-scale data processing while human historians provide interpretation, ethical framing, and narrative coherence.

Finally, the readings point to the emergence of new opportunities alongside new ethical responsibilities. AI can help uncover and amplify marginalized or overlooked histories, contributing to a more inclusive public historical record. However, it can also reproduce existing biases in archival collections and training data, or flood the public sphere with plausible but misleading historical content. This tension means that public historians will increasingly act not just as interpreters of the past, but as curators of authenticity and mediators of technology. They will need to guide audiences in understanding how historical knowledge is produced, especially when AI is involved.

Overall, AI is pushing public history away from a model centered on simply presenting narratives and toward one focused on navigating, evaluating, and explaining an overwhelming abundance of historical information. The role of the public historian will shift accordingly, emphasizing critical engagement, transparency, and trust in an increasingly AI-mediated landscape.

As with much else in the humanities, public history is a very multifaceted field. Examples of public history can include museums to preservation sites to even organized events; the field allows for far more than just indoor exhibits, and public interaction and engagement are common themes of public history. The field is also marked by its proficiency in adapting with the times to ensure that the public remains connected with its history, so as society becomes more electronic in work and language, so too will public history. As a result, public history sites will need robust and effective digital presences that both enhance their physical presence and provide new ways of conveying information. Electronic tools allow for extremely varied possibilities in constructing exhibits and interacting with the content therein, so both physical and digital means will be necessary going forward. Thus, this review of the Patriot’s Point USS Yorktown exhibit in Charleston, South Carolina seeks to demonstrate this principle through their mixed use of both mediums.

Public History Site Review

https://www.patriotspoint.org/

For my HIST 694 digital public history project, I will be using Omeka to create an online exhibit showcasing several previously obscure local authors from Summerville, South Carolina, focusing on both their primary literary contributions and their respective place in the timeline of the region’s historic development between the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I will be partnering with the local Summerville Museum and Research Center for this project, which houses the majority of primary source material relevant to this project, including original copies of the local authors’ works as well as additional biographical information on them. The idea came from a fusion of my experience and interest in literary history and some research into local towns for historic writers that are not featured prominently in regional history. Hence, while literary historians like myself will be an important demographic, the overall target audience will most likely be the increasing number of local residents who are becoming more interested in learning about historic figures from the region’s distant past. In discussing this point with the museum archive staff, this demographic of historically minded locals and volunteers has been growing steadily, so I believe that this project will be an effective way at drawing public attention to this section of regional history.

Overall, this project seeks to answer questions about the literary landscape of the region and what that reveals about the course of local history – all while shedding new light on little-known writers and their works. The profiles of each writer and their books will be largely biographical in nature, but each entry will be a part of an overarching analysis on their contexts within South Carolina Lowcountry history. As the research portion of the project continues, more questions or directions may be added or changed depending on the information uncovered, such as discussions on common themes, subject matter, and other contexts in their life or works. Thus, the overarching historical interpretation part of the project will follow these findings, addressing possible connections between the writers’ lives and how they reflect the overall history of the town – including reasons for writing, possible local audiences, and why the majority of them fell into obscurity.

The project will be constructed with Omeka’s online exhibit-making software, with a focus on individual profiles for each featured writer. Each individual will have a respective entry that profiles as much biographical information that can be uncovered on them, as well as an overview of their body of work – or most important work – including photographs and cover scans when available. As none of these works have been digitized yet, access to the texts themselves is not a focus of the project; instead, the project will provide a valuable interpretive analysis on local literary history using each entry. The specific layout of the Omeka site will be a chronological list of the entries, from the earliest in the eighteen thirties to the latest around the turn of the twentieth century. Likewise, the upcoming prototype will be focused around the two most prominent entries uncovered during research, which will likely be the earliest and latest examples from the sources. In conclusion, this project seeks to renew attention towards local literary history as a part of the greater historical record of Summerville, South Carolina, illustrating a record of obscure writers and their context within greater Lowcountry social history.

Persona: Tanya R.

Age: 44

Occupation: Office Accountant

Education: High School, BA in Management

“History involves all of us, which means we should all learn something from it.”

About:

Tanya is an accountant at a local company office who went to college for business management and accounting. She is highly reliable and capable at her job, and fairly tech-savvy for it, but keeps a consistent work-life balance, rarely devoting herself to overtime except in crunch periods. She is a mother of two: one in high school and another at a local college. In addition to her occupation, she greatly enjoys expanding her horizons in both learning and traveling, especially with her immediate family. Although she did not receive a Humanities-oriented education, she has always enjoyed learning about new things, and holds deep interest in local history. She especially enjoys interactivity and seeing how people can get involved in public, but despite her computer skills she prefers physical media and interaction to digital.

Day-in-the-Life:

Every weekday, Tanya wakes early around six to make it to her place of work, coffee in hand. After receiving her daily update, she immediately sets out to perform her daily work routine. A variety of friends in the office keeps the atmosphere amiable, but the work environment is overall fairly monotonous. She regularly heads home around five thirty to rejoin her family. In her evening free time, she enjoys word puzzles and reading about her eclectic interests before going to bed. On weekends, she enjoys traveling and seeing new places, valuing new sights and people.

Goals:

Tanya wants to involve herself and her family in publicly available humanities sites, such as museums and historical locations, to cultivate curiosity and a love for learning. When her children were younger, she made sure to bring them to all kinds of places like these along with national parks to teach them a broader awareness of the world, and she would love to continue doing so. Hence, for a digital project to catch her attention, it needs to be easily accessible while clearly communicating its informational value. The audience must include her own curiosities and interests in local history as well as her family in general.

Needs:

• Clear directions on the project website to the physical location of the exhibit/sources.
• An easy and accessible organization for the project website that emphasizes important information.

Persona: Richard M.

Age: 20

Occupation: Full-time College Student

Education: High School, Expecting a B. A. in History

“Learning about the past is the best way to prepare for the future.”

About:

Richard is a young college student entering his third year at a local university not too far from his suburban hometown. He has always been fond of reading and writing, and by the end of his time in High School these skills had coalesced into an interest in History. As one of many in his generation reaching adulthood, he is often concerned about his future career path and prospects, but he knows he wants to go into education because he enjoys sharing and discussing information with others. Also like his digitally native generation, he is fairly tech-savvy, which affects how he works, conducts research, and communicates. During the summer, he volunteers at local libraries and museums to gain valuable experience in humanities-oriented skills as well as interacting with people in the field.

Day-in-the-Life

During the semester, Richard is usually up by 6:30, either to hastily grab breakfast to make the commute for his 8:00 classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or to otherwise spend the morning going over upcoming work. Upon arriving to class, his days largely follow the routine of fifty or one hundred twenty-minute segments until either noon, when he spends lunch with likeminded classmates, or until classes are over, whereupon he usually heads home for the day. On certain days, after classes he volunteers at the college’s writing center where he helps other students work through ideas or writing problems. After getting back, he spends her evenings completing homework or reading ahead but making sure to reserve an hour or two for his own hobbies before going to bed around 10:00. As his weekdays are usually focused on academics, he makes sure to complete as much of his work as possible before the weekend, so he has enough time to rest and recoup. He strives to maintain a healthy balance in his life, placing equal importance on school, work, and fun.

Goals:

As an aspiring educator in History, he is aware of the wealth of knowledge and experience he will need to be successful in the field. Thus, in addition to merely good grades, he wants to be able to participate in the current trends of digital humanities to be prepared for a career in it. A digital public history project should be informational not just to a general audience, but also to serve as an example to others in the field. In keeping with his digital awareness, such an online project should demonstrate what those digital tools can provide to its subject.

Needs:

• A suitable example of the kind of research and writing necessary for his field.
• Content that is engaging and informative for both academics and non-academics alike.
• A web presence that illustrates what digital media is capable of in the field in addition to traditional methods.

Among the course’s introductory readings, the issue of direction was an interesting aspect of defining public history, especially regarding its intersection with digital history and all that it entails. In addition to needing a broad definition, the question of what public historians do, or what they are responsible for, has been thoroughly discussed – and from the reading, answers tend to be just as varied as the places wherein public historians work. Richard Grele posits that by its very name, public history redefines prior historical thought through fostering “a society in which a broad public participates in the construction of its own history” (Grele 48). The common image of a public historian from these definitions is of people amongst the broader public, in a sort of ‘democratization’ of history in contrast with previous notions of history within academia; museums and similar organizations are the obvious example, but public history can take on numerous forms in various fields and industries.

Regardless of their exact form, public history works on connections between academic institutions, the public, and the history that they share and feel should be focused on. As Robert Weible puts it, “in the historic preservation and museum fields, in community history projects, in government agencies, even in private businesses,” public historians “have raised professional standards and enhanced the way people understand the past” through preservation and interpretation (Weible). Having lived in several regions rich in public history initiatives, I have seen how important public historians can be in not just preserving history, but enhancing understanding of the community being preserved. Weible expounds that his ideal vision of public historians is of those who “help sanction and limit social and political power by ensuring that the understanding of the past on which the public shapes its future is factual, accurate, comprehensible, meaningful, useful, and resistant to cynical manipulators,” imbuing the field with an important societal purpose. Regardless of whether all public history initiatives are able to perfectly achieve this ideal, the image of the public historian who preserves history in order to share it with the public is part of what drew me into this path. Sam Wineburg’s description of a historian as one who argues “about the past’s meaning and what it has to tell us in the present” provides a succinct baseline for what a public historian should endeavor to do within their community, field, industry, or organization, one that I resonate with from my past experiences (Wineburg 1). Overall, it is clear that public history will continue to be an important field as it broadens its connection with society, and as digital history likewise expands, there will be more opportunities for public history in both number and form, making it both a challenging and exciting time to be a public historian.

Sources:

https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/defining-public-history-is-it-possible-is-it-necessary-march-2008/

https://www.debbiewaggoner.com/uploads/1/2/9/9/12998469/thinking_like_a_historian_article.pdf

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3377160.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3A6300580f525bd2d4f33d4793c3cffd25&ab_segments=&initiator=&acceptTC=1

Since attempting to define Digital Humanities for the first time, this course has heretofore demonstrated just how multifaceted the term can be in meanings, forms, purposes, and of course, the innumerable peoples and professions involved. Now, as I continue to work on my own contributions through a digital humanities project, I can see that my earlier definition decently captured the idea of digital humanities but did not effectively convey its scope. In a broadest sense, I would still define Digital Humanities as an interdisciplinary method of practice at the juncture between traditional humanities and modern digital tools. The earlier definition’s idea gathered from scholar Matthew Kirschenbaum in the course reading that DH is “methodological by nature and interdisciplinary in scope” is still true, but in my view it accounts for less of what DH actually does in practice (Module 2.3.1). The idea behind this earlier definition did not properly account for the actual possibilities of ways in which it is used or forms that it can take, and the course examples of data mapping, text mining, and network analysis illustrate just some of the ways that digital tools effect not only how information is gathered but how it is presented and how people understand it. In essence, a central facet of digital humanities omitted by my original definition is that the field is not just the usage of digital tools for traditional means, but it is also a study itself of how those digital tools are used and how they effect data itself. This still makes DH difficult to truly define, but ironically a good summation of this principle, as well as an example of DH crowdsourcing, can be found from the course activity with Wikipedia’s article on DH, which notes that it operates under “the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution” (Wikipedia). After studying the long editorial process of creating an article like this one, one of many examples of how DH is used to present and transform information, it is clear that any definition of DH needs to effectively communicate that it is both a method of study and a study itself of the digital age, and of the way in which modern society interacts with the tools it creates and uses. One thing is still relevant from the original definition: that modern society continues to digitize more and more aspects of life, from interpersonal communication to education and political discourse – almost every aspect of the dissemination of modern information is done at least somewhat digitally, and thus DH will continue to be an important field of study as it continues to expand and transform with the times.

Sources:

D_H_ShortGuide.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities