The Exciting Possibilities of Digital Public History

How do we make history relevant, interesting, and engaging?

How do we get important, exciting, or even fun and wacky stories out to the widest possible audience?

How do we bridge the gap between academic research and the general public?

These questions have driven the work of public historians (a relatively new breed of historian) since the 1970s. The advent of the digital world has given the public historian a whole new toolbox to work with and created a new sub-field – digital public history. So, what is digital public history? And what new avenues has it opened for the profession and, of particular interest to me, the history museum?

Today, we’re going to dive into a few sources that explore these questions. The first is a post on Digital History from The Inclusive Historian’s Handbook (https://inclusivehistorian.com/digital-history/). Author Shelia A. Brennan cites the opportunity to share the voices of minorities, the oppressed, and the underrepresented as the most thrilling possibility of digital public history. Digital platforms allow historians to reach a wider audience and, more importantly, allow those people or their descendants to participate in the telling of their own story.

Digital public history is particularly exciting because it is comprised of seemingly limitless possibilities. Brennan provides us with a series of examples from collaborative databases of digitized collections from over 40 institutions in the Caribbean to open, online access to primary sources relating to key moments in United States history for American schoolchildren, community-based efforts that seek to salvage and preserve forgotten history (my favorite example is close to home, The St. Louis LGBT History Project [http://www.stlouislgbthistory.com/]) and interactive games.

(Funnily enough, I have some experience with making a digital Make-Your-Own-Adventure-style game as part of an undergraduate class. My intention was to make a game that would bring the challenges of living as a woman in 14th century London come to life. Each choice may lead you to business success or a happy marriage but it could also lead you to starvation, desperation, ruin, or death. Digital games certainly have the ability to make history feel much more real than when you read about it in a textbook.)

Brennan praises digital platforms because they allow the public historian to think outside the box. Instead of taking a chronological approach, he or she can organize a story thematically. Text can link to other text to provide more information or define unfamiliar concepts. Michael Frisch, in “From A Shared Authority to the Digital Kitchen and Back,” presents further possibilities (particularly in the realm of oral histories) including mapping, transcribing, indexing, and most interestingly, involving the public in the creation process.

These ideas are not entirely unfamiliar to museums. Some museums have created entirely digital exhibits, others supplement existing exhibits with online materials, and finally others create digital content completely separate from any exhibits up within the museum’s four walls. For example, the Missouri Historical Society regularly updates their blog, which posts stories that are pulled from all over St. Louis history (https://mohistory.org/blog/). Also, the idea of shared authority is on the rise. Digital platforms certainly could allow museums to engage their audience in the exhibit creation process.

This all sounds great, but two major question sticks in my head. How do museum professionals gain the skills necessary to complete these projects? and How do fiscally restricted museums incorporate these projects at the lowest possible cost?

Andrew Hurley’s Chasing the Frontiers of Digital History presents a case study outside of the museum realm about how community organizations can utilize Google Earth software to challenge their neighbors to think about where their neighborhood has been and where it is going. He also provides an important reminder – digital is not the end all, be all. You may cast a wider net through the internet, but you are sure to lose others. In this increasingly digital age, this may become less and less of an issue, but still no museum professional or public historian should make unfounded assumptions about this subject.

Truly, the possibilities do seem limitless. The questions I posed truly are timeless and I hope that in the coming years, more studies come out on the effectiveness of digital techniques.