[bracket]

[This post was inspired by a panel on the Envisioning the Future of Public History Training at National Council of Public History 2012 in Milwaukee.]

The increasing interest number of courses and concentrations focusing on public history suggests that we need to have a serious conversation about what are the skills that are necessary for students to pursue careers in public history in the 21st century. In his presentation for our panel on the future of public history instruction, Steven Burg from Shippensburg University offered preliminary survey results that suggested that digital history is a core interest for course development in a of public history programs. Those results lead to questions about what kinds of digital history training these programs are offering.

The NCPH Curriculum and Training committee works hard to offer guidance on these questions by producing a series of recommendations for best practices in graduate and undergraduate education, and for internships and certificate programs. The document focused on masters programs [PDF] offers guideposts that address the need to train students to be effective research historians, but also to provide them with practical skills in an area of concentration, hands-on experience through internship work, and an in-depth capstone project of some sort. Despite the fact that the document was adopted by the NCPH Board of Directors in October 2008, there is almost no mention of digital skills or digital public history work in the recommendations.

While I don’t have any concrete data on what kind of digital skills individual public history programs are teaching to prepare their students to do public history in a digital environment, I do know what is being taught in the required set of digital history courses for candidates in the PhD program at Mason. We cover a range of areas that engage theoretical questions, methodological approaches, and practical skills. This approach helps graduate students begin to enter into the major conversations in the field of digital history and to start to conceptualize and produce their own digital projects. Based on this teaching and my experience collaborating with cultural heritage organizations on digital projects, I have some recommendations on the skills public historians need to demonstrate to claim competence in digital history.

First and foremost, students need to use digital technology to do good history and to model that practice in public. Of course, this is not really about the technology, but more about carefully considering the framing of historical questions and demonstrating the elements of historical thinking skills such as effective contextualization, and considering multiple perspectives, causality, and shifting interpretation. Engaging in this type of authentic work in public raises all sorts of questions about authority and expertise. In the digital space the public has so many venues in which to respond, question, and challenge based on their existing knowledge and assumptions. The trick is to meet these users where they are and bring them along through the process of inquiry so that they arrive at more nuanced understandings of the past. Done well, this dialogue can lead to deep attachment and investment for the public, so public history programs cannot neglect the central communicative aspects of good digital work.

Focusing on the ways that student can communicate the stuff of history and the practice of doing history in a rich context inevitably should lead to a conversation about disaggreggating the far-too-vague concept the “audience” or the “user.” Being able to identify and target specific audience segments will be essential for doing good digital public history work. There is no single or general user profile. Students need to know how to identify and assess the needs of their core constituencies. Retirees with an interest in local history will have vastly different concerns than middle school history teachers, who in turn will have different needs than scholarly researchers.

Next, students need an introduction project development and planning that embraces agile development. Most history majors never consider issues of collaboration and management in their course work, but public history is about project work. Students need to learn what it takes to plan a collaborative projects and see it to completion. In the digital realm, this will be both a question of clarifying intellectual goals and creating technical work plans. I have written elsewhere about teaching project management, but it’s worth emphasizing here why agile principles are important. Agile development began as a movement to resist the heavily managed and bureaucratic methods of software development. Based on the notion that frequent builds, assessment, and correction allow for more nimble and responsive development, agile methods offer a model for digital public history too. Projects can start small with existing tools and resources. From that base the project team can gather information about audience response and content framing that can then be rolled into the project work flows. The emphasis here is on moving quickly and learning constantly. These practices are particularly well-suited to small organizations with slim technical infrastructure and staffing.

Turning to the technical front, students also need a sense of sound design and development practices, including the basic forces that make the web work: HTML, CSS, content management systems, etc. It is too much to expect that students would graduate with deep knowledge of these building blocks, but they need to be familiar enough with the structural elements that they can interact with developers and designers who do possess the technical knowledge to build customized sites and applications.

Despite the need for this general technical knowledge, students must have a sense of how effectively to use existing software and services to stand up quickly a digital project. In some cases this will be as simple as meeting audiences where they are already gathering on the web by sharing collections and expertise on HistoryPin or Wikipedia. In other cases, it will mean using existing outreach and communication venues such as Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr or WordPress to share the exciting work of public historians and their organizations. Furthermore, students need to have a sense of how to use software-as-service tools such as Omeka.net, Drupal Gardens, Dipity, Viewshare, and GeoCommons to produce narrative exhibits and data and geospatial visualizations that can communicate historical complexity and can engage audiences with historical questions and materials.

These are just the basics, but I don’t see how we can ask anything less from our public history students if we are to claim to send them out into the world with training in digital history.

I shouldn’t be writing this. I should be commenting on student project proposals and working on an article that is three weeks overdue. And, that is exactly why I’m writing this.

Recently at RRCHNM we’ve been having a lot of discussion about why some of us offer much less in the way of public commentary on the field, our work, and the various and ongoing controversies, such as the relationship between “Maker DH” and “Theoretical DH.” As someone who is a little bit on the quiet side of this divide, I have been considering how I got there. It’s not as if I’m not deeply engaged in the work of DH–and here I mean Digital History, not Digital Humanities, because that is the primary work I do. In fact, I think that the deep engagement with work, DH and otherwise, is the reason for the quietude.

Let me explain.

As the director of the public projects division at RRCHNM, I am currently responsible for the forward progress of nine projects (soon to be ten — Thank you, NEH Division of Public Projects, for funding our mobile site on the history of the National Mall). That means nine work plans, nine sets of reporting requirements, and nine sets of deliverables. None of that work would be possible without the incredibly hard work of the twelve people who make up the public projects team (if you don’t know them yet, you should). Together, twelve months a year, we do the work of digital history, producing websites, software, implementation guides, and whitepapers. It is tremendously fulfilling work, but it is a lot. And there will be more since we are grant-writing non-stop (two major applications in the last 6 weeks).

Then, I have my own commitment to teaching, which is not part of my job at RRCHNM at all. For someone who is not a natural in the classroom, I love teaching. I love interacting with students and helping them develop the skills they need to pursue their own interests. That is why I have taught each semester for the last seven years. In addition, I usually find myself with a senior thesis or two to advise or a directed reading to oversee, or both. Again, this is tremendously fulfilling work, but it is a lot.

As for my own work, I have a book manuscript slowly grinding through the process of becoming one of those old-school traditional monographs. Since, my work on that is basically done (I hope), I am hatching another project in the back of my head. I’m reluctant to let it come to the foreground because I don’t really have the time to dedicate to it, and I could do without the distraction of a project that I can’t realistically pursue. And, then, there is the article for the edited collection that is three weeks overdue.

While this may sound like an extended whine about my work load or a covert call for help in learning how to say no, my real point here is to suggest that with all of these balls in the air, my brain doesn’t rest long enough for me to do nearly as much productive, innovative, and creative work as I would like. If I worked less, I would blog more. Sad, but true.

And I know that there are many many more like me–inside DH and out. One way I know is that we’re beginning to see more and more research telling us that we need to slow down in order to be more productive (See this article urging a return to the forty hour work week, or listen to Krista Tippet’s interview with neuroscientist Rex Jung).

So, as an experiment in April, I’m going to try to heed this advice to slow down some in hopes of thinking more, and being more creative.

Anyone care to join me?

(But, for now, I’m gonna go do that work for the kids….)

Public Projects @CHNM
• Jon Barth
• Sheila Brennan — @sherah1918
• Megan Brett — @magpie
• John Flatness — @zerocrates
• Lee Ann Ghajar — @leeannghajar
• James Halabuk — @JamesHalabuk
• Ron Martin
• Scott Miller
• Patrick Murray-John — @patrick_mj
• Kim Nguyen — @kimisgold
• Jim Safley — @jimsafley
• Roberto Sanchez

Prompted by a twitter conversation with Miriam Posner about the need for a really basic introduction to using blogs in the college classroom, I’ve been reflecting on the ways that I’ve come to use public writing in my own teaching over the last fifteen years or so — both on the level of changing technology, and on the level of the scholarship of teaching and learning.

First, some background….

As an undergraduate at Georgetown University, I had the good fortune of working for and with Randy Bass, who even in the very first years of the web was leading the charge to encourage faculty to use technology to improve their teaching. (It is no surprise for those of you who read his blog and Profhacker posts that Mark Sample, aka “The Naked Professor,” then a masters student in the English Department, was also an integral part of those conversations and that work.) Randy often used to begin conversations with teachers by asking them what kinds of things they would like to change about their teaching. What would you like to do better? And, what tools can we use to help make that happen? To me, this is the essential heart of the right approach to using technology in teaching. It begins with an issue with the teaching and learning and then turns to the the task of implementing an appropriate intervention. These are the basic building blocks, regardless of the content focus or the digital tools at hand. What could be going better in your teaching? What do you wish your students would do more of? Do better? What do your students need to improve their learning?

These conversations coincided with work on several really important efforts at Georgetown. Mostly, I was marking up things in HTML, but Randy and Mark and other were working with faculty around the country on Engines of Inquiry: A Practical Guide for Using Technology in Teaching American Culture (1997), published through the American Studies Association’s Crossroads Project. (Sadly both of those projects are no longer available on the web, but Mark is working to resurrect the essays from Engines of Inquiry.) This work rolled into the first summer gathering for faculty interested in technology and pedagogy, where the main conversation was about deepening student engagement and increasing their ability to communicate the complex ideas that might result from that deepened engagement. That meeting has continued to be held summer after summer, eventually coming to be institutionalized in the Teaching, Learning, and Innovation Summer Institute. So, as I was making the transition from being an undergraduate who worked on some basic web projects to beginning a graduate student who was developing my own approach to teaching, my thinking was infused with the findings of these scholars who were committed to doing research on how to improve teaching and learning.

In Fall 1997, I arrived at the American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota with a graduate research assistantship that called for me to help implement some web elements for the department, particularly with respect to the core curriculum. Over the course of that year, I built a bunch of websites (by hand, using tables) that offered support for those courses, some of which had six recitation sections. That spring we installing threaded discussion boards to support the small group work in a large American Indian Studies course. I wasn’t in the classroom on a regular basis to see how the asynchronous discussion supported engagement, but from what I did see students seemed to be in conversation with one another and the materials. It was a good lesson about priming the pump, but in my own teaching at the UofM I mostly used websites as a way to deliver the syllabus and course materials.

I returned to the DC area in the August of 2004 to start work at CHNM. That return coincided with the closing meeting of the Visible Knowledge Project, begun by Randy Bass and his colleagues at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship in 1999, to encourage research on teaching and learning. So Roy Rosenzweig and I spent several days absorbing the research and work that the project scholars had been conducting on the pay off of asking students to externalize their cognitive processes. My own thinking on teaching has been heavily influenced by the project’s resulting findings, which eventually were published in January 2009 in a special issue of Academic Commons: “New Media Technologies and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.”

The biggest take away for me from the VKP research was that students need to see their own process in order to repeat it in an independent way, and that the more they can think of themselves as being part of a larger public conversation the better their work will be. I took these two principles into my teaching with undergraduates and graduate students in subsequent semesters. To this, I added the goal of having the students significantly process and question the course materials before they came together for our face to face meetings. Unlike most teachers, I have only very rarely taught classes that met more than once a week, so making the most of a single almost-three-hour block is essential to running a successful course.

Now, onto the details…..

I have approached using blogs as a way to encourage engagement with course materials and peers in two ways over the last five or six years: with a network of individual blogs, and with a single place for shared writing. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages, but generally, I find that using a single blog with lots of student authors works well with undergraduates, and that asking each individual to create an separate site works better for graduate students.

Regardless of whether the students each have their own blogging space, I always set up my course materials in WordPress. I provide the course schedule, required readings, general procedures, and a description of major assignments. For several years, I used the ScholarPress Courseware plugin to facilitate the mechanics of plugging the readings into the schedule, but for the last couple of semesters I’ve been using a newer version of WP, so I just created pages using basic HTML.

One approach to integrating public writing with a course is to ask each student to set up an individual blog. This has the advantage of assuring that they leave your course with the skills necessary to set-up and use a blog should they need to do that for another situation. While there are many platforms available, including Blogger and TypePad, I usually suggest that students go to WordPress.com for an account. It doesn’t get much simpler than that, and they learn the administrative interface for the most common stand-alone blogging software. Once the students have set up their sites, I use Google Reader to create a bundle of their RSS feeds so that I can follow their work through a single feed rather than having to check many different ones (thanks to the PressForward staff for the tips on doing this). Then, I post the bundle to the main course site so that everyone can subscribe to it. I find that this method is good for the graduate students who seem to have more willingness to maintain their own space over the long term, and to put a little bit more effort into the interaction of commenting. I ask the graduate students to blog each week in response to the major questions raised by the assigned materials.

Alternately, everyone can blog in the same site. This has the advantage of making for a single source of work. When asked this semester if they would rather set-up their own blogs or work within the course site, my undergraduates opted for using the main blog suggesting that a stronger sense of conversation was easier when everything is together. I generally agree with them. The only exception may be for undergraduates who have established an e-portfolio for their major and who might want to concentrate their writing in that space. When we all work in the same blog, I set up categories for each major author or thematic concentration so that we can easily navigate the large quantities of writing produced during the semester.

Whether using a network of blogs or a single course site, I don’t ask the undergraduates to blog each week. I divide the students into groups of four or five. Each week the students in one group are responsible for writing a blog post that engages the reading for the week and the larger questions of the course, which is due by 5pm two days before class. Then the rest of the class is responsible for commenting on at least one post (due by midnight the day before class). This results in students having to write at least two major reflections and to comment six or seven times during the semester. By requiring comments, I am forcing conversation and a sense of public accountability. Some semesters students do get into the spirit of conversation, but even if they are just fulfilling the requirements, we end of with a solid base for a conversation when we get to class. I’m happy to enter the conversation at that point, but I very rarely enter the space of the blogs, in part because I would like the students to feel like they can offer their thoughts and engage with one another without the sense that I’m waiting swoop in and turn the conversation or correct them. I do, however, read all the posts and the comments, and that writing significantly shapes the approach I take to the materials when we get to class. Finally, I grade all the main posts, and two randomly selected comments from each student. The random selection process of grading was suggested by Mills Kelly many years ago, and has, as he promised, generally guaranteed a reasonably high quality of response from the students. That isn’t too much writing for them, and it isn’t a ton of grading for me.

Of course, I’m neither the first, nor will I be the last, to write about this. One good place to start are the many useful posts on Profhacker in the teaching category.

… for American Studies Senior Seminar participants. Below are some places to start with work for a larger project of historical research. These are by no means prescriptive, but rather are drawn from my own years of work — including the year I spent working on a thesis for American Studies at Georgetown 15 years ago.

• You need a question! Nothing is more important that having a strong inquiry question to keep your research and writing on track through the course of the project. You’ll need to refine it and elaborate it continually through the process.
• You need a method! Mine is generally centered around historical approaches with assistance from cultural theory.
  • What is the process of history? At its most basic, history is the practice of learning about the past based on evidence from primary sources. Generally, historians look at questions of change and causation, and then try to offer interpretations about what happened and why. This is not as easy as it seems.
• You need a field, or several! Historians care what other historians have thought about events in the past. These interpretations change over time and need to be accounted for in historical work.
  • Read as widely as possible in scholarly fields that are related to your topic. This forms your base of secondary sources, offers, context, and provides you with possible interpretations to engage.
  • Have an organizing system for your work from the beginning. Absolutely use Zotero. [Here is my current library.]
  • Search the databases that are related to your field for relevant articles. Start with the American Studies Research Guide. I really like American History and Life, but JStor, and ProjectMuse are also good places to start.
  • Consult Reviews in American History to get a sense of the scholarly conversations going on in the field.
  • Use your library. Search and browse the stacks. Skim and summarize individual works (what is the argument and how is it related to my work?). Be sure to read several reviews on each of the important secondary sources.
• You need primary sources! The choices are endless here, but you might want to consult Archive Finder or the searchable catalog of website reviews from teachinghistory.org to be begin locating materials that might start to offer answers to your inquiry question.
• You need to work through your sources!
  • Create a Zotero entry for each primary source. Take notes there. Sync often.
  • Cognitive science research tells us that there are particular ways that historians approach primary sources.
  • Write all the time: outline, make notes on significance, revisit your questions, constantly articulate your understanding of meaning. I do this with handwritten free writing, and plain text notes.
• You need to draft! Write and rewrite. Writing is a craft that needs to be practiced with conscious attention. Even after doing this for 15 years, I rarely produce anything worth reading without three full drafts. Plan ahead for the amount of time that this drafting process takes.
  • Use models. Find a writer or work that you really admire and use that a guide for possible approaches and structures.
  • Use your writing groups and your advisor. It is almost impossible to write well in isolation. We need readers who offer thoughtful commentary and criticism.
  • Writing environment is really important. I need a clean, full-screen place to draft if I am working on a computer (Try OmmWriter or WriteRoom).
  • Scale matters to me. I have trouble writing on a large screen, and if I get really stuck, I go to paper and pencil. I write a lot by hand and then type it up. The transfer process gives me a chance to take a second pass and make an initial revision as I make things digital.
  • I do my notes as I go (Chicago Manual of Style endnotes, including discursive notes). Never leave them to the end of the process; you will never catchup and you will end up with lots of mistakes. Use Zotero to drag and drop citation information into your documents.
• You need a platform to communicate your conclusions! Historical interpretation can take many forms, not just traditional linear narrative. We can talk more about this if you want.

This is a revised and expanded version of a talk I gave at MITH’s Digital Dialogue series on April 14. It is Part III of III. Read Part I and Part II.

III. Digital Public History and Knowledge Creation

If we’re not doing enough to help the general audience learn about history, how can we do more? How can we design digital exhibits and experiences that focus on public history collections but that also allow users to learn to think historically?

One answer is to expose some of the cognitive work that public historians do to produce the very polished narrative results that audiences are used to finding in public history settings. The work of content experts starts with questions — with being able to recognize gaps on our knowledge and understanding, and being able to work to bridge those gaps. To expose this process means admitting that the important thing about experts is not that they are bottomless sources of knowledge about particular topic, but rather they have existing knowledge AND the skills to build new knowledge.

For the most part, content work is done by experts, whether they are academic historians, museum curators, archivists, or librarians. Noticing the differences between how experts and novices approach knowledge and knowledge creation can provide us with a set of elements to consider as we try to create more meaningful and engaging digital public history. How People Learn lays out six principles of experts’ knowledge that suggest they have a different relationship to approaching new material and solving problems than novices. This relationship has significant import for how useful and transparent typical narrative exhibits are for an audience of novice learners.

1. Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices.

If we want to bring audiences along in critical thinking and problem solving, we need to help them begin to notice the things that experts notice. Providing access to historical materials without taking the time to help users understand what to look for and how to make sense out of it does a disservice to our goals as public historians. We need to carefully explain to users how experts notice those patterns, whether this is through providing a careful scaffolded interaction with historical sources or through providing models of expert practice. More than likely, we need to do both.

2. Experts have acquired a great deal of content knowledge that is organized in ways that reflect a deep understanding of their subject matter.

We cannot expect users to have access to the depth of content knowledge that experts have, but we can be clear about the organizing principles that are useful for attacking disciplinary problems. In public history we need to be identify the historical thinking skills that experts use, and the concepts that are central to solving historical problems. These include having an understanding of:

Evidence: Historical sources are not illustrative materials that accent a narrative. Historical sources are the heart of public history and they should be the focus of our work.

Perspective: Historical sources are created, and users need to account for that in their attempts to make meaning from those sources.

Context: Users will have varying degrees of context knowledge to bring to bear on historical questions, but they have to at least understand that asking about surrounding events, issues, and circumstances is central to beginning to understand how to interpret historical sources.

Multiple causality: Unilinear narratives do not always convey the messiness of history. Once users start to grapple with evidence and perspective, they come to learn that historical inquiry rarely results in the discovery of a single causal factor.

Interpretation: Users might grasp that historical actors bring different perspectives to a particular situation, but too often they forget that historians participate in a process of actively constructing meaning out of historical evidence. The notion that historical knowledge is constructed must be connected to the notion that different historians can reasonably come to different conclusions about the past. We must invite users to recognize interpretive differences and to question which interpretation they find most convincing. Placing those differences in interpretation front and center can quickly make audiences aware that history is not a single unified story, but rather a process of engaging with evidence and creating interpretations about what that evidence means. The existence of multiple interpretations automatically engages the visitor with the material because they can assess which interpretation they find most convincing.

Historiography: Related to the concept of interpretation is the idea that historical understanding changes over time, due to the same factors that influence the creation and meaning of historical sources. Users need to realize that historical experts are part of a long-standing conversation about meaning, and that the current dominant interpretations will not likely be the last word on a topic. Similarly, they need to understand that that conversation is subject to the same kind of rigorous analysis as original historical sources. [1]

3. Experts’ knowledge cannot be reduced to sets of isolated facts or propositions but, instead, reflects contexts of applicability: that is, the knowledge is “conditionalized” on a set of circumstances.

Certainly, novice users will not have the foundational knowledge to draw upon that experts have at their disposal, but more importantly visitors with little experience addressing historical questions will have difficulty decided how to use the knowledge they do have to work on a particular historical question. We need to construct digital work that helps model the ways that historians know which elements of their knowledge are useful in what situations. Undoubtedly, being able to quickly locate the useful tools for problem solving is dependent on practice, but we can provide scaffolding and examples that support that practice for users.

4. Experts are able to flexibly retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little attentional effort.

Once individuals internalize these common cognitive moves, they begin to stop noticing them. This is true of content experts and explains, to some degree, why so few digital public history sites provide the support, models, and tools that users need to begin to be able to ask and answer their own historical questions.

5. Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to teach others.

Experts may not be aware of the kinds of moves they make, so it might be hard for them to make that work explicit. Therefore, we have to re-notice what we do when we interact with historical sources. Additionally, we need to pay more attention to the common missteps novices learners might make when they do historical work, so that we can help move them in the right direction.

6. Experts have varying levels of flexibility in their approach to new situations.

Most experts are aware of these limitations and the level of effort and adjustment necessary for them to engaging in critical analytical work in new contexts. We need to help users develop a similar awareness so that they can adapt to new interpretive challenges. This means being able to assess their own level of understanding and realize where their understanding is inadequate so that they can work to learn something new.

Taking this research into account suggests that we need to fundamentally rethink the way that we address our visitors, both within physical institutions and in digital environments. This moment calls for more than lecture hall experts delivering neatly packaged stories about the past. Instead, we have to showcase the key elements of our disciplinary approaches, providing models of inquiry for the public.

We must find ways to make users aware of the kinds of real intellectual work LAM experts engage in as they labor to construct knowledge and interpretation from collections. How would public engagement with our collections be different if we provided visitors with significant questions to investigate about the past, rather than tidy unilinear narratives? How would public engagement with our collections be different if we provided examples of content experts examining materials from the collections and articulating the gaps in their knowledge and their thinking processes, rather than a polished interpretation? Making these questions and processes visible will begin to provide the key conceptual link for the public between the rich content of our cultural heritage institutions and the more general 21st Century skills.

These points have significant implications for the ongoing conversation about social media, crowdsourcing, and LAM expertise. If we were to do a better job of moving novices from superficial interaction with content to a place where they can begin to think conceptually about competing and contradictory claims, we might have more satisfaction with the types of audience engagement we see. Participation and engagement is good and interesting. It has lots of benefits to community and good will, but we can do more – we can collaborate in the building of knowledge and understanding and questions.

Digital technologies provide particular promise for creating an environment of inquiry, engagement, and meaning making. Institutions have made tremendous strides digitizing their collections and making them available to the public with full collection searches and APIs. Now we must provide users with both the models of and tools for the critical inquiry that will allow them to make their own meaning out of the collections.

Notes:

[1] My thinking about this list of concepts and their importance for the teaching and learning of history is heavily indebted to my collaborators on Historical Thinking Matters, Daisy Martin and Sam Wineburg, and my discussions with the project directors the Teaching American History grants in which CHNM has participated, particularly Eleanor Greene (Peopling the American Past) and Sarah Richardson Whelan (Foundations of U.S. History).

This is a revised and expanded version of a talk I gave at MITH’s Digital Dialogue series on April 14. It is Part II of III. Read Part I.

II. Digital Public History and Traditional Narrative Exhibits

Everyday those of us who work in the digital humanities see new online work that changes the way that we think about evaluating cultural material, whether it be work influenced by the geospatial turn or the results of large-scale text-mining work. Unfortunately, much of the work digital public history produced for a general audience is descriptive and summative rather than inquisitive or analytical. Reproducing the voice of narrative authority in public history projects reinforces the notion that history is just a string of facts, events, dates – not that chronology is not important, but to mask the wonder and questioning that historical sources raise is to misrepresent what history is as a discipline. This is even more important in public history than it is in the academic ranks of digital humanities, because the majority of the public did not receive significant instruction in historical thinking, but rather a steady stream of lecture, dates, and rote memorization. Without modeling authentic historical inquiry, digital public history projects have little chance of actually making a significant impact with their users because those users will be significantly less likely to begin asking their own questions of historical material.

To show the difficulties of many digital public history sites, I am going to focus on two award-winning digital history sites from 2005: NMAH’s The Price of Freedom and Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association’s Raid on Deerfield. These are sites that required major design and development work, and that show the distinction between work that reproduces a narrative of seeming inevitability and that which allows for the complexity of history. Both sites are several years old now, and have all of the drawbacks of content assembled within a Flash interface. Nonetheless, my concern is with their approach to history and not with their design aesthetic or their accessibility.

First, take for example the 2005 Muse Award honorable mention, Price of Freedom: Americans at War from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Graphically this is a stunning site. This site accompanied the very large exhibit that opened at NMAH at the end of 2004 and is ongoing in Military History Hall. The web developers and designers from Second Story Interactive Studios built an attractive interface that made it possible for users to move chronologically through American History, by focusing on major conflicts. Each conflict presents an introductory movie, and then an array of narrative text and artifacts associated with that conflict. It is clear that there was a major investment of time and resources used to create the site, but it is not clear that it serves any goals other than to reproduce the physical exhibit in a digital form.

That physical exhibit was not stirring success with critics and many of their observations can be applied to the online exhibit. For example, Carole Emberton noted in a Journal of American History review, “The exhibit’s title suggests an interpretive stance that assumes freedom is, and has always been, the objective of American military engagements. But freedom is a problematic term, and in failing to recognize how the meaning of freedom has been contested historically, the exhibit takes the viewer on a whiggish stroll through American social and political history, conveniently indulging any desire he or she might have to rely on a facile belief in the mythic march of progress and democratic expansion.” [1] Emberton was not the only critic of the exhibit. Beth Bailey’s review in the Public Historian took notice of an important aspect of the work: “In many ways, the exhibit calls to mind a high school textbook.” [2] These two reviews point to what might be said of so much of current digital public history—that it unthinkingly reproduces the all-knowing voice of the textbook, and that it often fails to raise hard questions. The unilinear narrative of the exhibit forecloses meaningful engagement and questioning from the audience because it fails to model any sense of rupture in knowledge or difference in interpretation.

It is important to note that every narrative exhibit site answers an implicit inquiry question. Those questions, however, may be completely obscured from a novice user by the tone inevitability that is present in the narrative. There are scores of digital history exhibits that follow the traditional narrative model. Some of these even give users access to an archive of materials and sources that supplements those used in the narrative exhibit. In some cases this works to a very good effect for users who are familiar with historical inquiry or for the teachers who want to draw upon the site and the archive to work with their students. But for others, access to the unmediated archive ends up feeling like access to more isolated items—curiosities, not elements in a larger body of evidence.

At CHNM, our own digital history exhibits, which are the result of the intellectual work of George Mason University historians, graduate research assistants, and a team of staff and web developers, provide both a narrative exhibit and an archive of sources. Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives presents a complex portrayal of the lived experience of the Soviet Gulag for the thousands of prisoners who did not fit stereotypical profile of political prisoners. Users have the option of navigating a rich exhibit that has a strong narrative voice, but is populated by documents, art work, and interviews. Users also have the possibility of querying a deep archive of related sources and materials to answer their own questions about the lived-experience of the Gulag. Martha Washington: A Life presents a biographical narrative about the nation’s first First Lady that links her experiences to larger trends in early American history and life. In addition to the narrative exhibit, users can access an archive of Martha Washington’s surviving correspondence. Both of these sites were premised on an inquiry question—Was the Gulag the same everywhere for all prisoners? What was Martha Washington’s life like and what can it tell us about the experiences of planter-class women in the Early Republic?—but neither site exposes the process of forming or investigating those questions for the user. Rather, both present beautifully polished answers (of which we are very proud).

In contrast to these narrative-driven sites, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association/Memorial Hall Museum’s ambitious website Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704 is built around issues of multiple perspective—a concept that is central to historical thinking. This approach drew significant recognition from reviewers, garnering the site an honorable mention for best online exhibition in the 2004 Archimuse Best of the Web Awards, and prompting Journal of American History reviewer Richard Rabinowitz to call it a “brilliantly executed and comprehensively organized electronic exhibition.” [3] Examining the Pocumtuck raid on a English settlement in 1704, the site asks users to approach the inquiry questions by considering the constituencies involved: “Was this dramatic pre-dawn assault in contested lands an unprovoked, brutal attack on an innocent village of English settlers? Was it a justified military action against a stockaded settlement in a Native homeland? Or was it something else?” First, the five cultures involved in the events are introduced first to provide users with a base of background knowledge. Then, the user moves through the conflict chronologically, often facing a question about the situation that asks them to consider the issue of perspective.

In reflecting on the site for participants of the 2005 Museums and the Web conference, Lynne Spichger and Juliet Jacobsen explicitly noted the public import of their work: “The role of museums in the 21st century is an expanded one, moving away from a focus on collections for collections’ sake, toward the conscious use and interpretation of collections for the purpose of engaging and educating a wide public audience in informal lifelong learning.” They argued that their goal was to “develop a powerful and engaging educational experience for a broad public audience” that was structured around the importance of multiple points of view. [4] Focusing on multiple perspectives allows the audience to always be engaged in an effort to piece together a complete story and a complex interpretation that takes into account the partiality of historical sources, and recognizes historians’ inability to fully and definitely know the past.

These few sites are by no means representative of all of the work that is being done in digital history, but they do represent the a large percentage work that is being produced with a general audience in mind. Those creating digital work to serve scholars and to serve students and teachers are doing a wonderful array of work that puts inquiry and process front and center. Others are diligently creating vast digital archives with varying degrees of contextual metadata. Still others are using geospatial interfaces to display historical collections, connecting users to very particular local places (Philaplace, Euclid Corridor History Project, etc.). But, digital history projects targeted at general users do not often enough go beyond traditional narrative exhibits to model inquiry, to speak self-reflexively about cognitive processes, or to provide users with the tools and support to conduct similar kinds of inquiry on their own. We owe our audiences more.

Notes:

1. Carole Emberton, Web site Review [The Price of Freedom], Journal of American History 92:1 (June 2005) paragraph 3 and 7.

2. Beth Bailey, Review [The Price of Freedom], The Public Historian 27:3 (Summer, 2005) 89-92. Quote from 90.

3. Richard Rabinowitz, Web site Review [Raid on Deerfield], Journal of American History 92:2 (Sept. 2005) 709-710.

4. Lynne Spichiger and Juliet Jacobson, “Telling an Old Story in a New Way: Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704 ,” in J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds.). Museums and the Web 2005: Proceedings (Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, 2005) <http://www.archimuse.com/mw2005/papers/spichiger/spichiger.html>.

Read Part III.

This is a revised and expanded version of a talk I gave at MITH’s Digital Dialogue series on April 14. It is Part I of III.

I. Digital Public History and How People Learn

The place of digital history in the digital humanities is topic of frequent conversation at the Center for History and New Media. While the staff have a variety of opinions on the question, we all generally agree that considering the place of digital history in the digital humanities requires that we acknowledge the long kinship between digital history and public history. While the two fields are by no means synonymous, they have similar goals and objectives. Though it may be a thin description of public history, the National Council on Public History offers a starting point, defining “public history as ‘a movement, methodology, and approach that promotes the collaborative study and practice of history; its practitioners embrace a mission to make their special insights accessible and useful to the public.’” They continue to explain “‘public history is the conceptualization and practice of historical activities with one’s public audience foremost in mind.’” This focus on audience is central to understanding the work of public historians, and really to understanding the future possibilities for transformative work in that field.

This focus on audience is central also to the work that we have undertaken at the Center for History and New Media. In the Center’s sixteen year history, we have done our best to take the scholarly work of traditional history and make it available to people outside of the academy. Our work has always been at the intersection scholarship and several publics: students and teachers, enthusiasts, “Citizen Historians” (Scientists, Humanists, Archivists, etc.). From this point of intersection, we are in the position to bring many fields into conversation with one another. Thus, our mission statement calls for using “digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.” This combination of open access and a focus on audience engagement has led us to think about how digital technology can allow us to help users significantly engage with the abundance of materials that are now in digital form. Our mission is not simply to add to the openly available stock of resources, but to provide a range of users with the tools, both cognitive and software-based, to do meaningful work with those resources. Thus, we are not focused on engagement for engagement’s sake, but rather on a larger goal of enriching historical understand for a range of publics.

That is not to suggest that the public is not already interested in history. It is clear that they are. Or at least, it is clear that the major media outlets think that there is significant interest, since they have invested in programming such as NBC’s “Who Do You Think You Are?”, and PBS’s “Faces of America”. Similarly, genealogy sites owned by as Ancestry.com have vast numbers of subscribers and users. These venues show that people have very personal questions about history: What was my grandfather’s role in WWII? Why did my mother’s family come to New York? While these questions are important and can be the route to a larger engagement with historical material, the majority of public history work dwells at another level. The real issue, then, is what can digital history and public history do to move these members of the interested public to engage with content and questions that might not be personal, but that are meaningful nonetheless.

This has always been an important issue, but it has achieved slightly more attention and salience in the last several years with the rise of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. This coalition of corporations and educators has come together to fashion a set of skills they believe workers need to succeed in 21st Century global economy. They call for a focus on critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation. P21 has had broad impact in education circles, and the Obama Administration is certainly aligned with their efforts. There are a variety of critiques of the P21 work, but the strongest is the claim from a group of scholars and educators under the title of Common Core, who argue that P21 ignores the knowledge and content base that learners need to acquire and actualize the skills that the Partnership emphasizes.

More than other institutions in our common cultural life, libraries, archives, and museums–the workplaces of many public and digital historians–hold the content that is central for moving from the vague concepts of 21st Century Skill to knowledge and learning. The collections that reside with our cultural heritage institutions can be vehicles for bringing the public into rich conversations about our past, present, and future. This possibility is even more important now that the Institute of Museum and Library Services is embarking on a major initiative to help LAMs take stock of their role in helping citizens build 21st Century Skills.

To build better meaningful engagement for the public around questions of history, we need to actively bring together the insights of our colleagues in public history with those of our colleagues in the learning sciences. We cannot just lay out a collection of stuff in chronological order; that kind of presentation does not do the work that we need it to do. History is about asking questions. All practitioners do it–academics, curators, archivists. Why don’t we share that with the public? Why don’t we model the kind of critical inquiry that goes on behind the scenes?

Only if we expose the cognitive process of doing history–historical thinking–the perpetual beta of historical scholarship, including conflicting interpretations–will we really be able to position the public to engage in meaningful inquiry. We need to surface the ways that the introduction of new sources spawns new questions, and those new questions make us revisit the evidence and the existing interpretations. Learning takes work. It is participatory and relational and represents authentic engagement. Knowledge and inquiry build on the context that users can access if we help them. But, public history–digital and analogue–needs to actively support this kind of interaction, to scaffold public inquiry.

One way to do this is to consciously integrate the work from cognitive science into the ways that we think about presenting content for users. In 1999, the National Research Council published How People Learn as a general overview of the latest work in cognitive science and what it could mean for teaching and learning in a whole host of disciplines. Subsequently, specific committees produced targeted work on learning in history, mathematics, and science. [How Students Learn: History in the Classroom (2005) is the relevant version.] How People Learn outlined three key findings (p.14-19) about learning that are important for how we might transform digital public history–even though these are phrased with respect to students, it is clear from the underlying research that these findings apply to life-long learners:

• 1. Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.
• 2. To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must: (a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application.
• 3. A “metacognitive” approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them.

These three findings have the potential to transform the way that public historians–digital and analogue–think about creating content for audiences. We may not be able to fully assess the preconceptions that users bring to our subject matter, but we can do audience research to start to understand some of them. Similarly, we can provide users with a base of content knowledge and then bring them with us as we form and investigate questions about history. Doing this in an explicit way will help users feel equipped to form and investigate their own questions when they are faced with the abundance of historical sources that are available online.

Read Part II.

As a follow up to yesterday’s slides, here is a link to the Omeka website that I developed to support the talk at the National Council for History Education. It’s much better than the slides because you can actually explore the resources and tools.

Have at it and let me know what you think.

The Future of Teaching the Past: Digital Technologies and History Education in the 21st Century (http://chnm.gmu.edu/staff/sharon/workspace/OmekaEd/)

Slides from a keynote at the National Council for History Education Annual Meeting, March 13, 2009.

The launch is pending for the exciting new browser citation tool from the most-excellent team of programmers at CHNM. Zotero is going to be the coolest thing to happen for academic Firefox users since tabbed browsing.

I can’t wait to get my download, because it will help immeasurably as I’m beginning to work on my new project (I’ve got research cites scattered all over the place…). Then, I’m gonna suggest that all my students download the toolbar, because it should really help them compile their materials for the edited collections that will be their culminating projects for the semester.