I was pleased to participate in this roundtable (PDF) about the possible digital paths for The Public Historian. As the flagship publication for the National Council on Public History, the future of the journal is an important thing for us all to consider.
I hope you’ll read the perspectives here, and offer your own.
The ITHAKA S+R report “Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians” covers a lot of ground from a number of perspectives. For the most part, I think people who work in digital history and with libraries and archives will find little that is surprising here. As someone who comes to this conversation as a digital historian who builds tools, works collaboratively with libraries, museums, and archives, and who teaches digital methods for graduate students, I generally agreed with the recommendations.
The report characterizes history as a discipline in transition, and it is–both in human and institutional senses. Historians, graduate students, archivists, and librarians are each in their own way coping with the “problem of abundance” created by the digital turn. The recommendations are addressed to a range of stakeholders, but I find that the group that is most in need of a reorientation here are the academic historians themselves.
In my reading of the report, I was struck by the general reluctance of the historians in the sample to try new approaches and learn new skills. Digitizing sources in the archives is not really a new approach; it’s an upgrade from the photo copy machine.
The unwillingness of the interview subjects to invest the time in learning and using citation management tools was particularly disturbing, and yet totally unsurprising. Granted, this is a difficult transition to make in the midst of an ongoing project, but as historians launch new projects, these are exactly the tools that can help them organize and manage the materials that they digitize during their archives visits.
Gaining intellectual control over source materials is a central part of our work as historians. The scale and format of those source materials have changed over the past thirty years, and somewhat dramatically over the past dozen as archival digizitation projects have begun to hit a critical mass. As a result, practices are going to be forced to change or we will no longer be able to say that our work represents the best reading of the existing evidence.
The report characterizes digital historians as a minority in the profession is certainly true. We are. And, we are primarily self-taught, but we are not self-taught in isolation. There is a community here on twitter and blogs–history done in public, if not public history. And, there are a range of ways that that community supports its members in learning new skills, building new tools, and producing new research.
Generally, these folks are at home with the sense of uncomfortableness and risk of learning new methods and approaches. This sometimes results in a feeling of being at sea while figuring out something completely new means accepting and embracing failure and frustration–you are no longer an expert; you are a novice.
I suspect that this kind of discomfort is simply to overwhelming for historians who are defined by being the expert in their field, being the most knowledgable, being the person who critiques the shortfalls of the work of others. As a result, we are seeing this community grow most rapidly amongst those willing to take the risks — those not under the tenure clock, and those not lulled into the complacency of the security that comes after.
But, the fact of the matter is that to be responsible guides to their students, mid-career historians desperately need opportunities for training in information managements and digital tools. The faculty who are teaching the current crop of PhD students are woefully unprepared to assist their students in surveying and analyzing the vast field of source material that they have access to at this point. Well-trained in the skills necessary to closely read and corroborate sources as they build answers to historical questions, these historians would benefit from knowing more about how text-mining, visualization, and geospatial tools offer ways to see new things a larger aggregate of sources.
Over the past seven to ten years the range of tools available for use in historical research that don’t require anyone to learn a programming language or to build anything from scratch has skyrocked–Voyant, ViewShare, WordPress, Omeka, Zotero, Paper Machines, etc. These “software as service” tools are a place to begin. So are periodic gatherings like THATCamps with workshop sessions.
But, really, we need something more concrete: a several week summer workshop for digital history novices who want to build a baseline of skills and learn how to learn new ones in a discipline-specific context. (The Digital Humanities Summer Institutes don’t fit the bill here; they’re just too advanced for this crowd.) Endorsement and promotion from the AHA and its Research Committee would go a long way toward making this kind of professional development viable.
Of course, first we need a field of participants who are willing to enter into a community of novices and risk takers who are willing to be uncomfortable as they learn new things and help one another.
Reaching this reluctant and unprepared middle of the profession is the only way that we can really answer the alarming sense of unpreparedness that report surfaces from the graduate students. We would do well to begin to take a “methods across the curriculum” approach to training graduate students, that includes both analogue and digital skills.
One semester of methods training frequently positions students to rehearse the history of the profession, and to identify the characteristics of a range of methodological approaches. This semester is usually eventually followed by a dissertation seminar that comes far too late in the game. The result is a growing number of students who languish at the ABD stage while they figure out how to do their work.
Readings courses that focus solely on mastering the existing range scholarship only begin to scratch the surface of preparing graduate students to contribute to that scholarship. Each and every topics course should to some degree offer additional methods work and guidance in forming research questions, locating and organizing materials, and applying analytical tools–analogue or digital.
But, this can only happen when the skills and knowledge about working in this digital environment is shared across the faculty.
[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.