How can digital history best serve public history?
2 thoughts on “DH Questions”
A lot of the things we discussed last class pertain here, especially the parts about visual representations. If public history is about translating information to the public and involving them in “history”, then digital history as medium has obvious applications (I’m still trying to wrap my head around DH as method and where the line is between the two). I think that it is very important for both digital historians and public historians (and digital public historians! Huzzah! Let’s make a sub-sub-field of two sub-fields and develop our own jargon!) to make sure that their visual representations effectively share information.
Naturally, making sure that the information is clearly interpreted is key, but I wonder if there are ways to help the public become more literate in the “language” of DH? Just as we’re learning how to process this info, is there a way to streamline the process so that anyone who is interested in the discussion can do so without the benefit of a professor/guide?
This is a great point–we’ll be discussing the charts in class on Tuesday, so this would be helpful to bring up. This might also be the beginning of a definition of method vs medium (a distinction the field is only starting to make). IE, digital history as medium has a lot in common with public history in that it’s focused on engaging and hooking in a lay audience, where digital history as a method has more in common with academic history with its focus on analysis and intervention in scholarly conversations.
A lot of the things we discussed last class pertain here, especially the parts about visual representations. If public history is about translating information to the public and involving them in “history”, then digital history as medium has obvious applications (I’m still trying to wrap my head around DH as method and where the line is between the two). I think that it is very important for both digital historians and public historians (and digital public historians! Huzzah! Let’s make a sub-sub-field of two sub-fields and develop our own jargon!) to make sure that their visual representations effectively share information.
Naturally, making sure that the information is clearly interpreted is key, but I wonder if there are ways to help the public become more literate in the “language” of DH? Just as we’re learning how to process this info, is there a way to streamline the process so that anyone who is interested in the discussion can do so without the benefit of a professor/guide?
This is a great point–we’ll be discussing the charts in class on Tuesday, so this would be helpful to bring up. This might also be the beginning of a definition of method vs medium (a distinction the field is only starting to make). IE, digital history as medium has a lot in common with public history in that it’s focused on engaging and hooking in a lay audience, where digital history as a method has more in common with academic history with its focus on analysis and intervention in scholarly conversations.