Deja vu.
One of my first reactions as I read through this week’s assignment was “Wait, we’ve talked about a lot of this already.” And we have– we’ve touched on the issue of permanence and the necessity of developing a strategy to ensure your digital resources stand the test of time, on the issue of what to keep and why, whether everything is useful or there should be some rubric for seperating the wheat from the digital chaff, how to approach issues of shared authority in online history… many of the points that Rosenzweig addresses in his article are things that have come up repeatedly in our blog posts and class discussions.
Thinking back on our class discussions, it is also fairly easy to perform a type of “source heuristic”, and to see where each of our individual backgrounds and interests color our approach to these issues. I, for example, tend to work from a “collections management” point of view, and so the necessity for having a well-developed strategy for the continued maintenance and upkeep of a site from day one (or before) is an important point, while Kate, with her library and archival science background, is very engaged with the issues surrounding archival collection policies.
And we all (Laura, our oral historian, perhaps leading the way) are very engaged with the issues of shared authority. In my opinion, that is perhaps what differentiates the “public” historian from the “academic” historian. Rosenzweig touches on this in his article, noting that “most historians would argue that, while digital collections may put ‘the novice in the archive,’ he or she is not so likely to know what to do there”, and that “most hostorians have not embraced this vision in which everyone becomes his own historian.” In this he refers back to Carl Becker’s 1931 AHA Presidential Address “Everyman His Own Historian“, taking it in one of the two most often used ways– as a call for more engagement with the public by our profession. Rosenzweig is not alone in this view of the historical profession– John Kuo Wei Tchen, in the December 1994 Journal of American History article “Back to the Basics: who is researching and interpreting for whom?” does not go so far as to argue “that to be a truly competent historian, one should first master the basics of being a public historian”, but does note that academe remains disengaged from the general public, writing only for itself, and states “A public-oriented historian, I would argue, is qualitatively different from an academic historian… theorizing from direct engagement with everyday people is quite different from theorizing from archival evidence.”
This is perhaps why courses such as ours seem to end up under the Public History mantle. As has been noted repeatedly, the web is a fundamentally “democratizing” technology– and the issues of contested authority in terms of historical interpretation and memory that arise from this orientation lead directly to engagement with the people who develop web-based history content, whether archives, web monographs, or interactive exhibits. And considering this, perhaps we should do Mr. Tchen one better, and ask “to be a competent online historian, should we first master the basics of being a public historian?”