The future of teaching digital public history

In the following text, Mills Kelly (George Mason University; currently Fulbright Scholar at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz) is going to discuss the benefits and opportunities of digital public history (DPH) courses. The author is reflecting on his experience teaching DPH courses and how they offer students a wide range of career paths and choices beyond traditional academic or museum settings. The author notes that students are drawn to DPH because it allows them to engage with the public and make a meaningful impact, but also recognizes that students want even more from their education. The text focuses on shared authority and collaboration and the challenges of collaboration within DPH projects. Overall, the author is advocating for the importance of digital public history education and its potential to shape the future of the field.

Mills Kelly

Several years ago I wrote an article about teaching digital public history that would be published in a collection by a leading German academic press. As is typical in these situations, I was asked to provide a title for the essay and I did. I’ll admit, it was a provocative title, but there was a good reason for being a bit provocative. When the page proofs arrived, the title was still there, but at quite literally the last minute, someone had second thoughts and the editors of the collection asked me to change the title to remove its provocative language. In other times, I’ve had editors or publishers suggest alternative titles for my writing that they thought would be more appealing to a wider audience, and if my memory serves me, I agreed to all those suggestions. But this was the first time I had ever been told my title of choice wasn’t appropriate and had to be changed.

What was the title that so concerned the editors and the publisher? It was, “I Just Wanna Move Some Shit”. The title the essay was published under was, “Learning Public History by doing Public History”.[i] Why did I choose that original title? I am a conservation volunteer in our national park system in the United States and more than a decade ago, a group of soldiers was helping me with a project on a trail. One of those soldiers came to me after about an hour and said, “Sir, you have to understand. I just wanna move some shit.” I gave him a task—removing a large tree stump from the trail—that let him move some shit. When he was done, he was as happy as I’ve ever seen a conservation volunteer be. On my drive home that day I was reflecting on our work together and also thinking about the digital public history class I would be teaching the following semester and it occurred to me that “moving some shit” was exactly what our students want to do. To be sure, they are very interested in the content of history, but they also want to make history. They want to create things, tangible things, that they can look back at with pride. A well-crafted essay or successfully completed examination might be satisfying, but those are ephemeral. A public history project, whether digital or analog, is much more tangible, much less ephemeral. They want to roll their metaphorical stumps out of the trail so they can show friends and colleagues what they have accomplished.

But our students want even more. When I ask my students taking digital public history (DPH) courses why they have chosen to learn more about DPH, the vast majority tell me that they are learning digital humanities because they love the humanities and they think having the knowledge and skills they obtain in DPH will help them find jobs and forge new career paths. And who can blame them?  If you love history but don’t want to be a teacher or a scientific researcher, it is not always clear to students just how many jobs, how many rewarding career paths there are in public history. Unlike conventional teaching and academic options, public history offers a wide variety of choices including museum educator, city planning official, historic preservation, metadata management, historic site manager, and on and on. On any given day there are hundreds of job postings in public history in the U.S. and every year, more and more of these jobs require applicants to be well-versed in digital methods. This means, of course, that students who have spent time studying DPH and applying their knowledge in project environments have a much better chance of securing one of those jobs and advancing rapidly in their careers.

Teaching digital public history is uniquely challenging for several reasons. When I was first asked to teach such a course more than a decade ago, I had been teaching history using digital resources and methods as well as outright digital history courses since the late 1990s. In those early days, “digital” meant working with the most basic versions of browsers like Netscape and Internet Explorer and teaching students to write their own HTML code. I also had been creating large-scale digital history projects since 2002. But none of my prior courses or projects had been explicitly focused on public history. In other words, I come to public history through digital history, not the other way around. I taught that first course just as my book, Teaching History in the Digital Age,[ii] was coming out and I decided it was time to apply the central conclusion of the book to what I was doing with my students. In the book I argued that we have to give our students opportunities to do something with the knowledge and information they acquire in our courses rather than just telling us in essays or exams what they have learned. I also had the example of that soldier and the stump firmly in my mind. In that very first digital public history course I began requiring them to make digital things for the public, not just for their professor. But I did not tell them what those things should beyond requiring them to be digital, public, analytical, and interesting. By turning them loose in this way, I wanted them to do something they thought was worth doing.

The tricky part of teaching this way is making sure students understand some of the fundamental issues in the field of public digital history even as they are having fun making digital things for the public. For example, the concept of shared authority is a fundamental principle of the field of public history, but it is not something that history students are used to think about. But, as Katherine Corbett and Howard Miller wrote in The Public Historian almost 20 years ago, “All good historical practice is reflective, but public history requires a special commitment to collaborate, to respond, to share both inquiry and authority.”[iii] For decades, public historians, whether they are doing analog public history or digital public history have wrestled with this problem. How far can we go in sharing authority with communities and individuals who are the subjects of the work we do? How should we structure our work to give authority to the public without letting the public dictate the content of our work? The answer remains a moving target, but as Serge Noiret argues, “A public historian’s role in sharing his authority with the public is also to critically validate opinions against recognized scientific knowledge.”[iv] Discussions of the concept of shared authority and the theoretical framework that public historians use to make decisions about just how much authority to share and in what ways can often be very rich and engaging, because these conversations force us to consider the role of the professional historian in society. Students are very interested in this question because speaks directly to their futures as historians.

However, In the last several years it has become clear to me that there is another element of shared authority that we need to be teaching our students to make sense of and there is very little in the ways of a theoretical or scientific literature that speaks to this issue. When I began teaching digital public history in 2013, most projects you could find online were the output of one team of historians and technical staff at one institution or historic site and only rarely pushed the envelope of technical innovation. But as the field has matured, more and more DPH projects involve collaborations across multiple historical organizations and are funded by multiple stakeholders. What this means is that going forward we need to be teaching our students not only how to share authority with the subjects of their work, but also what it means to share authority within the team or collaborators and stakeholders they are part of. And sometimes that navigation can mean playing the role of expert when working with new and innovative implementations of digital tools. A very recent book from the University of Bielefeld addresses this problem in several ways. As the authors ask,”Is it possible, despite all the diversity of our DH projects, to define central competencies and requirements for project managers in the DH field? Can we derive content for the transfer of the necessary knowledge and skills from these results? Where are these competencies learned and taught?”[v] I would suggest that we have to teach them in all levels of our history curriculum.

For example, the “HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium” (HCAC) is a project of America’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the special collections and archives at five of America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). When it is complete the database that drives the website will hold more than 3,000 digital items from the five universities—including oral histories, photographs, maps, images of artifacts, works of art, manuscript sources, and scans of newspapers and magazine. My colleague Dr. Deepthi Murali and I have been leading the back end of this project—database development, digitization management, etc.—with a team of technical staff and graduate students at my university. Our MA and PhD students in digital history have not only had to learn sophisticated digital humanities skills, but they have also had to learn how to navigate a project led by one of America’s leading museums, that has multiple financial stakeholders, five distinct content partners, a management consultancy, a web design firm, and a separate Smithsonian team developing a traveling exhibition tied to the digital project. To say that none of our students thought they would learn any of those skills when they enrolled in our PhD program would be a significant understatement.[vi]

Nevertheless, projects like the HCAC will play an important role in the future of digital public history. My colleague Dr. Murali and I are already leading or helping to lead several such projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (rrchnm.org) where we work and we have at least one or two more in the funding pipeline. Dr. Murali and I are not outliers in the field. More and more projects with similarly complex mixes of content partners, financial stakeholders, researchers, and students are appearing every day. The museums, archives, libraries and other public history sites where our students will end up working will, increasingly, find themselves involved in these sorts of multi-partner projects made possible by linked open data. What this means is that those of us teaching digital public history need to start planning now for how we will help our students prepare to work in these much more sophisticated project environments. Because none of us (or almost none of us) were trained to operate in such complex roles, we may need to find practitioners from industry or from other parts of the university who can collaborate with us to develop learning experiences that fit with our students’ needs. We will certainly need to seek out internship opportunities that put our students into these situations while they are still developing as professionals. And we will need to find new ways to evaluate their learning so we can provide them critical feedback as they grow.

Will it be easy? Of course not. Will it be exciting and challenging? Absolutely. And it certainly won’t be boring.

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[i] Kelly, Mills. ““Learning Public History by doing Public History””. Handbook of Digital Public History, edited by Serge Noiret, Mark Tebeau and Gerben Zaagsma, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022, pp. 211-222; URL: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110430295-018 .

[ii] Kelly, Mills, Teaching History in the Digital Age, University of Michigan Press, 2013; URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/dh.12146032.0001.001 .

[iii] Katharine Corbett and Howard Miller, “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry”, The Public Historian (2006) 28 (1): 15-38; URL: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2006.28.1.15.

[iv] Serge Noiret, “Sharing Authority in Online Collaborative Public History Practices” Handbook of Digital Public History (2022); URL: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110430295-004 .

[v] Fabian Cremer, Swantje Dogunke, Anna Maria Neubert, Thorsten Wübbena (eds.) Projektmanagement und Digital Humanities. Bielefeld University Press (2024); URL: https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839469675 .

[vi] HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium; URL: https://nmaahc.si.edu/connect/strategic-partnerships/hbcu-history-and-culture-access-consortium.

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