the social use of digital history

Our Past is in Bits

digital history (Interchange: The Promise of Digital History, The Journal of American

History, Vol. 95, No. 2 (Sept. 2008))

. to do digital history is to create a framework, an ontology, through the technology for people to experience, read, and follow an argument about a historical problem

. digital history makes use of sources in digital form

Digital history is not only a direction in the historical scholarship: this term can describe also new forms of social connections to the past

knowledge & heritage

outside the institution

Akademia Rzygaczy (The Gargoyle Academy): an association of amateur historians in Gdańsk, a grassroots and quasi scholary project. www.rzygacz.webd.pl, CC-BY-SA Jarod Carruthers

Citizen historians in action: online

discussion with historical maps, forum.dawnygdansk.pl

Akademia Rzygaczy offline: Measures

of Gdansk on the day of uncovery its

reconstruction (July, 2005)CC-BY Brosen

online community of citizen historians:

. they are amateurs: they have knowledge, passion and time

. they come from the internet and use it intensively

. they operate in digital and real world, outside institutions

. they share knowledge and resources for free, they do not care too much about the copyrights

. their knowledge has a dynamic character

historical heritage and grassroots digitalization

. independent actions without coordination and standards

. outside the institutions of memory

. the activity of local citizen historians

. true angels of public domain

. digital rescue history

the Digital Archives of Local Tradition (CATL)

. network of social digital archives based on thelocal libraries

. aim: to rescue local historical heritage, to support citizen historians by giving themknowledge, standards and tools

. promoting the local heritage globally(Europeana)

. use the potential of grassroots digitalization

the ontology of networked digital archive (James

MacDevitt, The User-Archivist and Collective (In)Voluntary Memory: Read/Writing the Networked Digital Archive, in: Revisualizing Visual Culture, ed. Ch. Bailey and H. Gardiner, Farnham 2010, 109-123)

. networked digital archive: open up for dispersal and aggregation

. before: the Archivist produces the Archive, theUser consumes it

. now: User-Archivist – when you browse thedigital archive, you create it

participatory archive (Isto Huvila, Participatory archive: towards decentralised

curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management, Archival Science, 8(1), 2008, 15-36.)

. decentralised curation - Users plan and produce the digital archive

. radical user orientation (not only usability)

. contextualisation of both records and the entire archival process - the importance of other than archival and organisationalcontexts of records

. more than web 2.0

Participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisationof records management saarenkartano.muuritutkimus.fi

Wikipedia is not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot.James Bridle, On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography,http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/

new universality (Pierre Lévy, The Second Flood. Report on Cyberculture, Council of

Europe, Paris 1996. )

. old universality: excluding the alternatives, total, connected with state, religion or ideology

. cyberspace as new universality: ratheracceptation than domination - because all can be published

commemoration

new universality

commemoration as a process of unification, supporting a dominantnarratives about the past

commemoration as a process of asking questions, identifying with people from history and discussing the dominant narratives of the past http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01abKAww_9k

new forms of commemorating

. remix and convergence (Jenkins)

. all can be discussed (new universality)

. virtual monuments and memory places(Wikipedia)

. participation and working in communities

. niche interpretations of the past (conspiracy theories)

History (19th century) digital history (now)

state institution of memory

independent onlinecommunity

knowledge information

monopol in ideology new universality (Lévy)

historians citizen historians

printed digital

state locality

witness / memory prosthetic memory / digital media

Historiaimedia.orginformation about historical resources available onlinenews about digital history trends and projectsarticles about connections between memory and popculturecontent published in CC-BY-SA

thank youmarcin@wilkowski.org