digital humanities – Online Portfolio

May 15, 2018 (Final Self-Reflection)

The best way to learn more about Digital Humanities is working with people who have the knowledge and expertise in the field. After learning from the best professors selected by the GMU program, I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Pamela (Pam) Henson, Historian for Smithsonian Institution Archives, and her research assistant, Lisa. During my internship with the Smithsonian for two semesters, I have gained new skills to help me complete my digital public humanities site and to teach my undergraduate students about digital humanities as an introductory course. For this Spring semester, I used what I have learned in my graduate courses as well as from my own teaching experience to design an oral history collection. Pam selected Lucile Quarry Mann to be the first from the many collections (150 and counting) for my internship project.

Before I worked with Pam, I had minimal knowledge about oral history. After reading and researching more about oral history, I realized how it is a crucial component of digital humanities and the preservation of living history. Listening to the recorded interviews, which were originally recorded with tape recorders in the 1970s, has helped me to appreciate the unique discourse of oral history interviews between an interviewer and interviewee. The concept of digitizing audio recordings of interviews is fascinating because it allows the current audience to have access to living history in different formats. I also learned the importance of keeping track of everything such as documenting each interview with detailed information by viewing the transcripts and notes that were documented by Pam.

Designing a digital platform for an oral history collection comes with several challenges. One of the challenges was to present the material in a way that would engage a broad audience. In the designing stages of the digital platform, I used the skills that I have learned from the DH courses and my teaching experience. I have been teaching online since 2007, and one of my courses introduces students to think and analyze visual content from a rhetorical perspective for a writing course. Another challenge was selecting a segment of a full interview to introduce to the audience. The interview segment had to be short (5 minutes or less). There were a couple of interesting segments that lasted 10 minutes, but they were too long. The next challenge was to select images from the archives to correspond with the interview. In addition to posting images and text with the interview segment (e.g. image carousel), I came up with an idea of creating videos that combined the audio recording of the selected interview segment with images. I enjoyed the creative process of making a video because I was able to improve my video making skills while incorporating some of the techniques and skills that I have learned from my DH courses. The other challenge was making sure that there was enough memory or space for posting images and videos on the selected web page. These challenges provided a pathway for designing a digital platform for an oral history collection.

Working with Pam and Lisa has helped me to re-envision my design for Lucile Q. Mann’s oral history collection. From our weekly teleconferences and feedbacks, we collaborated to make the oral history and video history collections website possible for future launching. The progress is steady. Their helpful feedbacks were encouraging. I also provided feedback for the introductory pages of the oral history and video history collections website. Pam created a template that was modeled after my web page designs for Lucile Q. Mann’s oral history collection for future interns who will be working to put together oral history collections for the Smithsonian Institution. I am very excited that my work helped with designing the template for future oral history collections. I am very proud to be part of their project. I enjoyed working with a supportive and intelligent group, and I look forward to viewing the oral history collection on the Smithsonian Institution website when it is completed.

This semester’s internship has given me a new perspective on how oral history plays a significant role as a component of Digital Humanities. Presenting information from the past to an audience of the present and future is less challenging when certain digital tools, theories, and skills are used. How do we keep the changing audience interested in the people of the past? What digital tools are useful for creating and designing a new digital platform to present the past? How do we try to preserve the past without losing sight of our focus? Even though the past will remain constant in a form of a recorded interview in the case of Lucile Quarry Mann’s oral history collection, it is up to the digital humanities scholar/specialist to work with others to keep it visible and interesting in the present and for the future. It is also up to a collaborative group of people with various skill sets to help preserve the past and curate it as part of living history. Therefore, I plan to continue networking with people to encourage collaboration for my own digital public humanities project on Korean American history and culture while working on honing my oral history interviewing skills for future interviews.

April 13, 2018

Since my March post, I have been working on designing and creating an oral history page for Lucile Quarry Mann. After listening to more than 30 hours of audio recorded interviews and reviewing the transcripts, I selected at least 4 interesting segments from the interviews as featured items. I enjoyed the selection process because I became more familiar with Lucile Mann’s life. Her life with Dr. William Mann was exciting and adventurous. Also, I enjoyed listening to Pam Henson’s interviewing techniques because they will help me to develop a better understanding of oral history and approaching it from a different perspective. Pam’s discourse with Lucile Mann revealed exciting stories about the couple and how they contributed to the Smithsonian history and culture.

The process of linking the images to the selected interview segments was very challenging. First, I had to research the Smithsonian Archives for images to match the interview segments. Second, I had to splice the exact point an interview segment begins and ends. Third, I had difficulty narrowing down my selections. I tried my best to stay within the 5 minutes or less for the interview selections. Fourth, I was unable to find specific images for one of the interview segments that I thought would be a great featured item to entice the audience to listen to the full interviews. Even though the interviews were audio recordings, I was determined to make a video that synchronizes the audio recording segment with the images that were from the Mann family collections (e.g. photo albums, field books, and journals). During this process, I constantly thought about my audience. I created and designed for two different personas who would be most interested in listening to the oral history interviews, especially Lucy Mann’s interviews. Here is a link to the video in YouTube: https://youtu.be/lhpLiLftZpc

In one of our weekly meetings, I informed Pam and Lisa that I was unable to find most of the images for one of the segmented interviews. Pam sent excellent files for me to search for more images. These files allowed me to explore another segment that might be interesting to the audience. Pam designed the Oral History Intro Page. Lisa designed the Oral Histories summaries page. I designed Lucile Quarry Mann’s page for the Oral History Collection. However, when we had our meeting, we provided feedback for each other’s design because it was a collaborative effort. I designed Lucile Mann’s page in a landscape layout, so that it would closely resemble an actual web page. I tried to stay within the current guidelines of the Smithsonian’s Natural History website. I used my skills from my GMU course in designing a digital platform for a public humanities and history website. For L. Mann’s page, I tried to keep it less crowded and spaced out with a main image of Lucile Mann, a short bio section, an image carousel, segment clips with transcript, and a video that combines the audio recording of interview with images in synchronization. I had to post it in YouTube because the video was too large to send via email. I also added closed caption and transcript. I included a link to access the full interviews with a short description to tap into the curiosity of the audience to find out more about Lucy’s adventurous life. For the description, I kept the language simple and engaging. I learned this technique in my GMU coursework in Digital Humanities. Also, I added a Finding Aid link and links for additional resources that reference Lucile Q. Mann within the Smithsonian Archives and website.

My project was challenging, but I enjoyed it. It made me think about ways to redesign my own public humanities website. It also encouraged me to work with people from different professions and listen to good feedback. Collaboration, Communication, and Creativity are key elements in presenting a living history on a digital platform. This project has given me a chance to work on honing my video making and audio synchronization skills. Therefore, I look forward to seeing the finished product.

March 9, 2018

For the past few weeks, I have been working with Pam and her assistant Lisa to redesign and re-envision the Smithsonian’s oral history website. After reviewing, evaluating, and discussing 8 different oral history websites, each of us came up with ideas for a website redesign plan. I used the skills that were learned during my GMU Digital Humanities coursework. I also incorporated skills from designing my own websites. I imagined at least 2 different personas to approach my design from an audience’s perspective. Then, I typed a document that explains each part of the redesigned website. After I wrote my draft, I sketched what the redesigned website would look like. I learned this skill in Dr. Leon’s class when I was designing my public history website. I drew 4 different web pages of the website with a pencil (traced it over with a dark blue ink pen) on white sheets of 8 x11 paper: main page, about page, oral history interview pages A and B. I included a menu with clearly labeled buttons that will allow the user to learn about the site, navigate the oral history collections, listen and/view the oral history interviews, and read about interview’s background. It also included copyright information, a finding aid, map, timeline, and a contribution page for future crowdsourcing. Then, I scanned the completed sketches and saved them into a .pdf file. At the time I was redesigning the website, I was unaware that they had a current website. I was referencing the old website from 2004. I was informed about the current website when Pam, Lisa, and I re-convened to discuss our redesign plans. Fortunately, it all worked out. I suggested adding a timeline and map. The importance of having a timeline and/or map was something I learned in Dr. Kelly’s class. It helps the audience visualize the locations and time period when connecting them to the historical content. Also, I suggested placing a short video 1-2 minutes on the main page to introduce one of their featured collections to draw in the audience and engage them to explore their site and oral history collections. The other option was to include 1 or 2 paragraphs about the featured collection with selected images.

The next part of my internship is to create a way to sort and bring one of the collections together. Pam has suggested focusing on women at the Smithsonian, so we agreed it was good start. I received several audio interview recordings, transcripts, blog links about Lucile (Lucy) Quarry Mann. I am in the process of listening to the interviews while viewing the transcripts. Each interview is 30 minutes or more. During this time, I have created a short video (59 seconds) to get an idea of what a short video would look like to draw the audience to Lucy Mann’s oral history interviews. I used iMovie to created my video. Since the video was too large to send via email to Pam and Lisa, I had to post it on my YouTube Channel. Here is a link to my humble and short video: https://youtu.be/caC-9EFBcGM

February 9, 2018

I enjoyed the selected readings that were recommended by my Smithsonian mentor, Pam Henson. She encouraged me to read Oral History and Digital Humanities edited by Douglas A. Boyd and Mary A. Larson before I start my internship work. The essays in the book helped me to see a different perspective of Digital Humanities, and it gave me enough background information of how oral history became integrated into the digital world. Also, oral history is a component of Digital Humanities, and it has some interesting roots. Each of the authors described their challenges and recommendations of presenting oral history on a digital platform. The methods described in the book were insightful and informative. With advancing technology, they had to constantly tweak a few things to present oral history interviews online. The concept of the audience from each author reminded me of my GMU Digital Humanities course lesson on audience or user. I thought about the type of persona they had to imagine when making adjustments to their work. In addition to budget concerns and having enough manpower, collaboration was a key factor. This book provided good resources, past and present, that revealed the changes and importance of keeping the content significant with advancing technology. I reviewed some of the older oral history websites and noticed how they much they have changed due to change in technology, budget, manpower, collaboration, and audience. Therefore, these changes are no different from creating and maintaining a digital public humanities site.

Also, Pam introduced me to 8 different Oral History websites for evaluation. Pam, Lisa (Pam’s research assistant), and I are in the process of evaluating them in order to design Smithsonian’s Oral History Archive online. So far, I have reviewed 3 oral history websites. Carefully evaluating each site helped me to come up with ideas to improve my own public humanities website. There are themes and trends that seem to be outdated on a few sites, but the content is very useful if certain things were changed. Even though I am evaluating each site from my own perspective, I am constantly reminded in the back of my mind that the user is also looking for something else. During my coursework, I learned about the importance of designing a digital platform with several personae in mind. The digital tools and presentation of the oral history interviews are very important. The description or metadata comes back to haunt me in a good way. Learning about Dublin Core at the beginning of the GMU DH program helped me to look for the basic elements for each interview. Also, I am learning to see differences on how transcripts are displayed on each site.

The work that I have completed for the past few weeks have encouraged me to use my learned knowledge during my GMU coursework and experience with designing my own digital public humanities and teaching history and literature sites. I am excited about working with Pam and Lisa. Pam has been very helpful, and I appreciate the knowledge she has shared with me. I look forward to working on their oral history archive site.

December 2017

From November through December 12th, I worked on project summaries for the Smithsonian Transcription Center. My mentor, Ricc Ferranter, introduced me to Trello (web-based project management board) and walked me through the process of drafting and launching project summaries for crowdsourcing. Each slideshow required research, and I enjoyed researching various topics. The more I read each one, the more I wanted to know about certain things. The biggest challenge was trying to select one of the items in the documents that will capture the audience and lead them to transcribe them. There was so much interesting information that the selection process was challenging and fun. The Smithsonian Transcription Center relies on crowdsourcing for their transcriptions, so my goal was to draft short and engaging summaries with a good hook. In addition to writing summaries, I researched information about the selected topic and selected online sources that will provide additional information about it.

Crowdsourcing is challenging, but it has its benefits. By drafting and revising the project summaries, I learned to tweak my words to capture a broad audience. Keeping the summaries short (3-4 sentences) was a great challenge. To make the summaries a little more interesting, Ricc suggested that I add web links for specific information; so the transcribers can have access to additional information via the web. Working with Ricc was awesome. He provided helpful feedback for each of my summaries. Ricc taught me to see things from a different perspective.

Working as a virtual intern is an amazing experience. Ricc and I communicated on a weekly basis by phone, email, and Trello. He was very patient and informative. He provided useful and informative feedback. Using Trello helped me to organize my assignments and to communicate any changes or updates with my Smithsonian mentor. Working on a digital platform was convenient for both of us. Also, waiting to see how the transcribing process from the digital volunteers was coming along was exciting. Ricc would provide an update, and I would take a peek at the transcriptions.

For my internship, I used some of the skills I learned about crowdsourcing from my GMU Digital Public Humanities coursework. I had to constantly think about my audience, which meant shortening my sentences and being selective with my words to engage the audience. I recalled the persona exercise I had to do for one of my courses, and I put that into practice when drafting the summaries. Researching and adding the links to the summaries reinforced the concept of what is appropriate for a broad audience. Also, I had to think about copyright issues and be selective with web content when linking the websites to the project summaries. By using what I have learned from my coursework, I was able to draft project summaries for a broad audience.

My internship work with Ricc and the Smithsonian Transcription Center connected me to a digital world of communication. Even though I did not know the digital transcribers, I had a virtual connection with them by writing the project summaries. After my project summaries were launched on the STC website, I was able to see how the audience responded to each one of them. The virtual communication between different audiences to meet a certain goal via the web is truly amazing. The concept of digital humanities is reflected in this internship project. History comes alive when digital volunteers partake in the crowdsourcing efforts with Smithsonian Transcription Center.

What I enjoyed most about the internship is being introduced to different historical documents for review and research. Also, I enjoyed communicating with Ricc about my process and what things I need to revise/edit. Ricc is a very supportive mentor. I admire Ricc’s work and dedication. He does his best to keep the digital volunteers interested in the transcribing. I also had a chance to see how the public responds to my project summaries. My internship assignment with the Smithsonian Transcription Center opened my mind to thinking about my audience throughout the entire process, and it helped me to understand and appreciate crowdsourcing. Therefore, I have gained a new perspective on how digital humanities keeps history alive through digital communications.

A Reflection on Previous Interviews

After viewing the previous interviews, I learned that the process of revising and narrowing a lesson is the norm. During the project making process, I was a little worried that I was not getting my point across; and I continued to add more material. Celeste and Jeri mentions starting with an existing argument, and I thought about Dr. Kelly’s advice to narrow my focus on what part of the historical content does not make sense to my students. I will narrow my focus and not make it bigger than it should be. Also, I will select 1-3 primary sources to help my students think about history and make connections to the novel. Teaching students to access primary sources online from reliable websites is very important. Also, teaching students what to do with the primary sources is very challenging but exciting. The focus on digital media or digital resources are mentioned in all of the interviews. Maura Seale makes an excellent point about teaching students to engage with the primary sources by exposing them to archives and collections. Devon Hardy’s emphasis on Learning Objectives is spot on because she knows the importance of keeping the audience in mind while creating a digital history project. I added a few learning outcomes on my site. She also mentioned learning assessment, which is very important these days in education. For the future, I will have to consider a plan to design an assessment for my project’s learning outcomes.

Designing my project site will require a few more changes because I would like to use it as a supplement to my course in ecampus. It would be a good ready to go class as mentioned by Erin Bush. If ecampus (Blackboard) is down, then I can always refer to my project site without worries. Also, I can make additional changes without dealing with weekly and unwanted system updates. My project did not turn out what I wanted initially, but I enjoyed the process of creating it. Nate Sleeter also mentioned that his project did not come out exactly as he was hoping. Therefore, I came to the conclusion that digital history projects are work in progress due to changing times, advancing technology, differing perspectives, innovative teaching methods, broadening of diversity, and new ideas. There is always going to be something interesting to uncover when learning about the past, and in the field Digital Humanities, a digital history project is one of the means of engaging the general public, students, and/or scholars to explore, examine, and analyze the past.

Second Piece of the Puzzle

According to McClymer, “We can think of the web as the untextbook,” and the abundance of digital resources allows educators to teach history because “the web enables students to become more active learners.” I would like for my students to understand the importance of filial piety and family values for Japanese Americans living in the U.S. and how WWII and the Executive Order 9066 played a key role in testing those values. First, I will ask my students to do a closed textual reading and analysis of the loyalty questions mentioned in John Okada’s No-No Boy. They will access Densho Encylopedia online because it includes information about the loyalty questionnaire that many Japanese American men were required to answer in 1943. This information plays a key role in helping the students understand the main character’s struggle as a young college student who had to choose between his family or the country he was born in. They will write a reflection that includes questions about the loyalty questionnaire and how it might affect the family.

Then, I will provide at least 2 or 3 primary sources such as photos of Japanese American families before and during WWII for the students to examine. They will be asked to find at least 1 primary source from 2 websites: Densho and the Hirasaki National Resource Center. I will invite my students to visit the Densho website to view photo collections of Japanese American families during WWII. The Densho Digital Repository holds extensive collections of digitized primary sources. They will be assigned to select an image from one of the photo collections of a Japanese American family for analysis and class discussion. Then, the students will select a film from the home-movie collection from the Hirasaki National Resource Center, which is part of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. There are several film collections that feature home-movie footage of Japanese Americans from 1920s to 1960s. My students will select at least 1 home-movie of a Japanese American family before or during the war. The students should be able to make a connection with the selected photo and home-movie and the stories of the families in the novel during an almost forgotten or hidden part of American history. The next lesson plan will include a synthesis of their findings.

I would like to encourage my students to ask questions and dig deeper into the social injustice and how what happened in the past still haunts many Asian Americans who are aware of it. For their final project, their findings and research along with questions can be mashed into a video, or they can create a digital map of family’s journey from home to a camp/camps and to the new home after camp along with some images from the family’s photo collection online.

The digital environment influences the way I teach and learn. I can teach the same objectives for my courses while I change the way I teach my students to think about history. Even though I teach composition and literature, I also place emphasis on history because it is the story of the people. There is so much information that needs to be “uncovered” to show students that history is not just about the past. Learning history goes beyond learning dates, places, people, and events because there are so many stories to discover and uncover. As problem solvers, teachers can learn to foster a learning environment that encourages students to think, to question, to discover, to solve problems, and to learn new ways of approaching history. Educators like me can learn so much from the digital environment. There is an abundance of digital resources that help me to conduct research and compose lesson plans. Also, learning about digital humanities and teaching history in the digital age in the GMU graduate certificate program has encouraged me to view teaching with digital tools and digital media from a progressive perspective. It has reinforced my longtime desire to teach my students the importance of learning with technology to be prepared in a globally competitive world.

Introduction for HIST 689

This is my third semester in the Digital Public Humanities Graduate Certificate Program. I plan to learn more about Digital Humanities from each course. I enjoy learning new methodologies and digital tools for engaging different audiences. While completing my coursework, I teach full-time for a two-year college. I teach First-Year Composition and American Literature courses. I hold a Bachelor of Science Degree in Biology, a Master’s Degree in English, and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric. I have not taught a full history course in a classroom; however, I do incorporate history into my First-Year Composition and American Literature courses because their reading assignments are centered on historical events, people, and places.

In addition to teaching, I am also responsible for coordinating events and workshops for Asian American and Middle Eastern American heritage programs. One of my ongoing research interests is folklore and how it helps us to understand the past and present. In studying and researching various aspects of folklore, I have learned the importance of preserving history and cultural heritage for American minority groups that tend to be forgotten or rarely shared with the rest of the American public. Although I do not have a strong academic background in history and/or library sciences, I would like to continue developing my skills as a digital humanities historian in order to research historical and cultural information about minority groups that needs to be shared with the audience in a digital space.

For HIST 689, I hope to learn something new and apply it to what I have already learned in the previous two courses by understanding how to teach history in my classes by using certain digital tools and learning how to be a better digital humanities historian. I hope to learn new theories about technology and teaching history and teaching methods on using digital tools/technology when presenting historical information online to a broader audience. Also, I would like to learn digital tools and teaching methods on how to teach my students to think like historians when it comes to conducting research for certain writing and multimodal projects.

For HIST 680, I created a project on Asian American History and Culture in the South. For HIST 694, I created a project on Koreatowns in North Texas. I used Omeka for both projects. Also, I collected majority of the sources for the both projects. In HIST 680, I learned to add items, create collections and exhibits, and add metadata. In HIST694, I learned more about persona and how it affects my perspective of audience engagement for future collaboration. I also learned to incorporate Oral History into my project. Evaluation is something on a working on for further development of my project site.

For both of my projects, conducting historical research with primary sources was an interesting challenge because I had difficulty finding available primary sources that pertain to my selected topics. However, creating and gathering the primary sources led me to a new path of understanding historical research because I had minimal knowledge or experience with historical research, especially pertaining to public history. Adding the metadata, narrative, and short descriptions challenged me to reconsider my broad audience in a very positive way. Working on my projects and learning new theories and methods have helped me to see how the graduate certificate program teaches us to apply historical thinking as an approach to learning and teaching history with technology. Historical thinking includes thinking about the actual primary and secondary sources in different layers of critical thinking, analysis, and evaluation. Furthermore, historical thinking involves more than the historian; instead, it includes a community of thinkers to “think” about the historical information by investigating new approaches and ideas in order to understand certain aspects of humanity and how history invites them to question things or issues. The graduate certificate program teaches the graduate students to understand the importance of becoming a digital humanities historian in order to help the audience think about history from different approaches in a time of advancing technology.

A Summary of User Research

From my research, I have learned that I need to broaden my audience. Initially, I did not consider interviewing people who have never visited the two Koreatowns and/or have no knowledge of Korean culture and history. Instead, I focused on people who have an interest or have some connection. Another thing I need to consider is asking users what they would like to know about Korean American history and culture in general instead of specifically Korean American history and culture in the North Texas area.

Regarding social media, I did not ask the purpose for using each one. Fortunately, the interviewees added that information without me asking. I have to reconsider how social media plays a significant role in their daily activities. In order to understand my users and broaden my knowledge of social media, I might consider using more social media than my usual two.

After reviewing the user interviews, I realized that I might have to make some changes to my project ideas and plans. It seems as though that my questions have focused too much on what they know about Koreatown and Korean history and culture. Due to my controlled focus, I focused less on audience. I have learned that I need to give up some control. In the article, “A Shared Inquiry into A Shared Inquiry,” Corbett and Miller argues Ronald J. Grele’s point: “A shared inquiry is a deliberate decision to give up some control over the product of historical inquiry” (20). So, I had to ask myself, “What can I learn from my audience in order to gain their attention and to engage them in a dialogue with the project?” I might consider adding a blog page for users to add their personal memories about Korean culture and connect them to their reasons for visiting a Koreatown. This page will help me learn about my audience and how they can contribute to building the project. I also need to consider the spatial components and how they affect the relationships or communications in Koreatown as well as the digital space. Instead of just searching the project site, I have to encourage the audience to explore it because “it suggests a non-linear spatial imagination rather than linear, funneled one: one inhabits a space that is being explored rather than simply forging a narrowing path through it” (Frisch 132). Therefore, the interviews have taught me that I have so much more to learn about audience and I need to revise my project ideas and plans.

A Response to Grele’s “Whose Public? Whose History? What is the Goal of a Public Historian?”

Similar to the broad definition of Digital Humanities, the definition of Public History is also broad because it is constantly debated and changed. From his article, “Whose Public? Whose History? What is the Goal of a Public Historian?” Ronald J. Grele defines public history to be “moving into fields long occupied by practicing non-academic historians. It is debating issues within a long tradition of debate. It is deeply embedded within a series of ongoing tendencies in the profession” (44). Grele’s definition is enlightening because he views public history to be diverse and versatile. According to John Dichtl and Robert B. Townsend’s article, “A Picture of Public History: Preliminary Results from the 2008 Survey of Public Professionals,” the comparison of the survey results from 1980 and 2008 show the changing trends such as how many public historians were employed in academia and non-academic institutions. The 2008 survey also shows that “women comprised two thirds of the respondents (65.5 percent)” compared to the 36 percent from the 1980 survey. Denise Meringolo, author of Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History, defines public history to be collaborative, multidisciplinary, and engaging with a focus on communication. In the following statement, Meringolo clearly defines the role of the public historian: “Public historians can produce original interpretations that connect scholarship and everyday life by respecting the ways in which their partners and audiences use history and by balancing authority against community needs” (168).

Dichtl and Townsend argue that “Public history is one of the least understood areas of professional practice in history because the majority of public history jobs are outside of academia.” On the other hand, it can be due to two reasons: “First those of us who currently work in the field have not clearly defined what is we do, why we do it, and why it is an alternative to other forms of historical effort. Second, the debates have taken place in a historical vacuum” (Grele 41). Even though the public is ubiquitous when it comes to history, adding the term “public” to “history” seems to spark some controversy, but “another group of historians emerged to work with a non-college public: local history movement” (Grele 42). As a result, Grele argues that “it was the local history movement which offered the most thoroughgoing alternative to the historical work done in the academy” (43). However, public historians were not seen as equal to the academic historians. Meringolo also mentions two reasons or trends of thought for the debate: “Some scholars emphasize the term “public,” arguing that the environment in which historians apply their craft impacts the questions, methodology, and content of interpretation. Others underscore the term “history,” insisting that credentialed historians perform their work in accordance to the same disciplinary standards regardless of location or audience” (xvi). Both Grele and Meringolo argue that the combination of “public” and “history” sparks a debate for defining public history.

Another reason for the broad definition of public history is the debate on its origin. Grele argues that the job crisis for the academic historians was the reason for the beginning of public history because the proponents of public history “have accused the [academic] profession of ignoring the possibility of opportunities outside of the academy and monopolizing the ideological formulation of the role of the historical by accenting a narrow vision of the historian as researcher or university professor” (41). Thus, it began opening up job opportunities for historians. However, Denise Meringolo contends the origin of public history began with the National Park Service. Meringolo argues that it was Verne Chatelain (first chief historian for the NPS) who should be credited for the beginnings of public history because “it was evident to Chatelain that an advanced degree in history did not necessarily prepare historians for work in the federal government” (xiii). Therefore, in the 1930s, “Chatelain’s new technicians were among the first public historians, and they had a profound impact on the evolution of the field” (Meringolo xiv). Also, Meringolo acknowledges that it was during the 1970s that academic historians were “concerned about the scarcity of jobs for history PhDs” (xiv); but in her book, she “examines the process by which federal workers began to conceptualize the protection of landscapes and artifacts as valuable public work” (xxix) and the importance of collaborating with other professionals (e.g. scientists) and the public audience.

Public history includes both the academic and non-academic historians working together to engage the public. Also, public history is a collaboration of historians and professionals/experts in digital humanities, science, architecture, literature, medicine, textiles, folklore, mental health, media, culinary arts, art, music, religion, etc. In today’s fast-paced and social media driven society, public history plays a significant role in the form of digital public history. It not only engages the audience, it allows the public to take part in the making and preserving history. Despite the debates, a broad definition of public history allows space for more ideas of collaboration and engagement because history is never seen and told in one way. Since “Fledgling public history inherited from its late nineteenth-century origins a pragmatic approach to research and an impulse to change” (Meringolo xxxi), the broad definition of public history allows change and evolves with change.

In agreement with Grele’s statement that “Thus the task of the public historian, broadly defined, should be to help members of the public to do their own history and to aid them in understanding their role in shaping and interpreting events” (48), the types of the practice the field of public history should encourage will change throughout history; and it will include more collaboration and engagement beyond the academic setting. For example, Social media plays a big part in public history. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube probably have their own public historians; and their platforms engage the public on a daily basis. Even their audience contribute to the making of their history through crowdsourcing. Public history projects invite the public to engage with artifacts that were once lost or hidden from the public. Public history is a collaboration of historians, other professionals, public, and technology. Therefore, digital humanities public history adds another layer to the field of public history and its definition.