Today I should have presented a paper on "Digital History: History and Memory for and by everybody ?" or, in French, "La Digital History: Histoire et Mémoire à la portée de tous" -not easy to translate- during a whole day conference on Digital History organised by Sébastien Poublanc doctoral researcher at Toulouse II Le Mirail, and webmaster of FRAMESPA laboratory (French do like abbreviations that nobody else can understand.... In this case it's about the Early Modern History of Southern France and Northern Spain if I understood correctly ! ). This paper draws on my essay "La digital history: histoire et mémoire à la portée de tous » in Pierre Mounier (ed.), Read/Write Book 2. Une introduction aux humanités numériques, Marseille, OpenEdition Press, 2012, p. 151-177.
« L’histoire
publique numérique (Digital Public History) dans sa version 2.0, a certainement
permis de désenclaver la «culture haute» mais avec l’apparition du web 2.0,
l’histoire et la mémoire sont à présent la prérogative de tout le monde dans la
toile grâce au «crowdsourcing». Le danger aujourd’hui est que les spécialistes
ne dominent pas les mutations du numérique en histoire ou que l’on se limite
aux usages publics du passé. Sans une prise de conscience qui ne peut passer
que par la connaissance des nouveaux instruments, la révolution du numérique
éliminera la capacité professionnelle de reconstruire le passé qui deviendra
l’apanage des mémoires individuelles et de l’horizon aveugle de chacun. Cette
intervention lors du séminaire "Histoire et historiens face aux usages
et à l'instrumentalisation du passé", à Toulouse le 13 juin 2013, tentera de comprendre quelles sont les mutations plus significatives de
l’histoire 2.0 pour le métier d’historien et quels sont précisément les enjeux
épistémologiques posés par le numérique participatif. Elle s’attardera sur les
pratiques nouvelles de la Digital Public History, l’histoire désenclavée à la portée de tout le monde qui répond aux profonds besoins identitaires de nos sociétés globalisées. (Mots-Clés: Histoire Numérique, Web 2.0, Sources Historiques, Public History, Digital Public History, Humanités Numériques, Mémoires, Toile d’Histoire.)»
Unfortunately Air France -I am a frequent flyer- was on strike between 11-13 of June 2013 and after rescheduling my flight twice and taking a taxi to Florence Airport to leave my city for Paris hoping to reach Toulouse in the evening on the 12th, I was unfortunately unable to leave Tuscany and I had to take a taxi back home, frustrated.
So I tried -as much as I could- to follow the live streaming of the conference discovering that my friend Sean Takats -which was also blocked in London Heatrow Airport- succeeded in taking its own flight to Toulouse....
I tweeted the following:
"Vu seulement l'aéroport de Florence pas celui de Toulouse pour #DigHist13 merci #AirFrance ! Désolé pas être à http://instruhist.hypotheses.org"
Toulouse Airport Twitter account retweeted my tweet with a real sense of humor I may say ...
Anyway I tried my best to interact with all the participants using twitter and the conference live stream channel and this is again an example of how much useful for scholarly purposes is now twitter.
For instance, when Sean Takats (CHNM, George Mason, USA) and, in direct streaming, mentioned the importance of popular history and reenactment in the USA he remembered that also in Europe we had reenactors like for the 18th of June 1815 Waterloo battle. He remebered that I said him about some "grognards de Napoléon" walking on the street nearby the battlefield still in 2011 !
 |
| Photo near Waterloo, 2011 |
I also loaded two power point presentation in SlideShare to add some information/queries to the lively ongoing debate.
But I felt anyway heavily frustrated not to being able to interact live with all the other participants
The first power point presentation was about a possible list of books -and monographs issues of Journals- on Digital History in all languages that I knew .. (Please help to complete the list).
A second presentation was about defining the field/champ or sub-discipline (if we connect DigHist to Digital Humanities) that Digital (Public) History is about today.
Here they are
.
and also this one
