Définir le champ de l’Histoire Publique Numérique, un atelier à THATCamp Paris 2015

Un atelier proposé pour THATCamp Paris a été voté par les participants à la "unconference" et s'est donc tenu le mercredi 10 Juin 2015 à 9 heures du matin. J’avais proposé -en mon nom et au nom de Mark Tebeau- l'atelier que Frédéric Clavert, un des organisateurs de THATcamp Paris, membre du THATCamp Council, a présenté en notre nom, mardi 9 juin au public quand, ni Mark ni moi n’étions encore à Paris. L'atelier portait sur la définition du champ de la Digital Public History (DPH) ou, en français, Histoire Publique Numérique.

Quelles en étaient les motivations ?

En décembre 2016, l’éditeur De Gruyter – Oldenbourg à Munich publiera un Handbook of Digital Public History dans la série "De Gruyter Reference" en langue anglaise. Mark Tebeau (Arizona State University) et moi-même coordonnerons cet ouvrage de référence international.

Nous avons défini un projet d'index détaillé de chapitres et de thèmes et voudrions aussi choisir les projets d’histoire numérique publique les plus importants internationalement pour qualifier la discipline, ses pratiques et, justement, certaines de ses meilleurs réalisations et objets numériques à l'échelle internationale.

La proposition scientifique du Handbook (abstract) acceptée par l'éditeur est la suivante en anglais.

Aims and Scope for an Handbook on Digital Public History

This handbook will provide a systematic overview of the present state of international research in digital public history. Detailed individual studies by internationally renowned public historians, digital humanists and digital historians will elucidate central issues in the field and present a critical account of the major public history accomplishments, research activities, practices with the public and of their digital context; the handbook will apply an international and comparative public history approach, look at its historical development, focus on technical background and on the use specific digital media, software’s and digital tools; it will offer a glossary of common terms, software’s, practices in the field together with a multi-lingual bibliography adapted to each chapter. The Handbook will analyse connection with local communities and different publics worldwide when engaging in digital activities with the past, and indicate directions for future research, practices and teaching activities. The Handbook will delimit the field extension between digital humanities, digital history and public history through its main theoretical chapters connected with smaller descriptive sub-chapters describing and comparing specific projects internationally.

 Coordinateurs:

Mark Tebeau, Associate Professor in the School of History, Philosophy, & Religious Studies at Arizona State University, Director of Arizona State University Public History Program, (Phoenix, AR, USA)

Contact information:

Email: Mark.Tebeau@asu.edu,

Website: http://www.marktebeau.com,

Blog: http://urbanhumanist.org

Commercial: http://curatescape.org

Serge Noiret, History Information Specialist (PhD) at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy

Contact Information:

Email: Serge.Noiret@eui.eu

Blog: http://dph.hypotheses.org (http://sergenoiret.blogspot.it)

Project: http://primary-sources.eui.eu

Questions posées aux participants de l'atelier de THATcamp Paris 2015 #tcp2015 :   

• What should be here which isn’t there
• What is there and should not be there
• Key examples for each entry (what do you think each entry should be about)
• Good authors, volunteers to contact us and suggesting who we should contact
• This is an International program so essays truly international should come from all around the world

Résultats de l'Atelier de THATcamp du Jeudi 10 Juin 2015

L'atelier "Définir le champ de l’Histoire Publique Numérique" a suscite des questions différentes autour des chapitres, des projets et des acteurs de la DPH. Il a permis aussi de susciter des collaborateurs potentiels pour le Handbook vu que nous sommes, Mark et moi, dans la phase d’attribution de chapitres et de recherche de collaborateurs.

Toutefois, la définition de ce qu'est la "Publi History" a été au centre de la discussion avent même d'entrer dans une interaction histoire numérique, histoire publique.

La question fondamentale, liée a l'architecture du Handbook, a été la suivante: en quoi de nombreux chapitres se différentient-ils de ce qu'un humaniste numérique pourrait écrire ? Quel est la spécificité de l'Histoire Publique Numérique dans chacun de ces chapitres?

Les résultats du FramePAD sur cet atelier et de la discussion à laquelle ont participé: Martin Grandjean, Frédéric Clavert, Sébastien Poublanc, Vincent Auzas, Nathalie Casanova, Léonard Laborie, Lyriane Bonnet sont les suivants. Ils touchent a la fois les demandes des participants et les informations données par les participants eux-mêmes, des participation potentielle au Handbook.

Question qui touche la langue anglaise de l'ouvrage et la relecture des articles ecrit par les auteurs internationaux:  Oui, l'ouvrage sera entièrement en anglais, mais l'editeur financera la relecture des chapitres.

Quelle est la distinction entre humanités numériques et histoire publique numérique ?

Quelle est la relation avec une communauté d'utilisateurs. 

Existe-t-il une histoire publique non numérique ?

 Serge Noiret rappelle l'origine britannique de l'histoire publique: enregistrement des mémoires des mineurs britanniques au moment des grandes crises sous Thatcher: enregistrement de leur mémoire AVEC eux.

Cite l'exemple des commémorations comme celle du 200e. de la bataille de Waterloo les 18-20 Juin 2015, sur le site même de la bataille avec une reconstitution de ses phases avec plus de 5.000 "reenactors".

 Il n'y a pas d'histoire publique sans historiens académiques.

Léonard Laborie: inclure des exemples de projets qui ont été mis en échec? Frédéric Clavert, la question complémentaire étant gestion de la fin d'un projet, la "sustainability" des projets ajoute Serge Noiret.

Voir si on peut inclure un chapitre sur les commémorations du centenaire de la Première Guerre mondiale: avec comparaison France / Royaume Uni. Avec Frédéric Clavert mais pas seul et Marie-Christine Bonneau se portent volontaires. Il faudrait des participants de la Mission du Centenaire scientifiques et de l'Imperial War Museum pour evaluer les projets d'histoire publique plus large.

 Contacter: luccianomelanie@yahoo.fr - talie - Traces de l'Antiquité à Lille et en Eurorégion

 Voir NYC Memory. Équivalent à Londres. Projet Marseille.

 Voir Base de données sur les Monuments aux Morts.

Martin Grandjean à disposition pour l'aspect "Social Media" (Rewriting history in 140 characters http://www.martingrandjean.ch/rewriting-history-140-characters/)

Frederic Clavert demande s'il y a des différences entre DH e DPH dans le domaine des langages numériques. Comment le Handbook fera ressortir la spécificité de l’histoire publique. Dans l’index (TOCs) des éléments sont spécifiquement DPH, d'autres pourraient être autant histoire numérique / DH que DPH. Comment faire ressortir les spécificités.

 On suggère d’avoir des chapitres qui sont écrits par des amateurs historiens directement (généalogie notamment).

Comment justifie-t-on un Handbook sur l'histoire publique NUMÉRIQUE?

Serge Noiret répond que la révolution numérique se retrouve dans les pratiques et objets des historiens publics. cf. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media: forts développements autour et donc avec les utilisateurs - centre de l'histoire publique. L'historien.ne publique travaille avec des communautés et pour ces communautés. 

 

Importance des "Environmental Humanities" pour la DPH: Digital Environmental Humanities, McGill : http://dig-eh.org/projects/ ; pour la partie Européenne : http://eseh.org/ (émanation française : RUCHE : https://leruche.hypotheses.org/)

 

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Handbook Draft Structure for THATCamp Paris 2015

Introduction

1. Introduction & Definitions

2. A Digital Public History of DPH

3. The Historiographical Foundations of DPH

4. Manifesto (5000-word culmination): Appendix that gets published separately

 Section 1: Historiography

 Section 1 explores the themes, disciplines, linkages to other fields, as well as the context of public history practice.  In each essay, the writers take on key aspects of the topic, with attention to how the intersection of the digital & public has transformed these fields/themes. It especially considers the theoretical aspects of the fields.

 

1. Digital Humanities & History In what ways has public history shaped the digital humanities and digital history?

2. Public History  In what ways has the digital revolution reshaped public history theory, practice, and training? 

3. International Public History Movement (Local-Global-International)

4. How has digital public history shape the spread of public history from the United States through the globe.

5. Oral History  In what ways has the emergence of digital public history reshaped oral history practice?

6. Public Archeology

7. Politics (of the past)

8. Nostalgia (memory today) 

9. Heritage

10. Violent Pasts Our ability to document and represent conflict, war, social unrest, inequality, and genocides has grown more sophisticated. 

11.  Identities The studies of identify formation in terms of class, race, gender, and indigenous cultures remains central to historical work; how has this work been transformed by digital and public history?

12.  Realm of Memory Memory sites, including monuments and commemorations, have become more accessible in the digital age, producing wider understandings.

13.  Environment Environmental humanities and sustainability have emerged as central concerns in digital public history in recent years. The NICHE (Canadian Network) as well as projects such as the environment & society portal from the Rachel Carson Center are examples of that work.

14.  Museums Museums have opened significantly as a result of the digital revolution, providing new modes of engaging public audiences, as well as imagining their function in an increasingly device-driven world.

15.  Archives/Library Archives & libraries face extraordinary challenges as books slowly disappear and our engagement with them becomes more and more digitally mediated. 

16.  Communication

17.  How digital public history has blurred past & present?     How digital public history is confronting periods and periodization?

Section 2: Contexts

Section 2 explores the places and contexts where digital public history is practices; it pays attention to scales of institution, locale (global, regional, national), and theoretical challenges faced in each domain.

1. Museums What does it mean to practice in specific history contexts, based on scale—w/attention to national/international?

3. Museum How has digital public history mattered in non-history contexts (such as natural history, art, or other museums, w/attention to international?

5. Virtual Museum + Exhibitions The emergence of the digital has produced the possibility for the virtual museum and exhibition. 

7. Archives How has archival practice been transformed? (Think: “what’s on the menu”)

9. Born Digital Archives Born digital archives have emerged. What are the issues associated with these (for example SAADA.org)?

11. Libraries (dp.la & europeana) The digital has raised the possibility of the virtual Library at Alexandria. What does digital public history tell us about the implications for large-scale library projects, such as dp.la or Europeana?

13. Digital Libraries (no connection with real libraries) The Digital library has supplanted the physical library. Or has it?

15. Technological  Devices matter in the digital age. How does the machine shape the delivery of public history? (Think the history and character of devices and technologies, from the CD to the DVD to floppy disks.)

17. “Privatized” Public History (market driven PH). Consulting and marketing for a private enterprise, e.g. Getty Archive, Fratelli Alinari Archive; what are the philosophical and practical considerations?

19. Publishing:  How we publish PH has changed. Consider twitter micro-blogging, open-access, peer review, evaluation, sharing, crowdsourcing, Hypothesis, PressForward. What’s happening to text?

21. University History Teaching  How have digital & public history have altered the history classroom--both for the instructor and learner; includes emergence of digital humanities curriculum?

23. Public History & Humanities Training: How do we alter public history curricula to confront the digital turn? What should the new public history curriculum look like, as it pertains to digital history, includes professional development for people in the field?

25. The Digital Public History Course: What does this course look like?

27. Pre-University Consider the context of High School, Primary & Secondary Education, perhaps Euroclio.org and project Historiana. How is the digital/public intersection changing & enhancing both approaches & engagement of schools with history, institutions, & publics?

29. Grassroots Local communities have begun to document and produce their own historical knowledge; how does this transform the relation to the past?

31. Federal Governments Policy (truly international: US, Canada, & EU)

32. State & Local Governments (also international)

33. National Parks & Historic Sites (is this in Federal Government)

34. Landscape & Space: parks, gardens, cemeteries, monuments; emphasis on local 

35. Historic Preservation & Cultural Resource Management The field of cultural resource management and preservation continue to focus attention on physical landscapes; how has emergence of a digital public history altered this work, in theory and practice?

37. UNESCO  How has the digital & public revolution transformed the work of international bodies, such as UNESCO?

Section 3: Practices: Engagement, Communities, & Curation 

Section 3 explores how public history practice has changed and digital practice has emerged as a result of the intersection of digital public history. This section focuses on best practices and approaches, using case studies and examples where possible. The big ideas for this section include public engagement, community building, the evolution of curation, and emergence of big data.

1. Strategies for the digital & public future (theoretical)

2. Professional Policies (What are the best practices of digital public history: i.e. open/closed access; open sources; filtering, algorithms, sustainability, programs?)

3. Law & Ethics (i.e. Ownership & Copyright)

4. Visualization (a kind of narrative but through visual means) Blogging & Textual Narrative (also video blog, podcasts, micro-blogging, tumblr, twitter)

5. Mapping

6. Data Standards & Practice

7. Collecting & Archiving (best practices)

8. Exhibiting

9. Conserving

10. Funding for the Past in the Future (funding, sustainability, emergence of a field in the funding)

11. Gaming (Playing and Fun) 

12. Crowdsourcing

13. Social Media  

14. Shared Authority

15. Community Building & Civic Engagement 

16. Storytelling

17. Living History 

18. Activist History

19. Narrative Practice: Popular, Fiction (Imagination – Imagined history), 

20. Genealogy

21. Curation

22. Teaching & Training: classroom, pedagogy, and program organization

23. Organizing/preserving the self

24. Amateur/non-professional public digital history (everyone their own historian?)

25. Commercial practice, DPH as Business, Market oriented DPH 

Section 4: Technology, Media, Data and Metadata

Section 4 explores various types of technologies, media, and metadata and how they’re being used in digital public history, with attention to the challenges in each of these domains--including the problems of engaging publics, the challenges of technological change, and modes of constructing historical argument.  This section also explores how the technological itself--both in its implementation and theoritization--is transforming digital public history.  The emphasis is on the emergence of both big ideas and categories of technology, as well as on the ways of organizing, dissemination, and sharing knowledge. With special attention to data and metadata, to hardware and software, as well as tool sets, essays in this section focuses not just on the present but suggests future direction.

1. Book & Print

2. Technological devices as mediators of media (also in technology)

3. GIS (the use of GIS, mapping programs, open street maps, designing maps, interpreting maps, arc-gis, q-gis (web & separate)

4. Mobile & Locative Media

5. CMS (various strategies and approaches)

6. Open Access (Theorizing, Application Programming Interfaces, Data Interoperability, Metadata standards, Licensing such as Creative Commons)

7. Open Source (Theory, Challengenges, Tools, GitHub, Maintaining Community, examples: Omeka, Drupal, WordPress, etc.)

8. Linked Open Data (Theory, challenges, taxonomies, ontologies, semantic web)

9. Standards (Different types of standards: archival, library, data, metadata, etc.)

10. Materiality and landscape in digital age (including soundscapes & 3-D modelling) Sensory history has gained currency as digital tools have emerged that allow for immersive experiences and multi-dimensional modeling. 

11. 3D Visualization (prospective, what it means: new modes of presenting and representing past, Second Life, Occulus Rift)

12.  3D Printing

13. Game Technologies (Occulus Rift?, soundscapes, connections, implications)

14. Programming (languages, approaches, should the historian be a programmer?, implications of the need for specialized programming skills--consider the public history context of the need for designers, exhibit developers, marketing specialists, etc.)

15. Websites (I want a “website.” What does that mean? Consider the transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0 to web 3.0 technology; thinking about characteristics of public history web: participatory/not, open/not, types of content; public engagement/not, links; how web technologies are changing, such as HTML5, including device contexts)

16. Video (video projects, streaming technologies, YouTube, Vimeo, portable devices, 

17. Photography (technologies, i.e. phones as cameras, photoshop, FLICKR etc., re-photography, HistoryPin, merging past/present locations (mixing past/present), cinemagraphs, focus on how technologies (both of taking photos and of representing photos, as well as sharing photos) shape the intersection of digital/public history; is this a new form of narrative in its own right? selfies

18. Audio (oral history in the digital age, transom http://transom.org/ for public radio, SoundCloud, streaming, podcasts, the emergence of sound studies, these three categories: focus on how technologies (both of taking photos/video/audio and of representing photos, as well as sharing photos) shape the intersection of digital/public history;

19. Social Media (focus on technologies of social media)

20. Reference/Management Tools (Zotero, Evernote, and other tools for building references, and links.)

21. Metadata (What is it? and why you should care? archival/library standards and machine metadata.)

22. Big Data (What this means for public engagement in history and cultural institutions; what does it mean for a digital data driven public history; what does proliferation of data mean for local institutions?)

23. Aggregation (Wikipedia, but also tools for content Aggregation, in cultural realm this includes such as dp.la, Europeana, new modes of engaging public outside ...)

24. Discovery & Connection (Connected Histories; Moving beyond Google: technologies for linking, connecting, & discovery of cultural information)

 

Public History International

This post is an extended version of "Internationalizing Public History. In: Public History Weekly 2 (2014) 34, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2014-2647" (German and French translations are also available).

Public History today is a worldwide discipline which considers the presence of the past -and the construction of history- outside academic settings. The practice of History has always been “public” in a way but individual and collective memories are nowadays invading the public sphere. Conflicting perceptions of the past and the inability to forget are asking for professional mediation because the past is not becoming history anymore. Public Historians answer the increasing demand for history worldwide and interpret the past with and for the public. Awareness of their global role fosters the internationalizing process of PH.

• Everybody’s interpreting its own past.

During the last thirty years, not only in Anglo-Saxon countries, historians engaged into public discussions about the past. Especially public historians were interested in collecting and interpreting memories using Oral History and digital technologies. Through social media and the web, conflicting collective memories of genocidal pasts, dictatorships, violent civil wars, have been displayed for a better public understanding in virtual and physical museums. Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and remembrance portals like the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, interacted with local communities using public historians to recover forgotten and uncomfortable civil memories.

Looking at the presence of the past in the American society, David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig noted something that can be extended to other countries (Australia and Canada studies the characteristics of national pasts in popular memories): even before the start of a participatory web 2.0 allowing individuals and communities to crowd-source their own vision of history, nonacademic public's were eager to re-memorize their family and local history. People also knew about history visiting memory and battlefield parks, true “lieux de Mémoire, and wandering in thematic museums and exhibitions with their popular narratives about nearby pasts.

Professional public historians, especially within the digital realm, are confronted with everybody’s public pasts. Historical expertise is needed worldwide for acquiring deeper contextualized understandings of history. Working within communities and for the public, public historians are the answer to such an universal quest for the past. Their task is to communicate history publically.

• Self-conscious or institutionalized ? Different paths to Public History.

If we want to understand to what extend the discipline is existing internationally, we have to consider different settings. International Public History aims at understanding divergent historical paths to the discipline with specific professional skills. Forty years after its institutionalization as a university discipline in California, public history contaminated new countries. So what makes history public and public history growingly self-conscious today?
This September in Brazil, during the 2nd Simpósio Internacional de História Pública, on Perspectivas da História Pública no Brasil, the Rede Brasileira de História Pública showcased a variety of multi-racial, social, political and local public history practices. Brazilian historians fostered workshops and participative media ateliers analyzing different facets of Brazilian PH as described in an introductory volume to the discipline (2011). But why the Rede, a federal decentralized network of historians belonging to different universities, used the term “international” for a conference about Brazilian public history? Universal practices and theoretical reflections on the impact of digital history and on the presence of oral history in Brazil populated roundtables and officinas (10-12 Sept.2014, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro) together with the participation of few international scholars.

Pioneer American oral historian Linda Shopes focused on the close integration between oral and public history. She discussed the concept of “shared authority” (Max Frisch) inaugurated by Raphael Samuel during the Seventies in Oxford. Samuel resurrectionism delivered to the miners their scattered memories sharing like Socrates, his own professional authority. In Belgium and the Netherlands were the first international public history conference has been organized in October 2014 at the University of Amsterdam together with the NIOD, public history programs are being created within universities. Like with the International Committee for the Historical Sciences hosting PH panels in China in 2015, in Italy and in Germany, academic historical associations added public history panels to their conferences (Cantieri di Storia Sissco 2013; 50 Deutscher Historikertag 2014).

In Greece, Public History and the role of the past in the present are openly discussed because of the dramatic financial crisis which brought new consensus to neo-Nazi parties. So, for Greek historians, making history in public is also a civil duty necessary to maintain the memory of the civil war, the resistance and the colonel dictatorship. Historians are challenging the present misuses of the past in Greece and they looked at how much the past is active in the present during a Greek Public History conference in Volos in August 2013, (some papers have been recently published in the Italian journal Ricerche Storiche). But the same pattern is also evident in Brazil where the violent history of the military dictatorship is showcased in museums and exhibitions; or in Sri Lanka, where the Colomboscope 2014 on “making history”, a national history festival remembered Herstories, women oral interviews telling about the horrors of a thirty years civil war.

When Greek neo-Nazis re-interpreted the national past to support their political claims, public historians questioned the political usefulness of history in the agora. Academic Historians answered this challenge publishing books, organizing conferences, commenting in the media the Greek civil war, the resistance and the colonel dictatorship and addressing local communities and their individual and collective memories.

• Glocal Public History meant consciousness of the past surrounding us.

Different ideas about what history is about socially developed differently and following different patterns globally. Nevertheless, Public History remains often a discipline without the name. Historians entering the public arena and creating narratives through the media weren’t always aware of the existence of a sub-field or a discipline called Public History. Academic historians have the tendency to call public history what is, de facto, a “public use of history”, engaging the discipline, its skills and practices with contemporary debates about the past in the polis. Only from few years now, and shifted by the digital turn in history which had a huge impact on Public History practices, new forms of awareness and of an overwhelming necessity of the field arose. This phenomena happened globally nonetheless the universal ambiguities and contradictions about a common professional definition of the field. The internationalization process is happening worldwide following such a multi-faceted process of globalization. It derives also from the crisis of academic history in our post-colonial societies. Emblematic of this process was the creation of the International Federation for Public History. A NCPH international Public History Task Force transformed in 2010 into an internal commission of the Comité International des Sciences Historiques. Today, the IFPH is mandated to create international linkages between public historians and promote the development of our growing worldwide network of practitioners and foster national public history programs and associations.

• A decentralized glocal history asking for a global public role?

Answering to this question qualifies glocally and internationally the role of public historians. Our world is now glocal, Europe have lost his central role in defining a universal idea of the past through its Eurocentric narrative, its colonial and post-colonial history. Subaltern studies theorized what was already evident publically: local pasts everywhere emerged forming multi-centered globalized pasts. This decentralization of history fostered the field worldwide, and favored the birth of what could be called glocal public history discipline.

Public History meant often working on the past with local communities and, in general, for their better understanding of their local-global memories. The process in itself is all about International Public History interpreted globally the same way: building oral interviews, remembering individual and collective memories, collecting and preserving sources, creating museums and exhibitions, confronting with difficult pasts and their interpretation. The usefulness of international public history relies on the universality of these glocal practices.

Bibliography

• Giorgos Antoniou (ed.): History and the Public Sphere in Contemporary Greece in "Ricerche Storiche", XLIV/1, January-April 2014.
• Silke Arnold-de Simine: Mediating memory in the museum: trauma, empathy, nostalgia., Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
• Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton: History At The Crossroad: Australians and The Past., Ultimo: Halstead Press, 2010
• Dipesh Chakrabarty: Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
• Margaret Conrad, Jocelyn Létourneau and David Northrup: Canadians and their Pasts: An Exploration in Historical Consciousness, in “The Public Historian”, vol.31, n.1, February 2009, pp.15-34.
• Michael Frisch: A Shared Authority: Essays On The Craft And Meaning Of Oral And Public History., Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
• Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes (eds.): Oral History And Public Memories., Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008.
• François Hartog and Jacques Revel: Les usages politiques du passé., Paris : Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2001
• Denise D. Meringolo: Museums, monuments, and national parks : toward a new genealogy of public history., Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.
• Wolfgang Muchitsch: Does war belong in museums? The representation of violence in exhibitions., Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013.
• Serge Noiret: “La “Public History”, una Disciplina Fantasma?” in Public History. Pratiche nazionali e Identità Globale., in "Memoria e Ricerca", n.37, May-August 2011, pp.10-35.
• Serge Noiret: “Digital History 2.0”, in Frédéric Clavert and Serge Noiret (eds.): Contemporary History in the Digital Age, Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2013, pp.155-190.
• Juniele Rabêlo de Almeida and Marta Gouveia de Oliveira Rovai (eds.) Introdução à história pública. São Paulo: Letra e Voz, 2011
• Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. Columbia University Press, 1998
• Raphael Samuel: Past and present in contemporary culture., London: Verso, 1994.
• Robert Weyeneth: “Writing Locally, Thinking Globally”, in "Public History News", vol.33, n.1, December 2012, p.8.
• Guy Zelis (ed.): L'historien dans l'espace public: l'histoire face à la mémoire, à la justice et au politique., Loverval: Labor, 2005.

Websites

• International Coalition of Sites of Conscience 
• Public History Commons, International section
• International Federation for Public History
• Rede Brasileira de Historia Publica
• Perspectivas da História Pública no Brasil
• Comité International des Sciences Historiques
• National Coalition for Public History
• Digital & Public History
• 50 Deutscher Historikertag 2014
• Società Italiana per lo Studio della Storia contemporanea
• Colomboscope 2014 – Making History
• Herstories
• Metapedia. The Alternative Encyclopedia

Storia Digitale o Storia con il Digitale ? E' lecito porre la domanda ?

La storia digitale ha rimodellato la documentazione dello storico e gli strumenti usati per accedervi, immagazzinarla e trattarla senza tuttavia che l’uso critico di questi strumenti -che non sono asettici nel rapporto tra lo storico e le fonti digitali-, fossero questionate a dovere nell’università italiana.

A livello internazionale invece, il terremoto del digital turn ha suscitato molti interrogativi nella professione confrontata globalmente con le incertezze sul futuro di una storiografia con il digitale, tra inquietudine e rigetto. La storia digitale richiede di riscrivere e reinterpretare i metodi professionali e di dominare le nuove pratiche nel digitale.[1] I cambiamenti delle pratiche professionali degli storici sono tali che ci dobbiamo interrogare su quali sia l’impatto di quella storia digitale sulle forme tradizionali di narrazione del passato e sui tempi della storia.[2] Ci possiamo chiedere se, alla luce della diffusione pubblica delle tecnologie, non dobbiamo rivedere in profondità il rapporto stesso che intratteniamo con il passato, la memoria e la storia nel presente.[3]

 Le pratiche degli storici impegnati a dominare -e anche forgiare- la tecnologia, avrebbero avuto come effetto di creare dei ghetti e di impaurire la professione tutta confrontata con il digital turn. Esistono difficoltà obiettive nel gestire le tecnologie digitali sempre più diffuse nel pubblico e usate -spesso egregiamente- all’infuori della professione.[4] Les incertitudes d'une mutation scriveva Rolando Minuti nel 2002,[5] Promises and perils of Digital History, ammonivano Daniel J.Cohen e Roy Rosenzweig nel loro manuale di digital history pubblicato nel 2006,[6] mentre ancora nel 2013, il catalano Anaclet Pons scrive un libro sulla storia digitale intitolandolo El desorden digital[7] in riferimento alla babele di una documentazione digitale difficile da dominare come lo aveva descritto Borges.[8] Questi studiosi interpretano il digital turn e la digital history partendo da una riflessione sui cambiamenti del mestiere di storico tradizionale. L’approccio non è né ottimista né pessimista, ma è quello di chi vuole capire le mutazioni tecnologiche alla luce di un positivismo critico –Cohen e Rosenzweig parlano di “tecno-realismo”-[9] non sottomesso alla tecnologia stessa, ma certamente interessato a essa. Toni Weller nel suo libro “History in the Digital Age”,[10] insegna che non tutti gli storici che utilizzano le risorse digitali e il computer sono “storici digitali”. Egli evidenzia l’impatto morbido della rivoluzione tecnologica applicata alle pratiche preesistenti degli storici e in continuità con le loro tradizioni professionali.[11] In sintonia con queste deduzioni di Weller, i risultati di un importante inchiesta Americana sulle pratiche della storiografia con il digitale sottolineano che “the underlying research methods of many historians remain fairly recognizable even with the introduction of new tools and technologies, but the day to day research practices of all historians have changed fundamentally”.[12]

Sempre dello stesso parere, la versione italiana del manifesto dell’Umanistica digitale nei suoi tre primi punti, recita che “la svolta digitale della società esplora e modifica le condizioni di produzione e di diffusione dei saperi” e che “le Digital Humanities riguardano l’insieme delle Scienze umane e sociali, delle Arti e delle Lettere, […] [e] non fanno tabula rasa del passato. Si appoggiano, al contrario, sull’insieme dei paradigmi, dei saperi e delle conoscenze proprie di queste discipline, mobilitando gli strumenti e le prospettive peculiari del digitale; le Digital Humanities designano una “interdisciplina” che include metodi, dispositivi e prospettive euristiche legate al digitale nel campo delle Scienze umane e sociali. [13] Questo Manifesto stilato durante THATcamp Parigi (The Humanities and Technology Camp, 2010) fu ridiscusso un anno dopo durante THATcamp Firenze (2011),[14] quando umanisti digitali italiani e francesi si confrontarono in un processo di internazionalizzazione della disciplina[15].

Comunque si pensi, riflettere sull’impatto transdisciplinare delle nuove pratiche che costituiscono le fondamenta della transdisciplina chiamata Umanistica Digitale (Digital Humanities) con le tradizioni epistemologiche e filologiche della storia è così diventato essenziale. E di fatti, la "cultura storica digitale" è parte di una più vasta "cultura digitale" che permea la nostra società attraverso la rete internet e sotto varie forme comunicative. Il concetto sociologico di cultura digitale proviene dall’opera di Manuel Castells[16] e anche dai lavori di Willard McCarty all’UCL[17] mentre in Italia, Tito Orlandi,[18] ha teorizzato addirittura la nascita di una neonata koinè, con un nuovo statuto disciplinare basato sull'elaborazione metodologica e scientifica del precedente concetto  d’informatica umanistica che incontra la rete internet e la comunicazione via web.[19]

Vanno così valorizzate le peculiarità disciplinari dello storico digitale: la ricerca di fonti differenti e le diverse trame narrative del web. Se è vero che l’umanistica digitale offre metodologie e pratiche comuni alle scienze che compongono l’area umanistica,[20] è vero anche che queste pratiche e questi concetti sono forse maggiormente elaborati a livello di singole discipline.[21]  Questo avviene riguardo alle diverse tradizioni scientifiche che ritrovano poi nella “république du virtuel”, un universalismo che supera le divisioni tra scienze umanistiche per forgiare nuove pratiche transdisciplinari e strumenti e linguaggi usati in tutte le discipline umanistiche. (Per esempio si usano protocolli aperti e compatibili nei siti della rete come gli standards di marcatura dei documenti,[22] i meta-dati descrittivi come il Dublin Core Project,[23] o i programmi e prodotti open sources[24] come Zotero[25] che favoriscono progetti collaborativi. Le banche dati, le biblioteche digitali e gli open archives sono ora compatibili tra di loro[26] attraverso un’interoperabilità dei loro dati, i cosiddetti linked open data dell’OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting o, in italiano il “Protocollo per il raccoglimento dei metadati dell'Open Archive Initiative”). [27])

Quasi tutte le problematiche tradizionali del mestiere di storico, dalla delimitazione di un’ipotesi di ricerca alla scoperta, all’accesso e alla gestione dei documenti e delle fonti, fino al conseguimento di un impianto narrativo e, soprattutto, alla comunicazione della storia e dei risultati della ricerca, e, infine all’insegnamento della storia, passano oramai in parte o in toto, attraverso lo schermo del computer: queste pratiche si annidano all’interno della ragnatela. La storia digitale si potrebbe così definire come “tutto il complesso universo di produzioni e scambi sociali aventi come oggetto la conoscenza storica, trasferito e/o direttamente generato e sperimentato in ambienti digitali (ricerca, organizzazione, relazioni, diffusione, uso pubblico e privato, fonti, libri, didattica, performance e via dicendo).”[28]

Invece, se si pensa al calcolo statistico, alla geo-localizzazione, alla gestione dei big data, enorme quantità di dati/fonti digitali disponibili come fonti che permettono pratiche trasversali di text-mining al loro interno,[29] -Peter Haber parlava addiritura di processo di “datificazione”-,[30] ai programmi che interrogano le immagini direttamente sui loro pixel, etc., la storia digitale, all’interno della transdiciplina dei digital humanities, non è soltanto fatta dell’utilizzo di nuovi strumenti digitali che facilitano vecchie pratiche. Si tratta anche dello sviluppo di un rapporto stretto con le tecnologie suscettibili di modificare i parametri stessi della ricerca. Lo storico è in grado di porre nuove questioni epistemologiche nell’analisi del passato dopo l’avvento del digitale. Tuttavia, solo una minoranza di storici digitali domina gli strumenti che rispondono a nuovi interrogativi scientifici. Meno ancora essi creano programmi originali che permettono nuove analisi e nuove forme d’interazione con le fonti e il loro trattamento in funzione d’ipotesi di ricerca facilitate dall’analisi computazionale.[31]

Lo storico oggi in Italia come altrove, [32] è storico con il digitale, molto meno storico digitale o umanista digitale,[33] ma è la storia stessa (fonti e storiografia) e la memoria del passato che sono, de facto, diventate digitali a prescindere di come gli storici individualmente e/o come gruppo professionale organizzato, si rapportino oggi al digital turn, ai digital humanities e alla storia digitale. La connivenza virtuosa con le tecnologie nonostante l’assenza di un quadro disciplinare istituzionalizzato per le Digital Humanities come in Inghilterra per esempio,[34] ha avuto delle ricadute diffuse e positive sul mestiere di storico nel suo insieme anche in Italia.[35] E’ certamente la comunicazione pubblica e una diffusa presenza del passato e delle memorie di ognuno in rete per le quali manca spesso la coscienza storica, che questionano il ruolo dello storico di professione nei confronti del mondo digitale.

[1] FREDERIC CLAVERT, e SERGE NOIRET (a cura di): L’histoire contemporaine à l’ère numérique - Contemporary History in the Digital Age, Bruxelles, Peter Lang, 2013.

[2] FRANCOIS HARTOG: Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps, Seuil, Paris, 2012; Pierre Nora intervistato sul significato dei “lieux de mémoire” ribadiva la necessità per gli storici di dare un senso e una vita nel presente alle trace della memoria collettiva della nazione. (PIERRE NORA: Historien Public., Paris, Gallimard, 2011, pp.446-47.)

[3] PHILIPPE JOUTARD: Révolution numérique et rapport au passé, in PIERRE NORA (a cura di) La culture du passé, in «Le Débat», n.177, 2013/5, novembre-dicembre 2013, pp.145-52.

[4] SERGE NOIRET : La digital history: histoire et mémoire à la portée de tous, in Pierre Mounier (a cura di) : Read/Write Book 2. Une introduction aux humanités numériques, Marseille, OpenEdition Press, 2012, p. 151-177, URL: [http://press.openedition.org/258].

[5] ROLANDO MINUTI: Internet et le métier d'historien: réflexions sur les incertitudes d'une mutation. Paris, PUF, 2002.

[6] DANIEL .J. COHEN e ROY ROSENZWEIG: Digital history: a guide to gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the Web., Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005; vedere inoltre degli stessi autori, Clio Wired. The future of the past in the digital age., New York, Columbia University Press, 2011.

[7] ANACLET PONS: El desorden digital: guía para historiadores y humanistas., Siglo XXI de España, Madrid, 2013.

[8]. J.L BORGES, La Biblioteca de Babel in ”Ficciones“, Alianza, Madrid, 1971, pp.89-100. Sull’incapacità di trovare una risposta nella “babele” dell’informazione, oggi nel web, il tema affrontato da Borges nel 1941, vedere il saggio di C. ROLLASON,: “Borges’ “Library of Babel” and the Internet", in IJOWLAC - Indian Journal of World Literature and Culture, 1/1, Gennaio-Giugno 2004, pp.117-120, ripubblicato qui: URL: [http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_papers_rollason2.html].

[9] COHEN e ROSENZWEIG, Digital History, cit., p.3.

[10] Weller distingue tra “those historians who were professionally engaged in digital tools and technologies in their work … and those who did not consider the subject within their remit at all, despite regularly using email, distribution lists, digitized newspapers or images and many other online resources.”, TONI WELLER: History in the Digital Age., London, Routledge, 2012, p.2.

[11] Lo stesso approccio cauto sull’impatto delle nuove tecnologie si ritrova in Italia in alcun recenti riflessioni sul significato della storia digitale. Il gruppo di giovani studiosi che fanno capo alla rivista Diacronie adopera questa visione cauta nel fascicolo a cura di Elisa Grandi, Deborah Paci e Émilien Ruiz: Digital History. La storia nell’era dell’accesso., in “Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea", 10/2, 2012; la stessa cautela si ritrova in un saggio che introduce il numero speciale della rivista storica BMGN nel Benelux a cura di GERBEN ZAAGSMA: On Digital History., in BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review, Vol. 128/4, dicembre 2013.

[12] J. RUTNER e R. C. SCHONFELD,: Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians: Final Report from ITHAKA S+R, December 10, 2012.

[13] Il Manifesto dei Digital Humanities elaborato da Marin Dacos e da chi assistette nel 2010 al THATcamp Parigi, fu presentato e approvato anche al primo THATcamp italiano, THATCamp Firenze all’Istituto Universitario Europeo, dal mondo dell’umanistica digitale italiana. Le proposte del manifesto sono volutamente generiche per identificare un momento di passaggio e di cambiamento e non legare il contenuto del manifesto ad una sola cultura, un solo paese o a pochi gruppi di innovatori. Si veda di M. DACOS: Manifesto delle Digital Humanities, 26 marzo 2011, pubblicato in italiano dopo THATCamp Florence, nel marzo 2011, URL: [http://www.thatcampflorence.it].

[14] THATcamp Florence, 23^rd-26th March 2011.

[15] L’AUICD italiana (Associazione per l'Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale) aderisce all’EADH, (European Association for Digital Humanities), URL: [http://eadh.org], una delle componenti dell’ADHO (Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations), URL: [http://www.digitalhumanities.org/], che raggruppa le associazioni internazionali di Umanistica Digitale; per motivi di diversificazione linguistica e culturale, è stato fondato durante il THATCamp Saint-Malo in Francia nel 2013, un associazione francofona di umanistica digitale, Humanistica con sede in Canada (URL: http://www.humanisti.ca). Il campo è oggi in piena espansione organizzativa ed associativa a livello mondiale.

[16] Sui mutamenti profondi, culturali, sociali ed economici, in corso nella nostra società dopo l’avvento di internet, si veda di MANUEL CASTELLS: La nascita della società in rete, Milano, EGEA-Università Bocconi, 2002 e dello stesso autore: The Internet galaxy: reflections on the Internet, business, and society., New York, Oxford University Press, 2001.

[17] WILLARD  MCCARTY: Humanities computing., Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

[18] TITO ORLANDI: Informatica Umanistica., Roma, La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1990. Per una bibliografia degli scritti di Orlandi rimando alla sua pagina web personale: Pubblicazioni relative all'Informatica umanistica, oltre che alla bibliografia contenuta in LORENZO PERILLI e DOMENICO FIORMONTE (a cura di), La Macchina del Tempo. Studi di informatica umanistica in onore di Tito Orlandi, Firenze,. Le Lettere, 2011.

[19] La nuova disciplina sarebbe da inserire nell’Area 10: Scienze dell’antichità, filologico-letterarie e storico-artistiche, e nell’Area 11: Scienze storiche, filosofiche, pedagogiche e psicologiche. (GINO RONCAGLIA,: Informatica umanistica: le ragioni di una disciplina). Si veda anche il manifesto Proposta di costituzione del settore scientifico-disciplinare: Informatica applicata alle discipline umanistiche (ovvero: Informatica umanistica), e a mia conoscenza il primo manuale italiano per la didattica dell’Informatica Umanistica che ne anticipava già le concezioni, TERESA NUMERICO, e ARTURO VESPIGNANI, (a cura di): Informatica per le scienze umanistiche., Bologna, Il Mulino, 2003.

[20] Il primo manuale (2004) accessibile dal 2007 gratuitamente in linea è di SUSAN SCHREIBMAN, RAY SIEMENS, JOHN UNSWORTH (a cura di) A Companion to Digital Humanities, Oxford, Blackwell, 2004. CLARE WARWICK: Digital Humanities in Practice., London, Facet Publishing, 2012; M.K. GOLD: Debates in the digital humanities., Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2012; MELISSA TERRAS, JULIANNE NYHAN, e EDWARD VANHOUTTE: Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader., London, Ashgate, 2013; sulle pratiche degli storici dopo il “digital turn”, rimando anche a SERGE NOIRET: “Storia Digitale: sulle risorse di rete per gli storici.”, in La Macchina del Tempo. Studi di informatica umanistica in onore di Tito Orlandi, cit., pp.201-25.

[21] PHILIPPE RYGIEL: L’inchiesta storica in epoca digitale, in Memoria e Ricerca, n.35, 2010, p.163-.

[22] Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)  URL: [http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml].

[23] Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), URL: [http://dublincore.org/].

[24] Open Source Initiative (OSI) è un progetto per rendere accessibile la codifica dei programmi e banche dati a tutti, URL: [http://www.opensource.org/].

[25] Zotero, URL: [http://www.zotero.org].

[26] Open Archives Initiative (OAI), URI: [http://www.openarchives.org/].

[27] Open Archives Initiative. Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, URL: [http://www.openarchives.org/pmh/].

[28] GIANCARLO MONINA: Storia digitale. Il dibattito storiografico in Italia, in Memoria e Ricerca, n.43/2, pp.185-202, qui, p.185.

[29] VIKTOR MAYER-SCHÖNBERGER, e KENNETH CUKIER: Big Data: a Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Vedere inoltre di DANAH BOYD e KATE CRAWFORD, Critical Questions for Big Data, in “Information, Communication & Society”, 15/5, 2012, pp.662‑679 e, di KATE CRAWFORD: Think Again: Big Data. Why the rise of machines isn't all it's cracked up to be, in “Foreign Policy”, 10 Maggio 2013. Infine, per un esempio dell’uso della dataficazione a storia vedere JORIS VAN EIJNATTEN, TOINE PETERS e JAAP VERHEUL: Big Data for Global History: The Transformative Promise of Digital Humanities., in BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review, n.128/4, 2013, pp.55-77.

[30] Il concetto di “data driven history” è quello che ha usato il compianto PETER HABER per definire il mondo nuovo della storia digitale, nel suo Digital past: Geschichtswissenschaft im digitalen Zeitalter, München, Oldenbourg Verlag, 2011.

[31] DANIEL J. COHEN, MAX FRISCH, P.GALLAGHER, STEVEN. MINTZ, KIRSTEN SWORD, A.MURRELL TAYLOR, WILLIAM G. THOMAS III, e WILLIAM J TURKEL.: Interchange: The Promise of Digital History, in The Journal of American History, 2, 2008, pp.452-91.

[32] Anche se per loro, la rivoluzione digitale passa da una nuova conoscenza transdisciplinare e dalla collaborazione tra diverse scienze; vedere di STEPHANE LAMASSÉ, e PHILIPPE RYGIEL, Nouvelles frontières de l’historien , in «Revue Sciences/Lettres», n.2, 2014, DOI: 10.4000/rsl.411.

[33] E’ quello che rileva Claudia Favero nella sua inchiesta per sapere “What does it mean to be a digital historian in Italy and in the UK?” basata purtroppo su un numero molto circoscritto d’interviste qualificate in entrambi I paesi. L’autrice delimita nella sua analisi, problemi e contradizioni degli storici che s’interrogano sul loro lavoro con il digitale o che fanno storia digitale, in CLAUDIA FAVERO: Digital Historians in Italy and the United Kingdom: Perspectives and Approaches., in CLARE MILLS, MICHAEL PIDD e ESTHER WARD: Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2012. Studies in the Digital Humanities., Sheffield, HRI Online Publications, 2014.

[34] Defining digital humanities: a reader., cit.. Una critica dell’uniformità culturale dei digital humanities, una definizione alternative e una descrizione degli ambiti disciplinari in Europa e altrove sono forniti da MARIN DACOS e PIERRE MOUNIER: Humanités numériques – État des lieux et positionnement de la recherche française dans le contexte international., Marseilles, OpenEdittion/Institut Français, 2014, pp.29-36.

[35] Malgrado ciò, la valutazione scientifica in positivo dell’Umanistica Digitale che include anche il lavoro degli storici con il digitale, è tuttora penalizzata nei suoi aspetti transdiciplinari dall’accademia italiana. L’Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale (AUICD) ha denunciato sul sito ROARS, “le gravi circostanze emerse con la pubblicazione dei risultati dell’Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale, che rischiano di compromettere in modo serio e preoccupante il futuro della formazione e della ricerca in un settore, quello dell’informatica umanistica e delle digital humanities, concordemente giudicato di importanza strategica per l’innovazione tecnologica e per la conservazione del patrimonio culturale”. (Osservazioni critiche dell’AIUCD sull’ASN).