As I have been thinking about history 2.0 and the possibilities it provides--and importantly, reading about web 2.0 and digital history--it occurs to me that to much of this conversation is in the abstract and/or deals with only the best funded and/or most elite organizations. How does web 2.0 shape history instruction and research at the margins--at the large state universities, second-tier state universities (like my own), or other less well funded private organizations? What about non-technical students or smart but overburdened students? What about k-12 teachers?
Conversations about what I am calling history 2.0 (which is probably something that I picked up along the way and am failing to credit) have to take into account where history is being learned. History is learned in university classrooms far from the centers of funding/technological expertise, and even more prominently in K-12 settings, not to mention museums that can barely manage volunteers much less sophisticated technical apparatus. How can history 2.0 work in these settings?
That is what I am to experiment with in these blogs that I have created (as well as the wikis). But, more to the point, I am going to see how it works in practice in an ordinary setting (and we are not as ordinary here at CSU as we often think, as we have excellent infrastructural support.)
But, there is also a political agenda, here for me: the goal of democratizing history. History 2.0 promises to offer what social history, the new social history, and other the other innovations in scholarship have promised but ultimately failed to deliver. History 2.0 can democratize the creation and construction of historical knowledge, just as web 2.0 would appear to be breaking down barriers between old and new media. In the 1970s, social historians sought to re-introduce ordinary folks into the history books, and they succeeded. Yet, they also suggested something more, a history that was more inclusive quite literally of the perspetives of ordinary folks. They suggested, rhetorically at least (and this language, incidentally, is part of what drew me to history as field), that the historical narrative would be inclusive of the insights and perspectives of folks. That people would actually help to rewrite their own histories. This has not happened. Scholars continue to study communities but for the most part scholarly history is written for a narrow audience of specialists, graduate students, and libraries. We have missed the opportunity to do something inclusive. History 2.0, to the degree that it is controlled by scholars and examined in the context of scholarly conferences, won't actually capture the possibilities of collaboration between historians and communities. Can't we actually use web 2.0 to move beyond the ivory tower (or in my case, the pored-concrete tower) and into the community to collaborative write history 2.0.
In some regards, a blog is still emblematic of an older model of didactic history teaching. I show, you read. On the other hand, its features suggest an alternative of interactivity--at least among bloggers, with everyone linking and creating blogspots or blogrolls or whatever they are callled. Also, the advantage for the historian is that the blog has an archive. We love archives. Curiously, though, wikis may offer a better possibility for collaboration. But, these require a different (and in some respects higher) technical hurdle, at least for the relatively untrained techie (i.e. me.) In either case, I wonder if we cannot get beyond our technical friends (another form of specialized expertise, akin to the historian's professional training) and find ways to collaborate.
In a future, not too distant, I will coment on how the Euclid Corridor Oral History Project is seeking to construct digital community beyond the poured-concrete tower. And, this writing, is quite invigorating, suggesting to me that our partners can use blogs as a way to contribute to ECOHP. We can have an ECOHP team blog--history 2.0 where we contribute to writing our region's history interactively. This can be my wordpress blog--one connected by topics rather than dates. Hmmm. More later.
Urbis is a museum in Manchester, England, devoted to exploring current and future cities, from a host of vantage points. They have an interesting website, with lots of great photographs. Their
photos of the week are spectacular.