Sharing Authority in Online Collaborative Public History Practices

Abstract

Forms of shared authority has become User-generated projects in the digi-tal realm public history practices and projects. New collaborative forms of historymaking through web technologies are ubiquitous worldwide. User-generated projectsdemocratized the making of history with public historians now engaged in sharingtheir authority actively with targeted communities. This essay discusses the criticalissues related to the concept as it dealt with public historians’activities, its accep-tance as a fundamental method for doing public history in the digital world, and theway Web 2.0 social practices contributed enormously in developing the field of digitalpublic history to intertwine crowdsourcing with shared authority practices.