Crowdsourcing and User Generated Content: The Raison d’Être of Digital Public History

Abstract

Digital History is different from digital public history (DPH) and this essaydescribes the central role of crowdsourcing practices in defining the specificity ofDPH. At the end of the 1970s, public history (PH) divided its field from a more tradi-tional academic history, engaging with the public in different ways. In the new mil-lennium, DPH developed new forms of interaction with the audience in culturalheritage settings and with communities, and made it possible, thanks to the web 2.0facilities, to engage in new forms of collective interactions about the past, harvestingcitizen’s knowledge. This essay will first define the term of“crowdsourcing,”thenlook at how the literature discusses the concept and finally describes different formsof crowdsourcing and user generated content (UGC) activities in DPH projects.