The Historiographical Foundations of Digital Public History

Abstract

Establishing the historiographical foundations in any field is a difficult orat least risky business. It entails granting a certain homogeneity and a good deal ofcoherence to practices, perspectives, and trends that do not necessarily have either ofthese properties and, to a great extent, to not aim to acquire them. This is more dif-ficult in the case at hand because the adjectives“public”and“digital”refer in prin-ciple to two distinct branches or trends within the discipline of history, each of whichhas its own referents. Today, however, they tend on the whole to be confused witheach other, or at least to overlap. If the aim of public history is to reach a wide audi-ence that includes historians and citizens in the collective discussion of the past, thenit must use the dominant ecosystem: the digital one. Obviously, public history encom-passes very different practices, not only in terms of their origin but also because, for afew years now, and even more so with its internationalisation, it has been turning intoa broad field where several realities that were previously separated now coexist. Inturn, most digital history is public history, starting with the pioneering project“Valleyof Shadow.”In short, traditional history can continue to operate within the parametersof the printed world, but public history cannot and should not.This text proposes looking at the backgrounds of digital history and public his-tory separately. On the one hand (digital), it selects three precursors: Paul Otlet,Vannevar Bush, and Roberto Busa. On the other hand (public), it examines the orig-inal North American model, local history, and popular history, not to mention oralhistory. From there, it presents the moment in which the public and the digital over-lap, presenting some of the problems and challenges public digital history faces.