Urban Humanist

The emperor has no clothes. Or so I declare in a comment on a post at the brilliant public history blog, History at Work. I didn’t mean to spoil the feel-good digital party at History at Work, really. But, the post was about a scholarly volume, Subjecting History that claimed to be “open review,” when it wasn’t. And, it also claimed to be “public” engagement. I didn’t see that either.

Here is the story, as I understanding it from reading Subjecting History: Seventeen scholars respond to a call for proposals. Some (all?) are accepted, apparently. (Are any rejected?) There is no evidence of review, review criteria, winnowing, or exploration of the volume’s content. In other words, it is a garden-variety essay collection. I have no problems with this aspect of the book, to be published by Ohio State University Press.

But, the book claims to be an “open review volume.” Thus, I presumed that I’d see something in the open about how it evolved. There is no indication as to how comments before/during/after solicitation would/will shape the essays on their eventual publication. Moreover, to date, there are handful of comments there, but nothing incisive or from others outside the volume. As far as I can tell, none of the comments engage the material as a peer reviewer might.

Likewise, there is no evidence, that I can see, of “public” engagement. I don’t see “public” (apparently defined here as non-academic) participation in review for acceptance or in comments on the site. I see a general statement about reaching out to interested constituencies and public audiences that might be interested in engaging the essays. I find this statement unsatisfying. Public historians, in our reviews of grants or such public projects or publications, would ask not just whether you were going to do such outreach (it’s obvious that it’s necessary) but *how* you would do it and *how* you would make such outreach successful. Doing outreach to public audiences is hard work.

I also don’t see how this volume presents material in a fashion that the “public” might actually engage. Really, public historians have taught us a great deal about the complexities involved in engaging the public. Writing words on a page and asking people to respond directly to those words is hardly public engagement, whether it is done digitally, on exhibit labels, or in a book. What would I like to see? How about alternative visions for “public history,” outside the text? How about solicitations of particular publics that might engage the essays through planned partnerships? How about some analytics (though that would impose a new standard than has been accomplished in previous comment-press books.)

I want to be clear here that I applaud such attempts. In fact, I think everyone should go over and comment on “Subjecting History.”  But, I’m not sure that comments can save a project that does not seem to emphasize open review. Indeed, what makes the work Jack Doughtery and Kristen Nawrotzki, Writing History in the Digital Age, so interesting was the process. The strength of Writing History in the Digital Age was that the project that evolved, grew, and morphed through an open scholarly process. This not only met the goals of openness that is surely valuable, but it met the standards of peer review. Moreover, it involved lots of participation, both inside and outside the project. It is a model. We should strive for it.

We should strive for it, because there is very much at stake. Surely, we need to find ways of publishing material, openly and with review, both to improve the process but also so that digital scholarship become more deeply part of the scholarly review process. Although I would note that this last statement validates old-fashioned academic standards that are increasingly antiquated by the digital age. And, of course, peer review is often (though not always) a sham embedded in 19th-century scientific practice, so I am not sure we should even see it as a gold standard. Still, there is something critical here and that is the importance for scholars–public historians and more traditional research historians–to connect with the public beyond the ivory tower. Our failures or successes in this regard are critical to the broader shape of civic society, which historical interpretation shapes in significant ways.

Which brings me to my final point. There is a claim here that “By implementing a digital platform that enables an open review process and inviting comments and discussion from the general public, we are experimenting in making history the subject of popular gaze, rather than the other way around.” If (as I’ve said) I don’t see the first part of this claim, I surely don’t see the second part. Isn’t “history” already “the subject of popular gaze?”

Really, heritage tourism is a global industry measured in trillions of dollars. History abounds in multiple media forms and is avidly consumed. History is actively debated in our civil and political culture. Elsewhere the volume proclaims that the term subject is also used because the volume seeks to “put History somewhat under the power of the public.” Commenting on scholarly essays, without any real say over their publication accomplishes neither of these tasks.

And, incidentally, I would suggest that history is already fully “under the power of the public.” As public historians (actually as historians–is there really a distinction?) one of our great challenges is to engage, challenge, interpret, and re-frame understandings of a past that is surely outside our limited power.

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I do have another model, other than the book–and there is a place for books written for public historians–from practicioner to theoretician. My suggestion, and a plug as to why my own work has importantly reframed our approach. We should abandon the conceit that our scholarship is “history” or even what makes our work specially. Indeed, public historians do more than write and theorize. We are brilliant at *practice* at project development. We should get into the trenches with the public and produce digital (or non-digital) projects that collaboratively remake the past, including memory landscapes (which is ostensibly one of the contributions of essays in the Subjecting History volume.)   I’ve been at work on that here in Cleveland with my work on the Cleveland Cultural Gardens.  Rather than theorize the Gardens, imagine how they could be better, or simply write their history (I’ve done all three, incidentally), I joined the fray and with students built a history website, www.culturalgardens.org. Oddly, we didn’t merely open up the site for public comment, or solicit the input of folks involved in the Gardens. No, instead, we invited our partners to use it as their voice, to reinvent it with photographs, text, and their own vision. What has emerged is an amalgam of traditional scholarship, student essays, enthusiast contributions, and community involvement. While the site does not quite make the grade as “scholarship” because of its form (and non-academic contributions), we have shaped public reinterpretation of the site by participating in, and helping to lead that change. Oddly, history in the Gardens is neither subject or object. It is collaboration–exactly what it should be.

NOTE (3/13/2013, needs spelling/grammar check.)

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Recently, I was invited by the Ohio Humanities Council to spend an afternoon with colleagues from around Ohio to brainstorm about how some of the council’s grant standards could be updated for the digital age. This gathering revealed the vibrancy of Ohio’s scholarly and professional community, re-introducing me to great digital initiatives like the Ancient Ohio Trail or Columbus Neighborhoods projects.  As we discussed OHC’s present and past grant programming, I raised questions about how state humanities councils could identify and fund innovative projects–efforts that push the envelope, whether of interpretation, format, or technical design. I was thinking, of course, about the “high risk, high reward” strategy employed by the National Endowment for the Humanities in its Digital Start-Up grants. My question, uttered in the waning moments of the meeting, became homework for those of us in attendance. How can a state humanities council encourage innovation in its digital projects? Are its goals and strategies for project support different from the NEH? Or, complementary? And, what might this mean for grant guidelines and programs?

As I’ve mulled over this, I realize that innovation is fomented in many different ways, not merely by funding technological development. Indeed, a significant amount of innovation in the funding of humanities projects is really funding that allows an individual investigator to grow in new ways, to experiment, and/or re-imagine their professional identity.  Understood in this way, the Ohio Humanities Council has long funded innovation. My experience in this regard was through its Oral History Institute at Kenyon College. About 15 years ago (who keeps track of time after a certain age) I attended an OHC oral history institute, which built the foundation for many of my present scholarly activities.  Working at the time as a historian at the Western Reserve Historical Society, I attended because I was planning an interview project to support a new museum initiative being development by my employer at the time, WRHS: a museum of technology and industry planned on the Cleveland lakefront. After the institute, I applied for and received funding for Cleveland Works, an oral history project that documented the lives of industrial workers, especially workers in the steel and auto industries. The project collected more than 40 interviews, many of them quite revealing.  Unfortunately, those interviews never made it into the museum’s exhibitions because WRHS’s plans for a lakefront museum collapsed (leading to long-term issues for the institution.) As the project was failing, I moved to Cleveland State University as a member of the history department.  And, for me, this is when the story gets good.

For the past decade, I have used that oral history training, and my experience from doing Cleveland Works, to explore different aspects of public history and digital humanities. That training has shaped my scholarship on the Cleveland Cultural Gardens, as well as student and public engagement with the Cultural Gardens. Subsequently, oral history became the basis for the initial incarnation of the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities. Oral histories done in collaboration with teachers also became the backbone for several Teaching American History projects I directed. Later oral history emerged as a core element in the history kiosks our team deployed on Euclid Avenue with LandStudio and the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority.  To date, our team has collected more than 800 interviews documenting community, region, and place in Northern Ohio. We’ve even returned those oral histories to the community as I originally hoped to do, but in a dramatically different fashion. Using digital and mobile tools, we’ve transformed the city into a living museum through the Cleveland Historical project, interpreting the region’s history through the voices of many of its diverse residents. I recently wrote about how oral history matters in the digital public humanities in the Oral History Review.

All this came to mind as I thought more deeply about how OHC could spur innovation through its grant programming. Indeed, I realized that we need to view such challenges and questions both in the short term and the long term. In the narrow view, some of what I would say were my more innovative OHC proposals (especially those about the Cultural Gardens, mentioned above) were not funded. But, that said, the support I received for oral history research and training has had a rather extraordinary impact beyond its initial funding: it has had impact on me, students, teachers, Ohio communities, and even on scholarship. (The public historian in me wonders if I should not just abandon the distinction between scholarly history and public history.)

Even as I write this, I realized that I can step back even further. Indeed, I was also fortunate, as a graduate student and later a recent Ph.D., to have collaborated with the Mercer Museum, doing my research on the history of firefighting. I discovered a treasure trove of firefighting materials at the Mercer Museum and then helped Mercer to catalog these materials. Later, Mercer curator Cory Amsler and I curated a major exhibition on the history of firefighting. Those projects, funded by the Pennsylvania Historic & Museum Commission, not only produced what I thought was a great exhibition (how could I not!), but also, the funding was instrumental in helping me become a public historian conversant in practice, not just theory. This, too, has shaped my career in important ways (see the projects above.) Most interestingly, I worked with Cory and a local exhibition consulting/design shop to create a movie for the exhibition that was developed in what was then a new digital tool for making films: iMovie.

Based on my interactions with colleagues, I suspect that my experiences are typical of the training received by many digital humanists, public historians, and oral historians. For many of us, innovation has begun with the support given through small grants or fellowships for public projects, obtained at various times throughout a career. This individual funding might not have been couched as high risk/high reward, but in fact investing in unproven young scholars represents significant risk for so many reasons. It also yields rewards, perhaps not in the short term, but often in the long term. In my case, modest investments, by the OHC in supporting Oral History or the Mercer Museum’s willingness to collaborate with a Ph.D. candidate on core activities of cataloging and curating, have produced long-term rewards for a variety of constituencies (both inside and outside the academy.)

Does this perhaps call for new categories of project investment in digital humanities or public history, more smaller seed grants from funding organizations (perhaps akin to kickstarter campaigns)? I am not sure.

But, I am sure that small grants are as important as large grants in funding innovation.

I am also sure that innovation is about funding individual growth and exploration, as much as it is about funding technology development or underwriting specific projects.

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We’re excited that Curatescape is being adopted. Present deployments thru April 2013 in blue; deployments scheduled for Spring & Summer 2013 in Purple; Projects in Green are funded and under development with anticipated deployments in Fall 2013. Yellow pins represent projects in active discussion, but far from being finalized. In other words, I’m being hopeful.

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