Doing History in Public
Digital History in the Digital Humanities
Speakers
What is the place of digital historians in the larger field of digital humanities? Are digital historians simply public historians working in a new environment? Recently, digital humanists have struggled to find a definition of the field that is sufficiently broad to encompass the goals and methodologies of practitioners from a variety of fields including literary studies, geography, archeology, media studies, classics, and history. Given these disciplinary differences, practitioners approach data and digital tools with different kinds of inquiry questions. Digital historians can draw on the thirty year tradition of public history, which emphasizes collaboration and public engagement. At the same time, they have access to the work of cognitive scientists, who have developed an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the way that people learn history. In combination, these influences yield a version of digital work—“Doing history in public”—that places inquiry questions front and center. This talk will explore the implications of scientific work and the ways that it can clarify the place of digital history within the larger landscape of the digital humanities.
Speaker Bios
Sharon M. Leon is an Associate Professor of History and Digital Humanities at Michigan State University. She is a core faculty member of the Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR). Dr. Leon received her bachelor of arts in American Studies from Georgetown University in 1997 and her doctorate in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2004. Her first book, An Image of God: the Catholic Struggle with Eugenics, was published by the University of Chicago Press. Prior to joining the History Department at MSU, Dr. Leon spent over thirteen years at George Mason University’s History Department at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media as Director of Public Projects, where she oversaw dozens of award-winning collaborations with library, museum, and archive partners from around the country. Dr. Leon’s program of research focuses on two areas. First, she is an historian of American religion with a concentration on U.S. Catholicism. Second, she specializes in digital methods with a focus on public history. As a result, Dr. Leon often is pursuing many research tracks at once. Currently, with the support of an NEH digital publication fellowship, she is at work on a digital project to surface and analyze the community networks and experiences of the cohort of people enslaved and sold by the Maryland Province Jesuits in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Simultaneously, she is building a major methodological project on doing community-engaged digital public history. Dr. Leon directs the Omeka web-publishing platform project, which provides a number of open-source options for digital scholarly communication and public engagement work: Omeka S, for linked data work and Omeka.net for a hosted solution. Dr. Leon’s ongoing writing, projects, and teaching materials can be found at 6floors.org.
A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues page.
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All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.
Contact: MITH (mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 301.405.8927).