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MAKING HISTORY ONLINE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2015

Tim Hitchcock  and
Robert Shoemaker
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Abstract

This article considers the implications of recent innovations in digital history for the relationship between the academy and the public. It argues that while digitisation and the internet have attracted large new audiences, academic historians have been reluctant to engage with this new public. We suggest that recent innovations in academic digital history, such as the highly technocratic ‘Culturomics’ movement, have had the unintended effect of driving a wedge between higher education and the wider public. Similarly, academic history writing has been slow to embrace the possibilities of the internet as a means of dissemination and engagement; and academic publishing has moved even more reluctantly. Despite these issues, this article argues that the internet offers real opportunities for bridging the divide between the academy and a wider audience. Through non-traditional forms of publication such as blogging; through Open Access policies; and through new forms of visualisation of complex data, the digital and online allow us to present complex history to a wider audience. We conclude that historians need to embrace the ‘affordances’ and ‘disruptions’ posed by the internet to render the discipline more open and democratically accessible.

Type
The Colin Matthews Lecture for the Public Understanding of History
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 25 , December 2015 , pp. 75 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2015 

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References

1 See www.jstor.org; www.eebo.chadwyck.com; www.gale.cengage.co.uk/product-highlights/history/eighteenth-century-collections-online.aspx; http://books.google.com.

2 See www.oldbaileyonline.org; www.londonlives.org; www.locatinglondon.org; www.connectedhistories.org; www.digitalpanopticon.org.

3 Charles Booth Online Archive: Police Notebooks, ‘District 31: Lambeth and St Saviour's Southwark’, B363, pp. 16–17 (http://booth.lse.ac.uk/static/b/districts.html, 28 Apr. 2015).

4 BBC News, ‘Census website a crashing success’, 2 Jan. 2002 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1737861.stm, 28 Apr. 2015).

5 See Sharon Howard, Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, ‘Crime in the Community Impact Report’ (2010) (www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20140614185215/ http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/analysis_cic.pdf).

6 For viewing figures, see ‘Garrow's Law’, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrow’s_Law, 1 May 2015); ‘Who Do You Think You Are? (UK TV Series), Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Do_You_Think_You_Are%3F_(UK_TV_series, 1 May 2015); and ‘“Secrets from the Workhouse” opens to over 3 million on ITV’, Digital Spy (www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/news/a493302/pbqJcUMHG6Nnr3, 1 May 2015).

7 National Library of Australia, Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/, 28 Apr. 2015).

8 The British Library on flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary, 28 Apr. 2015). See also ‘British Library uploads more than a million public domain images to Flickr’, Wired.co.uk, 15 Dec. 2013 (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013–12/15/british-library, 28 Apr. 2015).

9 Transcribe Bentham: A Participatory Initiative (http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/, 28 Apr. 2015).

10 Causer, T., Tonra, J. and Wallace, V., ‘Transcription Maximized; Expense Minimized? Crowdsourcing and Editing The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham’, Literary and Linguistic Computing, 27.2 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (e-journal).

11 Trevor Owens, ‘Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage: The Objectives Are Upside Down’ (2012), www.trevorowens.org/2012/03/crowdsourcing-cultural-heritage-the-objectives-are-upside-down/.

12 Howard, Hitchcock, and Shoemaker, ‘Crime in the Community Impact Report’.

13 Howard, Sharon, ‘Bloody Code: Reflecting on a Decade of the Old Bailey Online and the Digital Futures of our Criminal Past’, Law, Crime and History, 5.1 (2015), 21–4Google Scholar (www.pbs.plymouth.ac.uk/solon/journal/vol.5%20issue1%202015/Howard%20Bloody%20Code.pdf, 28 Apr. 2015).

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16 With Criminal Intent (http://criminalintent.org/, 28 Apr. 2015).

17 ‘Digging into Data Challenge Conference’, With Criminal Intent (http://criminalintent.org/2011/06/digging-into-data-challenge-conference/, 28 Apr. 2015).

18 For a recent discussion of these approaches, see Tim Hitchcock, ‘Big Data for Dead People: Digital Readings and the Conundrums of Postitivism’, Historyonics (http://historyonics.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/big-data-for-dead-people-digital.html, 28 Apr. 2015).

19 Research Excellence Framework 2014: Overview Report by Main Panel D and Sub-panels 27 to 36 (Jan. 2015), pp. 51–2 (www.ref.ac.uk/media/ref/content/expanel/member/Main%20Panel%20D%20overview%20report.pdf, 1 May 2015).

20 Blaney, Jonathan, ‘The Problem of Citation in the Digital Humanities’, in Mills, Clare, Pidd, Michael and Ward, Esther, Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2012 (Sheffield: HRI Online Publications, Studies in the Digital Humanities, 2014)Google Scholar (www.hrionline.ac.uk/openbook/chapter/dhc2012-blaney, 17 July 2015); Hitchcock, Tim, ‘Confronting the Digital, or How Academic History Writing Lost the Plot’, Cultural and Social History, 10.1 (2013), 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 19.

21 Hitchcock, Tim and Shoemaker, Robert, London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690--1800 (Cambridge, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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23 www.digitalpanopticon.org (1 May 2015).

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25 Helen Rogers, Conviction: Stories from a Nineteenth-Century Prison (http://convictionblog.com/, 28 Apr. 2015); Writing Lives (http://www.writinglives.org/, 28 Apr. 2015).

26 Broddie Waddell et al., The Many-Headed Monster: The History of ‘the Unruly Sort of Clowns’ and Other Early Modern Peculiarities (https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/, 28 Apr. 2015).

27 Sharon Howard, The History Carnival (http://historycarnival.org/, 28 Apr. 2015).

28 Laura O’Brien, ‘Twitter, Academia and Me’, The Society for the Study of French History (http://frenchhistorysociety.co.uk/blog/?p=348, 28 Apr. 2015).

29 For a wider discussion of the role of social media in modern academic discourse, see Tim Hitchcock, ‘Doing it in Public: Impact, Blogging, Social Media and the Academy’, Historyonics (http://historyonics.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/doing-it-in-public-impact-blogging.html, 1 May 2015).

30 This feature is already available when using the statistical function on the Old Bailey Online: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/forms/formStats.jsp (17 July 2015).

31 Gregory, Ian, ‘Using Geographical Information Systems to Explore Space and Time in the Humanities’, in The Virtual Representation of the Past, ed. Greengrass, M. and Hughes, L. (Aldershot, 2008), 35–46Google Scholar.

32 FBTEE: The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (http://fbtee.uws.edu.au/main/, 28 Apr. 2015).

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