by Since beginning to cover public history projects, my perspective and understanding of them have changed quite a bit. In such a short amount of time, I have been able to evolve how I search, plan, and create digital public history projects to examine the relationship between audience and content in public history projects. My understanding of public history began with topics like understanding your audience and thinking like a historian, to focusing on the content of the topic that a historian wants to focus on. However, one difficulty I’ve had with public history projects is correlating the relationship between the audience and the content of a given project. How does the content affect the audience? How does the audience affect the content? To further understand this relationship, I found three viable sources to help me understand this relationship.
First, I’d like to examine an excerpt from Ronald Grele’s Whose Public? Whose History? What is the Goal of Public History? In it, Grele explains that “the study of history is in an almost total collapse in the academy, while the popularity of history with the public is growing everywhere.” I found this passage to be telling, as the populations of history consumers tend to grow, they tend to affect what topics and materials we as historians want to focus on with our content. Although we as historians have a bevy of topics to research and work with, how we relay it to our audience is just as important. If we get too into detail, we may lose general interest in our audience due to the sheer number of content. However, we can resolve this content issue by coming up with creative or interactive ways to counter this issue.
For my second source, I read and utilized Sam Wineburg’s article titled Thinking Like a Historian. From his article, I was able to examine the relationships between historical concepts and the audience. Throughout the two pages, Wineburg uses several bullet points to help show how we should teach students to think historically. This can also be used to help examine the relationship as mentioned. For example, by using concepts such as contextualization, the understanding of basic knowledge, and reading the silences, we can break down each and every point to further understand the relationship between concepts and the audience it’s suited for.
My third and final source is Erika Hall’s Interviewing Humans. While I originally disregarded this article, there were certain aspects that caught my eye when writing my article. Specifically, the checklist provided shared some information on questions historians can ask about concepts as it pertains to their audience. For one, the checklist talks about historians taking responsibility to accurately convey the thoughts and behaviors of the people you are studying. Historians can look at a concept and ask how accurately we are relaying our topics to our audience. Another example from the checklist is encouraging participants to share their thoughts. By doing so, we are better able to understand our audience’s thoughts and feelings on the concepts we are trying to portray.
In conclusion, the relationship between historical concepts and our audiences revolves around a sense of understanding the information we have and how we wish to share it. Overloading information to an audience can both confuse and disinterest them. However, how we relay that information is the major difference that separates the audience being informed versus being bored. More importantly, the questions we as historians ask definitely play a part in this relationship. Our goals and expectations can greatly affect how the audience may learn a given concept of history that we are focusing on.
Citations
- Grele, Ronald. “Whose Public? Whose History? What is the Goal of Public History?” The Public Historian 3.1 (Winter 1981): 40-48.
- Hall, Erika. “Interviewing Humans.” A List Apart. Published on September 10, 2013. Published in Just Enough Research. A Book Apart, (2013).
- Wineburg, Sam. “Thinking Like a Historian.” Teaching with Primary Sources Journal. Pages 2-4.
