From the Editor

14 March 2012 – Cathy Stanton

As I was working on getting ready for the beta phase of “History@Work,”  I took on the task of freshening up the public history blogroll that we’ve used at “Off the Wall” for the past year and a half.  This turned out to be a sobering exercise:  it turns out that close to half the blogs we were following have shut down or become inactive (including, just recently, the venerable Cliopatria).  It’s not quite as daunting an attrition rate as that for new restaurants, but it prompts similar questions about why you would want to start yet another one, and whether the world really needs it.

In this case, I believe it does, and here’s why:  After several years of discussions around NCPH about how we might create a better digital gathering-place for public historians, the time feels right to pull together a lot of conversations and developments from around the field. Public history continues to grow as an international practice and discourse (particularly around the International Federation for Public History, founded two years ago), and it’s a no-brainer that the electronic realm serves a crucial function in maintaining conversations across national borders, particularly in times of leaner institutional and personal budgets.  Issues relating to the training and employment of public historians are always to the fore in the field, and we hope the blog will provide a forum for airing and discussing them, and linking them with other dialogues going on elsewhere on the Web, as Briann Greenfield’s piece on the “Tuning” project does in our first batch of posts.

NCPH itself is a robust and growing organization, with a vibrant annual conference and lots of good energy coming from younger practitioners entering the field as well as a generation’s worth of experience and wisdom under our collective belt.  We’re envisioning the blog as a place for cross-pollination of ideas and constituencies, where different elements of a multifarious field can encounter each other more regularly (for example, in the Consultant’s Corner, whose editors have started things off with a post that surveys some of the reasons that people go into this kind of work).  NCPH’s plans to create a new public history journal, after more than 30 years of association with The Public Historian and the University of California/Santa Barbara, have recently raised important questions about public history scholarship and its relationship to the rapidly-evolving world of the digital humanities.  Look for follow-up dialogue on that and many other topics to take place here in “History@Work” in the coming months.

Our long-running listserv, H-Public, served us well as a venue for these kinds of discussions in the now-distant digital past, but like “Web 1.0” platforms in general, it doesn’t offer the flexibility or “shareability” of newer digital media.  This was brought home to me as I was categorizing and tagging the first posts this week.  We’ve developed a core taxonomy of tags, in addition to the eight basic categories that you’ll see in the navigation bar, and rather than trying to stream things too rigidly into specific areas, we’ve decided to let the categories and tags do most of the work of sorting things out for us as we add content to the blog.  I can already see connections emerging that wouldn’t have been as visible in a more linear format–for example, between the “Tuning” post and Zach McKiernan’s chilling account of a how the past is far from over at a memorial to victims of Chile’s 1970s dictatorship.  One post focuses on history education in the U.S., another on human rights activism in Chile, but both are addressing questions about social equity and the critical role of history in tough economic times.  They have much to say to each other, and I hope these kinds of juxtapositions and echoes will make “History@Work” a reverberant, thought-provoking place.

For now, the blog site is still very much a work in progress (not unlike the public history field itself!).  As we get closer to our spring conference, look for new content and features:  social media functionality, more from consultants and those new to the field, additional “Letters from Chile,” exhibit announcements and reviews, and more.  I’m excited to see where this all goes, and grateful to everyone–NCPH’s superlative staff, the talented and dedicated members of our editorial team, and valued colleagues at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media–who are helping launch it on its way.

~ Cathy Stanton
Digital Media Editor, National Council on Public History