HNN looks at public and digital history in Milwaukee

30 April 2012 – Cathy Stanton

From our colleagues at the History News Network comes this roundup of the public and digital history components of last week’s conference in Milwaukee. Noting the synergy between the realms of public and digital history, HNN’s David Walsh points out that the center of gravity in the conference blog- and tweet-ospheres was clearly with historians working in those realms, constituting “a monopoly of coverage…so complete it could warrant an anti-trust investigation,” he writes (we think that’s a good thing).  The article also includes a word cloud and spreadsheet of all the tweets from the conference, for you database-lovers out there.

“It’s not as if there’s an easy way to opt out of the digital age,” Walsh says, and acknowledges that those who work in both online and offline public arenas tend to be more willing to accept that fact and to find ways to work with it.  It’s a nice shout-out from one of the discipline’s premier and pioneering digital projects.

~ Cathy Stanton