6th Digital History in Sweden Conference: Unboxing Digital Methods, Practices and Public Engagement
Whether or not it is a conscious choice, most digital history projects involve, engage, or inform the public in some way. This can be anything from crowdsourcing or creating a digital educational resource, to inadvertently enabling easy access to newly digitized material for everyone – not just researchers. Historians need to be aware of the potential of the digital in the dissemination and collection of historical knowledge, as well as the vital role they play in providing a context for local histories.
Fusing the sharing of memories and amateur history-writing online – where it can easily be disseminated – means that historians have started to be more aware of and open to the public’s role in collecting memories and sources, building networks, and enabling cross-border, non-Eurocentric ways of writing history. The internationalization of access to sources and histories leads to academic and amateur historians gaining insights into regions that previously were inaccessible, yet infrastructures for citizen participation remain limited to only a few. In many ways, digital methods, practices, and public engagement put a spotlight on history’s relationship with collective memory and how interactive practices, collaborations, and co-creation affect both the field and the public in general.
Registration for in-person attendance at the location of the event is closed (24 October). For the keynotes and some sessions, you can register for online-attendance (Zoom). Please register below.
The conference is organized by the Division of History at the Department of Cultural Sciences, with support from the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies and Digital Humanities at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University.
Keynote
Pippa Virdee, "The Digital Afterlife of the 1947 Partition". Professor of Modern South Asian History, De Montfort University.
The study of Partition has been growing in many diverse directions over the past two decades, taking the discipline from a niche subject to a significant area of exploration. The developments and changes in technology have made this process easier, allowing for the exchange of memories and oral histories through virtual spaces where international boundaries divide. However, with this growth there are also challenges for the study of Partition specifically, but for the discipline more widely. This paper begins by tracing the origins and context of these developments in Partition Studies, before discussing the impact this has had on the ongoing debates and discourses in the field.
Jacob Orrje, "Re-thinking the Crowd. AI, Lay Expertise, and the Sourcing of Historical Data", Forskare i idé- och lärdomshistoria vid Uppsala universitet och digital vetenskapshistoriker vid Centrum för vetenskapshistoria, Kungl. Vetenskapsakademien, PI för projektet Den tidigmoderna bergsvetenskapens geografier. En digital historia över Bergskollegiums utländska studieresor 1691–1826.
While public engagement in historical research has a long history, in recent years digital technology and the open-culture movement have profoundly changed historians’ ability to build on lay expertise. Emerging AI-based methods in turn enable us to draw on the work of even larger crowds obscured through black boxed technology. These developments could be considered the foundation of a public humanities, formed through mutually beneficial collaborations. However, such an idealistic conception risks hiding more problematic relationships of asymmetric reward structures and exploitation. In this lecture, I critically reflect on the global fiscal and moral economies of public engagement in a digital history that increasingly relies on pre-existing datasets and models. How do we create mutually beneficial collaborations if we rely on data and technology that systematically obscure the work we rely on? And finally: what are the connections between crowd sourcing and our contemporary online gig economy?
The 6th Digital History in Sweden Conference is a sustainability-assured meeting in accordance with Linnaeus University’s guidelines for sustainable events. These guidelines are linked to the 17 global goals in Agenda 2030 and comprise the three dimensions of sustainable development: the economic, the social, and the environmental.
Learn more about Linnaeus University´s sustainable events here.