The most exciting aspect of the relationship between audience and content in public history projects is active audience participation in the creation of the work. As discussed in the articles, “Whose Public? Whose History?,” “Creating a Dialogic Museum,” “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry,” and “From a Shared Authority to the Digital Kitchen and Back,” creating public history projects is not just about creating a product for a consumer, but it is also about working with the public to create their own history.1 It is collaboration between many entities: historian, audience/subject, technicians, designers, etc. The first time I encountered a public history project that explicitly took the needs, views, and ideas of the audience and subjects seriously and as the main focus of the entire project was the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa in 2007. I had never seen a museum that centered the first hand accounts, memories, and artifacts of the people whose story was being told. It was truly their museum and not just a museum about them. Many historians I spoke with didn’t like the museum because for them it lacked a coherence and a scholarly voice. The scholarly “authority” was missing.

This visit and the subsequent discussions of the museum with other historians is what I thought of when reading Michael Frisch’s distinction between “sharing” authority and “shared” authority.2 The academic historian typically sees herself as the one with the authority that she can choose or choose not to share. The public historian must recognize the authority within any project is not theirs to share but is inherently shared by all interested parties. This remains a difficult concept for academic historians and seems to be reflected in the Journal of American History’s review guidelines for digital projects. There is no call to discuss and evaluate that shared authority.

Even when the project isn’t directly involving the public in gaining access to content, such as oral histories or the collections of the District Six Museum, the public historian has to carefully consider how the public engages with the content. The “public” is a pretty broad category, so more thought has to go into who will be engaging with the project and how they will be engaging with it. The document “Building Histories of the National Mall: A Guide to Creating a Digital Public History Project” was a deep end experience for me in what goes into the planning of a digital project including who has access to technology, how do they engage with that technology, how to make the tech experience not over shadow the content experience, and just how many people are involved in such a project. This is NOT your lone historian in the archive approach to history. Then comes the user research and persona creation. I will admit, this is not what I thought I would be doing in learning to create digital public history projects. While I am still confused by the entire process, I am aware enough to realize without this work, my project may appeal to just me and a few other people, one of whom will be my father, so that doesn’t count. Having spent the majority of my professional career easily defining my audience as either students or other academics interested in my small corner of the historical world, I find the user research and persona creation to be quite daunting. However, it is clear to create a public history that is for, about, and with the actual public and not just the single historian and a limited audience, such work must go into the foundation in order for the structure to stand.

1. Katharine T. Corbett and Howard S. (Dick) Miller, “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry,” The Public Historian 28.1 (2006): 15-38; Michael Frisch, “From A Shared Authority to the Digital Kitchen, and Back,” in Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, edited by Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski, (Philadelphia: The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2001), 126-137; Ronald Grele, “Whose Public? Whose History? What is the Goal of Public History?” The Public Historian 3.1 (Winter 1981): 40-48; and John Wei Tchen, “Creating a Dialogic Museum: The Chinatown History Museum Experiment.” In Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, edited by Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992): 285-326.
2. Frisch, “From a Shared Authority” 127.