What insights do you have about working in digital public humanities as a result of this experience? What new questions or ideas do you have as a result of this experience?
When I sit down with a student to research a thesis, there are only so many places I can go for scholarly information. At my academic library, we only have so many databases that we subscribe to. Those databases are the gateway to journals and books that have been deemed worthy by subject specialists. But the internet is more vast than databases and compendiums, brimming with sources to find information of varying veracity. Those sources are often more readily available than the articles and books we push our students to use, and users outside the college often don’t have access to the databases I would recommend to my students. How is the public meant to distinguish between a trustworthy source and a site with less-than-admirable goals?
Having a website about websites seems hyperbolic at first. But when we consider just how many sites there are on the surfable web, it starts to make sense. If we know users are going to look to these sites to find information, and these sites are of questionable quality, making a collection of veritable websites is the next logical step.
This is, partially, what I have been doing at World History Commons (WHC). It was daunting at first — I am not an expert in cuneiform tablets or Asian-American culture, yet I recommend these sites to users as places of dependable quality. This is where my librarian background comes in handy. I’ve been trained to sift through information to quickly determine what is useful and what is not in specific situations, and that’s exactly what this is.
This is how I formed my piece of insightful wisdom: Public History is “public” not only because it’s made for the public, but by the public. The public is made up of people with a vast variety of skills, and there is work waiting for someone proficient in all of those skills. The sites I’ve recommended to the public are proof of that — respecting and fully understanding the laws of Native tribes in order to share information, consulting projects on digitizing their collection, and creating educational content are just some of the projects I’ve discovered and wanted to share with users, and there are many more both within WHC and undiscovered.
I think the only question I have is wondering how to inspire more belief in open-source projects. Open source, as opposed to open access journals, are not “peer-reviewed,” or held up to a strict rubric of scholarly rigor. While WHC recommends peer-reviewed or primary sources, WHC itself is not peer-reviewed, which may leave some users wary of accepting its information. I don’t really know what the remedy to this issue is, and the only solution I’ve been able to reliably execute is to just tell people about WHC and recommend its content. I’m hoping that by being a librarian and endorsing a site like this gives it some credibility, but I’m only one person. I can only hope that those people find enough use in it to tell their colleagues and peers. And from them, back to the public.
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