Curiosity and the citizen historian
This is my entry for Tom Scheinfeldt and Dan Cohen’s crowdsourced book Hacking the Academy. I would be one of those “newly-minted Ph.D’s” who are “foregoing the tenure track for alternative academic careers that blur the lines between research, teaching, and service,” except that I got my Ph.D. ten years ago. So, what—I'm a pioneer now?
Having lurked at the edges of academia for a decade, having not embarked on a monograph in even longer, having spent most of my intervening history-writing time blogging and developing resources for adolescents, I can afford to be curious. I can afford simply to wonder why people did a thing, or how they did it, and what it would have felt like when they did. I can afford to ask questions whose answers, if they exist, have no clear, orderly, academically-sanctioned research methodologies. Questions like what did food actually taste like two hundred years ago?
The place to take such questions is not a research library or an academic journal. There, the answers, if they exist, are buried in structure and argument and jargon. If I want to find my answers I have to frame my questions in terms of structure and argument and jargon, and at the beginning of a project, I don’t know enough to do that. I barely know enough to frame a question at all. My questions often start out more like “Milling: WTF?” If I start out looking through academic publications with that sort of un-focus, I’m only going to fill my head with other people’s well-formed opinions, and then I’m never going to have a chance to form my own. Simple, honest questions bounce off the hard walls of a polished essay. What I need at this point is a conversation, or even a cacophony.
Enter the Web. The place to take questions like these is Google. Google was made—more, the entire Internet was made for raw curiosity. There, the answers I find are, more often than not, provided by people who share my curiosity and wonder. Sometimes I wind up on JSTOR, reading journal articles, and believe me, I’m thankful for the keyword searching, even if I have to go through a proxy server to actually read anything. But more often I find myself reading a historical society website or a bit of corporate history, or (yes) someone’s blog, or even (gasp) Wikipedia. The authors have read a few books on a topic about which they’re curious, distilled what they’ve learned, and shared it with the world because they think it’s interesting and because they want to share what they know. They want other people to get interested, too.
Let me repeat that: they read and write history because they like it.
Professional historians do, too, supposedly, but we have other agendas that too often obscure that fact. The word amateur meant, originally, one who loves, and although I expect it’s too late to save that word from ignominy, it isn’t too much to ask that professionals respect the work of people who do what they do out of pure love and joy.
Sure, some of them are full of crap. So what? A lot of professional historians are full of crap, too. It’s usually easier to tell with the amateurs. Their conversations and distillations are a perfect starting point. Once I’ve gotten past the WTF stage (and I firmly believe that every research agenda should start with a WTF stage), once I learn enough about a topic to ask clear questions (e.g.: how did millers in colonial Pennsylvania fit into global networks of trade; what was the price of flour in Philadelphia in 1770), then I can move on to the archives, the journals, the monographs and dissertations.
And even then, surprisingly often, I find myself back in the realm of the citizen-historians.
Last winter I took part in the Great Backyard Bird Count, a project of Cornell University and the Audobon Society that engages “citizen scientists” to collect data on the birds in, literally, their back yards. Professional ornithologists compile all the data and analyze it to learn about changes in habitats, populations, and migration patterns—analysis for which they’re uniquely qualified, but they can’t collect the data themselves. They need citizen scientists, and the backyard birdwatchers get to play a meaningful role in science that directly interests them.
In April, the new Archivist of the United States blogged about “citizen archivists.” How, he asked, could the people who use archived materials help professional archivists understand and describe what they have?
And then, just this week, Martin Gardner died. Gardner, who never took a college math course, was responsible for getting multiple generations interested in mathematics through the puzzles he wrote for magazines such as Scientific American. You could call him a citizen mathematician if he hadn’t done so many other things as well.
All this has me wondering: What would citizen historians do?
To some extent, the same thing they do now. There are two parallel worlds of historical scholarship and education. One exists place in and around college campuses. The other goes on everywhere else—anywhere you can find people geeking out on highly focused topics — the county historian, the genealogist, the reenactor who has worked for twenty years running historic gristmills. Last summer, as part of a K–12 project, I spent time talking with, and filming, reenactors at historic sites, and one of the most interesting conversations I had was with a muleskinner who trucks his mule around the state to demonstrate pre-petroleum agricultural techniques. Guess which one of us knew more about 19th-century agriculture? Not the guy with the Ph.D. All these people working outside the academy—people who are in effect “citizen historians” even though few of them would think of themselves that way—have experience and knowledge that can be incredibly valuable to an openly curious historian.
Of course there is value to academic history as well—research methods, standards of evidence, complicated discussions of how to interpret various kinds of sources; the broad knowledge and ability to make connections between disparate topics that comes with full-time devotion to a field. Citizen-historians lack those kinds of skills, and where amateur history usually falls down is in failing to see the forest for the trees. But that isn’t a reason to dismiss what they know and do. Some of them really know those trees, and too many academic historians forget that there are trees in there at all.
Those different interests and skill sets make it all the more important that professionals engage with citizen historians. The latter are, after all, are at the front lines of historical education—museum educators and docents and high school history teachers, but also the blogger who writes engagingly and whose site is ranked near the top of a half-dozen Google searches.
What if we worked together on this stuff?
What if we shared not only the products but the process of our research with the world? What if academic historians routinely blogged or tweeted dribs and drabs of research findings? What if the citizen historians who followed them made suggestions or asked questions?
What if we found ways to aggregate the knowledge of museum educators? What if professors volunteered as docents? What if we held an unconference, invited a bunch of reenactors, and traded off the presentation duties?
What if we opened up the conversation?
Some of these open conversations are taking place already—in pockets of the Internet, in a few digital humanities forums, in some oral history and folklore projects. But there are still two parallel worlds. “Public history” tries to bridge the gap, but it tends to go one way, from the academy outward. The world of digital humanities ought to make open conversations between the two worlds easier, and it has, but even on the Web the worlds stay mostly separate. Is it a lack of respect? A lack of interest? I don’t know. And I’m not sure exactly how, or where, professional historians and citizen historians can collaborate. I do know that whenever I’ve been able to have these conversations, I’ve wound up listening far more than talking, and I’ve gained at least as much wisdom as I’ve imparted. There ought to be more of it. I think we’d all learn something.
Melissa
29 May. 2010, 11:17 pm
I love this. First – we did the Cornell nestwatch and love citizen science. As for
the other you have described my unique and brilliant brother who has done many
citizen historian-type things in his life. His latest desire is described here:
http://www.outerspacemovingvandriver.com. Future history.