Crowdsourcing and user-generated content, the raison d’être of digital public history?

Abstract

Digital History is different from digital public history (DPH) and this essay describes the central role of crowdsourcing practices in defining the specificity of DPH. At the end of the 1970s, public history (PH) divided its field from a more traditional academic history, engaging with the public in different ways. In the new millennium, DPH developed new forms of interaction with the audience in cultural heritage settings and with communities, and made it possible, thanks to the web 2.0 facilities, to engage in new forms of collective interactions about the past, harvesting citizen’s knowledge. This essay will first define the term of “crowdsourcing,” then look at how the literature discusses the concept and finally describes different forms of crowdsourcing and user generated content (UGC) activities in DPH projects.