Digital Public History: Origins of the Field and Possibilities for the Future

In recent years, award-winning scholarship from Denise Meringolo (Museums, Monuments, and National Parks, 2012) and Rob Townsend (History’s Babel, 2015) have forced scholars to reconsider the historic relationship with between public history work and traditional academic history in the United States. That reconsideration has made historians return to the beginning of the 20th Century to account for a larger sense of the historical enterprise. Just as this work revises understandings of the larger discipline's history, digital humanities scholars are beginning question the long-accepted origin story of computational linguistics as the root of their field, including with some pointing to Public History (Robertson, 2014 and 2016). With this renewed attention to multiple origins, this paper will excavate the emergence of digital public history as distinct approach to collaborative engagement with the public, situating that emergence in the context of the history of public history and digital humanities.