The conference Shared Authority: Public History, Social
Curation, and Social Practice, organized by the Temple University Library on
November 10 embraced all the focal points of Public History.
Erin Bernard illustrated her experience with the History
Truck, a mobile oral collection lab that interacted with local communities
helping them to revive their memory. Erin showed the fundamental importance of
a strong connection with institution, neighborhood associations, and private
citizens.
Cindy Little started her talk with her memories on a past
project of her, similar to the History Truck for the intensive work with
communities and the nomadic experience. It was a project that linked housing
and heritage and played on the strong connection that everyone has for the
place where we live. Citizens could share their memories on the neighborhood,
on the experience they had in living there or they could retrieve information
on the people that lived in their house before them.
Both these project relied on a strong participation of
communities on the project, the highly interactive process that Michael Frisch
(the third speaker) successfully baptized shared authority.
Frisch is scouting new paths on this ground: he is trying to
develop IT technologies that offer a platform where common people can archive
directly their experience or data. He is trying to utilize phone apps (Pixtory)
and social media to create a virtual ambient were communities can constantly
share and discuss about the past in an ambient that is practically
academia-free.
After the conference, a group of us kept talking with
Frisch. His ideas suggest a future that is still blurred and uncertain, but
that surely comprises a higher interaction between people and technology also
in relation to history. If this direction is certain and few have doubts about it, still
the academia is slow in offering strong education on the digital world. We did
have a more than interesting class on the argument and I already thought that
this technological divide between historians and world is problematic. This
conference reinforced my doubts: as historians, are we ready for the next
generation of technology innovations and for the share of voice-power that they
will bring with them? Will we burn in smoke like a resistor against too much power?
P.S. Magic Smoke
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