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Posts tagged ‘doing history online’

Jan 16

Doing History in Public review of the year

As the first month of 2018 rolls on, Carys Brown (@HistoryCarys) takes a look at the events of 2017 and how DHP covered them.

Whatever your opinion of the developments of 2017 it was undoubtedly an interesting year for history, or at least for future historians. In January an unpredictable and somewhat controversial Twitter-wielding former businessman and television personality was inaugurated as President of the USA amidst allegations of corruption and sexual misconduct. As David Runciman pointed out in a DHP post in June, investigations into Donald Trump’s conduct took a surprising turn towards twelfth-century England in a comparison between Trump and Henry II (bizarrely, it was quite a good parallel). This has also been the year of “fake news”, or at least allegations of fake news, so much so that last week Trump announced that he was going to hold a ‘Fake News Awards’ for those he regards as ‘the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media’. We shouldn’t get carried away assuming that we live in a unique age of misinformation, however, as Alex Wakelam’s March DHP post highlighted.

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Mar 5

The DPL of A: The New Knowledge Commonwealth

By Louise Moschetta, @LouiseMoschetta

Since the 1990s, in the early days of internet and the final demise of the floppy disk, new notions of knowledge have been hashed out on a global stage. With the dial-up sound (for those nostalgic for a slower, more complicated age, click here) came the possibility of an exchange of knowledge and interconnectivity which had never quite been achieved before. And with this possibility arose ideas of openness, of transnational sharing in virtual form which simply could not be attainable in a material shape. Read more

Dec 2

Remembrance, Re-launch and Richard III

By  Emily Ward

Doing History in Public (DHP) has been a fully-functioning, up-and-running collaborative blog project for the best part of a year. Those of us who have been involved with it since the start wear the ‘blogger’ badge with pride and have found blogging to be an excellent medium with which to pursue thoughts on a variety of historical interests, from personal research to current affairs or digital humanities. Hence a recent social media training session for first year Arts and Humanities Research Council PhD students provided the perfect opportunity for members of the DHP team to try to enthuse new graduates about the use of social media in an academic context. It also ended up providing an occasion to reflect on an exciting year past and to plug a new re-launch for the blog! Read more

Nov 25

Blog Re-launch 2nd December, 12.45 room 6, Cambridge University History Faculty

Dear all, We are looking for graduate students who are passionate about making history more accessible and using social media and blogging to discuss a range of history-relevant topics.

The Doing History in Public blog, https://doinghistoryinpublic.org/, will be re-launching at the Digital History graduate seminar on Tuesday 2nd December, 12.45-2.30pm in Seminar Room 6 in the History Faculty and we want you to get involved! Plus there will be free sandwiches! Read more

Mar 14

Thoughts about doing history in public: The case for Muslims in Britain

By Hira Amin

As a PhD student with an interest in Muslims in Britain, my initial thoughts were to focus on religious ideas, their evolution and how they are creating new British Muslim subjectivities. I specifically wanted to distance myself from the media sensationalism and politics surrounding Muslims in the West. Of course, all historians must take into account sociopolitical contexts; the understanding and practice of religion does not take place in a vacuum. Yet my subject was to be on Muslims’ evolution in understanding and practicing their faith in late 20th and early 21st century Britain.

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Mar 7

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria has closed his account

By Marta Musso

Have you ever wondered what world leaders would write in their Facebook accounts (in the pre-Obama era, of course)? Even though it’s two years old (a bygone era in the age of the internet) this post from CollegeHumor is more actual than ever. “Facebook News Feed History of the World: World War I to World War II” starts with pictures from the Crimean War and goes on to explain the causes and consequences of the two world wars up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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Mar 5

BBC Live Debate on World War One

by Tiia Sahrakorpi

Was the Great War a great mistake? 100 years on, historians and the public reflect on Britain’s involvement in World War One – a debate led by Niall Ferguson on BBC Two, Friday 28 February 2014. It then was moved to Radio 5 Live at 10.30 pm – 11.30 pm through which Professor Helen Weinstein (@historyworkstv) chaired the online debate via blogging and Twitter. Overall, over 4000 tweets were sent to #WW1, #pityofwar and #necessarywar. Here are some exerts from the debates found on Twitter: a TINY sampling of the various debates and thoughts of viewers and listeners. Read more

Mar 3

World Factory: fabricating a digital quilt

by Katy Bond, Jess Hope and Anne Alexander

Cambridge historians were recently invited to contribute research to World Factory, an interdisciplinary performance project exploring the global textile industry through the lenses of nineteenth-century Manchester and present-day China. A collaboration between Zoë Svendsen and Simon Daw of performing arts company Metis and Shanghai-based theatre director Zhao Chuan, it works by ‘stitching’ together research in a ‘Digital Quilt‘, placing nineteenth century sanitation reports and photographs of old Manchester cotton mills alongside twenty-first century labour laws and strike reports from industrial China. Read more