Exploring the value of digital citizen history and the challenges of seeking to locate it, link it to other sources and explore ways to ensure its preservation are the subjects of a current Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, ‘Our Heritage, Our Stories: linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people’s national collection’ (OHOS). OHOS is a collaboration between researchers in history, archive studies, linguistics and computer science at the universities of Glasgow and Manchester and the National Archives, along with partner organisations including the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Tate, the British Museum, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, producers of digital citizen history and a network of smaller regional and local heritage organisations from across the UK that hold digital content created by and relating to communities. The project incorporates a broad geographic range of organisations and groups to ensure a truly national approach which engages with every part of the UK and a wide range ofhistories and historians.
The last two decades have witnessed a boom in public or community history research in the UK, a significant proportion of which appears in digital format online – what we are calling digital citizen history. This is history that is public in the sense that it is produced by individuals and groups outside universities, rather than being something disseminated to the public by professional historians. Arguably the most genuine form of ‘bottom up’ historical enterprise, it is driven by the interests and motivations of its creators. The significant rise in funding for community history from organisations such as the National Lottery Heritage Fund, coupled with the ease with which anyone can now publish online has created a surge in the production of digital citizen history projects.
These are hugely valuable resources – for those who make them, for communities, and for a wide range of historical researchers. Yet they are often hard to find, difficult to link to other materials on related topics for research purposes, and frequently at risk of disappearing altogether. The digital outputs that citizen historians produce are typically established as standalone resources which are often effectively buried on a range of online sites, variously hosted on private servers, commercial blogging sites, and other disparate web platforms. For the most part such materials have been created with long term digital preservation as an afterthought, and seldom developed with an eye to either discoverability or the ability to link to related content. In a changeable world in which technology firms are subject to both rapid boom and bust and the threat of hostile takeovers, the future existence of historical research hosted, for example, on WordPress, Facebook or TikTok is uncertain. Its survival relies not only on the stability of individual platforms but also on its creators maintaining, updating and funding a continuing presence online. This is often not possible, which means that such materials are particularly fragile or vulnerable to becoming permanently lost or inaccessible.
OHOS is exploring ways to make it easier for everyone to locate digital citizen history and to be able to explore individual projects alongside those with linked themes and characteristics, at the same time as respecting and embracing the complexity and diversity of these forms of historical research and publication. Existing technical solutions to the problems faced when trying to discover and link citizen digital history are expensive, time-consuming and unsustainable at scale. The project team are exploring how to address this by creating sophisticated automated tools and open data software to make digital citizen history projects searchable and connected, developed on principles of co-production and participatory design and aligning with best practice in data management: the FAIR principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability. As we dissolve barriers and add meaningful links across these collections we hope to will make them accessible to new and diverse audiences, open them up for research and embed new strategies for future projects into heritage practice and training with freely available toolkits aimed at helping citizen historians protect and promote their digital materials.
The remit of the academic historians working on OHOS is to connect with the creators of digital citizen history and to explore the value of their work not only for them, but also for wider audiences. Stefan and I are convinced of the tremendous potential of these materials to represent UK history in its multidialectal, multilingual, and multicultural richness, as well as challenging ideas that history is, or should be, an activity best left to professionals employed in university history departments. In a series of initial case studies – on popular music, World War II, histories of race relations and disability – Stefan has tried to suggest the ways in which digital citizen history might enrich wider understandings of the past to reveal something of its tremendous value. For example, his survey of online citizen history sites devoted to the second World War suggests that these are now the main medium through which individuals share memories of the conflict – linking private, family stories with the popular memory of an episode in British history which retains enormous cultural significance. The light that citizen digital history shines on a diverse range of stories allows previously hidden wartime experiences, such as those of the West Indian servicemen stationed in East Yorkshire, to be better known and incorporated into mainstream historical accounts. The potential of citizen digital histories to feed into wider debates and understandings about history and culture is the basis of conversations that the wider project team is now having with funders and others about how the long-term preservation of citizen digital history can be ensured.
The rich resource of text, sound and imagery concerning past lives that citizen digital history represents embraces a vast range of topics and can be particularly helpful in restoring marginalised voices to the historical record. Yet though it has the potential to feed into a wide spectrum of historical research, reusing citizen digital history in other research should be approached with care and with respect for its original creators. Our discussions with a wide range of citizen historians have revealed a strong desire for their resources to be accessed and disseminated more widely, but this was coupled with a range of responses to the possible reuse of materials by individuals and institutions not involved in their creation. Whilst the majority of those that we consulted were very positive about the incorporation of their materials into other research, a significant minority were very uncomfortable about this prospect. This reminds us that though many uses of online personal data might be legal they can be seen as deeply problematic for the individuals and communities concerned. Thus whilst citizen history offers a potentially vast resource of new primary materials for historians, researchers have an ethical responsibility to respect the wishes of its creators concerning the reuse of their materials.
What this means in practice is that researchers should always attempt to work with the citizen historians on whose work they wish to draw. This can produce benefits for both sets of researchers in terms of opening up possibilities for knowledge exchange, collaboration and co-production, as is illustrated in the work of a number of academic historians, including Hakim Adi and the Young Historians project, Tanya Evans and Laura King working with family historians, and in the discussions of Meleisa Ono-George and other contributors to the Power of Telling articles in History Workshop. Though we have emphasised some ethical considerations concerning the reuse of citizen digital histories here, researchers should also understand and work within legal (and for academic researchers, also institutional) frameworks. Copyright and GDPR (General Data Protection) laws can be complex to navigate, but we have produced
some summary guidance on best practice in these areas, much of which overlaps with the excellent guidance produced by the Oral History Society. Though doing history in a digital era is full of exciting possibilities, like all research it also comes with significant responsibilities on the part of researchers.