Digital, Public, History

Student history projects that reach a public audience, and that allow students to include the public in their work, make for livelier classes that are good training not only for public history work but also for work outside of academia more generally. Sometimes, digital tools - websites and online collecting, for example, are useful approaches to this public work. But other kinds of projects, from exhibitions to public programs, as well as blended digital projects, can also serve the goals of learning, often better than the usual papers written by an individual student and only read by the professor. This presentation outlines some recent projects at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage that resulted in public projects.