An Institutional Model for Public History on the Web

AskHistorians is difficult to explain for those involved in conventional outreach through museums and institutions, because it doesn't really fit into the mould of "outreach" as it has usually been understood. This talk contrasts the outreach model of museums and public history sites, to the education model of universities and graduate studies programmes, to the "mediator" model of AskHistorians, in order to extract lessons about what engages members of the lay public on the web. Crucially, the goal of this talk is to explain the ways in which AskHistorians (AH) is not doing public history nor history education as they are understood, but rather something new.

AH works on a system of approximation and mediation, trying to attract both laypeople and experts to an open space where they can interact and share knowledge. The goal is to give lay users not only the product of the historical process, but a glimpse at that process itself; AH readers come into contact with working historians, graduate students, and experts in related fields (Linguistics, archaeology, social sciences) who volunteer to expose how their field actually works. Notably, AH is a space in which laypeople can be exposed to abstract discussion of historiography as well as specific discussion of historical events and people. Allowing readers' curiosity to guide discussion has produced unexpected results that would not have come out of a conventional outreach model where the agenda is set entirely by the institution.

The talk's goal is to clarify for the audience an abstracted model of how AH operates as an institution, and how institutions of its kind might be classified together into a new media form of public history.