Nearly three decades ago, the Virginia Center for Digital History’s Valley of the Shadow archive demonstrated how history could be represented, in the words of the project’s co-editor Ed Ayers, “from the viewpoints of everyday people who could glimpse only parts of the drama they were living.” In the years since, the promise of digital archives has become widely embraced. Countless new archives have opened up exciting possibilities for teachers and learners of history. With their nonlinear structures and multiple access points, these archives help break us out of the frameworks scholars often rely on to organize ideas and information for in their research, teaching, and public engagement. Digital archives facilitate thematic connections and dense juxtapositions that help make visible the relationships between people, places, and ideas. Digital organizing structures allow us to comprehend changes at regional and national scales while still centering local experiences. They enable us to encounter voices that trouble the narratives we thought we knew, and reveal stories rarely told.

Still, we cannot mobilize the possibilities of using digital archives without also acknowledging a number of stubborn challenges they present. How might we curate content and create navigational aids in ways that facilitate users’ ability to make meaning out of the diverse viewpoints represented across our vast collections? How can we mitigate the intimidating aspects of digital technology and the alienating qualities of remote learning so that our students – and the broader public – are empowered to use these archives to engage with history?

All over the country, we are seeing what happens when policymakers decide that students cannot handle, or should be shielded from, the complexities of the past. But as a profession, historians have also been guilty of prejudging the public to be uninterested in complexity, and assuming that public history necessarily entails simplifying and streamlining it into a tidy narrative. It may just be that we have been unable to conceptualize how to share complex stories in accessible ways.

This roundtable will start a conversation about using digital humanities archives to teach issues of current and enduring concern, and to bridge the divide between academic and public history. The panelists will share their experiences as practitioners with a range of digitized content, including audio, video, and print media, as well as born-digital humanities scholarship. What their projects all share in common is an active engagement with continually updated datasets and a commitment to helping public audiences contextualize current events. Through conversation with the audience, the roundtable’s goal is to discover more ways for the humanities – defined by Ayers as the act of “explaining ourselves to ourselves” – to become truly collaborative.