Public History for a Digital Age: The Art of Curation

Public History for a Digital Age addresses the selection, presentation, maintenance, collection, and archiving of digital assets. In this work, Mark Tebeau discusses how digital curation establishes, maintains, and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. The challenge of engaging publics in historical interpretation is one of the most enduring problems for historians across the spectrum of practice: in museums, the academy, National Parks, classrooms, and communities themselves. This text focuses on how the digital revolution has transformed how we produce, consume, represent, and imagine the historical endeavor. It also discusses how we theorize knowledge itself, including how we conceive of and interact with "publics." The dynamic intersection of public history and digital humanities has transformed both public history and digital humanities. In this book, Tebeau uses both the theory and practice of the "Curator" as a lens through which to understand this dynamic era. By exploring the shifting terrain of curation across multiple domains of practice, Public History for a Digital Age reveals how digital concepts and emerging technologies are reframing the theory and practice of public history.