Presenting the Past

What challenges do we face as history educators presenting the past in the digital world?

The modern day digital landscape has undoubtedly created more teaching and learning opportunities for a wider global audience, as well as having democratized who has access to scholarly historical information and research. Without this very digital landscape, our job as digital public historians would not exist in the first place, yet the same technologies that gave birth to our profession have simultaneously made it more difficult than ever in many aspects. One challenge that history educators face when presenting the past in the digital world is simply trying to stand out amidst the sheer volume of information that exists today. The democratization of historical authorship has, for the most part, proven beneficial to our work by opening up conversation about the past to include new viewpoints and experiences. Yet it is also now easier than ever to become lost in the endless interpretations, projects, and research papers which, more often than not, have had the unfortunate result of obscuring the past rather than illuminating it.