Can citizen history be considered an act of citizenship?
An act of citizenship is defined by context. In the most traditional sense, citizenship and acts of citizenship are defined and restricted by boundaries of nation and language. This diametrically opposes the contexts in which citizen history resides: the internet, academia and history. We must consider what is means to be a citizen in the technological age and the world of academia; the conditions of history and the internet can shape what it means to be a citizen and, subsequently, what can be defined as an act of citizenship.
The internet and the academic world are transnational and multilingual, comprising of a multitude of geographies, languages and cultures, transcending the most fundamental element of traditional citizenship, nationhood. Citizen history goes beyond these boundaries, with access to projects being available worldwide. Within an academic context, the volunteers, experts and academics become part of an intricate network of historical communities which develop within and between research projects as well as within the wider world of academia. The work they do contributes to the scholarly world, benefitting a substantial population of the globe.
History is a shared commodity on a global scale and exists outside academia in a number of forms. In recent years, citizen history has improved the quality and access to historical records which contribute to those interested in family history and genealogy. Additionally, commemoration and memory has also been benefitted by citizen historians. This places citizen history in a national, if not local context. Projects surrounding genealogy or commemoration benefit communities on small but by no means irrelevant ways. Despite remaining unnoticed on a wider scale, genealogy and commemoration contribute to tradition and local culture. As discussed, traditionally acts of citizenship are defined by the benefitting of a nation; can this be reduced as well as expanded? In the same ways the internet age and academic world have allowed citizenship to stretch across the globe, the benefitting of an individual community can surely be defined as an act of citizenship.
Contribution is an interesting branch of this question. How important is contribution to the defining of citizenship in this context? In recent debate, it has been argued that a hierarchy exists within the umbrella term ‘citizen historian’. At the core of this is the concept that the unskilled volunteer cannot be defined as a citizen historian due to the lack of historical skills implemented in the methods of data accumulation, such as transcription. Does this impact what can be defined as an act of citizenship? The nature of citizen history is important in answering this question. The reliance on the wider public to accumulate a large, otherwise unmanageable, amount of data suggests the simple volunteer provides the foundation of a project, and contribution plays very little part in what makes something an act of citizenship.
Where does this lie in the ‘real world’? This takes us back to the most annoying question to ever grace this earth; why is history important? In the very least these citizens contribute to maintaining tradition through commemoration and improving localised historical records. More widely, however, these volunteers and experts are contributing to building the academic world in crucial ways on a global scale. So, in a historical academic context, citizen historians help widen the field, benefitting the developments of areas of history such as global history and the increasing interest in exploring how communities and people thousands of miles and years apart are connected. Many questions still remain in what defines an act of citizenship, for example, how important is intention? Does the individual volunteer submitting a draft of transcribed text have the intention of bettering a field of academia? Does the academic conducting a project acknowledge their contribution as an act of citizenship?
In the real world, the work of citizen historians may go largely unnoticed or undervalued but there is crucial work being done, ranging from commemoration to organising archives in a local or national context, to furthering developments in the academic world on an international scale.
Digital Humanities 