Public History and/as Web Publishing
On April 18th, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the National Council of Public History, entitled WordPress as a Public History Platform. The panel is described in the meeting program [PDF] and on the conference blog if you care to read about it. If you’re attending the conference, I hope you’ll participate. I’m always excited to talk about WordPress. I use it for projects all the time and am really looking forward to the panel, where I think we’ll be able to draw out some of what makes WordPress a good choice for Public History projects. But as I was preparing some notes, something occurred to me: the key question I hope public historians and other scholars will be asking themselves in 2013 is not actually “How can WordPress help me make successful projects?” That’s a good question and worth discussing, but it’s not actually a first order question. The more fundamental question is “How can I improve the value of my project by understanding Public History as a form of web publishing?”
