The readings for this week were focused on audience and authorship and seemed to advocate a risky gamble;  engage in online publishing and hope that there is an audience for it.  According to the Madsen-Brooks and Wolff readings there is evidence of huge interest in historical topics as can be viewed in their case studies.  The public interest is beginning to dominate historical authorship which is a problem for academics who, for the most part, have not chosen to engage with this crowdsourced narrative (Madsen-Brooks).

This public process in which anyone can publish anything online is leading to major problems with the academic process and both Wolff and Unsworth deal with this in a more realistic light (Madsen-Brooks advocates an all-out academic overhaul).  Wolff makes a powerful differentiation between history and memory by quoting David Blight,

 “History–what trained historians do–is a reasoned reconstruction of the past rooted in research; critical and skeptical of human motive and action….Memory, however, is often treated as a sacred set of potentially absolute meanings and stories, possessed as the heritage or identity of a community.  Memory is often owned; history, interpreted…”

The power of memory permeates the human experience and allows history to become not only an intellectual pursuit, but an emotional one.  To engage with the public, historians may need to act as authoritative story tellers–there should be interpretation in the academic sense, but there should also be an understanding of the audience.  This is not to say that academic work should be done in layman’s terms or be “dumbed down”, in fact, scholarship should be emphasized in order to improve public understanding/appreciation and trust in specialization and expertise.    This is at the root, I would argue, of the divide between academics and the public; each have underestimated the other.

The Unsworth article deals with this issue head on by suggesting that historians must build up their relationship with a new audience.  He states that,  “I suggested that we could enlarge the audience for humanities scholarship, not by dumbing it down, but by making it more readily available. Maybe if we did that, scholars would find an audience first, and a publisher second, instead of the other way around.”  This mentality is attractive to this historian who ultimately wants to write as he/she has always done, that is to say with academic rigor, but also wants to be read.  This seems to be the only way in which the historian will survive.

Each of these articles was problematic and I am still sorting through how I perceive each solution to a rapidly growing problem.  I agree that the audience needs to expand, but I am in favor of a solution that does not contribute to the deterioration of the academy; I have not seen this solution in any of the articles presented so far.  What does everyone think about this?  Does the digital age mean that we, as professionals must adjust at the detriment of expertise and scholarship, or is there a way around this?