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Digital Platforms and Public History: Insights from r/AskHistorians
Panel for DH2024 conference featuring Sarah Gilbert, Cornell University; Lisa Baer-Tsarfati, University of Guelph,; and Daniel Howlett, George Mason University. Chaired by Mills Kelly, George Mason University. Panel Abstract: R/AskHistorians is a text-based Q&A community with 1.9 million subscribers on the social media platform Reddit. This panel features three moderators of the subreddit to discuss how content moderation creates a trusted community, how digital spaces improve accessibility to scholarly dialogue, and how subscribers use the forum to contextualize current events. Sarah Gilbert’s paper “Moderating r/AskHistorians on a cesspool of a website: Navigating power to promote public history” discusses the role of volunteer moderators and the challenges they face. She examines “intersectional moderation” as a way for moderators to navigate power in online communities and to reinvent a digital space with standards, rules, and norms. Lisa Baer-Tsarfati uses the AskHistorians Digital Conference in 2020 and 2021 as case studies to examine the accessibility of digital platforms in “Democratizing Public History: The AskHistorians Digital Conference as a Model for Inclusive Academic Engagement.” The conferences sought to remove traditional conference limitations and systemic inequities to center inclusive practices while presenting historical knowledge. Daniel Howlett offers data to demonstrate the relationship between current events and user engagement in his paper “The 20 Year Rule: Historical Context for Current Events on r/AskHistorians.” Reddit offers a rapid response opportunity for those seeking or sharing history related to the news cycle. However, systemic biases ensure not all presents are equally historicized by users, posing labor challenges for moderators and some subject matter experts. Together, these three papers argue for a reevaluation of public history engagement by embracing a platform often dinged for enabling misinformation. Millions of people read posts on r/AskHistorians each year, and through moderation, users receive scholarly content without academic barriers, oftentimes to help them understand the present. As humanities scholars, we must consider our responsibility to exist in, engage with, and curate digital spaces to reach audiences and reinvent our notions of public-facing work. In other words, we must wade into the Internet’s cesspools.
