Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World

Abstract

The traditional expertise of the history museum seems to be challenged at every turn. Web 2.0 invites ordinary people to become their own archivists, curators, and designers as they organize images on Snapfish, identify artifacts through Flickr, post text on wikis, and create websites with WordPress and Weebly. Bricks-and-mortar museums, meanwhile, in pursuit of civic engagement, give community members more say in what stories the museum showcases and how they get told. Exhibits frequently shun the authoritative voice. Two decades after historian Michael Frisch heralded oral history for enabling shared authority, museums feature first-person voices with less and less narrative mediation.

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