{"id":6186,"date":"2016-09-29T20:20:50","date_gmt":"2016-09-29T10:20:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/?p=6186"},"modified":"2022-08-04T00:23:58","modified_gmt":"2022-08-04T00:23:58","slug":"whpha2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/2016\/09\/29\/whpha2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Australian Professional Historians and Conference Excellence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello again! I have been very busy the last couple of months with some projects that will come to light in due course. But one of the causes of my ‘busyness’ was one of the best conferences I have attended. Read on…<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Banner<\/a>\u201cThings they never taught me at history school\u201d was the topic of a panel at last month\u2019s national conference of the Professional Historians Association of Australia, but it could have been an alternative title for the event. The \u2018Working History\u2019 conference held in Melbourne was unlike any other history conference I have attended because it was about professional practice, not the findings from our research.<\/p>\n

History is a profession. Universities are influential employers of historians. There are also people who are professional genealogists and family historians. These people have many years of experience and often have certificates of qualification in this field.<\/p>\n

I belong to another group of historians who are represented by the Professional Historians Association of Australia<\/a>. We run history consultancy businesses, work in galleries, libraries, archives, museums and governments. We do all sorts of work from heritage assessments to curating exhibitions to writing and presenting history on websites. Among other things this year I have been part of a multi-national team working on a biography of a successful business man originally from Queensland who died in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

Professional consulting historians come across different issues to those working in academia. We have to run a business and need to meet and guide the expectations of clients. We are often working in the field of public history. The history we produce needs to appeal to audiences who are not trained in history and may only have a passing interest in it.<\/p>\n

The Professional Historians of Australia has a branch in most states. I belong to the New South Wales and ACT branch<\/a>. The national organisation and each branch has a website where anyone who wants to hire an historian can get guidance on how to hire an historian<\/a> and a list of historians available for hire and their contact details. There are also some guidelines on fees<\/a> for hiring consulting professional historians which is useful for negotiating contracts.<\/p>\n

Working History Conference<\/h2>\n

Last month I presented at the Working History conference<\/a> organised by the Professional Historians Association of Victoria together with the national body. The program<\/a> was excellent. Over two days we discussed the particular issues that we face in our professional practices. This conference was not about the outcomes of our research \u2013 there are plenty of conferences that do that. The Working History conference was about how we run our businesses, communicating history, ethics, meeting the needs of clients etc. Around one hundred historians from around Australia and New Zealand attended.<\/p>\n

It has been over a month since the conference ended but I found it so valuable that this week I went back over my notes and the conference tweets. \u00a0<\/p>\n

The presentations at the conference were about all sorts of topics relating to the professional practice of historians such as technology, running a small business, writing for the public, working with and learning from other professions, sharing our research with stakeholders, ethical issues, identifying audiences for our work, contributing to social policy etc.<\/p>\n

\"Smiling
Keynote speaker: Tim Sherratt, Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The conference opened with a keynote presentation by digital historian extraordinaire, Tim Sherratt from the University of Canberra. He wowed the audience with all the things you can do with easily accessible tools and digitised documents. Learn about easily available digital history tools and have your imagination sparked by reading his presentation, \u2018Telling Stories with Data<\/a>\u2019 on his blog.<\/p>\n

Tim Sherratt\u2019s presentation touched on many things that I was planning to talk about the next day, so that evening I tweaked my paper, \u2018Life of a Fragment of History\u2019. I traced the life of an archival scrap as the historian captures it in the archives and works with it in their office. I considered ethical issues, maintenance issues (back it up!) and the enormous possibilities opened up by very simple use of technology. By the end of the presentation I wanted the audience feel that they could give it a go, even if they had no background in the IT world. I limited my examples to just a few things and included URLs to good, basic, step-by-step tutorials. You can read about my presentation on my digital humanities blog, Stumbling Through the Future<\/em><\/a>. I have also included the slides I used. Watch out for the piece of steam punk I unwittingly included, and the cultural reference I added as a result of some back-channel fun.<\/p>\n

Lucy Bracey also spoke about simple use of technology, in her case the use of WordPress.com websites for clients of Way Back When Historians<\/a>. These are easy to establish and free to run. Bracey pointed out that early in a project the audience for the history needs to be identified. Once this has been done historians need to assess the best means of reaching that audience. Not everyone wants to read a history book, so for some clients a website is the right medium to convey a history. Among the issues that Bracey raised was the importance of interviewees understanding the implications of the global accessibility of a public website, especially for those who may not have much experience with the internet such as older people.<\/p>\n

Reaching Audiences for History<\/h2>\n
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"One of the biggest challenges history faces is a better understanding of our audiences" @SydneyClio #whpha2016<\/a><\/p>\n

— Nicole Cama (@MuseumMinx) August 19, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n