Knowing is participating: digital public history, wiki and citizen humanities

Abstract

Citizen science (CS), "citizen science" or "participatory science", refers to the participation and active involvement of citizens in scientific research activities. While CS includes natural sciences, such as biology, chemistry and physics, and citizen social science deals with societies, citizen humanities apply to historical, literary, linguistic and philosophical disciplines. Digital public history, due to its public, participatory and collaborative vocation in a digital context, presents itself as one of the privileged fields of application of citizen humanities. The added value of citizen humanities depends primarily on two conditions underlying the digital public history: the participation of historians who do not come from the academy in the creation of collaborative projects and the communication of the results of historical research to the public on the network. The article intends to reflect on how collaborative writing, made possible by wiki tools, can be an excellent starting point for a participatory democracy that is located in the wake of citizen humanities.