"Public Historiography" emerged in the United States in the 1970s. After decades of development, nearly 100 universities across the United States have established postgraduate degrees in public history, focusing on teaching history.

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Generation of historical knowledge in the Internet era

Wang Tao's report title is "Generation of historical knowledge in the Internet era". Wikipedia has a very close relationship with the generation of historical knowledge in the Internet era. He selected English and German Wikipedia as research objects, combined with the research results of existing scholars, and examined the role and influence of Wikipedia in the generation and dissemination of historical knowledge through data analysis.

Wang Tao

Wang Tao first introduced the overview of Wikipedia. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 and has developed into a website with a total of 40 million entries and nearly 300 languages ​​as of 2017. Wikipedia's global ranking in Alexa (global comprehensive website traffic ranking) is basically stable in the top 5, with an average daily click rate of tens of millions. In many countries such as the United States, Germany, India, etc., the number of visits can be ranked in the top 10. Many small languages ​​such as Burmese, Vietnamese, Polish and other versions of Wikipedia also have high visits, and has become "the most comprehensive, representative and popular participatory knowledge platform in human history."

The entries of the historical category (historical figures, historical events) account for a large proportion of all entries. Although many academic historians are cautious about the use of Wikipedia, it is still attracting increasing attention from the academic community.

According to a 2009 survey, "male", "single", "young" and "student" are the four keywords of the Wikipedia author group (Week). Wang Tao believes that these traits of Weike will directly affect the content of the entry itself: "Male" and "Single" will determine the author's focus on the entry and the description of the words; while "young" and "student" indicate that many Weike are college students or even high school students, which gives people reason to doubt the value of Wikipedia entries.

Vikike's gender, age, education level and other statistics. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

Wang Tao then analyzed the three core purposes of Wikipedia entry writing: Verifiability, Neutral point of view, and No original research, in order to explore the historical writing of Wikipedia.

"Verified" means that the content can be verified from a reliable source. Although Wikipedia has developed over the past decade, the writing structure of the entry has been standardized and the information source is emphasized, after more detailed investigation, Wang Tao discovered a problem unique to online encyclopedia: Wikipedia entries use websites (especially free websites) as a source of information. Some scholars randomly compared 50 entries of Wikipedia with 18 academic papers in the core journal Journal of World History (JWH), sponsored by the World History Association. The results showed that 62% of citations of Wikipedia entries were from network resources, while only 1.2% of citations of JWH's academic papers were related to the Internet. As we all know, the content of the Internet is full of silence, which also means that there are loopholes in Wikipedia's verifiability.

"Neutrality" has always been an attitude advocated and upheld by professional historians. Do Wikipedia's historical entries comply with the principle of "neutrality"? Wang Tao selected some historical entries, compared the English version and the German version of Wikipedia to test whether the historical writing of Weike is consistent under different cultural backgrounds. Taking Martin Luther's attitude towards Jewish as an example, the English version directly uses a tendency title like "Antisemitism" to show Luther's position towards the Jews; while the German version has been vaguely treated and uses "relationship with the Jews" to lead to Luther's Jewish view. Research by other scholars also shows that "neutrality" is difficult to adhere to in Wikipedia's character evaluation, and the entries authors tend to emphasize "local heroes" in an attempt to create the illusion of balanced historical narratives.

"Non-original" shows that Wikipedia does not encourage originality, it hopes that Weike is a "porter" of knowledge rather than a "producer" of knowledge. In addition, Wang Tao also pointed out that Wikipedia's success is attributed to the "collaborative writing" method, which has brought about the "democratization" of content supply, while traditional historians are "lonely men" who are lonely in the archives and will not actively participate in the maintenance and writing of historical entries. It is worth noting that statistics show that 10% of Weike contributed 86% of "persistent word views" (PWV), and 1% of Weike even contributed 70% of the PWV. "In other words, only a few Weikes play a practical role in the project of historical writing, and 'everyone writes history' may be an illusion."

Through the above three aspects of discussion, Wang Tao pointed out that Wikipedia has flaws that cannot be ignored in history writing. However, the value of Wikipedia does not lie in the accuracy of information, but in the process of building knowledge. "The information and knowledge of any discipline are part of social construction and need to be improved through continuous research and dialogue." By studying the entry editing records of Wikipedia's "Historical Version" page, we can clearly see that the Weike group has continuous discussions, analysis and even struggles around the words.

In addition, Wang Tao believes that Wikipedia in different languages ​​writing the same event is also a phenomenon worth studying. For example, many language versions have created entries for the "9.11" event, and records of all language versions eventually form the "collective memory" of the entire human being. Of course, at the practical level, due to the existence of the "digital divide", a large number of people lack the Internet access, and the "global memory space" that some scholars optimistically estimate is actually not complete.

Finally, Wang Tao returned to the concept of "encyclopedia". "Encyclopedia" means "a summary of knowledge" in the context of ancient Greece. In the concept of Diderot , encyclopedia needs to present the "unity" of knowledge, so the writers of encyclopedias in the Enlightenment era emphasize "authority of the author" and prune the "knowledge tree" through a real academic community. With the emergence of Wikipedia, the "author" was deconstructed, the "expert" lost its authority, the academic community fell apart, and the complete knowledge graph represented by the "knowledge tree" no longer exists. "Is this deconstruction of authority good or bad? Can Wikipedia expand the scope of historical knowledge? These issues are worth further discussion."

Wang Tao believes that although there are various problems in Wikipedia, it is still worthy of research by professional scholars. From the perspective of public history, ordinary people are very eager to obtain the nutrients for historical knowledge. Professional historians need to face up to this spiritual need of the people, join the Weike community, carry out a "supply-side" reform of "historical knowledge generation", and reduce the traps caused by the writing principles adhered to by Wikipedia, as well as the negative impact of these defects on the dissemination of historical knowledge.

From the perspective of the development of academic research, Wikipedia, as an open massive literature, needs to use digital humanities to effectively study it. In today's hot day when "digital humanities" are so popular, through case analysis of Wikipedia, historical scholars have the opportunity to redefine the scope of historical materials, read "texts" from an unusual perspective, and dig out hidden information from it.

Respect the public's needs for history reading

Zhang Hongjie's report title is "Respect the public's needs for history reading: My popular historical practice". Combined with his own historical writing practice, Zhang Hongjie shared his understanding of popular history and public history.

Zhang Hongjie

At the beginning of the report, Zhang Hongjie admitted that history was one of the most annoying courses he had in middle school. "The originally colorful history is compressed into a dry event overview, year, location, and significance. In my opinion, this educational method is like cooling and air-drying a plate of steaming and fragrant good dishes, decomposing them into vitamins, cellulose, sugar, salt and MSG, so that you can eat them the same."

When I was in college, popular historical works such as Huang Renyu 's " 15th year of Wanli ", Dai Yi 's "Qianlong and His Times", Toynbee 's "Historical Research" and Gruse's " Grassland Empire " changed Zhang Hongjie's view of history and guided him on the road of historical writing. The transformation from readers to authors has made Zhang Hongjie better understand the historical knowledge needs of ordinary readers. He believes that this need can be divided into four levels.

The first level is based on the human instinct that traces the root of the root. Family genealogy is the embodiment of this instinct. Human beings instinctively need to know what spatial position they are, which country, province and city they are in; they also need to know what time position they are in, which dynasty or era they are in. Understanding the history of the community you live in is also because of your concern for the future of this community. Only by understanding a country's past can you see its future. "Like a passenger sitting in a bus, you can't ignore where it is going."

The second level of reading history is the needs of social life. Zhang Hongjie believes that human beings like to read history, just like he needs to get up in the morning to read the news or exchange gossip after dinner, it is determined by the instinct of obtaining as much information as possible. Only by grasping the true information of the world in which he lives as comprehensively as possible can a person help him make one complex and subtle measure and judgment after another. News is a horizontal understanding of the world, while history is a vertical understanding. Only when these two directions are intertwined can a person's information world be complete.

The third level of demand is more professional, and people who are engaged in certain professions have stronger demands for certain historical knowledge than others. For example, politicians, artists, media workers, etc. History is a very important part of their knowledge structure and a necessary tool for them to understand this society.

The fourth level is that history has strong entertainment functions. People love to read history, in addition to rational needs, they also contain psychological needs for curiosity and entertainment. Since the Tang and Song dynasties, Chinese people have liked to listen to historical legends after dinner. The strong entertainment nature of history is irreplaceable to other entertainment products.

Zhang Hongjie pointed out that many people, especially professional history researchers, often have a misunderstanding of the history reading needs of ordinary readers, believing that the general public only needs superficial, curious, and highly story-oriented historical popular reading materials. In fact, among the above four levels of needs, the first three levels are serious historical needs, and only popular historical works with certain academic content and ideological content can be met. For many readers, such works can also meet the fourth level - entertainment needs, "history is better than novels."

So, how can we meet the serious needs of ordinary readers to read history and promote the emergence of more in-depth popular historical works? Zhang Hongjie made two suggestions.

First, the historical community needs to have a more tolerant and open mind towards popular history and actively intervene in the writing of popular history. The experience of the United States is worth learning from. Compared with China, the American historical community is more inclusive. The scope of historical works basically covers the needs of different types of readers. Professional history and popular history coexist peacefully. The historical, publishing and book review circles have clear judgment criteria for "writing for the public", and can treat some new writing methods and types of historical books that are popular among readers, so it has better solved the problem of history affecting society.

Therefore, on the one hand, the United States has developed a strong popular historiography tradition represented by fanglong and Shi Jingqian; on the other hand, the interdisciplinary research of American history is very developed, which has promoted the emergence of emerging branch disciplines in the United States, including public history that was born in response to the needs of society.

Second, we must fully study the rules of popular historical writing. Zhang Hongjie believes that popular historical writing and professional historical research are essentially different. Professional researchers write popular works, sometimes just like actors singing popular songs in bel canto, and they may not be able to succeed easily.

professional research on thinking, writing language, and style structure are very different from readers' needs. It is not enough to "drool" the historical monographs. A complete and complete transformation process is needed between professional historical research results and popular historical works. "If the professional history is raw meat, then popular history is cooked meat. Only by carefully processing can the meat protein be denaturated and the molecular structure stretches loosely can it become delicious. From raw meat to cooked meat, it requires cooking skills, so if a cattle raiser wants to become a chef, he still needs a process of re-learning. The rules are worthy of someone's study."