2000s-2020s

Data analysis for Constellate Data for the latter two decades of analysis

The 2000s

The 2000s immediately ushers in a focus entirely on museum services, public history as a service to the public, cultural history and cultural preservation. Of the seven topics generated, five seem to explicitly focus on museum studies and cultural history. Words such as "culture", "preservation", "museum", and "exhibit" crop up everywhere, even in topics whose focus is more research and public oriented.

In this regard, the whole of the 2000-2010 corpus is focused on museum studies. Though two topics contain more references to work and research, it is not the norm, and the references to government and the workplace are minor. If pressed, the two topic lists that I would not directly connect to museum studies I would term "cultural research", or "historiographical work". They nevertheless include focuses on research and a service to the people that, while devoid of overwhelming connections to museums, nonetheless includes references to that sector of work.

This is incredibly interesting. Where before, the topics generated included multiple if not completely overwhelming references to government and private sector work as well as university research and training, those references are almost completely gone. The 3,267 articles published online in this period of time seem to contain an overwhelming focus on museum studies and cultural preservation. In fact, when the algorithm generates five topics instead of seven, all five of them contain different emphases on the same exact topic. In fact, it is only when the number of generated topics is significantly increased, from seven to ten, that any topics begin to contain references to public and private work, including the hallmark "California" and other words pertaining to training and university work.

Initially, this is very promising. It suggests that public history in the first decade of the 2000s is focused on producing work that addressed questions of museum studies and cultural history such as preservation and community oriented history. This is exactly the kind of work that was discussed by Grele as a real potential driving thrust for public history, but one that just was not present early on its existence. As the early topic models show, he was right - public history was not focused on community and cultural history early on, but perhaps now it is. But once again, the topic models are devoid of context, and simply provide clustered words arranged as potential discourses for analysis. In essence, the distant reading of this decade suggests a great and renewed focus on what before was only hinted at, but it is devoid of the context provided by close reading systems. Once again, this is where raw and relevant data models and tf-idf come in handy.

In the raw and relevant frequency model, words like "archive" and "oral" appear significantly more frequently than in the preceding decades, with "oral" reaching a stable high of about 30%. As stated, oral history is frequently utilized to conduct and produce historical work focused on underserved and marginalized historical communities. It is a hallmark of community history, and its presence here in a larger frequency is a testament to the renewed focus on the field in museum and community history.

Similarly, the terms "colonial" and "colonialism" both have increased their relevant frequency to an average of about 20% and 8% respectively. These rates are significantly higher than in preceding decades. They suggest, once more, a renewed focus on community history. The field was producing more work than ever before that focused on colonialism's connection to history, and at the very least made reference to the colonial legacy of the historical field and the impact it may have had on other communities.

Though the tf-idf model is difficult to work with, and shows many words that are unconnected to either of the potential focuses of the field, there is one word in particular that has a high tf-idf score of interest: "unionism". Unionism appears as one of the most distinct words that was discussed with relative frequency. This alone is interesting and shows a moving trend in the field of focusing less on great and potentially colonial historical narratives and more on smaller, community oriented narratives. But, when taken into account with the topic models, and the raw and relative frequency models, it becomes another pillar in the new narrative of public history. As a field, it has started to focus more on museum studies, on servicing its publics by conducting work on communities with a focus on oral history and taking into account colonial history. It has reduced its focus on university training and researching how best to integrate history into the public and political workforce. It has, at least in some small part, produced worker's history.

The 2010s

The topics generated from the corpus of the Public History from 2010-2021 continue the trend seen in the first decade of the 2000s. All of the seven generated topics contain references to museum studies, to service and the public and visitors, to archives, and to culture and cultural studies. The word "oral" appears in two separate topics of the first seven generated, and the topics it appears in are all focused on museum and cultural studies, just as they were in the 2000s.

With this arrangement of topics there are very few references to university, to federal and private work. The focus seems to be almost entirely on cultural work such as the kind of community history that Grere felt was outside his current circumstance of public history.

That said, there is some connection to the employment directive. Once again, words like "federal", "government", and "American" are present in a topic that is surrounded by words connected to research and other kinds of historical work. It is not bogged down with references to private or public work, and in this way is not as emblematic of that purpose of public history as it was in the 70s and 80s. Rather, this is a continuing throughline of the employment directive that is once more coming up. It represents that this is a continuing and present focus of the field, one that has not been supplanted by other cultural historical concerns, but that exists along side it. It seems a reversal of that first decade, in which "oral" and other cultural historical topics had small appearances, but were dominated by the larger sphere of university training and history-in-the-workforce. Now, those references are in the vast minority, complementing the new focus on the production of works of cultural history.

It is at this point that I would like to address one final topic that comes up frequently in this last decade of analysis. In the just over 2000 works digitally archived in this period, the word "story" appears as a term within several topics. It seems to appear in connection to a topic centered around museum visitors, and suggests the goal of producing cohesive historical narratives in museums. It also appears in connection to a topic about research and service for the community, and seems to suggest a focus on the story of community history and how it relates to the public history field as a whole.

This focus on the story of history, and its relation to community, to museums, and to oral history, creates an entirely different image of public history than existed in the 1970s and the 1980s. Then, the field of history was history by historians for the future of history in the world. Undoubtedly the field produced works of historical significance, but the meta-content of the field's landscape was focused on itself, on identifying the way historians could and should be included in all facets of life and the workplace. That, now, has become a secondary goal, and the terms that directly reference that goal are barely included in the topics. Even when the parameters of the topics are changed to produce more or less topics, still there is not a significant presence. No one topic could be termed "history in the workforce" or "historical training."

The tf-idf model supports this context by cropping up similar terms as discussed earlier. The raw and relevant frequency models seem to support this as well. Terms like "oral", "colonial", "colonialism", all appear with much greater frequency than in previous decades, averaging 40%, 25%, and 8% respectively, all substantially higher than in the decades before 2000, and still higher than in the first decade post 2000. This data continues to support the idea that in the more recent decades of public history, the focus of its participants shifted from producing work relating to the early employment directive to producing work as it relates to museum studies, and cultural and community history.