Audience VS. Project
Audience and Project in public history projects are deeply connected. It wouldn’t be “public” history without the public and if there’s not a project there’s no audience to view it.
The purpose of Public History is to help bridge the gap between non-historians and historians, by helping the public understand events with more nuance than they previously had. Denise Meringolo quotes J. Ronald Grele in stating that “the task of the public historian, broadly defined, should be to help members of the public do their own history and to aid them in understanding their role in shaping and interpreting events,” (Denise D. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), p. xxiii). This statement is pretty humbling for public historians. It requires us to be vulnerable and all the research to live with our audience in a way where they can interrogate it, in many cases without a historian to personally walk them through it. One of the most important things to remember is that the audience isn’t stupid, they just don’t have all the sources and resources memorized, and they could come to their own conclusions as long as we present them evidence to ponder.
So how do we determine the audience itself? The public is not one amorphous solid of humanity, but instead made of smaller niches, groups, or demographics. For the Histories of the National Mall public history project, the team sat down and came up with lists of potential people that would use their Omeka instance. Easily they came up with tourists, from abroad, across the county, or even local tourists. They also added history enthusiasts, public historians, and cultural heritage professionals, because after all, we’re all nerds and, in some ways, design projects that we personally would like to see, (“Building Histories of the National Mall – A Guide to Creating a Digital Public History Project,” accessed February 3, 2023, https://mallhistory.org/Guide/index.html, p. 8.) Each step of the way, they designed the project with the target audience in mind, considering how the tourists would approach the project (typically on a phone with sporatic Wi-Fi), and what topics they would find most interesting including semi-personalized tours by clicking on what topics they want to explore. The project was successful because the audience appreciate what the team did to consider them.
So if you know who your audience, Who is your audience? In this case you may want to develop a persona, or a fake identity of someone you imagine visiting the museum (often an amalgamation of real life visitors). So for my Tudor History video game (now turned timeline for the next few months), I made two personas of the audience I thought would enjoy my project.
Meet Janet:
