Digital technologies are increasingly defining modern society and culture. This module introduces students to theories and practices for using digital tools, networks, and media in public history. Digitalisation has transformed History and the Humanities, from the digitisation of historical sources and open access scholarship to data analytics, social media, and online dissemination platforms. Developments in digital culture impact the ways that we now preserve, analyse, understand, interpret, exhibit, and engage with the past, transforming the 'publicness' of public history. Digital cultural awareness and communication skills are therefore necessary for public history study and practice.

Students will study the ways that History is deployed in the digital age, experiment with digital media, and reflect on and discuss their insights. The module does not require specialised technical skills; the focus will be on digital culture and communication in public history. Students are expected to be adaptable, have an interest in digital developments in the Humanities, be open to applying new tools, media, and ideas to public history practice, and be willing to incorporate digital technologies into their own work. Topics covered may vary depending on the learning needs and goals of the class, and in keeping with developments in the field, but it is expected that they will include: content creation and curation; writing for public audiences; social media strategies, networking and niches; information design principles; inclusion and accessibility; crowdsourcing and citizen scholarship; digital public engagement; co-creation and collaboration; copyright, Creative Commons and the public domain.

On successful completion of this module, students will be able to: identify and explore a variety of digital tools, networks, and media useful to public historians; evaluate and discuss the digital platforms used by museums, libraries, archives, galleries, cultural heritage sites, heritage interpreters, and others in public history; devise appropriate digital communication strategies, developing a professional online profile; create or curate content on selected public digital platforms, (e.g. social media, wikis, blogs, podcasts), according to best practices; demonstrate an understanding of copyright, Creative Commons and the public domain, for appropriately using, creating and sharing resources and intellectual property;

On successful completion of this module, students will be able to: appreciate the democratising possibilities of digital tools for historical practice and use digital tools towards achieving these ends.

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This is a fully online module, with a practical component, where students will obtain technical knowledge relevant to demonstrating digital cultural awareness and communication skills, while conducting and communicating research at an advanced level. It will be relevant to clarifying their own learning goals and research objectives, while apprising them of the wider application of digital technologies to History and the Humanities. Learning will be facilitated through online lectures, case studies, and documentation as well as specialist masterclasses (e.g. Wikipedia editing) and technical instruction (e.g. podcasting and information design). Students gain hands-on digital content-creation experience with opportunities to research online media and test techniques on selected communication platforms, reflecting on and discussing their work via online discussion with peers.