Digital Public History through Social Media and Photography1

Serge Noiret (European University Institute)

for Paul Ashton and Alex Trapeznik What is Public History Globally?
Using the Past in the Present, (London: Bloomsbury, 2018)

Introduction
1. Social Media and Digital Public History Platforms
2. Twitter, Big Data’s and WW1 Commemorations
3. Crowdsourcing WW1using Twitter
4. Blurred and active memories through camera lenses

Introduction

Social media are "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the
ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation
and exchange of user-generated content.” 2 They develop user generated
knowledge in networked communities; they foster a peer to peer
interaction between the public at large, amateurs, academic or public
historians through shared authority practices. 3 But if everybody can load
directly in the web many memory/history contents, this spontaneous
activity hasn’t to be confused with what is today called Digital Public
History, a sub-field of the Digital Humanities:4 web 2.0 technologies -also in
1
All web sites have been accessed online 9 October 2017.
2
Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, “Users of the world, unite! The challenges
and opportunities of social media, Business Horizons 53, no. 1 (2010): pp. 59-68.
3 Tatjana Takseva, “Preface”, in Tatjana Takseva (ed), Social software and the evolution of

user expertise: future trends in knowledge creation and dissemination (Hershey, PA:
Information Science Reference, 2013), pp. xvi-xxix.
4 Serge Noiret: «Y a-t-il une Histoire Numérique 2.0?» in Jean-Philippe Genet and Andrea

Zorzi (eds): Les historiens et l’informatique. Un métier à réinventer, (Rome: École Française
de Rome, 2011), pp.235-288; «La digital history: histoire et mémoire à la portée de tous»,

1
social media- are technologies allowing direct participation of the public in
PH projects. From a public historian’s point of view, UGT practices involve
the direct capacity to govern and exploit these technologies in public
history projects.
Everybody’s activities with the past in social media need the filtering
role of public historians being projects’ mediators and organizers,
especially in a post-truth era when all kind of digital contents are shared in
the web even if they aren’t reliable nor scientific. This is why the public
historian’s mediation is an essential aspect of any DPH professional
activity like we will see here with examples taken from Twitter and
Historypin. DPH projects are never about what has been called radical trust
about user generated contents materials dealing with the past. 5 Digital
Public Historians use public expertise and contents in their projects, filtered
by critical methods adapted to web technologies and shared authority
practices.6 In this way, public historians take care of who has memoirs and
documents, information and expertise and can easily be enrolled in PH
planned digital projects.

in Pierre Mounier (ed.) Read/Write Book 2. Une introduction aux humanités numériques,
(Marseille, OpenEdition Press, 2012), pp.151-177, <http://press.openedition.org/258>;
“Digital History 2.0” in Frédéric Clavert and Serge Noiret, (eds.): Contemporary History
in the Digital Age, (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2013), pp.155-190 and “Digital Public History”
in David M. Dean (ed.) Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Public History, (London, Wiley
Blackwell, March 2018); see also Gerben Zaagsma, “On Digital History”, BMGN - Low
Countries Historical Review 128, no. 4, (2013): pp.3-29, <http://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-
lchr.9344>.
5 James B. Gardner called “radical trust” what he thought, in 2010, defined what Web

2.0 practices in digital public history projects were about. But DPH projects integrate
user generated and crowdsourcing activities through supervised 2.0 web technologies.
(Jim Gardner: “Trust, Risk and Public History: A View From the United States”, in
Public History Review, Vol 17 (2010), pp.52–61,
<http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj/article/view/1852>)
6 Sharon M. Leon: “Complexity and Collaboration: Doing Public History in Digital

Environments”, in Gardner and Hamilton (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Public History,
pp. 44-66.

2
 An early example of the way historians integrate people’s contents
and knowledge is PhotosNormandie a French project about capturing
unexpressed knowledge of an unknown audience interested in D-Day and
knowing about places shown in photographs shot in Normandy during the
summer of 1944. 7 As a digital public history project, PhotosNormandie
sought comments for the pictures and suggested enriching and/or
changing existing captions of the over 3,000 photos of the landing and the
Battle of Normandy which would enable these images to be
“redocumented” as primary sources. The public history aspect of this
knowledge comes through the shared authority activity between a group of
specialists adding new descriptive metadata to the pictures and the
curators of the project. The Flickr archive has found locally, thanks to the
scientific collaboration of local experts, unexpected and rigorous means of
public validation and curation of photographs.8

1.Social Media and Digital Public History Platforms

Today all individuals become protagonists using social media:

everybody is taking care of promoting her/himself. TV “reality shows” like
Got Talent select unknown people and connect them with an audience. The
TV “reality shows” Got Talent like9, are the most followed TV broadcasts
worldwide together with the many X factor national competitions. These
shows reveal unexpressed knowledge, skills and creative capacities the
same way online social media platforms do crowdsource knowledge and,
in the field of history, reconnect with the past. In this case, individual
memories are shared not only as written texts but more often as visual
materials, photographs and videos. Like talent TV shows, social media

7
Then and Now PhotosNormandie (36 members and 62 published pictures on 9 October
2017), <http://www.flickr.com/groups/thenandnowphotosnormandie/>.
8
Patrick Peccatte: «La FAQ du projet PhotosNormandie» in DéjàVu, 17 January 2017,
<https://dejavu.hypotheses.org/2998>
9 America’s Got Talent (2006), <http://www.nbc.com/americas-got-talent>; La France a un

incroyable talent (2006), <http://www.m6.fr/emission-la_france_a_un_incroyable_talent/>,

Britain’s Got Talent (2007). <http://www.itv.com/britainsgottalent>.

3
allow different public to promote themselves and their family history, an
easy way to gain social promotion, recognition and renown and to feel to
become part of “big history”.
Like we suggested at the beginning, in the field of Digital Public
History (DPH), social software could be key elements of an interaction
between public historians as mediators and communities. Social platforms
become virtual places where to engage in networked behaviors dealing
with the knowledge of the past. But social media contents become modern
primary source and produce “big data”; they organize a flux of multi-
media –mainly photographs audio and video- crowdsourced contents
through specific technologies and facilitate different forms of
communications of history between individuals and communities. They
integrate actors in interdisciplinary conversations and facilitate knowledge
building. They bring users together to discuss common issues, share traces
and documents about the past. They build online relationships, reinforce
identities and consolidate kinship and communities. They also allow
dispersed communities to reconnect online keeping the memory of
common cultural identities, especially, when communities aren’t today any
more present in physical spaces.10
Forgotten collective memories based on forgiven communities’ pasts,
may be reactivated and past cultures can be consolidated online through
Web 2.0 technologies. 11 Participative knowledge sharing creates public
awareness about these past in our present. An “archaeology” of memories
online maintains the past alive through direct public participation to global
cultural enterprises.12 Sharon Leon writes that “to achieve [the promise of
digital technologies for public history], we must focus on the goals of public

10
Dario Miccoli, “Digital museums: narrating and preserving the history of Egyptian
Jews on the Internet”, in Emanuela Trevisan Semi, Dario Miccoli, Tudor Parfitt (eds),
Memory and Ethnicity. Ethnic Museums in Israel and the Diaspora (Newcastle: Cambridge
Scholars, 2013), pp. 195-222.
11 Serge Noiret: “Digital History 2.0”, cit..

12
Serge Noiret and Thomas Cauvin, “Internationalizing Public History”, in James B.
Gardner and Paula Hamilton (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Public History (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017), pp.25-43.

4
history and adapt our working practice to the new conditions created by the digital
environment.”13 This is why we have first to understand how different social
media function 14 and then be able, as public historian, to critically
administer the content they convey online. 15
As Jo Guildi and David Armitage pointed out, 16 historians should
jump into this world of interconnected big data’s using specific forms of
network analysis providing new epistemological queries based on the
online availability of an enormous quantity of information that can now be
analyzed because interconnected. 17 Semantic links between digital data’s
can be displayed using graphs18 like it has been done with the fascinating e-
Diasporas Atlas which puts together more than 8.000 websites project on
migrations.19

13 Sharon M. Leon: “Complexity and Collaboration: Doing Public History in Digital

Environments”, cit..
14 Christian Fuchs: Social Media. A Critical Introduction (London: Sage, 2014); Michael

Mandiberg (ed), The social media reader (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
15 Wendy Duff, Barbara Craig and Joan Cherry, “Historians’ Use of Archival Sources:

Promises and Pitfalls of the Digital Age”, The Public Historian 26, no. 2 (2004): pp. 7-22,
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/tph.2004.26.2.7>.
16 Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2015), and Ramses Delafontaine, Serge Noiret, Quentin Verreycken
and Eric Arnesen, “The ‘History Manifesto’: a discussion”, Memoria e Ricerca 24, no. 1
(2016): pp. 97-126.
17 Martin Grandjean, “La connaissance est un réseau, perspective sur l’organisation

archivistique et encyclopédique”, Les Cahiers du Numérique 10, no. 3 (2014): pp. 37-54,
<<http://dx.doi.org/10.3166/LCN.10.3.37-54>. Peter Haber used the concept of “data-
driven history” to define the new world of digital history: Peter Haber, Digital past:
Geschichtswissenschaft im digitalen Zeitalter (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011).
18 Martin Grandjean, “Introduction à la visualisation de données: l’analyse de réseau en

histoire”, Geschichte und Informatik, 18/19 (2015), pp. 109-128.

19 Dana Diminescu, E-Diasporas, <http://www.e-diasporas.fr/>; another example looking

at the League of Nations intellectual network, Martin Grandjean, “Analisi e

visualizzazioni delle reti in storia. L'esempio della cooperazione intellettuale della
Società delle Nazioni”, Memoria e Ricerca 25, no. 2 (2017): pp.371-393.

5
 But because of the volatility and unreliability of web contents the need
for a strong critical commitment is essential procedure for historians 20
digging into the digital realm. 21 External and Internal Source Criticism
derived from the traditional way medieval historians were looking at the
production of sources and at their context of availability, should be
adopted in web environments.22

2.Twitter, Big Data’s and WW1 Commemorations

Which kind of knowledge and social connectivity about the past and
teaching activities, 23 even with only 140 characters provides a social
software like Twitter? 24

20
In Italy, between 2001 and 2003, a group of historians, archivists and librarians
analyzed the circulation of unreliable contents in the web: Antonino Criscione, Serge
Noiret, Carlo Spagnolo and Stefano Vitali (eds), La Storia a(l) tempo di Internet: indagine
sui siti italiani di storia contemporanea, (2001-2003) (Bologna: Pátron editore, 2004).
21 Andreas Fickers, “Towards a new digital historicism? Doing History in the age of

Abundance”, in Andreas Fickers and Sonja De Leeuw (eds), “Making Sense of Digital
Sources”, Journal of European History and Culture 1, no. 1 (2012): pp. 12-18.
http://journal.euscreen.eu/index.php/view/article/view/jethc004/4; Seth Denbo,
“Googling History: The AHR Explores Implications of Using Digital Sources for
Historians”, Blog AHA Today (16 May 2016),
<http://blog.historians.org/2016/05/googling-history-the-ahr-explores-implications-of-
using-digital-sources-for-historians/>.
22 Steff Scagliola, “Digital Source Criticism in the 21st century: reconsidering Ranke’s

principles in the digital age”, Blog DH Lab (August 3, 2016),

<http://www.dhlab.lu/blog-post/digital-source-criticism-in-the-21st-century-
reconsidering-rankes-principles-in-the-digital-age/>.
23 Emilien Ruiz, “Faire de l’histoire sur Twitter? Entretien avec @LarrereMathilde”, Blog

Devenir Historien-ne. Méthodologie de la Recherche et Historiographie (August 2016),

<https://devhist.hypotheses.org/3336>. The stories conceived by Larrere (August 2016)
about “revolutions” in history are regrouped using the software Storify,
<https://storify.com/LarrereMathilde>.
24 José Van Dijck, "Facebook as a Tool for Producing Sociality and Connectivity",

Television & New Media 13, no. 2 (2012): pp.160–176, DOI: 10.1177/1527476411415291.

6
 Today, public history is often driven by anniversaries and
commemorations. Interpreting the way digital public history projects are
commemorating the First World War25 allow us to examine the politics of
memory into the present. 26 Twitter shares memory, oral history, facts,
opinions, multi-media digitized sources and have so far approached WW1
often arousing new interests and new forms of public discussion
questioning the local public, regional, national and supranational
audiences. The WW1 commemoration worldwide produces big digital
data’s, an enormous amount of digital materials and of digital public
activities in websites and projects. 27 Twitter has been affected too. The
hashtags #WW1 or #WW1Centenary,28 are very popular. Twitter accounts
were created everywhere looking at the memory of the war. How common
people and their families passed through this cataclysm is the lens through
which many twitter projects dig into local memories.
Digital public history projects in Twitter -#WW1- are often connected
with a website project like Europeana 1914-191829 or 1914-1918 Online - the
Encyclopedia of the First World War,30 which has its own Twitter account. It
informs about events happened 100 years ago and retweet also
information, sources, curiosities or announces debates, exhibitions, book
publications.31 Like the Encyclopedia, Europeana 1914-1918 created its Twitter

25 Mélanie Bost and Chantal Kesteloot, “Les commémorations du centenaire de la

Première Guerre mondiale”, Courrier hebdomadaire du CRISP 30‑31 (2014): pp. 5‑63.
26 Alexander Etkind, “Mourning and melancholia in Putin’s Russia: an essay in

mnemonics”, Julie Fedor, Ellen Rutten and Vera Zvereva (eds), Memory, Conflict and
New Media Web wars in post-socialist states (London: Routledge 2013), pp. 32-47.
27 “First World War Websites”, 1914-1918 Online. The Encyclopedia of the First World War.

<http://www.1914-1918-online.net/06_first_world_war_websites/index.html>.
28 <https://twitter.com/hashtag/WW1Centenary>.

29 <http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/>.

30 <http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/home.html>.

31 @19141918online "is a collaborative international research project designed to develop

a virtual reference work on WW1”, <https://twitter.com/19141918online>.

7
account already in 201232 with the declared goal to engage directly with the
public asking for the crowdsourcing of memories and documents.33
In a country like Belgium, heavily affected by military activities
during WW1,34 Twitter is used for sharing the history and memory of the
occupation by the Germans with the wider public. In France, an important
documentation centre and museum for the History of WW1 like the
“Historial de la Grande Guerre”, joined Twitter only in October 2014 several
months after the start of the commemoration. 35 The Historial Twitter’s
account published less than 150 tweets between October 2014 and October
2017 but is followed by more than 1300 people. Hashtags like the
#centenaire, weren’t introduced to enter the wider international –or even
national- discussion about the war before 2017. Created in March 2009, the
twitter account of the Imperial War Museums in Great Britain36 tells “the story
of those who have lived, fought and died in conflict, from 1914 to now”. He’s
extremely popular with more than 108.000 followers and 21.000 tweets at
the end of September 2017.37
The battlefield seems to largely prevail as a topic in the number of
tweets that mention #WW1 in United Kingdom war institutions and
museums. Instead, French accounts focus more on the life and death of
soldiers (the “Poilu”). Twitter seems often to privilege the military history
of the war and isn’t open to new forms of social research, other nation’s
army, the colonial armies, life beyond the trenches, the lives of women
behind the front, etc., like the Encyclopedia of the First World War tried to
promote on the occasion of the centenary.

32
<https://twitter.com/Europeana1914>.
33
“The ‘Europeana 1914-1918’ project aims to collect and share material that relates to
the Great War (1914-1918) and those involved in or affected by it”.
<http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/>.
34 Mélanie Bost and Chantal Kesteloot, Le Centenaire de la Grande Guerre en Belgique:

itinéraire au sein d'un paysage commémoratif fragmenté (Paris: Observatoire du Centenaire,

Université de Paris 1, 2016). https://www.univ-paris1.fr/fileadmin/IGPS/observatoire-
du-centenaire/Bost_et_Kesteloot_-_Belgique.pdf;
35 Historial 14-18 - @historial1418, <https://twitter.com/historial1418>.

36 Imperial War Museums, <http://www.iwm.org.uk/>.

37 Imperial War Museums - @I_W_M, <https://twitter.com/I_W_M>.

8
3.Crowdsourcing WW1 using Twitter

Let’s explore how, from different perspectives, two national projects

try to make the best of Twitter during the centenary’s commemorations.
The first is a pedagogical project created in Luxembourg with international
scope (@RealTimeWW1); the second is a French project crowdsourcing the
memory of all single soldier fallen during the war (@1J1poilu).
In 2014 during the US National Coalition for Public History annual
conference in Monterey, California, Benoit Majerus, history professor at the
University of Luxembourg, presented an innovative pedagogical project
based on Twitter. His goal was to teach and research “the everyday life of
European people” during WW1. Day by day, history students of the
Luxembourg History Master, studied the war, discovered digitized
primary sources in archives or online and applied critical methods to the
sources before publishing a new tweet daily about how soldiers -or
civilians- were affected by the war. What is the peculiarity of
@RealTimeWW1, is that daily tweets are about an event which is not past
but present and happened hundreds years ago. Past and present
perception’s is blurred because of the capacity of social media to bring the
past in a permanent present.
Twitter, seems to serve better national goals and national memories
of the first world war shows Frédéric Clavert with the results of his current
research on #WW1.38 Clavert monitors the flux of more than two millions
tweets collected from April 2014 via a selection of the most used WW1
hashtags in three languages, German, English and French. 39 He used the
software IRAMUTEQ 40 to explore these Big Data’s from three distinct

38 Frédéric Clavert, “Les commémorations du centenaire de la Première Guerre

Mondiale sur Twitter, avril 2014-avril 2016”, in Luigi Fontana and Luigi Tomassini
(eds): “I mille volti della Grande Guerra ieri e oggi”, Ricerche storiche 65, no. 2 (2016): pp.
147-165.
39 @RealTimeWW1.
<https://twitter.com/RealTimeWW1>; “World War One goes
Twitter”, Blog H-Europe (July 2014). <http://h-europe.uni.lu/?page_id=621>.
40 Iramuteq, <http://www.iramuteq.org>.

9
perspectives, dividing between francophone and English tweets. and
analyzed the statistics looking first at a chronology of the main events. He
then made a textual analysis of the content of the tweets and, finally,
visualized the results through a network analysis of the hashtags. 41 It
shows that twitter isn’t at all used in France like it is being used in Great
Britain or in other Anglo-Saxon countries. In another essay, Clavert dogged
into only one important French Twitter project,42 «1 Jour - 1 Poilu»43 which
"unites the energies of everyday internet users, for a full transcript of 1.325.290
records of the memory of the men who died for France”. This project narrates a
French history of the war deploying the dynamic of social network’s for the
sake of national historiography and around the French soldier’s figure.
Thanks to twitter, a wider public knows more about the Mission du
Centenaire (2013) launched to coordinate WW1 commemorations.44 «1 Jour -
1 Poilu» is also part of the ambitious public project of the French Defense
Ministry, “Mémoire des Hommes”45 which wants to generate a collaborative

41 Clavert used mainly the following hashtags: ww1, wwi, wwiafrica, 1gm, 1GM, 1wk,
wk1, 1Weltkrieg, centenaire, centenaire14, centenaire1914, GrandeGuerre,
centenaire2014, centenary, fww, WW1centenary, 1418Centenary, 1ereGuerreMondiale,
WWIcentenary, 1j1p, 11NOV, 11novembre, WWI, poppies, WomenHeroesofWWI,
womenofworldwarone, womenofww1, womenofwwi, womenww1, ww1athome,
greatwar, 100years, firstworldwar, Verdun, Verdun2016, Somme, PoilusVerdun.
42 Frédéric Clavert, 1 Jour – 1 Poilu: exemple de contribution des «amateurs» à la narration de

l’histoire, in Frédéric Clavert, L'histoire contemporaine à l'ère numérique, Blog (December

2015). <https://histnum.hypotheses.org/2528>.
43
<https://twitter.com/1J1Poilu>. The project has been called “1 Jour 1 Poilu, défi
collaboratif #1J1P”, <http://www.1jour1poilu.com>; Jean-Michel Gilot, “Le digital au
service d'une cause nationale: l'odyssée d'’1 Jour - 1 Poilu’”, Blog Linkedin (26 November
2015), <https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/le-digital-au-service-dune-cause-nationale-
lodyss%C3%A9e-d-gilot>.
44 @Mission1418, "Mission Centenaire, Actualités, publications et informations sur le

centenaire de la Première Guerre mondiale", <https://twitter.com/mission1418>. The

mission in Twitter uses the official hashtag #Centenaire and supports the website
project 14-18, Mission Centenaire, <http://centenaire.org>.
45
Rejoignez le programme d'indexation collaborative et participez à l’enrichissement de la base
des Morts pour la France de la Première Guerre mondiale,

10
digital transcription of all individual “Poilus” hand written records
conserved in the Defense Ministry and identifies all those who scarified
their life for France.46
The possibility to integrate photos47 and, from 2014, also video48 in
tweets helps a lot historians to add visual primary sources to the only 140
characters, diversifying the usage of Twitter. It is easy procedure to
reproduce in a picture, any kind of primary sources, photographing and
sharing them in a tweet.
If we have to draw some conclusions about twitter’s engagement
with WW1 commemorations, we may say that, thanks to Twitter, witnesses
speak in the first person, often through a re-enactment of the past or a
storytelling, autobiographies, personal diaries and other ego-documents.
What "happened today", a chronological daily engagement with the past is
very common in Twitter in close connection with web sites projects where
the timeline is often part of a site’s architecture. But a critical approach of
the evidence displayed in tweets is often missing in twitter especially when
history photographs are provided. This is the case of the American Twitter
project History in Pictures which narrate the past “sharing the most powerful
and entertaining historical photographs ever taken” with very poor captions
because of the limited amount of available characters in a tweet.49

<http://www.memoiredeshommes.sga.defense.gouv.fr/fr/article.php?larub=52&titre=an
notation-collaborative>.
46 Base de données des Morts pour la France de la Première Guerre mondiale,
<http://www.memoiredeshommes.sga.defense.gouv.fr/article.php?larub=24&titre=mort
s-pour-la-france-de-la-premiere-guerre-mondiale>.
47Posting photos or GIFs on Twitter, Blog Help Center,

<https://support.twitter.com/articles/20156423>.
48Sharing and watching videos on Twitter, Blog Help Center (no date).

<https://support.twitter.com/articles/20172128>.
49 @HistoryInPics, <https://twitter.com/historyinpics>. See Jason Steinhauer,
“@HistoryinPics brings history to the public. So what's the problem? (Part 1)”, Blog
History@Works (18 February 2014). <http://ncph.org/history-at-work/historyinpics-
part-1/> and Kevin Levin, “@HistoryinPics Does It Better Than You”, Blog Civil War
Memory (18 February 2014), <http://cwmemory.com/2014/02/18/historyinpics-does-it-
better-than-you/>.

11
4.Blurred and active memories through camera lenses

After the pioneering role of Flickr (2004), Facebook and Twitter were
launched and some years later, Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr diversified
the number of social media platform dedicated to photography answering
to a visual turn centred on the role that images50 –let’s think about the role
of selfies-51 are playing today in narrating our daily life’s.
Understanding how common people use photography’s in social
media and play with history tells many things about which pasts are
important today. Pictures are used because of the constant need to revisit
the past bringing it back in a continuous present. Photography, in social
media, describes popular behaviors and, thanks to linked data
technologies, Google Maps and Street View, creates timelines, spatial
dimensions and time boundaries to individual memories. Old family
pictures are key elements of our family and individual memories.52 But
family pictures deal with a self-oriented past, the one of one’s own family.
The photographer Irina Werning in Back to the Future illustrates adults
wearing the same clothes they wore when they were children.53
Public historians can help ordinary people to use the technologies and
create contents online. Digital public history methods, sustaining a direct -
often unmediated- involvement into the past, matter to international
publics interested in incorporating their own memories into the present.
On the other hand, the popular query for genealogy which is ubiquitous in

50
André Gunthert, “Shared Images. How the Internet Has Transformed the Image
Economy”, Études photographiques 24 (2009).
<http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3436>.
51 André Gunthert, “La consécration du selfie”, Études photographiques 32 (2015),

<http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3529>.
52 Richard Chalfen, “La photo de famille et ses usages communicationnels”, Études

photographiques 32 (2015), <http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3502>.

53 Irina Werning, Back to the Future, Blog Irina Werning. <http://irinawerning.com/back-

to-the-fut/back-to-the-future/> and <http://irinawerning.com/bttf2/back-to-the-future-2-

2011/>.

12
most social media like Jerome De Groote observed, 54 only scratch the
surface of major events in history and are often disconnected from “big
history” and broader contexts.
The social media platform Historypin, “a global community collaborating
around history”,55 was created by the non-profit company Shift with support
from Google and launched at the Museum of the City of New York in July
2011. The company wanted to enable “networks of people to share and explore
local history, make new connections and reduce social isolation”.56 Linked Data
and semantic web technology connect digital contents in Historypin,
combining primary sources with places. Old pictures can be “pinned” in
the present suppressing time boundaries. Family pasts may be re-enacted
in today’s urban landscapes. Because technology is easy, lay people can
easily use the software like once the polaroid camera was a mass
instrument. Historypin is emblematic of what is happening with millions of
past photographs and personal memories crowdsourced daily in other social
media.57 Collections of images are included in Google maps.58
Public historians take Historypin very seriously to engage with
specific communities. 59 The US National Archive (NARA) suggests that
“this new media/map mashup site allows … to … upload digital files, add
54 Jerome De Groote: “International Federation for Public History Plenary Address: On
Genealogy”, The Public Historian 37, no. 3 (2015): pp.102-127.
55 Historypin. <http://www.historypin.com/>.

56 Historypin. <http://www.shiftdesign.org.uk/products/historypin/>. Mark Baggett and

Rabia Gibbs, “Historypin and Pinterest for Digital Collections: Measuring the Impact of
Image-Based Social Tools on Discovery and Access”, Journal of Library Administration 54,
no. 1 (2014): pp. 11-22.
57
“A short introduction to Historypin”, in Youtube.
<https://www.youtube.com/user/Historypin>; “Historypin — Mapping the past”, in
Storify, <https://storify.com/brightideasblog/historypin-getting-started>.
58 Hunter Skipworth, “Historypin turns Google Street View into a window on the past”,

The Telegraph (21 June 2010).

<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7854922/Historypin-turns-Google-
Street-View-into-a-window-on-the-past.html>.
59 Meg Foster, “Online and Plugged In? Public History and Historians in the Digital

Age”, Public History Review 21 (2014): pp.1-19.

<http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj/article/view/4295/4601>.

13
descriptive information and personal narratives to these items, and experience how
familiar environments have changed over time in front of you.” Thanks to
Histortypin, the NARA is everywhere outside the building in the virtual
space60 and solicits everybody’s contribution inviting the wider public to
"pin your history to the world."61
Academic historians could use the potentiality of Historypin, a tool that
makes easy to reenact difficult pasts? What about the Israelo-Palestinian
war in 1948? Alon Confino, tried to reconstruct the invisible Palestinian
past of Tantura a village near Haifa on the beach called Dor in Israel today.
Confino publishes images of Palestinians families of Tantura he founds in
archives, but social media could be used for crowdsourcing other original
documents of the Palestinian diaspora. So re-enacting pre-1948 Palestinian
memories into the present could be possible.62
Historypin is used worldwide. In Florence, during a public exhibition
(2014) commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of German
occupation in August 1944,63 citizens brought their stories and documents
on site to a project called MemorySharing: 1944 pictures were scanned and
included in Historypin today’s maps of Florence. Neo-Zealanders soldiers
are now re-enacted directly on Google Street view. You can fade the
vintage picture to see the contemporary layer of the street and back to
Florence 1944.64

60 Kris Jarosik, “Primary Sources With Some Help from Historypin”, The National
Archives Eductation Updates. <http://education.blogs.archives.gov/2014/12/16/primary-
sources-on-history-pin/>.
61 NARA, <http://www.archives.gov/social-media/historypin.html>.

62 Alon Confino, “Miracles and Snow in Palestine and Israel: Tantura, a History of

1948”, Israel studies 17, no. 2 (2012): pp. 25-61.

63 <http://www.regione.toscana.it/-/1940-1944-firenze-in-guerra; Francesco Cavarocchi

and Valeria Galimi, Firenze in Guerra, 1940-1944 (Florence: Firenze University Press,
2014), pp.xxiv-xxv.
64 “Kaye, George Frederick, 1914-2004. Looking towards the Porta Romana in southern

Florence, Italy”, in World War II, <http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22827427>.

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 Patrick Peccatte defines three different ways photos can be assembled
and change the relation between past and present in photography. 65
Another project created in 2009 by the photograph Jason Powell, Looking
into the Past, merges past and present altogether in a unique image.66 (It
was ispired by a photograph, Michael Hughes’ Flickr project called
“Souvenirs”.67) “Ghosting family pasts” in social media, thanks to digital
technologies, is very popular everywhere for resuscitating memories.
Merging old pictures and recent images shortens the digital timeline and
activates different regimes of historicity in the present as François Hartog
calls it.68 Emblematic of many others projects around the world, Past Present
Project in Tumblr,69 Instagram70 and Facebook,71 publishes pictures where
past and present overlaps. 72 These pictures say about individual and
generational experiences and our incapacity to close up our elusive
presents even when fixing it with pictures. Showing the pastiness of places
shapes a nostalgic present, like with the images of merged urban
temporalities by Zoltán Kerényi, an Hungarian artist 73 or with Hebe
Robinson’s Northern Norway photographical project Echoes which

65 “With a slightly fluctuating terminology, three types of montage are used for different
purposes: juxtaposition (Rephotography, Then and Now) to document, merge (Ghosts, Looking
into the Past) and insert (Past in Present) for creating an aesthetic or emotional effect.” (Patrick
Peccatte, “Re-photographie et effet de présent”, Blog Déjà Vu (5 December, 2012).
<http://dejavu.hypotheses.org/1268>.
66 Looking into the Past. <http://www.flickr.com/groups/lookingintothepast/>.

67 <https://www.flickr.com/photos/michael_hughes/sets/346406/>.

68 François Hartog, Regimes of historicity: presentism and experiences of time (New York:

Columbia University Press, 2015).

69 Christian Carollo, Past Present Project in Tumblr, <http://pastpresentproject.com>.

70 The Past Present Project in Instagram, <https://instagram.com/sayhellotoamerica/>.

71 The Past Present Project in Facebook, <https://www.facebook.com/pastpresentproject>.

72 Christian Carollo, Past Present Project, <http://pastpresentproject.com/about>.

73 Andréa Simoes, “25 photos du passé se superposent avec le présent pour vous

faire découvrir leurs histoires”, Blog Daily Geek Show (7 June 2013),
<http://soocurious.com/fr/25-photos-du-passe-se-superposent-avec-le-present-pour-
vous-faire-decouvrir-leurs-histoires/>.

15
reinserts old family photos shot in a Lofoten fishing village in a rural
landscape which was abandoned after WW2.74
Also called rephotography,75 these new images contains different time
layers in one unique image. Sometimes, more re-photographed images are
used to resuscitate the old photography at different period of time. Lost
settlements, historical landscape, urban transformations, family
experiences and even WW1 images are “ghosted” in a nostalgic past-
present continuum. The author of a website about Krakow in Poland “looks
for very old photos of the city and takes new ones from the very same spot, so my
readers can compare and see what has changed”.76
Images of WW1 soldiers were created by “mixing a vintage picture with
a shot taken recently from exactly the same spot”. Peter Macdiarmid travelled
3,000 miles through England, France and Belgium to revisit old photos’
sites, “standing where history was made and where a photographer stood 100
years ago”. 77 In Flickr and Facebook 78 Keith Jones Liverpool then and now
project, we discover “blended shots”, merged images between then (in
black or sepia) and now (in colour).79 A famous 1963 image of the Beatles
(in black) staying on the Derby Square central statue was again
photographed in 2014.80

74 Hebe Robinson: Echoes.

<http://www.heberobinson.com/#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&p=1&a=0&at=0>.
75 Loïc Haÿ, Quand la rephotographie rencontre le numérique.
<https://tackk.com/rephotographie>.
76 Kuba Sochacki, Dawno temu w Krakowie.

<http://www.dawnotemuwkrakowie.pl/english/>.
77 Lewis Panther, “Pictured: Fascinating World War One photographs mixed with

today's modern landscapes”, in Mirror, 19 April 2014.

<http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/world-war-one-photographs-mixed-
3433146>.
78 Keith Jones: Liverpool Then and Now,

<https://www.flickr.com/photos/keithjones84/sets/72157632063149974/>.
79 <https://www.facebook.com/LiverpoolThenAndNow>.

80 <https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7493/15837175252_ab828c45aa_o.jpg>.

16
 An Italian photographer, Isabella Balena, took pictures of today’s
ruins of the Gothic Line81 who stopped the allied offensive in central Italy
in 1944 and until the end of WW2. What is important in Balena’s
reproduction of monuments remembering this violent past, is to show us
today, the place where Mussolini was shot in April 1945 as a new living
experience. Only the name remains, this photographic journey, is about
visual public history narratives in which today’s memory of the violent
past is often blurred. Many times, present usages of past spaces lose contact
with the significance of places and monuments. Disconnection with the
past is what Serge Gruzinski shows us in the picture he choose to illustrate
his 2012 book, “l’Histoire pour quoi faire?”82 Young Algerians play football
and the goalkeeper uses a Roman old arch that does not mean anything for
him today: history and memories of ancient history are lost.

81
Isabella Balena, Ci resta il nome (Milano: Mazzotta, 2004).
82
Serge Gruzinski, L’Histoire pour quoi faire? (Paris: Fayard, 2012), pp. 21-24.

17
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