This, from web designer and social media consultant Emily Esten, is the final post in a series of reflections from our staff on why they were drawn to the mission of Contingent Magazine. You can read the first three posts here, here, and here.
Scribner's, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Illustration from “The End of Books” by Octave Uzanne, illustrated by A. Robida, Scribner’s Magazine, 1894
I don’t always consider myself a historian, even though most of the work I’ve done has been some kind of history. From leading tours of a historic house to researching oral histories for a community center’s upcoming exhibit, drafting finding aids in a research library to building visualizations from historical data, doing history is something I’m committed to in its many forms.
Increasingly, a lot of my history work (and the field at large!) is digital. Thinking critically about audience, content, and how best to use technology in service of people and histories is crucial to my work. This is why the pitch for Contingent immediately clicked with me. Erin, Bill, and Marc came to me while I was job searching, thinking about how best to design a site and digital strategy that touched all aspects of the history community. Not only did they recognize my expertise, but they already thought of audience, content, and technology as a core part of what Contingent would be.
Designing this site was a technical challenge, but it also helped me think about how we wanted history to be presented on the internet. We wanted a site that didn’t feel “academic” or “historical,” but actively considered the people who would use it. We thought about accessibility in digital history sites and projects, and how to account for that in our design. (We’ve tried our best, but we know we can do better!) We thought about how we approach footnotes, make homepages, structure searches, and make it easy for people to find the content they’re looking for.
And every step of the way, the work involved in getting to a place where sharing history would be possible–the coding, design work, community-building, and password-juggling for every Contingent account–was part of doing history. In saying that every way of doing history is worthwhile and that historians should be paid for their work, we recognized that the platform for doing history was part of that mission, too.
As Contingent moves into its first issue, I can’t wait to see how the site and community grow with us. Whether it’s building a better website, finding ways to support multimedia history work, or improving our accessibility, I believe we can be a space that models our principles for the history community at-large.