Mediating Science in the Mountain: Rethinking the Historian’s Craft through Digital Public Humanities

This article provides critical feedback on the design, development, and use of a multimedia website dedicated to a project on the history of science in the Alps during the Enlightenment. At the crossroads of the history of science and technology, experimental history, public history, and the digital humanities, this project serves as a good case study to explore the implications of the digital turn on the practice and dissemination of history. We show how our emphasis on eighteenth-century practices and materiality of science-in-the-making enabled us to reconceptualise historiography in the digital context. This approach encouraged us to produce our own archive for the project: a public website interweaving media and periods allowing visitors to reassemble materials according to their interests, thereby producing their own reflexive narratives and arguments. After presenting the website in detail, we analyze how a selected group of users engaged with it, raising core issues for the digital humanities. Conceptually, we discuss how this was achieved by aligning the mountain-as-a-milieu and the digital-as-a-medium to produce an ecology of media for a “public digital history”.