We know very well that time is precious for everyone. Teaching, and in particular a university career, is incredibly full of commitments and tasks. Even the commitment made in other institutions, such as museums, foundations and associations, is no small thing. So why dedicate time to this project?
The first banal answer could be: if someone has a passion for history and perhaps also for teaching, they should be willing to dedicate some of their time to an initiative in favor of young and future generations of the study of history. Who has passion, normally also has the passion to pass it on and pass it on. We know that this answer is apparently very demagogic, let’s say apparently because whoever is writing has dedicated a lot of time, money, resources out of pure passion, without having anything in return other than satisfaction; you will understand that, from here, we don’t see it as very demagogic.
But we have a much more solid argument. Today there is a lot of talk about “Public History”, about dissemination and somewhere it is being done. There are initiatives, this is one of them. The discussions between scholars, which are very important and complex, but which are confined to extremely restricted environments, do not seem to us to be the most suitable for dissemination to the general public.
Why do we have a space in the platform to insert sources? Precisely for this reason. Let’s imagine a professor who inserts a large, very exhaustive and important article among the sources. A young student takes a pill, an in-depth analysis and then inserts a link to the original article. Obviously in the hope that it will be clicked and read. This also applies to books, we specify to the editors that hyperlinks are inserted in the bibliography that take you back to the sites where a certain book can be purchased, or a certain article can be read. In our way, we believe that this too is disclosure, presenting something simple and easy to read, suitable for the general public and at the same time offering the possibility of “moving up” to the level by connecting to more important, more complete and exhaustive information. Obviously this can further benefit those who want to make more material available, but above all those who feel like seeing SnapHistory as an opportunity and not just as a useless and boring further commitment. Furthermore, verifying a pill of only 2,000 characters does not take much time.