A Movement: Citizen Humanities?

If you love watching birds, you may be a bit of a citizen scientist. If you already track birds or have watched the charming documentary Listers on YouTube, about two brothers who attempt a very serious year of birding, you are familiar with ebird and Merlin. Ebird lets you list birds you’ve seen, and Merlin helps you identify birds. Both apps are products of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. What does Cornell get out of creating free apps? If thousands of birders report what they’re seeing, that helps trace bird populations. Merlin improves the accuracy of those reports. In this way, birders can be citizen scientists. Even though they’re civilians, they aid scientific professionals and help guarantee coverage that could not be achieved by the people who staff the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

“Citizen science” is a widely recognized term and associated with more things than tracking birds. NASA has a whole page for citizen science projects. You can help map the moon, measure snow in New York, track wildlife, keep an eye on Mars in many different ways, watch for exoplanets, use your ham radio to help explore the earth’s ionosphere, and much, much more. The U.S. government also appreciates citizen scientists. They have a page for getting involved, as well. Citizen scientists do more than fill in data-gathering gaps, they sometimes make discoveries and co-author papers with full-time scientists.

There are all kinds of projects and all kinds of people who engage in citizen science. It is a well-known and respected niche. People enjoy participating in these projects. Projects need and value these participants. There’s no inherent rivalry between the laboratory or university and the backyard; these are complementary efforts. Citizen science has a lot of institutional approval and support from science professionals.

It’s time we started talking about citizen humanists. While the so-called professional humanities in higher education are imperiled, there are many other, non-academic ways to be involved in the humanities, and many people are already participating in endeavors related to the humanities. What would we call The Catherine Project? What might we call the labor of love that is Front Porch Republic, a forum for serious topics and intellectual inquiry that is unattached to a university or an academic journal? Citizen humanities is a good option. Technically, the term “citizen humanist” already exists, but it is not widely known or used. Of course, rescuing a humanities term from obscurity is classic citizen humanities.

Many of us operate in defiance of labels, especially seemingly unnecessary labels. Why add another label to our wallet? Labels can help us identify things. Putting a name on citizen humanities can help us recognize the activity in places that would otherwise go unnoticed. Identifying as citizen humanists can help some of the people currently wandering in limbo. There are people on Substack who think that they are the last of their species because they love print books or want to do intellectual work outside the academy, when they clearly are not.

Citizen humanities can also help us put this phenomenon into a healthy relationship with the academy, the professional humanities. Right now, a good deal of the defense of citizen humanities relies on castigating higher education or pronouncing it dead. Some of this is actual, legitimate criticism and some of this is about positioning, trying to appear superior to institutions doing the humanities more professionally or prestigiously. In half the articles bemoaning the fate of the humanities, paragraphs are spent denigrating the humanities in higher education. That seems more like service to self than to the humanities. Wouldn’t we all be better served by seeing our efforts as complementary (and making them so)? How many institutions would benefit from some helpful citizen humanists? And how many citizen humanists would benefit from some access to the academy? A relationship akin to that cultivated by professional and citizen scientists could prevent unnecessary rivalry among humanists.

A title might help people better identify their allies on the battlefield: the real enemies are neither professors nor amateur readers and writers but AI slop, TikTok videos, and the soul-sucking drivel that keeps so many people from leading examined lives. And if we look for it, we’ll see that many citizen humanists and citizen humanities projects already exist. The National Archives and Records Administration relies on citizen archivists. You can be a virtual volunteer for the Library of Congress. You can help the Smithsonian with transcription. The people who keep Wikipedia accurate are citizen humanists. So are podcast subscribers and book club members nationwide. This is not just about public humanities, which happens outside of the academy, this is about humanities by non-professionals, which is already happening all the time. Embracing the term citizen humanities can make it easier for citizen humanists to find each other and for all kinds of humanities projects to collaborate.

It’s worth noting that many great achievements in the humanities were carried out by people who were, in many ways, civilians. Consider Joshua Hammer’s book, The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, A Soldier, A Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World’s Oldest Writing. Austen Layard, the archaeologist, may have been more of a professional (though not well-compensated), but Henry Rawlinson was a soldier and East India official who spent his spare time wrestling with cuneiform, and Edward Hincks was a clergyman, who could barely get a weekend off but managed to make the biggest breakthroughs with cuneiform. The Epic of Gilgamesh was pieced together by the self-taught Assyriologist, George Smith, who saw tablets on display at the British Museum and discerned the story in them. Nothing says citizen humanist like a self-taught Assyriologist. May his number increase.

The Victorian era, as a whole, offers some guidance for the citizen humanities, because of its deep appreciation for serious amateurism. There were people who devoted their lives to languages and fossils and literature and history, whatever their employment or educational level. People stayed up late at night studying, with no prospect of payment. It was the pursuit of knowledge for enjoyment and its own sake. It was, by no coincidence, also an era which valued self-improvement and public lectures as entertainment.

At minimum, wider use of the term citizen humanities offers us a path to coherence for the phenomena we are experiencing now. Some people on Substack are saying we are on the precipice of a renaissance in the humanities. It seems premature to declare such a thing, but there are a lot of people out there taking books and ideas seriously, writing passionate essays, and supporting small presses and non-academic podcasts.

Embracing citizen humanities can help us better appreciate people and projects around us and enable us to better communicate what we are doing to those outside this loose movement. If people hear about the idea of the citizen humanities, they may well be inspired by it. The term invites involvement and new ideas. It enables alliances and partnerships. It conveys the gravity of projects outside of the academy and argues for the complementary nature of work by academics and non-academics. Citizen humanists have everything to gain by titling the movement and nothing to lose but our isolation.

Image Credit: Paul Sérusier, “Under the Lamp” (1906) via Wikimedia.