The era of the citizen historian

Andrew Murray and Hannah Lewi are crowdsourcing history through their PastPort mobile app, part of a new vanguard of citizen historians' use of tech.

A composite image of black and white photography with colour photography depicting Crichton Street in Victoria

Crichton Street in Garden City, Victoria. This mass housing experiment was initiated by the State Savings Bank in the late 1920s. The street flooded in the 1930s. Original image courtesy of the Port Melbourne Historical and Preservation Society. Image courtesy of Andrew Murray.

Your treasured family photos and oft-repeated anecdotes can now enter historical record through a new wave of digital history apps and websites.

New media technologies, including photography and film, provide potent ways of seeing into the past and visualising our shifting connections with it: think of time-travel movies and ‘then and now’ stereoscopic photography.

Today, smartphones, tablets and other digital media feed our desire for history and heritage. The accessibility of these tools now make it easy for any of us to become citizen historians.

Read more about Hannah and Andrew's work and the PastPort app on Pursuit.