Working with the public in historical data creation

Historians engage with the nonacademic public in diverse ways, from blogging their research, to public-friendly periodicals, to the art and practice of public historians. Within this special issue we present another way to engage with the broader public, through the shared creation of historical data. The four papers in this special issue arise from a session on historical crowdsourcing at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association, in Montreal in 2017. Each paper presents a different approach to using web-based interfaces to co-create historical data with a broad nonacademic audience. Scholars from across the historical sciences can use the lessons learned within this issue to guide development of their own public-facing data creation projects