In the 21st century, we live on an open platform. Surrounded by instantly available audiences of various sizes and seemingly unlimited opportunities for creating networks of intimacy, our lives are largely shaped by technologies of communication. Historians are also part of this story. Today, they use YouTube to make their lectures accessible, podcasts to introduce their research, and Twitter to promote books and other projects.

But historians do not only use modern media to self-market their work and share their expertise. Increasingly, they also interject in current socio-political debates through these media. Similarly, there is an increasing number of historians working outside university who tell the forgotten stories of the past using podcast and journalism. Through their regular publishing, they bring history right to the daily lives of those tuning in. Consequently, history as a subject has become readily available to wider audiences.

In light of these new currents, the Emmy Noether Research Group: Reaching the People based at Freie University Berlin is organizing a panel discussion on 27 January 2020, featuring the following historians, active in the fields of film, radio, and podcast:

Lucy Burns, Witness History, BBC World Service

Melanie Huchler, Deutsches Historisches Museum

Joachim Telgenbüscher, "Verrückte Geschichte", (Twitter: @drguidoknapp)

Florian Wittig, Real Time History GmbH/YouTube: "The Great War"

Together we will explore the following questions:

• Has the digital age changed the way historians communicate the past?
• Should academics try to share their research beyond written forms?
• Which mediums are particularly useful in reaching an audience?
• Do these new mediums breed new types of historians?