Our digital history class is off to a great start. Despite the sleepy time-slot, we had a lively conversation about the advantages and disadvantages of doing history in the digital age. Below, you will find notes from our first class. Please post any questions in the comments section. 

Digital History Class Notes Week One

January 13, 2015

4:30 p.m. – 5:15 p.m.

• Introduction to the class

  • Go over the syllabus
    • Assignment point totals:
      • Blog posts are each worth 12 points for a total of 48 points.
      • Comment assignments are each worth 8 points for a total of 32 points.
      • Class participation = 80 points.
      • Tag suggestion assignment = 32 points.
      • Research tool review = 96 points.
      • Digital history site review = 96 points.
      • Final project = 256 points.
      • Extra credit = 32 points.
  • Booking a tour of the BeltLine
  • Note– the most up-to-date version of the syllabus can be found here: https://sites.gsu.edu/mhp-digital-history/syllabus/
  • Go around the room for student introductions and questions.

5:15 p.m. – 5:25 p.m.

• Break

5:25 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.

• Discussion of concepts

  • What is history?

    • Origins of history
      • The earliest known critical historical works were The Histories, composed by Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484 – 425 BCE). Herodotus attempted to distinguish between more and less reliable accounts, and personally conducted research by travelling extensively, giving written accounts of various Mediterranean cultures.
      • Importance of writing and of the archive. (Refer back to Plato’s Phaedrus dialogues).
      • 19th Century German professionalization of history and focus on authentic primary sources for history creation. Leopold Von Ranke of the  University of Göttingen.
      • French Annales school introduced more geographical approaches.
      • Marxist historians focused on centrality of social class and economic interests.
      • The archive is key to historical practice and presentation largely comes about through monographs and journal articles.
    • Changing historical paradigms
      • Different historiographical interpretive lenses rise and fall in popularity during the 20th and 21st centuries:
        • Diplomatic and political history (the history of “great men”) 1900s-1940s.
        • Consensus history 1940s and 1950s.
        • Social History 1960s and 1970s.
          • Experiments in quantitative history focusing on statistics and the use of computers to analyze them.
          • Challenged focus on elites and primacy of written documents.
          • Use of oral history as evidence.
        • Cultural History 1980s and 1990s
          • Borrowing from anthropology and looking at the use of symbols to mediate human existence.
          • Focus on visual and material culture challenges primacy of written evidence as well.
          • Influence of postmodernism challenges primacy of categories.
        • World History, Environmental History and Memory Studies 2000s
          • Getting away from national boundaries.
          • Rejection of traditional historiographical categories.
      • Museum exhibits and historic sites as places for interpretation in addition to books and articles for scholarship.
      • But most historians still rely very heavily on written sources found in archives.

  • What is digital history?

    • What is special about the new digital media, and especially about the “History Web”?
      • Lower barrier to entry— larger chorus of voices. Authority not coming from above.
      • Historians used to write in a vacuum— now we can have more collaborative historical writing and open peer review.
      • What makes scholarship?
      • Changes to how you do history.
    • Positive qualities of digital media for history:
      • Capacity
        • More is better
        • More is easier to corroborate.
      • Accessibility
        • Can have a worldwide audience, so that changes the conversation around the meaning of events and places.
        • Removes geographic limitations on collaboration.
      • Flexibility
        • Ability to change the site, update, adjust the project quickly and easily.
      • Diversity
        • Can have many voices, different perspectives.
        • Ability to use different types of media (sound, moving images — working on touch and smell :)).
        • Create richer understanding of the past.
      • Manipulability
        • Creating an immersive environment.
        • Can manipulate the data, so there are more ways to analyze it and reveal new interpretations.
        • (GIS technology to reinterpret civil war battles).
      • Interactivity
        • Can have conversations from the other side of the world in real-time.
        • Contributing information quickly.
        • Opens up expertise of the diverse field of people.
        • Tapping into passion and excitement.
        • Can experience history through video games, history films.
      • Hypertextuality
        • “Footnotes on steroids.”
        • Breaks down linear narrative, takes the inevitability away.
        • Adds a third (and even fourth) dimension to interpretation.
        • Spacial relationships.
    • Pitfalls of digital media for history:
      • Quality
        • You get so many voices online — “any idiot with a computer can put something out there” How do you find your way?
      • Durability
        • Cloud might solve problems of storage, but what about changing technologies?
        • Proprietary archives (Twitter, Facebook).
        • Degradation — which calls into question copying into new formats.
        • Data corruptibility.
        • What about loss of information to future scholars?
        • Loss of provenance.
      • Readability
        • Loss of context.
        • Distractibility.
      • Passivity
        • There is so much out there that you are overwhelmed.
        • People choosing not to engage because the discourse is uncivilized.
        • Internet trolling.
      • Inaccessibility
        • Communities that are not comfortable with digital technology (age, socio-economic status, region).
        • Counteract with multiple access points!
        • Think about audience!

  • Types of digital history sites:

    • My own observation: Digital history projects tend to occupy a unique hybrid space between scholarship, resource provision and museum-style exhibition/entertainment. They often resist pure categorization and, like other history products, are context-specific. At the same time, they serve as excellent case studies in the interactions among the competing pressures of funding, audience and intent that so universally categorize public history projects. (Discussion of “More than an Argument about the Past.”)
    • Cohen and Rosenzweig’s categorizations:
      • Archival
      • Secondary sources
        • Exhibits
        • Film
        • Scholarship
      • Teaching
      • Discussion
      • Organization

  • Diving into digital history sites

    • American Memory
      • Best-known and most widely used repository for online primary sources in the country.
      • Started with CD-ROM in the 1990s trying to entice research libraries around the country to share its resources with researchers.
      • When project moved to the web, the staff dedicated to digitizing documents still focused on researchers who were part of LOC’s traditional clientele, but about 6 months into the project, they discovered that American Memory website’s #1 user group was K-12 teachers.
      • During 1990s and early 2000s, American Memory’s content continued to expand, fed by material-specific funding (such as the African American History Project and the AT&T-funded digitization of the Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel Morse papers) and funding by Congress to digitize presidential papers and other content of “national” significance.
      • Educational outreach staff also expanded to manage partnerships with master teachers to develop resource-specific lesson plans for distribution via the site’s “Teachers’ Page”.
      • Challenges in the use of the site include objects separated from their archival provenance and from the history of their preservation. (Ms. Dana Bell-Russel, Education Outreach Specialist, likes to lead workshops that focus on documents that show evidence of change over time including a typescript of a poem by Langston Hughes with his notes for revisions in the margins and a draft of the Declaration of Independence with notes by Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams.
    • Valley of the Shadow
      • Began as a personal research archive for Ed Ayers of UVA as he researched a book about the Civil War in Augusta County, VA and Franklin County, PA.
      • Serendipitous grant from IBM and the NSF in 1992 enabled UVA to establish the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) and Ayers’s archive was to be the test project.
      • IATH began without a set direction or explicit public orientation — it was to be a laboratory for technological exploration in an academic super-field that had yet to establish its “information-age” identity.
      • Project delivered to the Web using MOSAIC browser between 1991 and 1992.
      • Then, the team took a digression and transferred the content of the project to CD-ROM.
      • But, luckily, the project was already Web-viable and was able to stay ahead of the curve as the Web grew and site’s popularity spread “like wildfire” via word-of-mouth (Interview with Will Thomas, one of the original researchers on the project).
      • 1998 design based on Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest floor plans has remained in place and still feels elegant and easy to use!
      • In 1999, the project was transferred to the Virginia Center for Digital History and integrated into the Center’s TAH grant-funded summer institutes for teacher education.
      • In 2006, the project was declared complete (almost 10 years ago!)
      • Mr. Thomas’ reflections on the nature of the project: “Although most people lump the project in with digital libraries, it’s really very different; it’s more a work of scholarship than it is a true digital archive.” High degree of selection and arrangement in presentation of materials on the site. Visitors to the site enter the “mind of the site’s creator, to look at the relationship between two communities that, by virtue of a line on a political map, found themselves on opposite sides of the Civil War. At the same time, the archive-fed digital nature of the website has helped it to transcend the boundaries normally associated with a work of scholarship. Popular with genealogists, gender historians and K-12 students and teachers who would not normally read historical monographs in the course of their study of the Civil War.”
      • My own notes: “By surfacing what would otherwise be an obscure collection of separate archives, the Valley of the Shadow makes social history research and understanding more accessible to people without the backing of institutional resources.”
    • The Lost Museum
      • Began as a new-media based public program and evolved into archive-supported work of digital history. (Interview with Josh Brown of the American Social History Project).
      • Started in mid-1990s, in the age of the CD-ROM.
      • Between 1995 and 1996, ASHP secured enough funding to set up a new media lab at its offices in the CUNY Graduate Center.
      • Project grew out of desire to receive future funding and interest in the new technologies and aesthetics of computer games like MYST.
      • Topic of Irish immigration and the creation of Barnum’s Museum– original idea to create a 3-D environment to explore the interior of the museum.
      • Worked with architectural historians and PT Barnum Museum archives to recreate the museum’s environment in a digital format— but while working on this project, the ASHP staff realized the Museum told an intriguing story about the tensions running high in antebellum NYC, about racism, immigration, Nativism, science, and religion all culminating in a mysterious fire that incinerated the museum in 1865.
      • Turned to NEH Education department for funding of a Web version of the project in 1998. Education section of NEH proved more adventurous than the Public Programs section— but they also required that the project more deeply consider its audiences and the alignment of its content with history and science curriculum standards.
      • Result was the embedding of an archive of related material to support the exploratory environment of the Lost Museum as well as the creation of a mystery game to encourage students (and other users of the site) to ask questions about the strange artifacts, documents, and images built into the Lost Museum’s environment.
      • Mr. Brown hopes that there may be more sites created like the Lost Museum in the future.
      • My own thoughts: Unlike archives that put materials on the web without entertaining narratives, and museums that put exhibits on the Web without supporting resources, digital history projects can do both, to the benefit of potential audiences.
    • September 11 Digital Archive (Omeka)
      • Born-digital archive with public contributors.
      • Will revisit during Omeka intro class.
    • Digital Harlem (Maps)
      • Use of layering of maps to tell stories.
      • Will revisit during maps class.
    • Writing History in the Digital Age (Publication, challenging peer review)
      • Can the digital age make the border between traditional scholarship and public history more permeable? (Intro to Writing History in the Digital Age).