The readings which most resonated with me were the reports from the 2007 Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship and the 2007 essay by William G. Thomas III, “Writing A Digital History Journal Article from Scratch: An Account”. They are relevant not only to the course, but to my future as a historian (academic/public/digital), and I suspect I’ll reread these over the next few years.

Even if digital history isn’t implicitly public history, I think that the recommendations of the working group for evaluating public history work create a very helpful template for digital historians. The emphasis to community engagement is in particular is worthy of attention. One, because public history and publicly-accessible digital history works are a way of engaging with the community, and can especially help foster connections between a local group and the college/university, breaking down barriers which might otherwise exist. Secondly, because I think historians sometimes forget about the communities with which they could engage; if we keep that in mind as one of the assets of our work, it is harder to neglect those ties.

The reports from the working group, in conjunction with Thomas’ essay, point out some of the challenges in evaluating digital scholarship. For public history, the working group makes an excellent point that much of the work is peer-reviewed prior to the staging of an exhibition. That doesn’t always happen with a digital work, unless it’s grant funded, in which case the grant fills some (but not all?) of that function.

I think one of the challenges of peer-reviewing a digital work is finding the peer group. While public history isn’t that much older, as a discipline, than digital history, it has seems to have a larger group of practitioners. Moreover, there were curators, interpreters, and consulting historians long before there was a definition (as much as there is) of “public history.” It should not be difficult for history departments to find experts where exhibits and public projects are concerned.

The issue in digital history seems to be not just finding sufficiently informed peers to review a work, but even realizing that those peers are needed. After reading Thomas’ essay, the part which I found echoing in my head was the colleague who “explained that he had read ‘the actual article’ but had ‘not seen the web site.’ ” To me, that was like saying he had seen an exhibit when in fact he’d only read the catalogue. Even one of the lovely, detailed catalogues published by the National Gallery of Art doesn’t convey the same sense of a collection of, say, early printed books as being in the exhibit, with the layout and flow arranged by the designer. I think that there’s a conceptual understanding of the scholarship involved in digital (and public) history which is not universally grasped.

The overall tone of the reports and the essay, as well as the other readings, leaves me largely optimistic. Digital scholarship is not new, but it may be finally reaching voting age; the disciplines and people who dismissed it when it was a child may finally have to recognize it as an adult who has something useful and worthwhile to contribute.

Brett-NEH

I suspect I might have gotten more out of parts of this book if I had a better grounding in film/cinematic theory, or in art theory at least. There were digressions which were opaque – luckily they didn’t obscure the overall message(s) Manovich wanted to convey. The whole work is rich for discussion, but I only want to talk about the section on databases.

Why? I’m a database fan. Manovich argues that cataloging and narration are “two basic creative impulses” dating all the way back to the Greeks, and I agree.(233) I understand the desire to categorize, to sort, but also the need to tell a story about what you’ve sorted out. In some ways, that’s what writing history is – sifting out and distilling sources, and then telling the story which comes from combining those distillations. Thus, I think the section on databases can be of great use to the digital historian.

Some of the points Manovich makes in this section are ones we’ve heard already in the semester: organizing a database is a way to make an argument; a narrative is only one of multiple ways to access the contents of a database; “creating a work in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database”.(226) The examples he provides to support these arguments are helpful, particularly the lyrical paragraph on page 243, the end of the section, where he describes how Vertov’s film is an argument, a meaningful use of effects and sources – “Vertov’s goal is to seduce us into his way of seeing and thinking.” Vertov, we are told, successfully merges the database and the narrative into a new form.

The act of merging database and narrative, or at least smoothly joining the two, is one of the challenges of digital history. As Manovich points out, databases underlie most of the structure of digital projects. When we build an online exhibit or narrative, we build a collection of sources, whether or not we chose to make those sources accessible beyond the narrative we construct for the visitor/user. If we do, there is the chance they will only engage in the categorization, not the narrative. I think that’s okay.

In fact, I think exposing the work is an important benefit of digital history. Not in a rough way, necessarily – to use a textile metaphor, you want to finish your seams, not leave raw edges. Still, showing some of the process can be energizing for the creator as well as the viewer. Earlier in the book, Manovich mentions how Brecht experimented with meta-theatricality, exposing the work of a production to the audience; having worked as tech for a production of Caucasian Chalk Circle, I can attest to how exciting and exposed this technique can feel.

If we expose the work of selection and how we go from collection to narrative, I think it can not only strengthen the understanding of the narrative, but helps to reinforce the notion that simply creating a collection is, in itself, an argument. For ourselves (digital historians), we should make sure that we understand what our process is in making those choices, not just what records we create but what fields we capture. It is part of our method, our argument, and worth consideration.

As a coda of sorts, Jean Bauer has an essay in the open-reviewed work Writing History in the Digital Age about the interplay between a historical database and writing narrative history.

What do you want your users to learn? The impact, physical and psychological, of the British capture and destruction of Washington in August 1814.

What is your methodological stance? The exhibit takes a spatial social history approach, seeking to tie each source or object to the exact location which provides its relevance to the events of the burning of Washington. Images which show the extent of the damage, first-person primary source narratives, and recognizable objects will help create points of connection for general public users; hopefully this will be felt even more strongly when they are in the location where these events took place.

How does your design work to support these goals? The design of the site is arranged spatially, with options out from each place to explore the narratives and objects associated with it. The mobile/multi-platform design means that people can browse the exhibit and the archives while sharing the historical location.

What new things do you need to learn? Best practices for using Omeka, how to build an Omeka plug-in.

How will you go about learning these things? Best practices for Omeka can be learned by example and also by reading the extensive documentation. Building a plug-in starts at documentation, but I will probably also seek help from people who have built a plugin before.

What is the rationale for the decisions you’re making about source choices (by type, collection, time period, etc.)? In the documentary sources, I want as much as possible for the voices of the people present to be heard. I am selecting diaries and letters primarily, although also including some newspapers and memoirs (partly because there is a memoir by an enslaved person who was present, and I want to include all possible voices).  For images and objects, the goal is period pieces, to preserve the historic moment. I have to make some leeway for prints, because they take time to produce, but the objective is to collect as much immediate impact as possible.  The locations I select by their prominence – likelihood that someone will be in the vicinity – but also purely by documentation. The more documentation on a site which was or was not burned, the more likely it is to be included.

What questions remain for you to provide a convincing grant application? I think I need to more fully address the work plan, or at least convey the work involved in selecting sources/material and building the plug-in. I need to find a way to really emphasize the mobile/multiplatform aspect, as well.

Here is my prezi for my grant proposal.

I’ve had two encounters in the past two days with everyday sorts of history, and I wanted to share them.

One

Yesterday morning I went to my parent’s church and was engaged in conversation by an older woman who sat herself down next to me. Learning that I am a PhD student in history, she proceeded to tell me how she loves reading history and finding things out. Her personal interest is in the history of regional groups in the US.

She said to me “of course, the more you learn the more confusing it is,” (roughly paraphrased) which I thought was such a wonderful expression of how studying history can sometimes feel like travelling down Alice’s rabbit hole, or wandering into Ariadne’s labyrinth without benefit of a ball of string.

She also mentioned that she grew up in south-east Washington, DC. Recently she’d been coming back from National Harbor with her daughter and they’d driven around the neighborhood looking for a Dairy Queen. They ended up in front of her grandmother’s house. Not only did she tell her daughter about her memories of that house, she went home and dug out a picture of her grandmother on its steps, tracked down the woman how now owns the house, and sent her a copy of the picture. Apparently the current owner is the third generation of her own family to live in that house, and she loved having a picture of its first owner just after it was built.

Two

Today Patrick Murray-John retweeted a link to a blog essay written by a person of color who went to the Occupy Wall Street movement to see what it was about and ended up getting involved. The essay discusses the demographics of the people in the movement and the people organizing the movement. It’s worth a read.  I was particularly caught by this passage, near the end:

And this is the thing: that there in that circle, on that street-corner we did a crash course on racism, white privilege, structural racism, oppression. We did a course on history and the declaration of independence and colonialism and slavery. It was hard. It was real. It hurt. But people listened. We had to fight for it.

When you live rolled up in history all the time, it’s easy to forget that some people don’t see it unless they’re made to.  I don’t want to say that all history is political, or that it should be, but it’s worth keeping in mind that some people are doing the politics without understanding the historical context.  That just giving a student dates and names may not offer them the resources they need to know why riffing on race and the Declaration of Independence might be problematic.

There is chemistry in cooking, there is math in my checkbook, and there is history in the everyday.

MBrett-NEH-draft

It seems to me very easy to get caught up in the possibility of digital history, in all the exciting opportunities before us and forget to think about the durability of the sites or projects we create. We’ve talked in class about websites which show their age in terms of the user interface, and I’m glad that we’re addressing the basic accessibility or readability of the underlying data to future users. Just because something is digitized now doesn’t mean it will be usable 10 years down the line.

I might be a bit hyperaware of this – I know that I drew pictures of my cat, Middy, using MacPaint on our computer when I was a kid. I don’t know where those files are, and even if I could find them, would there be a program to open them? My father brought home a QuickTake camera in the 1990s; in the early 2000s he decided to try and open the files, and it took him about three years to find an application which could do so.

In addition to these personal examples, I remember reading about the efforts of the National Security Archive to ensure that presidential records from the 1970s and 80s would/will be readable by the time the confidentiality restrictions were/are lifted on them. I think that the authors of the article on digital forensics were not far off the mark in the predicting that there may be a need for engineers/developers who specialize in making older forms of born-digital or digitized content readable. While some individuals and institutions might make the effort to migrate as formats evolve, it’s unreasonable to expect that everyone will.

I wonder how much auto-generated metadata will be lost in the translation?

Which brings up another point from this week’s reading, specifically from Cohen and Rosenzweig – Document! Document! Document! Build the metadata into the code of your website or project, and track your changes in some sort of readme! Not only will be this be useful to scholars 10 or 20 years in the future, it will also be useful to the next person who works on your project! Or even to you, when, in six months, you try to remember why you built something the way you did.