Monday, October 29, 2012

A citizen's responsibility to history

One lesson I'll never forget from my undergraduate capstone and senior seminar is that historians have a responsibility to preserve the truths of the past. Much in the same way a good citizen of a nation has the responsibility to participate in government (through voting, referendums, and initiatives), a good citizen of history participates in the historical community by upholding their responsibility to promote the truths of the past. One way historians participate as citizens is to gather information about the present to give insight to future generations about our past. Daniel Cohen explains in a chapter about collecting digital history in his online book, Digital History (found here), "historians will need to find ways to capture such documents, messages, images, audio, and video before they are deleted if our descendants are to understand the way we lived". If we are to preserve the history of our present, the historical community as a whole must recognize the historical impact of the digital world on our lives today. It is irresponsible to ignore the digital world when collecting and preserving digital forms of history, but it is also a challenge when issues of quality and questions of relevancy surround much of what we find online.  
The Utah Digital Newspaper Project is one of many attempts to digitize information of the past and present to preserve history for future generations
     Because of technology's ever-changing and constantly improving nature, it can be a challenge to preserve some forms of digital documents. For instance, website codes need to constantly tweaked in order to remain accessible, making the preservation of webpages as they were 5 years earlier impossible. And what happens if one forgets to back up files and the originals get corrupted? Having my own computer wiped and all my Microsoft Word files corrupted by a particularly nasty virus, it is frustrating knowing that when a file is corrupted, unless you have a back up, it is lost forever. As Herbert and Estlund explain (here), the Utah Digital Newspaper found that people feared a reliance on "digital images as a preservation means" because they assumed the program would "destroy the originals". But Cohen argues (here) that historians should focus on "sticking to fundamentally sound operating principles in the construction and storage of the digital materials to be preserved is more important than searching for the elusive digital equivalent of acid-free paper". While I believe that part of the responsibility of a historian is to provide ways for people to easily access historical information, I also believe that the preservation of physical documents is just as important as it's digital counterpart. 
     There are hundreds if not thousands of projects dedicated to collecting, preserving, and presenting history on a digital format, but that does not mean that they are destroying the original sources. The Library of Congress (LOC) has an extensive archive of documents, many of which still have not be copied in a digital format. One of the LOC's attempts to provide digitized forms of historical information is through their myLOC program (found here). After registering for an account, users of myLOC can explore 104 online exhibits (including some that correlated to exhibits that you can no longer see when visiting the LOC today), participate in several online activities including finding secret messages in a virtual Thomas Jefferson Building, save teaching resources, plan for a physical trip to the library, and even save the information you find in a collection folder tied to your user account. While myLoc provides access to information through several collections, it still has much more information housed at the actual library that is unavailable online, and some of what is available online poses copy write issues. 
     In 2008, the Library of Congress announced it would launch a project that would allow the public to contribute to the historical conversation by uploading images on Flickr through a page known as The Commons (found here). For those of you that are unfamiliar with Flickr, it is a Yahoo owned photo sharing website, where people upload their own photos into online albums where they can be viewed by all who look. The Commons project has two main objectives (as outlined on the website):
  1. To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and
  2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge. (Then watch what happens when they do!)
This project is controversial for some, not only due to copy write and questions of ownership as mentioned on Spellbound Blog's review of the project (found here), but also because it gives the public the opportunity to add layers of metadata to the image so that those who view an image may learn all sorts of information relevant to the picture that has been added by other users. The problem with this type of crowd sourcing, is that most don't add relevant information to the picture, instead they offer up personal opinions. As many of us know through first hand experience, the internet lends itself to creating an environment that encourages self-expression, often without regard for others or the digital document itself. While some images in the project have benefited from crowd sourced metadata, it is hard to find as one must sift through layers of irrelevant junk to find "crowd sourcing gold" as Cebula phrased it (here). 
An example of the many layers of metadata one may have to sift through on the Library of Congress' Flickr based crowd sourcing  project. 
    While I am all for public participation in history, sometimes I have to remind myself that not everyone is an academic historian, and while some may find the information interesting, many will not have much to contribute to the actual historical discussion. By opening up historical information to crowd sourcing on popular sites like Flickr, we are not effectively presenting historical truths to society. If one has to sift through 40 comments about a woman's hairstyle or attractive looks on a 1920's photograph, only to find a single comment relevant to the historical conversation, is that really good history? If historians are dedicated to presenting the truths of the past, does it make the partners of the The Commons bad citizens of history when historical truths are drowning in irrelevant information? 

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Are webpages and Google the only ways to find digital history?


Perhaps one of the biggest challenges faced by digital historians today is the challenge to create a website that is easy to use, easy to find, easy to access, cost effective, and appeals to audiences.  Say you are a college graduate student and are looking to create a website on Pacific Northwest History. First, you’ll need to create a web page. While there are some free basic templates out there such as Wix, often if you want your own domain name, you’ll need to pay for the domain services. Daniel Cohen explains that “the pull of commercial designers has been strong across the web. Few books discuss academic web design, as opposed to commercial web design” (found here). 
Web page design templates like the free ones offered at Wix (found here) can help students with research projects they want to present inexpensively on the web. 

     One of the major problems with free access to web based academic history is the cost factor. Unless your website is being viewed and used, it isn’t really worth funding. Finding and maintaining an audience, is often forgotten by those discussing how the digital world can be used for history according to Cohen (found here). Since the internet is still relatively new in the ways we are using it, a major struggle will be coming up with solutions to keep an audience. Because marketing is not seen so positively in the academic world, it is difficult to come up with solutions to web-based scholarly work.
     Don't get me wrong, there are databases for cataloging digital academic work, like the one found at Art-Humanites.net  (found here). For most people, if they are trying to find something online, they turn to Google. Instead of falling into the commercial trap of search engine advertising, Cohen believes that historians should learn the fundamentals of Google ourselves. I tend to agree.
The power of Google searches is often underutilized by its users. 
     While Google has a lot of power over determining the audience that arrives at your site, Google also shapes the ways we find other sites on the web. According to Josh Catone, three in four college students ineffectively use Google search. His entertaining and informative iconographics on how to use Google (found here) show the range and flexibility Google searches can have (as opposed to being chained to the first page of answers on a search bar question). Additionally, Google does not just offer searches on web content, but also on digitally scanned books (found in Google Books) and digitally scanned news papers (found in Google News), as well as a plethora of academic journals and articles (found in Google Scholar). The problem with some of these new digital sources is copywrite law. Google books has been in a legal battle for almost a decade with authors and publishers over the rights to their books.
Smart phone applications are a new way digital history can reach audiences.
     While it is okay for libraries to lend out books to the public, Google (which initially wanted to do something similar) has been reduced to operating in the private sector for profit frame of mind. Other countries like France are spending billions to open up book access on the web (found on Cohen’s blog, here). There are other sources of digital history that don’t rely on Google too. Exploring Curatescape has shown me that thinking outside the webpage box can open up a world of new possibilities in digital history.
For those of you who are not familiar with the Curatescape project, it is an app based project that uses people’s natural inquisitive nature to create a self-guided tour of the historical sites in a city. Currently, there are Curatescape projects in Cleveland, Spokane, and New Orleans (found here, here and here). The beauty of this kind of project is that it is mobile. It is designed for an even larger emerging market—smart phones. And while we may still rely on Google to find that elusive chicken curry recipe or where the nearest Target store is, there may be other tools out there to explore the growing world of digital history.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Since taxpayers pay for it, perhaps we should open up access...

With the growth of the internet (and the subsequent privatization issues such as FERPA) the issue of open access is on the minds of many in the digital history community. 
     Digital historians are often greeted with new and exciting ways of presenting and researching history, but the question always remains: who should benefit from our digitized world? As Lisa Spiro said in a 2008 article on communication and open access in digital humanities (found here), “open access, just like dark and blueberries, is good and good for you”. She argues that opening up scholarly research in the humanities leads to more information accessed by more people, and encourages the exchange of ideas and collaboration with other scholars. Spiro like many other academics in humanities notes that while economic and scientific communities have greatly benefited from open access materials, the humanities has yet to really latch on to the possibilities digitizing and open access can bring. Dan Cohen, a pioneer in the field of digital history, notes in an entry on his blog (found here) the resistance some in the professional historical community have to open access forms of historical research. The American Historical Association (AHA) claims that open access works better in scientific and economic publishing, not humanities because of the nature of scholarly publishing in the field. Cohen argues that the AHA has a conflict of interest with the issue of open access, while it is mandated by congress to circulate history, it is also an association that publishes scholarly research and represents scholastic authors of history. There has been a “collective failure” on the part of historians who cling to the old ways of research (which is often funded through grants, endowments and tax cuts). According to Cohen, “we haven't tried very hard” to find a sustainable way of adapting to a democratized digital world.

This 19th century slave cage sits outside the American Historical Association building in Washington D.C.. Perhaps for the purposes of this article, we can use it as a metaphor: the cage is the box in which traditional historians have placed digital history. Instead of exploring the ever expanding and evolving digital world, historians like to follow the old methods and look at digital history as a quaint commodity that will never fit in a practical academic world. 

     While some groups like the AHA resist the opening up of scholarly research to the public, others have sought out new ways history can be presented freely to the public. Purely digital open access scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Digital Humanities (found here), provide scholars with new ways of presenting their research using digital tools. For instance, Daniel Booker's article, “Visualizing San Francisco Bay's Forgotten Past” was able to use high quality images to support his analysis of the use of the San Francisco Bay since the gold rushes of the mid 19th century. Lisa Spiro argued in 2008 that digital forms of publication can offer things like publishing photographic sources that traditional publishing methods can't or are unwilling to do. Scholars like Bill Turkel argue that history should be interactive and tangible, as it uses “people's natural way of comprehending the world through touch and other forms of sensory perception” (found in Spiro's article here). In other words, scholars should actively engage their audience instead of bogging them down with dry, and somewhat archaic, academic articles.

A pioneer in digital history, Roy Rosenzweig believed in open access of academic research. In his eyes, almost all historical research was underwritten by taxpayers, and should be made available to them. 
    University based centers are looking for new ways to research and present in digital forms, such as the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities based at the University of Maryland (found here), which provides access to current projects by students and faculty, as well as providing a blog, podcasts and hosting events that facilitate discussion on relevant issues for digital humanities. The Center for History and Media at George Mason University, is an excellent example of the strides historians can make using a digital platform. Founded by Roy Rosenzweig in 1994, the center has sought to create a variety of online digital projects aimed at educating and providing sources and tools for high school, and university students and educators. Not only does the center focus on providing tools for a “new generation” of scholars, librarians, archivists and museum curators, it has pioneer the ways we capture and preserve history made digitally. It's starring example is the center's September 11 Digital Archive (found here) which is made up of some 150,000 digital items like Black Berry Messages, video clips, emails, voice mails, and so on.

     While some historians will continue to resist the emerging field of digital history, the potential ways in which opening up history to the modern world are invaluable in teaching history to the next generation. The field is still developing, but it has come a long way in the past decade and will continue to expand, opening up new potential ways to share history and excite people in the process. While we still need to consider sustainable ways to  support the publishing of open access research, perhaps opening up historical research will inspire more creativity and new ways to think about the past.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

The world of digital history and how it can help solve the puzzle


History is like a puzzle with many missing pieces. Perhaps with digital history we can find some of the pieces.

A professor once said to me  how the study of history is like putting together a very large puzzle with missing pieces, some lost forever. Historical information that can be found digitally, known as digital history, can help us find some of the missing pieces. As Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzwieg explain in the introduction to their book, Digital History (found online here), by digitizing history we have the potential to change the ways we “research, write, present and teach about the past”. Abby Smith Rumsey explains in an interview (found here) that with the wave of digital history, we are better able to capture and interpret present history in the making. For those willing to embrace the digital realities of our present world, they will find spectacular new ways of seeing, exploring and sharing history.

William G. Thomas (found here) believes that digital history has “the capacity for play, manipulation, participation, and investigation by the reader”. Online, those that want to explore a subject in history can immerse themselves with all sorts of information that would not have been so readily available. Since digital archives require little space and have the potential to open up access to the same sources from anywhere in the world. 
The British Museum not only opens its doors to the public in  London but has a  growing collection of online exhibits for those who want to learn but don't want the travel expenses. 

The “democratization” of history seems to be a running theme in the digital history community. Online copies of primary sources, article databases, museum collection databases have opened up the world of historical research to a global audience—not just scholars, curators, and researchers. The internet provides new ways of learning history: not only are more written sources readily available, but images, audio recordings, compiled historical data and other historians with the research they are working on. As outlined in a New York Times article (found here), digital forms of history can provide a new, more enhanced environment for learning, exploring, and presenting history to a globalized world.
Internet based sources of information such as Wikipedia play to the democratization of history. The danger with sites like Wikipedia is the lack of scholarly review and the potential it has to perpetuate misinformation.

While digital archives have advantages: less space needed, more storage capacity, better access, easier to organize, there are disadvantages.  Because historical resources are more readily available, Daniel Cohen predicts that “historians will have to grapple with abundance, not scarcity” in the future. The risk of more information (and misinformation) available with less oversight can hinder the ways we learn history. The digital age has replaced our reliance on physical objects, this can make objects obsolete and can limit the ways in which we choose to study history. Katie Hafner (found here) points out how museums and archives are only digitizing a portion of their collections, and as we rely more heavily on digital sources, we forget the vast wealth of information that is not digitized. Since information online will only continue to grow as we digitize more of our history, historians will need to find ways to root out the trivial from the substantial while still incorporating what has yet been made available online. 

After this week’s readings, I am of the opinion that digital history is a wonderful tool for the future of historical research and education. But as our world is still adapting to the digital age, history and the ways we study and share it are changing too. The internet, computers, and convenient one-box searches (as Cohen put it) are all a reality in our world. We cannot ignore the impact of technology in history, but we shouldn’t replace the other ways we study and teach history. Instead, we should incorporate a bit of both. That way we only add to the puzzle and not take away.

Monday, October 1, 2012

Introductions

Hello! Anna here! Currently I am enrolled in a class on digital history at Eastern Washington University. This blog will be filled with reflections from class readings and anything fun I find related to my class. If you have stumbled across my page and are not in my class, welcome!

~Anna