More Than an Argument about the Past? (Dorn) Fall 2011
Is (Digital) History More Than an Argument about the Past? (Fall 2011 version)
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 6 The well-dug trench of long-form historical argument embedded in the university-press monograph fits poorly with the range of constructions that are well-used digital history projects. Embedded in successful digital history projects is always (the possibility of) a rich historical argument, but historical argumentation is not always the intended central purpose or the way users find the most value. Existing (successful) individual digital history projects suggest a common template that we can use in understanding and evaluating digital historical works beyond the long-form argument.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Are professional historians and other scholars in related areas worrying about more than we are learning from the digital projects we admire? The online world appears to be infecting humanities scholars in the U.S. with status anxiety.1 Many new scholars worry about what “counts” as scholarship in an online universe, fearing that their senior colleagues will not respect anything other than monographs published by university presses. More experienced scholars find themselves worrying about the nature of peer review online, or maybe the future of the codex and university press publishing as an infrastructure for scholarship.2 There are some important practical issues to address with online scholarship, but the status anxiety is misplaced or at least poorly focused, for two reasons. One is that we, our students, and others interested in the humanities need to see the threats to scholarship more accurately. Fundamentally, threats to humanities scholarship have their roots far from the influence of technological change on the mechanics of scholarship and the routines we use to certify quality within our fields. Long before the internet and Amazon.com came declining state support for public universities, vocational rhetoric surrounding the politics of higher education, the growing use of contingent academic labor, and increased pressures for scholarship at institutions that had focused on teaching only a few short years before.3
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 But a second reason to avoid reasoning about scholarship from a status-anxiety framework is that it distracts us from an opportunity to understand our field in a richer way. The need for this is both pragmatic and philosophical. In one pragmatic sense, scholars whose work goes beyond the long-form argument need a way to help peers and administrators understand their work. Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered is a general way of communicating but not sufficiently specific for each discipline.4 Public historians have often struggled to communicate the meaning of their scholarship in research-oriented institutions, and the development of disciplinary support for their work and appropriate tenure and promotion standards has been relatively recent.5
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 In a second pragmatic sense, we need a better way to teach historical scholarship for undergraduates, not only for the ordinary reasons why college and university history departments should be concerned about an undergraduate education (which we often focus on history majors) but also because for the next generation of elementary and middle-school teachers in the States, the majority of the future teaching pool comprises the undergraduates that colleges and universities in the U.S. have for one or two classes as part of their general education requirements. Often, the second-to-last history class elementary-school teachers take is in high school, leaving just one or two classes in college for them to understand history as a discipline. College history classes have little room for error in educating future teachers about what history is and can be.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 2 But the opportunity to use digital history projects to explore the nature of historical scholarship stretches beyond the practical issues of tenure, promotion, and exposing future teachers to our disciplinary conventions and understandings. In addition to these worthy aims, we can use the best of digital history work to reimagine the discipline. In attempting to battle the perception of history as a set of dates and names, or “just one damned thing after another,” as Toynbee and Somervell put it, historians have perhaps gone overboard in arguing that history is “an argument about the past,” as a poster available to schoolteachers puts it.6 The irony of the poster is that it is produced by the National History Education Clearinghouse, whose work fits squarely within Boyer’s “scholarship of teaching” rather than the monograph’s scholarship of discovery or integration/synthesis. A further irony is that the National History Education Clearinghouse site is hosted by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, whose well-used work often is far from arguments, instead often managing either the development of tools or the type of project (such as the Clearinghouse) that otherwise supports scholarship and teaching.
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Figure 1. Poster detail from National History Education Clearinghouse. Source: “Free Historical Thinking Poster!” (blog entry), August 17, 2010, available at http://teachinghistory.org/nhec-blog/24174 . The emphasis in the poster is on using primary sources, understanding multiple perspectives, and putting issues in historical context. What is missing is the type of work that often dominates digital history projects, including the one that created this poster.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 2 The development of digital history has not marginalized these diverse types of projects, and that diversity of digital projects has developed for several reasons: funders have had a range of interests, a few senior historians such as Roy Rosenzweig and Edward Ayers have used funding to develop diverse projects, and the development of digitization technology far in advance of electronic book publication and sales created a first-mover advantage. This first-mover advantage for CD-ROM and then web projects leveraged interest in digitizing a range of sources at a time when it was neither realistic nor professional advantageous to try to publish long-form arguments online. Into that gap stepped funders, institutions, and individual academics and teams of scholars who had different priorities. At the same time, two developments at a national level in the U.S. created educational audiences as well as funding streams for a range of projects. First, education reform politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s created a push for state-level standards in traditional K-12 academic subjects, including history.7 While the effort to create national history standards faltered because of political pressures by Lynne Cheney and others, states pushed.8 In addition, the late Sen. Robert Byrd (WV) and former President George W. Bush championed a dedicated funding stream in the Teaching American History grants, leading to a range of districts and partners needing curriculum material and trying to spread a more sophisticated understanding of history among K-12 teachers.9
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 This heterodox development is an opportunity to think about historical scholarship beyond the long-form argument, in ways for historians more specific than Boyer’s rough classification.10 This is consistent with historians’ more general craft orientation to disciplinary quality, what retired New York University historian Paul Mattingly once told me was his strong sense that historians were most comfortable with “mid-level generalizations” about specific times and places.11 So let us go about making some mid-level generalizations based on the diversity of digital history projects.
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Digital History as Diverse Types of Scholarship
Digital history projects that have provided public resources on history span a broad range of quality and scope. This section provides brief descriptions of several such projects that were created by professional historians, public historians, and other scholars.12 The point of this section is not to identify either the most polished or the most famous digital history projects but rather to list and briefly describe a range of both polish and scope. This section begins with two projects originally distributed on CD-ROMs, though digital history projects for a decade have generally focused on publicly-accessible online distribution.13
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 Who Built America? was an extension of a two-volume social-history textbook of the same name, with two CD-ROMs constructed and published in the 1990s.14 The CD-ROMs provided a digital expansion of the common textbook sidebar presentation of primary sources, including audio and video clips of speeches as well as photographs and text or facsimile primary documents. Creating such a compilation is a labor-intensive process in part because of extensive licensure issues involved in using media.15
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 1 The Valley of the Shadows was also an extension of a book project, in this case Edward L. Ayers’ comparison of lives in two counties (Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia) before, during, and after the Civil War.16 The project had an early online life that Michael O’Malley and Roy Rosenzweig described in 1997 as a guided exploration of primary sources: “It allows students to construct their own narratives of life in both towns in the years before the war, but it seems to encourage narratives that follow the framework of Ayers’s planned book.”17 In the years since, it has had various versions, including the transformation of the materials to a website that now serves as an official “archive” of the project.18
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Figure 2. Screen capture of main navigation page, The Valley of the Shadow archival website, August 2011. URL: http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/choosepart.html. This page uses a library-room metaphor for types of sources and the periodization, with each period represented by a virtual “floor” with its own “rooms” for types of sources such as letters, maps, newspapers, and census records. Other pages in the archival site provide other structures for entering the materials.
¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 The American Memory project (http://memory.loc.gov) is an explicit display of archival collections that highlights a large number of the notable and little-known primary sources, photographs, and other artifacts in the Library of Congress collections. Begun in the early 1990s with a pilot project and CD-ROMs, American Memory has continued as a sprawling online display of historical artifacts.19 Individual items in the collection are displayed with archival metadata and can often be reached either as part of an organized presentation or through search tools.
¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 1 The Papers of George Washington (http://gwpapers.virginia.edu) is a 43-year-old editing project that has produced more than 50 volumes of edited material (out of an anticipated 90). One digital version of the papers has public access (http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/GEWN). A more scholarly online version of the papers is available by individual or personal subscription as well as by purchase of individual printed volumes from the University of Virginia Press.20 The general-access version contains a number of entrees to the primary sources, including chronological back-forward buttons that are akin to page turns.
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Figure 3. Screen capture of public (“guest”) access to Papers of George Washington, with journal entry from October 17, 1781; URL: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=GEWN-chron-1780-1781-10-17-1. Left-right arrows contain hyperlinks to the previous and next journal entries. There is breadcrumb navigation to various levels of chronological organization as well as links to other methods of accessing individual sources. There is no standard bibliographic citation available on the page itself, though a user of the public access point could create one.
¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 Hypercities (http://hypercities.com or http://hypercities.ats.ucla.edu/) is a geographic display platform for layered maps built on Google Maps and the ability to geocode pictures and maps. While other platforms built on Google Maps focus on current events (e.g., Ushahidi, originally created to map Kenyan election violence in early 2008), Hypercities focuses on the collection and curation of historical map information. It is the result of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation grant to Todd Presner of UCLA and Philip Ethington at the University of Southern California and has been used for a number of classes at various institutions as well as for scholarly research (such as Ethington’s work on the history of Los Angeles).
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Figure 4. Screen capture of Hypercities map of Mexico City with 1519 Tenochtitlan map overlay. Users can adjust the transparency of individual overlays as well as zoom and pan to compare historical maps with a contemporary satellite view on Google Maps. Other features of Hypercities allow the geotagging and tying of photographs or other artifacts to the location of the referenced feature.
¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 Europe, Interrupted (http://www.inventingeurope.eu/invent/exhibits/show/europeinterrupted) is an online exhibit of the Inventing Europe project sponsored by the European Science Foundation and the Foundation for the History of Technology. It presents a structured path through collection items using the “exhibit” metaphor for presentation. It is an example of the type of exhibit produced using the open-source Omeka museum collection presentation software that public historians can customize for specific exhibits.21
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Figure 5. Screen capture of main navigation page for Europe, Interrupted. The navigation page uses a rail-map metaphor to allow different paths through the online connection. Each “junction” presents a curated object (or a media representation of one) with explanatory text. Each “line” has a label with an implied argument under the umbrella of imperfect technological development.
¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 History Matters (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/) is a website originally created in the late 1990s by the same organizations that created Who Built America? (the American Social History Project at the City University of New York and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University). The website supports survey courses in U.S. history at the high school and undergraduate levels (and is subtitled “The U.S. Survey Course on the Web”), with a range of materials from selected primary sources and historical links to sample syllabi, exemplary student work, and other resources for teachers.
¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 Digital History (http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu) is another collaborative teaching resource collection project headed by University of Houston historian Steven Mintz in the mid-2000s (and sponsored by a group including the University of Houston, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History). It has types of collections similar to those of History Matters, including both primary sources and lesson and other direct guidance for teachers.
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Figure 6. Screen capture of Digital History timeline tool, which combines a slider for a time window at the bottom with geographical markers of events that can be clicked on to reveal specific events. The copyright date of 2003 in the lower right corner of the image is older than the most recent copyright date elsewhere on the site (2007) and suggests the vulnerability of projects such as this to erosion from obsolescence (in contrast with an explicitly “archived” completed project such as The Valley of the Shadow).
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Digital History as PAELA: Tools for Presentation of Artifacts and Events, Learning, and Argumentation
The small collection of digital history described above includes several award-winning projects, and perhaps the most important starting point for learning from the projects is to acknowledge that digital history projects can win broad recognition of quality from peers who see them as professional, admirable, and enormously useful. And yet, of the collection listed here only Europe, Interrupted (and none of the award-winning projects) focuses on the type of argument that historians value in university-press monographs. Professional digital history projects can focus on the organization and presentation of primary sources from a specific range of time and place (The Valley of the Shadows), can be an online conversion of an archival collection (The Papers of George Washington), can be a teaching “portal” organized around instruction (such as History Matters), and can present a tool “modded” from open APIs such as Google Maps provides (Hypercities) as well as they can make an historical argument.22
¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 3 Academic historians in the post-WW2 era have recognized some types of non-argument activities and functions as important if marginalized in higher education. Public history is valued in theory, if only a few history departments have faculty who engage in public history projects (and fewer who have earned tenure on that basis). Archivists are essential to the work of historians, but they are usually trained in library or information science schools.23 If this pattern extends to digital history, one should expect that only a few departments will devote significant resources to the formal training of digital history technicians, those who have programming skills and some disciplinary history background, and that departments will struggle to evaluate digital history projects except where professional awards clearly convey peer approval.
¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 But there need not be significant difficulty in understanding the contributions of digital history projects. As demonstrated in just the few projects described in this chapter, academic historians have little problem recognizing the value of outstanding digital history work. The question is how to articulate the contributions of digital history in a way that is conceptual rather than ad hoc. We may use the existing outstanding digital history scholarship to bootstrap those concepts, and the rest of this section catalogues an initial classification.
¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 Using tools to present artifacts. There is already a range of recognized professional presentations of historical artifacts, generally primary sources but also multimedia files. The Library of Congress American Memory project is the most extensive in North America, but both the Papers of George Washington and The Valley of the Shadows organize primary sources for an audience. The scope is different in each case: the Library of Congress (or a research library’s special collections department) cares for and presents material from multiple collections in its custody), while an edited version of an individual’s papers or a thematic collection is much more narrow in purpose as well as scope. The critical traits of an archival resource for historians include custodianship and proper sourcing, and the critical traits of an online presentation of historical artifacts remains identical: care of the digital resource and clear provenance. One can see similar parallels with edited collections of primary sources (a Papers of… project), though in the case of the Papers of George Washington it is clear that while the editing quality is the same for the (identical) hard copy and online main text, the public digital version is missing critical traits of scholarly annotation that historians expect of scholarly edited collections of quality.24
¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 1 Using tools to present events. A second general use of tools for digital history is the presentation of “events” or, more generally, specifics of history bounded by time and place. A number of tools exist for creating online timelines such as the SIMILE timeline tool that has been incorporated into Google Docs, or the EasyTimeline markup format in Mediawiki software. However, one does not need an online tool to create a timeline. On the other hand, complex time and space data require specialized tools for presentation. The construction of historical maps has been an art form for centuries, generally beyond the recognized skill set of academic historians.25 Hypercities has attracted considerable attention in a few years of its development, because it allows the presentation of data in a form that is attractive, thought-provoking, and conceptually simple, with successive layers representing change over time. One does not need to be an artist to use Hypercities, though the required digitization and geocoding tasks require time and attention to detail. One could also argue that statistical presentation is an equally important activity in presenting “events” if one considers a datum bounded by time and place, with presentation of statistical data a skill often neglected in history departments. Gapminder is currently the most generally-known infrastructure for presenting historical data series online in an attractive and conceptually-simple manner.
¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 1 Using tools for learning. The three class-focused digital history projects listed above come with different organizations: an “expanded textbook” and the “teaching portal” with a broad range of resources. The construction of any website around learning is more than the appending of “lesson plans” to an existing website; it is the deliberate composition of a range of resources that includes primary sources and support for activities teachers might design or facilitate for students.
¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 Using tools for argumentation. Tools for constructing arguments have begun to catch up with the digital history projects that do not focus on argumentation. Blogs have been a tool for short-form argumentation that has made self-publishing of short commentary accessible to individual scholars for more than a decade, but long-form arguments or multimedia arguments have generally required specialized website construction until recently. Some blog tools such as WordPress plug-in digress.it now allow the publication of book-length projects with open commentary as the projects evolve (including the project which prompted this essay). Omeka is a tool for online public history exhibits discussed earlier. Some more adventuresome university presses such as the University of Michigan Press have also explored different definitions of the long-form argument as extending beyond the hard-copy book.
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Where Historians’ Boundaries Must Stretch: Infrastructure as Scholarship, Use and Collaboration as Criteria of Value
As I have suggested earlier, historians will probably recognize the value of digital history in presentations of artifacts and sets of events and event representations when they contain the recognizable elements of quality work in offline parallels: care in custodianship and curation, tracking of provenance, match of organization with purpose, and accessibility of presentation. Such digital history projects may be viewed as inferior to long-form arguments unless they are adjuncts to long-form argumentation that academic historians already recognize.26 But recognizing such projects as valuable scholarship does not require rethinking the fundamentals of historical work since it matches up well to the traits of existing “infrastructure” for historians. I hope my fellow historians are more ecumenical in recognizing this work than I expect them to be; anyone who wishes to take the “easier” path compared with the monograph, by creating a digital history project, is welcome to try!
¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 1 What requires more deliberate effort is the evaluation of scholarly work in creating tools for presentation. Here, an important consideration in viewing digital tool-building as scholarship is the public visibility and use of the work. This is a pragmatic issue in terms of long-term impact as well as immediate value. Tools by themselves have little value as archived; because software quickly becomes outdated, a tool that is not used within a year or two will have no one providing feedback, no volunteers for further development, and no chance of support from potential funders. Yet to gain users, generally most tools require a team that gains users and builds a community as well as creating a software package.
¶ 32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 6 This requirement of effective team-building makes collaboration an essential part of tool-building, and this may be the most difficult evaluation criteria for historians to assimilate, more than use (which has a parallel to citations). Historical scholarship generally operates as solo projects or as the product of very small teams of scholars. In contrast with those small teams, a much larger community is required by the development, persistent use, and maintenance of software packages such as Omeka or Zotero. A history department at a research university may give tenure to an assistant professor who writes a single-authored book on an obscure topic published by a university press, where fewer than 200 copies are sold to libraries and placed on shelves without any evidence of who read the book other than the acquisition editor, a small number of reviewers, and the peers and external reviewers of the assistant professor. In the case of a university-press publication, the prospective valuation of the manuscript and post-publication review by a small number of senior scholars is sufficient. What about the assistant professor who worked as a graduate student on a software package and continues to do so as a new faculty member, where the software package is used extensively by museums and historical sites but where the tradeoff for the new faculty member is a few articles published before tenure rather than a book? I suspect many history departments would gladly value a scholar who headed such a project, but for someone who was a longtime contributor but not the lead, the value placed on such work would be far below the long-form argument, even if it were the software development contribution that had the greater contribution to the field.
¶ 33 Leave a comment on paragraph 33 0 About the author: Sherman Dorn is a professor of education at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. In addition to various articles and books written about education history and policy, he has consistently written in his blog focused on education for more than a decade and is the former editor of the open-access, online Education Policy Analysis Archives.
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- This essay focuses on both the professional dynamics in the U.S. and websites in English, but the argument is more general: we should see the diversity of successful digital projects as a way to talk about historical scholarship. ↩
- Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence (NYU Press, 2011). ↩
- For a small sample of the recent literature on such changes, see Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace (Princeton University Press, 2004); David L. Kirp, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line (Harvard University Press, 2004); Martha C. Nussbaum, Not For Profit (Princeton University Press, 2010). ↩
- Ernest L. Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, 1st ed. (Jossey-Bass, 1997). ↩
- Kristin Ahlberg et al., Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian (Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship, June 2010). ↩
- Arnold Joseph Toynbee and D.C. Somervell, A Study of History (Dell, 1965), 295; National History Education Clearinghouse, “History Is an Argument about the Past” (poster), 2010, which can be requested at http://teachinghistory.org/poster-request. ↩
- Maris Vinovskis, From a Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind (Teachers College Press, 2008). ↩
- Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn, History on Trial (Vintage, 2000). ↩
- Alex Stein, “The Teaching American History Program: An Introduction and Overview,” The History Teacher 36, no. 2 (2003): 178–185. ↩
- This essay does not address the influences of postmodernism or some of the political influences on scholarship that Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob; Hoffer; or Wiener have explored. My focus on the disciplinary construction should not be read as a claim that these other concerns are irrelevant; Joyce Oldham Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret C. Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (Norton, 1994); Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect (PublicAffairs, 2007); Jon Wiener, Historians in Trouble (New Press, 2005). ↩
- Mattingly’s statement is itself a mid-level generalization consistent with Michéle Lamont’s argument about historians’ disciplinary temperament in How Professors Think (Harvard University Press, 2010). ↩
- There are also well-known digital history projects by amateurs, such as Phil Gyford’s presentation of Samuel Pepys’s diary as a blog; URL: http://www.pepysdiary.com. ↩
- The Papers of George Washington digital edition is available by subscription from the University of Virginia Press through the press’s Rotunda service, though a less scholarly version is available to the general public. The distinctions between public and subscription availability, as well as issues of ethics and business models, is beyond the scope of this essay. ↩
- Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Brier, and Joshua Brown, Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914 (Learning Technologies Interactive/Voyager, 1995); American Social History Productions, Who Built America? From the Great War of 1914 to the Dawn of the Atomic Age in 1946 (Worth Publishers, 2000). ↩
- Daniel Jared Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), Chap. 7. ↩
- Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies (W. W. Norton, 2003). ↩
- Michael OʼMalley and Roy Rosenzweig, “Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web,” Journal of American History 84, no. 1 (1997): 145. ↩
- The implied meaning of “archive” for the site is a static entity that will not be revised, rather than a living, curated collection of materials. ↩
- Library of Congress, “Mission and History,” n.d., http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/about/index.html. ↩
- The project has received considerable support over the decades from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. ↩
- Omeka was produced by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and can be downloaded from http://www.omeka.org. ↩
- An online exhibit is a relatively straightforward translation of long-form historical arguments to a hyperlinked environment. ↩
- The Society of American Archivists lists seven archival degree programs located in history departments. ↩
- A separate issue is the organization of such artifacts, and I recognize that one could argue that an exhibit using Omeka is also presentation of artifacts. I classify Omeka as a tool for argumentation based on the structured nature of Omeka. ↩
- The classic is Charles Joseph Minard’s display of Napoleon’s march into and out of Moscow; see Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd ed. (Graphics Pr, 2001), 40-41. ↩
- The illustrations in Bernard Bailyn’s Voyagers to the West (Knopf, 1986) may have contributed to the multiple awards it won, though they were peripheral to the argument. ↩
I have this poster on the wall of my office. I love it, and yet I wince at the irony that this was produced for teaching purposes… so does teaching have to have an argument in order to be history?
I love the room/floor/source metaphor. Did it appear in the CD-ROM version?
Unfortunately, you cannot directly use the URL listed in the caption–you need to enter through the portal and then navigate to this journal page about the surrender negotiations with Cornwallis.
This is one of the online exhibit pages that works beautifully on an iPad–Omeka does not require Flash, unlike a number of other packages that digital historians have used over the years.
The “active on-the-ground” version of this layered approach to display exist with several apps (or “programs” for those of us older than 30) for mobile devices, that can display historical photographs taken from the vantage point of where one is standing.
I forgot to acknowledge that there was an earlier online version from the early 1990s, with far fewer sources available (though still a wealth).
I thought this essay was quite provocative. But it did leave me uncomfortable. You suggest that the claim that we have gone overboard with the claim that “history is an argument about the past.” But I think it IS. That is what distinguishes historians from antiquarians — we both collect information but historians analyze it, place it in its context and explore why it happened as it did. I agree we should appreciate the challenges of creating digital sites, etc. but I am worried about giving this sense of history as analytical argument up.
Cheryl, I’m somewhat uncomfortable with this issue as well, which is why I wrote about it. Some years ago, a friend with a background in statistics asked me why historians never argue about methods. We do, occasionally, especially if there is an allegation of fabrication a la Bellesiles. But is it a sign of our craft orientation that we hide the “craftiness” of what we do behind the curtain of “this is all argumentation”?
History as a discipline has traditionally undervalued teaching, scholarly editing, archival work, and building tools and resources. Sherman Dorn discusses this longstanding problem with the valuation of historical work, particularly in regards to digital history. The public nature of digital history projects has raised the profile of these undervalued historical practices. I agree with Sherman Dorn that history as a discipline needs to value scholarship other than historical argument about the past, but I still believe the practice of history is intimately involved with argument. While not all types of valuable historical scholarship need argument, the practice of writing, presenting, and teaching history require argument. The fact that the practice of history needs argument does not mean scholars should not restrict scholarship to long-form arguments, however. Digital history projects help bring attention to these less appreciated forms of scholarship and hopefully history as a discipline will benefit from this discussion.
I do think on a general level teaching historical information involves argument. Teachers present an argument when they lecture on, for example, the causes of the American revolution or the worldwide impact of the Great Depression. They are arguing these particular events or social conditions caused the revolution or the Great Depression led to other specific events. Teachers may even present more than one argument to students. The way in which teachers present information, specifically constructing a narrative, creates an argument. The alternative seems to be simply listing names and dates, which is, at the very least, not good teaching.
However, I agree that teaching history (not simply historical information) does not always involve presenting an argument. Teachers must give students a set of skills for the students to do history. In teaching these skills, like writing and reading comprehension, teachers are not arguing, but they are still teaching history. In taking this broader view, teaching, like historical scholarship, is not simply historical argument, but rather argument and historical “infrastructure.”
History on a professional level is about formulating an argument from a set of sources or materials and presenting the argument in a clear, concise, organized manner that buttresses a final conclusion. Using that definition (or something similar), I think we can distinguish between digital projects and digital history projects, as there is a difference: the argument. For example, when we talk about tool creation and use, the tool itself is a digital project while the use of the tool to shape an argument by either the creator or a user within the field of history is a digital history project. This distinction needs to be made.
So let us rehash the digital projects presented here that do not fall within the author’s range of an argument: Who Built America?, The Valley of the Shadows, the Papers of George Washington, etc. I think Dorn’s argument has some validity here – not all of these make arguments. Some mirror arguments made in monographs while others merely provide an online archive. By today’s standard of digital history projects, many of these might not fall within the same grouping and appear more like digital projects. Is the only reason to count Inventing Europe because of its customizable interface and manipulability? What we need to understand when assessing these (at times award-winning) projects is that we are a long way from the Who Built America? and the Papers of George Washington. These projects were the forerunners of digital history, and at the time they were created, they were indeed revolutionary (no pun intended for the Papers of George Washington).
Unfortunately, that leaves us with a problem – do we discount previous digital history projects that would have been defined as such previously as mere digital projects because technology has changed? That hardly seems fair. To place this within a context that many non-digital scholars will understand, do we discard monographs once they get too dated, or do we build upon the work that previous scholars have written to formulate our own ideas? Certainly we do the latter. As historians, we love to contextualize our histories (as evidenced by the numerous historiographies I have to write for graduate school). If we were to discard previous work, how would we understand our work or the work of others? Admittedly, I created this problem by trying to distinguish between digital projects and digital history projects. I still hold that this distinction needs to be made for new scholarship. We have reached a point where our goals and objectives are clear when we start out. In other words, if we want to create an archive, then we have all the tools at our disposal to do so. If we want to create an historical argument about some materials, we have the tools to do that as well. We are no longer breaking ground at the same speed the authors of the listed digital projects had to. So to selfishly answer my own question, no – we should not wholly discount the work of previous historians and their digital history projects just because they are somewhat outdated. Instead, we should look forward and realize that we are charting the course for the future of digital history and we must maintain our focus and present arguments digitally.
To answer the title question, digital history is an argument about the past and needs to be maintained as such. Online archives that merely present or collect information while engaging in the materials are useful to the development of these historical arguments, but are not inherently digital history projects. To briefly clarify, I am not arguing against the generation of online archives. They bring needed primary sources to the home or library and that is an important service. I am merely suggesting that Dorn’s article could absorb some of these thoughts when looking at past projects. As far as digital history projects go, their central purpose should always be the argument as that is the value of history.
Digital projects, on the other hand, are enormously beneficial, especially to the history scholar. Great value lies in the development of new tools like SIMILIE and Gapminder because they can aid the formulation of one’s argument. Dorn’s breakdown of the tools to present artifacts, to present events, for learning, and for argumentation is a viable way to categorize the different types of tools. He states, “Tools for constructing arguments have begun to catch up with the digital history projects that do not focus on argumentation.” (paragraph 27) As already discussed, I think Dorn is absolutely correct. The tools used to facilitate argument creation or formulate arguments are much more advanced than those of the first digital history endeavors. However, Dorn’s definition of what these tools are (blogs, Omeka, etc) is too narrow as there are a multitude of tools being created that can revolutionize the way we approach our documents. Google’s N-Gram (despite the problem with its origins in the computer sciences with no input from the humanist scholars who would potentially use it), key words or phrases in context, and many other newer tools that I am just not cool enough to know about yet are more revolutionary to historical methods than blogging. Reworking this paragraph so that it encompasses some of these other argument-based tools would strengthen Dorn’s argument.
To close with some notes on collaboration, I will say that Dorn is spot on. History has traditionally been a solo-act. Digital history should not be. Is it too far to say that digital history cannot be a solo act? The way I see it, digital history hovers in a strange gray area. The computer scientists tell us that if we are doing history, we are doing computer science and programming wrong; the book-hugging historians tell us that if we are doing digital history, then we are doing history wrong. How do we solve this problem? Collaboration. In this way, and only this way, are we able to produce the best digital work possible. Let’s face it – historians are mostly trained in the same manner of thinking; computer scientists or other well-trained humanists can expose us to new ways of conceptualizing our arguments that will forever change how we view our materials.
I have created another gap in my response that needs to be addressed: I am excluding the idea of a joint project that simultaneously creates an archive of information, documentation, photographs, or artifacts (read: digital project) and a project incorporating analysis and interpretation of the archive (read: digital history project). In many cases, the archive needs to be created first in order to properly integrate it into the digital history project. Indeed, it could be that digital projects begin to sprout digital history projects. Perhaps collaboration between computer programmers, archivists, museums, and scholars would be the best solution to generation of digital projects and digital history projects.
As far as value of digital scholarship goes, I am not daunted by the tenure situation. There is no going back for history. Frankly, the field cannot continue to exist in the way it has for the past 150 years. Venues such as this one, and thought-provoking articles like Dorn’s, will pave the way for digital humanists across all disciplines.
I think the papers discussing Wikipedia’s Neutral Point of View earlier on in this may-be-volume help with this. That too is an argument, of course, even though it disclaims it. Similarly, whatever any teacher may pitch to a class is an argument, even if he or she speaks as Authority. It may be a completely well-founded and convincing argument! But I don’t see how encouraging the pupils to follow it through and make sure would hurt even then.
First, I want to express my appreciation of the way this essay sets out some articulate points about opportunities to “think about historical scholarship beyond the long-form argument.” This resonates deeply with ideas that I have encountered within the Digital Humanities community. Digital innovations have the potential to transform the ways we define scholarship in history as has been the case in other disciplines.
In my comment on the final paragraph, I have already said a bit about the effects of dichotomies that Dorn introduces in the final section. Here, I want to respond to Wingo’s comment above.
It’s perhaps to be expected that I dislike the idea of establishing a dichotomy between digital projects and digital history projects as Wingo suggests. Since I count the editorial staff of the Papers of George Washington and the XML experts at Rotunda among my colleagues, I object to the notion that PGW is somehow over or passé. Such commentary reproduces longstanding and unfortunate underestimation of the value of scholarly editing. I much prefer the generosity of the notion expressed by the organizers of the 2011 Digital Humanities conference, the idea that the field is a “big tent” that includes many different types of projects.
I do not dispute the notion that collection digitization differs from argumentation about the past, but I do think it’s useful for us to think about the potential of such digitization for making the asking of new questions possible. For example, my conversations with the editors at PGW began because both their projects and ours have begun to digitize financial records, an abundant and underutilized resource that can be found in many archives worldwide. I imagine a future historical profession in which markup and metadata standards for the digitization of collections that include such documents will make possible new kinds of understandings of the economic exchanges that characterized daily life through data harvesting. Digitizing this kind of primary source is more labor intensive than creating Google Books, and it produces data that differs from either the IPUMs demographic data or the ICPSR political and social data. That does not mean it does not have value or that the work of creating standards for metadata and markup should not “count” as scholarship.
Clearly, Wingo has hit a nerve, and I apologize if this comment offends.
I would be saddened indeed to think of our discipline as one so firmly attached to defining history as argument about the past as to fail to imagine possible uses of digital efforts that move beyond argument for future historians.
After such cogent and thoughtful criticisms and suggestions, I hesitate to wade into this further. I was thrilled and pleased to see that Sherman Dorn has taken on the question of “long form” digital scholarship and decided to labor in its “well-dug trench.”
What gave me pause was the idea that we have gone “overboard” in arguing that history is an argument about the past. I think that it could be argued we have persistently undervalued argument in digital history scholarship and as a result have opened up a troubling gap between digital history and mainstream historical scholarship. I would suggest that we ways to close this gap and develop new forms of digital historical argumentation–both embedded and narrative longer form.
One correction: the project is The Valley of the Shadow not The Valley of the Shadows–this is a common mistake but needs to be corrected throughout.
Digital history clearly opens up room for argument to take different forms beyond the scholarly monograph and it is helpful to point out the diverse types of large projects that have come forward. Whether Mintz’s Digital History textbook is an argument in the same way that The Valley of the Shadow is is not clear to me. Dorn has pulled together a range of digital history works, and each in its own way has advanced aspects of the field. They share an emphasis on building infrastructure for scholarship–assembling tools, data, documents, and other materials in service of teaching, scholarly inquiry, and interpretative narrative. These are not all documentary scholarly editing projects, like The Papers of George Washington. And the Papers has, of course, changed form as it moves into Rotunda with other Founding collections. PGW extends a long tradition in historical scholarship, maintaining the highest standards of research, validation, and editing integrity. American Memory is a digital library project and digitization project with little if any scholarly editing.
I would classify The Valley of the Shadow and Hypercities perhaps as more argument-driven than the others. The Valley’s intentional archive was specifically arranged to create a social history of the Civil War, which was underdeveloped in the historiography when the project began. It’s argument is in some ways embedded in its architecture and structure, which is explicitly comparative and built around what Ayers has called “deep contingency.” The project also produced a series of different scholarly products or outputs, most of them “long form”–Ayers’ Bancroft prize-winning book In the Presence of Mine Enemies, a co-authored scholarly argument and “article” (hundreds of pages) on The Differences Slavery Made, a primary source reader published by W. W. Norton, a CD-ROM also published by W. W. Norton, methods papers, conference presentations, and essays.
The institutional settings of these projects differ as well, as does their audience and intended purpose. The Valley project contains thousands of documents but it was never a scholarly editing project in the way that The Papers of George Washington is. In any case, the larger point is that all of these are scholarship and this scholarship has taken digital form.
Infrastructure is scholarly activity to be sure, and in many cases it may be scholarship. But the problem of argument remains. And so does the gap that seems to have opened up in the practice of digital history. The tools for argumentation Dorn has outlined here (blogs, Omeka) provide some good places to start, but I think we need to have a broader discussion about the changing nature of narrative and argument in long-form digital history scholarship.
Since I am not sure if I will have much time later this weekend (before the close of comments), I want to thank everyone who has commented on my essay, and especially William Thomas for encouraging his students to dive in. When I submitted this essay, I was not certain if it would get a rise out of anyone or just get a “ho-hum, so what?” reaction. Instead, I have a wonderful set of comments challenging me to think about the potential value of long-form arguments on multiple levels as well as missed opportunities for digital history to engage in argumentation. My deepest appreciation and gratitude to everyone who has responded.
In our invitation to revise & resubmit your essay, we wrote:
This essay’s focus on argument is commendable and much needed. However, we are left wondering how you see narrative (as opposed to argument, or in conjunction with argument) given the thrust of this essay. For instance, do you believe that historians overvalue narrative as well? As our 2012 Table of Contents shows, we plan to pair this essay with the one written by Stefan Tanaka, who discusses narrative, so it would be ideal for it to briefly address this. See also other comments on your essay in the Fall 2011 web-book, in particular the suggestions by Will Thomas.
Please do your best to incorporate these recommendations into your revised essay. According to the word count at the bottom of the WordPress editing window, your current essay is 4,599 words. In order to meet our obligations to the Press, your final resubmission must not exceed 5,000 words.