Writing History in the Digital Age

Pasts in a Digital Age (Tanaka)

Pasts in a Digital Age (2012 revision)

by Stefan Tanaka

See 2013 final edition from the University of Michigan Press

See 2011 open peer review version, with many more comments

“Digital remembering erodes time” —Viktor Mayer-Schönberger¹

 “My working hypothesis is that all views of history have been fundamentally shaped by the way records are duplicated, knowledge transmitted, and information stored and retrieved.” –Elizabeth L. Eisenstein²

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Digital media are altering our practice of history. The essays in this volume explore the many ways we have used and can use it to facilitate our research, aid and improve our teaching, and enhance scholarly communication. Others are also encountering a horizon of which Clay Shirky warns, “The communications tools we now have, which a mere decade ago seemed to offer an improvement to the twentieth-century media landscape, are now seen to be rapidly eroding it instead.”³ When applied to history, the epigraph from Meyer-Schönberger suggests such erosion. Since the eighteenth century chronological time has been foundational in how we conceive of and practice history. Erosion or not, a horizon of change also emerges when we line up his statement with the proliferation of digital information and the second epigraph, from Elizabeth Eisenstein.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 These statements raise the question, to what extent does electronic media change our relation to the past and future? The internet is the largest repository of data, ever.  Information is more readily available, the internet seemingly forgets nothing, and we see people and institutions confronting their future past.  Individuals now have to prevent their past which might possibly haunt their future.⁴  Indeed, we need to question to what extent the past is past and whether the distinction of past and present has ever been clear.  On the other hand, electronic data is ephemeral; digital information disappears, is erased, and is frequently modified. Our governments and corporations regularly shred hard drives.  Regardless of one’s position, the past is not just becoming larger, it remains varied and is changing.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 History and how we write history will also change. But to negotiate this transformation, and especially to use this as an opportunity to explore new modes of writing history, we must understand that some of the issues we are confronting are not as new as we might think; similar issues arose during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when history became the form of knowledge we know and practice today. For example, Zygmunt Bauman describes modernity today as passing from the “solid” to a “liquid” phase.⁵ Yet while social forms of modernity might now be more fluid and ephemeral, we must ask how today stacks up to what Marx identified over 150 years ago, “all that is solid melts into the air.”

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 At this point, before we celebrate or lament the changes, it is important to recognize that the deep, chronological way of thinking about the past that pervades modern society is far from natural. Unless we are mindful of the conditions that produced this naturalized understanding of the past we restrict our options to a return to a nineteenth century mode of thinking (still practiced today in academia) or a valorized “new” as if new social forms are better simply because they are more recent.⁶ Moreover, we might learn about different, “new,” ways of interacting with the past from these earlier moments.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 History as a Virtual Reality
History, as we understand it today, emerged during the late-eighteenth century and by the early-nineteenth century a specific form of historical thinking emerged, where people began to separate past from present and to write about the past using a linear, that is, chronological structure.⁷ The iconic phrase that has been used to capture this shift is from Leopold von Ranke, who writes in his first major work, Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations (1824), “To history has been given the function of judging the past, of instructing men for the profit of future years. The present attempt does not aspire to such a lofty undertaking. It merely wants to show how, essentially, things happened.”⁸ This is the passage from which wie es eigentlich gewesen, which has become his most famous—and misused—phrase that historians have used to claim scientific, neutral, and objective status, is extracted.

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 First, the popularization of one phrase from this passage indicates that soundbites, excerpts distanced from context, are not new to the electronic age. More important, this phrase that stands for the objectivity of history was only the last part of a passage that advocates for a new understanding of the past. Ranke is proposing a new reality–historical thinking. This historical thinking is the chaining of facts together into linear narratives where chronological time, not place, community, or environment, became central to understanding.⁹ The purpose of the past is no longer something continually present in our lives through Ranke’s sarcastic “lofty undertaking” that judges and instructs. Some historians call that history which Ranke sought to replace a practical past.¹⁰ It is a repository of moments, ideas, deeds, and events that might help us understand our present. It is an ethical past.

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 The new, linear mode of understanding the past led Thomas Carlyle to complain in 1830, “Things done are in a group, not in a series.” The historian Aron Gurevich described time during the ancient period as “spatialized,” that is dependent on space and environment: “Ancient man saw past and present stretching round him, in mutual penetration and clarification of each other.”  It is one where locale, not time, provided a different understanding of depth and connectivity.  More recently, the psychologist, Sam Wineberg argued that historical thinking “goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think.”¹¹

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 In the world of the early nineteenth century, the “common sense” of today’s history was then a new “virtual reality.” History became a technics, a science of describing that plotted facts according to the recently popularized Newtonian time, increasingly accepted as universal time.¹²  Here, Michel de Certeau’s sage reminder that chronology and time are not synonymous is pertinent. “Recast in the mold of a taxonomic ordering of things, chronology becomes the alibi of time, a way of making use of time without reflecting on it.”¹³ In contrast to the practical past, the historical past is separated from people. Data becomes a commodity—something dated, recorded, and verifiable, shorn from its immediate context. The subject shifts to the rise of some collectivity, usually the nation-state. And, human activity, that is, social life, sensibility, the everyday, emotions, and culture are de-emphasized and have often been excluded from the historical past.

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 This form of historical thinking is not going to disappear; nor should it. It is what serves as the basis of our liberal-internationalist world. For this reason, alone, it has purpose. This historical thinking emerged to deal with the new ideas (such as linear, progressive time), and forms (like the nation) that became increasingly common during the early nineteenth century. The new practices provided order for an expanded realm that now included the Americas and Asia and the concomitant rise of new data that had to be defined, collected, and organized. Institutions–libraries, archives, universities, and publishers–were reordered and created to manage this new knowledge.¹⁴ Practitioners of this form of historical thinking become the professional historian safely ensconced in the university. These are components of our academic and liberal-capitalist world. Carla Hesse calls it the modern literary system.¹⁵

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 This modern literary system is built upon a notion of information scarcity. Its goal is to collect, categorize, and disseminate information to better understand this ever-expanding world (both geographically and scientifically). As the increasing specialization of academia indicates, it is an evermore complicated structure which has been more or less effective for rendering understandable a complex world. Here, drawing from complex adaptive systems, complex and complicated are distinct.¹⁶ Our current mode of accommodating increasing scale is to continue piling stuff into these categories (and create evermore sub-categories) and building more complicated systems to handle them. History is one technology that gives form to and supports such complicated social forms.  For example, throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries nascent nations struggled to find and write their own history. (It is amazing that places like China and Japan with several millenia of civilization learned, in their late-nineteenth century encounter with the West, that they were without history). In these history writing projects the relegation of the past into chronological narratives of the nation-state and the subsequent forgetting of this act reinforced the new as “real.” The proliferation of history departments throughout the world has helped to naturalize those social forms that seem decreasingly stable in the digital realm.

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 We must remember that the spread of this form of historical practice both synchronized the world and proselytized a certain kind of forgetting, a devaluation and even denigration of the multiplicity and heterogeneity of pasts. The parallel that I am drawing between nineteenth century transformation of history and pasts in a digital age is in the historical condition of what we consider solid as well as the commodification of data that occurred to support that solidity. In short, our current understanding of history, the history that might be changing under pressure from digital media, has parallels in the commodification of data, the changing subject, and the new relation between past and present.

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Toward Complex Pasts
A question we need to ask is to what extent is our current structure still apposite. If modernity is indeed moving from some version of solid to liquid, then by its very connection to institutions and knowledge systems, this modern literary system is also shifting. Moreover, there is an important shift that makes Eisenstein’s hypothesis worth serious consideration. Digital media no longer operate under the condition of information scarcity. Indeed, there is a proliferation of data, ease of access, and means of disseminating interpretation. Observers and scholars now recognize this shift. Bauman’s recognition of this change is a different, perhaps radical, way of knowing: “A swift and thorough forgetting of outdated information and fast ageing habits can be more important for the next success than the memorization of past moves and the building of strategies on a foundation laid by previous learning.”¹⁷ Mayer-Schönberger, too, recognizes the reversal of this relationship between preservation and forgetting where the former has become the default.  He offers a concrete proposal in his book, delete, that information contain user-set expiration dates. On the surface, for the historian, it sounds preposterous. Yet it points to the massive amounts of data that are increasingly being saved. This does not make history and the past outmoded; it does alter how we value, access, and use pasts and histories.

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 Moreover, the use of the computer is a terrific aid to existing practices, but I (and I believe many others) have often wondered while adapting to digital media “why do we do xxx this way? ” Of course, we have been taught/socialized/professionalized to these forms of historical thinking in high school, graduate school, and beyond. But at this point I would like to introduce a simple, but important observation from Jerome McGann, “The simplicity of the computer is merciless. It will expose every jot and tittle of your thought’s imprecisions.”¹⁸ Interestingly, the more we integrate digital technologies into history, the more we confront practices that historians have naturalized to manage the past as “imprecisions.”  Digital technologies often bring out the peculiarity of inherited social forms; we begin to understand data differently, we have new ways to connect data, and we have more tools through which we can represent the past.

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 Before I continue, it is important to point out that the interpretations that I am offering are not created by or new to the digital media. As I hope the footnotes suggest, historians – often called intellectual historians or philosophers of history – have long written about the limitations of our current practices of history. It has been a recurrent theme. Indeed, a history of forgetting about the history of history might be in order here. But as McGann, Bauman, and others suggest, the digital does provide us with an important opportunity to explore the possibilities for reconsidering and reformulating the practice and value of history to contemporary society.

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 One way that I see history benefiting from the intervention of digital media, is through an understanding that other forms of socio-temporal modes of organization did, and do exist. I recognize that we operate in a modern temporality and that we cannot merely disavow or easily forsake it, even if it is a good idea. Yet it is different to operate within it and write history as if it is the only form of time. We have an opportunity to recognize that history has forsaken an important task that some might call practical, others ethical; we can also recognize that understanding is not the accumulation of data, but of locus, relations, and connections.  I extract the following discussion from a project, “1884,” that seeks to write history using digital tools. I will not explain this project here,¹⁹ but draw from it to suggest some ways that digital technologies have helped me formulate history differently.

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 An image of temporality that I use to imagine complex and heterogeneous pasts is from Michel Serres. He writes, “Time does not always flow according to a line … nor according to plan but, rather, according to an extraordinarily complex mixture, as though it reflected stopping points, ruptures, deep wells, chimneys of thunderous acceleration, rendings, gaps–all sown at random, at least in a visible disorder.”²⁰ Serres’ turbulence recognizes the multiple ways in which time might be organized; yet, there is still a dominant flow (that of liberal capitalist society). It accounts for multiplicity and heterogeneity in relation to a hegemonic process; it accounts for complex adaptation where one shift might reverberate broadly.

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Once freed from the limitations of absolute, linear time, we are able to use the past much more differentially; we can think of different ways to structure more expansive and heterogeneous pasts that operate in the multiple temporalities of life. Data can be recorded happenings, not just facts. For example, in 1883 and 1884 Meiji Japan there was a spike in newspaper accounts of mysterious sightings. This is an example of how history fragments the past, by rendering these beliefs as the forgotten of history; today, these sightings are categorized as timeforms of past or backward societies–superstitions and folklore, not facts. For example, the Shizuoka daimu shinbun, a regional paper, reports on May 18:

Chiyo (14 years old), one of the three daughters of the Fujimoto household, was routinely babysitting for a year at a shop in Gofuku. On the third of this month she did not return; her master inquired about her whereabouts, became suspicious, and began searching. Her parents became frantic. Five or six days later Chiyo returned in a daze. She said that she went with an unknown, old, white-haired man who said that he would show her interesting places.

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 Kidnapping, disappearance, running away might explain why Chiyo disappeared. Yet, the notion that she was “spirited away,” kamikakushi, was common (and is the English title of the popular anime by Miyazaki Hayao). We could dismiss this as an imaginative, naughty teenage girl and the backwardness of rural society steeped in superstition. Yet when placed alongside a depression that began in 1881, the proliferation of stories of mysterious happenings also signals beliefs or anxieties of various people during a period of severe hardship and rapid change. We might also wonder if there is a connection to the rise of supernatural, folk, and ghostly in Japan today. Here, time need not designate one as old and the other new.

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 Decades ago, Georg Simmel argued that human society operates at a different temporal scale than technological society: “the things that determine and surround our lives, such as tools, means of transport, the products of science, technology and art, are extremely refined. Yet individual culture, at least in the higher strata, has not progressed at all to the same extent; indeed, it has even frequently declined.”²¹ Rather than pity the backward for their ignorance and misfortune, this notion of heterogeneous time gives us a different understanding of how individuals deal with an increasingly abstract, rational, and mechanical society. A survey conducted in 1946 Japan provides an example of such a coexistence of multiple time systems. This study showed that many communities still used the lunar calendar over 70 years after Japan adopted the solar calendar.  Ninety-three percent of urban residents solely used the solar calendar, while only 8.8 percent of rural inhabitants solely used the solar calendar. Among rural residents, 37.6 percent only used the lunar calendar and 48.8 percent used some combination of the two.²² This heterogeneity existed amidst an era of unprecedented unity within fascist Japan (at least that is what the history books say).

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 From this recognition of heterogeneity, it is possible to think of a scalability within the nation that is simultaneously diverse, but also contained. Here, I find the metaphor of the wayfarer from Tim Ingold, in his recent book, Lines: A Brief History, to be helpful in thinking of different ways that people, things, and institutions connect and interact. The wayfarer moves along, taking in the surroundings, and inhabits that which s/he traverses. In contrast the traveller moves across, from point to point, or one pre-defined category to another.

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 Ingold applies this formulation to narrative, and I would extend it to academic disciplines, including history.²³ Travel becomes the effort to reach the destination, a modern liberal-capitalist nation state; mapping is provided through the models and tools for achieving that goal, and textuality becomes the establishment of a history (building upon the lessons from Ranke) that synchronizes a Japanese history into the teleology of world history at that time. It is a complicated negotiation of different categories–Ingold’s pre-composed plots. The variability of the regions and of people’s beliefs and anxieties is lost. Stories are replaced by “important” knowledge. Ingold argues for a storied, not classificatory form of knowledge. The former is like the wayfarer who inhabits the specific timespace, is embedded in practice and movement, and sees within the complex interplay of ideas, people, and events. At times, individuals connect, directly or indirectly, to the categories of the nation-state; at other moments, they do not. For me, this is not an exercise in bringing back individuals to history. It includes some of that, but it leads to a very different narrative of Japan’s transformation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 A second way that a different understanding of pasts might help us write deeper and, I believe, more accurate histories is to reconsider our understanding of change. We can describe quite well how societies have (and have not) become like the present. The default mode for ordering and connecting data has been from old to new. Such a structure is anything but neutral. It is a technological metric that establishes value–recent or new is better than older.²⁴ It orients society toward production, not life. It presupposes mechanical, orderly causality. Yet through psychological and cognitive studies we know that in individual learning the mind is not a blank slate or a computer hard drive that merely needs to be filled with meaningful information. It is a complex process of biological organisms, acquired knowledge, external stimulus, and environment. Societies, too, have inherited practices and knowledge systems that affect how the new is understood and adapted. Sylvia Scribner uses the work of psychologist Lev Vygotsky to state what might seem obvious, “societies and cultural groups participate in world history at different tempos and in different ways. Each has its own past history influencing the nature of current change.”²⁵ Yet in our understanding of other cultures we almost always locate them (as if they are singular, such as “The Japanese”) in some temporal category of the “not yet.”²⁶ We describe how they have made mistakes and failed (to be like our idealized selves), not how those processes are and are not appropriate, how they are understood, and how different places adapt those processes.

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 A different way to study change would be to adapt Lucian Hölscher’s notion of a historical event as a “common reference point of many narratives told about it.”²⁷ Such a concept recognizes that there are many stories told about an event, at that time, later, and even later, by historians. Ambiguity, insignificance, and conflicting views coexist. To return to my discussion of the non-West as the not yet, Hölscher’s new annalistic history enables us to write a much more layered history that sees the variability of process (such as modernization), place, event, and the way that a particular past impacts change. A simple example is the International Meridian Conference held in Washington, DC in October 1884. Forty-five countries participated in this conference, which determined the prime meridian, international dateline, and beginning of the day. Each country had one vote; Japan and Hawaii were equals with the United States, France, and Great Britain. The conference is significant in that it moved us toward a universal world time. That is, it became possible to both standardize and synchronize world time with the decisions of the conference.

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 From this event, we can see that Japan officially adopted modern time before many European countries and the United States. Japan unified time around the twenty-four hour clock and adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1873; it synchronized its time with Greenwich time in 1889. The United States did not officially adopt Greenwich time and the time zones until 1918, although railroads adopted the timezone system in 1883; France remained nine minutes and 21 seconds ahead of Greenwich time until 1911; and Germany unified its time in 1893. In this case, Japan was not behind; indeed it was often ahead. On the other hand, the setting of the beginning of the day at roughly 180 degrees longitude geographically codified Asia as the East (Oriental), that is, the not yet. A move away from absolute time to a temporality that includes a multiplicity of time systems, tempos, utility, as well as ignorance gives both a history of our current knowledge system as well as a deeper, richer understanding of the past, of other cultures, and of how people either changed or did not.

¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 Finally, while I am troubled by the “forgetting” of the past as well as the limited context and meaning past events now contain, I am more worried about the limited recognition of the past that also exists in our existing historical practices.²⁸ We too often insist on a single, correct understanding of an event, or of the past. Instead, a richer history would include a heterogeneity of interpretations, the diversity of practices, the contestations, and the processes and negotiations by which people have dealt with such differences–turbulence. Keith Sawyer points out that innovative change occurs in heterogeneous group settings; uniformity and certainty reinforce the status quo.²⁹ Digital media present us with an opportunity to use tools that facilitate more complex, not complicated, narratives and stories of the past and how they continue to operate in our present.

¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 Second, by bringing out such variability, we can show more of the operations of history, the stories embedded in primary data and the negotiations and decisions that lead to the structures, ideas, and social forms of our narratives. Constantin Fasolt quotes a rather casual, but provocative statement by Thomas Kuhn, “in history, more than in any other discipline I know, the finished product of research disguises the nature of the work that produced it.”³⁰ In the writing of history, we traditionally background our research, the management of a multitude of information, data, and social forms, for a more or less straightforward, unitary narrative. We limit our studies to book or article length, omit contradictions, and make decisions on conflicting views. This has considerable implications for the relation of past and present in history, but here, my hope is that if this helps us bring stories together with the narratives of historical thinking, we might be able to regain the role of practicality that professional historians gave up over a century ago.³¹ Moreover, the role of the historian shifts from expert who masters (and protects his/her) knowledge of a specific (increasingly narrow) area–an increasingly futile task–to that of a skilled and reliable organizer of the myriad data that helps us understand human experience. Here, it is worthwhile to consider (but not imbibe) Bauman’s warning that knowledge for the future “is not conformity to rules… but flexibility.”³²

¶ 30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 0 My hope is that an expanded past can bring the diversity of human experiences back to history. That, of course, is an overstatement, but we need to return the practical aspect of pasts to history. Digital tools help us reformulate history so that we might recover some of the complexity of human activity.

¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 0 About the author:  Stefan Tanaka is Director of the Center for the Humanities, member of the Laboratory for Comparative and Human Cognition, and Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.

¶ 32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 0 Acknowledgement: This essay began as a talk delivered to the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska.  I would like to thank Kenneth Price, Katherine Walter, and William Thomas III for the invitation and stimulating environment.