The Pyramid vs the Skyscrapper

The USS Los Angeles flying near the incomplete Empire State Building
Courtesy of the Flickr Commons

The ancient Egyptians built to last.  The pyramids are basically man-made mountains, containing negligible indoor space, and subject to erosion like any other pile of limestone cooking in the desert heat.  Simply put, they will be around for a long time.  The Empire State Building however, is different.  A dynamic structure of millions of square feet of work-space, it is made of steel and concrete.  If abandoned, the building's lifespan would be measured in mere decades, rather than millennia.  Its structure is infinitely more useful to people in the modern world than a limestone mountain would be.  But with those advantages it is also greatly more fragile and in need of constant upkeep.

We face a similar problem when it comes to digital preservation, which allows for dynamic use and constant updates, but lacks the long term storage advantages that older analogue technologies possess.  This is the subject of the last chapters of Cohen and Rosenzweig's Digital History.  They tackle the problems of adding to and maintaining digital projects over the long term, the stability of emulation and the ease of upgrading from older formats to new.  It begs the question of whether digital preservation is even possible in the very long term, with new (and frequently uncompatable) technologies undoubtedly on the horizon.  They come to a shaky conclusion that digital preservation is indeed possible, with constant help from a social process of updates and checks from real people.  Yet the future is uncertain.  While technology evolves, it is certain to result in easier ways to update and preserve older formats.  

That social aspect of digital history is on display with the Library of Congress' attempt to "crowdsource" the metadata of many historical photographs.  Dr. Larry Cebula points out that most of this data was useless, "throw-away jokes or comments, "I love this fabric!" by Flickr user Mrelia and "Lick this" by user HeatherrFalk (referring to the woman's forehead!)."  Someone must have read the blog post, as the "lick this" comment has since been removed.  

"Look at the color of that smoke!" writes user John Troxel
Courtesy of the LOC Flickr poject

Looking through the project myself, I found Dr. Cebula's concerns to be justified, as the vast majority of comments are the inane drivel of a typical internet comment section.  Jeanne Kramer-Smyth in her Spellbound blog post understates the problem optimistically   "Yes, all the tags won’t be perfect.Yes, there will be seven different ways of tagging for World War II. But when all is said and done, more people will find more photos."  The failure of this one feature does not by any means discredit the idea of crowd-sourcing, wikipedia being a prime example of the glories of the idea. Yet it does show how the idea will not work in every case, and perhaps letting untold numbers of random internet people write graffiti on pictures of women is not going to result in a new Renascence of historical understanding.  

One digital project that has enjoyed great success is the Utah Digital Newspapers project, which sought to digitize a collection of the state's newspapers for public use.  Using the site, it is useful but perhaps not as intuitively designed as the Google News Archive, which allows the user to easily navigate the newspaper with cursor movements.  UDN cuts and places articles in PDF format.  

An example of an article out of the UDN
Image courtesy of Utah Digital Newspaper

Other projects such as the Library of Congress' Chronicling America have had great success in replacing the outdated technology of microfilm storage.  More such projects will help us broaden the understanding of our past, and hopefully preserve it for the future.  

Dead of Spokane 1888

This is the map with the death locations listed.  It populated reasonably well, though clearly we have a cluster around where Google lists as the central point in "Spokane".  One death location, listed as "Shanty Town" populated in Central Nevada.  Go figure. Perhaps more interesting was the map populating the birth locations of these departed Spokanites. It says something about the makeup of Spokane circa the 1880s that so few of these dead were actually born there.  If you zoom in on Alabama, you'll find the only Spokanite on our list from the deep south, a 55 year old Black woman named Elizabeth Brooks.  Her age and her birthplace strongly indicates that she grew up as a slave.  An interesting find.


We can also make pie charts and other graphs to aggregate the data.  Here we see that Typhoid was the disease to avoid in 19th century Spokane.



Broken up by occupation you see a large majority of our subjects were children and unknowns, but you still get a small sampling of the kinds of blue-collar work Spokanites did in the 1880s, with "laborer" dominant.







It seems that people took a break from dying between April and late August.  Curious.  Perhaps it says something about the climate's effect on health?  Perhaps its just statistical weirdness.

Nuts and Bolts

At long last, we come to the actual creation, marketing and maintenance of websites and blogs.  Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig provide an adequate introduction to the concepts underlying the creation and design of web pages. Many of the problems with content creation and marketing that Cohen and Rosenzweig laid out seven years ago are still important to understand today. From creating a coherent URL structure (Cohen and Rosenzwieg rightly bashes Jstor.org for failing to do this, Jstor being a holy abomination of a website in almost every way) to maximizing your Google search results.

Is Google Evil?
Image Courtesy of techrepublic.com

Google.com, which has become ubiquitous in culture as well as the academy, is also a topic of debate among digital historians. Having captured the verb for internet search ("google it") in a way similar to the branding successes of Kleenex and Band Aid, it does not appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. But its growing status as the premier public domain book provider to the academy as well as general public has drawn criticism from Geoffrey Nunberg, who calls Google's book search a "Disaster for Scholars". In the article, Nunberg's very legitimate worries about private profit seeking company Google's "ownership" of a huge selection of out of print and orphan books gives way to whining about metadata results which anyone doing serious research would not be seriously affected by. My thoughts were stolen ahead of time by Dr. Larry Cebula of Northwesthistory.blogspot.com, who writes that "Nunberg has a number of good points--point he gathers together to form a molehill, from which he conjures up a mountain."

Is Google making us stupid?
Image Courtesy of http://iont3ch.wordpress.com

The power of Google in the realm of the academy leads us to charges that it is changing the way we think. In the Atlantic, Nicolas Carr writes that the way he, and many others interacts with the world has been altered in a fundamental way by the internet. "I’m not thinking the way I used to think." says Carr, "I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages." While not really about Google itself, it is more an argument that the short blocks of text and the skimming technique of that most use while on the web is making people less able to focus on longer narratives. Carr backs up his claim by showing how other technologies such as writing and the printing press changed the way humans thought. Its an interesting theory. One that should give us pause before jumping brain-first into the digital world.
 

Getting into the Digital World

When Roy Rosenzweig and Daniel Cohen wrote
Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, they made several underlying assumptions and predictions about the future of the Digital Humanities.  While some of their concerns, such as the difficulty of incorporating video into digital projects in a pre-youtube/blip/etc world, have been tackled, others remain.  The high cost of digitizing and the choices that must be made when designing a digital project are still as relevant as they were seven years ago.  

Image courtesy of the CHNM's The Making of 1989 project .

I found myself being sucked in to the Center for History and New Media's The Making of 1989 project. Its simple layout and use of wonderful soviet era art and propaganda posters to illustrate the text was successful in drawing me in.  Less successful was Matthew Booker's interesting yet confusing use of what seemed to be dynamic and interactive maps as static jpeg images.  

Image courtesy of The Journal of Digital Humanities.

  
In his article about San Fransisco Bay's ecological history, 
Visualizing San Francisco Bay’s Forgotten Past, Booker places these Spatial History Lab interactive timeline maps as image files, rendering them muddled and confusing.  In the image above, what do the green sections indicate?  What about the Brown?  How exactly does this help us visualize the landscape of San Francisco Bay's salt ponds?  

Another project close to my own heart is found on the University of Maryland's Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities site. Called Preserving Virtual World's II, it will attempt to create a way to preserve old video games and software.

Image courtesy of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

This project will attempt to create a framework of preservation for classic titles such as the above pictured "Oregon Trail".  Here we see a type of preservation only possible in the digital landscape.  As the video-game playing audience gets older and more interested in its own history, projects like this one are sure to draw attention.  

Another great use of the digital humanities is found on Dan Cohen's blog, where he shows how use of Google Book's archive of Victorian literature can be searched to find trends in culture.  

Image courtesy of Dan Cohen's blog

As the above image indicates, automated searching through a vast collection of 19th century books shows trends in the publishing of books with "God" in the title.  This kind of data can be used as evidence of larger trends in culture, and anomalies can lead to new areas of research that otherwise would not have been explored.  

New tools and guides to the digital humanities, such as Lisa Spiro's series on getting started in the digital humanities are opening up the digital landscape to new arrivals.  As technology and the tech capabilities of new generations of scholars grow, it is clear that more and better uses of digital spaces are inevitable.  

A Series of Historical Tubes

Exploring the Digital Landscape

Boilerplate exploring the arctic

Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig's Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web gives a good introduction to the glories and pitfalls of digital scholarship.  Seven years after its publication (2005) it is beginning to show its age in certain areas(It references the "hundreds" of historical articles on Wikipedia for instance.  But it remains a great look at the early internet, which produced the historical projects we now look to as reference, such as the famous Valley of the Shadow project. Cohen and Rosenzweig were prescient in predicting the rise of better reading technologies to replace the glowing back-lit screen (e-ink displays), and the increasing acceptance among "traditional" historians of digital tools. 

University of Virginia's "The Valley of the Shadow" project has become a classic of internet scholarship.

Cohen again argues, in a discussion published by the Journal of American History, that the use of searches and GIS tools to map complex data over longer and longer periods of time will enable scholars to make breakthroughs unavailable to "old fashioned" scholarship.  This “distant reading”, will enhance the abilities of scholars in new and unpredictable ways.  William J. Turkel in the same discussion argues that the ubiquity of digital tools in historical research, predicted by these early pioneers, has already taken place.  "The idea that digital history can be marginalized depends on the perception that the Internet is somehow external to our real business. But seriously, how much research can we get done during a power outage?"

In an article by Patricia Cohen of the New York Times, it is argued that digital tools are already re-shaping the traditional structure of historical research, while another by Katie Hafner shows the problems inherent in digitization, where exuberant costs and stultifying copy-write laws threaten new projects.  

Digital Humanities projects such as Rome Reborn are using web tools to bring an ancient city to life.

This new field is subject to vast amounts of reflection and self critique, as was done by William G. Thomas and Edward L. Ayers in their digital history project "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of two American Communities", which is as much a proof of concept and experiment in web scholarship as it is an article about 19th century America.   

A narrative map of Ayers and Thomas' "Differences slavery Made" project.

They found that complex interlinked and unfocused web narratives created confusion and uncertainty, and worse, caused some to miss the thesis altogether.  A more streamlined design greatly aided the project.

While historians continue to have a reputation as stuffy and erudite scholars hunched over great tomes in empty libraries, the field is destined to change and grow as the rest of the world has, into the digital landscape.  

       Andrew Torget argues that digital history is not a separate field, but just another historical tool.