Click the above link if you want to see it all in omeka format.
Text: In 1908, the Washington Street Bridge was constructed over the Spokane River, to provide an avenue for the rapidly growing city’s population. The 242 feet bridge was constructed by the Wallace-Coates Engineering Company of Chicago. They used a series of ribbed concrete arches for stability. The bridge’s costs inflated a great deal during construction. One Spokane city councilmen reportedly said that if they ever spent that much again, “the council would never be able to bond the city for another dollar for any purpose.” Nevertheless, the bridge was completed in 1909.
In 1910, a group of Spokane businesses offered Harry Houdini an undisclosed cash sum to perform one of his daring magic tricks on the Washington Street Bridge. Houdini reportedly had chains placed around his legs and his hands put in handcuffs, before plummeting to the Spokane River below. Houdini reportedly sunk deep into the freezing waters for a moment, before triumphantly arising to the surface unchained. The marketing stunt was a great success, and marks the Washington Street Bridge’s only claim to fame.
The bridged continued in relatively uninterrupted use until the late 1970s, when cracks and holes were discovered in the concrete superstructure. Weight limits and other stopgap measures were proposed, but in the end the decision was made to re-build it entirely, and by 1985 nothing remained of the original structure. Before its demolition, the Washington Street Bridge had the honor of being the oldest concrete bridge in the State of Washington.
Cant figure out how to add an audio track, so here is one turned into a video.
I suppose I got a bit carried away. But these videos are so much fun to create. Hopefully I can show some of you some of the tricks next week.
First two stop texts incoming, but before that, here is an interesting case of the web being used as instant international peer review, and also of a means for forgery.
Wikipedia's Definition of Copyright Courtesy of Wikipedia
I want you to imagine a world in which George Lucas lost control of Star Wars in 2005. The original film, re-dubbed "A New Hope" for its VHS release, is released into the public domain. Anyone can remake, re-edit, re-write and re-interpret the film. The story is ripped from the aging, corporate culture of Lucasfilm Limited™ and given to the masses. By 2011, the entire original trilogy is released to the public domain. The possibilities are nearly endless. George Lucas' dreary "prequel" trilogy is just one in a sea of interpretations, having to compete in the free market of ideas.
That was the world envisioned by the founders, who in the 1790 Copyright Act, laid out a relatively relaxed copyright regime, in which a person's work was under protection for 14 years, with a possible extension of another 14 years if renewed. Since then, the amount of time a copyright lasts has ballooned to the life of the author plus 75 years, effectively denying us access to nearly everything created in the middle to late 20th century.
The creative commons is an attempt to re-balance the scales in the other direction, with content creators freely waving some of their rights to definitive, ultra-long lasting copyright protection, in favor of a sharing regime. While not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, it is at least an attempt to come to terms with the increasingly draconian laws being passed on this issue.
When it comes to the history space on the web, Cohen and Rosenzweig lay out the basic ideas of copyright protection with the idea of protecting yourself from liability. Historians, by the nature of their craft, are going to use materials and objects under some form of copyright protection. Protecting yourself from charges of idea-theft and plagiarism are long traditions for historians already. What is new is the way that the latest forms of digital media and historical presentation fit into all this. Cohen and Rosenzweig give out basic information about copyright, mostly urging historians to be cautious and double check your rights with regards to source materials before use.
Mark Helprin, conservative commentator and author has a different take on the subject, and writes in the New York Times that copyrights should be forever. His argument, which was followed by a lengthy rebuttal by Lawrence Lessig, boils down to the idea that content creators should exist in the same space as major corporations and be able to benefit from their creations in perpetuity. He makes the claim that not only the children, but the great great great great great great great great grandchildren of the authors should have every right to the material profits as the original creator. In this he makes a stupefying analogy to slavery and other similarly overwrought comparisons. The torrent of negative reaction to the piece (750,000 angry comments) spawned a seemingly hurt but still defiant Helprin to pen Digital Barbarism: A Writers Manifesto , in which he intends to speak for all content creators who demand that works be placed in perpetual lock-down.
The dizzying maze of copyright rules and regulations governing so-called "orphan works" (in which the copyright holder cannot be found) have prevented a huge treasure of unreleased Jazz recordings from seeing the light of day. This sort of issue can underscore the need for clarity and reform in the copyright arena. Digital historians, far from being sued, are far more likely to refuse to post content over the fear of litigation. Not being lawyers, they rightly do not wish to enter the confused and somewhat backward world of copyrights, where an iPod filled with pirated music can be worth eight billion dollars and where unlawfully using a Michael Jackson song could possibly get you more prison time than killing him.
Still, I think digital historians should calm down and look at all the great alternatives available for their use. Historians are low on the copyright regime's radar, and are very unlikely to suffer legally from it, unless they do some clearly inappropriate things. Take me for instance. Remember the Star Wars idea I posited in the beginning of this post? I stole it from this wonderful C.G.P. Grey Youtube video:
Hopefully this belated citation will keep the angry copyright gods at bay...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
