Notes on The Local Digital History Scene

Comments on the textbook reading for this week:

In Rosenzweig's textbook, pay particular attention to his thoughts on capacity, accessibility, flexibility, interactivity (but that can also be passive interactivity), access, etc--all of which are things that can cut both ways on the web. What do I mean by that? Well, for example, in terms of capacity, you can put an awful lot of material online for very little money, but unless your material is well-organized and easy to use and maintain, then it will be a lot of hard work to be able to actually use the material. Here is a small example re organizing and setting up your materials ahead of time. A few years ago I moved materials from a Microsoft NT server to an Apache Unix server. The NT server was not sensitive to file names beginning with upper/lower case; the Unix sever is. That made for a lot of correcting of files and links, which would not have been necessary if I had thought through things ahead of time.

Another feature of the web is the way it levels, or universalizes, knowledge (especially for the unknowing). You've probably heard of problems with "false news" on the web.

But even further back in time, but the Encyclopédie project of the French philosophes in the eighteenth century had as the very rationale of its creation the idea that all knowledge was equal and thus could be organized simply by alphabetical placement (political authority did not come first in a compendium of knowledge; it just came in the "P" section, and the definition of "political authority" was just as important as the definition of "darter snail.). Wikipedia reminds me of the continuing appeal of this approach.

There are also "gated communities" in cyberspace--we will return to this concept later in the course when we look at databases--but note how that idea is in opposition to the democratization of the availability of knowledge on the web. Whenever I want to search for citations and information in scholarly journals (or when I do census or genealogical) work, then I have to pay for access to the knowledge I seek. That is much different than walking into Alderman Library at the University of Virginia and doing research in the library's collections, although those are kind of gated communities also.

Rosenzweig's introduction is really the best part of the book as he sketches out an entire overview of the web, its development, characteristics and the rationale for digital projects.

Random thoughts:

• These days, the web is all about digital tools and the development of software tools to manipulate content; it seems to me to be less about the creation of that content in the first place. In the last five years, we have had a lot of web-based content actually disappear. But the creation of digital tools takes programming expertise; expertise that often resides in a single person or two at a university center.
• Building an online audience is a very complicated process, and the identity of the audience can change over time. Not sure how much thought is given to this by many developers. I don't worry too much about it as my primary audience for most of my work is my online students. For some of my other work, such as Slatington Postcards, I am not much worried about the extent of my audience. In a way, I am the primary audience.
• I just mentioned this, but the task of preserving digital history has become a real issue. How quickly everything on the web changes (links seem to be replaced every two or three years) or disappears! Luckily we have the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, which works to find old content that has disappeared. But digitization of non-digital materials also contributes to preservation of those materials, which can be lost, forgotten, thrown out or destroyed in a fire or some other calamity.
• What about Facebook and twitter--one a very gated community; the other instantaneous disappearances--any value at all in the information there?
• Seems that every time that I go online there are more and more digital humanities centers in the United States, and I am always seeing job postings relevant to digital technology. There are also new publications and societies that have appeared. See, for example:
  • Wired! Visualizing the past at Duke University
  • Digital Humanities Now
  • National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education
  • Digital History (University of Houston)
  • H-Digital-History (part of a larger group of history discussion sites; good resources)
• Reading online v. reading a physical document or book
  • Lisa Allcott, Reading on Screen vs Reading in Print: What's the Difference for Learning? (2019)
  • Jill Barshay, The evidence increases for reading on paper instead of screens (2019)
  • Maryanne Wolf, Reader Come Home (2018), excerpt available, (eading in the digital world has had a negative impact on a reader’s ability to comprehend text when reading on line)
  • Maria Gilje Torheim, Do We Read Differently on Paper than on a Screen (2017)
  • Sarah Sparks, Screens vs. Print: Does Digital Reading Change How Students Get the Big Picture? (2016)
  • Andrew Perrin, Book Reading (2016)
  • Allison Sanchez, The Science Behind Why You Should Keep Reading Print Books (2016)
  • Anne Niccoli, Paper or Tablet? Reading Recall and Comprehension (2015)
  • Ferris Jabr, The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens (2013)
  • T. J. Raphael, Your paper brain and your Kindle brain aren't the same thing (2014)
  • Brandon Keim, Why the Smart Reading Device of the Future May Be Paper (2014)
  • Maria Konnikova, Being a Better Online Reader (2014)
  • M. Julee Tanner, Digital vs. Print: Reading Comprehension and the Future of the Book (2014)
  • Ferris Jabr, The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens (2013)
  • Arnfinn Christensen, Paper beats computer screens (2013)
  • Abbey Becker, Comparing Reading Onscreen and in Hard Copy (2012)
  • Michael Agger, Lazy Eyes, How We Read Online (2008)
  • Andrew Dillon, Reading from paper versus screens: a critical review of the empirical literature (1992)

Some comments about the local, university digital history centers

• The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University: Rosenzweig's creation has grown a lot and now gets quite a bit of money, which supports a large staff. Re the website, I have always found the Teaching + Learning section to be weak. For example, the world history sources, I have found to be largely unusable. Even the French Revolution stuff, which might be very good, is just not well designed. Research + Tools has Zotero and Omeka, which are both useful tools that we will take a look at later. Some of the projects (the Hurricane) are better done than others
• University of Virginia Center for Digital History: the original Ed Ayers creation which derived from his legendary (If we may use that word in terms of digital history projects) Valley of the Shadow Project. The center now seems to have some money, and there is quite a bit of an effort at outreach being done, largely to K-12. Interesting that its original location was in the library, where a lot of digital centers seem to be birthed. The television news of the civil rights era is a very unique project because of the video involved and also time period (copyright issues usually prevent the use of video on the web).
• University of Richmond Digital Scholarship lab: a new Ed Ayers creation. I kind of liked the focus of these small, useful digital projects. The Emancipation visualization is especially well done.
• Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland: Started by Kirschenbaum (from UVA) and Neil Fraistat now fields a pretty big staff in a big space; it is no longer in the basement of the library. I guess that is what happens when you bring in some big project money. They now have people who program, and that is why they have moved on to the development of tools. They usually have a series of great digital dialogues (basically brown bag lunches), but most of those dialogues are not focused on teaching or the classroom experience.
• The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia has some fabulous research projects, and a lot of money to fund them, but they are really research projects (content projects). What is bad is that for some of the projects listed there is nothing more than just a description. Not really a big creator of tools either.
• Scholars Lab at the University of Virginia: Really impressed by some of this work. Again, functions out of the library with a pretty large staff and a university dollar commitment, but hard to figure things out and whether anything that they do is usable by anybody as an instructor. For example, what is a Spatial humanities project? Lot of focus on programming.

Some random comments about local public libraries

It is very costly to mount an exhibit of digital materials online, and it is very costly, and time-consuming to digitize collections.

Historic Preservation

• List of local Northern Virginia preservation and public history organizations
• Preservation Virginia
  
• Preservation Pennsylvania
  
• Preservation Maryland
• DC Preservation League
• Historical Society of Pennsylvania
• Digital Preservation (Library of Congress)
• Please suggest additions to the list.

Some ideas for further reading:

• Ania Monaco, From Pong to PlayStation 3: Video Games through the Years (The Institute, December 2011)
• Frontiers in Digital Humanities
• Digital Public History
• Stephen Robertson, The Differences between Digital History and Digital Humanities (2014)
• Douglas Seefeldt and William G. Thomas, What is Digital History? (2009)
• Edward L. Ayers, The Pasts and Futures of Digital History (1999)