Category Archives: digital history

Turning “Digital Natives” into Digital Historians

digital history, HIST696, public history, readings

One of themes that spans across the readings for this week about teaching digital history, is the notion that “digital natives” (the generation of students who have grown up with computers) are expected by their professors to be comfortable and confident in their use of technology and media. However, despite knowing how to use Facebook, YouTube and other social media, these students are lacking in their digital literacy skills. Understanding, interpreting, evaluating and creating media is not the same as consuming media, and are skills that need to be honed by future digital historians.

Through several case studies, we can see how professors are attempting to teach students these vital skills, with varying degrees of success. At first glance, T. Mills Kelly’s experiment of having his class create an historical hoax struck me as a bad idea. However, throughout the course, the students were able to learn media literacy skills by being the hoax creators themselves. The fact that the hoax was meant to be revealed at the end the semester helped sway me into believing that this tactic was clearly more educational rather than mischievous. However, the end result was much more convincing. The students had actually learned how easy it is for hoaxes to fool people, how important it is to check sources, and actual maritime history about the Lower Chesapeake during the post-Civil War era by concocting a fake researcher who has discovered the “Last American Pirate.” While reading the chapter, I was actually glad to see that the students’ hoax had worked so well as to trick the academic world of historians, as I am sure that reinforced to the students the benefits of information and media literacy.

Another hands-on experiment that didn’t go as well as the professor had hoped, was Allison Marsh’s attempt to teach Omeka to her museum studies students. In trying to prepare her students for the real world that is increasingly more reliant on digital technology, Marsh found that her students weren’t as tech-savvy as she had thought. Omeka isn’t extremely hard to use, and I’m finding it very useful in my halfway completed final project, but for students who haven’t had to create metadata or lack basic graphic design knowledge, I can see how it could be a burden for some students. I think Marsh is correct in telling her students that they no longer have a choice in working with technology and digital media, as there is no going back to purely analog museum exhibits. From my own personal experience, if I visit a museum’s webpage and they don’t offer any type of virtual exhibit, my interest immediately wanes. I’m curious to see how Marsh’s 10 year project unfolds, and I hope future classes are still required to build some form of digital exhibit, if only to stay relevant within the public history field.

While it can appear baffling that digital natives are not prone to using technology for educational purposes as much as we want them to, I think there is room to grow. If more professors take on new approaches to using technology and digital media in the classroom by applying more active learning techniques such as Kelly, Marsh, Rabinowitz and Trepanier have done, the more capable students will become in utilizing technology and media in their own research. Some of these students may go on to work as digital historians and possibly go on to teach their own students, hopefully passing on the lessons they have learned from their professors who have been able to bridge the gap between using and consuming media.

Notes from Discussion on Copyright/Open Access/Fair Use

copyright, digital history, HIST696, readings

I think Monday’s discussion on Copyright/Open Access/Fair Use went rather well considering that the topic is very nuanced, especially when dealing with digital history. The discussion on the embargoing of dissertations wasn’t as vociferous as I had anticipated, but maybe my expectations were based upon the strong criticism that followed the AHA’s statement on the subject on various blogs and comment sections. Our class discussion was much more milder, although several good points were made.

It appears that the AHA Statement was a sounding board for historians to express their opinions on issues that are much larger than the actual statement. The issue of embargoing dissertations isn’t the problem – the problem is that the field in general has been slow to adapt to the digital world. This is evidenced by their lack of ability to establish set criteria for promotion and tenure for digital historians, which is also true for public historians. The AHA seems happy to stand by the book as the end-all be-all for Phd students after they complete their dissertation, but the AHA and universities can’t seem to break free of the printed final copy. This poses problems for digital historians who would be more likely to create something digitally than in traditional print format.

We did talk about Open Access models and how historians and other academic writers have been writing for free forever, and Open Access doesn’t really change that. In the author pays model of OA, academics are even asked to pay to publish. Compared to the sciences, the number of Open Access journals in the humanities is drastically low. A change in the overall system needs to happen in order for OA journals in the humanities to grow.

Overall, the discussion touched on many valid points that were culled from the week’s readings. I think some of our questions could have been rephrased or re-worded, as we didn’t get through all of them. We missed out on talking about the consequences of not being familiar with fair use in the art world, especially with art historians. The topic of copyright and fair use is complicated, but the more we know about it, the more confident we can be about what is acceptable to use in our digital projects.

Digital Scholarship: Moving Forward while Looking Back

digital history, digital scholarship, HIST696, readings

The readings about digital scholarship in the humanities this week have me thinking about  the future. As Hitchcock suggest that the book is being replaced by digital texts, I wonder what scholarship, print or digital, will look like in 25 – 50 years from now. Will books still be printed? Will something else come along that replaces digital texts? I cannot see into the future, but barring some type of catastrophic event, I cannot envision the technology we have today regressing. I can only picture it advancing, as it has been doing over the past 50 years. I feel as though right now we are in the middle of a transformation and in the near future, academics will no longer question the legitimacy of digital scholarship, as it will become fully integrated into our everyday lives.

As younger generations who are used to utilizing the web for research start moving to publishing online, as has already been happening, “traditional” historians will likely either jump on board, or get left behind. The argument that digital scholarship is less credible has been stated many times, and also disproven. With Will Thomas‘ and Dougherty, et al.’s writings about the peer reviewing practices on digital scholarship, it is obvious that credible and reviewed work can be digital.

By embracing the open culture of the web, more readers will have access to historical writing, which I think is a good thing. Academics are trapped between moving forward with the technology available to them to present their writings, teachings, and other forms of scholarships, and being held accountable to out-dated standards that privilege the monograph books. I agree with Galarza, Heppler, and Seefeldt’s Call to Redefine  Scholarship in the Digital Turn, as they encourage the American Historical Association to take a serious look at the current state of digital history, in order to keep up with modern tools available to historians. Their proposal has an emphasis on reevaluating the current standards for tenure and promotion by history departments, which speaks to the underlying issue that digital scholarship is still not taken as seriously as traditional methods.

My hope is that in 50 years or less, the discussions we have today on digital scholarship will be unnecessary, and we will look back on this time much like we look back on other innovations in history. By creating credible and well-researched digital history projects, as well as advocating for a change in the academy, digital scholarship will hopefully be as accepted just as much, if not more, than the print book in the years to come.

Using Games to Teach History

digital history, gaming, HIST696, readings

This week’s readings about history’s place in gaming brought up issues such as form over content, games as instructional aids, and whether or not games can be a worthy outlet for historical scholarship.  I have long believed that games can be a useful tool in the teaching and learning of a subject, but have been cautious in believing that historical games are historically accurate. Most games are created with the sole intent of entertaining and making profits, which can leave the educational component lacking. As a kid, I remember playing computer games in school, such as Oregon Trail. At the time, I didn’t consider that game to be educational since I loved playing it so much, but looking at it from my perspective now, I can see how it used an episode of American history to teach school kids about the strife of traveling West by covered wagon in 1848 (and also what dysentery was!). So even though I didn’t realized I was learning something, I actually was.

Looking at The Lost Museum or Pox and the City, I can relate to my childhood experience with Oregon Trail. By creating an interactive and 3-D mystery game, I can envision school children using this website to discover P.T. Barnum’s American Museum and its subsequent fire in 1865. However, whenever I find myself visiting the Lost Museum, I seem to navigate to the Search the Archive page, where I can find primary sources that relate to the museum itself, rather than playing the actual game.

With Pox and the City, the player is placed inside the world of Edinburgh circa 1800 amid an outbreak of smallpox. Taking a real-life event, such as Edward Jenner’s experimentation with inoculating smallpox victims with cowpox material, and turning that into a game that builds on narrative interaction with other players, helps the player learn about the social history of that real-life event. This game reminded me of another childhood favorite computer game that I played obsessively in 1995 called Dust: A Tale of the Wired West. Dust, while loosely based on an historical time period (American West, 1880s), made no claims of being an historical game, especially since it took place in the fictional town of Diamondback, New Mexico. However, thematic elements such as silver mining, Chinese immigrants, and Native Americans captured my interest and led me to do my own research on these topics outside of the game. The role of interactive narrative is also similar to Pox in the City, in that certain dialogue responses would yield different outcomes.

Based on my own experience and the articles this week about Pox in the City that highlight its historical accuracy and user interaction, the ability to educate through gaming seems undeniable. I also believe that historical games can be their own form of historical scholarship, as Trevor Owens ponders in his Play the Past entry. By changing the format of scholarship, historians are able to break out of the traditional mold of papers, articles and books, and engage audiences more interactively.

Crowdsourcing History, the Good and the Bad

crowdsourcing, digital history, HIST696, readings

This week, we are taking a look at crowdsourcing and how it can help and also hinder how history is used on the web. The idea of crowdsourcing in history isn’t  new, as many genealogists and volunteers have been helping archives for quite some time. However, the transition to the Internet has opened up more avenues for crowdsourcing than was previously available. As the walls between professionals and amateurs become less noticeable, it’s important to think about how crowdsourcing can open up new methods of collecting and distributing information without historians having to play the role of gatekeeper.

Prior to this week’s readings, my frame of reference for Wikipedia was from a library science standpoint, which encourages anyone who wants to cite Wikipedia to try to investigate the references from the article. However, a few authors brought up the issue of the gender-divide when looking at Wikipedia, which is something I had not considered previously. While Wikipedia is known for its factual writing that prohibits any original research or bias, that anyone in the world can contribute to, I had not realized that most articles were written by men. Both Rosenzweig and Madsen-Brooks each acknowledge that the average Wikipedia editor is  English speaking and male, which has shaped the types of articles that get attention by editors. This raises questions about what voices are being heard on Wikipedia and how diverse these voices are. Is it really crowdsourcing if only one segment of the population is contributing? There are other issues surrounding Wikipedia, such as the editing wars and incorrect information, that cloud its effectiveness in being a global online crowdsourced encyclopedia, but the issue about gender was the one that struck me as the most intriguing.

Other crowdsourcing projects, like the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank serve to collect personal testimonies about an event from those who experienced it. These projects reminded me of traditional oral history projects, but captured online. The issue of creating a functioning website that allows for easy submission by the user appears to be the biggest hurdle after getting the funding necessary to take on such a project. Projects like these are great in collecting the stories, images, and information that might not survive due to the impermanent nature of the Internet. The staff necessary to make these projects cannot be overlooked as well, as they are not so much playing the gatekeeper in these online archives, but are more like the construction crew. In a project like Transcribe Bentham, the majority of funding was spent on staff, as the project relied on the public to transcribe the manuscripts. In this case, although volunteers were used in the transcription process, the project’s moderators had to ensure quality, as they were going to be ultimately published in the Collected Works edition. While anyone could assist with the project, the staff still retained editing control in the final version, which makes this project an interested experiment. I have been seeing more of these kinds of crowdsourcing transcription projects (probably because I like transcribing) and have even signed up to be a Smithsonian Digital Volunteer to try to do my part.  Although, I should add that I have not had time yet to take on any projects yet as a volunteer.

The issue of crowdsourcing naturally goes against the professional historian grain, especially when we start to think of ourselves as gatekeepers. However, there are benefits to be had, especially in projects that require time and effort that dedicated staff just cannot feasible do in a short period of time. Collecting and capturing original source material is one of the better uses of crowdsourcing history, as it provides another way for archives and digital projects to gather information that might have otherwise been lost.

 

Trying out Omeka

digital history, HIST696, practicum

Once I was able to finally get Omeka installed on my website, the program proved quite easy to use, which was great! I decided to use image files from the photo album of Henry W. Schweigert, which is an example of the earlier styles of photo albums that were used to contain cartes-de-visite. The album dates back to the 1870s, and I had scanned all 50 pages of it during the summer but have not been able to put them online yet, as part of my Henry Schweigert Diary project. I thought Omeka might be a good option to try out for this, and so far I think it is proving to be easy to work with.

The trickiest part about using Omeka was creating consistent metadata for my items. I had to go back and forth between the items I had already created and the one I was currently editing, to make sure I was using the same vocabulary. I created a collection for the photo album and then placed all of the items into that collection as I added them. I changed the theme from “Thanks, Roy” to “Berlin” and also installed a plug in called “Item Order” so that I could arrange the items in a specific order. In this case, I wanted to resemble the page order of the photo album. However, when you are viewing the Schweigert Family Photo Album collection page, you can only see the first five items, even though there are six. I tried adjusting all the possible settings to reveal all, but I’m thinking this page just might be a preview page, and I will need to do some research on fixing this, if at all possible. You can see all six items if you select “Browse Items” but they are not in the correct order.

I’m excited to keep learning more about how to customize my Omeka installation, as there are lots of plug ins that I am eager to explore. Besides the trouble that I originally had installing it on my own server space, I think Omeka is a worthy tool of presenting historical collections online. Had I originally used Reclaim for my hosting, I wouldn’t have had such difficulty. Eventually my tech support people were able to fix the problem, which I am grateful for.

Here’s the direct link to my Omeka project.

Mapping the Civil War

digital history, HIST696, practicum

For this week’s practicum, I created a map using Google Map Engine, which allows users to plot events in specific geographic locations. In this example, the class used data from the 1st Regiment of the Michigan Calvary from 1864 – 1865.

Google Map Engine’s option to include different icons to label the locations helps to identify the various action that the regiment encountered during the Civil War. The list of battles and campaigns have been labeled with explosion-like symbols, which are most common in this map. The map itself reveals the pattern of movement in clusters of icons, but it doesn’t provide the order of events or other details. By clicking on each marked location on the map users can read more details, such as the specific dates. The ability to use layers allows users to separate events visually, however, I did not choose to use layers in this example. Looking back, I could have had different layers for battles, expeditions, and other different types of events. Or I could have made a layer each for 1864 to 1865. I tried creating layers after the events were created, but it wasn’t obvious as to how to place events on different layers, which is something I will need to look into.
The map is interesting to look at, though, if you think about how far this calvary traveled in two years. At the end of their enlistment, they were as far west as Utah.

Mapping History

digital history, HIST696, readings,

From this week’s readings, it appears that there has been some disconnect between historians and geographers in the past. However, there has been an effort made by digital historians recently who have gravitated towards geographic information systems (GIS) to link the two fields together for scholarly purposes. Tim Hitchcock suggests that this division was partially due to geographers’ seeking more secure academic funding by aligning themselves with STEM departments rather than with history/humanities and as a result, there has been little dialogue between the two fields. However, the availability of user-friendly GIS programs and mass digitization of historic texts and lots of data, have opened the doors to collaboration between history and geography in a digital format. History can now be geo-referenced, as historical maps can be digitized and layered, as well as analyzed, as the examples covered illustrate.

The Visualizing Emancipation project is a prime example of how mapping historical data can reveal patterns through imagery. I could spend all day playing with Visualizing Emancipation. By allowing the user to select an Emancipation Event, such as the “Capture of African Americans by Union troops” or “Conscription/Recruitment” by either the Union or Confederate Armies and filtering by source type, such as book, official records, newspapers and/or personal papers, researchers are able to explore a previously primarily text-based set of documents in a visual geographic manner. This pairing is helpful to those, like myself, who like to match a document to its complete history, including its geography. With adjustable map options, users can choose how they want to visualized the data presented to them and click on specific events to learn about its details. One of the tool’s most handy features is its ability to link directly to the actual source material that is geo-referenced, as it allows users to interpret the data for themselves. The map visualization helps us to take on a new perspective on such a large topic on different scales, allowing us to expand and contract our view of emancipation in a geographic way.

On a smaller scale, geographically, Digital Harlem is somewhat similar to Visualizing Emancipation, in that historical records have been geo-referenced to reveal patterns of daily life in Harlem from 1915 – 1930. By selecting a type of event, the name of a person or place, users can create custom maps that plot each event, with their descriptions as well. Multiple layers can be built on top of a Google map and/or an historical map, helping us to visualize the geographic display of archival sources, such as crime records and newspapers.

With GIS, historians can use maps to explore historical themes, such as with the ORBIS project from Stanford. Both take historical data and apply it to a map, which ORBIS allows researchers to not only map the Roman Empire, but also calculate travel routes with respect to seasonal changes, modes of transportation, and expenses. It differs from the above examples in that it is not a tool to plot specific events, but it models various outcomes by using criteria set by the user based on historical data.

All of the tools covered in this week’s reading each combine history and geography to create customizable and interactive maps that can help us gain a new perspective on the historical record. This pairing has benefited from the digitization of documents and advances in/ increasing availability of GIS software and tools, and I can only see an increase in scholarship that utilizes such tools.

Text Mining and Visualizing History

digital history, digital history projects, digitization, HIST696, OCR, readings, text mining

This week’s readings on the topic of text mining has helped me to understand a little bit more clearly just why historians might want to consider such an aspect of digital history. Text mining and topic modeling can both help reveal new patterns and themes about events, people, and documents that might otherwise have been overlooked. When information is presented in a visual map, whether it’s a chart or graph, or even word cloud, that information takes on a new perspective that researchers can choose to investigate more fully, although it is important to remember the context that surrounds the original data.

I’ve come to realize that I am very much a visual learner, which makes text mining and topic modeling quite interesting to me. By seeing the data maps that Cameron Blevins used in his article by using a program that measured the instances of geographic locations mentioned in two Houston newspapers during the 1830s/1840s and then later in the 1890s. The idea of “imagined geography” was new to me when I read the article and accompanying website, and I think it is aptly named. At the time when the newspapers’ articles, features, railroad schedules, etc were being written, I hardly doubt that anyone was thinking of all of the locations that were being referenced, nor their sociological/historical impacts.

Having read Ted Underwood’s tips for starting your own text mining project before diving into Blevin’s or Kaufman’s Quantifying Kissinger project, I had a basic understanding of the large amount of text needed for such undertakings. Underwood’s FAQ style post puts the idea of text mining into easy to understand concepts, which I found most helpful. When I saw the Wordle example, I though, “hey, I’ve done that before!” which put a personal connection to this week’s readings. Then I tried out Google’s ngram viewer, which is a cool tool for visualizing the usage of a word or phrases over time, but clearly the context is lacking, especially since we can’t see which texts are being searched.

Moving on from last week’s discussion about “buckets of words,” this week’s readings tell how we can take those buckets, do our keyword searching, and find out how those words stack up across time, for whatever it’s worth. While I think text mining definitely has a cool factor because of its employment of data maps, which I really find helpful, I need to remember that due to poor OCR and lack of context, text mining is just another tool to use in the grand historian toolbox.

Thinking about Searching Databases

databases, digital history, digitization, HIST696, OCR, readings

This week’s readings all explored how wonderful it is that so many historical documents have been scanned, digitized, run through OCR software and made available through countless different online databases, making lengthy trips to libraries and archives less common. Of course, there are drawbacks to relying on database searching, as the authors have pointed out.

Different databases behave differently when users type in a keyword or search phrase. As Patrick Spedding points out in “The New Machine,” some databases will run OCR for transcription purposes, to be used in the search process, but will not make that original OCR text file available to users. In Spedding’s example of the Eighteenth Century Collections Online database, this lack of transcription is supplanted by using “coded linkage” by highlighting the keyword in the original document. Other issues arise when alternate spellings and synonyms come into play as well. How can you be sure that you are finding all of the documents related to your search when using these handy databases? You can’t.

This reminds me of Lara Putnam’s example of the Benbow Follies in her working paper from this year. While researching using microfilm, she came across and editorial that referenced “Benbow’s Follies” and three years later decided to do some more digging on that serendipitous find. Turning to Google Books, she found more information, but still wanted know how Benbow appeared in her original research in Costa Rica. By searching digitized newspaper sources, she found advertisements for Caribbean Tours by Benbow’s musical troupes, which she had never found in the traditional sources such as music reference sources.

These examples help illustrate the good and the bad of searching databases. On one hand, you might not be able to find what you want, either because you don’t know what you don’t know or because of wonky searching capabilities. But on the other hand, the ability to search such a multitude of documents from the comfort of your home can aid in tackling a research question that previously may not have been answered if one hasn’t had the opportunity to travel to libraries and archives across the world. Either way, this “digital turn” is still evolving, and hopefully the future has in store for us researchers more comprehensive and creative searching abilities.