lovehistory.net

The pairing of reading(s) and websites this week forced me once again to address my own stubbornly linear mode of reading, perhaps more blatantly than other readings in the syllabus have. Like the extremely linear person I tend to be when it comes to proceeding in an organized fashion, I read the conference paper before I even clicked on the link to the Attack on Deerfield website, and therefore my experience of it as a user was a bit distorted. I was unable to navigate it with virgin eyes, but instead found myself evaluating it in part relative to the way the conference paper had outlined its design and goals. I did not have to discover for myself how to read and interact with the site, as the paper had already outlined that for me. What I took away from my own experience, however, was still up to me.

The first thing I noticed is that I was pretty overwhelmed with how much information was being presented and how many ways there were to navigate it, though that might be in part because I was already mentally primed for the website and did not have to read it blind. Websites like this, however, tend to lose my attention rather quickly, which is interesting because while I parsed through the Price of Freedom website rather thoroughly for both WWI and WWII, I found its linear narrative and presentation, as well as lack of depth and limited scope in choosing its artifacts to be intellectually unfulfilling. As a website, it was great in providing my very fleeting attention span with a flashy point upon which to focus my attention, but as a scholar, though artifacts were wonderful to look at, it wasn’t enough. This unevennness of attention span is something I struggle with online – there’s something about the glare of the screen and the non-linearity of the medium that leaves me incapable of staying in one place on one site for very long, a struggle I’m sure I share with many users and builders. To research on the web I really have to focus my attention, and often have to keep some ibuprofen nearby to ward off migraines. It’s only when I’m doing something incredibly, precisely, actively creative, like writing, working in Photoshop, or coding, that I can focus my attention on an undynamic computer screen for long periods of time.

So why the trouble with the Deerfield exhibit? I don’t know. I think they very well reach their aims of informing visitors about the temporal space the attack inhabited (even changing the word to more neutral “attack” from the politically charged “massacre” used in the article shows how multi-cultural voices and varying viewpoints were certainly incorporated into the telling and presentation of this event on this website). It does provide layers of information, the most interesting one being something I stumbled upon completely by accident:

Because I knew how to “read” the site without interacting with it, I chose to randomly click a figure on the image map on the “Attack” page without even following where my mouse had fallen (I literally wasn’t looking at it). I landed on Parthena and when I read the little blurb that popped up I was surprised to discover that the story they’d concocted for her was just that, concocted. A link after her brief story led to a page detailing the process of bringing the people of Deerfield to life, including those who left behind no factual evidence other than that they did exist and, in Partena’s case, died. Here the historians and builders behind the site lay startlingly bare their decision to create composite characters and extrapolate facts about similar, contemporaneous historical actors so that they could be grafted upon the vague outline sketches we have of those who were present all in order to personify the participants in the attack whose story the exhibit follows. They also provide a list of the sources they used to create this composite sketch so that if I was ruffled by their dramatization of a life (which I was in some ways) I could trace their scholarship and see if it was reliable.

Creating a narrative around the characters in these exhibit relating both to the attack itself as well as the character’s own historical context is a storytelling, historical choice, one the builders of the site found so important that they created composite characters so that users could still follow the stories of people that the historical record cannot precisely flesh out. This approach also helps the site builders maintain their commitment to following all view points,as it allows them to attempt reconstructing the viewpoints of those like Parthena, an African American who the historical record at the time simply didn’t deem important enough to include.

I think this raises important questions about the nature of public history and historical scholarship and narrative in general. The layered structure of this website allows someone like me, with a trained interest in getting to the bottom of every source or historical agent, the means to not only trace the historian’s method but then read their justification for deviating from what might be considered a faux pas if carried out by an academic historian, and to follow their own scholarly trail. The comparison to academia in this case seems false comparison though, as all historians, especially those dealing with groups so absent from the historical record, must sometimes necessarily work in the realm of composites, whether they research for a museum or a university. If the Deerfield project historians can demonstrate the reliability of their sources and the logic of their comparisons then it seems fair that they should be allowed to use this narrative technique. However, there is the concern that the fact that Partena’s story is at best an approximation is just buried, and that a casual observer may click through and miss the nuance. How important is it to highlight that nuance? Upon further inspection, the People page also includes a direct link to this same essay on the creation of composite characters, so it appears that the Deerfield designers have attempted to compensate for non-linear navigation. In a way, they might be even more clearly upfront about their creation of a compositite than a traditional scholar might be able to a a monograph, or in any case, on the internet hypertext makes it that much easier for a reader to trace the and evaluate the tools the scholar used to make the composite. Perhaps revealing the man behind the curtain is what makes some traditional academics so nervous about the possibilities of digital history.

At the end of the day it is the user who makes the decision what to see and imbibe. By presenting the information consistently and positioning it proimnently and clearly, the builders of the Deerfield site may have done all they can to ensure accurate transmission of information. In a format where your audience is the world, however, it is important to keep in mind how to present overt interpretation of the historical record in a way that allows for a very casual, perhaps even disinterested audience to distinguish “fact” from “very good, well documented, well-informed guess.” I think the Deerfeld site does it pretty responsibly, and in a way that made me rethink once again the way I myself read and write all different kinds of history.