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.

I found the articles we read for class this week to be very challenging (not only because some of the terminology was completely alien to me), as they forced me to think about the way I have always approached the web as a builder. I’ve had an amateur interest in web design for years, and when I approach new websites I spend a great deal of intellectual energy evaluating the usability and aesthetic of a site from a design standpoint before I consider content. Usually this boils down to: how attractive is the webpage (which special consideration to how legible it is in terms of colors, typeface, etc.) and how navigable is it? How easy is it for me to get from A to B? Is it visually disruptive? Does the physical layout of the page hinder my interaction with it? I’ve come to be increasingly of the clean and simple school in these respects. And sometimes I’ll admit that if the design is too difficult or offensive I’ll leave and never return, despite the value of the content. I’ve never had to design anything resembling a digital history project, though I have written for one (and what I wrote vs. what was selected to go on the web site and how it was arranged could be explored in its own blog post), so to read these articles on the way digital history and design must intersect has given me new perspectives on how to evaluate the history sites I interact with on a regular basis, as well as new ways to consider how I might create and design my own project.

In the chapter from Cohen and Rosenzweig, “Designing for the History Web,” I was struck my the authors’ assertion that “graphical sophistication and occasionally even challenging design can help place historical materials and ideas in formats that solicit powerful responses from the viewer.” This speaks a bit to my previous post about the possibility that digital history could be used as an experiential history project. Historians often debate the ultimate goal of the profession itself: is the role of the historian to present the reader with a factual narration/presentation of the historical record, or should they go a step forward and employ their research and presentation of the historical narrative to evoke a response in their reader that then effects the way they view and interact with the present? This question is as equally relevant to digital history projects as it has been to all other facets of the historical profession, especially since the internet is becoming an increasingly larger way for us to see and experience the world in a non-physical sense. Hearing and watching recordings and seeing images I would argue, however, are physical experiences, and the web makes it possible for most users to experience these kind of historic texts. Further, if we continue to conceptualize of the web as a space and the website as a part of it we ourselves design, it can be viewed then as a space which the user experiences and engages with intellectually and emotionally. We may not be able to control the path the user takes traveling through our site as we might in a physical museum, or how long they stay, as Cohen and Rosenzsweig point out, but the design of the website can create intellectual and emotional reverberations within a user’s mind simply through their visual and perhaps aural interaction with the layout, the information present, and the way it is displayed. Websites can visually and perhaps even spatially convey tone, and their presentation of information can be emotionally evocative, especially if it is visual. As digital history projects continue to proliferate, I think these are important considerations builders should keep in mind, including, when evaluating their work, whether or not these choices have been made consciously.

The way a site is designed can also give clues as to its purpose. The Elings and Waibel article discussed the standardization of metadata, but a similar move toward the standardization of design in digital history sites might have the virtue of increasing usability, though you might lose the potential value of presenting your own interpretation of the material through the visual medium of design.

I was also was intrigued by the way the chapters from Digital History and the typography article (my favorite reading of the bunch) discussed how web design is in many ways a child of the (mostly standardized) design of print books, and that in terms of usability and even aesthetics some of the lessons learned from print books are still valuable to web designers. Reading the article on typeface once again made me think about how I myself design – I think I am more visually than content driven in the initial stages. Visually how I want my site to appear seems to naturally progress into what kind of information I will want to include because I am already spatially organizing the content in the design. My visualizations of the website also help me consider my audience because I am already anticipating the community of people I might imagine responding well to such a design. I’m not sure how well adapted to digital history this approach will be, but in my experience content and design by the end of the process have become inextricably linked. I suppose in saying that I’m not making any new or revolutionary claims, but that was what I took away from a lot of this reading: even in the new digital medium, a lot of the common sense things we’ve learned about communicating information (for example, the way text is presented to the reader from the way the fonts are shaped to the size of the margins on either side of the text, etc.) transfer to the creation of web sites. It will be interesting to see if these conventions hold true over time – do they work so well because we are used to them? Will web design move further away from print design as we grow and adapt to working on computers? The popularity of the Kindle – a digital medium that is so popular in part precisely because it works so hard to reproduce printed text, is an interesting example of how ingrained our physical reading habits are in terms of the way we physically view text, if not necessarily the way we choose to navigate through it.

When Cohen and Rosenzweig stress that you don’t necessarily know who your audience might end up being, and should therefore be willing to tailor your website to the arrival of an unexpected community of users, they make a good point about the way we as historians should view all of our historical work. Digital mediums by their very nature allow us as scholars and designers/builders to constantly respond to the interests of our audience, to update our own work based on changing trends in scholarship, if we so choose. How we present this information may also have to change over time.

This post is not directly related to the readings in our classes last week, however, after commenting on Megan’s blog post I thought I might open my thoughts up to the class-at-large. I’m not sure if any of you are familiar with Alison Landsberg, but she is a (wonderful) professor in the History Department here at Mason whose research, among other things, focuses on “museums and the installation of memory.” Her book Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture examines the way mass culture influences the development of individual and collective memory(1). She explicitly states in her introduction that she believes “modernity makes possible and necessary a new form of public cultural memory” (2). She dubs this memory “prosthetic memory,” which she defines as a memory engendered in a person of an event that they did not actually experience that “emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theater or a museum” (2).

The crux of Landsberg’s argument for the role of prosthetic memories is that they can be used to engender within a historical observer an empathy for and understanding of those who actually experienced the historical event in a way that then might be transposed to the way historical observers interact with similar situations in the present. The intent of my post, however, is not to discuss this aspect of her argument, but instead to examine how Landsberg evaluates the missions of experiential museums like the Holocaust Museum, and how her conclusions may come to bear on projects in digital history.

Because the Holocaust Museum is what Landsberg dubs to be an “experiential museum,” or one in which new technologies and specifically designed physical sites and exhibitions have made it possible to “experience an event or past without actually having lived through it,” (38) it “raises questions about what it means to own or inhabit a memory of an event through which one did not live” (129). Because the Holocaust is falling out of “living memory,” those who seek to transmit knowledge about it in a way that conveys not only a factual recounting of it as an event but of the emotional impact if wrought upon people across the globe must explore new avenues of disseminating this information. The Holocaust Museum, in this sense, seeks not only to inform a viewing public of the factual occurrence of events and to present reliable evidence and artifacts, but to engage visitors emotionally with the suffering of the millions who died under Hitler’s brutal regime. It does this not only by presenting documentary evidence, written, visual, oral, and recorded, but by physically structuring the museum (and controlling the way visitors move through its space) and displaying artifacts in such a way that will strike or even shock the viewer into actively participating with and digesting the material they are being presented with. As Landsberg writes,

“The museum visit is deigned to be an experience for the visitor. This is not to say that visitors somehow experience the Holocaust. Rather, they have an experience that positions their bodies to be better able to understand an otherwise unthinkable event” (131).

From being handed identification cards that literally identify you with one of the victims to seeing a room powerfully filled with shoes taken from those exterminated in the camps (which Landsberg writes about, and which has always been my own most lasting memory of this museum), the visitor is purposefully guided through the museum from exhibit to exhibit on a very carefully crafted path meant to leave a distinct emotional as well as intellectual impression, though perhaps what that impression is remains up to you to decide. Either way, it is evocative. It elicits the active participation we discussed in class. But this evocation is very firmly grounded in the visitor’s physical presence in this physical space which they physically as well as intellectually interact with.

My question then becomes, what place does this kind of experiential museum have in digital history? Is it possible to create such a space digitally? Can the flexibility of hypertext work to improve upon the experiential nature of the Holocaust museum by allowing the user to find their own path, or will it dilute the message? Putting aside the question of whether we should be attempting to create prosthetic memories at all (and Landsberg may argue that it is impossible in many cases to avoid doing so due to the diffusion of historical narratives into mass culture via mediums such as film, etc.), is it possible to create these experiences/prosthetic memories in digital media? Should we be examining how digital media might be creating prosthetic memories itself? How does the presentation of digital history as a public history project shape the way we remember historical events? How should builders incorporate these considerations into their digital history projects?

I’m not sure if these issues will come up in future readings/discussions, or if you all have any other questions you’d live to pose, but I think it’s an interesting angle to examine. One starting point might be to compare and contrast the structure and mission of the Holocaust Museum or other experiential museums with the mission and design of their websites. Either way, I look forward to continuing this conversation.

By way of introduction, I will say that, outside of the more basic functions of digital history (i.e. online searching, email, class wikis, etc.) I have almost no experience with digital history as a field or methodology or genre or however you want to label it. Several years ago I interned at the National Women’s History Museum, where I helped research and write the Chinese American Women, Women in Early Film, and Women in State Legislators exhibits. My role there was not really one of a builder so much as a researcher, and therefore I was almost exclusively using my academically trained writing and research skills. When it came time to organize the exhibit in a way that could be presented to the public I found my own interests and ideas of audience conflicted with those of my employers, though the strong tendency to frame the sites around chronological narratives seemed universal in some cases. It was a very interesting if limited experience with public history, and the only substantive interaction I’ve had with it or with digital history, outside of limited forays into research for papers. I have used the internet as a tool for finding history, but I have not thoroughly engaged in digital history.

I feel as if I am approaching this class with the mindset of a user and as the “graduate student” that William Thomas describes in the Interchange discussion. Thinking of myself as a builder of digital history is new (I have maintained several personal websites over the years), though I’m surprised at how differently I evaluate some of the digital history projects I have been involved with using eyes informed by only one week’s worth of reading and online investigation. The discussions of linear versus non-linear thinking that seem to dominate the discussion are particularly interesting when I look back on these past projects at the NWHM which, when I myself was outlining, I tried to structure without much thought to the fact that the user might want to interact with the material presented in a variety of ways (which may have been outside the scope of our resources even if we had wanted to incorporate avenues for user-lead investigation). Instead I wanted the user to investigate the material as I had presented it, divided into the categories I had devised, and I envisioned a very physical outline that didn’t leave much wiggle room for personal interpretation or interaction. I was trying to turn my research paper into a website, and cutting and pasting it to a webpage with some old pictures probably wouldn’t have promoted much interactivity or interest of any kind. Still trapped in academia, I was envisioning the wrong audience.

Most of you in class seem to have rather extensive experience with all of these topics and many of the example websites – you bring to the discussion conceptualizations of web space and the presentation of history that I have never even thought of before. I have extreme difficulty reading a book any way but start to finish, however, I can see the benefits of incorporating a more flexible approach to the presentation of information when designing a website meant to provide historical information and interaction. When we talk about drawing in users my initial thought is that these websites are targeting non-professional users, however, I loved the ways the articles critically examined how these new digital mediums can be used to draw in professional historians as well, and how they can help shape the methodologies of our discipline, as well as how we share information. I like the idea that opening the discipline will keep it from going stale or prevent accredited history from falling out of the public eye. By creating open, usable, interactive websites we can draw in a far wider audience that can serve the purpose of invigorating our discipline and disseminating knowledge and critical thinking skills to a wider, intellectually curious audience. The ability to restrict user access or use hypertext to create levels on the web means, as mentioned in class by Megan, that websites can be created which allow users of all interest levels to investigate deeper and deeper into the historical record or, further and further into intellectual traditions or ways of presenting information that we might consider to be academic. The challenge is designing a website that functionally facilitates these layers of information and interaction.

It seems to me that the story of professional history is one of constantly emerging and competing fields/methodologies/genres, what have you, and while digital history is a revolutionary new way of interacting with, presenting, and examining historical data and narratives, it also seems to me like another step in the process of crafting the discipline of history, driven in this instance in large part by the technology that dominates this historical moment and the competing mindsets that shape its development and use. I found the discussion of the scholarly community using digital history to open its doors in terms of accessing material, building community, enlarging audience (be they professional or not), and promoting collaborative efforts to be extremely exciting. Just as we professionals can use digital and public history to view the public and reach out to them, so too can they perhaps look in the window into our discipline to learn how and why it works. When we discussed binaries in class, it seems important to me to remember that categories are almost never mutually exclusive, and it is in focusing on their overlap that we can mine the most useful information.

I realize my blog post has been geared a bit more toward the ideas that we all articulate in our seminar than in the reading (which will not be the case in future posts unless, I anticipate), but what I have felt overwhelmed with so far is how I feel that I am deficient as of yet when it comes to reading digital history projects and sites as units unto themselves. I am new to that “methodology.” In a way I already have the skills to evaluate sources, locate and think critically about interpretations, and evaluate on a basic level how usable a site is, but ideas the authors discussed about interactivity and hypertext are all new to me – things I interacted with without thinking about them. I think it is important to remember as we use and evaluate these digital history sites that we must always consider their audience as well. Which one(s) of the five categories do these sites fall under? It is possible for digital history sites to meet all the needs of all the users, or is it inevitable that different sites, no matter how comprehensive and well-designed, will still “suffer” the limits of their intended purpose? I was also intrigued at ideas of contribution and interactivity that we very briefly discussed. Opportunities for user contribution seem to be a way to encourage interactivity, but who should be allowed to contribute? How do we then assess the credentials and reliability of these contributors? Is all contribution positive? Should all digital history projects allow contribution?

I may be one of those budding historians who so far has been a little resistant to more fully infusing my own work with digital history, but just by virtue of coming of age in the digital medium I had the skill sets to recognize, even unconsciously, when the previous digital history projects I did work on failed to meet my needs as a user and a builder. I believe that as a builder at the time I was still trying to force my own conceptions of a linear historical narrative into the presentation of digital history, but when I saw the finished project I realized how limiting that structure can be, especially in this context. My goal for this course will be to go deeper in learning to build and non-linear, interactive framework without sacrificing my interest in accessibility and web design. Looking at the more recent exhibits on the NWHM website, I can see how subsequent digital historians have reconceptualized the way they present digital history to the public. Their audience may not necessarily have changed, but the way they design and organize digital space has, which may say something about the way users respond to the presentation of information, and builder’s willingness to adapt to it to encourage hits and interaction. It would be interesting to learn more about how users have reacted to these changes, and why the builders chose to make the changes that they did in the first place. I suppose we will explore this later on.

And so begins my first history-related blog. Soon to be more content rich!