lovehistory.net

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.