lovehistory.net

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!