Over the past two days, I was privileged enough to be one of
the few historians in the room at the Radcliffe Workshop on Technology and Archival Processing. It was a wonderful experience and I valued the opportunity to learn from a wide range of people that I don’t generally get to spend time with. There was a robust twitter presence (mostly thanks to Shane Landrum that Eileen Clancy is storifying) so check out the hashtag #RadTech16 for more perspectives. In between panels I chatted with other historians there, Jennifer
Gugliemo, Shane Landrum, Monica Mercado, and Claire Potter, and my thoughts
here were inspired by those conversations.
At some point I tweeted my concern that digital history was being conflated with digital archives and that digital history in general was being invoked in fuzzy ways. There have been many efforts to sketch out taxonomies of digital history (I wrote about Trevor Owen's efforts. See also William G. Thomas' typology).
When I say digital history I usually mean history that is
written with evidence that has been created computationally.
In my case this is either social network analysis of
individuals or computational linguistic analysis of primary source
documents. The digital part of this work
comes before I write what looks just like any other history essay. The sole area of deviation is that tables and
graphs augment my essay. This is, of
course, not uncommon in many subfields like economic, social, and political
history. What makes it look unusual is that digital “humanities” has drawn more
cultural and intellectual historians into the presentation of “data.”
I’ve written before
about the challenges of using quantified data for historical readers not particularly
accustomed to looking at such evidence. I
continue to struggle with that particularly as complex data visualizations
require significant explanation as to the source of the data and how the
visualization was created.
Sometimes I combine historical evidence analyzed
computationally with digital modes of
presenting history differently.
Sometimes this takes a non-linear
multimodal format, and it often is done in order to show how
I used computers to analyze my sources. I don't usually refer to this as digital history, but rather as digital publishing.
As a person who studies things like naming as political
praxis, I’ve also written about the
challenges of reducing people to data and experimented
with different ways of represented lived experiences as data. It was exciting to speak with people who
create metadata and have thought deeply about what controlled vocabulary
means. I was inspired by Jarrett Drake’s
provocative presentation on provenance as a form of colonialism and his call
for naming practices that reflect the terms used by archival subjects
themselves.
I’m looking forward to continuing these conversations at the OAH
Friday April 8 9-10:30 #OAH_114 where I am on a roundtable that has librarians,
archivists, and historians (Emily Drabinski, Cathy Moran Hajo, Bergis Jules,
Juliette Levy, and Stacie Williams) discussing the ethical practices of doing
history digitally. I’m also hopeful that
more historians will pick up these conversations with colleagues in libraries
and archives and propose similar panels at professional conferences. |
| some more thoughts of ethics & digital history |
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