So, What Does the Future Hold?

One of the great beauties of Omeka, which is no design accident, is the built-in web of metadata that the user is bound to discover as she encounters the architecture of the site and starts to furnish it with digital treasures.  The choice to use the metadata is hers, but the opportunities are abundant and the pay back will be significant once the site goes live.  Tried and tested Dublin Core is the first expression, creating context around each “item” and the opportunity for access via stipulated information elements.  There is then the opportunity to add metadata about the nature of the item, including its original format and any textual data that is known.   Further opportunity for discovery is offered via tagging, which attaches a string of key words or concepts to the item and so matches them up with the searcher.  This perhaps more tedious part of online exhibit planning requires compliance to rules for the best results, but as Studs Turkel made clear in “Digital History Hacks (2005-08)”  it’s worth taking significant steps when adding meta tags to web sites.  In his case some clever use of digital tools for mining a database, such as the one AOL put out for the universe to play with for a while, pulled up some helpful information for those interested in meta tags.  Understanding how people search and what people search for helps those tagging to know how to include related words and concepts to facilitate searches which will find your site.

So it goes with organized archives, libraries and curated collections.  At the other extreme of the digital universe Google works with a different model.  This model depends on BIG DATA, algorithms and statistical analysis to make the best match between seeker and sought.  Peter Norvig,  Google’s Director of Research, uses Sherlock Holmes as his comparison.  Holmes’ success is not ”flash in the pan” brilliance, but a calculated observation and manipulation of the data.  This is the kind of task that is best dealt with in the digital world where information can be extracted using computational methods that find patterns, categorize, and determine what is relevant.  It seems that with such methods the bigger the data the better, and now that the Internet is more than 100 million times bigger than it was in the beginning the Google search engine is even more likely to be accurate and relevant than it has ever been. 

Although the site had to be taken down when Google took away the support of the API that sustained it, Daniel Cohen’s Syllabus Finder harnessed Google’s search engine along with its own purpose built search tools to aggregate about 1.4 million documents from the web that were identified as syllabi and put them into a huge database.  They were collected over the seven-year period from 2002 to 2009 and since last year this has been available as a huge database for data mining and analysis.  Cohen built his search engine by first generating a “dictionary of notions” or terms which commonly crop up in such documents.  Users could put their own search terms into the Syllabus Finder and it would send optimized queries to Google to extract the best matches.  It also had the refinement to pull out useful information from the relevant data such as where a syllabus was from.  Cohen points out that this method of data mining using specialized filters or sorting programs and harnessing a mammoth search engine such as that of Google or Yahoo has great potential for pulling relevant information from huge amounts of unstructured data.  In fact he even goes so far as to suggest that rather than seeking high-quality digitization and thorough text markup it may be more cost effective and more worthwhile to digitize a larger amount at a lower standard and rely on API’s to provide the path for mining data and synthesizing knowledge.  The greater the data, even if that data is not of the highest quality, the greater the likelihood of accuracy.

One historian who has been maximizing the value of the web and its infinite connectedness is Patrick Leary, who’s web site, Victoria Research Web provides historians of the 19^th century with a smorgasbord of resources and the tools to maximize their use.  Here rather than shunning the lesser texts they are brought to light to be subjected to the historic lens.  Leary himself is acutely aware of the great significance of the Internet and accompanying computer tools, which he sees as having revolutionized the role of the researcher.  What one person could do travelling to research libraries and archives and taking note of significant information has been expanded exponentially.  A comparison might be the travel itself.  When people were limited to their own bodies for transport the going was tough and long.  Today we can cross the Atlantic in 6 or 7 hours.

Considering the great changes that we have witnessed in new technologies over the last ten or fifteen years, what I wonder does the future hold?  Let’s hope the electricity stays on!

Those who forget history are doomed to re-tweet it

I have to say that although I don’t mind “tweeting” I don’t particularly relish it either.  It can seem a rather solitary venture, sending out some brutally condensed message into the ether……unless, as luck would have it, there happens to be someone else responding in real time and then the act is almost like taking drugs or gambling, except that the pay back is in the connection with a human being.  Which I suppose is what social media is really about, connecting with people through discourse from wherever you happen to be at the time.  People are after all highly social animals.

I was, therefore intrigued to find that the temporal feature of Twitter has been harnessed to educate students of history in an ingenious way.   When I was a high school history teacher we were very interested in the primary document, the real material of life and how the role of the historian can be compared with that of the detective weighing the evidence and drawing conclusions.  I was even involved in a “living history” project where students took on the trappings of a particular time period and scenario to explore history from the inside.  The results were dramatic.  A week without electricity in a moorland cottage making your own candles and milking cows has much to teach and in addition there is a great deal of research necessary ahead of time to prepare the participants for what events were likely to unfold.  The realities of education, however, dictated that this was an unsustainable model, only possible in rather special circumstances and with very small groups.  The onset of the National Curriculum put paid to most of these kinds of ventures.

Welcome Twitter.  Unlike conventional methods of discourse at a distance and even in contrast to e mail or facebook, Twitter comes very close to conversation when it happens in cohort with fellow Tweeters.  Time is significant.  Tweets are short and ephemeral and their work is done efficiently.  Enter re-enactment.   Students become real characters in historical role and their actions, thoughts, emotions, and motivations are played out as Tweets.  Because it is happening within the framework of time it takes on a sense of immediacy and has the potential to make the tweeter internalize the past.  In “Retweeting History Brings Those Stories to Life” [1]Sara Bernard describes an ingenious tool called TwHistory.

TwHistory allows students to experience historical events in real time.  You can either follow an historical enactment that is being broadcast via Twitter or you can design your own by thoroughly researching an event and meticulously plotting tweets to allow it to unfold over time.  Enactors have experienced the Cuban missile crisis, pioneering in the American West, the Battle of Gettysburg, the sinking of the Titanic, and Freedom riders, to name a few.  Not only is it ingenious, but it is also free through a creative commons liscence.

Tom Caswell goes into more detail about Twhistory in "A Twist on Social Media and History Education"[2]  where he describes how students first choose a character, then research, evaluate and discuss the historical evidence.  The next step is to write tweets and schedule them to be sent at a specific time.  The tweets will reflect the perspective of the chosen character and so unveil the human experience of a historic event to the student.  Twitter messages are scheduled to reflect the real time that events occurred on a particular day, adding a further layer to the experience.

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[1] http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/08/retweeting-history-to-bring-life-to-historical-events/ 

[2] http://www.academia.edu/364649/A_Twist_on_Social_Media_and_History_Education

Digital History and Historical Practice

In essence the craft of the historian has remained constant for some considerable time.  It has entailed the study of the past through reading and research, analysis of the material under scrutiny, and the creation of cohesive and convincing narrative and argument.  For academic historians there is also the necessity to pass on this knowledge and skill through teaching.  However, the advent of the computer and the Internet has changed the tools that are available to the historian almost immeasurably, both in the pursuit of their own scholarship and in their teaching practice.

The American Historical Association’s journal “Perspectives on History” has elicited a wide variety of commentary on the subject over the years, and the May 2007 issue took the impact of digital history on historians as its central theme.  Despite the passage of the last five years and the significant changes that have occurred during that time span, the articles are still relevant today and raise interesting points and questions.

A.H.A. president, Barbara Weinstein[1] sets the scene with her column “Doing History in the Digital Age”.  One wonders whether her habits and opinions have shifted over time and her honest confessions raise the question of how the digital world really has impacted historians of the early 21^st Century, especially those whose own scholarship was established long before the Internet became a player.  Weinstein describes her own slow and patchy adoption of the digital world.  She indicates that she is appreciative of the utility of the computer and Internet, yet wary of the real benefits offered. She did indeed quickly adopt the PC as a sophisticated writing tool, and the Internet as an accessible source for students and a repository for historical journals such as the “Hispanic American Historical Review”, which she co-edits.  She doubts, however, that the computer has really improved writing[2] since she speculates that less time is now spent on the drafting of a scholarly work.  In contrast she notes the clear benefits that the digital age gives to historical journal editors.  In her own experience, communication between the editing team of HAHR became much more efficient via electronic mail and the publishing of the ten year index on-line created more space in the journal for articles and gave the added value of search ability.  She cautions, however, that with digital come new dilemmas, such as where to host a site and how to maintain it for the long term.  She questions the decision of the NEH’s Digital Humanities Initiative to insist on digitization as part of all grant supported projects, since declining resources may diminish scholarly standards in the interests of publishing on the web.  She also raises the significant paradox of “free access”, since there are always costs associated with any access to information, and she suggests that perhaps the trade presses would be the most likely agents to create electronic resources that would be maintained for the future.[3].  Finally Weinstein admits to a Luddite tendency (even while she is trying to change this) with respect to her teaching style, but readers are left in no doubt that her classes would certainly be worth standing in line for and her parting comment that writing a history of Brazil without visiting would be “no fun” serves to underline this.

Perhaps an update of Weinstein’s column today would elicit more appreciation for the wider resources that a modern PC and the Internet offers the historian author and perhaps her own research and teaching has been influenced by the ubiquity of the Internet to a greater degree than it had in 2007.  By contrast to Weinstein, fellow contributor Daniel J Cohen[4] illustrates in his article, “Zotero : Social and Semantic Computing for Historical Scholarship”,   that he was well beyond the curve in appreciating and pioneering emerging tools for academic historians plying their trade in 2007.  Zotero, which he co-directed, is an open source alternative to commercial applications to manage bibliographic data and related search materials.  It is a good example of the new possibilities that the digital age has opened up for historians who wish to adopt them.  Cohen makes us aware of the vast and hidden knowledge about sources collected laboriously and individually by historians over time, which never see the light of day.  Zotero, he claims will aggregate that invaluable data and organize it alongside citations and whole texts in a digital environment that “enables better searching and analysis, easier integration with the writing process (adding footnotes and bibliographies), and more sophisticated organization.”[5]  This kind of internet tool is particularly powerful since it leverages the developments of social networking for collaboration and sharing, and the growing use of metadata for discovering sources.  Cohen predicts that this will create an "ecology of scholarship" with historians discovering and sharing sources and information about sources that "perhaps will lead to the discovery of new knoweldge."  

 Of course in the last resort the impact of this and other digital research tools depends on how widely it is being used.  Perhaps the jury is still out.

Addition

Nothing better than this video can speak to the impact of the computer and the Internet on teaching:

TEDxKC Michael Wesch

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[1] Barbara Weinstein is professor of history at NYU

[2] This might be a matter for debate.

[3] Five years on it is interesting to note the costly litigation that has ensued as a result of copyright issues and ownership of information.

[4] Daniel J Cohen is professor of history and director of research projects at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

[5] http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2007/0705/0705tec2.cfm

"Doing History in the Digital Age"