behind AotW

a companion to Antietam on the Web

Year: 2006

  • Problems in Digital History (Intro)

    Dr Dick Hamming
    If you don’t work on important problems, it’s not likely that you’ll do important work
    –R. W. Hamming

    William Turkel has taken Dr Dick Hamming’s challenge*, elegantly condensed by Paul Graham as

    What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?

    and begun to apply it to his view of the field of history. Dr Turkel asserts that “questions raised by digital history are some of the most important that we [historians] face”.

    I don’t know enough to say that these are the most important questions in the field of History, but they’re of keen interest to me. I thought I’d use the ‘thinking out loud’ mode of this blog and walk through some of these questions from my own perspective.

    But I need to look at this methodically–I’m not the intuitive type. I propose to work through the following steps:

    1. Scope: define Digital History (DH), what it is and what it isn’t;
    2. Goals: specify the purpose for DH – what do we expect to be able to do in or with it;
    3. Requirements: identify the environmental, technical and other prerequisites for DH to achieve the goals;
    4. Obstacles: identify the apparent roadblocks to the goals;
    5. Best Practices: survey existing or planned DH strategies and approaches, evaluate their potential and effectiveness, and look for gaps and lessons-learned;
    6. Targets: select specific problems (meeting requirements, overcoming obstacles) for personal attack based on my skills and interest;
    7. Strategy: build a plan to focus efforts on the targets and produce results
    8. Feedback: execute the strategy, periodically review steps 1-6 against results, and revise the Plan accordingly.

    I’ll explore each of these stages in further posts here. Just now, though, I should be finishing another map, hacking through the backyard jungle, working out, washing the dog …

    Next: Problems in Digital History 1 (scope)
    ______________

    *See a 1986 Hamming presentation containing the “challenging” question paraphrased here. Hamming photo above from the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews.

  • Fishel: Secret War for the Union

    As mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been reading Edwin C. Fishel’s The Secret War for the Union : The Untold Story of Military Intelligence in the Civil War (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). In particular, I was hoping to gain some insight into how General McClellan arrived at the strength figures he used for General Lee’s forces in Maryland in 1862.

    Fishel book cover

    I’m about halfway through, just past The Battle, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to finish.

    This is one dry read. You’ve got to be truly dedicated to slog through it. It is a book which could have used a strong editor. I’d say 1/2 to 2/3 of the text is redundant or otherwise unnecessary. There is little structure – the book has been one seemingly endless, chronological string of anectodes and factoids.

    There are gems of new and important discovery, but they play hard-to-get. I’m probably going to miss many by not staying to the end.

    That aside, how did McClellan come to a grossly inflated figure for the size of the army facing his at Sharpsburg?

    All by himself. (more…)

  • Opening new territory to exploration

    For some time now, maybe the last year or two, I’ve felt too closely focused on the events of one day, 17th September 1862. Not that there isn’t a lifetime’s work yet to be done, or that I’ve done much more than nibble at it, but obviously the Battle of Antietam didn’t spontaneously erupt out of the ground. It is surrounded on all sides – in time, geography, and event – by an ocean of context.

    I’ve not entirely ignored the ocean, but haven’t paid it the attention it probably deserves.

    So I’ve jumped out of the comfortable boat (a dingy, in this analogy) into the water. I’m not going too far really, only expanding the scope of my research and the website to include the duration of the Maryland Campaign. The period of roughly 4 through 20 September.

    I have some reservations.

    I worry that AotW will become wider than deep, a trait that would reduce it’s value. There are plenty of survey and CliffNotes versions of history online already. Collection of information in detail beyond the standard and the obvious is my goal at AotW.

    I worry also that by expanding the scope, I’m diluting the effort. There’s so much yet to learn and document about the battle, and only so many hours (years) in which to do it.

    I’ll just have to work with this for a while and see how it goes.

    McClelln enters Frederick City

    My first new project is mapping the motion of the military units on the Campaign. To do this, I’m building a new series of theater-scale maps, one per day. The physical context to Antietam.

    As I have been plotting units, though, I’m finding there are far more of them than I’d read of previously, and the neat orders of battle with which I’m familiar are of less and less help. Local militia, orphaned cavalry detachments, signalmen, state troops; not to mention rear-area logistics, supply, and communications points.

    New and exciting territory, but I may have bitten off more than I can chew.

  • TV feeds the Web

    I was interested to see a large spike in the number of visitors to AotW between about 6 and 9pm eastern time yesterday. Not too surprising, I guess. This coincides roughly with the History Channel Antietam film airing.

    We typically only see about 200 people all day on a Sunday. Yesterday we got 1,100.

    AotW stat graph, GoogleAnalytics

    The majority of these people came from Google searches. Only 3 were referred from the link to us on the HC website about the film series. What does this say about how (these) people use the web?

    I can guess that many Googled “antietam” before the TV show to get some background on the battle, and that’s how they found us. I’m inclined to use Google that way myself: like a giant, ever-ready reference source.

    How about you?

    [I know our visitor stats aren’t terribly impressive. It’s the delta that jumps out here.]

  • World Premiere at Antietam

    My wife and I attended the World Premiere of the History Channel‘s Antietam last night at the Park Visitor Center. If you get the History Channel, you do want to see this show when it is broadcast this evening at 9/8c. It is very nicely done.

    The premiere, a day in advance of the broadcast, was sponsored by the H-WCC&VB and the WMIA – the Antietam Partner folks. Thanks very much to Kurt Redenbo of the WMIA for the invitation. I can’t think of a better place to have seen the film than at the battlefield, with about 60 other guests.

    The film was introduced by brief remarks from historical consultant and talking head Dennis Frye (Harpers Ferry NHP) and director Michael Epstein. Mr Epstein came across very well, and was careful to credit his whole team for the film. He was presented with congratulations and lauditory certificates from Governor Ehrlich and the State Film Board by the Visitor Bureau chief Tom Riford [group picture]. After the lovefest, the film was screened.

    sample from film

    First and foremost, the photographic effects are stunning. All of the battle sequences were shot with still cameras and made to look like glass-plate collodion photographs of Alexander Gardner – motion being created by “flipping” from still to still. Moving in and out of period photographs, Epstein has also simulated the popular 19th century stereographic effect. Early 3-D. These techniques are extremely effective in keeping us in the period. They are the claim to fame of this film. I’d have been happy to sit thorough an hour of two of them alone.

    The usual documentary talking heads, however, provide the sound bites the TV audience will need to tie the story together. These were Frye, historians James Robertson (Va Tech), Gary Gallagher (UVa), Thavolia Glymph (Duke), David Blight (Yale), and Allen Guelzo (Gettysburg College), along with novelist Richard Croker. I heard somewhere that they competed during production for the pithiest phrases, bidding for more airtime. May not be true, but it sounded like it on a few occasions.

    The story, necessarily brief to fit the TV time slot, breaks no ground historically. An overview for the newcomer, it ignores significant details of the campaign. Mr Epstein answered a question about this – specific to a Gary Gallagher statement that McClellan just sat, waiting, on September 15th and 16th, skipping past the preceding action on South Mountain – by explaining his time and technical limits, and that he made decisions about what to include based on the fundamantal point he wanted to make: that the Emancipation Proclamation and what it meant to American History was the reason Antietam was one of the HC’s 10 days. He reserved most of his time budget for the action at Antietam and the EP.

    This is not deep, sophisticated history, this is television. I am not criticizing. TV does things no other media can. At a brief reception after the film, I heard conversation suggesting that public interest in the battle is rising generally, and that this film may have large impact. I hope that’s true.

    After the screening, it was my pleasure to chat in person with internet-friends Tom Clemens and Stephen Recker. These guys are among those doing the very best work on the battle, largely unseen.