behind AotW

a companion to Antietam on the Web

Author: Brian

  • 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.

  • Digital history iceberg, tip of

    There must be something in the air.

    With a range of ideas and dotted with many fine links and teasers, William J. Turkel of the great white north has posted, in a piece called Methodology for the Infinite Archive, comments on some of the challenges in the r/evolution that may be Digital History.

    “… So does this mean that we have to throw out everything we hold dear? Of course not. There’s still no substitute for being able to read closely and critically … Given the low average quality of online information and the read/write nature of the web, we need the work of archivists, librarians and curators more than ever.”

    “We also need some new skills. We need to be able to digitize and digitally archive existing sources; to create useful metadata; to find and interpret sources that were “born digital”; to expose repositories through APIs; to write programs that search, spider, scrape and mine; to create bots, agents and mechanical turks that interact seamlessly with one another and with human analysts.”

    Extracted here, these are questions without answers. But go see his post. The links in the questions push toward solutions.

    This is a complex topic, and I’m not doing it justice in all its facets. Fortunately, I don’t have to. I’m a minor node on the web of people like Professor Turkel who, collectively, probably can.

  • The future of ACW publishing

    Dimitri Rotov has posted a pre-manifesto on what American Civil War (ACW) historians might be doing in the realm of web publishing their work.

    Published history which is innovative and insightful does not necessarily sell. The popular swill based on the same tired cliches sells rather better. As a result, most people get their history as Hollywood-style whiz-bang narrative, and miss the richness in the [obscure] work of the better historians. This is not good for we, the people.

    If you’re one of those laboring in the dark, doing good history, but not selling any books, or daunted by the prognosis and not even attempting to publish, you might consider the web and related “New Media” as a better publishing platform.

    [I’ve grossly simplified here, skipped all sorts of subtle gems, and made unauthorized extensions on my own. Please read the original post.]

    Let’s see if I can support the practical value of what he’s saying.

    I don’t know what kind of sales the average academic historian’s book has (you can tell me), but the potential of the Internet probably has any of them beat.

    I am not an academic historian, but what I publish on AotW appears before a large number of eyeballs. I don’t write particularly well (tho’ some of our contributors do), we’re not doing Gettysburg, I’m not a “name”, for sure, and I don’t market much.

    Even with all that, Antietam on the Web, our site about the Maryland Campaign, gets about 3,500 visitors a week, 75% of them first-timers. They request and are served over 20,000 pages of content in that week*. These numbers are still growing.

    Imagine what a really popular ACW website does. Or what a name author could do. Wide is the reach of the web.

    My internet-friends at George Mason’s CNMH have reported that millions visit their digital history projects. Millions. And this is just (yawn) Experimental History.

    Want to be read?
    _________

    Weak attempt at an ACW sales case study

    Near the top of Amazon.com best-seller search results for “American Civil War” is John J. Dwyer’s The War Between the States: America’s Uncivil War (Bluebonnet, 2005). Sales rank Yesterday: #9,285 in Books. Copies sold through Amazon, per week (rule of thumb estimate) at that rank: 12. National sales? Library copies? Who knows.

    (blub: Finally, the true story of the War Between the States, in one captivating volume … has radically transformed the tedious, uninspiring textbook rendering of the Civil War into what it should be “America’s greatest epic” … etc)

    Or, for some contrast, De Anne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook‘s They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War (LSU Press, 2002). Amazon Rank Yesterday: #547,633 in Books Amazon sales in a week (est): 0.5

    (blurb: … [National Archives archivist] Blanton and Cook detail women soldiers in combat, on the march, in camp and in the hospital … Solid research by the authors …)

    ___________

    * Thanks to GoogleAnalytics.

  • Thanks Dimitri

    For giving this blog some good press on Saturday. “Alternatives to bottling” sounds like drinking beer directly from the keg, but I think I know what you mean.

    I’d post on the Bookshelf directly but you don’t entertain comments (turn ’em on!). Emails through the old cw-book-news to lycos route are bouncing because of a full inbox, apparently.

  • How long til New Media isn’t?

    In a post on Future of the Book, Ray Cha reported discussion among a group of history educators using New Media* to help teach and study American history. These are people who have pushed the envelope; some for many years. At least one of them has helped invent the field of Digital History.

    “Almost immediately, we found that their excellence in their historical scholarship was equally matched in their teaching. Often their introductions to new media came from their own research. Online and digital copies of historical documents radically changed the way they performed their scholarship. It then fueled the realization that these same tools afforded the opportunity for students to interact with primary documents in a new way which was closer to how historians work …”

    “… They noted an institutional tradition of the teacher as the authoritative interpreter in lecture-based teaching, which is challenged by active learning strategies. Further, we discussed the status (or lack of) of the group’s new media endeavors in both their scholarship and teaching. Depending upon their institution, using new media in their scholarship had varying degrees of importance in their tenure and compensation reviews from none to substantial. Quality of teaching had no influence in these reviews. Therefore, these projects were often done, not in lieu of, but in addition to their traditional publishing and academic professional requirements.”

    These themes confirm for me that New Media are not broadly accepted or well understood, suggesting they still need to be defined, refined, and carefully marketed before most historians will reap benefits. This was not the main point of the discussion they met to talk about born-digital textbooks, in particular but it tripped me to wondering aloud about it.

    Interactive video, cdroms, “educational software”, and other New Media technologies have been around for at least 20 years. The practical, universally accessible InterWeb has been delivering vast resources and global interconnections for more than ten years. Web tools and techniques provide amazing power to even slightly aware historians and educators. The raw material of history is online in great huge heaps. Yet I see very few large scale digital history projects by academics or other professional historians online. I gather classroom application is rarer still. (more…)