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)
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*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.

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.

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?
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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 …)

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* Thanks to GoogleAnalytics.

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…)