Digital Scholarship

In the spirit of full disclosure I should state that I am very skeptical that the Web has or will be able to provide a fundamentally different understanding of history than that of a book or journal. As a result, I must admit that I initially read Hearsay of the Sun and From Hogan's Alley (not to mention Hamlet on the Holodeck) with a pretty jaundiced eye, feeling vindicated every time I came upon an example of scholarship on either website that could have been just as easily presented in a print medium. However, such a viewpoint is not productive so I re-read (tellingly, I printed out all material) and re-browsed each website with a more open (hopefully) mind.

Regardless of one’s views of the impact of technology on digital scholarship, each website should be judged by 1) the level of scholarship and 2) the use of the web’s unique abilities to enhance historical understanding. The criteria to assess the level of scholarship is completely familiar to students of history regardless of medium, “solid research, crisp analysis, interdisciplinarity, and clear prose.” (Ref. Roy Rosenzweig, Crashing the System?: Hypertext and Scholarship on American Culture, Forum on Hypertext Scholarship, AQ as Web-Zine: Responses to AQ's Experimental Online Issue American Quarterly). The basis for assessing each website’s use of the web’s unique potentials is, of course, still in flux, and largely the point of this assignment. However, I do not think that each can be examined separately. In particular, I believe that the very process of creating the structure of a hypertext essay can influence the structure and flow of the historical argument. This idea I believe is evidenced in Thomas Thurston’s web essay, Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity, and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century American Courts. The essay’s subject is narrowly about the changing legal views and use of photographs as evidence in 19th Century American courts and broadly about the changing nature of identity in American society at that time. To explore these issues, Thurston writes four linked essays that incorporate traditional legal history and literary analysis. Each essay is meant to stand alone but is also linked to the others to arrive at a larger more nuanced argument. However, the drawback of this approach is that many exact phrases or close paraphrases are used in different essays. (To be fair, the repetitions all regard the main theme of the essay.) It would seem that the need to make each essay stand on its own required the repetitions of certain phrases. Nevertheless, if one prints out all of the essays and reads them as one document, the repetition is distracting and detracts from the scholarship of the essay.

Thurston’s numbering of the paragraphs also took a little getting used to. Even though I knew that each paragraph was numbered simply for ease of citation to negate the effects of different monitor sizes, it was hard for me to get used to. While reading the essay, often I unconsciously prepared myself to begin a new subject when I switched from one numbered paragraph to the next. However, in most cases it was simply a new paragraph.

While I had these quibbles about Thurston’s otherwise good scholarship, the true benefit of his web essay was the inclusion of so many source materials. The Hearsay of the Sun website provides hyperlinks to 42 sources, including legal decisions, articles, and books excerpts. This saves an interested reader considerable time in tracking down source material. However, one problem with the inclusion of so many hyperlinks is that it is very difficult for the reader to quickly ensure that they have visited every page and link offered on the website. In contrast, with a book or journal a read has all information provided by the author on hand. Similarly, Thurston provides approximately 50 individual images throughout his essay. However, one must spent an inordinate amount of time browsing each page to see all 50 images. In contrast, a book can provide 50 photographs either interspersed with text or in a separate section, which is accessible in seconds. Nevertheless, few scholarly works include full text copies of source material, either in the text or in an appendix. And in many cases the inclusion of 50 images may be cost prohibitive. The great value of the web is that it is now possible to provide reams of source material, either text or visual, conveniently. Thurston’s essay does this well.

The web’s ability to provide large amounts of detailed visual information cheaply and conveniently is highlighted to an even greater degree on David Westbrook’s From Hogan's Alley to Coconino County: Four Narratives of the Early Comic Strip. Because of the economical cost of information storage, Westbrook is able to provide 53 richly detailed cartoons of the Yellow Kid. This is vastly more than a scholarly work on cartoons in a traditional print medium could afford to include. However, one drawback is that the clarity on the web is not ideal. For instance, in strip “The Yellow Kid's New Phonograph Clock” I was not able to read the writing on the Yellow Kid’s night shirt in the final frame that provided the punch line to the strip. I have seen a print copy (expensive) of the Yellow Kid comic strip and the smallest detail can be discerned. Thus, while the Web can provide enhanced quantity it is not necessarily the greatest medium for quality.

Westbrook puts great effort into the use of hypertext links in his essays and within each comic strip. While he largely succeeds there are a few small glitches. For instance, when you go to the Business of the Strips section it automatically opens a second window that shows the patent application for the Yellow Kid. However, the application image is the third in the Business of the Strips section well down the page. It is not apparent to the first time viewer why the first illustration, “The Pirates Grab a Few Goats” does not come up. This is a small quibble because it is easy to click on the “Goats” thumbnail to access the larger, interactive image. With regard to each interactive image it takes a few attempts to realize that you can turn off captions by clicking a second time on the hypertext link about the comic strip. The first time I tried the captions I opened them all without knowing how to close them. This created crowding and some of the text commentaries overlapped each other.

Westbrook, like Thurston, employs a linked essay structure to discuss his topic. As a result, his essay also suffers from less than ideal narrative flow. For instance, The Business of the Strips essay is the topmost of the three essays and, therefore, the most natural choice to be read first. However, the first line of this essay (presumably the first words read by most visitors to this site) is: “In other threads of this essay…” Thus Westbrook opens his argument (if this is the first link the reader goes to) with a reference other works that made me abruptly halt. I understand that this is on purpose and is meant to stimulate the desire to read the other essays. And it is also a recognition that many visitors to the site will look at the other articles first. Nevertheless, I find the acknowledgement of other threads of an argument in the first line of an essay as distracting. I do not believe that the author of a scholarly book would begin Chapter 1 with the line: “In Chapter 7 I discuss the effects…..”

I understand that the Web’s capabilities have intrigued many budding and established scholars with the possibility of alternate viewpoints and related side stories. However, such explorations have also been done successfully in traditional print (see, for example Simon Schama’s, Dead Certainties (1992), or to a lesser degree, John Demos’, Unredeemed Captive (1994).

In conclusion, I remain pessimistic about the Web’s ability to do something fundamentally different for historical scholarship. I believe it will be a long time (if ever) before there is a change to David Staley’s assessment that “despite the apparently revolutionary nature of the tool, most historians use computers conservatively: to laterally transfer textual culture from paper to screen.” Staley’s example of the Diagram of Japan, 1500-1650 is a good example of the continual need for text. I studied the diagram before I read Staley’s explanation and tried to determine (unsuccessfully) what it meant. However, Staley’s description of the diagram revealed items that were not readily apparent to me. Without the benefit of explanatory text I would not have come away with all that William McNeill intended. Even after reading Staley’s description of the author’s intent, the diagram did automatically convey that intent to me. For instance, the many arrows coming from the village in the second panel initially were confusing and did not impart the idea of trade with the towns and a protective agreement with samurai. Even after reading that this was the intent of the arrows, I did not feel that it unequivocally conveyed such a message. This belies the idea that a visualization standing alone can be comprehensive. The complexity of events and ideas, the meat and potatoes of historical scholarship, requires the use of text for explication. Staley agrees with this and says that visualization can be used to supplement, rather than supplant, the written word. It is this sentiment, I believe, that summarizes my assessment of digital scholarship: historical scholarship will always be a predominantly textual endeavor, but technology may offer from time to time tools that supplement historical understanding.