Digital Scholarship

Digital technologies allow historians a variety of approaches to creating history—all equally valid, if the theory behind their approaches is explained clearly. "Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger" by Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz and "Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity, and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century American Courts" by Thomas Thurston take different approaches to digital scholarship, and both fulfill some of the “promises” of digital scholarship while simultaneously succumbing to some of its pitfalls.

Krasniewicz and Blitz “see hypertext via the Web as an effort to map and articulate a dream-like territory where there can be radical shifts in context, unusual juxtapositions of content, sudden exits and entrances, the elimination of standard time references and physics, and creative elaborations on themes and theories.” Their site reflects this theory. There is no clear beginning or ending, and the content (and even the site map) is jumbled and interwoven. Links are broken, other links seem pointless. And in the end, Though they begin to admit this downfall, (“What we were supposing was, in other words, that the personal would not somehow impinge upon the work at hand. And yet, the work at hand was also, increasingly, the work we were doing with our hands …”) but never fully come clear (or at least not in a place that I could find.) Rather than a visualization of the past, Krasniewicz and Blitz offer a visualization of their creative process. In their (over)excitement about the possibilities of hypertext, they loose ole’ Arnie, and any argument they may be trying to make about him, along the way.

Thurston’s project mimics print scholarship, and is more digestible and consumable immediately than is Krasniewicz and Blitz’s project. Thurston lays out an easily navigable site composed of four chapters charting the course of the reception of photography by the legal system, reflected primarily in the legal press. For the discipline of history especially, digital scholarship can better show how historians do their work. The evidence becomes more than necessary, but banal, supporting detail, and can take a more central role in the project itself. Thurston allows his evidence to take as central a role as his argument. But in doing so, Thurston’s project becomes what David Staley would deem a “conservative” use of the “revolutionary nature” of the computer. Thurston “laterally transfer[s] textual culture from paper to screen.”

Both projects in hypertext form are stronger pieces than either could have been on the printed page. Both are as useful and rigorous as prose accounts, though in the case of Krasniewicz and Blitz, rigorous in a very different way. Common to both projects is that they are immediately self-reflexive, and more personal than print scholarship. Though readers do not necessarily have to begin with the explanation of the site, it exists nonetheless. There is a clear, visible rationale for the sites’ content, that is often painfully lacking in print scholarship. Viewers are given the ability to actually see and, sometimes, manipulate for themselves, the sources that the historian used to weave her argument. Additionally, even if interactivity is not built into the site itself, hypertext scholarship is a much more interactive medium by nature. They necessitate reader (rather, viewer) interactivity. While examining a site, viewers can bookmark its links, or copy its images and text onto my computer, and arrange and analyze all of this information immediately and in any way they see fit. They are more active readers of digital scholarship than of print materials—they’re more engaged, and consume and remember more of the materials presented.

Finally, and as a slight side note, just as students are taught to read print articles (skim, look to paragraph headings, jump to the conclusion first) in schools, if digital scholarship is to fulfill its promises, students must be taught how to read hypertext scholarship on the web—encouraged to feel lost, to devise creative methods for navigation and maintain a foot-hold for navigation, to develop Staley’s “visual habits of mind.”