Challenges of Digital Scholarship--Two Websites

The Hearsay of the Sun
http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/photos/index.htm

Imaging the French Revolution
http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/imaging/home.html

These scholarly websites, one a work in progress, explore different approaches to utilizing the special characteristics and opportunities offered by “history on the web.” One of the goals of “The Evidence of the Sun,” a study of how early photography was viewed as legal evidence, is to explore how hypertext could be applied to the organization and interpretation of a body of case law, itself a collection of relatively discrete elements which do not form a narrative per se, yet collectively impact each new case. “Imaging the French Revolution” seeks to both present to a wider audience current interpretations of visual images as historical evidence and be a “forum” for a more collective, interactive mode of scholarship.

“The Hearsay of the Sun” centers around a series of linked essays on various aspects of photography and the law in 19th century America. Each essay is supplemented with an illustration and an extensive “notes” section with links to many of the texts cited in the footnotes. These sections and the images, and the footnotes, occupy separate frames from the essay text. The author, Thomas Thurston, discusses how the scientific, legal and philosophical/cultural issues surrounding how photography is defined—as art, as documentation, as a commodity—determined how it was received in courts of law. The author also considers how these same questions of the objectivity of photography and the value of images affected issues of social and racial identity in 19th century America.

Thurston notes that the challenge photography posed was not really that it was a new technology, but that it broke the boundaries of “primary” and “hearsay” evidence as they had been drawn in Anglo-American common law for centuries. As such it was the forerunner of all the new scientific, forensic evidence forms from fingerprinting to DNA analysis that the law continues to grapple with. The essays center on querying how the era’s conventions regarding identity, appearance and truth were reflected in the courts’ response to this challenge.

The three-frame design is a bit cumbersome, but it does seem to facilitate the “hypertextuality” the author seeks by enabling the reader to readily explore the lengthy extracts of literature and legal commentary that would, in a printed work, be only references in the notes unlikely to be pursued by most readers. I enjoyed the extracts from Twain and Hawthorne, and these rambles down a few “byways” of fiction illuminate the legal culture’s underpinnings in a way really impossible in the “old” media conventions of texts and notes. Since social identity could be a matter for law enforcement, photography—as an objective record of external appearances—could be used to challenge the systems of classification which took “blood,” ancestry and religious worldviews into account. Ultimately it could not supplant them in American culture or law, according to Thurston. Nevertheless in the extract from “Pudd’nhead Wilson” the socially shape-shifting villain is unmasked by a new forensic science—fingerprinting—not by the traditional concepts of testimony. I am not sure if this supports the author’s points.

Like the Hearsay of the Sun, Imaging the French Revolution seeks to present history on the web in a way that breaks through the limits, both physical and conceptual, of printed matter. Also centered around linked essays, the emphasis here is not on hypertextuality but on images as evidence of the past and the potentialities of the collaborative and evolving processes facilitated by the internet, instead of the equally traditional individual authorship of monographs.

The “Discussion” section opens up for the visitor some of the process of development, collaboration, “feedback” and differing interpretations that underlies the text, likewise offering something traditional media does poorly or not at all. The essays provide an accessible and multifacted discussion of the many aspects of images and contemporary history writing. The design is handsome and functional, my only quibble is that while the images can be viewed separately with good size and fine detail with the “image tool,” the smaller versions embedded with the text sometimes are not large enough to adequately view the rich iconography described in the text.