Clio Wired (History 696)

The promise of digital scholarship should then be: to encompass all that is scholarship while also being digital. In other words, the “promise” of digital scholarship is to extend the investigation beyond the confines of the margins of the book and to add something significant to the story that could not be achieved on paper.

I examined Will Thomas’ and Edward Ayers’ “The Difference Slavery Made” and Lynn Hunt’s and Jack Censer’s “Imaging the French Revolution” in order to determine whether their scholarly essay is better in an electronic environment than it would be on paper and if they took advantage of the digital medium to try something “new”—in other words, whether or not they fulfilled the “promise of digital scholarship.”

"The Differences Slavery Made" by Will Thomas and Edward Ayers is "an applied experiment in digital scholarship." Using digital media, Thomas and Ayers wanted “to give readers full access to a scholarly argument, the historiography about it, and the evidence for it.”

BORing...

Their scholarly argument explores the paradox of slavery: the profound difference slavery made is widely recognized, yet studies show that “slavery did little to create differences between North and South in voting patterns, wealth distributions, occupation levels, and other measurable indices.” The “test-bed” for their article comes from the Valley of the Shadow Project, which is based on a detailed examination of the same two counties--one in Virginia and one in Pennsylvania--that had almost everything in common but slavery.

Published in the AHR—a peer-reviewed, public journal—“The Differences Slavery Made” is clearly scholarship… but is it good digital scholarship? Initially I was convinced that Thomas and Ayers brought nothing new to the table in terms of new media. While the article was talking about Vannevar Bush and thinking in webs, it seemed like they just hit “save as webpage” in Microsoft Word and slapped it up on the internet. I guess I was hoping for more than the text version of the Valley of the Shadow. When it comes to reading online, I string with George Bush: “One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures." I’m not trying to just read online.

Fantastic pictures.

But once I got past my design snobbery, I realized that “The Differences Slavery Made” definitely does take steps to take advantage of its digital medium: the inclusion of evidence and methods used, as well as subject historiography is something that is not impossible in print, but it is rarely—if ever—done. Thomas’ and Ayers’ inclusion of research materials is not, in this case, more beneficial to the author than the reader, as Smulyan would put it: they do not include the materials in an attempt to exempt themselves from “making decisions on the most important materials to present” (Smulyan). Rather, the materials are included in an attempt present the “fundamental components of professional scholarship-evidence [and] engagement with prior scholarship” (Thomas and Ayers) in a new way.

As Janet Murray points out, “literary [print] works are hypertextual in their allusions to one another,” but “The Differences Slavery Made” is hypertextual in that a citation within the text provides you with a link that includes the bibliographic information as well as an excerpt from that source and its relation to the information in the text. Thomas and Ayers put regular footnotes to shame.

The digital part of the essay is the “Tools” section, which includes a full-text search function, a reading record that informs you what areas of the article you have and haven't seen, a citation locater, and the ability to print a PDF formatted version of the article (hmm… maybe they did just “save as webpage.”)

While not blazing any new trails in terms of design and flashiness, “The Differences Slavery Made” does fulfill the promise of digital scholarship: it breaks away from the book, doing things online that can’t be done on paper.

In terms of design, the flashier of the two sites “Imaging the French Revolution,” is definitely more my (and George Bush’s) kind of website—lots of fantastic pictures. But I think they actually went a bit too far with the bling: the little flash intro/menu takes too long to load and to play out for no good reason.

Stop Loading!

Another “experiment in digital scholarship,” “Imaging the French Revolution” is organized in three sections: Essays (seven scholars analyze forty-two images of crowds and crowd violence in the French Revolution), Discussion (comments from an on-line forum that took place during the summer of 2003) and Images (allows readers to examine, magnify, compare and manipulate the 42 images).

I would say that 2/3 of the project fulfills the promise of digital scholarship: the discussion and the images.

A real-time forum is something that is obviously impossible to do in a book (although I’ll admit, now the site only has the archive of the discussion, which would be possible to replicate in print). The opportunity to give feedback and toss around ideas is the crux of an online community and a different form of communication. Interestingly, the discussion focuses not only on the site itself, but also on the impact of digital media on scholarship… Perhaps keeping an ongoing message board (a la the Blackout Project site) would be a way for this section to stay one-up on print (although you do have to watch out for the spam).

While this site does give readers the opportunity to “consult a wider range of images than are usually available in a print format,” this does not good digital scholarship make. What fulfills the DS promise is the “Image Tool,” which allows you to manipulate images and even to compare them by overlaying the images and making one transparent. Quantity and access can be done in a book; manipulation and movement cannot.

Unfortunately, the “meat” of the project—the Essays—do not break free from their print constraints. Though the essays provide the scholars’ analyses of the depiction of the Revolutionary crowd, I was let down with the lack of IMAGES in them. The images included in the text are few and far between, and they are thumbnail-sized—clicking on them brings up a (somewhat) larger image in a pop-up window. Otherwise, you have to click on the link: "[Images 1, 8, 25 and 26]" to see the images pop up.

I was really disappointed by this section because I felt like so much more could have been done to integrate the text and the images. The site is called “IMAGING the French Revolution,” yet the emphasis is on text—the “Essays” are always listed first in the navigation menu… it’s the section that you start with. It seems that the authors fall into the category that David Staley refers to when he says, “many historians view images as intrinsically inferior to words.”

It seems to me that there could have been a different (read: non-texual) way to fully explore the themes and questions coming from these images—maybe a (large) map of each image with pop-up text to point out certain symbols, maybe a zoom function that works with the text to examine certain portions closer… I don’t know what exactly, but something.

I actually feel like these essays would have been better presented in print format—with large images on accompanying pages… that actually gives you more “instant access” than clicking on "[Images 1, 8, 25 and 26]" to get the little pop-up window.

If the authors could just pry those last couple fingers off of the prose ledge, “Imaging the French Revolution” could work toward fulfilling the promise of digital scholarship… but as for now, it’s still hanging in there.

And so, to sum up, “The Differences Slavery Made and “Imaging the French Revolution”: Original? check; Based on research? check; peer reviewed? check; public? check plus. Encompasses digital audio, digital video, the World Wide Web and other technologies that can be used to create, refer to and distribute digital "content"? eh, not quite there yet… but at least we know where to go from here.