The Virtual Past

(First, sorry this is late guys—we’ll blame it on the 48 hour post-comp bug.)

So…moving on…

It is of constant fascination to me just how many people instantly equate history and technology as incompatable….but as the articles for this week indicates history and technology have walked arm in arm for a long time.

In thinking about the relationship between history and the internet I have a few questions to discuss.

First is this idea of a community and how the internet and technology develop and expand particularly the historical community. What comes to mind instantly (and is discussed somewhat in Roy Rozenswieg’s chapters) are the immense arrays of listserve hosted by H-Net. One of the things I often find wanting in certain public arenas is the lack of debate allowed between differing points of view.To some extent H-net’s forums allow historians from all across the world to come together and discuss projects, ask questions, and float new ideas—sometimes becoming more then merely an online discussion. Take the idea of the “New New Political History” that (and some of us heard about this in Colloq I last semester) started out on H-SHEAR the listserve for the Early American Republic. It’s hypothesis argues that the typcial politcal history is being subsumed by a new new political history that looks at political culture and cultural politics…these historians look at things like election day parades, and fetes (I’m thinking of David Walstreicher’s book on Nationalism in the Early Republic) and how these contributed to framing this new nation. (For reference, the new politcal history that came before transformed a generation of history examining big men to looking at political parties and voter statistics). Well, this discussion on H-SHEAR pushed the historians on the list into a wider discussion that resulted in papers and later a book discussing the new trend, and whether it is actually a new trend at all.

Anyway, My point is that online communities allow historians that are seperated by geographical limitations to easily transfer ideas to a large group of collegues without the need of a physical face-to face conference.

Secondly, in the public history realm, as is exhibited by the websites that we visited there is growing attention to the presentation of history in exhibitions and other designs. There is something to be said about the impermanence of exhibitions that go up for a variable time period from two weeks, a few months, to a few years. While some museums like the National Museum of American History have exhibitions that go up for decades sometimes the only way that visitors from far away are able to experience them is through the internet. This is the interesting thing about the web—in that it appears more permenant than a phsyical exhibition with a limited time span, but at the same time it is more transcendent and more ephemeral then seeing and almost touching physical objects. Exhbitions on the web provide an outlet of preservation that would not have existed prior to the advent of the internet, and also allows older sites to be updated and revised faster than a physical exhbition. For example (and sorry to use the National Museum of American History again) check out

“A More Perfect Union”

http://americanhistory.si.edu/perfectunion/experience/index.html

“Within these Walls”

http://americanhistory.si.edu/house/

So my questions for you are—how much content is too much content? Do we really think visitors or historians actually pay attention to these larger discussions or actually take the time to peruse the whole website? What are the advantages/disadvantages to having websites that are easily editable? And also—and I speak of Wikipedia in particular—how confident are we that that sort of communal fact construction is entirely accurate? Do online communities like that have less authority than one hosted by a university or organization?

Let me know what you think

This entry was posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2006 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Weekly Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.