Readings for January 24, 2006
When I began reading for this week, I became interested in the many similarities in issues of digital history to that of museums. It is important to predict and understand your audiences for both, but it is impossible for a museum curator or a website developer to control who the audience will be in a free, open space. Trends in the two also seem to be similar, with the creation of spaces in which visitors can comment on the exhibits, both on the web and in the museum. This is an important aspect of interactivity because it does democratize the process, as people who were unable to write the history become able to influence the exhibitions or sites. This can become a problem, however. While working in the Whatever Happened to Polio? exhibit at the Smithsonian, I read many comments that people had written that disrespected the struggle of polio victims, and were very offensive. I found this same problem on the National Geographic website for Pearl Harbor. I think it is very important to create boundaries to prevent posting such comments, but this seems to be much easier to do in a museum than on a website, which may receive so many postings that it is no longer feasible to check each posting before it is visible to the public. The democratization of history in museums and on the web is a positive trend, but I wonder about the difficulties created by the limitations of the internet.
Another question came to mind as I read the first chapter of Digital History. It is interesting to consider the possibility of web-published articles within the field of history, but I wonder if these articles, if published outside of the realm of established historical journals, such as the JAH, could ever have and maintain the same respectability of the peer-reviewed journal articles.
I appreciate the value of discussion on the internet, such as that on the website of images of the French Revolution. One of the interesting discussions looked at “the power of images in establishing ‘historical memory.’ This discussion brought up common issues of visual and material culture. These include the struggle over how to use images- whether historians can take them as a literal documentation of history, or whether they are more of a documentation of the popular perceptions of the historical events. Despite this struggle, images are able to create a fuller understanding of history that textual documents cannot provide. The final statement in this discussion particularly intrigued me. This statement was that “Some historians have paid so little attention to images that when they include illustrations in their books they sometimes, in effect, misinform their readers. One might even say that they dispense false knowledge.” I was wondering what other people thought about this idea, and whether this is a problem that historians need to address by making further use of images.
January 23rd, 2006 at 8:57 pm
That is an important question and I guess the short answer is no. I think that there is too much of a stigma placed on articles not published in traditional journals or mediums of history. Not to say that articles published on the web should not gain the same respect as more traditional prose, but I am not sure that the history profession is ready to accept such changes.
January 23rd, 2006 at 11:04 pm
In terms of inappropriate material being posted on websites and in museum comment boxes, I think the positives of visitor interaction and response vastly out way the negatives. Sure it is sad that there will always be people who make insensitive comments. But, I found some of the comments on the National Geographic website were very moving and seemed to indicate that the person really appreciated being able to share a story.
I would agree that in many cases historians could better use images. You would think would be rather easy to do. For example, this image depicts…. which never actually occurred. Or something like that. I have no basis for this, but I would suspect that often images in textbooks are probably more often misleading than images in works by professional historians. Which may be a greater problem and why often times people have great misconceptions about history.
January 23rd, 2006 at 11:25 pm
I was actually wondering about the interactive discussion boards after I visited the Pearl Harbor website. Although I really wish people could grow up and show a little respect, I don’t know how you can really limit comments. As Craig mentioned, often the positives do outweigh the negatives.
January 24th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
The issue of respectability for web-published journals is a thorny one. I don’t believe it is the publishing medium (_Diplomatic History_, for instance, publishes both paper and digital versions of the journal) as much as a question of peer review. At the moment, many online journals do not have a peer review process (please correct if I am mistaken) and I am therefore less likely to turn to such journals for scholarly information.
January 15th, 2007 at 6:50 am
very best idea make rules time!…
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