neylon

I found the discussion of collecting history online interesting.  While there are issues, as we saw with the National Geographic website for Pearl Harbor, the benefits of this method of collection are clear.  There will be a few “bad” responses, but I found it encouraging that they have found that most people answer honestly.  I think that this method is just as valid as that of oral history, as long as the historian keeps the same possible problems in mind for online history as for oral history.  When we use personal narratives about an event that occurred a long time ago, the information from the narrative must be taken with a grain of salt, because you cannot be sure how accurate the subjects’ memories are going to be.  Broad, sweeping questioning may be the best way to get as much information as possible when memories might not be that great anymore, and because some people see specific questions as a sort of test and attempt to provide the answer they think the researcher is looking for.  However, general questioning is not always enough; follow-ups after someone answers an online survey would help to get more details when necessary.  I think it would be great if researchers had the time to follow up on many of the stories gathered online, because people usually do have more to say that could be valuable.

My main question about gathering information online is how to handle responses that may be outside the scope of the research.  For example, some people responded to the video store project with stories of working for a store after the date range.  Should a researcher who runs into this issue discard the information, or incorporate it into the work in some way?  Do you think there is a sort of ethical dilemma in discarding this information?

The September 11 Digital Archive’s use of qualitative analysis in examining the submissions on the site was a way of using online history I had not considered.  The analysis showed the true ways that the country reacted to the events of that day.  The findings that nationalism was not the most common immediate response to September 11, but that the responses were much more personal, were very telling of how people view their lives, and more importantly to historians, their history.  People are far more likely to remember things in personal terms, because as important as a person’s country may be to him/her, it is his/her personal life that is most important.  Everyone connects to the broader, national picture, but mostly through the personal ties and experiences.

As for the searching, spidering, and scraping, I was with the author up until he began to talk about spidering.  I understand what he was getting at, but I don’t think I could fully comprehend it with my nonexistent knowledge of programming.

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.