The authors of The Character, Value, and Management of Personal Paper Archives ask “what makes paper information valuable?” After the readings for this week, my gut reaction of “Because it’s paper” is a bit more sophisticated. Instead of being valuable in its own right, paper is a proven storage medium and will show changes. The Personal Paper Archives article was particularly appropriate reading this weekend as I attempted to sort through piles of paper (including many duplicate articles) and figure out a filing system for the chaos. In the terms of the article, I am a hybrid piler-filer — which I think means I am doomed to have a desk covered with half-way sorted piles for the rest of my life. Additionally, Case’s observations about the filing practices of historians were dead-on for my filing system. Did anyone else find the authors (sometimes obtuse) comments about filing systems and unread files relevant? At a bare minimum, it was comforting to read that my filing habits are pretty “normal” for the most part. (Or, I would be if my cat didn’t eat paper.)
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So, was anyone else really tempted to try a caffeine nap?
The Digital History chapter, “Becoming Digital,” offers a concise and (mostly) user-friendly discussion of the issues of digitization. I must admit I skimmed the more technical sections, but it’s good to know where I can find a basic overview if I should need it in the future.
The discussions of potential methodological shifts resulting from metadata, tagging, and most simply computer-readable text were particularly interesting to me. I’m fascinated by language and linguistic patters and keyword searches could simplify my research. Since my previous work quantitatively analyzed rhetorical and voting patterns, I had to physically read and track keywords in the Congressional Record, the Public Papers of the President, and major newspapers. Midway through an early version of this project, I tried using digital search engines, but found that they rarely turned up articles and quotes that I knew existed. Consequently, I still don’t trust keyword searches for my research.
However, I will be the first to admit that such searches are excellent exploratory tools. If nothing results from a particular keyword search, it is unlikely that the search engine missed a treasure trove of information. However, the chapter’s discussion of metadata pros and cons, while intriguing, gave me even more reasons not to trust keyword searches for my work. But, better understanding of the process has helped me to understand why and how keyword searches did not work for my earlier work and how they may work in future projects.
So, I’m curious. How much do you trust keyword searches? When do you use them in your research? If you’re interested in creating a digital archive, which metadata option(s) do you think will best fit your project. As a linguistically-inclined historian, I’d love to have both fully searchable typed texts AND page scans with exhaustiive keywords. But, I knew that’s too much to expect of small projects with limited resources. I’m still not sure what trade-off I’d make in their shoes.
For the final project, I’m planning to create a hyperlinked timeline of the Vietnam War — not a particularly exciting project, but if nothing else, it will be useful to me as I write my dissertation. Initially, I simply wanted to create a detailed and informative timeline that would answer basic questions about the war as well as place the various aspects of the war into a larger context. However, after our readings and discussions on collecting and searching, I’m thinking of adding to my basic project. Possibly by creating some sort of a disussion board or even a survey to collect war-related memories. Since my dissertation will explore forms of and reasons for popular support of the Vietnam War, a survey asking the site’s visitors to share their thoughts of the war and how they acted on those opinions could be very useful and interesting. (Fortunately, I have a very large family to seed the site and get things rolling, so hopefully I wouldn’t have to spend too much time advertising and outreach. If anyone has friends or relatives willing to tell their stories about the war years, please let me know.)
I also think it would be interesting to have multiple surveys for the site — one for people who lived through the war asking them how they felt about the conflict during the war and how they expressed those opinions and so on, one for people who learned about the war after the fact discussing how/where they learned about the war and how that experience did or did not shape their opinions about the war, and possibly yet another for either or both groups discussing how additional information/experiences changed their understanding of the war. In an ideal world, such stories would serve as a source for my dissertation and would complement my more traditional sources.
The readings and websites for this week highlight the contradictions of digital history. Online collecting and communication is increasingly important and necessary, but “historians usually have no training in such matters,” and instead must rely on outside programmers and general-use software for their research infrastructure. How problematic is this technical ignorance and subsequent dependence? Do you think more history programs will (or should) offer classes such as ours to ensure that new historians have the basic tools necessary for an increasingly digital world. How important is it “for historians to be able to create their own tools, rather than using the tools created by others?”
Additionally, the FAQ question, “How do I know this item is factual?” points to another (more pressing?) concern about online history. Whether or not new historians are trained to create their own collection systems is moot if information collecting via the internet is inaccurate and unreliable. The answer to the question concisely addresses a wide range of concerns without offering a concrete answer. The mutable response lends itself to the goals of the project, but how would you treat “erroneous, misleading, or dubious” information contributed to your own project? Would you vet donations before posting them to ensure that they fit within the parameters (ideological? methodological? factual?) of your project?
Interestingly, the readings and ideas for this week came together in a very concrete way for me while exploring The Video Store Project. The first thing I did when I went to the Video Store Project, was look for my favorite video store — Video Spectrum in Bowling Green, Ohio. I found two “stories” (for lack of a better word) about the store. They were accurate in a factual sense, but didn’t fully reflect the status of the store in Bowling Green. The customers were cultish, the employees every professor’s new best friend, and the selection was amazing. I’ve only seen one other video store organized by director (Cinema Americain in Takoma Park) and have yet to find a store that matches the selection of a video store staffed by popular culture and American culture studies majors. I wonder if the cold, almost clinical tone of the stories on the site resulted from the survey (instead of a free-form “talk about movies and the place you used to love to rent them”) format? (Or, maybe everyone who opted to contribute has very similar personality traits?)
I wonder what everyone else thinks about the issue of what I’m going to call “academic legitimacy.” Namely, the determination of whether or not a work (article, book, pamphlet, tract, website, essay, doodle) presenting itself as history is an acceptable source of information. The determination of the criteria of acceptability is problematic in and of itself, and certainly worth discussing. Should academic standards for “historical” websites apply to non-historians? How important are degrees and other professional qualifications in the digital presentation of history? The Digital History chapter touched on this issue, including:
- George Welling’s struggle to get his colleagues to accept his website “From Revolution to Reconstruction” as an “academic venture”
- the thorny question of whether online archives are “true” archives (see the JAH guidelines for clarification)
- the explicit division of online history-providers into “professional historians” and “enthusiasts”
Who are the “gatekeepers” of this historical legitimacy? Can someone without an advanced degree (or even a BA) attain historical legitimacy? Do degrees and credentials even matter when so few people think critically about the material presented in websites — or books, for that matter?
Also, how would you teach students to critically evaluate websites? Would “historical legitimacy” be a factor you would encourage students to address? What other aspects of a site, beyond the content/form/audience/new media areas discussed in the JAH guidelines, would you ask your students to examine. Would you even direct students to the JAH guidelines? Or would you create your own rubric for “acceptable” and “legitimate” websites?
Lastly, how important is the intended audience when evaluating the legitimacy of a website? The JAH guidelines recognize that websites’ effectiveness depends on their accessability and that content must be tailored to the audience. Should a historical website attempt to link different communities, defined by Agre as “people who share a certain institutional location,” into one audience? Or, should each community have its own set of websites? Also, if a number of communities constitute an audience for a particular website, does that audience become a community itself?