Archive for the ‘Historical Culture’ Category

« Older Entries

#523 – Occupy Downton

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

relating to class relations.

Recent articles (here and here) about the British ITV series Downton Abbey (now playing in the United States on PBS) have noticed its odd incongruencies (and its tantalizing intersections) with the Occupy movement in the United States and around the world. These articles point out that the middle classes are, at first glance, largely missing from Downton Abbey. The show seems to be a classic story of British upstairs-downstairs, of lords and their servants and the ceilings and floors between them. Why then, Irin Carmon asks on Salon, has the program struck a chord with American “liberals” in the upper middle class at precisely the moment when many are largely supportive of (or participating in) a movement against the contemporary aristocracy of monied elites?

It’s a valid observation to make until one thinks about how the figures of Matthew Crawley and his mother are central to the show. This middle-class lawyer and his social reformist mother place the middle-class front and center. However, the way they do so is telling, particularly for the American viewing audience.

What the articles largely miss is that Crawley is upwardly mobile in the most melodramatic of ways—he wakes up one day and discovers that he is next in line to become an Earl. What this sudden deux ex machina does in the American viewing context is to link his middle-class identity at once downwards and upwards. On the one hand, his story is the dream that links the middle class to those below them: anyone might win the lottery, might suddenly strike it rich, might wake up to find themselves a lord or a lady. On the other hand, the Crawleys are a symbolic link of the middle-class to elite power: they are, after all, distantly related to the Granthams.

This shadow life of class relations, stirred up and in flux, is shot through Downtown Abbey, from the plotline of Lady Sybil and Branson the chauffeur to the figure of Sir Richard Carlisle to the downstairs love story of Anna and Mr. Bates. In fact, it is the main concern of the show. The force driving this melodrama is not a nostalgia for feudalism but precisely that the old order of lords, servants, and vassals is under pressure from the forces of modernity.

The sense of the last days of an epoch and its crumbling system echoes contemporary times, when the hierarchies of rich and poor are increasingly coming under pressure. Downton Abbey displaces and resolves these modern tensions by reasserting the paternalistic commitments between the elite and their underlings. Lord Grantham and even his mother, the prim and proper Dowager Countess Grantham, always eventually adjust to the new realities of class in their historical moment. Sometimes they even lead the way.

The emphasis, even celebration, of paternalistic empathy, I would argue, is exactly what many in the American liberal middle classes feel is missing in the current system of American neoliberal capitalism. Many middle-class Americans do not begrudge the rich their riches, but they do long for a sense of reciprocity. They would live gladly with hierarchy within certain codes of the common good.

Others are beginning to doubt even this ideology. The specter haunting Downton Abbey‘s vision of reciprocity reestablished between the one percent and the ninety-nine is the question of whether the twenty-first century demands a new conceptualization of the very relationship between reciprocity and equality. Which is to say that gnawing at the edge of our mass-produced screens and mass-consumed pleasures that give us the melodrama of Downton Abbey is something more disconcerting: the outright drama of contemporary democratic social relations.

For the most part, the show resolves comically into a world of noble aristocrats and aspiring serfs in harmonious social progress. The program’s order is disturbed only to be reestablished anew. It provides a vision of society in which paternalistic reciprocity works. Perhaps this is, at some deep level, what many Americans long to bring to the United States.

But this comic resolution has a tragic undercurrent, for it marks the abandonment of the radical dream of American democracy, which was supposed to replace the English and European structures of hierarchical society with a world in which all were created equal, in which everyone acquired nobility by deed rather than birth. (Admittedly, this is a somewhat exceptionalist interpretation of the American dream; one thing Downton Abbey might be saying to American viewers is that this dream was always a facade, that they were never so far from the English and Europeans as they believed; but if this dream of democratic equality was but a superficial one, belied by a pile of catastrophes, ruins, and hypocrisies, it nonetheless still holds great allure for many Americans as a dream.)

The great question of the twenty-first century may well be one that Downton Abbey dramatizes by being unable to melodramatize it. How can egalitarian power and its tricky processes of effective representation and collective commitment be authentically enacted when the old system does not function anymore? That question is our property, not Downton‘s, and the answers will have to be found beyond where the estate ends.

Links:

Posted in Culture Rover, Historical Culture, Mass Culture, Political Culture, Popular Culture, Public Culture, Television Culture | 1 Comment »

#522 – Roll Over Ranke and Tell Hofstadter the News

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

more on no more plan b and the future of history.

Tenured Radical (Claire Potter) has a typically incisive blog post about the recent “No More Plan B” brouhaha (upcoming panel this Friday at the AHA in Chicago). Calling Grafton a rock star, hers is a synthesis of his call to restructure the values of advanced historical training and Jesse Lemisch’s retort that what we need are jobs, jobs, jobs in education.

Of course, as TR points out, we need both:

Although I think that Lemisch would agree with me on the point I make above, the implications of his argument are that expanded employment (which would enact other kinds of social justice agendas, not the least of which would be expanded opportunities for education) would be enough. I disagree: it is not enough, and this is why Anthony Grafton is a rock star. Arguing that we stop pushing young scholars into a failed market where the most successful will be constrained in their opportunities and intellectual choices, Grafton wants to change the values that have been ineffective in creating jobs for historians. Public history has the potential to create a more free employment system that would support an expanded intellectual community and allow creativity collaborations to flourish.

Furthermore, in a topic that I will take up in part II of this series, Grafton is arguing that the most path-breaking and influential scholarship in the twenty-first century is likely to be collaborative and accessible to a broad public.  Breaking with the model of the exceptional individual, who works in private and competes successfully among professionally and narrowly similar peers, a paradigm that has governed access to the profession for over a century, is in its own way revolutionary.

There’s a lot to consider in TR’s synthesis, but I want to weigh in again with the point that we need to honor the desire of many hopeful history graduate students to become tenure-track professors. Yes, we can, should, and must imagine new modes of cooperative, public historical scholarship (digital humanities in the house). We just need to do so in ways that do not wind up reinforcing experiences of precarity, exploitation, and contingency among the intellectual laborers in the field of history.

In other words, there are important things to cling to in the older, increasingly impossible model of tenure-track professorships. In fact, the longing to be a tenure-track professor seems to me to be connected to the larger critique of intellectual labor within neoliberal capitalism implicit in Lemisch’s curmudgeonly response to Grafton and Grossman. People want to practice the independent craft of history securely, with a range of autonomy and freedom that empowers democratic historical activity rather than impoverishes it.

Ultimately, the question is not just what kind of history we pursue, but also what kind of public we pursue it in. We need to imagine and work toward a public life that supports the knitting together of university history departments, public institutions, and people’s lives in ways that are robustly intellectual and economically innovative. It needs to be a public that expands individual autonomy and collaborative historical research at the same time.

If we do not think carefully about the profession and public life in tandem and work toward changing both, we risk creating a field and a public that merely incorporate historians into existing, exploitative labor markets instead of transforming labor conditions to unleash improved historical investigation and a better public life.

This project, however, will require more collective modes of historical creativity, not just a rock star in the spotlight.

Links:

Posted in Academic Culture, Civic Culture, Culture Rover, Educational Culture, Historical Culture, Public Culture | 2 Comments »

#519 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

historical half-truths from nick tosches.

True history seeks, it does not gather; for the deeper we seek, the deeper we descend from knowledge to mystery, which is the only place where wisdom abides.

— Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather

The cellular core of what we call history—knowledge itself—is diseased. It is not the artful novelist who has blurred the divide between fiction and fact: it is the professor of learning, the peddler of secondhand misknowing. The more we “know,” the less we know. It is better to keep away from words, “facts,” “knowledge.” They are almost always the carriers of disease.

— Nick Tosches, Arnold Rothstein, King of the Jews: The Greatest Mob Story Never Told

(From Dave Sanjek’s unpublished comments on Tosches at LitPop: Writing and Popular Music conference, 2011)

Posted in Culture Rover, Historical Culture, Unfamiliar Quotations | No Comments »

#511 – New Deal History

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

time for plan wpa: history corps, a proposal for the job crisis in history ph.d. programs.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a response to Anthony Grafton and Jim Grossman’s “No More Plan B” article, which called upon history departments to grapple with the lack of tenure-line positions for an oversupply of Ph.D. students. In many respects, my response overlapped with Jesse Lemisch’s critique of “No More Plan B” and the duo’s subsequent article, “Plan C” (more back and forth here).

I find Lemisch’s call for “a program for historians like the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project” a compelling proposal. Not because it would be easy to achieve in the current political environment, but rather because it seems to me that it addresses multiple problems: the lack of rewarding employment for smartly-trained historians; the history being lost all around us all the time for lack of study; the strange and distorted gaps between specialized academic research and historical knowledge among the general public, which need not be so strongly dichotomous and in fact often complement each other.

So Culture Rover is not always just about critique. Here is my proposal, utopian but also weirdly practical, for something that the AHA could develop along with history graduate programs. I call it History Corps.

History Corps would fund historians to “embed” themselves with institutions around the United States and the world in order to explore historical topics. Picture a historian working with a neighborhood association to document the history of a place. Picture a historian working with an Occupy activist group to study historical background and think about making history in the present. For that matter, picture a historian working with a police force on their own history, on developing a better understanding of policing, and other issues. Unions, schools, museums, government agencies, think tanks, corporations, banks, consulting firms, small businesses, retirement communities, health institutions, hospitals, architects, magazines, embassies, NGOs, the military—all these have histories both oral and archival; all these could benefit from historians trained at the most advanced levels; all these might benefit from the back-and-forth project—both individual and collective—of both making history and understanding it.

I am sounding a bit like a marketing brochure here, but so be it. A few other thoughts about this proposal:

History Corps would fundamentally not be about abandoning specialized research but rather deepening it through engagements beyond the classroom. It would not replace traditional research and learning but join what Ph.D. programs already do. It might even offer new ways to reinvigorate graduate historical training by bringing into the classroom the need for new skills, approaches to the past, and perspectives on what it means to study and advance the historical field (for instance, increased digital media literacy, skills, and perspectives).

History Corps would absolutely raise various ethical questions about complicity or advocacy, but that’s fine. Those issues have always been there, so why not engage them substantively and meaningfully.

History Corps might be funded through a combination of governmental, institutional, foundation, and user support. The AHA might perhaps be an ideal organization to administer such a project. It knows how to administer complex, multi-institutional projects. It knows how to mediate between specialized research and general learning. It has the history itself to make this history happen.

This kind of endeavor would address the very real economic issues that younger historians and aspiring historians face. But it does so not by telling them that they should have gone to business school. Instead, it offers a vision of historians as professionals. It gives them dignity and it more clearly distinguishes the distinctive skills, perspectives, and expertise that historical training brings. It’s not about making historical training applicable for other fields, but rather of clarifying how history as a field is necessary to a good society.

And all the while, it makes the historical enterprise itself richer intellectually, both for historians and for those who are history—which is all of us.

Posted in Academic Culture, Culture Rover, Historical Culture, Intellectual Culture | No Comments »

#505 – Reinventing the Wheel

Friday, November 4th, 2011

X-Post from Issues in Digital History.

on developing critical and methodological frameworks for the digital humanities, or the digital humanities is the humanities.

To be an equal partner—rather than, again, just a servant—at the table, digital humanists will need to find ways to show that thinking critically about metadata, for instance, scales into thinking critically about the power, finance, and other governance protocols of the world. — Alan Liu

Fred Gibbs has a typically perceptive new post continuing his thinking about developing a more defined critical discourse for digital humanities as a field. Drawing his inspiration from Alan Liu’s question, “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”, Gibbs argues that digital humanists should aim for three main goals: 1) more effective critical discourse around DH work; 2) better rubrics for evaluating projects; and 3) a different kind of peer review.

These are good starting points chock full of provocative possibilities. However, I think it’s worth returning to one of Liu’s key ideas: that digital humanities is not a “servant” to the humanities, it is the humanities.

What I have been discovering in my own DH work on folk music and archival study is that the digital takes us back to core disciplinary questions (in my case these are long-running methodological and interpretive concerns in cultural history, folklore, pop music studies, cultural studies).

Too often, DH gets framed as something new, as a breakthrough, as a reinvention of the wheel. Witness Patricia Cohen’s breathless “Humanities 2.0″ articles in the New York Times. It seems to me that this is because of an unwise conflation between Digital Humanities as an intellectual and scholarly endeavor and the narrative we use in contemporary society for innovations in the private technology sector.

This conflation has everything to do with the contemporary moment, which finds academicians jockeying for money in an increasingly corporatized and neoliberal university setting. The danger here is that we are not thinking carefully about the framework in which Digital Humanities might thrive and contribute to society beyond assumptions about technology solving all problems and creating financial wealth. This, it seems to me, is where Digital Humanities needs to continue to develop greater critical self-reflection built upon well-tested humanistic models. In what larger systems of power are the digital humanities complicit? What is producing this moment in which digital humanities is making such an impact? How does the cultural context shape everything from the code we are creating to the findings we are producing to the jobs that are available in the field?

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with being critically self-reflective an intersection between private sector work and more public intellectual and scholarly concerns; the problem is a total conflation between the two. And there’s nothing wrong with being excited about the fresh, unprecedented, and surprising places that the digital takes us, so long as those are not placed in direct opposition to the rich past of humanities scholarship that we can draw upon (critically of course, since those traditions come with their own troubling problems and historical contexts).

I am not trying to stop DH in its tracks. We can be critically self-reflective and move forward. But perhaps we can only do so if we also move backwards too, recovering and remembering all that the analog humanities has to offer.

In sum, there’s a whole lot of new in the Digital Humanities, including what I think is already an extremely sophisticated intellectual move to cut through stale assumptions about old disciplinary boundaries, approaches to evidence, understandings of authorship, and more. The bits and bytes of the critical theory that Gibbs calls for is already happening, in my opinion, on numerous Twitter feeds, countless blogs, and at various conferences and un-conferences.

But even as we find ourselves experiencing the new, it’s just as worthwhile to locate Digital Humanities in relation to the old. For there is a return, a circling back, to pursue if we so choose. DH takes us back—in deeply illuminating ways—to age-old issues in various fields across the arts and sciences. It is not a revolution away from the humanities, but a turn more fully into the humanities.

It is in this sense that the digital humanities should reinvent the wheel.

Links:

Posted in Academic Culture, Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Historical Culture | No Comments »

#498 – Don’t Know Much About History

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

crisis in the humanities, part one: a response to anthony t. grafton and jim grossman on graduate history programs.

The October 2011 issue of the American Historical Association’s newsletter, Perspectives on History, has a column by the president of the AHA and the organizations executive director. It’s a noble piece that once again notes the extreme oversupply of PhD’s in history compared to actual history jobs in the academy. It makes the usual points: that departments need to rethink the privileging of academic jobs over other professional opportunities for historians, that history is relevant to a wide range of fields, and other “modest proposals” (is that title supposed to be a Swiftian joke? Or is it an unintended one about their recommendations?).

In a way, this is a very sad column. It’s a kind of giving up and giving in. Rather than think of graduate historical education as a way to study the past in order to improve the present and future, or at least try to do so, Grafton and Grossman simply call on departments to acquiesce to the world as it is. They write of the declining tenure-track job market:

As many observers have noted, this is not a transient “crisis.” It’s the situation we have lived with for two generations. And it’s not likely to change for the better, unless someone figures out how to work magic on the university budgets that lead administrators to opt for flexible, contingent positions rather than tenure-track jobs. AHA supports and joins in efforts to convert contingent to tenure-track jobs—but it’s unrealistic to expect these to pay off on a large scale. We owe it to our students and to our profession to think more broadly.

“How to work magic.” “It’s unrealistic to expect these to pay off on a large scale.” There is a lack of engagement here with the deeper inequities and inequalities both in our society as a whole and within the university. Yes, we need to think more broadly about history’s applicability, but the first place that the AHA might apply historical skills is to the university itself: what are the ideals of this institution? If universities are no longer meeting those ideals, why is this so? How did this happen? What kinds of alternatives might we imagine to a world in which only “magic” solves the actual problem? Grafton and Grossman offer a band-aid for a gaping wound. The bandage might be decorated with historical figures and pictures of famous events, but it doesn’t even cover, nevermind cure, the deeper political and economic malady.

Perhaps the answer is not only for departments to level the playing field between work within and beyond the academy in graduate training (an important goal to be sure), but also to recognize the very real desires that I suspect push many students toward doctoral work in the first place. Grafton and Grossman seem to want to make the university more like the rest of the world; what about rethinking how the rest of the world might draw upon the best aspects of the university while jettisoning the worst parts?

Which is to say that their column largely misses the point. My hunch is that graduate students do not only aspire to tenure-line positions at universities because they “internalize” the attitudes of advisers and departments and seek the approval of their mentors and institutions. Sure, that’s part of it. But graduate students also long for careers that produce the kind of life that tenure-line positions make possible. They hunger, in short, for a taste, just a taste, of unalienated labor.

Yes, I know this is an ideal. But Grafton and Grossman’s column refuses to engage—indeed they seem almost cruelly to want to crush—the desire that I think many graduate students possess, which is to do what a professor ideally does: to have a modicum of autonomy over her or his labor (yes, again, I know this is an ideal); to have an opportunity to help others acquire knowledge; to have the chance to explore new, specialized kinds of knowledge and produce new ideas as an expert in a particular topic; to be able to work in institutional settings that have, at some level, a democratic component of debate, deliberation, and collective agreement rather than the hierarchical and solely-profit-oriented rule of the corporation (and yes, once again, I know this is an ideal).

Graduate students may not know much about history, fools that they are according to Grafton and Grossman’s piece, but I think they do long to love their work and be loved back by it. That’s the wonderful world they seek: impractical and idealistic, yes; driven as much by desire and utopianism as by pseudo-realist approaches to the profession, yes; a bit of a pipe dream to change the world rather than acquiesce to its profound imperfections, yes. But for many graduate students, I suspect, this dream of a more beloved future world is at the core of their interest in studying past failures to achieve it.

As history departments aspire to train students for a broader range of careers, they must not lose sight of why it is so many students long to become tenure-line historians. The AHA should be working to make those other professions more like the best parts of the tenure-track position, not giving up on those kind of working conditions.

Without seeking to make good on the hopes among graduate students to become fully-fledged faculty members, why not simply dismantle PhD programs entirely? Just have students earn their MBA’s and JD’s, hone their “soft skills” and “hard skills,” professionalize for the world as it is, become happy team members, and work in their cubicles without all the effort.

If, at some basic level, we don’t maintain the ideal of seeking out historical knowledge as academics do, in the way they do, is there anything left to graduate historical training at all?

Next—Crisis in the Humanities, Part Two: a Response to Cathy Davidson’s “Strangers on a Train: A chance encounter provides a lesson in complicity and the never-ending crisis in the humanities.”

Links:

Posted in Academic Culture, Culture Rover, Historical Culture | 5 Comments »

#484 – Rovings

Friday, August 19th, 2011

quick list #2.

Jukebox:

Words:

Screens:

Posted in Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Film Culture, Folk Culture, Historical Culture, Intellectual Culture, Journalism Culture, Literary Culture, Music Culture, Rovings, Television Culture | No Comments »

#472 – On Arcade Fire On Fire

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

“wild fire in the ‘burbs” @ first of the month.

Arcade Fire, the Grammys, rockism, the 60s, Lewis Mumford, Betty Friedan, Maoism, The Trotsky, Ian Svenonius, surburban wars, edge cities, class politics, history, globalization, wilderness, and more, now online in my article over at First of the Month.

Arcade Fire.

Posted in Culture Rover, Historical Culture, Marxist Culture, Music Culture, Sixties Culture, Urban Culture | No Comments »

#456 – History as Knish-tory

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

cooking up past pasts not past: michael chabon’s the yiddish policemen’s union.

Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a historical novel about a history that never happened. For this reason, one is tempted to call it a counterfactual-historical novel since it imagines the past of a future that did not occur. But even this isn’t quite right. Chabon’s tale is too playful, too interested in actual history, to be dismissed as mere counterfactual fantasy. The novel is closer to Benjamin’s notion of history, which is fitting since the novel is haunted by the history of the holocaust. Chabon presents the past as a distant constellation in the sky, a space onto which we project our dreams—and our nightmares.

At first, you don’t notice it in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: history. At first you are simply in a new place, but hearing an old story. We’re in Alaska, but with Isaac Bashevis Singer, or even Kafka, in a Yiddish Central European ghetto. Wait, no, we’re in a hard-boiled detective novel, something that Paul Auster might write, with a healthy dose of Pynchon (whose last publication also used the detective genre to explore a past historical moment, in his case the sixties counterculture). Wherever we are, everything is dislocated, fragmented, and jumbled together in the haze of Detective Meyer Landsman’s hangover, which starts the novel.

Gumshoe-cum-snowshoe novel? Hard-boiled egg and chicken-fat novel? Shamus story? Humphrey Bogart with his yiddeshe momme?

The immediate plot grabs your attention as Chabon begins to fill in the background details of Meyer Landsman’s life. But as the novel develops, one begins to see that there’s a larger history informing the story. Chabon has situated his novel within a path not taken, the aborted effort to make the Alaska territories open for resettlement by Jews fleeing Hitler. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, this effort actually succeeded.

But the brilliant move Chabon makes is to never explicate this larger history. Instead, he folds it into the story, like the meat in a cabbage roll. You bite into the leaves of the plot first, following the wrinkly, comical surfaces of Landsman’s misadventures. It’s good. But then—oy!—there’s a far richer, more fulfilling flavor within.

He picks up the shot glass that he is currently dating, a souvenir of the World’s Fair of 1977. …He lifts the glass and toasts thirty years gone since the Sitka World’s Fair. A pinnacle of Jewish civilization in the north, people say, and who is he to argue?

— Michael Chabon

The detective story that is in the foreground of the novel echoes two deeper mysteries that the reader must solve: first, what happened in this history? Second, what light does it shed—askance—on the existing history of the Jewish diaspora in the aftermath of the holocaust?

It’s as if Walter Benjamin, fleeing the Nazis in 1940, made it out of Spain and lived. Only there’s something different going on here.

Chabon has a different take on Benjamin’s notion of how we should understand history. Rather than “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger,” as Benjamin famously suggested in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Chabon shifts the equation. He seizes hold of a moment as it flashes up in a memory of danger. Which is to say his entire novel takes place within a moment that never occurred, but which is filled with dread, which somehow comes to count for more than the actual past.

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. …a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

— Walter Benjamin

In the corner by the door stands the famous Verbover clock, a survivor of the old home back in Ukraine. Looted when Russia fell, then shipped back to Germany, it survived the dropping of the atomic bomb on Berlin in 1946 and all the confusions of the time that followed. It runs counterclockwise, reverse-numbered with the first twelve letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

— Michael Chabon

If Benjamin imagined history as Klee’s Angelus Novus, with its gaze on a pile of debris as a storm of progress pushed it relentlessly backwards into the future, then Chabon pictures history as something else from Benjamin’s imagination: it is shot through with “splinters of Messianic time,” which is to say the past always consists of all the pasts that did not become the past, but which remain, suspended, in the stars, intact, constellations of potential futures as yet undetected.

The clock of time ticks backward in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. It ticks and explodes in a million directions. Drawing humor from the absurdities of diaspora and strength from the traumas of holocaust, the novel’s reverse flow has something to tell us about the way we think about history now: keep telling stories.

**

Incidentally, it seems to me there is a great study to be done on Alaska in the American cultural imagination. One thinks immediately of the strange, unfolding saga of Sarah Palin, but there’s also more, from the mega-successful Into the Wild to the now-forgotten Ken Kesey novel Sailor Song, from the uses of Alaska in Disney cartoons to the reality TV show Deadliest Catch, from the indigenous art of Native Alaskans to the use of Alaska in novels such as Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

**

Links:

Posted in Culture Rover, Historical Culture, Literary Culture | 3 Comments »

#455 – Gloves Off: The Tantalizing Irony of Virtualized Artifacts

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

manipulating evidence (in a good way) and touching history.

X-post from Issues in Digital History.

While the buzz in digital history is currently emanating from “data-mining”—amassing large amounts of evidence in searchable digital form in order to develop algorithms that might detect new patterns and interpretations about the past—my work this quarter with students on a digital history of the folk music revival using the Berkeley Folk Festival Archives in Northwestern’s Special Collections library has made me consider a different side of the emerging field of digital history: not data-mining, but rather data manipulation.

Wait, we don’t manipulate data! That sounds like a bad thing at first, but what I mean is that the digitization of archival materials not only allows greater access to historical artifacts, but also, potentially, enables new ways of examining the materials in those collections. Whereas once librarians had to guard materials in order to safeguard them from decay, in digital form we can investigate artifacts in all sorts of ways.

We can rip them up, reassemble them, twist and turn them around and inside out or outside in; we can play the tape backwards, splice it up, conjoin it to other sounds; we can zoom in and out, set things in virtual motion, or make them still for a closer look; we can annotate in new ways, we can bring competing interpretations together around archival evidence with an immediacy that can be revelatory; we can place artifacts in relation to all sorts of other materials and information.

When it comes to historical archives, the irony of the virtual is that it actually makes materials more tangible. It allows us to take the gloves off and really touch history.

Of course, we have a long way to go in developing the right tools and creating the right conditions for more robust online learning environments that allow for the virtual examination of historical artifacts. We still need to figure out what tools work well for what materials, and how institutions can enable innovation of new tools by users themselves. We still need to work through legal and ethical issues of copyright as they pertain to special collections materials. And we need to figure out how digital repositories will continue to interact with their ancestors, those crucial material repositories; which is another way of saying we need to better understand how the real world and the virtual world intertwine in ways that make the pursuit of knowledge and the strengthening of historical competencies and, most of all, historical inquiry, expand.

As we nudge the materials of the past forward into the virtual realm of the future, let’s smudge that future up more with the past, shall we? For we can now leave our fingerprints behind on these thingless things.

Posted in Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Historical Culture | No Comments »

« Older Entries