(Unit 2 assignment)
When did historians realize that to compete in the digital age with their wares, they needed to learn a bit of technology, graphics, and ad-copy marketing to make their product appealing?
That is not exactly what Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig ask in the introduction to their book, but I found most interesting the takeaway that history is a commodity competing with other commodities in the marketplace, and that historians must learn some of the ways to make it available on the internet -- or lose out on the digital revolution. Some historians embrace digital history, but others are skeptical.
Anyone can post anything online as if they are an expert on it, so how do you know what is fact, what is secondhand, what is hearsay? Does it matter? Is something posted on George Mason University's site on the Civil War better than a longtime independent scholar's work? Should GMU's Center for History and New Media tie it all together and link to the best primary sources, to somehow distinguish and judge the best? Some original research is produced by these scholars. Is it equal to PhD dissertation material?
The advantages of digital media -- flexibility, immediacy, accessibility, diversity, interactivity -- are apparent to those in any news media today. The printed, hard-copy newspaper is outdated before website content. As the book says, the hazards are that quality may suffer (short deadline with no verification), and durability is out the window.
Capitalism is alive and well. Predominant after reading the introduction is the message that historians were sleeping while information such as census records, phone numbers, genealogy data and other things that used to be free and in the public domain were bought up by companies (think ancestry.com). Cohen and Rosenzweig advocate taking back some of the power by having historians compete on a more-level playing field in the digital world.The gates erected prevent scholars and researchers from sharing information freely--scholarly journals by subscription only, for example.
The technical skills needed to put history online are changing fast, and this book is an attempt to understand it and show what can be done even by amateurs (I think). People who can merge those technical tools with original research, using images, text, video, anything that enlightens the subject matter, can bridge the gap between books geeks and tech geeks.
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For a final project, I'm thinking about something with the Mantua neighborhood, for which I am gathering primary and secondary source materials, or something with the Alexandria house/museum that I have started documenting. I have primary source documents, original and historic photos and images for each, and other resources. Historical timelines or a story map might be possible for either.
(I have not decided on the Loudoun Cemetery project, but did preliminary research last week. It has changed from creating a story map into a 50-some page booklet done in Word, involving research, original photos, and writing for at least 50 cemeteries, with sections on iconography, veterans, etc.)
Like the point about historians competing in the marketplace, but historians are also competing for attention, the attention of students and the general public, and a historian has to be skilled to get and hold that attention. Your web or social media presence has got to be good.
ReplyDeleteIt is extremely frustrating that materials that are government records are only available by paying a private company that is making a profit off them. In a way it was kind of ok when Ancestry was run as a non-profit enterprise, but then it was sold. And I really hate having to pay for some military and birth records. Argh.
It is one thing to be doing the story map, which is something that would be very useful, and doable. I would run from the creating a booklet done in Word. They, whoever the they is, should understand that you create the story map first. Then it is a relatively straight-forward to take all the cemetery descriptions that you used on the story map and combine with a photo and voila, you have a boooklet.
You're right about competing for attention of students and general public; I guess I assumed that. Sorry.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the insight on the cemeteries.