Stephen Robertson
One strand of digital history centers on the distribution and presentation of material online, for scholarly audiences, for use in classrooms, and for different groups of the public. A clear categorization of history sites is difficult; the diversity of what can be found online cannot be fit entirely within existing library categories derived from print media.
When historians Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig sought to map the “History Web” in 2005 they took the approach of classifying history websites “by the types of material they provide and the functions and audiences they serve.” At that time they identified five genres of sites:
- Archives (containing primary sources);
- Exhibits, films, scholarship, and essays (that is, secondary sources);
- Teaching (directed at students and teachers);
- Discussion (focused on online dialogue);
- Organizational (providing information about a historical group).
Cohen and Rosenzweig also noted that history sites frequently blurred these categories; primary sources could be found in exhibit sites and teaching sites as well as archives. Some sites took a topical approach that tried to provide every kind of content on that topic. These different mixes of categories hinted that the medium of the internet had the potential for new and different forms for presenting history.
More than ten years after the publication of Cohen and Rosenzweig’s book, archives, exhibits and scholarship, and teaching sites remain discernible and prominent genres, although their details have changed. However, discussion and organizational sites have become simply part of the digital landscape.
Archives remain the most common form of digital history. The use of the term archive to describe online collections of primary sources has provoked considerable resistance from archivists and librarians. That reaction results from the how few digital archives meet the traditional definition of an archive as the papers of some particular person or the papers or records of a particular organization, a collection that exists as a whole, not assembled after the fact. Digital archives range from digital copies of collections held in archives to virtual archives assembled from diverse sources that can lack the shared provenance and common association of traditional archives.
- The American Memory site created by the Library of Congress was the pioneering American online archive, containing more than 8 million items by the end of the 1990s. Most of the more than 100 collections in the site mirror original library collections archived and preserved together by format, subject matter, or name of the person who assembled or donated them.
- The most famous early digital archive is Valley of the Shadow, created by a team led by historian Edward Ayers as research for a book he was writing. The site consists of newspaper articles, letters and diaries, census records, photographs and images, and maps related to Augusta County in central Virginia and Franklin County in southern Pennsylvania during the Civil War drawn from multiple different archives.
Even when a digital archive reproduces an archival collection, the digital form is different in being more accessible and searchable. Rather than reading through a finding aid that generally only includes information about folders or boxes, the user of a digital archive can search a collection and retrieve individual documents potentially relevant to their interests. In early online archives generally only descriptions of items could be searched. More recently, in the case of documents, improvements in optical character recognition software have made full-text search common. However, current software does not accurately recognize handwriting, which means that full-text search is usually only a feature for archives of printed documents.
One way that individuals and organizations have increasingly sought to expand digital archives is through crowdsourced transcription. The Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 is one such site. It is home to a collection of digital images of more than 45,000 handwritten documents by hundreds of different authors, including not just correspondence but accountant records, treaties and inventories. Just over 3000 people have signed up to transcribe the images at some point in the seven years the project has been running, and nearly 23,000 pages have been transcribed into searchable text.
In the last ten years, a growing expectation that archives will be available online has seen a dramatic expansion in digital archives. However, the cost of digitization, description, and generating machine-readable text to support search, as well as copyright restrictions, has seen many digital archives created by corporations and made available only to those who pay for access. The most notable commercial digital history archives are ProQuest Historical Newspapers and Ancestry, which has grown from census records to include a variety of other historical records that identify individuals. Some large-scale freely available digital archives have also been developed since 2005, with the Library of Congress offering access to historical American newspapers before 1923 in its Chronicling America collection, and the Digital Public Library of America aggregating digital collections from cultural institutions throughout the country. At the same, the availability of free software such as Omeka and affordable digital cameras and scanners has also spurred individuals and teams to create smaller scale digital archives. Goin’ North, for example, is a collection of oral histories of African Americans who migrated to Philadelphia between 1910 and 1930, together with images, newspapers articles and other sources from a variety of different archives. As is the case with many smaller digital archives, the site was created by students in the context of a course, in this case West Chester University graduate students enrolled in Professor Janneken Smucker’s graduate seminar in digital history with undergraduate Honors College students and history majors enrolled in Professor Charles Hardy’s special topics course.
A major development in the form of digital archives has been the increasing use of visualizations, particularly maps, as the interface for presenting and accessing collections. In part, this development reflects a reaction against search as incapable of representing the abundance of digital collections. The alternative is what designer Mitchell Whitelaw calls “generous interfaces” that reveal the scale and complexity of a collection, and offers means to browse and explore not just query and retrieve. The turn to visualizations also represents the emergence of new forms that move beyond reproducing traditional practices online and instead reflect the characteristics of the web as a visual medium. Digital Harlem, for example, uses a map to present a variety of sources, including the case files of the District Attorney and black newspapers, related to places, events and individual lives in the neighborhood from 1915-1930.
When Cohen and Rosenzweig categorized history on the web in 2005, online exhibits, films, scholarship, and essays were little more than digital reproductions of print formats. Those forms have proved remarkably resilient in the last ten years. Historical scholarship is now more generally available online, but almost always as PDF files that reproduce page images from a print publication. Those files are now searchable, but only rarely even have links that can be clicked on to connect them to the wider web or online archives of the sources from which they draw evidence. Historical journals are also typically only available to subscribers. A small number of online, open access journals do exist, but do not generally depart far from the forms of print scholarship. Common-Place, for example, is an online journal of early American history that publishes feature essays, reviews, interviews with authors, discussions of teaching, analysis of material culture, and reports from libraries and archives. While some submissions contain more images than would typically appear in a print journal, the style and design follow print formats.
Blogs have emerged since 2005 as an additional online platform for publishing about the past that allows for informal short-form writing that incorporates multimedia, is freely available, and on which readers could directly comment and engage in discussion with authors. That blogs could also be published without the peer review that validates academic writing has led to extended debates about their value as scholarship. At the same time, blogs had the advantage of providing a means to reach a wider audience than academic publications and to more quickly share and respond to ideas and events than was possible in print publication. Blogs have gained wider acceptance as a form of presenting history, but they have been progressively preempted by the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. More recently there has been a resurgence of group blogs. Some, like Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History publish posts related to a particular topic or field, together with relevant historical and academic topics, and calls for papers, conferences and funding opportunities. Others include additional content makes them similar to an online magazine. Black Perspectives, for example, the blog of the African American Intellectual Society, publishes online essays, roundtables, author interviews and digital projects such as #CharlestonSyllabus.
The use of blogs and social media to reach audiences outside of the academy are examples of the expansion of digital public history beyond reproducing exhibits online to engaging with audiences. More so than historical scholarship, public history has also taken advantage of the possibilities of the web as a medium. An early site like Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704 allows users to pursue their own interests rather than restricting them to a single path through the content, in that way introducing them to complexity and multiple perspectives. The site presents the events of the French and Indian raid on an English settlement from the point of view of each of the five cultural groups who clashed during the raid.
After 2005, the launch of the Apple iPhone and the spread of GPS technology and mobile platforms for accessing the web provided the basis for new forms on digital public history. Cleveland Historical is an early example of a project that used this technology to allow users to explore the city’s history while they traveled the city. The site presents location-based stories and accompanying images, oral histories and thematic stories. The more recent Histories of the National Mall combines location-based content in the form of historical map layers, primary sources and contemporary scholarship with four non-linear pathways through the content: Maps, Explorations, People and Past Events. Maps argues for the importance of temporal and spatial perspectives and the relationships between events and locations that it highlights. Explorations highlight questions that have shaped the historiography, and offer answers based on that scholarship and linked to 440 selected sources. Past Events presents an argument about change over time and its nature. People asserts the importance of lesser known individuals, whose stories are absent from the monuments on the Mall itself
Teaching sites specifically addressed an audience of teachers and students. The earliest examples focused on presenting syllabi online and then sites that offered primary sources and advice for teachers on how to teach, and for students on how to work with evidence. Teaching sites vary in breadth, from a focus on particular events or documents (the Amboyna Conspiracy Trial), to subfields of history (history of childhood), to broad areas such as American history (Teaching history).
Since 2005 syllabi have become less openly available online, as schools and universities have adopted password protected learning management systems like Blackboard to host teaching resources. Resources for teachers and students continue to expand, increasingly as part of online archives. Teaching sites also often now interactive learning exercises. Early examples asked users to answer questions for which there is no clear answer, such as who burned down P. T. Barnum’s museum in 1865. Eagle Eye Citizen, a more recent example, allows users to both solve three types of challenges centered on documents from the Library of Congress and to create their own challenges: Time After Time asks you to put a set of sources in the correct chronological order; Sort it Out asks you to put sources in the correct topical category; and The Big Picture asks you to identify the main idea of an image of which you can only see segments.