White Paper Report
Report ID: 99064
Application Number: HD5098410
Project Director: William Seefeldt (wseefeldt2@unl.edu)
Institution: University of Nebraska, Board of Regents
Reporting Period: 3/1/2010-8/31/2012
Report Due: 3/31/2013
Date Submitted: 9/9/2013
Final Performance Report
Report ID: 99063
Application Number: HD5098410
Project Director: William Seefeldt (wseefeldt2@unl.edu)
Institution: University of Nebraska, Board of Regents
Reporting Period: 3/1/2010-8/31/2012
Report Due: 11/30/2012
Date Submitted: 12/19/2012
NEH Grant # HD-50984-10
Digital Humanities Start Up Program
PI: Douglas Seefeldt
Final Performance Report
"Sustaining Digital History"
Report filed through University of Nebraska-Lincoln
William G. Thomas, Chair, Department of History, University of Nebraska, project co-director
This project aimed to build a scholarly community for the practice of the emerging field of digital
history by 1.) enhancing communication and collaboration among scholars and journal editors, 2.)
creating model forms of scholarship and peer review, and 3.) establishing a clearinghouse for all peer-
reviewed digital history scholarship. Digital History has grown up in the last fifteen years through and
around the explosion of the World Wide Web, but historians have only just begun to explore what
history looks like in the digital medium. Increasingly, university departments seek scholars to translate
history into this fast-paced environment and to work in digital history; however, they have found that
without well-defined examples of digital scholarship, established best practices, and, especially, clear
standards of peer review for tenure, few scholars have fully engaged with the digital medium.
1. Enhancing communication and collaboration among scholars and journal editors
Our project worked to develop interest in digital scholarship among history journal editors through
several parallel efforts. We contacted editors and scholars involved in the History Cooperative and
hosted a two-day meeting of journal editors in Lincoln in October 2010, including:
Robert Schneider, American Historical Review
Christopher Grasso, William and Mary Quarterly
Alan Lessoff or John McClymer, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
David Lewis, The Western Historical Quarterly
Tamara Gaskell, the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
Eliza Canty-Jones, Oregon Historical Quarterly
We hosted a meeting titled “Sustaining Digital History” the day prior to the fifth annual Nebraska
Digital Workshop and invite potential authors, peer reviewers, and interested scholarly journal editors
to participate. We invited Anne S. Rubin (University of Maryland Baltimore County) to attend the
meeting as a practitioner/digital scholar and we invited Abby Smith Rumsey (Scholarly
Communication Institute) to serve as a consulting expert to advise the group. In addition, we invited
Mike Spinella from Jstor to comment on the state of online journals and Jstor's plans for potentially
hosting a digital scholarship journal space. Scholars attending the Nebraska Digital Workshop who
participated in the Sustaining Digital History meeting included Stefan Tanaka (University of
California, Los Angeles), Andrew Jewell (UNL Center for Digital Research in the Humanities),
Amanda Gailey (UNL, English Department), and Jeannette E. Jones (UNL History Department).
Graduate students in attendance included: Brent Rogers, Leslie Working, Kaci Nash, Jason Heppler,
Michelle Tiedje, and Brian Sarnaki.
The outcomes of this valuable editorial and scholarly meeting were several:
a. the editors affirmed their desire for a clearinghouse of reviewers and practicing digital
historians as a means to understand the field, identify peer reviewers, and link up with scholars
undertaking digital work
b. the editors appreciated a demonstration from Anne Rubin laying out the creative process in a
digital project and the expectations of authors engaged in digital scholarship
c. the group considered the questions of hosting, collecting, imprinting, and indexing digital
scholarship with the three groups (authors, peer reviewers, and editors), examined models for
incorporating digital scholarship, and agreed in principle with the goal of greater indexing and
integration of digital scholarship into the journals.
d. the group discussed a possible award or prize for digital scholarship submission to one or
more of the participating journals.
2. As an outcome of Sustaining Digital History we expected to assemble a digital history scholarly
journal publishing advisory group that includes key scholars active in the field, such as Edward L.
Ayers, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Daniel Cohen, Amy Murrell Taylor, William Turkel, and Richard
White, and others listed in our directory of digital historians, who might serve as first peer reviewers
working with journal editors.
The editors did not see this advisory group as a high priority, preferring instead to work within their
current editorial board structures. We did not pursue this objective further. The current structure of peer
review combined with our Digital History Index (see below) was a system the editors found sufficient.
Editors have used the Index already to line
3. Identify, peer review and publish a number of digital history projects in a number of scholarly
journals.
This was an ambitious goal and one we did not have time and resources to meet fully in the course of
the grant. Journal editors preferred to hold peer review within their current operating structures rather
than federate that role. We sought to identify potential peer reviewable works of digital scholarship
through networking among digital history scholars. Several projects came forward from UNL: in
particular, Seefeldt worked with his graduate students in the William F. Cody digital project to create a
series of digital research analysis modules (www.codystudies.org), some of which are being developed
for peer review in scholarly journals. William G. Thomas has been working with graduate student
Leslie Working, and his collaborators Richard G. Healey (University of Portsmouth) and Ian
Cottingham (UNL, Computer Science) on his Digging into Data Challenge grant for "Railroads and the
Making of Modern America" to produce a peer reviewable "App." He is considering electronic
submission to the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Southern Spaces, or The Journal of
the Civil War Era. Other scholars, including Jon Christensen (UCLA), used the Sustaining Digital
History project to initiate communication with the project editors and other editors (such as
Environmental History) regarding possible electronic submission and digital peer review.
An outgrowth of the Sustaining Digital History project was the wider dissemination of the concerns
related to digital scholarship and peer review. Thomas was selected for the Board of Editors of Anvil
Academic, a new digital scholarship peer review publishing venture. Seefledt was selected for the
Board of Editors of the digital arm of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
4. Expand the Digital History site by building on our directory of digital historians and experimenting
with digital “digital history reviews” of projects and tools that take full advantage of the medium.
Establish Digital History as the clearinghouse for the best digital history scholarship.
We have made substantial progress on this aspect of the project. We worked with UNL graduate
research assistant Kaci Nash to overhaul the design and organization of the Digital History Project web
site (http://digitalhistory.unl.edu) to highlight “Documenting,” “Doing,” and “Teaching” digital history
to aid in defining and sustaining this emerging mode of scholarly research and communication. We
have put together a “Directory of Digital Historians” that we discussed at our meeting last fall and
prototyped during the first year of the project. It now has approximately 140 entries seeded from a
number of sources (conference programs, digital history reviews, word of mouth, self nomination, etc.)
. We have also expanded the “Project Reviews” section from
twenty (20) to approximately fifty (50) projects written by UNL graduate students as projects in digital
history courses taught by professors Seefeldt and Thomas: . We plan to expand this section and the “Tool Reviews” section when we move the
Digital History Project to the WordPress platform in the spring of 2013 and open up the editorial
functions to other digital historians who have expressed interest in collaboration.
5. Sponsor and organize sessions to share this work at both the AHA and OAH annual meetings during
the winter & spring of 2011, with one panel of journal editors on the topic of “the future of the journal
in the digital era” and another panel of scholars presenting their own digital history scholarship at each
meeting.
This objective was perhaps our greatest success in the project. The participating editors and scholars
proposed several digital history and publishing session for the American Historical Association annual
meeting and the Organization of American Historians annul meeting (the OAH did not accept our
proposals for two panels at the Milwaukee meeting, unfortunately). Two panels were accepted for the
2012 meeting of the AHA in Chicago.
These sessions addressed a range of questions. One question is whether there are alternative ways of
writing history than the analytic essay. Are journals interested? Are our colleagues interested? If so
what is making this move difficult? What are the financial ramifications of digital production and/or
digital journals for journals themselves and for their associations? What becomes a sustainable model
financially as well as intellectually going forward? Who will be the audience for our online journals?
These questions addressed wider themes that AHA President-elect William Cronon raised in AHA
Perspectives, as well as vital issues around what one participant called "the weakening binaries in the
digital realm: professional/non-professional; academic/public; specialist/synthesizing."
Other members of our panel focused on these questions: What genres will emerge as the most robust in
the journal niche of the short-form communication? What have you done so far to take a traditional
journal into the digital age and what are the next steps? How is digital scholarship like and unlike the
traditional forms of scholarship that your journal deals with? What are the challenges a born-digital
"article" (entity?) poses to the double-blind review process at a scholarly journal? What challenges
does it pose to editing, production, and distribution? To what extent do you think your journal will be--
or should be--transformed by digital technologies by 2022?
The AHA panels, presenters, and abstracts were as follows:
“Digital History: State of the Field”
Chair, William G. Thomas, U. of Nebraska
Panelists:
Jon Christensen, Stanford U.; Jo Guldi, U. of Chicago; Andrew Torget, U. of North Texas
Abstract:
Digital History as a field emerged with the explosion of the World Wide Web, since 1994, the
dominant means of information access, knowledge acquisition, and communication for the
public and increasingly for the scholarly community. Because the medium is so new and the
technology so quickly changing, we have only just begun to explore the new forms that
historical scholarship might take. We need well-defined examples of digital scholarship,
established best practices, and, especially, clear standards of review for tenure. We know that
time has not solved the problem; indeed, recent studies show that scholars in history and other
humanities disciplines are as wedded as ever to traditional forms of communication. Young
humanities scholars, especially in history, are not experimenting in the digital medium in large
part because the wider professional culture has been slow to change. A whole range of social
and cultural barriers confront scholars who consider digital scholarship. Their departmental
colleagues know little about digital technologies, practices, or methods, and their promotion and
tenure committees, outside reviewers, and upper administrations often consider peer-reviewed
monographs the sole basis for advancement.
The current problem is multifaceted—administration leaders often seek to promote digital
technologies in teaching or research, yet department tenure committees often rank digital work
below a published monograph; libraries have taken the lead in creating digital research
platforms for faculty, yet university presses and scholarly journals remain the gold standard for
tenure and promotion; senior faculty often feel liberated to embrace experimentation, yet junior
faculty often prudently avoid risks. The growth of digital history, it should be stated, has been
given shape and encouragement most directly by the leading professional associations and the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The American Historical Review offered a
pioneering set of peer-reviewed digital articles, the Journal of American History has reviewed
leading history web sites, and the NEH has funded important history projects, from The Valley
of the Shadow to Zotero, and created a portal for leading digital sites (Edsitement). These steps
have provided absolutely critical opportunity for scholars to work in the digital medium.
The problem historians face now is institutional, structural, and social, and this panel discussion
by a slate of researchers actively pursuing digital forms of scholarship is aimed at discovering
and lowering these barriers in the discipline of history.
“The Future of History Journals in the Digital Age”
Chair, Douglas Seefeldt, U. of Nebraska
Panelists: Christopher Grasso, The College of William & Mary; David Rich Lewis, Utah State
University; John F. McClymer, Assumption College; Abby Smith Rumsey, Scholarly
Communication Institute; Stefan Tanaka, U. of California at San Diego; Allen Tullos, Emory U.
Abstract:
As digital technologies advance rapidly, as vast repositories of information come online, and as
more and more people participate in the digital revolution around the world, historians face a
very important set of decisions about the nature of historical scholarship and its forms. Yet, few
venues exist for scholars to conceive, produce, and distribute their digital work, or to
communicate with one another about the forms and practices of the digital medium. While
several funding institutions have committed significant resources to the development of digital
collections and tools, most prominently the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National
Endowment for the Humanities, scholars perceive few options for publishing digital work and
university presses and leading journals have been slow to embrace "born digital" scholarship.
The professional associations (the American Historical Association and the Organization of
American Historians) have taken crucial steps in promoting digital scholarship and provided
essential leadership. Our challenge now is to build on their foundation and create a wider
scholarly community of authors and journal editors around Digital History to identify, peer
review, and disseminate article-length digital scholarship by placing these works in some of the
leading journals.
One of the most important aspects of this roundtable discussion will be to explore ways to
reduce the gap between the scholarship in the profession's journals and scholarship on the web.
After significant discussions with History Cooperative journal editors over the course of the
past year and a half and during meetings at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln last fall,
supported by an NEH-funded Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant titled “Sustaining Digital
History,” digital historians Douglas Seefeldt and William Thomas have found wide support for
taking some steps to close this gap. Journal editors see the burgeoning work on the web and
recognize its value. They also recognize the challenges of peer reviewing this work. Currently,
the journals serve as the gatekeeper and record of scholarship in the fields of history, yet most
do not yet index, review, refer to, incorporate, imprint, or publish anything from the digital
medium. Conversely, the independent scholarship historians have produced on the web remains
all too often unconcerned with peer review, editorial control, and incorporation into the
scholarly record. Because digital work is rarely featured or recognized in the profession's
leading journals, among other reasons, younger historians have proven reluctant to develop born
digital scholarship and departments have had difficulty evaluating this scholarship for
promotion and tenure.
This roundtable discussion seeks to explore avenues of practice for integrating digital
scholarship into the record of professional scholarly activity and to consider how best to help
authors, reviewers, and editors negotiate a difficult transition.
These panels discussed the significant gap in the social and cyber-infrastructure for supporting digital
scholarship in history. Pointing out how young humanities scholars, especially in history, are not
experimenting in the digital medium in large part because the wider professional culture has been slow
to change. In fact, as Robert Townsend's 2010 survey of AHA members regarding research and
teaching published in Perspectives found, half of those polled have considered publishing online,
noting the benefits of reaching a wider audience, publishing their work more quickly than via print, and
the ability of the digital medium to reach a wider audience of historians, among other factors. It is
crucial to note that among those who have not yet published any form or electronic scholarship but
would consider it, they overwhelmingly cite the perception that online scholarship lacks the scholarly
recognition and prestige of print publication (Robert B. Townsend, “How Is New Media Reshaping the
Work of Historians?” Perspectives on History November 2010). Essays in the January 2011 issue of
Perspectives written by AHR editor Robert Schneider and John Thornton, a member of the AHA's
Research Division, further explore the cost and benefits for historians of the current “digital turn” in the
humanities. These panelists hope to make it possible for scholars to create, publish, and review digital
scholarship and, in effect, to mainstream this work within the disciplines and through the leading
professional journals.
As digital technologies advance rapidly, as vast repositories of information come online, and as more
and more people participate in the digital revolution around the world, humanities scholars face a very
important set of decisions about the nature of scholarship and its forms. Yet, few venues exist for
scholars to conceive, produce, and distribute their digital work, or to communicate with one another
about the forms and practices of the digital medium. We take as something of a mantra Jerome
McGann's dictum from his 2008 article “The Future is Digital,” that “The matter won’t become clear,
one way or the other, until we undertake to design and implement a working model.” This roundtable
discussion explored avenues of practice for integrating digital scholarship into the record of
professional scholarly activity and to consider how best to help authors, reviewers, and editors
negotiate what is a difficult, but ultimately profitable transition from print-based scholarly
communication standard to an approach that makes room for a variety of modes.
Participants on the panels of these two sessions and editors associated with the project came to a
"brown bag" session with Seefeldt and Thomas to discuss next steps and future developments that
would benefit the project Sustaining Digital History. The group agreed that a series of digital
humanities NEH Institutes at participating institutions would greatly benefit the project, spark models
of digital scholarship, and provide participating journals with potentially reviewable works.
Conclusion:
We expect to continue the work in Sustaining Digital History through several venues. First, we will be
moving the web site and its ongoing development home to Ball State University where Seefeldt is now
teaching and leading research in digital history. We will be implementing a more user-friendly Digital
Historians Index so that visitors and self-register more easily and we will simultaneously deploy more
social media tools to support registration. Additionally, we will release in Spring 2013 the Directory of
Digital History Scholarship, as a first effort at categorizing peer reviewed scholarship in digital history.
Finally, we will begin planning a Digital Humanities Institute proposal at two or three institutions
whose faculty have expressed already an interest in partnering on an institute.
Since this proposal several initiatives have simultaneously developed to open venues for digital
scholarship and peer review, including innovative post review models such as The Journal of Digital
Humanities. Other new ventures include Anvil Academic and Scalar. We are pleased to have
contributed to this innovative movement. Our project enabled some developments in history journals,
notably the upcoming American Historical Review digital scholarship article contest and the JGAPE
digital arm's further growth. Some journals have adopted web site reviews and are attempting to more
systematically consider digital work as scholarship worthy of record in their pages. Nevertheless, we
are struck by the lack of progress as well--most journals continue to work exclusively with traditional
form articles and the energy around digital scholarship is continuing apace outside of the world of
many history journals. Nevertheless, our project and the critical support of the NEH helped mainstream
these concerns at the American Historical Association annual meeting and among gatekeepers in
significant ways. We are grateful to the NEH for its support and its patience as we have worked
through difficult and challenging issues for the profession and the future of digital scholarship.
APPENDICIES
A. Screen Shot of Sustaining Digital History blog section. The project blog includes the meeting
schedule, professional biographies for presenters, journal editors, and grant project directors, a
bibliography of selected relevant publications and materials related to the Sustaining Digital History
initiative, and the project Purpose Statement document.
B. Screen Shot of Sustaining Digital History project. In addition to the Blog mentioned above, this
website includes sections on “Documenting” digital history (Directory of Digital Historians, NEH
Digital Humanities Grant, Project Reviews, Tool Reviews), “Doing” digital history (Essays,
Interviews, Lectures), and “Teaching” digital history (Student Projects, Syllabi).
C. Promotional postcards, Digital History Project. 1,000 4-1/4” x 5-1/2” full color cards and 1,000 3”
round stickers for distribution at conferences and other professional meetings.
D. Rachel Ensign, “Historians Are Interested in Digital Scholarship But Lack Outlets,” Chronicle of
Higher Education blog “Wired Campus” entry on “Sustaining Digital History” project, October 5,
2010.
E. Jennifer Howard, “Historians Reflect on Forces Reshaping Their Profession,” Chronicle of Higher
Education"January 8, 2012. The section “Going Digital” dedicates a paragraph to our AHA panel “The
Future of History Journals in the Digital Age” quoting panelist Stefan Tanaka.
F. Question list for “The Future of History Journals in the Digital Age” panel discussion at the 2012
American Historical Association conference.
AHA Day 2: State of
the Field
Posted on January 14, 2012 by Jason Heppler
In the second workshop session sponsored by the AHA
Research Division, Prof. William G. Thomas chaired a panel with
Jon Christensen, Jo Guldi, and Andrew J. Torget. The purpose
of the panel was to examine ways that digital scholarly work was
being produced.
Jon Christensen sought to answer to questions: 1) what has the
research produced?, and 2) so what? He presented on the
research for his book Critical Habitat: A History of Thinking with
Things in Nature. Much of the digital output from the book,
which can be viewed at the Stanford Spatial History Project,
sought to use spatial analysis to examine historical correlations.
Data, he reminds the audience, is shot through with historical
contingency. Thus, you need new methods to see through the
data.
Jo Guldi suggested that digital materials press scholars to
consider sources in larger scales of time and place, indeed, may
even demand larger scale and longer periods. Methods of digital
history help raise new questions. Guldi argues that we are
secure in our traditional methods of doing micro history, but we
don’t know how to release macro history in our work. The
Annals school attempted this, but required large research teams.
Mass digitization, however, gives us new tools. She
demonstrated her uses of File Juicer and the timeline feature of
Zotero to highlight ways of examining the longue durée of
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history.
Andre Torget illustrated his Texas Slavery Project and how spatial
analysis helped him raise new questions about the extension of
slavery into Texas. He spoke also about the challenges of
translating digital work into traditional narratives. His dynamic
maps of Texas speak as a sort of argument on their own, but
moving that into print is a challenge and ultimately falls short.
Some models of moving digital to print exist, he points out,
including William Thomas’s The Iron Way and Richard White’s
Railroaded, but the book remains the standard for tenure and
promotion.
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AHA Day 2: The
Future of History
Journals in the
Digital Age
Posted on January 14, 2012 by Jason Heppler
At session 136 on Saturday, Prof. Douglas Seefeldt led a
roundtable discussion with Christopher Grasso, David Rich
Lewis, John F. McClymer, Abby S. Rumsey, Sefan Tanaka, and
Allen Tullos. The purpose of the panel was to explore ways to
reduce the gap between scholarship in the profession’s journals
and the scholarship of the web. University presses and scholarly
journals remain the gold standard for tenure and promotion, and
time has not solved the problem of valuing digital work below
that of print.
Those participating faced a series of questions. They spoke on
the steps they were taking to move their journals into the digital
age. Some are making concerted efforts to incorporate new
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digital supplements to their journals while others, like the
peer-reviewed Southern Spaces, is entirely digital.
The issue of peer review was a key focus in the discussion as
well. The editors generally agreed that double blind peer review
panels could maintain their function, but also begin bridging the
gap of print and digital by incorporating experts on the content
and experts on the digital to talk together and assess how well
content and form interact. Stefan Tanaka challenged the idea,
suggesting that double blind review is only one of several ways
to do peer review. He also pointed out that a peer review
process exists online, and these discussions needed to happen
online where the scholarship is being produced. An example that
Tanaka points to is blogs, where people are doing serious, public
scholarship and should be recognized as communities of
conversations.
Open access formed another nexus of the conversation. Open
access digital publishing gives authors an idea of how many
people are viewing their work. Abby Rumsey provocatively
suggests that libraries have the money to fix the problem — they
have the ability to reshift their budgets and support digital
humanities without any problems. Exploring the digital space
means being more demanding about libraries finding solutions,
and they can find solutions by reallocating budgets. “University
libraries still have a lot of money,” Rumsey suggested. “If faculty
demanded they support digital and open access scholarship,
they would.”
Journal editors suggested that they are open to the idea of
digital scholarship and are waiting for more submissions of such
work that force them to think about ways of incorporating digital
work into their apparatus.
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Presenting Historical
Research Using
Digital Media
Posted on January 9, 2012 by Jason Heppler
At session 75 on Saturday, “Presenting Historical Research
Using Digital Media,” the presenters introduced several new
modes for presenting their scholarly work. The session included
a companion website that contained resources for each of their
talks.
Monty Dobson, a historian and archeologist, discussed his work
in documentaries and showcased his upcoming PBS series,
America from the Ground Up. Originally designed as a half-hour
video for his classroom after he became frustrated with the lack
of material on the history of the interior U.S., the project has
grown into a four-part series. He hopes that his work will focus
our attention more squarely on the interior United States,
promising the audience that not once will he mention George
Washington when discussing the arrival of Europeans and
Americans to the region. In confronting a narrative that is East
Coast centric, he hopes to reshape public history and examine
the history of a region more closely aligned with New France
rather than the experiences of the coast.
Phil Ethington discussed geo-historical visualizations. Digital
media, he reminds us, is important because of its substance and
what we’re communicating. The media is not the message;
rather, the media enables new ways of seeing the past. He has
developed HyperCities, built for urban research and
collaboration, as a method to examine how people came to
understand their place and space. Ethington also pointed the
potential of nonprofits and community-based organizations to
use HyperCities as a way to crowd source their local history.
Katrina Gulliver discussed her process of starting up her
podcast, Cities in History. She came to podcasting as an
experiment in learning how to do this technically, but also to
think about presenting her work to a general audience. She
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outlined the various off-the-rack and easy to use tools she uses
in her setup, including Jellycast and GarageBand to record and
Tumblr for her site.
Jennifer Serventi ended the session discussing the variety of
digital projects that the National Endowment for the Humanities
funds and things to think about when writing proposals to the
NEH. Serventi reminded the audience that humanities projects
should use the best genre or medium for the project, whether it
was a book, podcast, film, or otherwise. She also pointed to the
NEH’s new database of digital projects as a way to begin
learning about the sorts of projects that have been funded and
may serve as a starting point for our own proposals.
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AHA Day 1: Pioneers
Discuss the Future of
Digital Humanities
Posted on January 9, 2012 by Jason Heppler
The panelists at session 67 “The Future is Here: Pioneers
Discuss the Future of Digital Humanities,” the presidential
session chaired by outgoing AHA President Anthony Grafton,
included presentations by Erez Liebman Aiden and
Jean-Baptiste Michel from Harvard University and Blaise Aguera
y Arcas from Microsoft. Both presentations emphasized the
necessity of collaboration and opportunities that digital
computing offers humanist inquiry while also warning about the
pitfalls of relying on digital technology.
Aiden and Jean-Baptiste outlined culturomics in their talk that
almost exactly followed their TED talk. Aiden and Jean-Baptiste
provided examples of word-frequencies and usages over time.
Using 5 million books digitized by Google, they insisted their
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methods gave insight into a sort of cultural genome. They also
confronted five “myths” of those critical of their approach to
analyzing historical documents, insisting they were not trying to
replace historians with machines but rather build tools that
historians may find useful in their work. In their most provocative
section of the talk was a discussion of new work they’re
undertaking in to “cultural inertia,” or asking the question of
whether we could use cultural data and history to predict the
future. History, they concluded, will remain the domain of close
reading, primary sources, and interpretation, but will also include
big data, massive collaboration, data interpretation,
computation, and science.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas, known for his work on Photosynth,
discussed his effort to understand typefaces in Gutenberg’s
printing press. He examined how type was configured using
clustering software and high resolution images of letters to
analyze the components that made up the text. Moreover, he
asserted that Gutenberg’s real contribution was the development
of fonts rather than moveable type. At the core of his talk was an
emphasis on collaboration. Only through collaboration in several
areas of expertise could he come to understand different
aspects of typesetting. The same holds true for any aspect of
the past. Collaboration will be essential after the digital turn
because we cannot make assumptions about digital data — the
rise of proprietary digital environments, the inability to truly own
data, the misguided notion that one can own a gadget, the filter
bubble, and no guarantee that the lights will remain on. Invention
does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, collaboration is essential
for exploring or generating new ideas.
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Humanities: A
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Hands-On Workshop
Posted on January 9, 2012 by Jason Heppler
On Friday, January 6th, Session 36, “Digital Humanities: A
Hands-On Workshop” sponsored jointly by the AHA Research
Division and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New
Media, introduced attendees to a variety of approaches in digital
methods for research and teaching. Six stations were arranged
around the room that allowed attendees to wander from topic to
topic and engage in conversations, questions, and
demonstrations. Topics included digital publishing with Dan
Cohen, who discussed a variety of different methods that
scholars use to communicate their work. He also talked about
Digital Humanities Now and the platform that runs it,
PressForward.
Jeff McClurken presented on teaching with social media and
shared his experiences with using Twitter, Facebook, and blogs
for the classroom. McClurken collected many of the resources
he discussed on a page he created.
Fred Gibbs discussed text mining and offered examples from his
experiences in using the method for research. Gibbs also has a
companion website.
Rwany Sibaja talked about digital storytelling and using
multimedia in narrative. He has collected several tools and
resources for others to check out.
Jennifer Rosenfeld talked about the resources available at
TeachingHistory.org and how the website can help students gain
a better understanding of the types of evidence used by
historians.
Patrick Murray-John discussed content management systems,
including Zotero, and its usefulness in categorizing, tagging, and
collecting data and information.
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Digital Historical
Scholarship and the
Civil War
Posted on January 8, 2012 by kacinash
The Civil War lends itself greatly to the digital medium. In addition
to the subject’s scholarly contingent, it also possesses a great
public audience of increasingly computer literate members. This
question of audience was something addressed in the AHA
Panel wittingly titled “Hardtack and Software: Digital Approaches
to the American Civil War,” a digital spin on John D. Billings’
popular 1887 reminiscence Hardtack and Coffee: Or The
Unwritten Story of Army Life.”
Of the four projects presented during the session, two seemed
to be readily open to the inclusion of the general public as well
as the more general scholarly audience—Visualizing
Emancipation and Sherman’s March and America: Mapping
Memory. Yet the ability to play with data and explore the history
provided by the digital medium promotes public use as well. Civil
War Washington, while being a repository for scholarly
information about the nation’s capitol, may also be of interest to
“amateur” Civil War scholars. Mining the Dispatch is admittedly
geared toward academics, however, Nelson’s findings will be of
interest to any student of the Civil War, with or without
professional scholastic credentials.
Each panelist provided an overview of their respective projects,
which I shall not repeat here. Readers are encouraged to visit
the sites and interact with them for themselves. Instead, each
presenter introduced the scholarly findings or evidence displayed
or exhibited in the projects. The tools and technology employed
by each project received relatively little attention. During the
comments section of the panel, Robert Nelson asserted that the
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challenge is to produce scholarship that is going to be of interest
to scholars of the subject not the technology. We must focus on
historical questions and historical moments, not on techniques.
This thought was one that stayed with me more than any other
aspect of the session. If we want the discipline of history to be
receptive of works created through and with the digital medium,
it is essential that we emphasize the scholarship that is being
produced, not the way in which it is being produced. In order for
“doing digital history” to become synonymous with “doing
history,” we need to convince the field of the validity of digital
scholarship.
Back to the issue of audience, users outside of the academy
—Civil War “buffs,” teachers, and students—are likely
unconcerned with whether or not what they are interacting with
is considered scholarship by academics, but rather what they
can learn from utilizing such projects. To me, a Master’s student
with career ambitions in the public history sector, this is the most
exciting aspect of combining technology with doing history—its
ability to make history more accessible and appealing to the
public. Whether through providing access to documents and
visualizations which allow a thorough analysis of Washington,
D.C. or using an algorithm to reveal large societal and cultural
patterns over thousands of newspaper articles, the digital
medium is truly an effective way both to craft history and to
communicate it.
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History | Tagged events | 1 Reply
The Future is Here:
Digital History at the
126th Annual Meeting
Posted on January 6, 2012 by kacinash
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“The Future is Here,” a series at the 2012 AHA meeting, will
feature numerous presentations and discussions on Digital
History. Several graduate students who are attending these
panels will post reactions to these panels as well as participation
at the THATCamp hosted on January 5.
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History, Teaching Digital History | Tagged events | Leave a
reply
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Digital History Project
ABOUT
BLOG
DOCUMENTING
Directory of Digital Historians
NEH Digital Humanities Grant
Project Reviews
Tool Reviews
DOING
Essays
Interviews
Lectures
TEACHING
Student Projects
Syllabi
SOCIAL MEDIA
Added link to Guidelines for Evaluating Digital Scholarship compiled by the Center for
Digital Research in the Humanities.
New submission form added to Directory of Digital Historians.
Documenting Digital History
As we begin to explore what history looks like in the digital medium, we need to see examples
of excellent digital historical scholarship, established best practices, and, especially, clear
standards of peer review for tenure and promotion in history departments. This section
contains a Directory of Digital Historians, an Index of Digital Scholarship, information on the
National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-up Grant, Digital History
project reviews, and new media tool reviews . . . [more]
Added the essay, "What is Digital
History? A Look at Some
Exemplar Projects".
Doing
Digital History
Digital History is about digitizing the past
certainly, but it is much more than that. We
aspire to create ways for people to
experience and participate in history, as well
as to see and follow an argument about a
major historical problem. This section
contains essays on the process of creating
works of digital historical scholarship,
interviews with leading practitioners, and
lectures by digital historians sharing their
work . . . [more]
Updated list of Syllabi.
Teaching Digital
History
As Digital History becomes more prevalent,
we will be teaching with digital sources and
teaching digital methods. Teaching Digital
History involves methodological questions,
narrative theories, computational
programming, technical writing, group
projects, and digital media productions. This
section contains links to undergraduate and
graduate student projects and course syllabi
. . . [more]
Join the conversation
Digital History Project http://digitalhistory.unl.edu/index.php
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Roundtable questions/topics for discussion
“The Future of History Journals in the Digital Age,” Douglas Seefeldt, Chair
2012 American Historical Association conference
[CG] What have you done so far to take a traditional journal into the digital age and what are the next steps? To
what extent do you think journals will be--or should be--transformed by digital technologies by 2022? [How can
we get the good digital scholarship into the minds of historians who are accustomed to encountering such
scholarship via journals and books?]
[ASR] Who will be the audience for our online journals? How will the digital format weaken the familiar
binaries of professional/non-professional; academic/public; specialist/synthesizing?
[DRL] what are the financial ramifications of digital production and/or digital journals for journals themselves
and for their associations? What becomes a sustainable model financially as well as intellectually going forward?
[It's a practical question of sorts that also gets at issues of changing membership patterns (as well as readership
or scholarship) within the profession as well as by an interested public]
[ASR] You have expressed the concern that too much discussion about $$$, important as it is, may bog us down
because there really are no ready models yet. But you contend that we must start with the premise that the fate of
journals—the fate of the scholarship that gets communicated through journals, to be more precise--should be
decoupled from the revenue models for societies. Or else…..
[AT] Do we see libraries increasing stepping up to publish journals in the way that some are now housing
university presses?
[CG] How is digital scholarship like and unlike the traditional forms of scholarship that your journal deals with?
What are the challenges a born-digital "article" (entity?) poses to the double-blind review process at a scholarly
journal? What challenges does it pose to editing, production, and distribution?
[JM] JAH's insistence upon applying print journal criteria (number of pages, for example) to online projects.
More specifically, the JAH is determining whether or not to include online scholarship in its index of recent
scholarship. Not making the index means that your work does not exist.
[ST] Are there alternative ways of writing history than the analytic essay [spatial, data mining, deep databases,
etc.]? Are journals interested? Are our colleagues interested? If so what is making this move difficult? [How
should the discipline rethink itself and how should scholarly journals fit into it?]
[ASR] Genres always emerge as a response to audience. What genres will emerge as the most robust in the
journal niche of the short-form communication? [Is the journal a “community” or just the expression of one part
of a community?]
[CG] Is there a point where trying to increase readership for sustainability (or other noble goals) comes into
conflict with the scholarly mission of the journal.
[ASR] what conventions of the journal are optimized for print (page limit might be one) and we should feel okay
about letting go of in the digital? And which new convections can we imagine as optimized for the digital?
[AT] It is clear that the tendency among digital scholarship is to support OA via Creative Commons licenses or
other methods. What are the ramifications of Open Access principals to the history journal model?
[All] [Creativity, in the form of digital historical scholarship, is coming from the authors now. How do we need
to redefine the definitions and roles of authors and editors/publishers in light of this? And where does the
“brand” come from? Does the digital format change/challenge that authority?]