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Essays


HISTORY AND THE SECOND DECADE OF THE WEB

by Daniel J. Cohen

June 2004

Overviews

Originally published in Rethinking History Vol.8, No.2, June 2004, pp. 293-301

More than ten years of experience with the web has allowed us to understand what
the medium does well and what it does poorly, and how we may improve online
historical efforts so they capitalize on the web’s strengths while avoiding its
weaknesses. This essay explores three possible ways to advance digital history:
interaction between historians and their subjects, interoperation of dispersed
historical archives, and the analysis of online resources using computational
methods. Thinking about such possibilities raises important, age-old questions
about how we should preserve and chronicle the past.

Keywords: Digital history; Data-mining; Interoperability; XML; Archives

With the World Wide Web now in its second decade of existence, and with the
euphoria of the dot-com era now well behind us, it is a good time to reflect on
what historians have been able to do in this still immature medium and how in
the next decade of its existence we can better make use of it. Generally a
conservative bunch in terms of the adoption of new technology (if not in
political inclination), historians have, mostly for better but surely on
occasion for worse, incorporated the medium into their work over the past ten
years. For the most part using the web–it seems appropriate in our post-bubble
sobriety to drop the grandiose alliterative phrase as well as the
capitalization–has meant the posting of materials for courses, exhibitions,
independent work and collaborations, as well as the communication of news and
views from all corners of the discipline. Websites have flourished on almost
every conceivable historical topic, created by historians from within and beyond
the academy.

To be sure, this represents a tremendous step forward. As many have noted, the
marginal cost of reaching another person with these electronic materials is
almost zero, which represents a great advance over the physical world of paper
(Negroponte 1996). With the web a hundred interested colleagues can access an
online essay as cheaply and simply as a dozen. Moreover, the structure of the
web allows interested parties to access that essay from any internet-connected
computer, at any time, and to search the text for phrases or keywords. Creator
and audience alike may link this piece to others on the web, catalogue and copy
it, and even print it if so desired. By now most of us are familiar with these
significant advantages that come with digital, rather than physical, historical
resources.

One senses, however, that the medium of the web has not been exploited to its
fullest if the best we can say about historians’ use of this highly advanced
computer network is that it has become a giant, global fax machine, faithfully
reproducing and distributing copies of historical documents (primary and
secondary), related commentaries and professional missives. And because of the
openness of the medium–and the always tenuous relationship between the
professoriate and the large population of lay historians and the general public
interested in history–many historians have found the web to be a mixed blessing:
prolific but unmediated, powerful but untamed, open to all but taken seriously
by few. When my colleagues Roy Rosenzweig, Michael O’Malley and Andrew McMichael
first surveyed the historical web in 1995, they were impressed with the number
of websites on FDR: 49. Today that number stands at 628,000–and one would
venture to guess that not all of them are compelling, accurate, and the product
of the kind of deliberative thought and research that our profession honours
(McMichael et al. 1996). Online history has not–and indeed may never–rival the
gold standard of the book, replete with its physical and (hopefully)
intellectual heft, peer review, and centuries of technical improvements such as
the footnote, table of contents and index (Grafton 1997; O’Malley 2000).

Yet historians will never know if this apparent inequality of media is inherent
in the natures of the web and print unless we work harder to capitalize on the
advantages of the web and lessen its disadvantages, in the process creating new
forms of history that can only exist online. Surely it is ridiculous to ask this
new medium to reproduce the exact successes of paper, just as it would be silly
to denigrate Ken Burns’ Huey Long for being less comprehensive than the
biography by T. Harry Williams. Both worthy examinations of a crucial figure in
American history, these two efforts had different goals that were commensurate
with the strengths of their intended medium. Furthermore, just because the
majority of websites on FDR are not worth the electrons they vibrate should not
condemn by association the thoughtfully or creatively produced minority.

So what have we learned about the strengths and weaknesses of this young medium,
and how can we maximize the web’s advantages and minimize its disadvantages to
create the best forms of online history? It is clear that the web is very good
at connecting large numbers of people regardless of physical location; allowing
for synchronous and asynchronous communications between those people and in
general facilitating collaboration; enabling the storage and transmission of
huge amounts of information; encoding information in such a way as to make it
rapidly searchable by machines; removing barriers to publication and providing
space for unbounded publications and parallel publications of a single entity
(such as translations); and allowing for revision and updating. The web’s
disadvantages include its lack of stability and persistence; its difficulty in
displaying human-friendly, legible formats for text, especially for the
long-form narratives that have been the hallmark of history for generations; its
failure to provide reliable clues that help one discern the real from the fake
and the good from the bad; and its lack of the kinds of checks that in the
physical world lead to an often beneficial winnowing of available information.
Examining this list of pluses and minuses, it should not be surprising that many
in our profession have regarded the web with suspicion. We spend much of our
time as readers, and we like our documents stable, authentic,persistent and
legible. Moreover, when even web designers who have come out of academia such as
Sarah Horton and Patrick J. Lynch note that it is best to break text on the web
into ‘small chunks’, defenders of the traditional historical essay and book have
had a right to be worried (Lynch & Horton 2002). In addition, high expectations
for both ‘e-books’ and new, nonlinear forms of digital writing (‘hypertext’)
have thus far proven unwarranted. Most of us still like our text linear and
coherent, and in crisp black fonts on a white page.

Although technologists constantly praise computers as ‘universal machines’, and
while it is true that they are remarkably flexible and powerful, this does not
mean that we should use them for every kind of historical effort or production.
We can truly begin to think about history in the second decade of the web, and
to postulate new, more appropriate and ideally more enlightening forms of online
history when we begin to look beyond the distribution of documents (including
essays, articles, exhibits, news and messages) and consider instead the
collection, interrelation and exploration of those documents. Much of the
problem here is conceptual:from the beginning of the web historians have largely
discussed nouns such as web pages and websites, rather than verbssuch as
searching, sorting, gathering and communicating. We can reorient ourselves by
remembering that the web is a subset of the internet, its very name representing
the way this computer network shuttles information between and among people,
rather than just a publishing medium that goes from point A (historians) to
point B (an interested audience). This character of the web is already being
exploited well by websites that have furthered professional communication. For
instance,H-Net (http://www.h-net.msu.edu) has online discussion groups on over a
hundred topics that one can access via the website or through email. Every day
historians ask each other for assistance with their research and analyse new
work in their fields. In contrast to paper media, the internet seems ideally
suited for this kind of vibrant, daily exchange. There are other forms of
interactivity, or two-way communication, on the web that are less developed but
that have the potential to create new kinds of history on the web. What about
communications not just among historians but between historians and their
subjects? For historians working on topics in the post-Second World War era, the
web can be a tremendous resource for reaching those across the globe who have
recollections or materials that could further their investigations in the
present and contribute to archives for future historians.

Two web projects I have worked on, the ECHO Project (http://echo.gmu.edu) and
the September 11 Digital Archive (http://911digitalarchive.org), have explored
this possibility of using the web not only to present the past but also to
collect it. Both sites use flexible databases and the upload capacity of the web
(in addition to its vast capacity to download, or distribute, documents) to
acquire materials from far-flung historical subjects such as scientists and
engineers (in the case of ECHO) and those who witnessed and were affected by
9/11 (in the case of the September 11 Digital Archive). It is so far an
imperfect science, to be sure, with pitfalls and insecurities, but the pay-off
can be tremendous when a project that collects history online is successful. The
nature and extent of what one can gather, while certainly different from a
traditional oral history project or museum effort, seems just as enlightening
and important as a future historical resource, and likely will grow more so as
an increasing percentage of our communications and expressions occur in digital
media. That has certainly been the case with the September 11 Digital
Archive,which the Library of Congress recently accessioned–the first major
digital acquisition by the institution. Started in January 2002 with a
rudimentary website by myself and colleagues at the Center for History and New
Media at George Mason University and our associates at the American Social
History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York, and funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the
archive now contains over 130,000 digital objects from the tragic events of that
day and its aftermath, including stories, email, photos, artwork, poetry, audio
recordings and digital video. The materials have been donated via the website
and through less sophisticated meanssuch as postal mail and the telephone
(digitally connected to our servers) by over 30,000 individual contributors. The
result is an extremely varied and vital archive of the experiences, thoughts and
emotions of a broad spectrum of contributors from every state and from many
nations. The archive contains the recollections and images of emergency workers
and those who survived Ground Zero in New York and the Pentagon, the sounds of
voicemail and the chatter of instant messages, as well as more impressionistic
responses and subsequent reflections. While the September 11 Digital Archive was
by far the largest and most comprehensive online effort to record this history,
we were not alone in this endeavour; at the same time that we were permitting
submissions through our website, dozens of other individuals and institutions
were engaging in similar projects on the web, creating parallel collections that
historians in decades to come will hopefully find useful when they try to
understand the true meanings of 11 September 2001.

This concurrence also suggests a second, relatively unexplored possibility for
history in the next decade of the web: the potential for ‘interoperability’. A
word most frequently used by ‘web services’ software developers who work on
integrating websites and databases for decentralized businesses,and associated
with opaque acronyms and new information architectures such as the international
standard XML and Microsoft’s NET initiative, interoperability holds promise for
historical researchers interested in creating and accessing vast archives of
documents that exist in different places on the web. For example, for my
research on the history of nineteenth-century mathematics I have been following
with great interest the virtual integration of several major archives of
digitized mathematical texts by the Cornell University Library, the University
of Michigan Library and the State and University Library Göttingen, called the
Distributed Digital Library of Mathematical Monographs
(http://www.library.cornell.edu/mathbooks/). This novel effort, facilitated by
these new technologies that allow dispersed web servers to respond in tandem to
requests for information, shows the power of interoperability. Certainly one
could have gone to each library’s website and conducted a separate search for
books or phrases. However, the combined archive, created through seamless,
hidden communications between these websites, is greater than the sum of its
parts, and not only as a time saver. The Distributed Digital Library makes it
far easier to get an overview of passages on a specific topic, such as
non-Euclidean geometry, and to spot trends in the development of that subject
during the nineteenth century. It represents both a quantitative and a
qualitative advance over prior resources in the history of mathematics. My own
effort to explore the potential of interoperability has been an attempt to
virtually combine the often disregarded educational products of tens of
thousands of academics. By using an algorithm to analyse documents found through
behind-the-scenes communications with Google’s enormous database, my Syllabus
Finder (http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/syllabi) searches the web for pages that look
like syllabi and, when successful, saves them in a special format. It can then
present those syllabi to interested seekers, figure out which school, college or
university a course is being taught at, and, more experimentally, attempt to
extract assigned books and other notable features of a syllabus. In a sense the
Syllabus Finder creates a single, overarching course directory (though obviously
it includes only syllabi that are posted to the web), with the potential to show
how many courses are being taught on a specific topic, which books or articles
are popular or influential, and which types of assignments faculty like to
assign. My hope is that ultimately it will provide a unique window into the
state of higher education. With over 250,000 syllabi collected so far (including
over 10,000 history syllabi) it is not unreasonable to say that it is, by
several orders of magnitude, the largest archive of course materials ever
collected–and all of this was done in an automated fashion following my initial
programming.

This collection of a quarter of a million syllabi, which could only have been
acquired in a medium where text is machine-readable, searchable and easily
reproduced, suggests another possibility for history in the second decade of the
web: a digital cognate of ‘close reading’ that computer scientists call
‘data-mining’. Data-mining involves complex analyses of digital materials to
find meaningful patterns. In a way it is a more advanced version of what some
classicists and literary scholars have been doing for years when they have
manually counted the frequency of certain words, or compared the various uses of
those words, in a text or set of texts. On the web the speed with which one is
able to do this sort of textual analysis can enable both quick assessments of
historical collections as well as more substantive investigations. When Michael
Kazin used search tools to scan the September 11 Digital Archive for the
frequency of words such as ‘patriotic’ and ‘freedom’, he came to some important,
if initial, conclusions about the American reaction to the terrorist attacks.
Kazin discovered that fewer Americans than one might imagine saw 9/11 in terms
of nationalism, radical Islam versus the values of the West, or any other
abstract framework. Instead, most saw the events in far more personal and local
terms: the loss of a friend, the effect on a town or community, the impact on
their family or jobs (Kazin 2003). Using similar electronic techniques,
researchers are already probing the Syllabus Finder database to investigate a
variety of themes, such as the changing role of race and ethnicity in
undergraduate education, the growth of distance learning, how course materials
on the web differ from offline materials, and how globalization is affecting the
teaching of history and international relations. Future enquiries may use an
extremely powerful computer science method called ‘regular expressions’, which
one can use to search documents for all kinds of text patterns, not just keyword
or phrase matches. As with interactivity and interoperability, early efforts at
data-mining hint at a future of doing and using history on the web that may have
more to do with providing materials and structures for historical research than
with the presentation of a finished secondary source such as an electronic book
or exhibit website. Done correctly, and taking advantage of the medium’s
unparalleled ability to store, scan and interrelate documents, the web may
enable new investigative tactics and resources. The 130,000 objects in the
September 11 Digital Archive are not like any other 130,000 objects in the
Library of Congress; we have acquired them, and can explore them, in ways we are
only beginning to consider. Such collections and their associated electronic
methods have the potential (an appropriately cautious word at this point) to
supplement, though not replace, traditional historical research in physical
archives.

Finally, thinking about doing history on the web, just like thinking about
history in any other medium, should ideally force us to revisit age-old
questions about what history is and how we should engage in it. For some years I
taught Herodotus and Thucydides to freshmen and perennially enjoyed (and felt
professionally reinvigorated by) their sense of the differences between these
two progenitors of the idea of history. Purveyor of a mostly tidied, marching
chronology that aspired to the truth about what seemed to him (and to most
historians since) to be the most devastating events to befall ancient Greece,
and with a particular focus on remarkable figures such as Pericles and
Alcibiades, Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War captured the hearts and
minds of most in my classes. Students readily identified his compelling
narrative of warfare and diplomacy as ‘history’. Other students found themselves
drawn to Herodotus’ idiosyncratic tangents and more expansive view of ancient
culture beyond the battles between the Greeks and the Persians. This minority
found Herodotus’ sense of what belonged in the historical record refreshing: the
strange rituals of non-Greek cultures, the sentiments of common people in
addition to leading figures, competing and contradictory accounts. As Herodotus
told his audience, he was saving and recounting it all because in the future
people might have different notions of what or who is important: ‘I will go
forward in my account, covering alike the small and great cities of mankind. For
of those that were great in earlier times most have now become small, and those
that were great in my time were small in the time before. Since, then, I know
that man’s good fortune never abides in the same place, I will make mention of
both alike’ (Herodotus 1987, p. 35). Not having to worry about fitting his
account into a limited number of pages, a rich description of what he had
learned from a wide variety of sources, Greek and otherwise, seemed to Herodotus
to be the sensible course to take. Although the medium is still in its infancy,
it appears that the web may be more propitious for history in the inclusive and
wide-ranging mode of Herodotus than in the resolute mode of Thucydides. On the
web historians can supplement their narratives with virtually unbounded
collections of sources, notes, graphs, charts, images and links that even a
profligate publisher could not hope to fit into a book. In addition, given the
open access of the web it seems appropriate to cast the widest possible net (so
to speak) in projects like the September 11 Digital Archive, rather than focus
on figures such as government leaders who will likely dominate coverage in
print. The massive capacity of the web means that historians can push beyond the
selectivity of paper collections to create more comprehensive archives with
multiple viewpoints and multiple formats (including audio and video as well as
text). These archives, hopefully partially making up for their lack of a
curator’s touch with their size, scope and immediacy, will in turn require more
sophisticated tools for future research. If carefully developed, such
collections–ideally interoperable with others of their ilk–may provide
historians not only of this generation, but also of generations to
come, with the means to understand the past better and more deeply.

Footnotes:

Note

1 Routledge cannot be held responsible for the content or accuracy of the urls
linked to from the online version of this article, which can be found at
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13642529.asp

References

Grafton, A. (1997) The Footnote: A Curious History, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA.

Herodotus (1987) The History, trans. David Grene, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, IL.

Kazin, M. (2003) ’12/12 and 9/11: tales of power and tales of experience in
contemporary history’, History News Network, 11 September,
http://hnn.us/articles/1675.html.

Lynch, P. J. & Horton, S. (2002) Web Style Guide (2nd edn), Yale University
Press, New Haven, CT.

McMichael, A., O’Malley, M. & Rosenzweig, R. (1996) ‘Historians and the web: a
guide’, AHA Perspectives, January, pp. 11-16.

Negroponte, N. (1996) Being Digital, Vintage, New York.

O’Malley, M. (2000) ‘Building effective course sites: some thoughts on design
for academic work’, Inventio, Spring, http://www.doit.gmu.edu/inventio/spring00/


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