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By Leah, June 26, 2009 11:54 pm

Just a quick post to let everyone know that my final project for digital history is nearing completion (well, at least for now). My final project is entitled Personal Liberty in Antebellum America: The Fugutive Slave Crisis and the Coming of the Civil War, and I intend to keep developing the site beyond just this summer as time allows. Feel free to let me know what you think so far.

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By Leah, June 11, 2009 3:23 pm

In what ways can the computer truly revolutionize history? Much of what historians are currently doing on the web isn’t really that different than traditional forms of scholarship, since many history websites are dedicated to archiving print materials and are still largely prose-based. In his book, Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology Will Transfrom Our Understanding of the Past, David J. Staley argues for the importance of visualization in transforming our understanding and study of history. He defines visualization as “any graphic which organizes meaningful information in multidimensional spatial form” and argues that visualizations should be seen as a legitimate form of historical inquiry as well as an important type of secondary sources (p. 3). He is also quick to acknowledge, however, that the field of history still has much progress to make in terms of accepting visualizations and other forms of digital history as legitimate sources. Staley is not saying that visualizations should replace all prose, but he does argue that there are instances in which visualizations are the better choice since they allow for different, nonlinear types of thinking.  

We also read “When Was Linearity?: The Meaning of Graphics in the Digital Age” by Alan Liu and “50+ Web 2.0 ways to Tell a Story” by Alan Levine. Both of these articles prompted a discussion regarding the future of images and visualizations in historical scholarship. Historians such as Staley have published photo essays (such his Visual History of Germany) that force readers to draw their own conclusions with little written guidance. Certainly there are instances in which images and visualizations are the best choice for conveying specific types of historical information or narratives, but Americans (and, even more specifically, historians) have not been trained to interpret images as we have been trained to interpret text. Just as with other new forms of historical scholarship (i.e. public history), historians need to learn to embrace well-done examples of visual history. However, historians producing such types of work also have to think carefully about how their audience will interpret such work. If authors of photo essays such as Staley are ok with different people interpreting their work in different ways, then that is fine, but if they want to ensure that a specific, fairly uniform conclusion is met by people that read their work, they will likely still have to provide some written explanation. Until we are taught to better understand and interpret visual works, visual historians will have to decide how far they want to go in ensuring that their work is interpreted in a specific way.

For me, the ultimate point of visual history and visualizations is to better convey complex history and to get people thinking critically and in new ways about important topics. Here are a few of my personal favorite examples of visual history:

• The new Virtual Museum of Iraq: The Baghdad Museum was looted during the United States invasion in 2003, but just this past Tuesday Italy helped Iraq launch this virtual museum as part of an ongoing cultural collaboration between the two countries. You can read more about this partnership and the project itself in the article, “Italy Puts Baghdad Museum Online,” but you should definitely explore the site itself. Visitors can enter different “halls” (from the prehistoric to the Islamic), and through this project people across the world gain access to priceless artifacts from more than 6,000 years of history. Although each object does have a brief description, the site is largely visual, utilizing still images, 360-views of artifacts, and movies to convey a great deal of history in a very engaging way.
•  The Coney Island History Project is a nonprofit group whose goal is to “increase awareness of Coney Island’s legendary and colorful past and to encourage appreciation of the Coney Island neighborhood of today.” Their website now includes an interactive development map that “seeks to preserve the memory of the Coney Island that was and to tell the story of how it arrived at the form it takes today.” The map allows visitors to explore sites on Coney Island through the ages, providing a map with different views as well as multiple pictures of each highlighted site through the years.
• The National Constitution Center is definitely worth a visit. Their opening presentation and exhibits make use of visualizations, immersing people in a variety of interactive experiences that explore what, exactly, “We the People” means for us as Americans.