HIST 381: Digital History

Recently I interviewed  Dr. Cathy Moran Hajo, Assistant Professor of History at NYU, and the Editor and Assistant Director of the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, via email. (Check out her project at http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/).  I came across her project through the recommendation of another professor at NYU whom I originally contacted.  I was really curious to find out how a person becomes a digital historian, and what role digital history plays in the whole field of history.  Dr. Hajo was a great interviewee, and gave me a lot of insight about how she got where she is, why she is passionate about what she does, and the challenges and advantages of being in her field.

The most important thing I learned about becoming a digital historian is that the skills we are learning in “‘analog’ history,” as Dr. Hajo put it, will still be extremely valuable in doing digital history.  Dr. Hajo said that she developed her digital skills while she was working on the MSPP. SInce technology is constantly changing, Dr. Hajo recommended that students who are interested in digital history stay up-to-date on new tools, subscribe to digital history blogs, and not try to do it all.  “Focus in on the kinds of work that you would like to be doing, and then figure out the skills that you need for that aspect. “

Dr. Hajo and I also talked about why she cares about digital history in the first place.  For Dr. Hajo, digital history is about giving complete, accurate accounts of history to a wider range of people than would have access to analog primary source documents.  Dr Hajo was very adamant  that in order to truly “immerse ourselves” in history, we need to look at primary source documents.  This is particularly important because people often use their version of history to make a political argument.  Obviously, it’s not uncommon for people to cherry-pick information and quotes, taking what happened completely out of context to serve their argument.  Furthermore, some people completely fabricate stories.  By giving the general public access to the original source, digital historians are empowering people to do their own research and form their own opinions, instead of taking someone else’s word for it.  “We can’t retreat to a scholarly corner when historical texts are used for overtly political purposes and used badly,” said Hajo.

Next, Dr. Hajo and I discussed  the issues of relevancy, funding, and the struggle for legitimacy that digital historians have to face. I was really curious to know Dr. Hajo’s opinion about whether digital publications receive as much respect among academics as traditional publications.  Her opinion was that they don’t, for a variety of reasons.  First, because older, more prestigious faculty usually haven’t published in this format.  Also, in Dr. Hajo’s opinion, it is more difficult to understand the historical skill and the interpretation that go into any digital project.  She didn’t elaborate on this, but I think what she is saying is that digital history is about more than just scanning documents and putting them on the internet.  In the same way that researchers, archivists, and curators have to make sense of a jumble of items, digital historians have to do the same.  The difference lies in the tools that they use.

I questioned Dr. Hajo about the lack of funding available for humanities in general, and while she was realistic, she had some good news about the digital humanities.  It’s clear that right now, science is where it’s at, and humanists have to fight to convince others of the relevancy of their work.  However, Dr. Hajo said that digital projects often have an easier time getting funding because digital projects tend to be seen as more attractive and more accessible than print projects.  Unfortunately, however, digital humanitarians have to deal with changing technology.  “You cannot promise that the resources we build will be around 10 years from now–we can make our best case for it by using open-source and popular tools, but there is no telling when the next big thing will shake everything up.” Another advantage of the digital humanities that I had never considered is the ability to know how many people are using a particular resource.  If many people are using a resource, that organization can make a better case for their relevancy and continued funding.  If many people are not using a resource, humanists have a chance to fix that.

The main thing I learned from my interview with Dr. Cathy Moran Hajo is that the digital humanities are a two-edged sword.  Digital tools are exciting and the possibilities those tools represent are infinite.  However, digital tools are constantly changing, and digital humanists have to adapt quickly.  Digital projects can sometimes have an easier time finding funding, but generally have a harder time gaining legitimacy among traditional humanists.  Digital projects open up primary sources to a much wider range of people, but the work to do this is difficult and time-consuming.

I saved Dr. Hajo’s best observation for last.  I think this quote shows that Dr. Hajo respects the field of history deeply and that she hasn’t gotten so caught up in the “digital“  that she has forgotten the “humanity.”  She wrote, “Another challenge is to not fall into the trap of shaping historical inquiry to the tools that are out there instead of trying to develop or demand tools to do the kind of historical inquiry that you want…We need to stay historians first and digital second.”

I decided to interview Dr. Tona Hangen, Assistant Professor at Worcester State University, a small public school in Massachusetts.  According to Dr. Hangen, Worcester State University only has a small library and the students do not have access to archival materials on campus.  It was her students’ inability to access the “raw materials of history” that prompted Dr. Hangen to create a digital environment that would allow her students to utilize real historical sources.  She explained that print journals and even books are increasingly accessed via digital media; however, she also explained the need for students and historians to be able to access primary sources, secondary sources, and academic conversations.

Dr. Hangen strives to build assignments around digital resources so that her students learn to navigate around the digital world while mastering their historical content.  Just as students must transform “from readers to makers of history” in the traditional classroom, Dr. Hangen hopes her students will “recognize digital material and use it as a legitimate source to recreate history.”  In order to ensure her students utilize reliable digital sources, she teaches her students to recognize markers of authenticity online.  In her freshmen courses, she has her students deconstruct a Wikipedia entry in its entirety to help them realize what really exists online and learn about what is going on behind the scenes.  After her students deconstruct Wikipedia entries, they realize the importance of “reading Wikipedia from the bottom up” in order judge the entry’s authenticity based upon the sources used to create the entry.

After beginning teaching at Worcester State University, Dr. Hangen was perplexed with a question, “How can I get my students interested in what I do and get them involved in the world they live in?”  She was able to make her dreams a reality when she created Digital Worcester, an online archive.  Digital Worcester began as individual student projects on the post-industrial city of Worcester, Massachusetts.  Dr. Hangen wanted to accumulate an archive of her student’s projects online, in order to preserve them instead of simply writing a paper and keeping it on file.  Moreover, Dr. Hangen wanted future students, as well as members of the community and interested historians, to be able to access the information.  Over time, Digital Worcester has evolved into a database combined with richer information, as around two hundred students’ projects have been added to date.  Of utmost importance to Dr. Hangen, Digital Worcester “allows her students to engage with the world around them and learn” history in a digital age.

Another way Dr. Hangen engages her students in the classroom is by using GoogleMaps, GoogleDocs and other Google sites.  As the Assistant Director of the Honors Program at Worcester State University, she utilizes GoogleDocs to create and disseminate surveys and forms.  GoogleSpreadsheets helps her to manage the Honors Program as well as her many classes.  She often schedules “workshop days” in her classes where everyone brings their laptops or tablets to collaboratively create and edit projects.  Dr. Hangen also uses WikiSpaces to enhance her students’ learning through discovery, something her students respond very well to.  Dr. Hangen clearly understands that students work best when they find the activities to be relevant to their own lives, something she demonstrates in the fact that she implements numerous digital aspects in her classroom.

With all of the technology Dr. Hangen implements, I assumed she must have had intense technological training while in school; however, I assumed wrong.  Dr. Hangen had “almost no technological training” besides “reading and writing blogs” before teaching.  She began working with the Omeka site shortly after starting to teach.  While working with the Omeka site, she began coding through experimentation.  She said that “working online is really a learning by doing experience,” that is to say, experimenting through trial and error.  Dr. Hangen said one of the greatest benefits of the digital humanities is that  “you must build things and experiment [by] getting your hands dirty.”  The digital humanities are uncommercialized and they encourage collaboration on all academic levels.  Keeping in line with the ethics of the digital humanities, Dr. Hangen is devoted to maintaining open resources for the online community of historians.  I found it inspiring that Dr. Hangen taught herself how to work in the increasingly digital world, all the while ensuring the newfound information was implemented in her classroom.

As far as advice for a future educator hoping to utilize the digital world to liven history up, Dr. Hangen said “don’t be afraid to experiment,” “don’t just take the safe route,” and that “it is really a good thing to try new things, anything to enhance the learning environment is a good thing.”  She also said that the most essential thing for effective teaching is to read about what actually works by combing through online blogs and archives.  Moreover, Dr. Hangen said that “deep learning necessitates action and ownership!”  Her work is truly an inspiration, an illustration of how a teacher who cares can truly impact their students by making history accessible through online networking.

Her website contains further information for anyone interested: http://www.tonahangen.com/.

I chose to interview Mills Kelly of George Mason University. Because I am studying to become a history teacher, and he is a professor of history working with technology, I thought he might give me some insight into what I need to know before I begin teaching in the digital age.

My first question for Mr. Kelly was what his biggest obstacles have been in working with the digital humanities. His response was time and funding. Apparently and unfortunately, there is a lack of grant agencies that are willing to fund projects in the digital humanities, especially those that are related to teaching. I find this extremely unsettling considering the increasing presence and importance of technology in today’s society. I find it even more unsettling that funds for projects specifically in education are even more scant. The quality of education today is what will define our society’s future, for the people making the decisions in 50 years are being educated now. Humans need to evolve with their technologies, and if those technologies are not used to help educate future generations, how can we expect our world to progress?

The second obstacle Kelly noted—time—may in fact be related to this lack of funding. Mr. Kelly teaches, runs a Global Affairs program and conducts his own historical research, so he hardly has time to work on his digital projects. It seems to me that if more funding went towards digital research and the people who conduct it, perhaps people like Mr. Kelly could find time for their projects without putting their livelihood at stake.

In addition to his history classes, Mr. Kelly has also taught a course similar to our Digital History course: Teaching and Learning History in the Digital age. I asked him what the biggest changes have been since he began teaching this course; his reply was “the advent of social media”. When he first started teaching this course, he says the closest thing the world had to a social network was “Friendster”.

My next question to Mr. Kelly was what he considered to be the most important thing for future teachers to know as they begin teaching in the digital age. He noted that there is a difference between understanding how students learn with technology, and understanding how they use it. He says it that “we place far too little emphasis on teaching teachers how to understand how their students learn” and that it is most important to understand how students learn with technology, so that it can be properly utilized in the classroom. In relation to this, I asked him what he thinks are the most useful technologies in helping students learn about history. As may be expected, he said it was the internet, adding that data analysis tools will become more and more important in helping students maneuver their way through overwhelming databases.

Currently, this issue of helping students learn is Mr. Kelly’s greatest area of interest. Specifically, “how technologies are transforming the ways that students learn about the past, how they use those technologies to create new ways of expressing historical arguments, and how they use technology to bind themselves together either briefly around an assignment, or over the long term to create colleague relationships with other learners around the world.” His current project is a web journal called Global Perspectives on Digital History (http://gpdh.org), which gathers material from a multitude of sources including the personal websites of scholars, institutional sites, and blogs. In addition, this journal monitors different types of social media to see what is being discussed by the community. This journal is available in English, German and French and on its way to incorporating many more languages so the information found on its pages may be shared across the world.

The project Mr. Kelly is most proud of is his 1989 project he did a few years back http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989 . This is a webpage with information about the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, including an introductory essay, primary sources, scholar interviews, teaching modules, and case studies. The webpage is easy to navigate and contains many useful sources. Not only can this site be useful to students, but it contains a variety of helpful resources for teachers.  I can definitely see why Mr. Kelly is so proud of this project.

Looking into the field of digital humanities can be a daunting task for a young historian who is just beginning her career. Everything that I have learned related to doing history has involved going to the library and checking out books and printing academic articles. The concepts explored within the field of digital humanities, however, offer young scholars the opportunity to look at sources, evidence, and other academic scholarship in an entirely new and innovative way. As a means of peering into the new and emerging field of digital humanities I had the honor to interview one of Canada’s most knowledgeable digital humanists, Shawn Graham. The information he provided through this interview gave insight into his experiences in the field of digital humanities as well as advice and guidance for scholars who are just beginning to learn about using digital tools as part of their academic career.

As a young child, Shawn always enjoyed tinkering with things and learning how they worked. He gained this valuable knowledge by breaking things and taking them apart, always trying to understand how their mechanisms worked. At age ten, Shawn had an incident with a grand piano which rendered the instrument useless. This experiment, however, turned into a memory that Shawn attributes to his desire to work with technology. Although Shawn had an initial interest in how technology worked it was not until he was in college that he was asked to confront the uses of technology in an academic setting. Only after being presented with an assignment to create a “webography of sites,” did Shawn form an idea of how technology would play into the future of academia. At first, the relationship between technology and academia did not look promising to Shawn. Based on an article he wrote titled “Why the World Wide Web Will Never Be Useful for Academics,” it was clear that Shawn’s initial reaction to technology in the classroom was very pessimistic. On this note, however, he did provide a bit of advice to young people beginning their careers in this field. He believes in “failing gloriously and failing often.” He said that “it’s only through that cycle – and being willing to share what happened – that we move forward.” I find solace in these words, especially considering the fact that the technology used within the realm of digital humanities is new and quickly changing. I know that I will take Shawn’s advice to heart as I continue to explore the opportunities and possibilities that digital history provides.

Although Shawn has a solid footing in the digital world, his real passion lies in the content that he can present through digital means. Shawn is from a family of history buffs and teachers. His sibling, aunts and uncles all work in the realm of teaching in some capacity or another. His particular field of study, albeit related to history, is not history, but rather archeology. Shawn has a true interest in the idea of historical landscapes and the materialism associated with archeology. Being able to touch and see ancient artifacts and work at archeological digs spurred Shawn’s passion to share this content with others in the digital world through interactive and exciting means. An example of such a digital component is presented as a concept of augmented reality. Easily accessible through his blog, electricarcheology, Shawn depicts and then describes how to recreate a “visual 3D pop-up book.” I believe that this concept is incredibly innovative and can be used to draw the public, and especially children, into the wonders of archeology and history.

Being one of the only academics in Canada to have “digital humanist” as part of his job title is encouraging for young scholars. While I find the idea of being one of the first academics to conquer this new field as daunting, Shawn takes a difference approach. He sees this situation as one of freedom. He really does have the ability to shape the field of digital humanities and encourage the academic world to engage in this new technology, or as Shawn put it, “He is making it up as he goes.”

As the world of digital humanities and digital history more specifically continues to grow, I find myself more and more intrigued with the possibilities that these new technologies can offer. And while I consider myself a historian by trade as opposed to a digital humanist, I am not going to limit myself or the projects I want to work on to the traditional methods of academia. I look forward to using multidisciplinary tactics and techniques to further my own education and to share my research. In the 21^st century there is no denying that the digital world will offer a new venue and means of connecting with other scholars and providing a new and exciting outlet to share our passions with a public audience.