Digital History in the Twenty-first Century: An Introduction to History 2.0

"In democratic countries, knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others." Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835.

History is collaboration. Every acknowledgments section of every history book assures us of this. Historical works are not created in a vacuum. We test our new ideas on colleagues, we expect feedback from our peers and professors, and we give trial presentations of our papers at conferences and make changes based on the feedback we receive. We maintain good relationships with librarians and archivists without whom we could not do our work. Collaboration is vital to the work of history. Digital history provides historians with new ways to collaborate.

The internet and the digital culture surrounding it spawn neologisms with astonishing regularity. We "google" search terms, we "youtube" video clips. We blog. We email. We surf the net. We also do digital history. Digital history has different meanings in different contexts. Most commonly, digital history means digital archives, or electronic copies. Libraries have been digitizing their collections and making them available on-line for the last quarter century, and historians have been using those archives. Every history student is familiar with JSTOR. This access to digital archives has been a boon to researchers at all professional levels. This access to archives may make the historian's job easier, but the posting of images or text does not substantially change the way historians do history. For the purposes of this essay, digital history is history that can only be done with computers. The term History 2.0 refers to the concept Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is one of those frequently used internet buzzwords that seems to have little real meaning.

What is Web 2.0?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee says there is no such thing as Web 2.0.(1) Berners-Lee knows something about the internet. He created the protocols for the World Wide Web, and designed the first web browser. The Queen of England knighted him for his role in inventing the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee says that Web 2.0 is just the web doing what the web was always meant to do. It helps people communicate and collaborate. Web 2.0 is little more than a marketing term. Berners-Lee is correct.

The phrase Web 2.0 was coined by another Tim famous among the computer-savvy; Tim O'Reilly. O'Reilly built a corporate empire writing and publishing manuals on almost every conceivable software and computer-related topic. During the summer of 2004 O'Reilly became interested in identifying the successful trends in the post-bust world of internet entrepreneurship.(2) To articulate the difference he saw in the pre-bust internet, and the post-bust internet, he coined the term Web 2.0 and asserted the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is the difference between publishing and participating. He also is correct.

The web has always been about collaboration, but much of that was obscured in the nineties by the ease of using the web as a publishing platform. List serves, bulletin board systems, and email were three of the most rapidly adopted functions of the World Wide Web, and three functions that point to early methods of collaboration. Amazon, EBay, and Google are three early corporations that embraced the participatory nature of the web with great success. However, despite the existence of participatory cultures on the internet in the nineties, the early 2000s have seen an explosion in social networking software. The nineties were about publishing. The 2000s are about participating. Blogs are not about publishing on the web, blogs are about comments, link backs, and cross posts. Web pages are a soapbox, blogs are a conversation. Or, they can be. Both Tims are right. The internet has always been about collaboration, but there is a new generation of software and attitudes that are re-invigorating this idea. Because Web 2.0 is a buzzword, sometimes used for marketing, for the purposes of this paper not everything tagged Web 2.0 falls within my definition of Web 2.0. Similarly, not everything referred to as digital history falls within the definition of digital history used in this paper.

What is Digital History?

So, what is digital history? Digital history is the combination of history and computers. It may help clarify to explain what digital history is not. It is not taking materials that could just as easily be published in a book and posting them on the web. This may be the most common use of the phrase digital history, but we are after something else. Watching, or reading, primary source material on a computer, or on the internet, is not digital history. Digital history is not adding together an already familiar media form, like books or movies, with a computer. Digital history is also not an extension of a correspondence course done via email. All of these things have their own value, and computers may help or enhance, but it is not what is being considered here this morning. The computer is more than a magical chalkboard.

The first generation of people watching moving pictures saw them as a form of recorded theater. Literary critic Janet Murray calls this "an additive art form (photography plus theater)." Eventually movie makers learned to use "montage, close-ups, zooms, and the like as a part of storytelling." When the medium of moving pictures was still novel, creators were uncertain how to shape it creatively. The same is happening with the internet. The initial use of the internet was additive. Publishing plus computer screen. But, now people are finding creative uses that are unique to the social, distributed nature of this new electronic medium.(3)(3a)

Part of the creativity of Web 2.0 comes from moving beyond email and blogs and wikis and blending them all together into something new, then mashing that together with cell phones and digital imagery. Static web pages are boring. "Email is for old people."(4) In a few years, if it has not happened already, your students will use email only to correspond with their professors, their parents, and other old folks. Instead of static web pages, people build web environments which mash together their favorite music videos and movie clips combined with their own digital video shorts, blended together with streaming music, and linked to original reviews of bands, and comments about restaurants, movies, classes, and pointers to other cool stuff on the web, including friends and foes, combined with streams of their Flickr and del.icio.us accounts. This is an entire ecology of information being created and shared. None of this will replace the history book, or journal article. It will provide a new creative platform, just as the documentary film created a new platform for historians a century ago.

Six "Big Ideas"

So, if the internet is something more than some familiar pieces added together, what is it? What has happened with the evolution of this new medium that makes neologisms like Web 2.0 make some sort of sense? And, most importantly, why is this significant for historians, and other academics? Paul Anderson and his associates at the Joint Information Systems Committee identified six unique "big ideas" underpinning Web 2.0., and by extension digital history (5) --

1. Individual production and user generated content. This means that the barrier to participation is lower. There are now exponentially more people with whom to discuss your disciplinary interests then there were a decade ago. This is especially important for historians who do twentieth century studies. More people are publishing their experiences, more people are thinking about what those experiences might mean, and more people are looking for patterns in the past. User generated content is also what built Wikipedia. Most of the web is user-generated content.

2. Harnessing the power of the crowd. When the users who create content become a crowd they can build a significant body of knowledge. Thanks to online forums people with computer access can research health problems, and get a better understanding of their ailments and the possible treatments, than most doctors had available a few decades ago. This is because the crowd has added information little by little.

3. Data on an epic scale, like the amount of data perused by Google, or available in Google books, allows for creative new searches and serves up remarkable new patterns.

4. Architecture of participation. This is one of the key ideas for understanding new methods of collaboration among, and within, academic disciplines. The Web 2.0 model is not just that more people can participate; it is that to succeed it must be easier for people to participate. Wikipedia is a perfect example of this. There is no barrier to changing most articles. You do not even need to share your name or email address. If you see a fact that needs correcting, or a gross mischaracterization of the facts, or even a typo or grammatical error, you simply change it. Overcoming barriers to participation are critical, since participatory culture works better the more people who are involved.

5. Network effect. The knowledge ecology becomes richer and more robust with a greater number of people involved. The value of a network does not increase geometrically as more people join it, but exponentially. If a 10 person wiki adds another author, that is not just one more person that can contribute, that is ten potential new conversations that can take place. And, finally,

6. Openness. Since, in order to get the best effects, there must be an ease of participation, openness becomes crucial to this new media. Success comes from an aggregate of tiny additions by many people. Restrictions which make sense with older forms of media no longer make sense with the medium of the internet. Intellectual property is transforming into intellectual sharing.

Speculative use for a wiki

The wiki may be the most notable collaborative web 2.0 software. Like some other web 2.0 software, it existed before the term was coined. A wiki is a remarkably simple idea. It is a website to which anyone can add an entry, and then, anyone else can edit that entry. The most well-known, and by some standards, the most successful wiki is Wikipedia. Some wikis are open for anyone to participate, like Wikipedia. Almost anyone who can get to a Wikipedia page can edit it. Other wikis restrict editing, and posting privileges to a select group of users. This group can be as small or large as the members or creators decide.

Wikipedia is not the only possible type of wiki. Imagine, for example, a wiki survey text. Compiled by a wide range of historians the wiki survey text might cover the themes commonly covered in a regular textbook.(6) If a professor found a section was too short, or too long, that individual professor could edit that portion for her class. Under this scenario students need never buy a textbook again. A survey text wiki could be compiled for any discipline, for any survey course, for any department, or for the profession as a whole.

Another potential use for wikis in the profession might be as a replacement to the American Historical Association’s Guide to Periodical Literature. The Guide is a tremendous resource, but it would be a better resource if decades did not go by between editions. Wikis can also include timelines, images, and digital copies of original documents. The wiki survey text could be so abundant, and robust it could be used for almost anyone's purpose.(7)

Future-ese

In his essay "The Historian as Polyglot," Jaroslav Pelikan suggested that it is the historian's role to translate past-ese into present-ese.(8) In his "Polyglot Manifesto," Manan Ahmed takes the metaphor one step further and argues that historians also need to be able to speak future-ese.(9) For some historians learning computer language skills will be as important as learning a foreign language. The profession will benefit if history graduate programs encourage students to learn skills like web development. To succeed in this new publishing environment the bewildering acronyms of digital media - API, CSS, AJAX, XML, etc. need to become a second language to today's scholars.(10)

New ways to teach

This new digital environment suggests new pedagogies, and new strategies for teaching the survey.(11) In his recent Journal of American History article, Lendol Calder notes that history professors cover the material in class. Calder recommends that instead of professors covering the material, professors teach students to uncover historical knowledge.(12) Rather than reading history, or taking history, students should be doing history, uncovering history. In another effort to rethink the survey course, Professor John McClymer urges the use of new media in his 2005 monograph, The AHA Guide to Teaching and Learning with New Media. The digital tools referred to as Web 2.0 are the new media that can help students uncover history. Using these tools to engage students as active participants in historical research fits the definition of digital history used in this essay. Combine Calder's ideas about uncovering history with McClymer's ideas about learning with new media, mash them together with some wiki software, and an interesting new way of teaching history is suggested.

Let the students write their own survey textbook.(13) Working together, with the professor's guidance, students can build a wiki dealing with the theme of the class. As they collect information questions of authenticity, context, and meaning will arise, and provide teaching opportunities for the professor. Major themes, like the Civil War, the abolitionist movement, the Seneca Falls convention, etc. can be assigned as student essays. Students can be taught to act as editors over other student essays, checking source citations, and editing prose for clarity. A final exam might ask them to recreate the essay they composed for the wiki. Or, their final exam challenge might be editing together a smaller version of the wiki, dealing with a specific overarching theme. Ambitious professors can implement reputation ranking software, allowing students to give feedback on each other, to determine a portion of their grade. Keep in mind that participatory history is not likely to replace books, or traditional teaching. Digital history is a complementary genre. The old ways will not vanish. History books will still be produced and read in survey courses. Documentaries will still be filmed, and static websites will still be posted. Digital media simply expands the playing field, and allows new ways of doing, and teaching, history.

New ways to research

Digital history also offers new tools and new research strategies for scholars, researchers, and writers. The simplest, and perhaps most obvious digital tool, but still one of the most powerful is the search engine. Digital History Promises and Perils by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig offers as an example of the power of search, analyzing the "changing reputation of Richard Hofstadter in the historical profession."(14) Searching for Hofstadter's name in the scholarly journals held in JSTOR offers a starting point that did not exist a generation ago. Even the most intrepid researcher would falter at searching through the thousands of issues of hundreds of journal titles necessary to locate passing references. Yet, this sort of search is available for most scholars to perform in a matter of moments. A search for Hofstadter immediately gives the researcher a snapshot of who was interested in Hofstadter, and when. A closer analysis reveals the method with which Hofstadter and his ideas were deployed.

The dark side of digital history

I want to emphasize that I am making an argument for including digital history, not an argument for replacing traditional forms of history. There are problems with digital history. The most commonly noted problems are those of permanence and transience. Books are perhaps the most versatile, and sustainable, technology ever invented, while electronic media has a long history of dying. If a researcher uncovers a treasure trove of information, it may do him little good if it is locked on 4.5 floppies, coded in some archaic word processing software. Or, for that matter, what does a researcher do with a pile of freshly discovered Edison cylinders?(15) An over-reliance on digital archives can skew the historical record. As Rosenzweig asks "Could we arrive at a future in which, if it is not on the Web, maybe it didn’t happen?"(16) An over-confidence in digitization projects can result in the destruction of historically valuable materials. Materials are being destroyed after they are digitized, or in the digitization process, but there is no guarantee those digital copies will be available in one hundred years. But, those are problems with digital archives. More to the point for the digital history I am discussing are problems like the problem of participation.

The power of the network depends on participation. What if you build a social network and no one contributes? How do you peer-review work on a constantly shifting wiki? Can history really be opened to a broader audience when journals are kept behind the ivory firewalls of research libraries? Despite Carl Becker's democratic desire, "everyman" cannot be a historian. The private web, those wonderful databases that cost so much and are purchased by university libraries, are not available to everyman.(17) How does this digital divide affect historians and their ability to capably use the new media? Can history be free and open-source? Do historians even want history to be free and available to all? If history is freely available to all, does this mean the end of journals and of the organizations that journals support?(18) Technophiles like to point to Jack Valenti’s prediction that videotapes would kill cinema as a frivolous concern about the effects of new technology. But, historians know better. Cars killed the horse and buggy. Cassette tapes killed reel-to-reel. Technological changes can lead to widespread cultural change. Have the advocates of digital history and new media considered the profound, and not necessarily positive, changes that might be in store for a generation of scholars who turn their backs on traditional methods?

Anyone attempting to keep abreast of the ever-accelerating developments in the digital world quickly realizes there is an attention economy at work. The digital world often demands a lot of attention for the value it provides. Attention is our most limited and most precious resource. Is it really feasible to learn new software languages, develop new course strategies, and syllabi, to test out new educational methods, to build wikis and blogs all while continuing to research, sit on committees and advise students? Maybe not. But, if digital history is embraced by academics, then it is reasonable that contributing to an officially-sanctioned wiki has the same cultural value as sitting on a committee. A few years ago Ivan Tribble published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education wringing his hands over whether academics should blog.(19)(19a) For Tribble and the CHE blogging was akin to doing something slightly untoward, like collecting antique smut. It might not be against the law, but it offended delicate sensibilities. On April 5th of this year history blogger and professor Mary L. Dudziak was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.(20) Presumably that is some sort of indicator of the changing status of blogging. Historians and other scholars will use these new media. But, will the various departments and administrators understand the value, and the dangers, of these new media? Will they create new ways to encourage graduate students to learn how to use these new digital tools?

Questions awaiting answers

The future of digital history is limited only by the imaginations of the historians who will create it. Those departments who have not considered how to implement digital history into their curricula, both undergraduate and graduate, are already behind the curve. They need to address now if spending a year working on a wiki is worth the same as a year spent working on an article for publication. Or, is participating in a wiki which will become a reference work for historians more along the lines of sitting on a committee, or serving as an editor, or one of the other voluntary acts which make academic life? Will institutions accept junior faculty who do not want to see their work copyrighted? Not only departments, but universities need to re-think their policy on copyright. Interest in the participatory scholarship suggested by digital media, and falling broadly under the rubric of Web 2.0, is spreading rapidly throughout the social sciences. A graduate student in the anthropology department at this university runs a wiki about anthropology 2.0. A recent work by Laura B. Cohen about the Library 2.0 argues for using "social software tools" for publication, as well as embracing "open access journals."(21) The first issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, an "online, open-access journal" was published this month.(22) MIT Comparative Media Studies Program director Henry Jenkins has been writing recently about the value of creating transmedia works, works meant to be published over multiple media.(23) An entire conference on open source history will be held next week, hosted by Brown University libraries.(24)

How can these digital tools best be used? They should not be used just because they are new. They should be used because they help teach history, and they help research history and write history. These tools can be an aid to scholarship. But, in order to use these tools intelligently historians needs to answer again the questions – What is history? What purpose does history serve? This new generation of tools will not be used effectively until this new generation of historians begins asking – What is important about history?

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1. Richard MacManus, "Berners-Lee Disses Web 2.0" http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/berners-lee_disses_web20.php

2. Tim O'Reilly "What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software" http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

3. "But does digital history do anything differently? Literary critic Janet Murray raises this issue in Hamlet on the Holodeck, her book on the future of narrative in cyberspace. There, she distinguishes between 'additive' and 'expressive' features of new media. She makes the useful analogy to early films, which were initially called 'photoplays,' and thus thought of as 'a merely additive art form (photography plus theatre).' Only when filmmakers learned to use montage, close-ups, zooms, and the like as part of storytelling did photoplays give way to the new expressive form of movies." Digital History: Promise and Perils of Digital History http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/introduction/
http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/introduction/#_edn13

4. T. Mills Kelly "Sending Your Courses Into the Blogosphere: An Introduction for 'Old People'" http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/d/45

5. Paul Anderson, "What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for. Education" http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/techwatch/tsw0701b.pdf

6. Roy Rosenzweig "Can History Be Open-Source: Wikipedia and the Future of the Past" http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/d/42

7. An example of what a US Survey might look like already exists at WikiBooks - http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States.

8. Jaroslav Pelikan "The Historian as Polyglot." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 137, No. 4, 250th Anniversary Issue (Dec., 1993), pp. 659-668

9. Manan Ahmed, Chapati Mystery, "Polyglot Manifesto pts I & II" http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/univercity/the_polyglot_manifesto_i.html

10. Manan Ahmed "The Polyglot Manifesto II" for further argument supporting this point http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/univercity/the_polyglot_manifesto_ii.html

11. Lendol Calder "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey" for some thoughts on strategies and arguments for revamping the traditional History Survey course. http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/textbooks/2006/calder.shtml

12. Lendol Calder "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey" http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/textbooks/2006/calder.shtml

13. See the syllabus by Joshua D. Rothman "Digital History & the Jim Crow South" for an example of students creating web sites as the course objective http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/aas405/syllabus/descrip.html Note that Rothman is interested in creating a static web page, rather than the dynamic form being discussed here.

14. Daniel J. Cohen & Roy Rosenzweig Digital History: Promises and Perils http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/introduction/

15. See the Dead Media Project http://www.deadmedia.org/notes/index-cat.html

16. Roy Rosenzweig "The Road to Xanadu" http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/d/9

17. Roy Rosenzweig "The Road to Xanadu" for more information about the Private Web. http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/d/9

18. Roy Rosenzweig "Should Historical Scholarship Be Free" for more about self-archiving http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/d/2

19. Ivan Tribble, "Bloggers Need Not Apply" Chronicle of Higher Education, July 8, 2005 http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/07/2005070801c.htm & Ivan Tribble, "They Shoot Messengers, Don’t They" Chronicle of Higher Education, September 2, 2005 http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/09/2005090201c.htm

20. Guggenheim Foundation 2007 Fellows, http://www.gf.org/newfellow.html#US & Mary L. Dudziak, Legal History Blog http://legalhistoryblog.blogspot.com/

21. Laura B. Cohen, Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective http://liblogs.albany.edu/library20/ http://liblogs.albany.edu/library20/2007/03/the_campus_is_a_user.html

22. Digital Humanities Quarterly http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/1/000007.html

23. Henry Jenkins, "Transmedia Storytelling 101" http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html

24. "Open Source History: Making History Public" April 19-21, 2007 http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/aas405/syllabus/syllabus.html