behind AotW

Big news for practitioners and proponents of Digital History: the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum yesterday announced a massive project to digitize and make available online all of the millions of documents, images, and audio and video recordings in their collection. See more in the Press Release.

Being one of the twelve such Presidential Libraries under the direction of the National Archives (NARA), hints that they might all eventually get this treatment. If they can do it, who else might follow? Keep those cards and letters coming ...

JFKL&M is getting help from EMC who are donating hardware and software assistance, estimated to be worth 1 Million $US. Good press and credibility for EMC - more power to them. Featured is the EMC Documentum product - a suite of management and "transformation" tools to support digitizing, data management, and web delivery. I worry a little that this suggests some proprietary software platforms or storage formats, but trust that core data will be available to the end users in standard web-friendly formats like .txt, .xml, .pdf, .jpg.

"The project to digitize the collection is expected to take more than 10 years and will begin with the official papers of President Kennedy", says the press release.

Keep your eyes on this one as it goes forward. The potential here - for all of us - is enormous.

OK, so what do I think Digital History is, exactly?

Digital History (DH) is a subset of the field of History the branch of knowledge that records and analyzes past events in which historical information is discovered or created, stored, published, distributed, and/or consumed on interconnected (networked) computers. The products should be universally available and generally accessible.

A Word document on your hard drive isn't DH: it's just a work in progress until you publish online. A CDROM archive is just local information unless I can see it on the network. A PowerPoint classroom presentation is just an abomination, not DH.

If I have to pay extra to read your dissertation or query your historical database, by the way, it's not Digital History, it's Commerce.

Digital History is a relatively new field, first practical in the early 1980's with the advent of cheap personal computers. It has been recognized by a measurable number of historians only within the last 10 years, or so.

In earlier years DH relied on portable media (floppy disk, videodisc, CDROM) for publication and distribution. These have since been made obsolete by the ubiquitous nature of the Internet. The proliferation of the network and wide availability of the PC together enable mainstream DH.

DH is not separate from traditional History, nor is it a challenge to the field or its professionals. It offers new tools, techniques, and capabilities to the profession. The fundamental nature of the study of History continues.

DH is used to

• Teach: guide students to resources (analog and digital); distribute classroom materials to geographically diverse students; share resources with other teachers; visit historical sites and sources virtually,
• Research: find and use digitized primary source materials; do peer review; keep current with advances in the field; use software to mine and analyze data sources, and
• Publish, Preserve, and Share: publish findings online for easy access and peer interaction; archive and organize born-digital information; convert and store historical documents and artifacts digitally; capture and serve current events (tomorrow's history).

I'll explore further in future posts in the series [see intro].
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More on doing Digital History:

• Cohen and Rosenzweig: DH Promises and Perils (from how-to guide)
• George Mason's incubator: the CHNM
• Virginia's VCDH - another early adopter
• Turkel: Doing Digital History (for example, from Hacks)
• Smith: DH Destined for the Dustbin?
• Bateman, Brennan, Mudd, and Petrik: digital cameras in the archive
• Rosenzweig: scholarship for free?
• Lee: DH in the classroom
• Robertson: History in Hypertext
• Anderson: digital maps and history
• Talbot: fading memory of the State
  

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Source for "the branch of knowledge that records and analyzes past events" is Merriam-Webster, Online Dictionary

Covering some odds and ends, prompted by my Internet Friends ...

On the community blogging the American Civil War

Joe Avalon has just posted a listing of Civil War-related blogs on his venerable Civil War Interactive site (tip from Drew). Joe already has the preeminent set of recommended ACW web links at Link Central - over which he's labored for at least 10 years. This is a welcome and logical addition. As a relative newcomer to these blogs, but not to the War or the web, Joe's first impressions are quite valuable. He opines:

[These blogs] ... tend to have something in common: terrific material and not enough comments.

A blog isn't just a soapbox set up in a vacant lot for people to declaim their voice to the weeds and litter and less identifiable rubbish lying about - it is, ideally, a meeting place for a community where voices go back and forth, opinions are shared, questions are asked and answered, and people who would otherwise never have met get acquainted.

As I hinted to Joe on his board, I wonder if he isn't expecting too much from us, or blogging generally. Judging from my web server logs and stats posted or derived for other ACW blogs, I believe there's a group of maybe 50 to 100 regular readers for most of these. A core subset are the bloggers themselves. An almost incestuous little community are we.

If you don't work on important problems, it's not likely that you'll do important work
--R. W. Hamming

William Turkel has taken Dr Dick Hamming's challenge*, elegantly condensed by Paul Graham as

What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?

and begun to apply it to his view of the field of history. Dr Turkel asserts that "questions raised by digital history are some of the most important that we [historians] face".

I don't know enough to say that these are the most important questions in the field of History, but they're of keen interest to me. I thought I'd use the 'thinking out loud' mode of this blog and walk through some of these questions from my own perspective.

But I need to look at this methodically--I'm not the intuitive type. I propose to work through the following steps:

1. Scope: define Digital History (DH), what it is and what it isn't;
2. Goals: specify the purpose for DH - what do we expect to be able to do in or with it;
3. Requirements: identify the environmental, technical and other prerequisites for DH to achieve the goals;
4. Obstacles: identify the apparent roadblocks to the goals;
5. Best Practices: survey existing or planned DH strategies and approaches, evaluate their potential and effectiveness, and look for gaps and lessons-learned;
6. Targets: select specific problems (meeting requirements, overcoming obstacles) for personal attack based on my skills and interest;
7. Strategy: build a plan to focus efforts on the targets and produce results
8. Feedback: execute the strategy, periodically review steps 1-6 against results, and revise the Plan accordingly.

I'll explore each of these stages in further posts here. Just now, though, I should be finishing another map, hacking through the backyard jungle, working out, washing the dog ...

Next: Problems in Digital History 1 (scope)
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*See a 1986 Hamming presentation containing the "challenging" question paraphrased here. Hamming photo above from the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews.