behind AotW

Dimitri Rotov has posted a pre-manifesto on what American Civil War (ACW) historians might be doing in the realm of web publishing their work.

Published history which is innovative and insightful does not necessarily sell. The popular swill based on the same tired cliches sells rather better. As a result, most people get their history as Hollywood-style whiz-bang narrative, and miss the richness in the [obscure] work of the better historians. This is not good for we, the people.

If you're one of those laboring in the dark, doing good history, but not selling any books, or daunted by the prognosis and not even attempting to publish, you might consider the web and related "New Media" as a better publishing platform.

[I've grossly simplified here, skipped all sorts of subtle gems, and made unauthorized extensions on my own. Please read the original post.]

Let's see if I can support the practical value of what he's saying.

I don't know what kind of sales the average academic historian's book has (you can tell me), but the potential of the Internet probably has any of them beat.

I am not an academic historian, but what I publish on AotW appears before a large number of eyeballs. I don't write particularly well (tho' some of our contributors do), we're not doing Gettysburg, I'm not a "name", for sure, and I don't market much.

Even with all that, Antietam on the Web, our site about the Maryland Campaign, gets about 3,500 visitors a week, 75% of them first-timers. They request and are served over 20,000 pages of content in that week*. These numbers are still growing.

Imagine what a really popular ACW website does. Or what a name author could do. Wide is the reach of the web.

My internet-friends at George Mason's CNMH have reported that millions visit their digital history projects. Millions. And this is just (yawn) Experimental History.

Want to be read?
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Weak attempt at an ACW sales case study

Near the top of Amazon.com best-seller search results for "American Civil War" is John J. Dwyer's The War Between the States: America's Uncivil War (Bluebonnet, 2005). Sales rank Yesterday: #9,285 in Books. Copies sold through Amazon, per week (rule of thumb estimate) at that rank: 12. National sales? Library copies? Who knows.

(blub: Finally, the true story of the War Between the States, in one captivating volume ... has radically transformed the tedious, uninspiring textbook rendering of the Civil War into what it should be "America's greatest epic" ... etc)

Or, for some contrast, De Anne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook's They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War (LSU Press, 2002). Amazon Rank Yesterday: #547,633 in Books Amazon sales in a week (est): 0.5

(blurb: ... [National Archives archivist] Blanton and Cook detail women soldiers in combat, on the march, in camp and in the hospital ... Solid research by the authors ...)

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* Thanks to GoogleAnalytics.

In a post on Future of the Book, Ray Cha reported discussion among a group of history educators using New Media* to help teach and study American history. These are people who have pushed the envelope; some for many years. At least one of them has helped invent the field of Digital History.

"Almost immediately, we found that their excellence in their historical scholarship was equally matched in their teaching. Often their introductions to new media came from their own research. Online and digital copies of historical documents radically changed the way they performed their scholarship. It then fueled the realization that these same tools afforded the opportunity for students to interact with primary documents in a new way which was closer to how historians work ..."

"... They noted an institutional tradition of the teacher as the authoritative interpreter in lecture-based teaching, which is challenged by active learning strategies. Further, we discussed the status (or lack of) of the group's new media endeavors in both their scholarship and teaching. Depending upon their institution, using new media in their scholarship had varying degrees of importance in their tenure and compensation reviews from none to substantial. Quality of teaching had no influence in these reviews. Therefore, these projects were often done, not in lieu of, but in addition to their traditional publishing and academic professional requirements."

These themes confirm for me that New Media are not broadly accepted or well understood, suggesting they still need to be defined, refined, and carefully marketed before most historians will reap benefits. This was not the main point of the discussion they met to talk about born-digital textbooks, in particular but it tripped me to wondering aloud about it.

Interactive video, cdroms, "educational software", and other New Media technologies have been around for at least 20 years. The practical, universally accessible InterWeb has been delivering vast resources and global interconnections for more than ten years. Web tools and techniques provide amazing power to even slightly aware historians and educators. The raw material of history is online in great huge heaps. Yet I see very few large scale digital history projects by academics or other professional historians online. I gather classroom application is rarer still.

Pass the word:

The Mason Basketball Digital Memory Bank is now live at http://hoops.gmu.edu.

... As Patriot hoops make history, our historians are helping fans become a part of the story. By posting online their memories and media files of this momentous run to the Final Four, fans around the world can become a part of this important process. Our stories, as a component of this digital archive, will become part of a living history ...

From a announcement today by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM).

In a mini-rant on one of the ACW boards yesterday, a publisher of an excellent website raged about someone stealing and re-posting his "copyrighted" photographs from the site. The alleged perpetrator was characterized in vulgar terms. All of these online photos, as far as I can tell, were created during the 1860s, and the pictures in question would have been of Civil War general officers.

Putting aside the moral obligations for crediting sources, or respecting someone's family pictures, or the sanctity of a private collection, or whatever else might be in play, I have a fundamental problem with his complaint of copyright infringement.

How can our angry friend claim to own the copyright on these pictures? They are, by my reading of US Copyright law, in the public domain. Public Domain = not copyrightable.