Coding is a topic which I have mixed emotions about.  This set of articles explain the difficulty of coding as a historian and highlight the importance of embracing the “culture of coding” with a humanist stance in mind.  In terms of “learning code for the sake of coding, Cafferata suggests that “As decontextualized rote response mechanisms, they are retrograde pedagogical steps in an era when critical thinking ought to be a hallmark of educational effectiveness.”  This seems to be important not just to coding, but to understanding the role that we, as budding digital historians, should play in developing our profession.

I have been guilty of the attitude expressed by Widner; I have considered digital history, and coding in particular, a “necessary means to an end”, and this has left me feeling a dislike and even a philosophical push against the digital humanities.  We have been told we must code in order to save our profession.  What if we opened ourselves to using code to our own ends and not the pragmatic ends of the academy (that needs to increase their revenue and student body)?  What if we looked at it as fun and exploratory?

Kramer

This week’s readings were interesting as they explored the implications of digital history on the way we view our profession.  Kramer suggests that perhaps “all” that historians do is add meta to metadata.  While at first I found this insulting, eventually I saw the value of this label.  History adds information to/about the primary source documents.  What we do is analysis and by placing the historian and the archivist together in this way the act of “doing” history becomes more clearly defined and accessible.

The historiography is where Kramer runs into trouble.  I do not believe that the entire historiography of a source can be placed into a primary source and be understood.  Perhaps arguments and counter arguments could be layered into the system; for instance, full access for people who would find that meta useful and common access for the average person who can not, without training ,understand the implications of what he/she is looking at.

Olsen and Argamon

Text mining is an interesting concept which seems filled with both problems and solutions.  When a historian works with primary sources they are limited in the number of texts they can use for any given project.  A computer is not human, therefore it can sort through many documents much more quickly which means faster work with a more complete body of sources.  This sounds like it would be extremely helpful in the humanities, but a computer is not human.

A computer can not understand the text it reads, it can not place value in circumstances and it can not feel the era it “reads”; a computer only recognizes symbols and their recurrence in a particular set of data. As Dr. Church said, it is difficult for the computer to mine symbols and metaphors in primary source documents.  This is a red flag on the use of text mining, because it is limited in scope;  the historian can view patterns through it, but computers have a limited capacity–perhaps this is comforting.

The article suggests that one goal of text mining is to make very large data sets “manageable and meaningful”.  In this pursuit, I believe that text mining provides the ability to organize and work with a large set of primary source documents, however, it does not provide meaning.  Meaning comes from human ability to grapple with data.  Meaning comes from the interpretation of the historian.  Text mining can lead the professional to explore different research questions and broaden his/her ability to work with sources, but can not be relied upon to give meaning to sources.

This article was much more realistic than the others we have read and asks similar questions to those that have cropped up in class.  Obviously the field of history, humanities, and academia are changing as a result of the digital era.  This may not always be for the better, but historians, and humanities professionals in general, have an opportunity and a responsibility to preserve what is traditionally important while taking on digital tools.

The term “hegefox” was discussed and I think it perfectly describes the conundrum and perhaps the solution.  Levis in the 60s and the author speculated on how we, the professional, could deliberate over new technologies and evaluate them properly.  How the humanities could thrive in a new environment without both losing the precious pillars of our profession and/or becoming obsolete.  The idea of the hegefox was his suggestion, we must preserve traditional methodology and also incorporate new digital tools.

The author presents the same question I have been asking myself,   “…to what extent will those of us who care about the humanities be allowed to fret about the present state and future of our disciplines in the same way that Leavis wondered about what can and should be done, without being considered “highbrow,” elitist snobs?”  It is just as important, I would argue, for the hedgehog to respect the fox as it is for the fox to respect the hedgehog during this debate.  Those who want to dive head first into quantitative research and digital analysis without considering the importance of traditional methodology do not allow for the evaluation necessary for viable and long lasting solutions.

I wonder if the digital age, because of the fast pace in which it evolves, produces a moment in which we must chose.  Instead of being able to evaluate and progress, will the humanities have to let go of the past and embrace a future that steps further and further away from the “human” element?  Social media, as mentioned at the beginning of the article, has driven people both closer and further from one another–we may be losing part of our human connection.  Is this what will happen to the humanities?

This article made me look closely at the database work that we have been doing.  How did people feel about the primary sources after working with them in a database?  I saw that it would be possible to come to new conclusions, draw correlations I may not have seen before, and work with large loads of data; but I also felt distant from the subject matter, the period of time, and my own connection with the material.  Maybe because this method is new to me? Maybe not.

Cubitt, Geoffrey. History and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (accessed February 2, 2015).

I was extremely intrigued by Unsworth’s differentiation between memory and history, which is in essence the differentiation between professional and public history.  This divide has been placed on a public platform because of the digital age.  Cubitt has some interesting things to say about the nature of the relationship between history and memory.  His argument is more plainly stated than Wolff’s.

The title of chapter 1 for instance is “History and Memory:  An Imagined Relationship”.  He discusses the ways in which people have tried to relate memory and history and suggests that they can be reconciled only by understanding that they are different beings and have separate roles to play in the social and academic experiences.  Cubitt’s discussion of the profession is extremely powerful and I think contributes to our debate on what makes a historian, and perhaps refutes Madsen-Brooks’ argument that everyone is a historian (“I too, am a historian”).

For instance Cubitt cites Collingwood’s argument about the separation between memory and history which can also be seen in the case study about African American Confederates in the Madson-Brooks article.

“This imagination, Collingwood implies, is
concerned with conceptual issues (ones of causation, for example or of social structure, or of long-term continuity and change) that derive from the realm of historical thought rather than from remembered experience. The essential achievement of historical reasoning is to rescue us from a slavish dependence on memory’s limited and subjective form of consciousness.”

This book lends new insight onto the historical process and why it is so important to preserve the academic rigor that marks our profession. It also helps the reader to have a greater understanding of the relationship between history and memory which is part of this ongoing debate about the digital humanities.

The readings for this week were focused on audience and authorship and seemed to advocate a risky gamble;  engage in online publishing and hope that there is an audience for it.  According to the Madsen-Brooks and Wolff readings there is evidence of huge interest in historical topics as can be viewed in their case studies.  The public interest is beginning to dominate historical authorship which is a problem for academics who, for the most part, have not chosen to engage with this crowdsourced narrative (Madsen-Brooks).

This public process in which anyone can publish anything online is leading to major problems with the academic process and both Wolff and Unsworth deal with this in a more realistic light (Madsen-Brooks advocates an all-out academic overhaul).  Wolff makes a powerful differentiation between history and memory by quoting David Blight,

 “History–what trained historians do–is a reasoned reconstruction of the past rooted in research; critical and skeptical of human motive and action….Memory, however, is often treated as a sacred set of potentially absolute meanings and stories, possessed as the heritage or identity of a community.  Memory is often owned; history, interpreted…”

The power of memory permeates the human experience and allows history to become not only an intellectual pursuit, but an emotional one.  To engage with the public, historians may need to act as authoritative story tellers–there should be interpretation in the academic sense, but there should also be an understanding of the audience.  This is not to say that academic work should be done in layman’s terms or be “dumbed down”, in fact, scholarship should be emphasized in order to improve public understanding/appreciation and trust in specialization and expertise.    This is at the root, I would argue, of the divide between academics and the public; each have underestimated the other.

The Unsworth article deals with this issue head on by suggesting that historians must build up their relationship with a new audience.  He states that,  “I suggested that we could enlarge the audience for humanities scholarship, not by dumbing it down, but by making it more readily available. Maybe if we did that, scholars would find an audience first, and a publisher second, instead of the other way around.”  This mentality is attractive to this historian who ultimately wants to write as he/she has always done, that is to say with academic rigor, but also wants to be read.  This seems to be the only way in which the historian will survive.

Each of these articles was problematic and I am still sorting through how I perceive each solution to a rapidly growing problem.  I agree that the audience needs to expand, but I am in favor of a solution that does not contribute to the deterioration of the academy; I have not seen this solution in any of the articles presented so far.  What does everyone think about this?  Does the digital age mean that we, as professionals must adjust at the detriment of expertise and scholarship, or is there a way around this?