Three Cheers for Digital History
Manan Ahmed’s “The Polyglot Manifesto” certainly raised many issues: a right-wing conspiracy to destroy the Humanities, the possible contradiction-in-terms of “a public scholar,” and telegenic charm versus ivory tower retreat. Despite the controversy inherent in these issues, Ahmed’s final point —that the humanities, historians in particular, should become publicly engaged through the digital world—should be anything but.
Frankly, I don’t understand how one person can master his chosen historical field (plus a couple of minor fields), a few foreign languages necessary to do exceptional archival research, and learn to create digital archives —actually, I’m sure there are many exceptionally bright people who are capable, but certainly not all scholars are so gifted. It makes me think that, with the exception of the 10 people in the world who are capable of doing all of this, scholars will spread themselves too thin to be effective in their primary fields. We can’t all do everything. If, for example, you are an expert in colonial American history and you have a profound understanding in American constitutional law and political philosophy, how can you also master French, Spanish, XHTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript? Can you really be a master of it all?
But, I digress. I don’t think this is Ahmed’s point. I do wholeheartedly agree that the digital arena is an excellent place for historians, and all scholars in the humanities for that matter, to engage the public. Ahmed raises three main questions: “Who am I, as a scholar? What is my role within my community? What are my responsibilities to the public?” In his writing, there seems to be a hunger for being more than a scholar, more than a teacher. He cites examples of some who have gone beyond the halls of academia to the public realm, primarily through television. This kind of public involvement, to Ahmed, seems almost like conduct unbecoming a scholar—with its “mass-communication demanded sound-bites” and “rhetoric.” To his goal of being a “socially-engaged scholar,” he argues that the digital world is the place where this goal can be met. While I agree, and I’m sure to garner some flak from my colleagues, I have to point out that as a professor of the humanities, you have a ready-made connection to public society: your students. Isn’t this one of the reasons many people choose become professors, to teach? Not only are there your students, there are your writings, your publications, which presumably is one of the reasons why publications are generally required for tenure —because this is how you contribute and engage the public in your chosen field. Not that one shouldn’t strive to reach beyond these two forms of public communication, but don’t forget that they are there. The way I see it, the Internet, especially the “Web 2.0 World,” is an extension of these two realms. Historians, for example, can better reach their students this way, and reach more students; they can reach more of the general public as well. It is really another form of publication that allows new and different forms of interaction, especially with regard to visual communication.
On Jenny Reeder’s blog, I raise the question of whether the notion of historian as interpreter claims too much. It does strike me as rather pretentious, but I know from my own research that this is what we strive to do. Any thoughts?
February 13th, 2007 at 12:38 am
Two thoughts:
1) As to the question of if it’s all too much– I think it really is much more attitude-dependent than skill-dependent. By which I mean people’s attitude toward the whole web-design, coding, programing thing.
I don’t mean to imply that it’s easy, but some people just have a bad attitude. It’s just a matter of whether you think of learning the computer skills as something that’s fun. I think it’s safe to say that a vast majority of academics have a pretty substantial knowledge of a few topics outside their field– things that other people dedicate years of study to. And that many of these academics, if they were inclined to spend the time, could probably be active and publish in that field. I know a sociologist who can name just about every LA punk album that came out before ‘84. There are Historians who know modernist literature like the backs of their hands.
Enjoying the topic makes it fun, not enjoying it makes it work– and yet another hurdle to that piece of lambskin.
2)Personally, I don’t think that Historians can be anything but interpreters. Mightn’t it be the case that Historians as people who have some sort of preternatural ability to state objective fact is in fact claiming too much?
February 13th, 2007 at 6:29 am
I disagree. But perhaps it’s a matter of degree…Yes, of course, there are people who can do all of these things. Our professor, Paula Petrik, is one of them. In fact, so am I, and so are we all in this class, to some degree or another. And, there is the Center for History and New Media, with which I am proudly affiliated. In my mind, there is a difference between being able to do all of these things and in doing them well. There are degrees. Maybe I have too high standards, or maybe I’m just being realistic in saying that we can’t all expect (aspiring is a different matter) to achieve greatness in all areas–in the history, philology, and technology of “The Polyglot Manifesto.”
February 14th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
Jenny, Tad, Laura, and John:
The historian has to be an interpreter. Historians create a narrative about the past to be understood in the present. Language, ideas, and methodology all perform subtle interpretation. Think of histories from a hundred years ago, they are anachronistic when compared to recent histories on the same topic. No matter how objective we are, we are translating the past as we create a fresh narrative.
Bill
February 15th, 2007 at 6:50 am
I think there’s a problem with words here. Both “translating” and “interpreting” can mean either a very loose or a very close interpretation/translation. Historians are on the loose side, since there are many different arguments to be made about any historical event or figure. See more of my response to Bill’s comment on his blog Through Hiker.
February 16th, 2007 at 10:56 am
[…] You can read Bill’s Waiting on Abdulhamid II, Jenny’s History Polyglot: How to Translate or Interpret in a Digital World, Historiarum’s I’d Love to Take a Public Beating, Misha’s Thank you, Sepoy, and Laura’s Three Cheers for Digital History. […]