Comments on: Three Cheers for Digital History

By: Reading Manifestos

Reading Manifestos — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 17:56:22 +0000

[...] 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. [...]

By: lauraveprek

lauraveprek — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 13:50:29 +0000

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.

By: Bill

Bill — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 02:48:25 +0000

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

By: lauraveprek

lauraveprek — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 13:29:13 +0000

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.”

By: tad

tad — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:38:31 +0000

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?