Webs of Significance: The Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project, New Technology, and the Democratization of History
Drew E. VandeCreek is Director of Digital Projects at Northern Illinois University Libraries. Please see http://dig.lib.niu.edu to examine digital history projects he has directed. He holds a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Virginia, where he worked on the Valley of the Shadow Civil War History Project at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.
Authored for DHQ; migrated from original DHQauthor format
Lincoln/Net (http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu), a product of the Abraham Lincoln Historical
Digitization Project at Northern Illinois University Libraries, represents a new type
of historically oriented digital library resource. Like many other digital libraries,
it contains a large amount of searchable primary source materials. Like a number of
other historically oriented online resources, project staff have organized
Lincoln/Net around a specific topic, in this case Abraham Lincoln’s life and times in
antebellum Illinois. In addition to Lincoln’s own papers, the project’s databases
contain resources shedding light on his context, including letters, diaries, and
publications prepared by his peers. Unlike most historically oriented digital
libraries however, the project Web site also includes a wealth of multimedia
materials, including image, sound, video, and interactive map resources. But
Lincoln/Net is perhaps most unique in that it furnishes its users with an extensive
set of interpretive materials. This approach suggests that historians may play an
expanding role in the development of digital libraries. It can also provide them with
a badly-needed means of communicating with an audience beyond their own scholarly
community and students. This communication can facilitate what one digital history
pioneer has described as the democratization
of history,
as defined by an expanded user group enjoying primary source
materials and using them to engage in historical thinking
Presents Lincoln/Net (http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu), a product of the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project at Northern Illinois University Libraries.
Lincoln/Net (http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu), a product of the Abraham Lincoln Historical
Digitization Project at Northern Illinois University Libraries, represents a new type
of historically oriented digital library resource. Like many other digital libraries,
it contains a large amount of searchable primary source materials. Like a number of
other historically oriented online resources, project staff have organized
Lincoln/Net around a specific topic, in this case Abraham Lincoln’s life and times in
antebellum Illinois. In addition to Lincoln’s own papers, the project’s databases
contain resources shedding light on his context, including letters, diaries, and
publications prepared by his peers. Unlike most historically oriented digital
libraries however, the project Web site also includes a wealth of multimedia
materials, including image, sound, video, and interactive map resources. But
Lincoln/Net is perhaps most unique in that it furnishes its users with an extensive
set of interpretive materials. This approach suggests that historians may play an
expanding role in the development of digital libraries. It can also provide them with
a badly-needed means of communicating with an audience beyond their own scholarly
community and students. This communication can facilitate what one digital history
pioneer has described as the “democratization of history,” as defined by an expanded
user group enjoying primary source materials and using them to engage in historical
thinking
A number of pioneering historians have developed online historical materials. Edward
L. Ayers, developer of the award-winning The Valley of the Shadow Project (http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu),
has argued that history may be better suited
to digital technology than any other humanistic discipline.
Nevertheless,
he notes that the great democratization of
history over the last few decades has not been accompanied by a democratization of
audience.
The rise of scholarship examining a diversity of populations, topics and approaches in ways
unimagined a few generations ago
has often left the academy disconnected from the desires of the general
reading public.
He muses that perhaps the tools of the digital world can help us out of this lull.
Lincoln/Net suggests how historians may indeed address this lull by building on the
foundation of online resources that librarians have fashioned
Despite historians’ prominent roles in the development of several well-known digital library projects, librarians have been prime movers in the development of online historical resources featuring primary source materials. Since the mid-1990s, they have used the World Wide Web, digital media formats, and database technology to provide a dramatically expanded public with an opportunity to consult books, manuscripts, and other resources long restricted in their use due to their rarity and fragility. Historically oriented digital libraries, most developed by college, university, and other research libraries, have been a boon to these institutions’ core users: scholars, teachers, and students. These patrons readily grasp the context in which historical actors produced and collected primary source materials — scholars from a career’s reading in the secondary literature and students from their course of instruction. But members of the general public often find digital library materials, in spite of their ready availability online, inaccessible in another sense. Lacking a knowledge of historical context and interpretation, they find little meaning or significance in primary source materials’ discussion of events and controversies from the past. Only historians can provide this overlooked user group with the additional resources that they need to perceive and enjoy historical source materials.
Historians have yet to integrate much of their professional expertise into the
digital libraries they produce. Many, like Ayers’ Valley of the Shadow, have
facilitated the use of digital libraries by collecting materials pertaining to a
specific place, period, or historical episode. But these resources largely stem from
an idea originally developed by librarians, the idea of access
. One leading
librarian has defined access as a patron’s freedom or ability to obtain or make use of
library resources
In recent years a number of leading historians have remarked upon their profession’s
seemingly increasing detachment from public discourse. In 1986 Thomas Bender worried
about the declining significance of history in
the general intellectual culture of our time
Professional historians are becoming
increasingly isolated from the general public and writing primarily for other
historians
seek every possible opportunity to talk
to a non-historian…about how history is produced
academic contempt for the public
and added that American historians faced
an obligation to give the public the resources necessary to make interpretations of
the past that resonate with their own lives
the best work that professional
historians are capable of producing
Over seventy years ago Carl Becker dubbed Everyman His Own Historian
in an address to the American Historical
Association. In it Becker called for a living history
that would provide members of a broad audience with a
sense of meaning and identity, rather than a history that lies inert in unread books
and does no work in the world
. Even as his
colleagues built a professional edifice around the goals of objectivity, Becker
argued that history was an imaginative creation, a personal
possession which each one of us… fashions out of his individual
experience
The Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project builds upon the tradition
initiated by the Library of Congress’ American Memory Project (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html), the Valley of the Shadow Project,
and other successful digital libraries and online archives. It began in 1998 as a
partnership in which a number of Illinois institutions, including museums, archives,
and research and academic libraries, sought to share historical materials with the
public. With the advent of the Internet and World Wide Web, representatives of these
institutions met in the forum provided by a statewide library consortium to discuss
potential ways in which they might use the new technologies to produce a digital
library site combining materials from each of their collections. The subject of
Abraham Lincoln quickly came to the surface. While the Library of Congress and
National Archives hold large collections of Lincoln's presidential materials,
resources from his life before the presidency remain scattered throughout the
collections of individual libraries, museums, archives, and private individuals.
Among these many collectors, Illinois institutions boasted some of the largest and
most coherent collections of pre-presidential Lincolniana. The librarians and
archivists planning the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project thus focused
their attention upon this period of Lincoln's life, much of which of course took
place in Illinois itself. United in a single World Wide Web site, these materials
could prove extremely useful to a variety of audiences.
Upon beginning work as Project Director in 1998, the author of this article brought an historian's perspective to a project facing several immediate challenges. While over a century of scholarship and study suggested that a large audience existed for online versions of Lincoln's letters, speeches, and other writings, these materials had been gathered and published as the
Abraham Lincoln clearly represents a popular, even iconic, figure in American
history. The opportunity to reach a significant non-scholarly audience presented
itself. But Lincoln's iconic stature did not begin with his assassination, or even
his election to the presidency. During the heated campaign of 1860, Republican Party
managers identified Lincoln, as yet largely unknown outside of his native Northwest,
as a rail splitter,
a representative man
Likewise, Abraham Lincoln serves as a lens through which today's World Wide Web users may examine and interpret the past, and thus provides the Lincoln/Net site with an interpretive framework. His life experiences shed light upon significant themes that historians have developed in their discussion of the antebellum period. Lincoln's early struggles illuminate the realm of economic development and labor in this period, and his role in the 1832 Black Hawk Indian War temporarily placed him at the center of the unfolding tragedy in which American settlers removed Native Americans from their lands. Lincoln's subsequent legal career brings issues of law and society to the forefront, and his well-known political activities outline the rise and fall of the Second Party System, including the genesis and development of Whig and Democratic political cultures in this period. Much of Lincoln's political activities came to focus on the conflict over African-American slavery and, hence, race relations. Like many other Americans, Lincoln confronted the period's evangelical religion and made his peace with it. Like many other American men, our sixteenth president married, raised a family, and wrestled with the nineteenth century's rapidly changing gender roles.
The Lincoln/Net World Wide Web site's searchable databases and interpretive materials provide users with over thirty million words of searchable text, more than 3000 images, and over 100 sound and 100 video files. In keeping with the idea of Abraham Lincoln as a lens through which users may examine and explore his context in antebellum society and politics, project staff members have added a wealth of materials created by, and describing, his contemporaries to the project's collection of Lincoln materials. Project users may explore texts including antebellum Illinoisans’ letters, diaries, and formal publications, stored in a database system, through the use of the PhiloLogic software suite. Developed by the University of Chicago’s ARTFL Project and the University of Chicago Libraries’ Electronic Text Services Division, PhiloLogic facilitates user searching by author, title, date, and genre, as well as familiar string searches. In addition, project users may explore subsets of texts corresponding in content with each of the project’s eight themes. Project staff members and workers have marked these texts up in a scheme compliant with TEI Lite that also uses customized Dublin Core headers to identify resources by the above categories.
Project image materials include maps, engravings, and early photographs, available
through a MySQL database using the PHP scripting language. Project staff members and
collaborators have also used digitized period song books to record performances of
selected songs. These sound files are available in RealAudio format on the
Lincoln/Net Web site. They present students and lifetime learners who find musical
materials particularly instructive with a rich resource. They also provide an
audience increasingly comprised of individuals familiar with, and expecting to find,
online multimedia materials with the materials they seek. These song books also tell
us something about Abraham Lincoln's context, and digital libraries' potential for
illuminating the past. Historians of American society and politics have largely
ignored nineteenth century song books as worthwhile source materials. But these
publications played significant roles in each. Available in increasing numbers thanks
to dramatic advances in printing technology, antebellum song books shaped many
Americans' leisure time, time often spent today with radio, television, or video
games. They also served as important levers for cultural work. Singing of course
played a major role in religious services, as hymns placed religious doctrine in a
participatory format contrasting with the Bible's text or a minister's spoken word.
While a fair share of song books disseminated popular ditties, many others mirrored
hymnals by setting powerful normative arguments to music. These included publications
echoing the period's popular advice literature, such as the Young Lady's Songster, as
well as song books devoted to temperance and other reform programs
The Lincoln/Net site also features dynamic historical maps generated by Geographic
Information Systems (GIS) technology. GIS maps provide project users with an
opportunity to explore another type of historical resource: statistical data gathered
by censuses or latter-day social scientists. At the same time that librarians and
humanities scholars developed online digital libraries filled with searchable
databases of texts, images, sound files, and video files, geographers and their
collaborators in the world of systems analysts and computer programmers developed
Geographic Information Systems. GIS provides an opportunity for its users to examine
and analyze spatially-oriented materials in dynamic new ways. It manages and displays
map information in a database environment that enables its users to submit queries,
which in turn instruct the GIS software to create maps depicting only the types, or
"layers," of information that the user has requested. For example, a GIS user may
request a map of a region representing its railroad network, on a specific date,
alone, without the clutter created by other types of information. That user might
also ask GIS technology to render a map depicting the railroad network as well as
results from the United States Census for a particular year, rendered to represent
population density, for example. This map might facilitate preliminary research on
the relationship between railroad development and economic development. The ability
to isolate, depict, and overlay these layers of information makes GIS a formidable
tool for the integration and analysis of a wide variety of data, and provides
individual GIS users with a flexibility that facilitates inquiry and research.
In the years immediately following its introduction in the early 1990s, GIS users employed stand-alone computer workstations to tap databases and generate dynamic map resources. This state of affairs largely restricted usage of the technology's dynamic data layering and map generation capacities to professional geographers, university professors and their students, and employees of well-funded business concerns and government agencies. But by the late 1990s GIS developers and vendors had adapted their technology for ready use on the World Wide Web in the form of products such as Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI)'s ArcIMS. This development places Geographic Information Systems' considerable analytical power within the reach of a much larger audience, including, potentially, the users of online digital libraries. Much like digital libraries use metadata and full-text string searching to make text, image, sound, and video materials both accessible and subject to manipulation and analysis for a dramatically expanded audience, Geographic Information Systems unlock the potential of spatially-oriented data.
In addition to large, searchable databases of historical materials shedding light upon Abraham Lincoln and his context in society and politics during his pre-presidential years, the Lincoln/Net World Wide Web site features interpretive materials discussing Lincoln and these contexts. A brief, original Lincoln biography places local and national events in a temporal context. Original interpretive essays using episodes from Lincoln's life also present a public audience with an overview of the literature in each of eight fields: Frontier Settlement, Economic Development and Labor; Native American Relations; Law and Society; Political Development; African-Americans and White Americans' Racial Attitudes; Religion and Culture; and Women's Experience and Gender Roles. Lincoln/Net also features streaming video files in which leading historians discuss episodes in Lincoln's life as they relate to major themes in their scholarly publications.
Lincoln/Net’s interpretive materials, prepared by project staff members and other
scholars, provide project users with an opportunity to locate primary source
materials in what one scholar has called that man is an animal suspended in webs
of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the
analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but
an interpretive one in search of meaning
webs of
significance
, although he believes that he has interpreted its
importance in the development of online historical materials differently from Dr.
Ayers.
Historians' interpretive work situates historical actors and the materials that they created within these webs by emphasizing different portions of the historical record and explicating selected aspects of the actors’ experience. Individual works may analyze actions and events with special emphasis upon the social, or the cultural, or the political context in which they took place, and frame their argument and methodology through a discussion of works in this field. Scholars interested in different aspects of historical experience often find meaning in, and highlight, divergent portions of the source materials. For example, American historians who introduced a new focus on social history in the 1970s identified and worked with a very different set of source materials from their predecessors. The political, intellectual, and diplomatic historians who had dominated the discipline in previous decades largely drew upon state papers and the work of well-known intellectuals and policy-makers. The new generation of social historians dug into records, long considered largely insignificant, that shed light upon the lives of minorities, working people, and women. They also employed quantitative techniques drawing upon census returns and other statistics. By the 1990s another generation of scholars had begun to explore the connections between society and politics in light of the new social history.
These structures provide World Wide Web users with a variety of interpretations of
historical materials, and ask them to weigh the available evidence in order to assess
their persuasive power. But these interpretive schemes need not be mutually
exclusive. The Web enables librarians, historians, and other collaborators to present
what Janet Murray has called the kaleidoscopic canvas that can
capture the world as it looks from many perspectives — complex and perhaps
ultimately unknowable but still coherent
We…are trying to democratize history
with our projects.
As he puts it, We want to give students and others
access to the materials of the past, allowing them to engage in the process of
doing history…
This democratizing initiative traces its roots back to at least two major movements
in the historical profession. First, public historians, or those historians working
outside of academia in museums, historic sites, or other public forums, argue that
they seek to enable their patrons to think historically, to explore the complexity
and contingency of change over time. In 1978 Robert Kelley, a leader in establishing
the nation's first public history program at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, argued that his students brought the historical method
to the public learn to participate in the research
process
the basic goal of encouraging people to think about the past for
themselves
(Karamanski, quoted in Cole 1994, 17). Public historians' exhibits and programs
have realized these goals in that they have brought selected primary source materials
and artifacts, framed by scholars' interpretations in broad outline, to public
audiences
Second, historians concerned with classroom education have promoted an ideal of
"active learning" using primary source materials. Deanne Shiroma has summarized this
line of thinking by arguing that As students work with primary sources,
they have the opportunity to do more than just absorb information; they can
also analyze, evaluate, recognize bias and contradiction, and weigh the
significance of evidence presented by the source
The analysis of primary sources, and the
structured inquiry learning process that is often used in such examinations,
are widely recognized as essential steps in building student interest in
history and culture and helping them understand the ways that scholars engage
in research, study, and interpretation
virtually all
versions of the national standards for social studies and history
call for
the use of primary source materials in an active learning environment
Digital materials built around librarians’ concept of access thrive in institutional
settings like schools, colleges, and universities, where students can bring knowledge
gained through classroom instruction and reading lists to bear in the crucial
formulation of their queries. This intellectual capital, amplified through teachers'
workshops and the other professional development events, greatly facilitates
students’ becoming their own historians. But members of the general public using the
World Wide Web for educational purposes, or lifetime learners,
usually
encounter an online archive in far different circumstances, and with quite different
needs, than student groups. Unlike enrolled students, these individuals and groups
usually lack any recourse to instruction or other forms of historical expertise that
may inform their exploration of a digital library. The more diligent and/or ambitious
among them may find a wealth of stimulating materials on the Valley of the Shadow
Project World Wide Web site, but they will largely rely upon their own interests,
formed from personal experience, to guide their database queries. Some may employ
historical training they received in high school or college classrooms. But many
others will shy away, intimidated, from its mass of data. One reviewer of the Valley
of the Shadow Project World Wide Web site noted that it fails to outline conceptual frameworks through
which a user might approach the archive
To get much out of…the Web site…users
must have a prior notion of what kind of information they are looking
for
While digital collections may put
the novice in the
archive
, he or she is not so likely to know what to do there
Lincoln/Net’s interpretive resources provide Web users, and especially lifetime
learners, with a new level of access to primary source materials, complementing the
freedom or ability to obtain or make use of
them. The Oxford English
Dictionary suggests other aspects to the concept of accessibility. It defines
accessible
as able to be (readily)
understood or appreciated.
In order to enable users outside the
educational community to understand and appreciate their collected materials,
Lincoln/Net furnishes its users with more than the opportunity to examine excellent
digital reproductions of primary source materials, or even a metadata scheme
reflecting the state of academic discourse. It also provides users with accounts and
summaries of this discourse itself, laying out both the events that they discuss and
scholars' various interpretations of them. A new generation of online historical
resources, matching historians' ability to frame and pose historical questions and
debates with digital libraries' new technologies, can make historical materials more
fully accessible to the general public. Armed with these tools, members of the public
can begin to engage in the process of doing history.
Professional historians may instinctively recoil from presenting members of the general public with such a custom made opportunity to comb over their research methods and findings as an affront to their authority. But historians must surely believe that in the vast majority of cases this phenomenon will serve to buttress that authority by demonstrating historians' judicious use of the evidence. By injecting themselves into the rapidly widening historical forum that the World Wide Web represents, historians can win new significance in the formation of public historical consciousness, and contribute to the general public's ability to come to understandings of the past fashioned from their individual experience. These understandings will serve to bridge the gap between scholars' interpretations, long available only in monograph or article format, and the literate public. Developed from their own analysis of primary source materials and evaluations of scholars' interpretations, they may also provide individuals with the sense of meaning and identity that Becker sought.
If Lincoln/Net represents a departure from digital archives and libraries featuring
primary sources alone, it also diverges from the vast majority of other World Wide
Web sites providing historical interpretation. With the rise of the Web a new
generation of online entrepreneurs rushed to furnish its users with a wide variety of
online resources on which advertising might appear. As is the case in a number of
other disciplines and subjects, these Web sites have become for many Americans a
principal source of information. Today many students, lifelong learners, and other
members of the public turn to the World Wide Web or, more specifically, the
ubiquitous Google search engine, for a wide variety of data and interpretation.
Recent research in library science shows that Google, or similar web search engines,
is the information finding tool of first choice for many users - far ahead of
proprietary online services or libraries and light years ahead of print
sources
Our librarians are fully aware that
Google is our students', our faculty's, and sometimes our own first choice to
find information…. Everyone starts with Google except librarians
World Wide Web users employing general terms like American History
, Civil
War
, and Woman Suffrage
, can unearth a diverse collection of resources
comprised in part of online digital libraries produced by academic and historical
institutions. These searches more readily direct users to a set of materials produced
by individuals and business enterprises outside the library, historical, and archival
professions, however. Some of these Web sites mix a smattering of digitized primary
source materials and interpretation with advertising and promotional materials and a
plethora of links to other, similar sites. Many contain no primary sources at all.
Librarians and historians have noted that these sites present users with the
challenge of assessing their reliability. But they are attracting far more online
visitors than digital libraries governed by professional standards.
A review of a number of these Web sites provides a snapshot of professional
historians' relative standing on the World Wide Web today. In response to a search
for materials pertaining to American History
, Google produced a list topped by
http://americanhistory.about.com. The larger About.com Web site contains
the following welcome: Each month more that
20 million people visit About.com. Whether it be home repair and decorating ideas,
recipes, movie trailers, or car buying tips, our Guides offer practical advice and
solutions for every day life.
About.com developers go on to describe their
approach to distributing content: About.com was founded in 1997 with the
simple premise, that people are the best Guides to the Internet…Today, when you
read an article on About.com, you are tapping into a powerful network of 475
Guides — smart, passionate, accomplished people who are experts in their
field…
your Guide to
American History.
A summary of Kelly's qualifications reveals that he
holds a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Florida. He has worked as a secondary
school Social Studies teacher for eight years and is currently at work on the
Advanced Placement American History Course for the Florida Online High School. Mr.
Kelly is clearly a credentialed and industrious educator. But the Web site that he
administers quickly reveals clear signs of its place within a larger media conglomerate.
The About.com American History site itself attempts to provide coverage of a wide
variety of periods and themes, but lacks a comprehensive organizational scheme. A
brief investigation of available materials reveals that the site principally provides
a series of links to other online historical resources, some hosted by universities
and colleges. A few contain primary source materials. A click on the link entitled
Wars and Diplomacy
produces a
list of three recommended resources, including Top American History War Movies,
apparently selected
by Mr. Kelly. A click on Government and
Politics
yields a list of two resources: Political Humor
and U.S. Government Information and Resources.
The list of
Political Humor
materials
emphasizes current events, leading with a story entitled Video makers famous for filming women flashing their breasts
plan to donate revenues from
About.com developers clearly try to repackage existing Web resources, including
current events journalism, as historical materials. But, perhaps more significantly,
they find no place for professional historians. Neither the About.com site, nor any
Web site to which it provided a link, featured the work of a professional historian,
either in selecting materials or interpreting them
The HistoryNet.com and U-s-history.com also appeared in the top ten responses to a
search for American History. The HistoryNet.com site boasts that it delivers the deepest and broadest collection of
articles from leading writers and historians, accessible to novices and students
as well as experts.
A review of available materials reveals that the
Primedia History Group, the world's
largest publisher of history magazines
provides TheHistoryNet with a steady flow of high-quality
editorial content and the authoritative input of editors who are among the leaders
in their respective fields.
A search for this content leads to a toolbar
prominently displayed atop the HistoryNet.com page, which serves to direct users to a
set of activities quite at odds with finding actual historical materials: Subscribe, Renew, Shop, Classifieds,
Forums, Book Reviews
. Of these activities, Forums
provides access to online web logs, each
directly tied to a Primedia publication
The Historical Text Archive appeared at number nine on Google's list of materials.
Its opening page announces The HTA publishes high quality articles, books, essays,
documents, historical photos, and links, screened for content, for a broad range
of historical subjects
(http://historicaltextarchive.com, accessed September 22, 2005). Cutting
directly to the chase, the HTA's front page also declares that it contains 682
articles, 68 books, and 5938 links.
A review of a number of these materials
reveals that the site attempts to provide materials pertaining to a dizzying array of
historical themes and periods. Many of these articles consist of primary source
materials, including Lincoln's Second Inaugural. They also include the work of
professional historians, including Russell F. Weigley's
However, the authority of the Historical Text Archive is compromised by its inclusion
of materials which, though presented as part of the site’s historical content (in
sections entitled Other History Articles
and Informative Articles
), in
fact serve to guide the user to commercially sponsored links. A review of these
materials, listed under headings including Black Lights
and Cell Phones
shows a series of broadly informational discussions of these devices, framed by the
same attractive graphics that accompany the site’s primary sources and professional
historians' interpretations — but including, in most cases, several links to
commercial web sites selling the product in question. Many World Wide Web sites rely
upon advertising revenue in order to make materials freely available to the public.
Created by Donald F. Mabry, an historian and administrator at Mississippi State
University, the Historical Text Archive represents the work of a professional
historian, and it presents a significant amount of valuable historical materials. But
the Archive's presentation of purportedly informational materials that in fact serve
to introduce and direct its users to advertising sites badly undermines its
credibility.
Online historical materials thus run the gamut from the Library of Congress' impeccably documented, well-organized
Professional historians cut a negligible profile on the World Wide Web. While most
university and college students and faculty enjoy access to their monographs and
articles in for-pay online formats, the rankings in Google search responses suggest
that large numbers of individuals not attached to institutions of higher learning
(and likely many who are) often make use of the variety of other online historical
resources discussed above. While most historians have largely ignored the World Wide
Web, the rise of new technologies has undermined long-standing structures and
hierarchies of authority. Independent journalists and bloggers using the Web have
caused untold headaches for political campaigns and, in the case of individuals
discrediting Dan Rather's investigation of George W. Bush's National Guard service,
humbled a major news organization
The rise of online digital libraries and archives like the Library of Congress'
American Memory projects or the Valley of the Shadow Project has enabled scholars,
educators, and students to explore primary source materials far more readily than
ever before. Only a few years ago an individual found him or herself obliged to
travel to a library or archive, and often a single, specific library or archive, in
order to examine these sources. Today, the World Wide Web's expanding reach provides
many of these individuals with an opportunity to examine these materials at their
leisure. But high quality digital library projects reflect only a portion of new
historical materials available on the World Wide Web. Many Americans make use of
sites developed by amateurs or commercial concerns seeking to use historically
oriented content to attract web users. Too often About.com, TheHistoryPlace.com, and
other, similar resources provide shallow, unfocused, and undocumented collections of
historically oriented materials. From a scholar's point of view, they do not provide
significant educational resources. Their significance lies rather in the way that
they have democratized history in a way quite unlike what Ayers and Thomas imagined.
These materials' rapid emergence online have truly made everyman his own historian.
Carl Becker imagined
laymen thinking about history in new ways that enabled them to relate scholars'
accounts of past events to their own experiences and identity. Today everyman not
only locates obscure historical documents on the World Wide Web; everyman produces
his or her own historical Web site. These online resources illustrate the impact of
the last decade's pervasive set of technological changes more fully than librarians’,
and a few prescient historians,' production of digital libraries.
Technology’s pervasive democratization of history cuts against the grain of the
historical profession’s development. In the twentieth century historians defined
themselves as professionals in part by largely removing themselves from public
discourse. Moving away from the work of the nineteenth century's more literary
historians, professionalizing scholars increasingly devoted themselves to a new ethos
emphasizing objectivity, research, and the expansion of knowledge. This orientation
led historians to produce articles, monographs, and book reviews speaking almost
exclusively to a limited audience of fellow professionals. In an era marked by rapid
technological changes, increasing functional specialization, and the rise of large
bureaucracies, historians devoted themselves to establishing a hierarchy of what one
scholar has called sound opinion
The new technologies that have helped to produce an array of dubious historically oriented materials on the World Wide Web can contribute to democratizing history by taking up the challenges posed by Appleby, Greenberg and, ultimately, Becker. They can provide a vast public with a more complete set of historical materials, including both primary resources and historians' interpretations of them. Historians’ concise descriptions and accounts of the circumstances in which individuals and groups created materials comprising the historical record can lay out a series of events allowing users to place individual source materials, and the events that they describe, in a temporal context. These accounts can also illuminate significant themes and arguments that have emerged from historians' evaluation of primary materials. Each of these interpretive elements provides digital library users with a framework within which they may begin to examine and assess elements of the historical record. These frameworks, or webs of significance, represent a new level of access to primary source materials, providing users with expanded ability to understand and appreciate them.
The World Wide Web provides an ideal platform for historians to reach out to a broad,
public audience and show how their work pertains to, and enriches, Americans' lives.
This approach represents an attempt to realize Thomas Bender's vision of a civic professionalism.
He argues that,
in seeking to reach a public audience, the point is not to displace the
traditional scholarly question; rather we must think more clearly about its
most fruitful relation to general education and the public world
This is not to say that Web sites like Lincoln/Net simplify history. Like any
relatively sophisticated Web site, Lincoln/Net can present a multiplicity of accounts
and interpretations in parallel, enabling the user to draw his or her own conclusions
or, in effect, create their own synthesis. As Janet H. Murray has argued, We no longer believe in a single reality,
a single integrating view of the world, or even the reliability of a single
angle of perception. Yet we retain the core human desire to fix reality on one
canvas, to express all of what we see in an integrated and shapely
manner.
If the Web represents an ideal environment for individuals' self-directed exploration of primary source materials, it also helps to facilitate historians' participation in the collaborative work necessary to produce these resources. Historians have benefited from the rise of digital libraries. Many have integrated large new sets of online primary resources into their teaching curricula. A farsighted few have explored new technologies' impact upon historical scholarship. But, to date, most academic historians have largely ignored these technologies' implications for their own roles in public life. In doing so, they have failed the American public. They have also failed their own self-interest. Academic historians can use the rapid technological changes that are shaping our society to demonstrate how their scholarship and debates relate to the general public and encourage critical thought - in other words, demonstrate their value to society. If they do not, they may soon confront significant portions of the American public relying on amateurs' undocumented online historical materials. They may also find themselves increasingly marginalized in their own universities and colleges as faculty members' ability to attract outside grant funding becomes an ever larger part of academic life. Finally, they may find themselves increasingly vulnerable to state officials' attempts to use new technologies, in the form of distance learning, to push scholars and critical thought farther to the margins in the world of higher education. A new, more democratic history is a part of historians' future, like it or not. Today they face the question: will they add their voices to this discussion?
Objectivity Questionand the American Historical Profession