the future of the past:
history in the digital age / assignments (i of iv)
schedule/websites || assignments || due dates || writing center info || class home
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the future of the past: history in the digital age / assignments (i of iv) schedule/websites || assignments || due dates || writing center info || class home |
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for American Memory and Who Killed William Robinson? (due 2/8 at the beginning of class) American Memory, Library of Congress This part of the first assignment is designed to introduce you to the concept of digital historical archives. Archives are one of the key workplaces for historians – they are usually located in libraries or museums (typically with the title of "Special Collections") and are staffed by curators who are responsible for cataloging, preserving, and supporting scholarly research on their holdings (which are items such as letters, manuscripts, diaries, photographs and other kinds of historical documents and records.) One of the major expenses (in terms of time and money) in many historical research projects is traveling to the archives that have materials you need to study. You submit requests to the curators, and they then bring you the boxes that contain what you need to look at. Very few people outside the scholarly community visit archives to examine the materials they contain. Sometimes items from scholarly archives might be published in a book (a president’s letters, for example), but the vast majority of items have normally had a very restricted circulation. With the advent of the internet, however, it has become possible to make these kinds of holdings available to anyone who might be interested in them, whether they are professional scholars or not. That means, for example, that a high school student researching a paper could easily have access to materials (if they are online) that previously only a small number of professionals had seen. Digital archives have also made it much easier for collections of images to become more widely available (it is much more expensive to print books with illustrations than books that are primarily text). The Library of Congress is one of the largest archives in the world, and they hold a diverse array of material that represent the puzzle pieces of the American past. In their mission statement (appended to this paper copy, and available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/about/index.html) they explain their commitment to making these archival holdings available through the internet, and the history of how the LOC put more than 5 million items online by 2000 – there are now more than 7 million -- through the American Memory website at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html.Instructions Please answer the following questions: 1) As you browse through the topic area, how easy or difficult did you find it to be to navigate your way through it? How easy or difficult was it to access the material? Write a paragraph or two describing the experience of working your way through the site. 2) Imagine that we were going to put together a website on the topic area you are looking through. Looking through both text documents and images, select one of each that you would want to use on the beginning page of the website to communicate why this historical topic is important for understanding the past. Explain the thinking that went into your final selections, and provide a copy of the image and a printout of the first page of the text document. Who Killed William Robinson ?, University of Victoria This next site also is an archive, but it is focused on a particular set of historical events, a ready-made historical question: who killed William Robinson, an African-American from New Jersey who immigrated to the Canadian Pacific Northwest to take up farming in the mid-19th century? In your essay for American Memory you made the choice of what historical artifacts to highlight, based on personal interest and judgment. In working with this second digital archive, you will still be finding your own individual pathway through the historical material, but with a different goal: thinking about the nature of the materials themselves as witnesses to what "really" happened in the past. As the authors note in their introduction to the site: No one expects a researcher on a limited time frame to explore every document in any archive or library, and that is true here, where material has been drawn from several archives. You choose your path into the original sources and follow the leads and questions that seem interesting to you. Chances are you will come to different conclusions from others who have explored the same site, but seen different evidence. This was the case when a selection of these documents was shown to university and college professors who research and teach British Columbia History. Legal historians, social historians, labour historians, political historians, all interpreted the evidence in different ways and came to different conclusions. This web site then is not just about William Robinson or about British Columbia. It is also about historical understanding. It allows you to look at the same documents that professional researchers look at to build their accounts. It allows you to interpret the raw material of the past and to ask the larger questions like, how do we know what happened in the past? http://web.uvic.ca/history-robinson/indexmsn.html I’ve appended a review of the site here to give you a sense of how historians have assessed its strengths and weaknesses. Review by Terry Crowley in the Journal of Multimedia History (vol. 3, 2000) http://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol3/robinson/robinson.htmlInstructions 1) In "The Murder" section select a category from the left-hand side of the page, and then read a sampling of some of the items that appear. Very important: when you click on one of the items, you will notice that it has a magnifying glass at the top with the words "about this source". I would like you to not only read what the source says, but read about why the source exists at all. 2) In "The Archives" section, do the same as above. Please answer the following questions: 1) As you browse through the topic area, how easy or difficult did you find navigating your way through it? How easy or difficult was it to access the material? Write a paragraph or two describing the experience of working your way through the site. 2) You’ll have looked at a small sample of the archival documents, but already you can begin to form some hypotheses about this historical event. From your initial impressions, discuss the following: 1) which kinds of documents do you think would be most trustworthy or untrustworthy, and why? (Provide a printout of an example of each); 2) What are some of the relevant factors of daily like in this community that will need to be taken into account when examining the evidence and weighing the significance of different pieces of the puzzle? for The Valley of the Shadow (due 2/22 at the beginning of class) The Valley of the Shadow, University of Virginia Center for
Digital History This is the last of our introductory outings on the web, the first two being the sites you visited for the first website review assignment (American Memory and Who Killed William Robinson?). With The Valley of the Shadow you’ll move closer to making history happen yourself, by doing some searches of letters/diaries and images, and then writing up a short thinkpiece about what you’ve found. But first I’d like you to spend some time on the website and to get acquainted with a few of its features. One of the interesting things about The Valley of the Shadow is that its own development has traced the shift from print to digital history – it was originally conceived in 1991 as a print project by historian Edward L. Ayers. To learn more about how this venture shifted character from one medium to another, please read "The Story Behind the Valley Project" – it will give you a good sense of the impact of how particular media affect what is being communicated: http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/usingvalley/valleystory.html I’d also like you to see how real students have also produced real history, using The Valley of the Shadow materials. The websites produced by student teams can be found at: http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/usingvalley/projects.html Take a look at a couple of them and see what you think of their efforts. Instructions For this assignment, I would like you to work with the letters/diaries component of TVOTS, and the images component. For each of these two components you can do searches that will bring a selective group of materials to you for your consideration. Your website review should be 3-4 pp. in length, typed, double-spaced. This assignment is due on 2/22 and is graded s/u. Please answer the following questions: 1) As you browse through the site as you do this assignment, how easy or difficult did you find it to be to navigate your way through it? How easy or difficult was it to access the material? Write a paragraph or two describing the experience of working your way through the site. 2) Choose a word or words to use to search through either the letters or the diaries (the instructions appended to this assignment use the example of the word "love.") See: http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/personalpapers/browse/aboutpersonalpapers.html Drawing on the documents/items that have been produced, consider the following questions: What do the documents seem to suggest about life in this time, in this place? What further questions are generated by thinking about these documents? Be sure to use examples from your documents in your answer. 3) The Image Database has drop-down menus that allow you to search by keywords they provide: either by place/battlefield or by subject. Choose a keyword to search and to generate images for you to consider: http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/Images/search_images.html (Some tips for searching can be found here: http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/Reference/tips.html ) Drawing on the images that you have produced, choose a few of them to
reflect on the discussion you began in part 2. In what ways do the pictures
tell you less than the textual evidence does? In what ways do they tell you
things that may be hard to grasp from text alone? |