In the very useful survey of the “history web” in their 2005 book Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web , Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig identify the range of genres that encompassed the historical content on the web: archival sites, exhibits and scholarly essays, teaching and learning sites, and discussion forums and organizational sites. Even though Cohen and Rosenzweig failed to account for the way that blogs, YouTube, and social media would eventually permeate the history web, I like their categories because they continue to the give us a way to think about what we do when we create public history online. We tend to provide access to collections, to offer interpretation, to offer instruction, and to offer a forum for conversation, both general and professional. So, as I began to think about the critical issuing in effectively using data visualizations in public history, I wanted to consider them in relationship to the activities above. Since Sheila has already written a great post on collections and enhancing access with visualizations, I’d like to focus both on their interpretative and instructive use, building on Trevor’s thoughts from his last post on discovery and communication.

For public historians, the mode of online outreach that has the longest history is that of interpretative exhibits, whether as companions to a physical exhibit or as independent works of scholarship. Despite the liberating possibilities for disjunction, many of exhibits hue very closely to the linear narrative structure of traditional narrative history. In doing so, they have demonstrated varying degrees of success in offering the public a glimpse of the richness of the past. Two sites from the National Museum of American History demonstrate the wide range of approaches. Both “The Price of Freedom” and “A More Perfect Union” are beautiful sites, but one presents a linear and reductive narrative of military history and the other presents the difficult topic of Japanese internment during World War II with a range of voices and perspectives that highlights historical complexity. The difference here is in the effort to bring together evidence in a user interface that allows for the consideration of many perspectives and multiple causality, as opposed to offering a single perspective that simplifies the past.

Successful or unsuccessful, most exhibit sites have the benefit of offering visitors a range of contextual information in both the text of the basic narrative and in the descriptions that accompany individual artifacts, images, or documents. This contextual information is essential for a public who may not have a deep background to bring to their encounter with primary historical materials. Data visualizations can short circuit the tendency to present simplistic narratives about our collections. Unfortunately, however, data visualizations that concentrate the user interface into a single interactive screen can also significantly reduce our ability to offer the public necessary historical context if we’re not careful.

Take, for example, the great interactive correspondence visualization created by the historians and computer scientists at Stanford for the Mapping the Republic of Letters project. This complex interface really only makes sense to individuals who are content experts, and sometime then only after they’ve read the accompanying pdf explaining the different facets of the tool. For a content novice, the tool is little more than a colorful toy because it links to primary sources in a subscription database, and because it lacks the biographical data on the correspondents that might make their network connections intelligible. If the visualization included access to a larger context of the enlightenment and background on the individual correspondents, it could be a powerful and concentrated way for the public to learn about the development of this period in Euro-American intellectual history. To some extent, we can excuse the Stanford project because it is explicitly a research venture targeting scholars of the enlightenment, rather than members of the general public

The Digital Vaults site from the National Archives and Records Administration, on the other hand, was created precisely to engage the public. Unfortunately, the project is completely hampered by its abstraction. The Flash version of the site gives users access to a seven randomly selected sources from a database of over 1,200. Clicking on a document, the user enters a web of connections to other documents based on shared tags. (The HTML version simply offers an alphabetical list of tags.) The sources have minimal accompanying metadata–usually title, date, and a brief description. While this environment is attractive and fun to play with, it fails to offer users enough context to make any historical sense out of the materials they encounter. Rather than offering and entree into NARA’s rich collections, the site leave users at sea with only their pre-existing historical knowledge to support them.

Unlike Digital Vaults, visualizations that make use of geospatial and temporal cues offer users more necessary orientation. One successful example is Minnesota Historical Society’s True North project, which offers users the ability to layer information in space in time to glean some understanding of the state’s history. While the interface does not link out to individual primary sources, it manages to offer enough cohesiveness that users can start to construct their own narratives of change. The National Museum of Australia’s History Wall is even more successful. Built on the backbone of a flexible timeline, the interface allows users to explore the lives of Irish in Australia between 1770 and the present, drawing on, among other things, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and amazing Trove database that aggregates over 280 million sources from National Library of Australia. Together these elements let a user to explore within a much more deeply layered context that can push them to use heuristics that are important to historians as they make sense of the evidence from the past.

Considering this range of examples, I hope that we can begin to have a conversation about how to create and frame data visualizations that provide the public with new ways to access our content but also offer them enough context to help them begin to make sense of those materials in meaningful ways.

• You need a question! Nothing is more important that having a strong inquiry question to keep your research and writing on track through the course of the project. You’ll need to refine it and elaborate it continually through the process.
• You need a method! Mine is generally centered around historical approaches with assistance from cultural theory.
  • What is the process of history? At its most basic, history is the practice of learning about the past based on evidence from primary sources. Generally, historians look at questions of change and causation, and then try to offer interpretations about what happened and why. This is not as easy as it seems.
• You need a field, or several! Historians care what other historians have thought about events in the past. These interpretations change over time and need to be accounted for in historical work.
  • Read as widely as possible in scholarly fields that are related to your topic. This forms your base of secondary sources, offers, context, and provides you with possible interpretations to engage.
  • Have an organizing system for your work from the beginning. Absolutely use Zotero. [Here is my current library.]
  • Search the databases that are related to your field for relevant articles. Start with the American Studies Research Guide. I really like American History and Life, but JStor, and ProjectMuse are also good places to start.
  • Consult Reviews in American History to get a sense of the scholarly conversations going on in the field.
  • Use your library. Search and browse the stacks. Skim and summarize individual works (what is the argument and how is it related to my work?). Be sure to read several reviews on each of the important secondary sources.
• You need primary sources! The choices are endless here, but you might want to consult Archive Finder or the searchable catalog of website reviews from teachinghistory.org to be begin locating materials that might start to offer answers to your inquiry question.
• You need to work through your sources!
  • Create a Zotero entry for each primary source. Take notes there. Sync often.
  • Cognitive science research tells us that there are particular ways that historians approach primary sources.
  • Write all the time: outline, make notes on significance, revisit your questions, constantly articulate your understanding of meaning. I do this with handwritten free writing, and plain text notes.
• You need to draft! Write and rewrite. Writing is a craft that needs to be practiced with conscious attention. Even after doing this for 15 years, I rarely produce anything worth reading without three full drafts. Plan ahead for the amount of time that this drafting process takes.
  • Use models. Find a writer or work that you really admire and use that a guide for possible approaches and structures.
  • Use your writing groups and your advisor. It is almost impossible to write well in isolation. We need readers who offer thoughtful commentary and criticism.
  • Writing environment is really important. I need a clean, full-screen place to draft if I am working on a computer (Try OmmWriter or WriteRoom).
  • Scale matters to me. I have trouble writing on a large screen, and if I get really stuck, I go to paper and pencil. I write a lot by hand and then type it up. The transfer process gives me a chance to take a second pass and make an initial revision as I make things digital.
  • I do my notes as I go (Chicago Manual of Style endnotes, including discursive notes). Never leave them to the end of the process; you will never catchup and you will end up with lots of mistakes. Use Zotero to drag and drop citation information into your documents.
• You need a platform to communicate your conclusions! Historical interpretation can take many forms, not just traditional linear narrative. We can talk more about this if you want.

I’ve driven the route from DC to Pittsburgh at least half a dozen times for the last 17 years or so. I’ve come to know the landscape of Western Maryland and West Virginia along Route 68 fairly well. Unlike the mess and stress that is the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I find this a remarkably renewing drive. The landscape itself has a lot to do with it. The route literally cuts through the mountains rising from Frederick to Sidling Hill and then Town Hill and across to Garrett County and on to Morgantown. As a result, I get a good deal of time with dairy and evergreen farms and occasional mining sites that roll along the horizon to the left and right, punctuated by the sheared layers of rock that rise up on the edges of the highway as it slices through the mountains. Some days this is a brilliant green scene of new vibrancy, but at this time of year, it is a scene with a muted pallet–browns and greys, scrub and trees stripped of their foliage. And, that’s just the way I like it. The barrenness of the winter landscape leaves me space to think.

Just as it should be, particularly given the occasion for my journey. I was on my way to hear Maya Lin speak about her art, architecture, and memorials at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Her talk was the launch event for the installation of her current traveling exhibit at the Heinz Architectural Center. I’d seen the remarkable works in the exhibit when it was at the Corcoran a few years ago. True to form, it is art of the landscape, reflecting actual places in the world, both above and below the surface of the land and the water line, made of wood, particle board, recycled silver, wire, and pins. And, her talk was a discussion of the ways that landscapes and environments are constantly in flux, and how her work tries to illuminate the spaces of absence and void more than anything else.

Lin’s theme for the evening rolled into an introduction of her new project: whatismissing.net, which offers us all a chance to think about the ways that we are actively causing pieces of our natural world to disappear. She invites us to pause and question what is missing from our environment, and to remember those elements as a step to making a commitment to change.

Route 68 is a landscape of sparsity and I’m sure that there are legions of species missing in this region. For me, over the course of the last nearly twenty years, it has been a place for my mind to roam, working through difficult places in critical projects and important relationships, meditating on the deeply incarnational aspects of natural world–some of which only appear in the grey. New work emerges from the grey.

Conceptualizing the project

• Collaboration — reach out to others in the field; know the field

Writing the Grant: Necessary fictions

• Follow the guidelines
• Select the staff
• Create the workplan
• Key Deliverables
• Estimating work
• Budgeting: personnel, materials, travel, indirect
  • Office of Sponsored Programs

Get the Grant==>Hooray!! What’s next?

• Redo the workplan — reassess in light of changing technologies and staff availability and skills
• Collaboration — reach out to others in the field; know the field

Team management: Trust

• Protect the staff: administrative concerns, competing demands
• Supply the staff: software, hardware, space
• Meetings (syncronous and asyncronous communication)
  • Individual (how are things going? what can I do for you?)
  • Larger group (where are we? what problems do we foresee? how shall we proceed? concensus building)
  • Small group (paired programming, etc.)
• Tracking systems
  • Github/SVN for tracking coding tasks and issues
  • Basecamp for tracking other project activities and deliverables

PI Responsibilities:

The buck stops with you, so it helps if you are at home with complex organizational systems and detail oriented.

• Budget and Deliverables
• Conflict management
• Individual time management
• Communication with the grant officers
• Communication and work with the institutional systems
  • Administration
  • Office of Sponsored Programs
• Learning enough about all of the elements of the project and the technologies to make decisions comfortably.

Much has changed in the world of digital archives and preservation since we embarked upon this work with our partners at the American Social History Project|Center for Media and Learning (CUNY) in 2002. As a result, we are embarking on the work of migrating the Archive to Omeka so that it will have a infrastructure that will improve both popular and scholarly access to the materials for years to come.

This work is being supported by a “Saving America’s Treasures” grant administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Park Service. Unfortunately, the SAT program was a casualty of the most recent budget fights, and it will no longer be a route to preservation and stabilization for our cultural heritage materials. The funding for this type of work from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission is all similarly endangered in the current political environment.

Perhaps as we reflect on the meaning and impact of September 11th on our nation and our cultural life, we might all contribute a reflection to the Archive. Second, we might write to our Congressional representatives to tell them how essential it is that we maintain our commitment to the preservation and presentation of the cultural heritage materials that play such an important role in those reflections. That commitment demands continued public support for the grant making institutions that make our work possible.

A survey of the current landscape in public history, archive, and museum projects suggests that a tide of interest in crowdsourcing is building in the community. Just recently, the participants in the Digital Humanities API Workshop at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities produced an excellent summary of recent work and current needs. The list of projects launched recently is long and includes projects such as:

• Ben Brumfield’s FromThePage
• Transcribing Bentham
• WikiSource
• Rescript
• T-Pen
• Old Weather
• DigitalKoot

This ecosystem of relate projects all draw up on the interest and enthusiasm of members of the general public to advance the work of important intellectual ventures. In a sense, the participants in these projects work to support Clay Shirky’s thesis in Cognitive Surplus (2010) that new media is allowing individuals to redirect their free time away from passive consumption of media to active participation in social and cultural ventures that can be harness in positive ways. Shirky’s work is somewhat utopian, but we at CHNM share his enthusiasm for the possibilities that community-wide collaboration might have for our work in public history.

Our enthusiasm for community participation in public history comes from the mission of the Center, which includes using “digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.” This impulse to provide open access to historical materials and to build open source tools also includes an interest in welcoming the wider public to join us in our work. In 1998 CHNM founder Roy Rosenzweig entitled his closing thoughts of The Presence of the Past (co-authored with David Thelen) “Everyone a Historian,” in an effort to indicate the very complex interpretations individuals who are not professional historians make of their encounters with history. We wish to encourage this historical work by providing everyone with access to historical materials and opportunities to participate in the work of history.

In addition to these general goals for members of the interested public, we have several specific goals for Scripto and its role in crowdsourcing documentary transcription for documentary editors.

1. For digital documentary projects, Scripto will allow users to provide text that is essential to improving the function of the archive’s search engine and the ability for users to locate the materials they need. As such we are not looking for perfect transcriptions, but rather the progressive improvement that users can provide over time. All of the text contributed by the crowd will provide more data to search, and will allow users to pursue topics and interests that might not be represented in the metadata created by project editors.
2. For documentary projects with the fiscal resources for professional transcriptions, we hope that this initial and imperfect transcription data will provide project editors with a first pass from which they can build more robust transcriptions for scholarly editions. To some small degree, user contributed transcriptions will allow projects to reallocate resources toward the value-added materials they bring to scholarly editions in the form of annotations, glossaries, and other contextual elements.
3. The landscape of documents that user choose to transcribe will provide documentary editors with vital insights about the topics and elements of their archives that are of interest to users. This information is central to informing future efforts at outreach and to prioritizing site enhancements, such as teaching materials and digital exhibits.
4. Opening up an archive to crowdsourced transcription provides projects with an opportunity to think seriously about fostering and maintaining a vibrant community of users. Public history is meant to be public, and Scripto will help editors focus on seeking out interested users for their important holdings.

In the end, our work on Scripto and its implementation with the Papers of the War Department is an experiment in pursuing these goals. Eventually, editors from other digital documentary projects may wish to customized or extend Scripto’s functionality to serve the needs of their users and their collections, but these four essential goals will remain consistent across projects. As a free and open source tool, we have designed Scripto to be light-weight, flexible, and modular so that it represents a simple step forward for documentary editors.

[Cross-posted from the Scripto blog.]

Omeka.net is a hosted web service that brings standards-based online collections and exhibitions to the internet cloud. Simply create a username and password at http://omeka.net, and your online collection or exhibition website is up and running. Similar to cloud-based content management services offered by WordPress.com, Blogger, and PBWorks—but geared to the needs of scholarship and cultural heritage—no server or programming experience is required to launch an Omeka.net website. With Omeka.net, users can build digital exhibits, map photographs, collect memories from web audiences, or publish new scholarship in a few easy steps.

Omeka.net will offer five plans for users that include a range of options from building one site using a few plugins and themes to deploying an unlimited number of sites that uses an extensive set of add-ons and designs. These plans, including a basic free option, are available to accommodate a variety of individual and institutional users.

Omeka.net is an outgrowth of the Omeka project, in partnership with Minnesota Historical Society and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Library of Congress, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

[Cross-posted from Omeka.net.]

We are looking for a combination of the following skills:

• fluency with current Web design technologies (including ability to hand code HTML, CSS, and JavaScript);
• experience with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator;
• experience with Web accessibility and Web usability standards;
• experience with common open source content management systems (e.g., WordPress, BuddyPress, Drupal, etc.);
• familiarity with Web-database technologies (e.g., MySQL, PHP);
• familiarity with contemporary trends in Web development (e.g., AJAX, DHTML, Rails, HTML5);
• and prior work in history or the digital humanities is preferred.

This is a grant-funded, two-year position at the Center for History and New Media (http://chnm.gmu.edu/), which is well known for innovative work in digital media. Located in Fairfax, Va., CHNM is about 15 miles from Washington, D.C., and accessible by public transportation.

For full consideration, please apply online at http://jobs.gmu.edu for position 10376z; complete the staff application; and upload a cover letter, resume, and a list of three professional references with contact information by November 11, 2010.

This developer will work on a variety of digital humanities software applications and content-based Web sites in a nonprofit, academic environment that values openness, creativity, innovation and teamwork. They will contribute to project development paths and learn new skills as emerging projects require them. Finally, they will have the opportunity to work in a relaxed, fun environment with other designers, developers and humanists who strive to keep pushing forward the cutting edge of digital humanities work.

We are looking for a combination of the following:
• Strong object-oriented programming skills;
• Experience with PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and XML;
• Standards-compliant CSS and HTML; and
• Experience with WordPress, BuddyPress and Drupal.

CHNM is the leading producer of open source tools for humanists and of award-winning history content on the Web (for example: Zotero, Omeka, teachinghistory.org and the Bracero History Archive). Each year CHNM’s many project Web sites receive over 16 million visitors, and over a million people rely on its digital tools to teach, learn and conduct research.

For full consideration, applicants must apply online at http://jobs.gmu.edu for position number 10398z; complete the staff application; and upload a cover letter, resume, and a list of three references with their contact information.

Swimming Cows, just for fun

As I made my way down Route 5 toward the tip of the St. Mary’s peninsula, I was reminded that although I have only the most vague sense of my family history in this farm land, I have a much more developed sense of the Catholic and slaveholding history of this place. Though I am by no means an historian of Early America, or of slavery, I spent a good deal time as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student trying to puzzle out the human contradictions of this past. Before and after those years plenty of scholars, most of them Jesuits themselves, have written about these men of God and their slaves. (See my Zotero collection.)

During my first semester as an American Studies student at Georgetown University in the mid-1990s, I’d been introduced to disturbing fact that the early Jesuits who had founded the school owned six plantations in Maryland where they own nearly 300 enslaved Africans. During those years, the American Studies program was engaged in an experiment with digitization and transcription, using subsequent classes of students to grow a digital archive called The Jesuit Plantation Project. The site is in somewhat of a state of disrepair and the metadata on the documents is lacking, but the contents represented my first introduction to this research.

When the first settlers arrived in the area in 1634, included among the them were two Jesuit priests and four slaves. By the 1800s, the Jesuits were firmly established in Maryland and had founded Georgetown College (1789). But, with no support from a local diocesan system–there really wasn’t one yet –, the Jesuits were farmers like everyone else and they used their farms to support their spiritual and educational mission.

St. Ignatius Chapel, what is left of St. Inigoe's Plantation

In 1815, Br. Joseph Mobberly, who managed the farm and slaves at St. Inigoe’s plantation, wrote to the president of Georgetown College counseling that it would be best to sell or free the slaves, arguing “It is better to sell for a time, or to get your people free—1st Because we have their souls to answer for—2nd Because Blacks are more difficult to govern now, than formerly—-and 3rd Because we shall make more & more to our satisfaction” (Mobberly to Grassi, MPA, 204k3, February 15, 1815.) When I made my first visit yesterday to what is left of St. Inigoe’s–St. Ignatius chapel and a cemetery–I was again returned to my puzzlement over the slaveholding Jesuits. Mobberly’s reasons for ending Jesuit slaveholding illuminated the dramatically compromised situation in which the members of the Society of Jesus found themselves. He claimed to be concerned about the spiritual welfare of the people he managed and corporately owned. He also seemed to have no grasp of why those enslaved people would be hard to govern. The raw facts of the economics made the most sense to him; if the Jesuits used hired hands instead of keeping slaves, they would save almost $400 a month.

Eventually, the Society of Jesus agreed with Mobberly that the slaves needed to go–though, not through emancipation. In 1838, the Jesuits sold their 272 slaves to a buyer in Louisiana. The sale brought them nearly $60,000 and relieved them of immediate responsibility for the families who sailed South. Though there were conditions laid out prior to the sale that required guarantees that families would be kept intact, and that the slaves would continue to be able to practice their religion. The hollowness of these conditions should have been immediately clear, but they came back to the Jesuits in print when in 1848 Rev’d Van de Velde wrote with concern about the conditions he witnessed in Louisiana. But, by then, they exercised no real control over the situation.

Revisiting these disturbing exchanges fifteen years after I first read them as an undergraduate makes me wonder if it might be time to find out more about the Mattinglys and Wildmans. I could think of less good ways to get to know my father than to learn how his relatives, who were neighbors of these mission Jesuits, fit into the world of early nineteenth century St. Mary’s County.