Pictures and Narratives

This week's readings for my Digital History class discuss how photos shape our memories and our understandings of historical events. The theme reminded me of an article I read awhile back about photos adding different perspectives to historical events. One of the readings pointed out that the first photo was probably faked, so who knows how accurate the rest are, but it was interesting, so I thought I share it anyway.

8 Ordinary Photos Hiding Mind Blowing Details
http://www.cracked.com/article_19894_8-ordinary-photos-hiding-mind-blowing-details.html

Twitter Diaries and Historical Webcomics

When I saw the title of Suzanne Fischer’s article, “Historic Diaries on Twitter,” it reminded me a book series that got me interested in history when I was younger. The Dear Canada series is a set of fictional diaries written by young girls in different periods of Canadian history. Even though I have not read them for years, I still have them on my bookshelf. With Fischer’s article, I was interested to see how historic diaries were translated to the web. Her short article discusses how Twitter is being used to post actual entries from historic diaries. She points out that the diary entries were often very short, meaning that these documents translate perfectly into Twitter’s format of 140 characters per post. The threads are posted by historic organizations, or sometimes the descendants of the diaries’ authors. These posts allow readers to follow the lives of people who lived long ago, just as they would follow their friends, or other threads. Fischer argues that these tweets create an emotional connection with the past, by allowing readers to get a taste of the person writing them and the events they lived through. The short texts also force people to come back for more if they are interested in the story as a whole.  

Beyond creating a connection with the past, diary projects are a great method of encouraging readers to dig deeper into the subject. 140 characters does not allow for in-depth information, but it does provide a starting point for readers to research events, people, or society further if they are interested. Off Twitter, there are many other publications with this same power to get readers to dig further into the subject matter. A good example would be Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant, a webcomic, which includes entries on people and events ranging from Medieval Europe to 19^th Century Canada. Beaton usually accompanies her entries with a blurb discussing the comic’s contents. This permits readers who are unfamiliar with the comic’s subject to fully understand the jokes, as well as providing specific information to use in personal research if they wish. I once chose an essay topic from a comic of hers’ that I particularly liked. Another example of this type of publication is CollegeHumour’s “News Feed History of the World.” This comic used Facebook as a template to tell the history of WWI to WWII. The comic is able to form a connection because it uses a format many readers are already familiar with. Like the twitter diaries, there is not a lot of text in each blurb, but it outlines the subject matter fairly comprehensively. These are only a few examples that I’ve picked up; there are plenty more to explore.

Tweets, webcomics, and Facebook are all great tools to use to attract people who are not usually interested in history. All of the creations mentioned above provide a connection to the past in a format that is already familiar to many people, providing a connection to their daily lives, while introducing them to a subject they may not know much about. And maybe, once they are interested, they will dig deeper into the subject matter to learn more for themselves.

How do I see digital tools and approaches affecting my current and future practice of (public) history?”

During my undergraduate degree I used multiple digital research tools for school and for my own purposes. For school purposes, I would always start a paper by searching the library catalogue (usually at home with the off-campus website) for books related to my topic. If I couldn't decide on a topic, I would see which topic had more available sources. The next step would be to search the school’s online journal databases and bookmark anything that could be useful. In my upper-year seminars, when I started using more primary sources, my first stop would usually be the historic newspaper databases. These databases contained digitized copies of newspapers from the US, the U.K. and Canada. Accessing all these resources was done at home in my bedroom at my computer. And all of it was possible due to the increased accessibility allowed by the Internet and digitization projects. My best example of this phenomenon is how I once found an article in a British newspaper database that perfectly fit my arguments. It was almost as if the author written an editorial 200 years in the past just to help my paper, and it was available to me online without having to cross an ocean. 

Digitization projects allow for document collections to reach far wider audiences then they ever could without the web. One of the best examples of this is one we discussed in class: an increased interest in genealogy among the general public. Online genealogy websites have links to resources that allow people to do research from home after work, rather then visit archives they may not have access to. These sites help increase people’s interest in history because they provide starting points from which users can do as much or as little research as they like depending on how much time they have available. Other sites use digitized sources for exhibition purposes rather than research. Sites like Buzzfeed allow users to create articles about any subject they like, which will then link to similar subjects already available. Recently there have been multiple articles comparing photos from the two World Wars to their modern day counterparts. Museums and government archives are also following this trend. By publishing online exhibits as stand-alones or as companions to current exhibits, they hope to attract wider audiences then their physical exhibits alone. 

However, like all things, digitization does have its downsides. Large projects take a large amount of resources in both time and labour. There are too many artifacts, and/or documents for everything to go online; meaning that choices have to be made on what should be digitized, and what shouldn’t. When considering which documents to publish online, the project must consider among other things, the funding available, and selection bias. As well, if the project involves personal information, such as genealogical records, the project must consider the ethics surrounding putting a deceased person’s personal information online. Another flaw involves the status of a collection’s accessibility. Despite the increasing accessibility of multiple sources around the world, not everyone has the same access. For example, my access to all the databases mentioned above is due to my student status, most people don't have this access, and I won't either once I’ve finished school.   

Despite these flaws, the possibilities and accessibility offered by digital tools are amazing tools to be used by public historians to present information in multiple different formats to wider groups. Following this trend, there is a good likelihood that I will be working on digitization projects or be involved in developing online exhibits in the future. This course will allow me to learn the skills I need to follow this path. I am especially looking forward to the mapping and web design portions of the course.