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.