The reviews in the AHR Exchange were a great step towards implementing digital history into the rigorous peer review process of the historical journal – by asking reviewers to follow the same guidelines they follow for book reviews and providing a method of publication on discourse and discussion on digital humanities, the AHR has presented a routine for digital history review that seemingly had not existed before.
Before discussing the reviews of the
digital history projects, I will provide my own. Digital Harlem: Everyday
Life, 1915–1930 provides an apt, interactive overview of the spatial and
temporal relationships that permeated Harlem during the timeframe –
specifically about everyday life as reported in newspapers, police reports, and
case files. The site allows the user to delve into specific areas and topics,
generate results based off entered parameters, and read pre-constructed informational
themes about life in Harlem to a specific degree or encounter; overall, I found
the site incredibly interesting as a visual source bank. One is free to interact
with visualized source materials in order to come up with their own
conclusions.
Slave Revolt in
Jamaica, 1760–1761: A Cartographic Narrative,
in the same way as the Harlem project, visualizes a historical event through an
animated thematic map, allowing the user to consider the strategies and impacts
of the slave insurrection. Users can click certain dates on an interactive
timeline that provides an animated visual of slave movement, as well as an accompanying
source material that provides written insight as to what was happening at that
moment. You can follow along with the movements of the slaves – an excellent way
to showcase historical themes that get lost in words but are better spoken in
visualizations.
Just as the structure of a book review
promotes, the reviewers of the digital history projects focus on the arguments
of the projects, quality of and analysis of source materials, presentability,
and use of evidence by the projects’ designers.
In his review of the Harlem project,
Joshua Sternfeld takes issue with the lack of concrete conclusions provided, as
well as the inherent focus on crime and police reports. He claims that this
focus relegates daily life in Harlem solely “on street corners and avenues,”
rather than as a complex place of many historical agents and changes.[1] He
feels historians should view the project in good light for its use of digital
history tools, but that the translation of a monographic focus when combining
multitudes of data should pose a cautionary concern for historians looking to
use this newfound medium.
This lack of concrete conclusions is
conversely applauded in Natalie Zacek’s review of Slave Revolt in Jamaica,
1760–1761: A Cartographic Narrative, where she notes that the interactive nature
of the map, along with the access to archival grade sources, allows for users
to exercise an agency over the narratives presented that is rarely seen in traditional
history projects. This, along with the website’s accessible language and navigable
landscape, make the project perfect for a versatile audience – both academic
and public.[2]
Both project creators responded with the same desire to allow for users to establish
their own conclusions based off the materials provided, believing that the
accessibility of the internet should only mean better accessibility and shared
authority to historical information.
This accessibility is further touched
on by Jessica Marie Johnson in her AHR interview – concerns over source accessibility
and the periphery of history on the matters of social justice only make sharing
authority with the public over historical narratives even more important.[3] This
specific issue of accessibility, shared authority, and the perceived lack of
conclusions discussed by Sternfeld were my main concerns during the readings.
As a student on the public history track, we are ingrained pretty early in our
studies of the power that shared authority and source accessibility can have in
promoting civic literacy and historical engagement. Traditional history methods
have unfortunately failed to reach the public audience – historians have long
grasped at the authority of determining the narrative conclusions of the
evidence they interpret. I believe that digital history projects provide the
most compelling, far-reaching way we can allow an audience, a user, to view
source materials, understand spatial and temporal themes in a visualized
presentation, and then cultivate their own conclusions based off of the
information they have parsed; what Sternfeld views as detrimental is actually
an incredibly important asset of getting history outside of the ivory tower.
Overall, the inclusion of digital
history projects within the AHR and its rigorous review program is a great step
in allowing the digital method to find a place within the profession altogether.
The closer we get to a consensus of acceptable digital practice, the closer we
get to a solid profession.
[1] Joshua Sternfeld,
"Harlem crime, soapbox speeches, and beauty parlors: digital historical
context and the challenge of preserving source integrity," The American Historical Review 121, no. 1 (2016): 143-155.
[2] Natalie
Zacek, “Reading the Rebels and Mining the Maps: Digital Humanities and
Cartographic Narratives,” The American Historical Review 121, no. 1
(2016): 167–75.
[3] American Historical Review, “Jessica Marie Johnson on the History of Atlantic Slavery and the Digital Humanities,” AHR Interview, published through Libsyn, February 17, 2021. https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/american-historical-review/ahr-interview.
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