The Importance of Digital Archives

Last year we hosted a film team at the Washington State Archives. They made three films about our work. Here is the first--I am really pleased with how it came out.

The Spokane Historical Smart Phone App is in the House!

Spokane Historical on the web. But that is not all...

Readers with long memories might recall that I have been working with my students to create smartphone walking tours of local history. I am pleased to announce that as of today our smartphone app, Spokane Historical, is available in both the Android market and the iTunes store.You can also explore our contents on the web. Yeeessssss!

Sample stop on the iPhone 

We are launching with about 60 historic sites in Spokane and Cheney, but more are being added every day and by summers end there should be over 200 sites. We are currently in what is called "soft release"--the app is available but I am publicizing it only a little bit at a time as we work out a few bugs. My students in Digital History last spring did a great job in researching and producing community stories and getting them into the database. But without the app in existence we did make some mistakes in things such as formatting and labeling. Email me if you find any errors.

Many more sites are under development. My excellent graduate students, Julie Russel and Tracy Rebstock, are developing rich tours of Spokane's cemeteries and parks, respectively. I am teaching a Digital Storytelling class right now where the students will be developing tours of the Centennial Trail, Indian War markers, Fort George Wright, and more.

Next steps on this project include looking for sponsorship and content partners, software updates that will include QR codes and better tour functionality, and perhaps expanding the project beyond Spokane. If you want to help, drop me line.

Navigating with the Android app

Spokane Historical was made possible by the generosity and support of my colleagues in the EWU History Department, who voted unanimously to support the project with department funds. So many public historians complain about how their colleagues demean or ignore what they do, I am lucky to work in a supportive department. Thanks friends. I also want to thank all of the local archivists, librarians, and historians who have helped my students create these stories. Spokane has friendly and sharing historical community, without whom this project would hardly be possible. A big thank you to Mark Tebeau, Director of the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University and his team for sharing with us the software platform for Spokane Historical, along with their hard-earned expertise. And my colleagues at the Washington State Archives, Digital Archives offered some technical advice along the way.

Last but not least, Spokane Historical is the product of many hundreds of hours of work by my awesome EWU students in public history. A year ago I walked into my Digital History class and announced that everyone should scrap their final project plans, we were going to create mobile historical walking tours instead. "How do we do that?" they asked. "I don't know," I answered, "Let's get started." It is a brave student who stays in a class after that.

Check out Spokane Historical and let me know what you think.

Wikipedia, Bound

Here is an interesting project!

On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography: This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.

This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

James Bridle's printed and bound Wikipedia article the Iraq War, with edits, is a fantastic visualization of how Wikipedia works when covering a contentious and ongoing topic. "For the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information," Bridle enthuses. "Everything should have a history button."

I have mixed feelings. Whatever the opinions of academics like myself, the cultural importance of Wikipedia is only growing. I think it is fair to say that it has become the first stop for basic factual information for most people in our culture--college undergraduates, journalists, professionals in all kinds of fields, and (rumor has it) even a few history professors. There is no use fighting it anymore. At the same time I suspect the genesis of Wikipedia articles is fairly mysterious to most users. Brindle's row of bound volumes illustrates the mutability of Wikipedia. It is shifting sand.

What Brindle doesn't do is offer any analysis of the forces that went into the 12,000 edits of the Iraq War article. It would be interesting to see someone mine the data. Are there spikes in the editing activity, and do they coincide with breaking events? Can the users be divided into categories or factions, and how do the factions seek to control the narrative? What has the role of the moderators been in shaping the article? This article points to some interesting possibilities for such research. As one of the commenters over at MetaFilter wrote, "I guess that's the difference between 'making an art project' and 'writing a book.'"

Bridle's talk which accompanied the project is available online, as are the slides. His blog, booktwo.org, featuring "literature, technology and book futurism" is wonderfully thoughtful and interesting.

THATCamp Pacific Northwest

THATCamp Pacific Northwest will be at the University of Washington this year, October 23rd & 24th. THATCamp PNW is a "digital humanities unconference" where participants "show, tell, collaborate, share, and walk away inspired." Last year I attended the main THATCamp at the Center for History and New MEdia in Georgetown as well as THATCamp PNW in Pullman and came away with so many great new ideas and contacts. THATCamp PNW is by application, and the deadline is June 7. See you there!

You Know Who Else Hated Digital Humanities?

Whitman College's Online Northwest Archives

Whitman College has put online a small but well-chosen set of books and documents from its excellent northwest history collection. Some of the highlights include a 1913 picture of an "Indian War Dance," a handwritten Journal of Lieutenant John Mullan, and Marcus Whitman's missionary certificate, pictured above.


Whitman College has one of the most impressive collections of source material for early Northwest History (check out the collections guide), and it is great to see some of it going online. I had the pleasure of meeting Whitman archivist Michael Paulus at THATCamp PNW in the fall and he is forward-looking archivist who understands the new digital realm. This is a site for PNW historians to keep an eye on.

Five Take Aways from THATCamp Pacific Northwest

THATCamp Pacific Northwest was a great success, thanks to the hard-work of Julie Meloni and others at Washington State University. Unconferences such as THATCamp are said to be "user generated" but that is only true of the sessions--someone has to reserve the space and pay for the coffee and make sure everyone can get online and a hundred other things to make a successful meeting. Anyway, I learned so much and have a lot to think about. Here are a few random insights/resources/ideas that I am mulling over:

1. There are a LOT of us doing interesting work in digital humanities in the Pacific Northwest and we never meet one another. More than 40 people gave up a Saturday to travel from Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and the Puget Sound to Pullman (Pullman!) for the chance just to talk about digital humanities.
   
2. We should not waste effort recreating resources that are already out there. As Dave Lester of the CHNM said create scholarship, not destinations.
   
3. Apparently some digital projects that were created with public funds have since vanished behind pay walls! This is both obscene and easy to understand--as public money ran out and institutional support eroded, digital projects were adopted by commercial entities that could at least keep them alive. (I am eager to learn of specific examples of this phenomena, so email or tweet me or whatever if you know of any.)
4. Humanities scholars working on digital projects should reach beyond their disciplines to their natural allies in libraries, museums, the genealogical community,  teachers, the open-source movement, and elsewhere.
5. Michael Paulus of Whitman College made an important point: The Northwest needs a digital humanities center. Such a center could help prepare grant proposals, host meetings, form collaborative networks, sponsor digital projects, etc. We can start small--perhaps the center begins as an email list. Michael, I'm looking at you!
   
   
   

The Death of Scholarly Publishing?

The University of Michigan Press has announced that they will be "redefining scholarly publications in the digital age"--by which they mean they will no longer print books. Rather they will shift their resources to "digital monographs." You to have give them props for the positive spin in the press release. "Freeing the press, in large part, from the constraints imposed by the print-based business model will permit us to more fully explore and exploit ever-expanding digital resources and opportunities," Phil Pochoda, director of U-M Press, quotes himself as saying. Pochada also refers to his team and himself as "visionaries."

There is much fussiness in the academic community about this move, but it is not like we did not see it coming. Scholarly publishing of monographs has been on its death bed for years, with press runs of many books dropping below 1000, then below 500, then into the low hundreds even as prices have soared and subventions have become almost respected.

But as the guys over at Digital Campus pointed out in a recent podcast, the vital element of scholarly publishing is the peer review, not the physical form of the end product. Though no one seems to be noticing, academic articles have already made the leap. I am willing to bet the average article in the Journal of American History gets far more digital readers via the commercial databases such as the History Cooperative and JSTOR than through actual subscribers who crack open a physical copy.

And the digital versions of the articles are far superior to the printed ones. First of all you can actually find relevant articles via search engines. Then you can do keyword searches to take you to a relevant passage. You can store the articles you are working on in your laptop and mark them up with various tools. Within five years most of all of our history journals will cease publication in the dead-tree format.

But even I have to admit that the book poses special challenges.

First of all, we have no good delivery format for digital books. The Kindle solves many of the readability problems of digital publications, but it also locks away your content into a closed proprietary system. You don't actually own your books on a Kindle, you just pay Amazon for permission to read them. The Sony Reader does not seem to be catching on, and there is no open source reader that I know of. (Update: Not so fast...)

Second, will anyone buy digital scholarly monographs? Grad students are too broke and their professors too deep in their print fetish to buy digital books. And books have a somewhat different revenue model than scholarly journals, depending more on individual and less on institutional purchases. Journal subscription costs are largely borne by institutions, but books still generate some of their revenue via sales to individuals.

Third, authors who have a choice will go to publishers who print physical books until the last one closes shop. After all, what kind of gift to grandma is a digital book? The answer here is print-on-demand (POD) services to turn digital books into hard copies. One can imagine a bookstore that has exactly one hard copy of each title on its shelves. When you make a selection you bring the book to the clerk who punches a few buttons and a machine in the back spits out a lovely bound copy. In fact you have to imagine such a store, because none currently exist, despite developments such as the Espresso Book Machine. There are quite a few online POD vendors, and I was pleased with my experiment with one of them, but I don't think they represent any significant fraction of the book market.

So the transition to digital is apt to be trickier for books than it has been for journals. As university presses pull back and are closed down in the current economic crises (is LSU press next?) the search for a new model of scholarly publishing grows more urgent.

Digital History at University of Nebraska-Lincoln

The University of Nebraska at Lincoln is angling to make a place for itself at the digital history table. Their website Digital History has some excellent resources. As UNL describes it:

Digital history is an emerging and rapidly changing academic field. The purpose of this site is to educate scholars and the public about the state of the discipline by providing access to:

• Presentations about the field by noted scholars
• Interviews with scholars about topics related to digital history
• Information about many aspects of digital history, including reviews of major online projects and reviews of tools which may be of use to digital historians
• A clearinghouse of current events and news items of interest
• A selected bibliography of Digital History resources
• And more!

Some of these sections have yet to be filled in. The review of tools for instance contains exactly two reviews, and none for Omeka or Zotero. But the essays are excellent, and I really love the video interviews with leading digital historians such as John Lutz, William Turkel, and Ed Ayers.

What jumps out at me here, more than the site itself, is who is built it. The University of Nebraska Lincoln graduate program in history has an excellent reputation as a training ground for scholars of the American West--but it was not much noted beyond that sub discipline. They seem to be using digital history non-traditional way of moving up the rankings. And good for them. When one thinks of the other emerging leaders in digital history one sees the same thing--George Mason University, which houses the incredible Center for History and New Media, was not on most people's radar screens before they started their digital programs.

The leaders in the traditional ways of training historians, the big graduate programs of the Ivies and R-1s, are not going to be the leaders in the new wave. This is a similar model to what happened in my other field, public history, where it was second tier institutions who saw the need and opportunities most clearly and were able to create the leading programs.

Are We Losing Our History in the Digital Age?

Time for a scare-report! British Library warns of 'black hole' in history if websites and digital files are not preserved: "Historians face a ‘black hole’ of lost information if we do not preserve websites and other digital records, the head of the British Library warned today. Chief executive Lynne Brindley said our cultural heritage is at risk as the internet evolves and technologies become obsolete."

Well, maybe. The article underestimates the efforts already underway to preserve at least some digital records. There is the Internet Archive (Wikipedia article) which maintains a huge cache of expired webpages. (The Wayback Machine is invaluable for recovering information when you hit an expired link.)

And of course there is the magnificent Washington State Digital Archives, my employer. We preserve the websites of former Washington governors Mike Lowery and Gary Locke among others.

The other problem with the "black hole" argument is that it compares the spotty preservation of digital records to an imaginary paper past where every record was lovingly archived and preserved in climate controlled isolation. But every historian learns soon enough that huge chunks of our historical record are missing. Twain's articles in the Territorial Enterprise are gone, burned up with the rest of the archives in an 1875 fire. A 1973 fire in Saint Louis destroyed 16-18 million military personnel files dating back to 1912. The Library at Alexandria was burned.

And yet we have histories of all these times and people. I would dearly love to be able to read all of Twain's articles as a fledgling journalist--but the handful that survive, Twain's own accounts of his Nevada years, and other primary sources from the period give us a pretty clear idea of what was happening in the to Virginia City and to Twain in those years. Future historians will find records enough for writing their histories of the early 2000s.

[Burning paper image from Flickr user The Shifted Librarian and used via a Creative Commons license. I added the wise-ass text using Picasa 3. This story is also being discussed over at Metafilter.]

Botanicus - Digital Library from the Missouri Botanical Garden

Botanicus - the Digital Library from the Missouri Botanical Garden is an interesting approach to digitization. Botanicus is designed to fill a specific niche: "Comprehensive collections of botanical literature are only available in a handful of libraries, all located in North American and Europe. For botanical researchers, these library-centered literature searches, while a crucial requirement of any project, delay hypothesis development or recognition and publication of new plant discoveries. For those traveling in remote parts of North America or stationed overseas, lack of access to library resources compounds these difficulties." Botanicus now has over one million pages of rare botanical manuscripts online.

This is a very different digital collection than those I usually highlight here. Though there is a lot of historical information within these volumes, the focus here is on botany, and many of the older volumes (the oldest book is from 1480!) are in Latin as well as French, Spanish, Italian and German. (The image to the left is from Tabacologia, a 1616 treatise on tobacco.)

There are a lot of things to like about this project. Though the search function is weak, there are a lot of ways to browse the collection, including by date of publication, as a tag cloud of LOC headings (I've never seen that one before!) and as a list of locations on a Google Map. The user can zoom in and out of the page images using the mouse scroll wheel. The project has a blog to allow users to follow along with the progress and to comment on features. Titles may be downloaded as PDF files or even reprinted via the internet publishing service Lulu.com. And many of the illustrations in the books are simple breathtaking, as in the 1801 muscorum frondusorum.

A few items at Botanicus need work. The search function is simple, allowing only keyword searches. And it does not work very well, searches for "tobacco" and "Indians" get zero results, though the collections do contain items about tobacco and Indians and both appear as tags on the tag cloud page. And given the project's emphasis "primarily on beautifully illustrated volumes from our rare book collection" an image search or at least an image browsing capability would be nice.

Botanicus is an excellent model of a large scale digitization project that utilizes some innovative technologies and strategies for sharing information.

Finding the Inland Northwest in Unlikely Places

One of the great promises of digital history is the unexpected discoveries. As archives become widely accessible and keyword searchable, even a casual researcher can come across documents and images that were previously unknown. This is especially likely to happen with documents that are themselves in unexpected places, separated from their frames of reference by historical happenstance and lodged in some archive where researchers of the topic are not prone to look.

Consider for example this striking color image of Spokane Garry from the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery. I have often seen the black-and-white version but had no idea that a colorized version of the image existed. The NYPL page notes: "Published by EDW. H. Mitchell, San Francisco for G.M. Imlay, Spokane, Wash."

I discovered this with a NYPL search for "spokane" which revealed some other interesting historical images including some stereoscopic views of the falls and this commemorative menu of Columbus' 400th anniversary.

Segregated Seattle

Segregated Seattle: "For most of its history Seattle was a segregated city, as committed to white supremacy as any location in America . . . This special section presents research that will surprise many Pacific Northwesterners. "

Segregated Seattle is part of The University of Washington's Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project. Created and maintained in part by students and members of the community, it is both a valuable historical resource and a nice example of collaborative teaching and community outreach using digital technology. The student Research Reports are quite good--see for example Nicole Grant's "Challenging Sexism at City Light: The Electrical Trades Trainee Program" and Heather McKimmie's "Quileute Independent and Quileute Chieftain, 1908-1910." The rich site also contains short films and slideshows, Activist Oral Histories, and a page where you can browse the site by time period or topic. There is much more--take a look!

I am going to begin teaching my seminars and perhaps select upper-level courses this way. The trick will be to come up with the website and some basic templates before the course begins. I tried something like this last year, adopting the ideas in Michael Lewis' 2004 Environmental History article "Reflections: 'This Class Will Write a Book': An Experiment in Environmental History Pedagogy" to my own environmental history class. It was a mixed success--the course was small (5 students) and lacked the critical mass to develop much momentum. I am teaching Introduction to Local History in the spring and will try again.