Hi again, all. To reintroduce myself, my name is Alexa, and I am a master’s student studying applied history and new media, with a research focus on 20th-century American women’s history. I’ve never had a blog before this class, so I’m excited to see how I end up documenting my learning. Okay, to start writing…
Happy start of the semester! I turned twenty-one this summer; I moved away from home, got a new job, and am still mostly trying to figure out my life. Despite debates over definitions, though, I know one thing for certain after our first Clio Wired class together:
I am a digital humanist.1
I started my BA at George Mason knowing I wanted to study digital history. I have long been fascinated by cultural and legal history (even before I knew the terms for them). Still, when I was forced to participate in National History Day in my senior year of high school, something clicked. While most people in Rho Kappa—the history honor society that made us do this—chose to write a research paper or make a poster board display, I was immediately drawn to building a historic website. I poured my heart into researching and creating my NHD project on the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, learning both about the impact of race on 20th-century women’s suffrage movements and how rewarding it could be to build that research into a public-facing website.2 It was like building a museum exhibit, but everyone could access it from their homes across the country with a tap. I was hooked.
My first semester of undergrad, I signed up for Dr. Mills Kelly’s digital history course. There, I learned about the Roy Rosenzweig Center and the academic field of Digital History that its eponymous founder helped establish in the 1990s. There, I learned that a Digital Historian was something you could be. I spent the next three years aiming to become one, guided by Dr. Gabi Tayac onto a path toward Digital Public History. I’ve incorporated a variety of tech into my history and museum studies scholarship in that time, from Omeka sites and digital exhibits to podcasting to 3D-printed dumpsters.
This all led me to the first class of Clio Wired.
Definitions
Despite my prior coursework, if you had asked me what Digital History was, I would not have had a great answer before Monday.
“Well… it includes historical websites and digital exhibits, to be sure. There are digital archives and searchable databases like the LOC’s Chronicling America collection, historical podcasts, mapping and spatial history projects, scholarly blogs, and history YouTube channels. People 3D-print historical models and use sonar to find submarine and shipwrecks…”
But listing all these things cannot fully represent the diversity of Digital History as a field or practice. For a comprehensive definition of DH, I appreciated Seefeldt and Thomas’ definition from their aptly titled 2009 article “What is Digital History?” Simply put, the field encompasses all ways of “examining and representing the past” using digital technologies. Emphasizing the public and interactive nature of DH as they explain further, Seefeldt and Thomas also note that Digital Historians use and collaborate with such technologies to create historical arguments that people can “experience, read, and follow.” This definition of DH fits quite a few under the “big tent,” expanding the field to include anyone who uses digital tools to research and understand the past while also emphasizing the importance of both interaction and access.3
After reading about both the history and the possible futures of DH in Crymble’s Technology and the Historian, I am interested in learning more about the concept and possibilities of Web 2.0, or the “Participatory Web,” as they relate to DH.4 The concept of the participatory Web reminds me greatly of the AIDS Memorial Quilt project. As a publicly searchable archive, art installation, and outlet for commemorative and collective grief, the project always reminds me of the power of a crowd. I see crowdsourced DH projects, coupled with the reach of technology, as having the potential to fuel insightful and relevant social, cultural, and environmental history projects. What could photos of yearbooks uploaded from attics across the country contribute toward our understanding of regional patterns of race and gender throughout the 20th century? What could a global survey of recorded folk songs and lullabies reveal about transnational migration and language patterns? What can street and library names mapped by volunteers across the United States expose about our collective political past and how we remember it?
Crowdsourcing archival work–such as transcribing census records–could also be an affordable way for archives to build both searchable collections and a community around their institutions. Compared to automated text recognition, recruiting the public may yield more reliable and accurate results. (Or not, because of some DH wizardry we will explore in this class.) Nevertheless, I appreciated the perspectives of both Crymble and Seefeldt and Thomas on the importance of public DH participation. In the past, I understood DH as product-focused (turning history into the website, the podcast, the video, etc), but the Web 2.0 idea that users should engage and contribute to the project, and not just consume it, is an important element of creating relevant and engaging histories in the modern day.
In Class
To be sure, setting up my site this time was much easier than it was freshman year. I went through Reclaim Hosting and installed WP a few nights before class, feeling semi-confident in the process. In class, I went through all my settings and chose this simple theme. I am a little concerned that I have been receiving a lot of login attempt emails, but I installed two security plugins, so I hope they come through. Regardless, it was a pleasure to meet you all in class, and I am looking forward to reading everyone’s posts this week.
Fun fact: you should comment on my posts because it’ll assign you a weird monster profile picture.
Signing off,
Alexa
- I know this because I am choosing to identify as one. ↩︎
- Somehow, the site is still up! Obvious disclaimer: I was–and am–proud of the research and analysis I did when I was 17, but it isn’t up to graduate history standards. Go easy on me. “The Equal Suffrage League of Virginia: A Frontier in Ideas in the American South,” 2023. https://site.nhd.org/40948714/home.
↩︎ - Seefeldt, Douglas, and William G. Thomas. “What is Digital History?” From Intersections: History and New Media. American Historical Association, May 2009. https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/what-is-digital-history-may-2009/.
↩︎ - Crymble, Adam. Technology and the Historian. University of Illinois Press, 2021, p. 64. ↩︎
Alexa,
I am glad we get a chance to have a class together! Your previous digital humanities projects sound really interesting. I think the circuit court archives are lucky to have two up and coming digital historians working behind the scenes to provide engaging educational material for Fairfax County middle schools through the Judicial Learning Center. I think the questions you are asking and the ideas you have about future participatory web projects are important. They show that history can be much more than putting things in conversation with the historiography.
Hope you have a great weekend!
I really liked your blog because it feels very personal, much like my own blog, which I write in my native Persian and sometimes in German. I have always preferred reading this kind of blog, especially when it includes thoughtful criticism of interesting topics. I am happy to be in the same class with someone who has such a thoughtful and independent spirit.
It was good to learn more of your journey as a digital humanist. It is interesting how our experience and training influences how we identify. In my blog, I explain that I identify as a public historian rather than a digital one. This is in spite of me spending the majority of my time working in digital formats. I view it more as a tool rather than a field, but as an archivist that makes sense.
I also appreciate the AIDS Memorial Quilt Project. I had to search its digital archive to identify alumni from my work.
Alexa,
It was really great to learn more about your intellectual autobiography and how that led you to the digital history field! Thank you for adding the link to your Equal Suffrage project in your citations. The passion in your blog post made me want to check out the site as I was reading! I look forward to taking a look at it to see how your practices of digital history began !
Hi Alexa!
First, good call reintroducing yourself; now I definitely wish I had done that on my post. It sounds like you’ve had a lot of changes this year, but I hope you’re taking them in stride! You seem to have really found your place at GMU.
Your website project about the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia is super interesting. I have a few questions about it.
What lessons might you have learned from this first website that you want to remember going into this Clio Wired class? Has your opinion on the website or those lessons changed after the first class of the year? Might you return to the website, or create a new version of it, during or after this class?
I think it would be very interesting to see how different the sites could be.
I have also been receiving a lot of login attempt emails! The things we have been posting must be very alluring to the powers that be, haha.
I too appreciate the autobiographical angle of your blog. When writing, I always tend to just say what is in my head and then go back and refine the mess so it always seems to be from my point of view. I think that is the best way to approach these posts, because they should be about our own experiences with these topics rather than just summarizing text. I also started on day one not knowing anything about digital humanities. Years ago, when I started my higher education journey, I would have described it as a small field, but now, with how much tech is involved in even the simplest of tasks, I would say it’s hard to find something that is not DH. I look forward to reading more of your insights over the semester.
Alexa,
Similar to you, I could not have told you what digital history was until our class, and to be entirely clear, I’m not sure if I still fully understand it. Also, after reviewing the site where your project is posted, it is especially apparent how true your passion for digital history is. I was especially fascinated by the part on “recruitment and meetings.” The different evidence you incorporated and displayed alongside your analysis worked perfectly together, and I was even more impressed by how you went beyond simply including pictures and also included audio portions to create a multimedia experience. Great work, Alexa! I can’t wait to see what you put together in this course.
Hi Alexa! You’ve written a very thoughtful blog post. I like how you highlighted the importance of interaction and access in using digital history tools to create historical arguments. And I also thought you made a great point about community-building in crowdsourcing history projects and how it has the potential for collective contribution to a wider historical narrative. Nice blog post!