Web Journal

Fulfulling the Promise of Digital Scholarship

After reading "Deformance and Interpretation" by Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, I think that perhaps the "digital" in digital history should not become completely "invisibile" for fear of losing the "deformative" aspects of the medium. By deformative, McGann and Samuels mean the deliberate "deformation" of a work to lose "the sign of prose transparency" and look at the text of the work as "a made thing". The act of deformance, then, makes "reading" a text a "practice", in stark contrast to a theoretical and intellectual endeavor.

Perhaps "Imaging the French Revolution" and "The Difference Slavery Made" can be seen as examples of what deformative history could accomplish. Both sites examine relatively large historical topics: the American Civil War and the French Revolution, respectively. Both sites also utilize the medium of digital technology to render the typical scholarly exposition into a non-traditional format. As a result, the tenets of the traditional scholarly "social contract" are thrown up in the air, and the reader must readjust his/her expectations when reading these two sites and think more critically and retrospectively about the historical evidence and commentary presented.

While neither of these sites seems to do anything genuinely "new", the way they each use "old" tenets of scholarly inquiry make these sites innovative. For example, scholars often engage in discussion and colloborate on projects, as the "authors" of "Imaging the French Revolution" do. The only thing that this site does "new" in regards to colloboration is make it a key focal point of its argument, visible to all who visit the site. The "Discussion" section of the site provides links to various discussion threads among the authors about their work. Insights drawn from discussions and other scholarly interactions are often only acknowledged in print media either in the preface of books or brief footnotes in either books or articles. In "Imaging the French Revolution" the authors stress the importance of scholarly interaction and make available several discussion lines among the authors.

Thomas and Ayers likewise do something rather remarkable with the medium to enhance historical scholarship. In "The Difference Slavery Made," Thomas and Ayers divide their "narrative" into several sections: Statements, Summary, and Evidence. While this division exists in traditional, print scholarship, "The Difference Slavery Made" makes it far easier to access these conceptual and logistical divisions in any manner the reader sees fit. Thus, readers can embark on a deformative reading of the material Thomas and Ayers present.

Maybe, then, the promise that digital scholarship holds for historians and other scholars alike is the possibility for us to look at history through a deliberately different medium. Neither plunge us into what Edward Ayers calls "postmodern flight into chaos," but both challenge us to look at historical processes in different lights. Both sites allow readers to rearrange their orientation to historical evidence and commentary and allows reader to ask how they can "release or expose" history's "possibilities of meaning." By doing so, digital scholarship helps us challenge our presumptions, build our knowledge, and learn to appreciate the wonderful complexities of history.

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