Question: What does David Staley mean
when he says, “Virtual reality as a model for historical inquiry
will certainly open up new vistas of interpretation, but it will be
as limited as any other representation of the past”? (David Staley,
Computers, Visualization and History) How might Cronon, Jenkins,
or Murray evaluate Staley's arguments?
While we may be tempted, as predominately
textual people, to jump to the second part of Staley's comment, there
are two equally provocative parts to his statement. First, what does
it truly mean for us as historians to delve into the world of virtual
reality? And how will this world not only change our presentation of
history but also the arguments we find ourselves making about the past?
Hopefully, the world of virtual reality will further open up the world
of history to students and lay people, as Staley suggests. If this medium
does not also open up the world of the historian, however, then I fear
it will never move beyond the moniker of “entertainment.”
Can we, in other words, find a way to use the computer and the art of
virtual reality to refine our interpretations of the past? Perhaps merely
the feedback we would receive from pedagogical interaction would enhance
the ways we examine our sources. Or perhaps the mere creation of a virtual
world would cause us to ask questions of our sources, as well as the
historical actors we seek to recreate, that have not occurred to us
before. Similar to ways in which scholars not only used new kinds of
sources but also began to ask different questions of traditional sources
when they began writing the history of women, African Americans, and
other marginalized groups, we may discover yet even newer ways to mine
the sources.
Second, as Staley reminds us, there
are limitations to any recreation of the past. Indeed, virtual reality
may be too ambitious a term when applied to history. Primary sources
are sketches of the past at best, and the further we retreat in time,
the hazier the outline of the sketch becomes. Moreover, not only are
there biases that historians bring to their scholarly work, but there
is a bias that comes with the mere selection of sources. Are the sources
written or oral? What was the contemporary's point of view? Was the
“author” of the source rich or poor, black or white, man
or woman? These are just a few of the parameters that we as historians
must accept when entering the murky waters of the past. This point is
well illustrated by Robert Rosenstone in his article, “The Reel
Joan of Arc: Reflections on the Theory and Practice of the Historical
Film,” (The Public Historian 25 (Summer 2003): 61-77).
In exploring new criteria for evaluating historical film, Rosenstone
questions the scholarly world's present criteria, or lack thereof, which
seems to be drawn haphazardly from our more comfortable terrain of text.
How can we judge, he asks, how believably an actress portrays Joan of
Arc on screen when we really don't know for sure many of the characteristics
the real Joan possessed? As we consider exploring the world of virtual
reality for what it can do for historical interpretation and presentation,
we would do well to consider as we go along the criteria by which we
should judge our scholarly efforts.
To the extent that the world of virtual
reality explores history through “stories” that are centered
on the agency of people, I think William Cronon would welcome the possibilities
of this new medium. Yet, he too would suggest that narratives in cyberspace,
even virtual reality models, are bounded in much the same way textual
narratives are. He outlines these boundaries in “A Place for Stoies:
Nature, History, and Narrative” (Journal of American History
78: 4 (March, 1992): 1347-1376), and two of them are indeed
applicable. First, these histories cannot contradict what we know to
be “true” about the past. For example, a virtual reality
exploration of the world of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison that
ignored their status as slaveholders while highlighting their views
on liberty would not be credible. But Cronon makes another excellent
point. Historical narratives, and hence historical explorations into
virtual reality, are produced within a community -- a community of scholars
who are able and willing to judge the history, not only the presentation.
In short, these products are judged not only as narratives or virtual
realities (or web sites, or film, etc.), but they are judged as nonfictions,
as histories. If they are not, then we run the risk of losing control
of the medium, as in the case of film as some might argue. Not that
these different media should be judged using the same criteria as text.
I would agree with Rosenstone that they should not. (Indeed it would
be interesting to have Rosenstone and Cronon in the same room to discuss
the criteria for evaluting history in different media.) But I know that
we as scholars would at least agree that new media should be critically
evaluated nonetheless, so that we may discover the ways that it can
“open up new vistas of interpretation” for us all.