History and the New Media

Rob Townsend's Clio Wired Home Page

Proposal 1

A Review of History Journal Scholarship on the Web

Summary: As a medium, the World Wide Web provides a means of distributing a rich array of history scholarship on the Web. However, few scholars have been able to use the medium to transcend the type of scholarship that can be presented on a printed page. In the course of the review, I hope to briefly sketch why a new taxonomy for online scholarship is needed, highlight the interpretive cues that serve to distinguish four types of online scholarship, then turn briefly to the design strategies needed for presenting the new scholarship.

The proposed review will focus on the different types of journal articles that have appeared on-line over the past two years, highlighting the need for a new taxonomy that can take us beyond Janet Murray’s fiction-based “additive” and “expressive” categories. In its place, I would propose four distinct categories of electronic journal article—the textual (articles that are pure reproductions of a print article), the supplemental (articles that use hyperlinks to other primary and secondary sources on the Web for illustrative purposes), the archival (articles that link to supplemental materials that the author has created or prepared for the medium, but again only for illustrative purposes), and the foundational (articles that are built “from the ground up” and fully integrate other electronic resources into their argument). The key in this taxonomy is the author—the amount of effort a scholar puts into transforming the article for the medium, the amount of work they put into creating a scholarly foundation for their work, and the interpretive guidance they provide the reader in assessing the linked materials.

Reviewing the literature by the proponents of electronic publication, highlights the confusion posed by an undifferentiated treatment of electronic scholarship by it place within the medium, or its deployment of other electronic resources. We have reached a moment in which we can and should do a better job of differentiating the types of scholarship on the Web, and the function and value of each. This is essential as a means for building bridges to those who are dubious about the merits of electronic scholarship, and for building better measures of where these articles stand within the medium and where the medium stands within the articles.[1]

Textual Scholarship Online

Most of the scholarship on the Web is purely textual--an article that appeared in print and has simply been converted to HTML for display and distribution on the Web (Figure 1). This material offers no hot links to a glossary of definitions; no icons promising a voice, music, or some snippet of video. Nevertheless, this is rich and substantive scholarship, which contributes to the greater storehouse of knowledge. An interested student of history with an interest in a particular topic (and access to these sites), can immerse themselves in some the best and latest scholarship in the discipline.

Both proponents and opponents of the medium tend to overlook the value of this material. Those who want to dismiss online scholarship would rather talk about how pleasantly the sunlight dapples the printed page as they read their printed journal beneath a tree. And when they want to confront online scholarship head-on, they can usually identify some horrendous mish-mash of shoddy text, broken links, and sluggish multimedia. At the same time, proponents of the Web tend to want to focus on the future potential of the medium for new and vibrant forms of scholarship, and in the process tend to ignore the exceptional scholarship that is already available online.[2]

The real value of most of the material that has been published on the web is in its contribution to a larger database of knowledge that allows greater, and more immediate access, to some of the best history being produced today. Readers with a substantive (but not academic) interest in history no longer have to wait years for these developments in the historiography to be integrated into textbooks and the secondary literature. And few scholars with an academic interestcan resist the added value of keyword searching and occasionally (regrettably) clearing off a few feet of shelf space. Proponents of the Internet need to give this form of scholarship its due. I have seen quite a few senior (or, if you prefer, “old”) historians drawn into the Web by these simple translations of print scholarship—particularly the materials on J-STOR. As such, purely textual electronic scholarship is crucial element in the legitimization of other forms of electronic publication, and shouldn’t be left out of the catalog of electronic scholarship.

Supplemental and Archival Scholarship

When the proponents of the internet discuss the materials currently on the Web, they typically site one of the two types of formal electronic scholarship I would mark as either supplemental or archival. While taking the form of hypertext, with links to other texts and multimedia, these are only enhancements to their presentation, not a fundamentally new form of scholarship. Janet Murray’s notion of “additive” links is typically applied to describe these kinds of articles.[3],. However, while Murray’s notion points us toward these kinds of relationships, it fails to note a crucial distinction in the type of material at the other end of the relationship. The additive materials can either rest on top of the published article—as links to external materials—or beneath the article in a larger archive of primary documents and materials. As scholarship, these relationships take on two very different, and important meanings.

The top-up kind of article is essentially a print article that has been translated to the web, with supplementary links to external data sources. Given the paucity of historical materials on the Web, there are no good examples in the field. However, in the field of computing, which has a much richer base of materials to draw from and connect to, journal articles of this type are quite numerous. While it does not diminish from the merits of the article, the contribution to scholarship is limited to the text itself. The supplemental links allow for an added layer of value in the article, providing more immediacy to the footnotes and added depth to the argument. However, as an interpretive act these links are no more than footnotes—they offer the reader a link, but no clear direction on whether or why the reader should follow that link, or what they should do and learn when the get there.

Figure 2: The Darnton article includes a wonderful interactive map that allows the reader to narrow in on the location of specific Parisian cafe's, but the reader is largely left on their own in interpreting what to make of them.

In this, the supplemental and archival article are quite similar. Robert Darnton’s online article An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Figure 2).[4] The multimedia component offers a number of interesting and useful materials that serve to enliven and enrich the text, but it makes little substantial impact on the argument (as indicated by the ease with which the text was transposed into print in the AHR and the New York Review of Books). Indeed, some of the most interesting and innovative aspects of the Web version of Darnton's article—an interactive map and sung versions of 18th century French songs, are referred to only in passing in the text. While interesting and valuable as an addition to the storehouse of knowledge, this illustrative material only rests on the surface of the text, and makes no deeper impact on the scholarship. The reader is never directed to take a moment to view an aspect of the map, or listen to one of the songs, with a particular interpretive point in mind.

Figure 3: In this articles from the Journal of Multimedia History, the author includes film clips, but interpretively the article barely even relies on the still image.

Similarly, a review of recent articles in the Journal of Multimedia History demonstrates the same illustrative use of multimedia and images to serve to enliven the article and offer some additional materials for the readers consideration, they are not integrated into the interpretive apparatus of the article. The integration of the materials is largely through the captions, or other text external to the scholarly argument contained in the article (Figure 3).

This is certainly not to imply that this is bad scholarship, only that the medium has not fundamentally changed the message. The author's contribution to scholarship goes beyond the written article and includes further contributions to the body of primary source materials on the Web. In that sense they have provided an added benefit to the profession, by making further supplemental scholarship possible. At the same time, the text is more open than a standard journal article, as the reader can immediately do a bit of fact checking on the author and draw a few conclusions on their own. But the essential form of the journal is largely unchanged from the print.

Fundamental Scholarship

In contrast, there is a small but growing number of examples of scholarship that use the medium to truly transcend the kind of scholarship that can be contained on a printed page. Philip J. Ethington's "Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge" could not exist outside of the electronic medium (Figure 4). At a number of points in the article, Ethington directs the reader to a particular image with specific

Figure 4: In Philip Ethington's article the text fundamentally relies on the maps and visual evidence, weaving the interpretation into and through them.

interpretive guidance. As a result, the text cannot exist apart from the medium, and the medium thereby makes possible a new type of scholarship.

However, with the new possibilities of the medium comes a new problem, as the issue of design surfaces in an entirely new way. The textual, supplemental, and archival articles typically take the same form as a print article—occasionally using paragraph numbers instead of page numbers as the navigational paradigm.  The text flows from left to right, and beginning to end with only the screen and the links really distinguishing it from print.

In contrast, Phil Ethington’s article and Thomas Thurston's "Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity, and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century American Courts", are forced to confront the problem of situating the reader in a space where the text can not be the only object of their attention. The review will therefore pay particular attention to the design imperatives of this new form of scholarship.

My greatest concern is that at this point the medium has really only been used to integrate visual materials into an argument. I have yet to see a similar use of the medium to do close textual analysis, which seems equally open to benefit from the medium. Hopefully, by discerning characteristics of a scholarship truly designed to make use of the medium we can open the medium to a variety of new (some might say "traditional") materials in journal articles.