“The only historically justified tactic is extremist innovation” – Debord & Wolman, A User’s Guide to Détournement (1956)

I’ve been thinking about the Situationists for about a decade now, after learning of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle in some Propagandhi liner notes (I think) about a decade ago.  Sadly, after all that time, I’ve developed no great insights as to what the hell they were talking about.  I mean, I get the gist if that counts for anything, but I think to really grasp what they’re really getting at, one needs a graduate seminar and plenty of contextual knowledge.  Nevertheless, the shit is damn brilliant and informs my worldview in many ways (most of which are surely based on misreading).  Since presently, I do what one might call information work, and as a result have become heavily invested in the web and social networking, I’ll use this post to share some cool films by the Situationist International (SI), and briefly look at how the SI’s  ideas of spectacle, détournement, and separation apply to the social web.

Social networks as commodified existence…

I’ve always felt a certain ambivalence toward the Internet, particularly as it has become the prime mediator of social and professional interaction.  Obviously, we have experienced some real and perceived benefits due to our increasingly rapid adoption of technology (defining “technology” is problematic in many of the same ways as “information,” but let’s put that aside and assume I mean computers and electronics and stuff).  We have increased economic opportunities (for some), more free time (theoretically), greater safety and efficiency, instant production and communication without regard to geography, and access to unbelievable amounts of information.  But we can just as easily indict technology for it’s less benign social, political, and economic effects.  A short list of technology’s less celebrated effects might include: modern global warfare, loss of personal privacy, environmental devastation, and political (as well as social, economic, and cultural) hegemony — all brought to new heights by liberatory (at first glance) technology such as industrial automation; steam, electrical, and combustion power; the telephone; modern media; and any number of innovations in digital computing.  Of course, what we currently colloquially refer to as “technology” — the Internet — is equally hailed in alternation as a force for democracy and a catalyst for democracy’s demise.  Obviously, both are true in their own argumentation, but miss the larger point altogether.

With the relatively recent explosion of Web 2-point-oh!, social networks, etc., we see something notably different than what was experienced with earlier technologies.  Machines, electricity, cars, televisions, and the like, were all transformative and initially liberated in some sense; addressing (and inventing) needs, and conferring legitimacy and status to their early consumers.   In those regards, the Web is not different.  Where it departs from previous innovations is that it goes beyond creating, serving, and reinforcing consumer identity and consumer culture into actually displacing and disappearing the consumer as he exists in reality.  Debord identified this tendency in …the Spectacle as it relates to earlier (1960s) cultural conditions, but it is ripe for application to the 21st century, with it’s ravenous tech fetishism and fascination with identity construction and maintenence through social networks.

As you may have guessed, I recently picked up Society of the Spectacle for some rereading and found that basically the entirety of the first chapter is as effective a deconstruction of 21st c. new media culture as it was of television, films, and advertising in 1967.  Here’s a sample…

1

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

2

The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.

3

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.

4

The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.

5

The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.

6

Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process.

I could continue quoting ad nauseum (actually, you may already be throwing up), but I’ll leave it to the reader to read more if they choose.  In the end, I’m still not sure where I stand on this.  I like the internet.  It’s amusing and often useful.  And as a worker in information and technology, I am actually not alienated from my own work.  More than ever, I have a high degree of control over the products of my labor. While I see the potential harm of these evolving conditions, I mostly see them in the bizarrely onanistic tweets/status updates of others.  I, naturally, am able to rise above the unreality of mediated life — so much so that I’m thinking about purchasing an island timeshare in Second Life to serve as respite for my World of Warcraft guild.  This, of course, would be done as an act of serious-parodic détournement (not to be confused with shallow irony), and thus would not be lame.

Détournement…

So, what is détournement?  A quick but insufficient answer might be found reference to hip hop, web mashups, Marcel Duchamp, or Adbusters. “In détournement, an artist reuses elements of well-known media to create a new work with a different message, often one opposed to the original” (Wikipedia).  A common example (though I’m not sure it was ever actually produced) would be to take the footage of The Birth of a Nation, and replace the text panels of that technical masterpiece with new music or text which would change (or détourne) the original meaning, from an egregiously racist historical lie, to something that crafts from the film’s intellectual content and technical strength an effective (and modern/correct/relevant) moral-political statement.  As Debord & Wolman point out (1956), if such a project merely attempts to negate the meaning through irony, counter-argument or comedic juxtaposition, it misses the opportunity and the point.  The best example I’ve seen, which serves as a better instruction than I can write, is René Viénet’s Can Dialectics Break Bricks?.

Film: Can Dialectics Break Bricks?: René Viénet, 1973: via U B U W E B

I’m not a great fan of the Debord films, though they do nicely illustrate, literally, the idea of the spectacular as it permeates our collective media life.  As with social networks, academia and high culture, the images Debord détournes in Society of the Spectacle are, individually and collectively, simultaneously useful, beautiful, and inspiring, as well as banal, authoritarian and vacuous. Like all cultural products, their meanings are contextual and constructed and can serve many masters at once.  The same is true of new media products, services, and cultural tendencies.

Film: Society of the Spectacle, parts 1 & 2: Guy Debord, 1973: via U B U W E B

Although new media culture has some very deep differences from traditional media culture working in its favor (openness, decentralization, interactivity), it’s yet to be seen how that will change over time.  Likewise, will the ubiquity of web-mediated social interaction continue on its current trajectory (whatever that might be is actually unclear), or will it evolve into new and unexpected forms?  I’ve got this idea that the (social) web is the perfect vehicle for détournement, though I’m less convinced it’s a worthy venue for cultural resistance.  Any thoughts?

My experimentation with these concepts and methodologies has been occasional up until this year.  I’ve used primary source documents in class before and typically in a constructivist fashion.  Combining web 2.0 would allow students to publish their final products on a public medium.  I decided to start a Myspace page to serve this purpose. I know, I know, Rupert Murdoch has already purchased my soul and sold it to Bernard Madoff who in turn sold it to some Mormons in a bizarre pyramid scandal.  I’d estimate that about 60-70% of my students have Myspace pages and about half of those use Myspace seem to use Myspace as their primary internet activity.  In fact, about two years ago, a community center up the street from the high school had a computer lab where Myspace use was so rampant the center had to make certain times “Myspace free.”  In other words, the site seems extremely popular amongst my student population.  Regardless, I figured Myspace would be an easy way to trick kids into thinking I was playing in their world in hopes of greater participation.  And it worked…. kind of.

We had been studying the Civil Rights movement, and I really wanted students to figure out, using primary sources, how de-centralized the movement was.  I wanted them to grasp how normal folks, including students in high school like them, were moved to courageous action.  Young people are increasingly aware of leaders beyond Martin Luther King Jr. but knowledge of groups like SNCC is sparse.  I wanted to encourage my students to see beyond the master narrative of “I have a dream” speeches to understand just how involved folks their age were in this push for freedom.

Students were divided up into groups of three to four and given six front pages from 1957 editions of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.  They had to use articles from these newspaper front pages to write a three paragraph blog entry on the Little Rock Nine and post it alongside their peers’ on my Myspace page. The results were an interesting mix from fairly terrible to pretty interesting.  None were shockingly brilliant, however.  This is not surprising though.  My guess is that few, if any, history teachers in these students’ classrooms have encouraged them to look at primary documents, decode them, and then “publish” a written recreation of their contents.  Take a look at your old college essay on the Vietnam before you’re too critical of these kids.

Nonetheless, there were some apparent obstacles that need to be considered for future activities of a similar nature.  First, the use of the articles as not just primary sources but the only sources they could use proved difficult and problematic at times.  Some groups really struggled to put together a coherent narrative beyond essentially cutting and pasting interesting facts from the newspaper.  Some failed to even do this chronologically.  One group stated, “After 8 Africans [sic] entered the school across the street. They tried to call other students to join them but they were pushed back by guards.”  This was after they already mentioned the students entering the building and members of the 101^st helping them.  While this might be intellectual Viagra for a few choice grad students looking to deconstruct the Western obsession with chronology as history, any educator would see it for what it is: an inability to properly read the articles together rather than as separate documents.

Additionally, several groups included sentences like, “As six negros tried to enter NLR high white students pushed them back because they did not want them at there school.” Frustrating grammar and spelling errors aside, I’m hoping you noticed the antiquated term “negro” in that depiction of the Little Rock Nine.  Seeing as how the kids in this group are all Puerto Rican and not rednecks, they were clearly just adopting the language of the 1957 Arkansas Gazette journalists.  While most groups did not make this mistake, it’s clear that more work needs to be done on the interpretation side of using primary sources.  Thinking historically does not necessitate using outdated language.

Another component that troubled me was the discussion of violence within the narratives.  Clearly, anyone with even a basic understanding of the Little Rock Nine case is aware of the intense mob violence that accompanied the desegregation of Central High School in 1957.  Some students failed to grasp the level of violence through these primary sources though.  “That caused a big chaos because at lest 100 parents of the students and other adults lined up on the side walk in front of the high school an hour before classes recessed for the noon hours.” [sic] There is no mention as to what these students and parents did once they lined up in front of the school and this is where the blog entry abruptly ends.  Lacking detail is to be expected, to a degree, in an assignment like this, but this clearly lacked understanding.  Did this group really go away thinking this racist family picnic mob was there to simply “be heard?”

The issue of responsibility also arose in the blog entries.  One group placed the white riots squarely on the Little Rock Nine’s boldness. “Due to court orders Faubus removed the National guard. After they were removed, the African Americans tried to enter the school causing the white young students to form a riot.” [sic]  Perhaps this is splitting hairs, but there is no discussion of white racism being the source of these riots in this entry.  I doubt the group of students, a racial mixture of whites, Puerto Ricans, and Arabs, meant for it to read this way.  The difficulty comes into getting students to grasp that how they phrase things is perhaps more important than what their intentions are.  This is an integral part of thinking and being able to write historically.  When others read your interpretation of the past they do so with their own understanding, not yours.  Getting students to convey their analysis of something as complex as the Little Rock Nine case is difficult but they should be encouraged to do so as clearly and thoroughly as possible.

One group attempted to retell the tale through the modern civil rights narrative which goes something like: “Black Americans worked hard to be recognized for their contributions and are now allowed the same opportunities as whites today.”  It’d be interesting to see if this was sparked by group members comparing their experiences today to that of the Little Rock Nine but alas, this was not the assignment.  The group concluded that “the students were allowed to go to the school with problems but at the same time they wre getting an oportuinty in life because some people dream of an opportunity while orthers wake up and work hard for it,” [sic].  I read this as an attempt to fit African-Americans into the American ethos of “hard work = success”, which is essentially what many watered down versions of the Civil Rights movement have become.  This view lacks a historical understanding of the barriers of white supremacy and the struggles of grassroots organizing.

Clearly there is much work to be done here.  Students need to engage and investigate primary sources much earlier on in order to be more comfortable and familiar with interpreting them.  Perhaps they also need a little more scaffolding to get to the point where they can take on similarly styled projects.  Nonetheless, the students did work with primary sources and did produce a piece of historical work on the topic.  Like getting President Obama to publicly condemn Cambridge police officers for acting “stupidly,” it’s a relatively small victory but an important one.  In doing so the participating students gained a greater understanding of the importance of historical interpretation, grassroots organizing during the Civil Rights movement, and their role in deciding what matters from the past.

BackStory:  BackStory is one of my favorite podcasts in any genre.  “On each show, renowned U.S. historians Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf, and Brian Balogh tear a topic from the headlines and plumb its historical depths.”  In addition to the hosts’ impressive knowledge, the show has NPR quality production values and a great sense of humor and relevance. The show is a product of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, who produce a couple other shows (which I’ve yet to hear) through their VFH Radio project.

StuffYouMissedInHistoryClass: This one is produced by HowStuffWorks.com, which initially made me a bit skeptical.  I was quickly won over though.  Historians Candace Gibson and Jane McGrath investigate “the stories behind the lines of your textbooks.”  The topics range from esoteric (e.g. the history of happiness) to  topical (“Historically inaccurate movies”) to explanations (“How the Marshall Plan worked”) and conversations appropriate for younger students (“Did Betsy Ross really make the first American Flag?”).

BingeThinkingHistory:  While the previous two podcasts are conversational and focus on American history, this project – a one man show by Tony Cocks -  is oriented toward British and European history.  Since I know very little about European history, I am both intrigued and confounded by the subject matter.   Luckily the host has a dignified English voice and a knack for telling history in a narrative, documentary style that makes good use of music and background audio (e.g. the sounds of battlefield artillery).  So I like it, even though I don’t really know what he’s talking about.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History has a wide selection of “eminent historians discussing major topics in American history”, which they release as audio podcasts.  My first impression of the project site was that this would be a stuffy, old-school academic series wherein pokey old coots discussed their own greatness by way of displaying their mad lecture skillz.  I also thought it would cater primarily to college students and other academics.  In fact, there are some really interesting and informative lectures here, and it serves as a really great resource for pretty much any group above maybe middle school.  I noticed a handful of  high school teacher comments on the project site, reminding me that some teachers actually challenge their students to do real historical thinking.  Imagine that.

HistoryPodcast/HistoryOnAir … “Jason Watts is the host of History Podcast and an amateur historian. It should be noted that he is not a professional.”  That’s what it says on the site, but ignore that (or sit and quietly appreciate it).  Jason does a good job of documenting his sources and telling historical stories, and has been doing it since 2005.  This is actually a nice little operation, and it looks like Jason is beginning to use video and visualization tools so this is one to watch.  Users can submit topics, ideas, and even scripts for new episodes.  Also of note is the provision of transcripts and citations for each episode, which is handy for students who might want to explore a topic in more detail.  There’s also a big list of additional podcasts you might want to check out.

So there’s a brief list.  I actually have a backlog of additional podcasts in my iTunes library that I haven’t had time to review, so I may add more to this post or continue the topic in a new post as I find more quality podcasts.   Please use the comments section to suggest some others you like.

So, I really like the looks of this nifty little flowchart, though I’m not sure it’s logically consistent.  In fact, it kind of reminds me of the inscrutable maintenance manual that came with my Taiwanese scooter.   I’m feeling compelled to take it down and make some revisions, but I think it best to just move on to writing my little article about the challenges inherent in digital history at the institutional level.  So here it is…

Introduction

After reading through the latest issue of Perspectives on History (May 2009),  I’m thinking a lot about what exactly is meant by terms like “digital history” and “digital humanities.”  On the surface these seem like pretty intuitive ideas.  You can slap a “digital” in front of just about anything and the meaning conveyed is more or less “on the web.”  In general, the actual practice of digital history bears this out.  Every history professor has a blog, every city has its own digital archive (in Ohio, they seem to all be named “[yourCityOrState] Memory”), and every modern historical event has a commemorative website or two.  Increasingly, discreet areas of historical inquiry are also well-represented online.  Each of these has a value.  Some are well executed and well used.  Others are well meaning and… well… ignored.  The best projects engage both teachers and learners, as well as the general public, with tightly focused, organized and comprehensive research and presentations.  Many others struggle in ways that are predictable (notably aesthetic design, usability and information architecture, and an apparent failure to comprehend the strengths, weaknesses, and demands of the media they are working in).

Nevertheless, we want and need more of whatever digital history is or is going to be.  My impression is that many would-be digital historians jump into new and exciting projects without fully understanding what they are getting into and what it takes to realize their vision.  Most projects seem simple at the outset, but, as you can see from my totally mad flowchart, even projects with modest goals can be jarringly complicated.

Before I get into the nitty gritty I should point out here that I am not an educator — though I do plenty of staff training and instructional sessions.  Nor am I an academic in the conventional sense.  I have an undergraduate degree in History and a graduate degree in Library and Information Science, as well as a few years under my belt managing various oral, public and digital history projects, including some on-the-job training in website development.  My professional expertise in not in content creation, nor in technology, but rather in conceptualizing practical ways to bring the two together in an educational context.  With these qualifications and caveats in mind, I will attempt to describe what I see as the barriers to operationalizing digital history at the institutional level.

Note: I am operating on a university model in which professors set project goals, providing direction and instruction, and using class time, staff and/or student labor resources, as well as university or grant funding to achieve completion.  The end result being an online resource of some type.

Core Competencies for Teaching, Learning, and Doing Digital History

Content:  You need to know your stuff.  If you are creating a digital history exhibit about Content X, then all participants (those who conceptualize the project and those who populate it with content) must have a reasonably advanced understanding of Content X as well as an ability to communicate that knowledge.  The final content must be of publishable quality since it is more or less being published.

Technology:  Although it is often assumed that the current generation of students is more technically competent than their instructors, this is often not the case.  Just because a student brings a laptop to class and uses email and social networking sites does not mean he or she understand how to use complex software and publishing platforms.  Assuming that students will “pick it up as they go” misses the reality that technical learning requires the building of experience through use and training, along with ample time to explore, experiment and fail.

In most scenarios, students are the technological proletarians of the project, contributing the bulk of the content and spending the most time using the technology.  Thus, they need to know how to use the tools at their disposal.  Professors and other supervisors have the luxury of guiding outcomes and watching content amass, but also bear the burden of bigger picture and behind the scenes technological matters such as data security, workflow management, server and site administration, and perhaps even a healthy dose of coding, designing, and debugging.

Law and Ethics:  Digital history, like “regular” history, often involves collecting and analyzing primary and secondary sources.  Traditional history is typically filtered through rounds of vetting and editing before it reaches the public.  Digital history can be “published” without such constraints.  Professors and other supervisors are not always able to comb through all the content that students collect in the course of their research.  As a result, there is often a risk of unwittingly publishing someone else’s work.  Leaving the issue of blatant plagiarism aside, what students deem fair use and what actually is fair use can differ greatly.

In my experience I have seen many images taken from commercial websites (some with giant watermarks and embedded logos!) and embedded or reposted without attribution or permission.  Students must understand that they have a responsibility to not only respect relevant laws, but also to not do things that make the primary investigator look like a total jerk.  There are appropriate and inappropriate sources, and there are sources for which appropriate use depends entirely on the way and the context in which they are being used.  These issues are not self-evident and must be explored and codified at the outset.

Likewise, there are often ethical questions that should be fully addressed.  Consider the use of digital oral history files.  Due to their length, file size, and meandering nature; we often edit them down to excerpts or reframe them in new contexts such as film or video.  We do this for any number of reasons: to tell stories, to increase use and access, to accommodate bandwidth restrictions, etc.  But with each modification and recontextualization, we run the risk of betraying not only the historical integrity of the item, but also the trust of our subjects.  The mere act of cataloging an oral history in the library takes a new meaning in the digital age, when recorded political beliefs and entire life stories (sometimes in full text or streaming audio) are only a name search away.  The potential for harm cannot be ignored.

Organization of Information:  Surely one of the least discussed aspects of digital history.  Supposing your team has a strong understanding of content, is attentive to legal and ethical responsibilities, and is reasonably skilled at using technology;  a final gauntlet awaits.  Yes, I speak of the soul crushing demands of metadata and information architecture.

Historians, like others in the Humanities, pride themselves on weaving complex and idiosyncratic narratives, employing deep analysis and rich vocabularies in the process.  Librarians in contrast use plain and objective language to create clean, accessible resources that are predictably organized and easy to understand.   This famously boring approach to information is actually one of the most useful tools that libraries employ to create usable collections and resources.  Digital history projects are likely to involve any number of cataloging and metadata standards, which must be implemented consistently with the help of considerable documentation and training.

Information architecture is also important.  Just as metadata needs to be consistent, so too does the organization of websites and other interactive resources.  Navigation must be clear and intuitive, but defined according to project-specific needs and amenable to many different use scenarios.  Most of this is laid out in the planning and design stages, but must be continually monitored lest the system break down.  As a resource loses organization, it also loses value.

The Primary Challenges

Training:  Each of these core competencies requires some degree of training.  A common critique of digital humanities education has been its rotation between conventional history training (content mastery, research, writing, et al.) and “digital” training (technology, metadata, information theory, etc.).  This will be a necessary reality into the foreseeable future.  Thus, digital historians should expect pushback at the institutional level from those concerned with maintaining tradition in history education.  Furthermore, some history students will ruffle at the idea of being graded on such non-history competencies as the use of software, HTML, and Dublin Core.

Time:  Training takes time, as does the required planning and management.  Instructors need time to teach all that needs to be taught and have limited classroom time to do so.  Personal time is likely to become a consideration as well; as projects evolve, they can become unwieldy and demanding.  Other professional expectations (i.e. traditional publication activities) are often set aside, to the chagrin of tenure review boards. Students also have limited time in their day.  Most students today work at least part-time and also have family and social lives to maintain.  At my place of employment, the majority of students commute to and from full-time commitments at both work and school.  Unless a project has a regular paid support staff, time is certainly a major barrier.

Money:  Costs can add up.  Server space, domain names, web design, hardware and software, as well as administrative and other staff all cost money.  Though it is often possible to find alternate sources of finance (grants, fellowships, etc.), most funding is likely to originate at the institution.

Of course, it need not be this way.  At the risk of devaluing my own position as a facilitator, I suggest that most digital history projects could be accomplished cheaply and effectively by a small team of informed and devoted volunteers working outside of the institution.  Students often devise ambitious projects, but never follow through for lack of financial or intellectual support, time, and know-how.  A recent post by Dave Lester suggests the possible emergence of “digital history street teams.”  I really like this idea, which reflects a rising interest in DIY approaches to education and scholarship (the kids are calling it “edupunk” these days, and I heartily approve).   So while the barriers I outlined above are very real and require some serious thought, there are also alternatives for creative and motivated individuals and groups – both inside and outside the Ivory Tower.

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm, or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data… The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.

If you didn’t pick up on that right away, then maybe you should head over to wikipedia.org and tweak the punctuation, add some citations, or re-write the entire definition. That is the essence of crowdsourcing and it’s nothing new. The term has been around for at least a few years, serving as nom d’guerr for the so-called Web 2.0 revolution. The general idea is that many people will collectively do for free (or cheap) what one or a few people would do for money (i.e. a salary). In the case of Wikipedia, we all watched (some in glee, others in terror) as free user-generated content dethroned and then beheaded maligned publishing giants Encyclopedia Brittanica and Microsoft Encarta (Guardian, 2009).

Could a similar coup unseat scholars, teachers, and publishers in the humanities? Well, no. In fact, that’s a really stupid question. But you might want to pay attention anyway. Because for one thing, we can see from such events that students (and the public in general) are learning in different ways. They are consuming information, which one might argue is very different from learning, at a rate unimagined even by futurists such as H.G. Wells, who envisioned an integrated World Brain (Wells, 1938) capable of storing, indexing, and retrieving from the global knowledge base.

Even if one agrees that the Internet fullfills Wells’ prophecy – I don’t by the way – then a distinction must be made between knowledge and information. Without getting into the vast LIS literature the topic, we can generally agree that information is factual and verifiable, whereas knowledge is something more esoteric. It involves understanding that is not easily transmitted or received. It is an end result. The point being that you or your students may easily find and recite a list of every faction in the Spanish Civil War, but that doesn’t mean anyone truly understands what is going on (as case in point, I have been pondering why the Spanish anarchists refused tips for at least a decade… but then, I identified as an anarchist and worked for tips for nearly a decade). Lists, including names, timelines, and inventories (I’m talking to you, military history buff) are information at best (as opposed to data at worst). They are generally meaningless without contextual knowledge. So the teacher and the scholar (especially in the humanities one might argue) still have a central role in the creation, maintenance and transmission of knowledge. Until Google unleashes its sentient robot army, this will not change.

As learners and consumers of information, we will nonetheless continue down paths shaped by the Internet. If not in school, then everywhere else. Educators ignore real changes in our society at their own peril and to the disservice of their students. Just as the social and labor historians were both a culmination and a component of social and cultural change in the last century, so too will be digital historians and digital humanists. (This is not to suggest any comparably meaningful moral or ethical imperative). Classroom hardware has evolved from chalkboard to Powerpoint to whiteboard in the past decade, but the teacher is, as ever, at the front of the room projecting information. It can be interactive, surely. The best educators craft stories, start discussions, stoke debates, and facilitate hands-on experience. But they retain control over the parameters and content of the learning. They choose the text-books, design the syllabi, prepare the lectures, and grade the results. Crowdsourcing projects involve giving up some of this control – to students and also to strangers. As always, the specter of misinformation hangs over all information not controlled by authority (as if authority didn’t propagate its fair share of BS). Indeed, discussion of crowd sourcing content-creation and review, particularly in libraries, often hangs on the notion of “radical trust” – can online communities be trusted to create a quality product that is free from major errors and willful or accidental misinformation? It is an important question and, in the context of educational projects, one that can be addressed, like any other assignment, by applying appropriate degrees of control and setting clear parameters. Of course, there will still be issues with the end product.

Below is a very brief survey of some digital history and humanities projects that apply the crowdsourcing idea to various degrees. It is by no means comprehensive, or even very good. It’s just some things that come to mind in no particular order.

History Engine
http://historyengine.richmond.edu/pages/home
Description: A wiki-based “educational tool that gives students the opportunity to learn history by doing the work—researching, writing, and publishing—of a historian. The result is an ever-growing collection of historical articles or “episodes” that paints a wide-ranging portrait of life in the United States throughout its history and that is available to scholars, teachers, and the general public in our online database.” Students do all the work as part of course assignments and take part in the creation of an actual usable resource. Basically, a focused and controllable Wikipedia. Quality and completeness varies. Limited documentation and supervision required.

WhereYouThere?
http://www.wereyouthere.com/
Description: Social networking site collects firsthand accounts of historic moments (JFK assasination, 9/11/2001, First Lunar Landing, etc.) to create a resource for historical, journalistic and literary research on one hand, and schamltzy nostalgia and incoherent ramblings on the other. More noise than signal, but as someone who spends a lot of time with oral histories, I can say that this is a really interesting idea. Perhaps something like this could work on a smaller scale with some administrative control and narrower parameters. Speaking of which…

Hurricane Digital Memory Bank
http://hurricanearchive.org
Description: Uses Omeka “to collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. It contributes to the ongoing effort by historians and archivists to preserve the record of these storms by collecting first-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, and podcasts.” No real way to verify information or control quality, but that’s not really the point. Succeeds in creating a focused archive of first-hand accounts on a topic that is emotionally and politically charged, and will be for years to come.

Australian Newspapers Digitisation Project
http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp
Description: “The National Library of Australia, in collaboration the Australian State and Territory libraries, has commenced a program to digitise out of copyright newspapers. We are creating a free online service that will enable full-text searching of newspaper articles… published in each state and territory from the 1800s to the mid-1950s, when copyright applies.” Users can add tags and comments, as well as correct the automatically-generated text transcriptions

The Commons on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/commons
Description: “The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.” Users are “invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments.” Participants include the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institute, and the George Eastman House.

Dan Cohen’s Twitter Experiment
http://www.dancohen.org/2009/04/29/the-spider-and-the-web-results
Description: “…using Twitter to replicate digitally the traditional ‘author’s query,’ where a scholar asks readers of a journal for assistance with a research project. I believe the results of this experiment are instructive about the significant advantages—and some disadvantages—for academia of what has come to be known as crowdsourcing.” Go read the blog post for more. This is my favorite example, because it is so easy. It’s not a website, it’s not an educational resource; it’s more akin to performance art (performance history? or as Cohen says “stunt lecturing”?). Assuming you have a good handful of Twitter followers, you can organize and carry out little events like this on short notice and without any technological “overhead.”

Related Reading:

• Stephen Mihm in the Boston Globe: Everyone’s a Historian Now
• Crowdsourcing Blog: User-Generated Content in History
• Spellbound Blog: Crowdsourced Transcription and Collaborative Annotation
• Chronicle of Higher Ed. (Wired Campus): Management Prof. Uses Crowdsourcing to Write Textbook

There are many more projects and articles that apply to this topic. But this is a blog post, not a research paper. Feel free to share more resources and ideas in the comments.