Digital Archives - Not Even Past

Cold War Chronicles

What does a Catholic Cardinal sequestered in the US embassy in Budapest and the dead body of an American found in Prague’s Vltava River in the 1960s have in common? Characters in a true crime podcast? No, at least not yet. Instead, these are examples of lives (and lives lost) whose stories are buried in the voluminous files of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library on the University of Texas campus. In addition to a fantastic museum, the Library contains an extensive archive of over 45 million pages of documents from the LBJ administration, providing a unique insight into America’s global reach during the momentous 1960s. For those who don’t have time to visit the wonderfully Cold War modern building and its peaceful reading room, there is also a considerable digital collection. Substantial as it may be, at last count, the percentage of digitized material was still well under 1%, a figure that is understandable given the scope of the collection and the resources required to scan and process materials for public online access. I experienced firsthand these challenges when I initiated and managed Cold War Chronicles, a decade-long (and ongoing) digitization project of the LBJ materials related to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

The Cold War is best studied and researched as a deeply transnational phenomenon, in which both sides were constantly observing and directly or indirectly engaging the other side. If we study Eastern Europe only from its own sources, we miss half of the conversation. With that in mind, I began to explore the vast collections housed in the LBJ library over 15 years ago, mining it for documents related to my own research on Cold War-era Eastern Europe. I recall, for example, researching US-Eastern Bloc competition and engagement at Cold War trade fairs as part of my broader interest in consumption practices and patterns under socialism. I found a fascinating memo written by Anthony Solomon, LBJ’s influential financial policy advisor, who pushed for increased trade with the Bloc at a time when many Americans opposed it: “It is clear to me that it is in our best interest to take actions which help bring about a diversion of their resources from military and space programs to consumer goods…Who among us wouldn’t rather have Soviet workers making passenger cars instead of missiles?”^[1] Solomon seemed delighted by the idea of the Soviet citizens having to deal with traffic, parking issues, and their kids asking for the keys to the car. Indeed, new exchanges that exposed Eastern Bloc citizens to American consumer culture mushroomed under the LBJ administration, which led the Eastern Bloc to try (and fail) to “keep up.” I integrated this and other discoveries into my research as well as teaching on Cold War Eastern Europe, which foregrounds the permeability of the Iron Curtain, but also the East-West mutual preoccupations.

My research discoveries coincided with my assuming a new role as Director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) in 2010. As director of CREEES, I had the pleasure of hosting and interacting with visiting scholars from Russia and Eastern Europe, many of whom were fascinated with the LBJ materials related to the former Eastern Bloc (and ex-Yugoslavia). These materials were cataloged in a rough guide created in 2009, which I still regularly consult. In 2014, I faced the daunting task of applying for a US Department of Education grant that would give CREEES the status of a National Resource Center (NRC). In preparing our proposal, we needed to think creatively about projects that would utilize the resources of UT relevant to the Eastern Bloc and ideally make them accessible to a much broader audience. We consulted with LBJ library archivists, who informed us that the repository’s documents are in the public domain, allowing us to digitize and post them on our site as desired. An LBJ documents digitization project was featured in our successful grant proposal, which gave CREEES the status of a National Resource Center (NRC) from 2014-2018, and again in 2018-22, and 2022-2026. The Cold War Chronicles project slowly but surely came to fruition.

Okay, but where to begin? The files related to the former Eastern Bloc were significant, and most of them were scattered among disparate collections, including those of Foreign Policy advisors like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow, as well as collections on agriculture, trade, space, etc. There were also communications from heads of state, White House central files, and the list goes on. In the very beginning of the guide, however, there was an easy answer – the Country Files of the National Security collection. Given the concentrated nature of this set of documents, it made sense for us to digitize whole folders and boxes on each country of interest, as opposed to cherry-picking documents of interest. Thus, the online collection would be complete, allowing users to have a similar experience to being in the archive. Federal funds supplemented UT resources, which supported a (revolving) team of UT students and staff at CREEES and the UT libraries to scan, crop, tag, process, and post in Texas Scholar Works. By far the largest of these country collections was the USSR, with 15 boxes full of some 10,000 documents! Due to its sheer size, we decided to complete that collection last. As of fall 2025, it is still not available for public use, but it will be soon!

Instead, we started with Czechoslovakia, the largest and most significant of the Eastern Europe collections, because of the notable 1968 event, the so-called “Prague Spring” in which state reform snowballed into a popular movement for change to “socialism with a human face.” The result was a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of the country to crush the liberalized regime and its enthusiastic population. Indeed, our first iteration of a public website was on the Scalar platform, entitled “The Prague Spring Archive,” put together by Ian Goodale, who is currently the European Studies Librarian for the University of Texas Libraries. The LBJ documents shed light on day-by-day developments on the ground, the decision-making process around the US response, and the global reaction to this consequential set of events as the “Czechoslovak crisis.”

The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia. Tanks burning. People carrying flags

The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Source: Wikimedia Commons

After Czechoslovakia, we went country by country across the region–Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, and finally the USSR and East Germany. As of fall 2025, most country files have been digitized, and only the Soviet and East German files remain to be fully processed and posted online. The cache of digitized documents is permanently housed in the Texas Scholar Works (TSW) repository, a massive open-access collection of materials that UT faculty and students have authored, digitized, or collected. In addition to its ample storage capacity, the repository provides convenient features for its collection, such as author and date searchability. However, its interface is not particularly flexible or user-friendly, and it does not allow for any curation of our collection. For that reason, I spearheaded the new Cold War Chronicles website, which we launched this fall in collaboration with a team of CREEES staff and students.

Cold War Chronicles offers a user-friendly portal and guide to our entire TSW collection, designed for researchers, teachers, or enthusiasts of Cold War history. For researchers, we provide a detailed guide with clear instructions on the scope of the collection and how to navigate, access, and cite the documents. The site also includes country-specific landing pages with general overviews of the sub-collection contents and links to folder-by-folder descriptions. I have also included a link to other English-language online archives for Cold War research, with direct links to search pages and short notes on navigation in cases where usability is not intuitive.

These other archives are also linked to through the “teaching resource” page, which includes a series of assignments that I created while teaching my “Cold War Eastern Europe” course at UT in spring 2025 (note: the Soviet Union was not a focus of the course, and the materials reflect that). In these assignments, students are asked to work in “country” groups on in-class activities that require them to dig into various online archives to find answers to prompts on discrete phases in the Cold War. The teaching resources also include a link to a list of English-language memoirs related to communist Eastern Europe and a sample assignment for using them in a course. These teaching materials are flexible and appropriate for higher education, as well as high school curricula.

Returning to the Catholic Cardinal stuck in the Budapest embassy, one of the most interesting collections of country files in our archive is Hungary. The Hungarian Cardinal Josef Mindszenty, designated “venerable” by Pope Francis in 2019, is a famous and revered figure in Hungary today. He spoke truth to power against Fascism and Communism, and as a result was imprisoned by both wartime and postwar regimes in Hungary. Released from prison during the famous Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against Soviet domination, he took refuge in the US embassy when the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and remained there until 1971! During the LBJ years, he wrote frequent letters, such as the one to LBJ, who responded through the local chargé d’affaires. The complete set of letters offers a rich Cold War chronicle of this episode in history, in which the US was harboring an enemy of the state in Hungary while trying to broker detente with the Eastern Bloc.

Cardinal Mindszenty giving a public speech

Cardinal József Mindszenty, 1956. Source: Wikimedia Commons

As far as the body in the Vltava River, it was Charles E. Jordan, executive vice president for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), who was found on August 20, 1967. Jordan was reported missing five days prior while vacationing in Prague, a side trip from his JDC work in neighboring Romania. Although it was reported as a suicide by Czech authorities at the time, there has long been speculation as to the cause of death, and it is considered an unsolved murder by the JDC.

Stories such as Mindszenty’s and Jordan’s are just a select few that were once buried among the millions of documents in the carefully kept boxes under lock and key in the LBJ Library. Now, at least some of these chronicles are online for all to access, although there is so much more to discover for those who can make it to the nearly windless white tower perched on a hill on the east end of our campus. Cold War Chronicles will continue to evolve over the coming years. This has truly been a labor of love for me and the CREEES team, and we sincerely hope teachers and researchers make use of this unique collection!

^[1] Personal Papers of Anthony M. Solomon, East–West Trade, Box 1, file 1, p. 36. Lyndon Baines Johnson Library.

Mary Neuberger is the Mildred Hajek Vacek and John Roman Vacek Distinguished University Chair in Russian and Slavic Languages; Director of CREEES; and Chair of the Slavic & Eurasian Studies Department at UT Austin. Her research interests include urban culture, consumption, commodity exchange, and the history of truth at the intersection of science and religion in modern Eastern Europe, with a specialization in southeastern Europe.

NEP’s Archive Chronicles: Tips for using PARES (Portal de Archivos Estatales)

NEP’S Archive Chronicles explores the role archives play in historical research, offering insight into the process of conducting archival work and research. Each installment will offer a unique perspective on the treasures and challenges researchers encounter in archives around the world. NEP’s Archive Chronicles is intended to be both a practical guide and a space for reflection, showcasing contributors’ experiences with archival research. This article, part of a two-part series by Diana, focuses on three tips for using PARES, the digital platform of the Archive of the Indies in Spain.

In the first part of this archive chronicle, “”An experiential approach to the Archive of the Indies”, I discussed why PARES is the AGI’s front façade for virtually every researcher nowadays. Even though PARES is an online tool, my user experience changed significantly once I was in the reading room. After months of searching for references and organizing them, I thought I had mastered PARES through Scott Cave’s helpful guide. But I was humbled during the first week at the archive when it became obvious that PARES does not reflect the entire holdings or archival organization of the AGI. This is certainly true for any archive or collection. Still, I did learn a few tricks along the way that changed how I approached the archive and its online catalog. This piece has three how-to’s in PARES to help make the research experience easier for researchers.

1) How to explore the AGI’s numerous subsections or how to use PARES like a print catalog

Most of the search results I initially got from PARES were located in the section of Contratación. However, this is the archive’s largest section with close to six thousand legajos and fifty-one sections. When I finally started consulting some of these references, I wondered why most of them came from “Autos entre partes” (litigation between private parties). Did this mean that this subsection was described in greater detail than others? What else was out there in this immense section?

Two PARES features make it easier to answer these questions:

Clicking on “Location in the Archive Classification Scheme” shows where a document or section is located within the archive.

If we click on any of the hierarchical locations, it will open a new tab or window where we can see how many units a section has and a broad description of its contents.

In this case, the subsection of “Autos entre Partes” has 207 legajos, but the Content and Structure section does not provide a substantial description. For many other archival sections, there might be a finding aid on the index file that lists references to print catalogs which you can consult at the AGI’s reading room. Identifying these broader archival sections along with the legajo range they cover is quite handy when consulting microfilmed portions of the AGI. While now considered an almost defunct technology, it is important to remember that several libraries across the Americas have AGI microfilms such as the Benson Latin American Collection, the Bancroft Library, or the Eusebio Dávalos Library at Mexico’s National Anthropology Museum.

Once we click on “207 units more”, I recommend sorting the Description Unit by Reference number. This places the oldest legajo on top of the list and allows you to systematically review the section. I also like to use the “text filter” to make targeted searches within a single description unit.

2) How to find digitized files that do not look like they have been digitized

One of the best tips an AGI archivist shared with me was how to find apparently non-digitized documents from bound volumes known as libros. For example a reference with a geographical marker (e.g. Lima, Guatemala, Charcas, Indiferente) and an L such as MEXICO,1064,L.2,f.283r-283v indicates it comes from libros on the Gobierno section (including Indiferente). While the description and digitization of these books is almost complete, they are not always subdivided by individual files in PARES.

Here’s an example of a book that is clearly subdivided and can be easily accessed by clicking on “View Images”.

The reference below, however, looks like it has not been digitized because it does not have the camera icon. But since it has an “L”, we can almost be sure it has been digitized. Expanding the “Location in the Archive Classification Scheme”, shows that its containing section has a fully colored camera icon (when a camera is gray, it means the section has been partially digitized).

Once we click on this location, it will open a new tab where we can access the fully digitized libro.

Now it is only a matter of clicking on “view images” and finding the folios from the original reference. Since the PARES viewer operates by image number, this means we have to multiply the folio number by two if it’s a verso folio and subtract 1 if it’s a recto folio. Our reference number (283r-283v) suggests the image number should be 565.

Sometimes this might not work precisely so you might need to skim through a few pages to find the specific page numbers.

3) How to start identifying relevant documents for your research

Compared to its earlier version, PARES 2.0 has two new tools that are a good starting point to explore a new topic: the Authorities Search and MetaPARES.

The Authorities Search works similarly to a subject search in a library catalog. The main difference is that the results will lead you to a virtual index file that lists at the end a list of the Spanish Archives where you can find your topic and the number of documents previously identified by archivists. This search is by no means comprehensive, but it is a good starting point. For instance, to know more about the bison found in New Mexico, an authorities search would be useful to identify the jurisdiction and place names used for this region during colonial times.

Screenshot of the AGI documents associated with the subject of New Mexico

Another tool that connects published and unpublished academic work to the holdings of the Spanish State Archives is MetaPARES. The goal of this portal is to refer researchers to secondary literature that cites Spanish Archives. The tool is still in development, but it is a good way to quickly become acquainted with Spanish scholarship and document collections.

The MetaPARES search for New Mexico lists four results. They are not many, but they are more targeted than your typical Google Scholar search and will likely be in Spanish.

It also goes without saying that learning Spanish paleography and early modern Spanish vocabulary is key to identifying relevant documents. There are many online tools and software such as the Dominican Studies Institute Paleography Tool, the Diccionario de Abreviaturas Novohispanas, or Transkribus that make this endeavor easier nowadays. Additionally, reading transcribed document collections and getting acquainted with the structure of Spanish bureaucratic documents will improve your own reading and comprehension of the materials you collect. Navigating the archives and documents of Colonial Latin America demands practice and patience, but this experience can be slowly built throughout the years and from afar. For me, it took about seven years, but it was worth the wait.

Diana Heredia-López is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Originally trained as a biologist in Mexico, she has specialized in the history of science and colonialism since 2012. Her current research examines dye cultivation and commerce as a framework to investigate early modern Hispanic extractivism, knowledge production, and material culture.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Digital Tools for the Classroom: A Guide to Using Hypothes.is in History Courses

Historical research often feels like a solitary process. Students pore over readings, visit archives, and write papers alone. There are limited opportunities to collaborate on group projects or engage in peer review. New technologies can shift this dynamic. Digital tools can help transform the traditionally lonely aspects of historical study into a more collaborative process. Social annotation platforms like Hypothes.is create new possibilities for engagement with historical texts that allow students to build community and develop critical reading skills. This guide to using Hypothes.is explores how such platforms can enhance the learning experience in humanities courses.

Getting Started with Hypothes.is

Hypothes.is allows users to highlight, comment, and annotate documents. This is a relatively straightforward platform that integrates with most learning management systems and works with PDFs, web pages, and other digital media. To get started, instructors and students must register for a free account on Hypothes.is. Registration allows users to annotate and respond to others within a shared document. Professors can invite collaborators, create student groups, upload readings, and assign projects with specific annotation tasks.

Screenshot of hypothes.is to set free account.

Hypothes.is provides several resources for getting started on their website. Some general recommendations are to establish clear expectations about the quality of annotations. While instructors may assign a certain number of comments, they should also encourage students to pose analytical questions, make connections across texts, or identify historiographical arguments. Additionally, professors should consider requiring students to respond to at least one annotation by a classmate rather than only generating individual comments. These practices help avoid superficial engagement and promote more meaningful dialogue.

Timing is also particularly important when incorporating social annotation assignments into courses. Having students finish annotations 24 to 48 hours before class gives everyone a chance to review their peers’ comments. It also allows instructors to identify themes for discussion based on student interests and questions. This process creates a bridge between individual preparation and classroom dialogue.

Reimagining Historical Reading as a Collective Enterprise

Hypothes.is’ collaborative approach is especially valuable for history courses that rely on careful reading and analysis of texts, ranging from primary sources to academic monographs. Traditionally, students read these materials alone and develop their own interpretations. Their only opportunity for additional perspectives comes from class discussion, which often has uneven participation due to class sizes and time constraints. Social annotation platforms change this dynamic by creating a digital space where multiple readers can engage with a text simultaneously.

Image of annotated text on a screen. — Text on Tablet Screen. Source: Tima Miroshnichenko

When students collaborate on annotations, they engage in asynchronous dialogue that enriches the reading experience. Hypothes.is allows students to see how their peers approach historical analysis—what questions they ask, what connections they make, and what aspects of the text they find significant. This visibility of analytical processes helps students develop their own historical thinking skills.

Moreover, collaborative annotation transforms the margins of texts into spaces for dialogue where students can pose questions about difficult passages and gain insights from classmates or instructors. This process fosters a more dynamic reading experience, blending individual analysis with group discussion. Shy students who might hesitate to speak in class often feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts through written annotations.

Likewise, the collective approach helps students recognize that confusion is a natural part of engaging with new material. The questions and dialogue that emerge show students that their classmates are also wrestling with difficult passages or challenging concepts. This shared vulnerability frequently leads to more authentic engagement with both the material and their peers.

Limitations and Challenges

Social annotation platforms offer compelling benefits for history courses, but they are not without limitations. Timing and participation patterns present challenges. For example, students who complete their assigned readings at the last minute might submit annotations close to, or after, deadlines. This limits the opportunity for meaningful dialogue with their classmates, who will have fewer comments and questions to comment on while reading. Last-minute participation can prevent organic and ongoing conversation and lead to a set of disconnected observations. Moreover, early participants may feel discouraged if their thoughtful annotations receive no response from classmates.

Technical barriers can also impede effective implementation. Some students may struggle with accessing or navigating the platform, particularly if they are using older devices or have limited internet access. These accessibility issues could create or exacerbate inequitable learning experiences. Some historical documents, particularly those with complex formatting or poor digitization, may not display properly on the annotation platform. This technical issue may limit the professor’s ability to assign primary source materials.

Despite these challenges, platforms like Hypothes.is offer exciting possibilities for shaping how students engage with historical texts. By making reading a collaborative activity, these tools can deepen analysis, build community, and better prepare students for meaningful classroom discussions. However, educators should consider potential challenges when incorporating these platforms into their course. Regular feedback from students about their annotation experience can help instructors adjust their approach based on specific course objectives and student needs. With careful implementation, social annotation platforms can be a highly valuable addition to the historian’s pedagogical toolkit.

Gabrielle Esparza is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history, with a focus on twentieth-century Argentina. Her dissertation examines the evolution of President Raúl Alfonsín’s human rights policies from his candidacy to his presidency in post-dictatorship Argentina. At the University of Texas at Austin, Gabrielle has served as a graduate research assistant at the Texas State Historical Association and as co-coordinator of the Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality in 2020-2021. Gabrielle was also Associate Editor and Communications Director of Not Even Past from 2021-2022. Currently, Gabrielle works as a graduate research assistant in the Institute for Historical Studies and as an Editorial Assistant for The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History.

History of Modern Central America Through Digital Archives

By Vasken Makarian

What happens when historians take a pause from using archives to write history and instead delve into the science of producing digital archives? If you are a traditional historian, you might cower at the bombardment of technological know-how that comes your way. Look a little closer however, and you soon find that archival science is an intellectually and theoretically rich field. Engaging with digital archives and digital history is a great way for scholars to re-think how they and archivists alike, select, categorize, and publicize historical data for educational and scholarly purposes. As historians increase their use of digital platforms, it can be helpful for all historians to take a step in the archivists’ shoes.

In the spring of 2016, students of Dr. Virginia Garrard’s course, “History of Modern Central America through Digital Archives” had this opportunity. The course bridged traditional historiography with an introduction to digital archives and digital history. Students came from a wide array of disciplines, from Information Studies to History. For their final project, they could choose between writing a traditional research paper or designing a digital history project, or both. This mix of both worlds allowed for a hybrid conversation that melded traditional historical debates with sensitivity to the way scholars and archivists produce and organize knowledge.

Biblioteca_Nacional_de_Guatemala_Luis_Cardoza_y_Aragón

The National Library of Guatemala, a more traditional place for historians to conduct research (via Wikimedia Commons).

Students eager to get up-to-date with newer digital history platforms were not disappointed. Homework assignments ranged from digital primary source scavenger hunts to analyzing pre-established digital scholarly interfaces, such as the Latin American Digital Initiatives Collection (LADI). The class introduced students to up-to-date digital projects like interactive maps, self-correlating databases, and archival metadata. Students also worked in groups to grapple with the challenges of making digital archives more accurate and efficient.

One of these challenges involved selecting the right “subject terms” that help users search for content in digital databases. To facilitate the search process, students needed to produce terms that were neither too narrow nor too broad, and that represented the “aboutness” of their subjects. Just how efficient, accurate, and unbiased these terms appeared influenced the way users would receive and write about history. In one instance, I had to produce English subject terms for a short and vague Guatemalan newspaper about a desaparecido or forced disappearance. Choosing between terms like “assassination,” “murder,” and “homicide” prompted me to scrutinize the meaning, political implication, and contextual relevance of each term. These questions added a nuanced perspective to my research as well.

Forced disappearances were common during the Guatemalan Civil War (via YouTube).

A less somber yet strangely satisfying task involved creating a sound bite archive from Radio Venceremos—an underground anti-government radio program from 1980s El Salvador. Here, students created an archive of background noises: shouts, singing, frogs, birds chirping, gunfire, alarms, helicopters, and static. Rather than paying attention to content, they recorded language dynamics, the environment, and materiality. This innovative way of organizing data allowed them to get at more subtle information, such as timing, emotion, background events, secrecy, and level of danger. This was detective work at its finest and “tech-savvyist.”

Outside of the Radio Venceremos studio (via Wikimedia Commons).

Of course, walking away with new skills in digital media was not the be-all and end-all. Thinking more deeply about digital archives illuminated urgent theoretical questions relevant to scholars and archivists alike. To whom do historical records belong? What biases do archivists and scholars convey when presenting data? Do living (or even dead) historical actors want others to publicize information about them? How do we reconcile the desire to uncover histories, with the risks and inconveniences public knowledge poses for historical actors and their communities?

Personally, this course contributed to thinking about my dissertation on Guatemala’s recent civil war, which spanned from the 1960’s to the 1990’s. The legacy of the civil war carries over to present-day Guatemala and presents political and ethical roadblocks to the publication and presentation of records. Emerging data may appear rich for archiving, as the recent Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive demonstrated. However, historical records are living things that carry emotional, political, and economic consequences for present-day actors. As this course demonstrated, archives are anything but a mere compilation of sources. They require much human configuration, strategic organization, and logistical coordination. On the other hand, they demand sensitivity to the ethical, political, and intellectual problems of producing knowledge.

Digital Teaching: A Mid-Semester Timeline

By Chris Babits

Last March, students in Dr. Erika Bsumek’s Introduction to American Indian History took their midterm exam. Most students earned good grades, but on a mid-semester assessment, a large number expressed interest in some form of extra credit. Students also indicated that since the material was very new to them (secondary curricula rarely emphasizes the American Indian past), they felt that they didn’t have a good grasp on the sequence of events covered in the class. Although Professor Bsumek, the other teaching assistant, and myself were shocked at the overwhelming request for additional work, we thought we’d try something new: a digital timeline in order to improve students’ research and writing skills.

A screenshot of the timeline.

Digital history projects have grown more popular over the past decade. Professors, instructors, and history educators have increasingly recognized the limitations of traditional assessments. Exams, quizzes, analytical essays, and book reviews — each of these can measure student learning. Exams and quizzes, for example, challenge students to recall a wide-range of information. This can include students crafting and proving original arguments, using the course’s source material in order to support one’s position. Writing essays, on the other hand, provide students the opportunity to work on their writing skills. Recent reports show how this crucial part of literacy is lacking in the workplace. History papers can play a crucial role in developing students’ analytical and writing skills, preparing them to be better in the business world and as engineers.

What these traditional assessments are missing, however, are the twenty first century skills our students need. The teaching team for Introduction to American Indian History wanted to create an extra credit assignment that combined the best parts of history education with the core components of digital humanities pedagogy. When we reflected on the midterm exams, we noticed a few things that were lacking. Most importantly, the students were right. They lacked a strong sense of chronology. How would we better equip them to understand sequence and change over time? They needed some tool to help them see these important parts of historical inquiry. A digital timeline seemed like the best way to go. Utilizing course development funds, Dr. Bsumek agreed to compensate me for the extra time this would require.

The initial step was determining which online timeline generator to choose for the project. With the growing interest in digital humanities, there are many timeline generators. After less than an hour of research, and after further consultation with Dr. Bsumek, I decided on Knight Lab’s TimeLineJS because of its user-friendly interface. My former colleague, Dr. Julia Gossard (now an Assistant Professor at Utah State University) helped me make this decision as well since she had successfully implemented several assignments in her courses with the program.

Knight Lab has created a template from which one could create their own timeline. I was initially wary of the template but, as one can see below, Knight Lab describes what type of information should be placed in which column.

Knight Lab Template (click to enlarge).

After deciding on the digital tool for the timeline, we created the instructions for students. Students could write a 150-200 word timeline entry for any person, place, event, movement, or piece of legislation from the midterm on. Before writing an entry, students had to write to me to receive approval for the entry they wished to write. Upon approval, I then asked students to find and email me an outside academic source. Only after clearing this hurdle were students approved to write their extra credit timeline entry.

The result was a collaborative study tool that students could use on the final exam. Thirty seven students out of the 156 registered for the class contributed to the timeline. I proofread each entry not only for content accuracy but also for writing style, proper grammar, and spelling errors. If students wanted the full points they could earn for extra credit, they usually had to revise one or two times.

Most students earned additional points that were added to their final grade. Twenty one students submitted two entries, markedly increasing their chance of earning a better grade in the course. More importantly, they collaborated on a project that addressed the weaknesses they identified when studying for their midterm exams. The final exams displayed a much more sophisticated understanding of sequence and change over time. Students crafted better in-class exams that highlighted a more nuanced interpretation of the history of American Indians.

Virtual Auschwitz

By David Crew

Ralf Breker wearing the VR headset in front of his VR view of Auschwitz (via BBC News).

The Bavarian State criminal office (LKA) in Munich, Germany has developed a 3D virtual reality model of the infamous Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp to be used in trials of Nazi era war criminals who still remain alive. Drawing upon original blue prints, laser scans of remaining buildings and contemporary photographs, this VR model allows prosecutors, judges and lawyers to view Auschwitz from almost any angle. The digital imaging expert, Ralf Breker, who developed this technology says that it can be used, for example, to determine whether someone who was a guard in Auschwitz in a specific watchtower could or could not see crimes committed in another part of the camp. Breker thinks the technology he developed will soon be used in other types of criminal proceedings because it allows investigators to re-create crime scenes that no longer exist as they were when the crime was committed. He hopes, however, that when the German legal system no longer needs his 3D model of Auschwitz, it will be given to a museum so that it does not fall into the hands of anyone wanting to turn it into a computer game.

For further details and an interview with Ralf Breker, see

Marc Cieslak, “Virtual reality to aid Auschwitz war trials of concentration camp guards”

Also by David Crew on Not Even Past:

The Normandy Scholar Program on World War II.
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer (2007).
Normal Pictures in Abnormal Times.

Digital Dividends

By Joan Neuberger

For the past few months I have been considering beginning a new digital history research project. I’m not talking about digitizing sets of existing archival documents or starting a new history blog, although those have both proven to be important new tools for researching and talking about history and I will probably have good reason to do both along the way. I’m talking about what I’ve been calling Digital History For Real: a project that creates new kinds of historical documents that can be analyzed with new kinds of computational methods and that can generate new questions or answer old questions with new kinds of historical knowledge. The last part of that sentence is especially important to me. Although Richard White, distinguished historian and digital history pioneer, argued that the production of digital historical documents was itself an analytical project, most of what passes for digital history has been document-making rather than document-reading and document-analysis. This is now beginning to change.

One advantage of digital sources is their scale. For example, we can learn a great deal about the Middle Passage from fine-grained readings of sources about a handful of slave-bearing ships. Now, though, the massive Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database lets historians test our micro-histories and draw new conclusions based on scale. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database exemplifies White’s argument: the compilers of the data had a number of difficult sources to work with and difficult decisions to make about coding entries, a process you can read about in the website’s detailed “Methodology” section. The database has generated a number of stand-alone works as well as providing a source for a whole generation’s histories of the Atlantic. David Eltis, one of the founders, has written a number of award-winning works based on the database, including the Atlas of the Atlantic Slave Trade (co-authored with David Richardson), whose maps have become popular through internet sharing and reporting, including our own article by Henry Wiencek on its maps. Another recent book that uses the TASD is James Walvin’s Crossings: Africa, the Americas, and the Atlantic Slave Trade (2013).

Increasingly, historians are embedding analytical essays and articles into the websites that contain their data and data visualizations. Kindred Britain, a site that shows family links among close to 30,000 people in Britain, includes a section of essays related to the networks the site illustrates. “Britain’s First Botanist: Eras mus Darwin,” — more a blog than a scholarly article — is one of the site’s “Stories” and is accompanied by customized data visualizations (“familial and professional associations” for example) that illustrate its arguments. An older project on networks of Enlightenment literary figures, Mapping the Republic of Letters, a project well funded by prestigious institutions and often held up as a model, illustrates one of the most significant current problems of digital scholarship: sustainability. Mapping promisingly includes a page for listing publications based on its networking data, but the links are all broken at the moment because the team is in the process of re-design. [Update November 4, 2017: This has been partially rectified now. The links are live and one can find more excellent visualizations and other primary sources on the Publications page, but of the six projects listed, only one includes a published article.]

Another approach in digital scholarship is to use computational methods on a smaller scale to address a single problem in some depth. One contribution along these lines is Cameron Blevins’ article in the Journal of American History, “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston.” The article is based on the use of text processing to track place-names in two Houston newspapers for the periods 1836-51 and 1894-1901. A blog on Stanford’s Spatial History website explains the methodology used to quantify the place-name data and the article then analyzes the significance of the patterns the data generated for understanding the historical construction of space through analysis of economic, political, international, and regional contexts.

The sample of projects I’ve been discussing here uses a variety of different computational methods and a variety of written presentations, from blog to scholarly journal article to wide-ranging book, but they are still a rarity among historians. Where the literary studies wing of the digital humanities has developed formal institutional structures like national and international journals and conferences, historians are still more engaged in digitizing data or constructing visualizations of data, or in using digital documents for pedagogy, than in scholarly analysis and institution building. Unlike literary studies, historians are not usually working with ready made texts like novels or poems, but rather have to construct new digital documents before they can get started. And the start-up costs in time and labor and career-risk are high. It remains to be seen how many historians will do more than make digital illustrations for conventional research they carry out with conventional documents. Another problem is that in many departments, digital history remains marginalized or under-developed.

My own project is relatively modest in scope. As a historian of Soviet film, I have long been focused on the work of one of film’s great innovators, Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein was not only a film director, he wrote the first body of serious film theory and he made thousands of drawings on a wide range of subjects. He was also a key figure in the Soviet film industry and the Soviet culture industry at large. He travelled to Europe, the US, and Mexico between 1929 and 1932 and made contacts in cultural spheres everywhere he went. In other words, Eisenstein was at the center of a number of important, overlapping social and political networks. When I stumbled on the networking website, Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, one of the best known examples of social network analysis in the humanities and devoted to the social networks in which Bacon travelled, I thought it would be fun to plot the networks revolving around Eisenstein and his many acquaintances. He knew everybody, but how were his contacts connected? I am especially interested in the ways personal relationships got movies made in the Soviet Union. Patronage seems to have played a significant role in all the highly politicized arts communities there and I wondered if I could track patronage relationships to understand its role more thoroughly.

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On the set of Ivan the Terrible (L-R) Mikhail Romm as Elizabeth I in drag, Eisenstein, and Andrei Moskvin, Director of Photography. Photograph by V. V. Dombrovskii

In other words, I have a lot of questions about Eisenstein and the Soviet film industry that haven’t been studied, but I don’t know yet if digital social networking computation can help me answer them. For example, I don’t yet know if I want to put Eisenstein at the center of a set of networks or if I want to plot the industry as a whole where Eisenstein would be only one important node. Social networking analysis is very basically a set of nodes and connections. I don’t yet know how to weight or measure the various relationships that one can plot using networking nodes and connections. I also don’t know if the answers are worth the investment of time and labor.

I have been working with a colleague, Seth Bernstein, at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, who has done much of the preliminary work in creating a database of cast and crew members of Soviet films. And this week, I’ll be taking a hands-on seminar in social network analysis offered by the American Historical Association at its annual convention and taught by Jason Heppler. I hope that the workshop will help me decide whether to move forward with the project.

In order for me to decide to go ahead, I have to be convinced that I can do more with the technology than make a new database; I will have to be able to produce data on social relationships in the Soviet film industry that form the basis of a new perspective and new analysis of the subject. I will also have to find out how much of the work I can do myself. Most digital scholarship is collaborative and requires significant funding; I’m hoping to design a project I can do without a huge, expensive team. I also want my project to be fully integrated into the academic fields of history and film scholarship; I’m not interested in a project that is isolated or marginalized on a methodological island. And it will have to be fun.

If I decide to plunge into this new methodology that I’ve only passively observed and consumed until now, I will be using this space to record my progress. I hope you will follow along with me as I explore a world that is sure to be challenging and interesting.

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