digital history Archives - Page 3 of 8

Digital Learning: Starting from Scratch

Getting a PhD in History requires us to learn some new skills, but those skills are mostly refinements of things we’ve been practicing since first grade. We have to improve our ability to read carefully, to write lucidly, and to ask increasingly complex questions about what we read. We need to pay attention to the ways historical documents are created and preserved and to the contexts that shape their ideas, but those issues are not qualitatively different from thinking about the books we read in high school and college or the novels we enjoy reading as adults. Digital history, on the other hand, demands entirely new ways of thinking. Building complex digital networks requires me to think like a computer, which is different in significant and interesting ways than thinking like a reader or a writer.

From “Elements of Design in Avant-Garde Magazines,” by Christa Clay, Amanda Jordan, and Natalie Pyle. students in “The Avant Garde in Print,” taught at UT Austin by Meghan Forbes

In my last blog I referred, somewhat skeptically, to Richard White’s contention that constructing a data visualization was itself an analytical project. Here’s the full quote:

“One of the important points that I want to make about visualizations, spatial relations, and spatial history is something that I did not fully understand until I started doing this work and which I have had a hard time communicating fully to my colleagues: visualization and spatial history are not about producing illustrations or maps to communicate things that you have discovered by other means. It is a means of doing research; it generates questions that might otherwise go unasked, it reveals historical relations that might otherwise go unnoticed, and it undermines, or substantiates, stories upon which we build our own versions of the past.”

Now, I get it.

This month I went to two digital history workshops at the annual convention of the American Historical Association. I knew that a three-hour workshop wouldn’t give me all the skills I needed to carry out a social network analysis of the Soviet film industry, but I wanted to figure out whether it would be worth it for me – a pretty old dog – to try to learn some new tricks. I wanted to know if I could manage the computational work on my own without having to raise enough funds to hire a team of computer scientists. And I wanted to know if I am capable of acquiring the skills to make the project yield new questions and interesting answers.

Jason Heppler, an Assistant Professor of History at University of Nebraska at Omaha and a Researcher at the Stanford Spatial History Project, ran the workshop on social network analysis. The goal was to show us the basic functions of the network analysis program, Gephi, an open source program for generating visualizations of networks. We also learned how to use Palladio, an even more user-friendly network analysis program. As with any complex skill, the introduction to these tools was just enough to give us a sense of the range of the program’s main functions. Gephi can take a massive collection of data on relationships and turn it into visualizations (graphs, flowcharts, networks, etc). It can tell us how relationships we might find in a small number of sources play out on a much larger scale. It can display degrees and flow of relationships (friends of friends of friends), suggesting hierarchies of influence and alliances.

I know I will need more time and repeated practice to learn everything that social networking can do for me, but the introduction demonstrated some of the ways Gephi “thinks” about data, or how I need to think about data in order to work with Gephi. I am interested in analyzing social and political relationships in the Soviet film industry. Right off the bat, I can understand some of the most elementary ways I can track some of those relationships. I understand how I can get Gephi to show me who knew whom, who had the most acquaintances or working partnerships, and how to track those in overlapping ways for an individual’s various roles (as director, teacher, actor, etc). Historians Jamie Miller and Maria Belodubrovskaya have shown the continued influence of some prominent avant garde directors even as Stalinist cultural policies in the 1930s prohibited avant garde filmmaking. I want to know how long that influence remained in effect and on what scale. Did directors tend to work with the same actors? Which party-state administrators had direct contact with which artistic studio administrators? Gephi can weight those kinds of relationships, establishing patterns of contact in a number of interesting ways. The most interesting thing I learned is that Gephi can show something called “betweenness.” So, for example, Person A and Person B may know and be known by the most people, but Gephi can identify a Person C, who might not be personally known by as many people as A and B, but might be a conduit for a higher number of relationships; more people need to contact C in order to reach either A or B. That looks like a promising category for trying to generate new information about people who might not look influential or powerful at first glance.

Hue (from red = 0 to blue = max) shows the node betweenness. Graph by Claudio Rocchini

I was still left with a lot of questions about how I can tell Gephi to code relationships in specific ways. I’d like to be able to show that government bureaucrats who supervised the film industry had important, two-way relationships with the artists who made the films. I’ve written about patron-client relationships between a handful of party-state arts administrators and one film director based on reading documents in the film studio archive that show how people in power made decisions that could only be explained as patronage, but I don’t yet know how I can collect and organize data that shows such relationships and shows them on a larger scale. I don’t yet know how to weigh or color or mark those relationships in order to generate that kind of new knowledge. I am also still trying to decide whether I want to organize my study around a single, influential individual, like the great filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, or whether I want to organize it more broadly without a single central node.

Even more useful than the workshop, therefore, was the drop-in session for digital history that took place on the day after the workshop. There I was able to speak one-on-one with Jason about my particular project. He recommended that I look at some projects organized around a single individual that have used Gephi and Palladio, such as Micki Kaufman’s Quantifying Kissinger. And he recommended some reading, including Scott Weingart, “Demystifying Networks,” Shin-Kap Han, “The Other Ride of Paul Revere,” and Caroline Winterer, “Where is America in the Republic of Letters.” There is also a large literature on networks in other disciplines, all of which I will discuss later on this blog.

At the drop-in sessions, I was also able to talk to Ian Milligan, another network specialist and an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Waterloo, about web scraping. Ian ran the web scraping workshop the previous day at the AHA. (All his materials are available here.) He walked me through a easy-to-use web scraping tool called import.io and we used it to see how to generate databases from lists of films and their cast and crew on a Russian website called Film-Theater.ru. Like with Gephi, I am going to have to figure out how to adapt the web scraping Ian taught me and I’ll have to start from scratch when I do. Not only will I have to relearn the steps I need to take to use import.io (because once through just wasn’t enough to build those memory pathways in my brain), but I’ll also need to think hard about how to organize and categorize the data I collect.

Looking at documents as a mass of information points that need to be categorized and coded is very different from reading and analyzing masses of documents in order to get a general idea of something and then to pick out the relevant bits of evidence to support the argument I am developing. I am still trying to figure out how I can show power relationships with these tools. One step at a time.

Next time: “From Kissinger to Eisenstein.”

The previous post in this series: Digital Dividends

Information about all the Digital History panels at the AHA 2017 can be found here:

Seth Denbo, “Making Connections: Digital History at AHA17.”

For more on Digital History on Not Even Past, see our series, The New Archive.

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.

Public and Digital: Doing History Now

Three years ago I broke a promise to you.

In the spring of 2013, I wrote two articles on the digital technologies that were changing the way we do history: one on blogging (Digital History: A Primer Part 1) and one on digitizing documents and images (Digital History: A Primer Part 2). I promised to write a third article on what I called “Digital History For Real.” I never wrote that third one.

At the time I was scouring the internet for digital history projects that were using computer technology to produce new kinds of historical documents that I hoped would generate new historical questions or new historical methods, and eventually yield new ways of thinking historically and new insights into the past. To share what we were finding, we started The New Archive, a series of reviews of digital history projects. The first two entries covered an online archive about the Irish Easter Rebellion of 1916 and an interactive map called Visualizing Emancipation about the surprisingly long-term and often violent process of resisting and ending slavery in the U.S. Along the way, we found marvelous maps, archives of sounds, even a database of feelings. We found data visualizations of stunning creativity and graphic appeal. Our most recent front-page feature, by UT art historian John Clarke, displayed the ways gaming technology can be used to reconstruct ancient buildings and make them accessible to everyone. And about a year ago, in November 2014, we offered a list of resources on digital history, in case you wanted to start exploring on your own.

These projects were each presented in increasingly sophisticated and eye-appealing ways, which is important, but, for the most part, they were using digital technology to do the same kinds of history we have always done. I never wrote that third article because a new digital history hadn’t yet materialized.

Now I think that we are on the cusp of seeing some very impressive new uses of computational thinking and digital presentation of databases, mapping, and text mining – all of which have had more impact in digital humanities fields other than history until now. And I promise (!) that I will write something about those developments later this month.

10426760_10206009617059332_927044538242862274_n — Source: Digital Public History

First though, today I want to talk about the ways that historians have been using digital methods to make history more appealing and accessible to the public. This is the realm where Digital History and Public History overlap. So far, public history has benefited from the digital more than any other kind of work historians do.

I’m defining public history as any activity that makes high quality, professional historical research and writing available and accessible to the public. This differentiates it from popular history, which, at times, can be as good as public history but also includes all kinds of dubious junk.

historyonline — Source: Smithsonian, The National Museum of American History

Not Even Past is public history, like other kinds of online history writing and blogging. Public history, which appeared well before its digital enhancements, also includes the work of museums and archives, the preservation and display of historical sites, the collection of oral histories, and the production of documentary photography and filmmaking. Public historians work for private and public institutions, government and business. In 1979, the National Council on Public History was formed; its website is a great resource for information about doing and enjoying public history. And in 2013, The Digital Public Library of America was launched online as a national digital library.

The internet, computational technology, and digital film and photography have made much more professional history available to the public than ever before. Much of that newly available history is visually exciting and effectively interactive and it is changing the ways public and academic historians go about their work. In many cases Digital History and Public History overlap. The most obvious case is the vast number of online archives: digitized documents, books and other texts, films, photographs, and other images that are available to the public, while at the same time providing fundamental research materials for academic historians.

Carolyn.Alexa-1354830727 — MediaNOLA: New Orleans Will Forever Have a Piece of My Heart

Another area of overlap is in the practices of openness and collaboration. Digital projects often require the work of people with diverse skills in programming, archiving, and data analysis, but collaboration goes beyond the specialists who produce projects. As Ben Schmidt put it, “collaboration in the digital humanities manifests itself not just among those involved in creating digital scholarship but also with the audience. Through comments and feedback sections, social networks, and other mediums, historians are able to engage with their audience on an unprecedented level.” This kind of openness to multiple voices is beginning to have an impact on academic history, but it has already been shaping many public history projects. For example, Vicki Mayer and Mike Griffiths describe their project MediaNOLA as a website for showing “the invisible contributions of ordinary people, places, and practices in the creation of New Orleans culture and its representations.” They quickly realized that in order to show the role of ordinary people in creating a city’s culture, they would need to engage those people in producing the website and that included training students to work with local librarians, archivists, and institutions.

pinterest history — History on Pinterest

Public interest in history is also served by collaborative, self-generated digital platforms. Television and movies, with all their romantic and entertainment oriented distortions, remain incredibly popular, but they are joined by outlets that satisfy the public’s desire to know “what really happened.” This is a question that can now often be answered easily and relatively authoritatively online. AskHistorians, for example, one of the many specialized and moderated pages of Reddit, the huge (sometimes scandalous and often misogynous) information sharing website, “aims to provide serious, academic-level answers to questions about history.” With 450,000 registered readers, AskHistorians is a lively open forum for discussing history. Crowdsourcing has its well-known problems, but it is worth noting that studies comparing Wikipedia and the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica carried out by Nature in 2005 and Oxford University in 2011 found them to be equivalently reliable.

Not only is there more historical information more widely available, but the technology has made all kinds of information available in exciting new visual forms that are relatively easy to produce. Data visualization is so popular now that there are dozens of free software programs that are openly available and easy to navigate and many other sites like Rice historian Caleb McDaniel’s, to instruct anyone on using them. We have already reported on excellent data visualization projects from big digital history labs like those at Stanford and Harvard as well as individual projects hosted at other universities and institutions elsewhere.

These visualizations raise important and unanswered questions about the differences between seeing and reading. To take just one example, a 14-minute video made in 2012 by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto, illustrates each detonation of a nuclear weapon between 1945 and 1998, with a flash and a sound. One historian claimed that “almost anyone watching the animation will come away with a deep understanding of the key features of the nuclear age.” Now, while the video powerfully conveys the high number of explosions, it is impossible to derive a “deep understanding” of anything from watching it, because it violates almost every fundamental rule of historical presentation: it offers no way to think about or contextualize the data, and no way to verify its accuracy. Other commentators come closer to the mark in pointing out its emotional impact. For example, on Open Culture, Kate Rix called it “beautiful” and “eerie,” and said its laconic style makes it “work better” than excessive films like Oliver Stone’s historical psychodramas. Hashimoto’s video “works” as an art object because it generates feelings, conveys some generalized knowledge, and might stimulate the viewer to learn more. But it fails, in my opinion, to become anything more complex than a simple timeline, however beautifully rendered, because it lacks all analytical credibility and depth.

I’m not arguing against such visualization of historical data, just the opposite. We know that the visual has a visceral impact on us, an effect that often skirts around words and goes straight through our senses to our feelings. A famous (or internet-famous) marketing info-graphic claims (correctly) that we process visual information much more quickly than text. But what are we processing? What kind of history are we “learning”; can visuals that exclude the precision of words manipulate our feelings more stealthily?

I’m asking how we can harness that visceral and emotional power used by public and popular historians to academic data analysis. I’m also asking how we academic historians can do a better job writing for the public. One place to start is by asking how museums, historical sites, and films, for example, use that emotional power and our ability to identify with what we see to convey historical information and encourage thoughtful responses in their public audiences? How can we, as academic historians, work with professional public historians to learn what works in a documentary film or museum exhibit or Reddit, to understand how better to convey our own work to public audiences? And how can we apply this galaxy of ideas to our research and teaching?

This year at Not Even Past, we plan to dig much deeper into the ways that digitization and public accessibility are changing historical research, teaching history, disseminating history online, and training graduate students to become historians. I know I speak for many of my colleagues and readers, when I say that we are learning as much from our students about digital tools as we are teaching them.

We will also introduce a new page, Thinking in Public, devoted to public scholarship in all fields. One of the problems we face in entering these new fields is the lack of adequate archiving and indexing projects in digital and public history. Thinking in Public will seek to create a database of public scholarship projects conducted at UT Austin as well as to review and promote them. We will also be seeking to review the most interesting public scholarship taking place at other universities.

We have a new staff member to coordinate our Public and Digital History initiatives. He is Edward Shore, a UT History graduate student specializing in Brazilian history. You’ll recognize him as the author of some of our favorite NEP articles on Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto’s famous album and Hugo Chavez. Eddie will work with our current Senior Assistant Editor, Mark Sheaves, to commission and contribute to a series of articles about becoming historians in the digital age, and about their own forays into public history.

We will continue to offer the best historical writing in our reviews and articles, but we will also be thinking about how we can use new digital and public history practices to make us all better and more interesting historians who can speak to larger and more diverse audiences.

Featured image adapted from Steven Lubar, “Teaching Digital Public History,” January 2, 2014.

New Digital Technologies Bring Ancient Roman Villas to Life

By John R. Clarke

If Poppaea, the purported owner of the grand Roman villa that has come to light near Pompeii, were to walk into her slaves’ quarters today, she would think the gods had enchanted it. What are these banks of red flashing lights and strangely-dressed men and women manipulating words and pictures on magical tablets? It’s the Oplontis Project team, using digital technology to reanimate her Villa, which was buried in ash on August 24, AD 79, when the Mount Vesuvius volcano erupted near Pompeii.

Oplontis Villa A, north façade and garden after replanting in 2010. Photo by John Clarke. ©The Oplontis Project

Italian excavations between 1964 and 1984 uncovered 99 of the villa’s spaces, including over forty exquisitely-decorated rooms, four large gardens, and a 61-meter swimming pool. After a hiatus of more than 20 years and on the invitation of the Italian Ministry of Culture, I assembled a team of experts to excavate, study, and publish Poppaea’s Villa (officially known as Villa A at Oplontis, Torre Annunziata, Italy), a UNESCO World Heritage site. The high-speed internet and multiple computers that would astonish Poppaea are only a small part of the arsenal of digital technologies that are bringing her villa to life.

Aerial view of site with superimposed plan of actual and hypothetical remains. Drawing Timothy Liddell. ©The Oplontis Project

Given the many unanswered questions about what had been excavated, the Oplontis Project chose not to attempt to bring to light the estimated forty rooms that still remain under a nearby military complex, but rather to study fully what was there. This meant conducting the first excavations beneath the AD 79 level to learn about earlier phases of the villa and to carry out geological surveys to understand its relation to the surrounding land- and sea-scape. It also meant dealing with thousands of orphaned fragments, combing archives to track the procedures used to recreate the villa, and analyzing the chemistry of everything from ancient carbonized wood, to the pigments used in the frescoes, to the marble used throughout the Villa.

To address these challenges in the most efficient way, we adopted three digital strategies: the born-digital e-book for publication; a flexible database to collect and share resources; and a navigable 3D model to record the actual and reconstructed states of the Villa.

In light of the limitations of print publication, we chose the most successful scholarly publisher of digital e-books, the American Council of Learned Societies Humanities E-book series. Their ambitious e-books typically have excellent finding tools and hyperlinks to a myriad of electronic media, including archive repositories, databases, and films. Our book, Oplontis: Villa A (“Of Poppaea”) at Torre Annunziata, Italy is now available for free on-line.

The Oplontis Project database developed parallel to the ACLS e-book; indeed some of the contributors to the e-book began work on their chapters by building their part of the database. For this reason it includes all of the categories of research we are doing, including the decoration of all surfaces, the architecture, excavations, archival materials, and photographs. In this sample page from category 1, Wall and Ceiling Decorations, we see the east wall of the atrium, the top part of the catalogue description, written by Regina Gee, and a thumbnail image of the wall.

Clicking on the thumbnail we get a screen showing the actual-state photograph taken by project photographer Paul Bardagjy in 2009. From here we can link to scores of archival photographs of this wall, including details of the wall when it was in better shape.

Oplontis, atrium 5, east wall. Photo Paul Bardagjy. ©The Oplontis Project

One of the archival photos linked to this wall recently came into our hands from a private collector in the town of Torre Annunziata. It shows what the atrium looked like when Princess Margaret of England visited the Villa in 1973—years before it was open to the public.

Oplontis, atrium 5. Visit of Princess Margaret and entourage 14 August 1973. Courtesy the Vincenzo Marasco Archive. ©The Oplontis Project

Notice that the Princess is shooting photos—and also notice the leftover fragments lying on the floor. A yet earlier photograph, from the Wilhelmina Jashemski Archive, shows what the wall behind the royal group looked like at the time of excavation, around 1968: it was in a state of collapse. The wall paintings a tourist sees today were literally salvaged from the debris, consolidated with reinforced concrete backings, and re-hung on a wall made from modern materials.

Oplontis, atrium 5, east wall. Photo the Wilhelmina Jashemski Archive, 1968_45_24. © The University of Maryland

As this historical photo shows, when excavations began on the west wall of the atrium in 1966, it was miraculously standing to the level of the architrave (Fig. 7).

Oplontis, atrium 5, west wall, at beginning of excavations. Photo courtesy the Soprintendenza Archaeologica di Pompei, De Francisis Archive, dia 9.392

After reconstruction, it was clear that the top part of this wall had succumbed to the blast of the pyoclastic flow, displacing fragments of its upper zone. When we located the fragments piled on the floors of several storage areas (transformed today into our laboratories), we had the basis for reconstructing an Ionic second story, which you can see below.

Oplontis, atrium 5, west wall. Reconstruction by Martin Blazeby, King’s Vizualisation Lab. © King’s College London

As one sees it today, the modern roof is some three meters too low. The 3D model allows us to reconstruct the interior of this and all the other spaces of the Villa, finding homes for the many fragments of painted and stucco decoration (over 3,000 in all) that were left over when funds ran out.

Oplontis, atrium 5, west wall. Screenshot from 3D model with modern roof. ©The Oplontis Project

Not only have we been able to put fresco fragments into their context through digital means, we have also reconstructed whole rooms. A case in point is the transformation of a seemingly featureless space into the most lavishly decorated reception room in the Villa.

Oplontis, diaeta 78, actual state. Screenshot from 3D model. ©The Oplontis Project

The process of reconstructing room 78 started with my discovery of a cryptic note in the excavation daybooks for 1974 mentioning that excavators had found a series of impressions of wood panels in the hardened volcanic ash. This is a kind of wall revetment never before attested in antiquity. What of the floors and wainscoting, stripped of their marble in antiquity? Simon Barker closely studied tiny fragments of marble residue, identifying the range of expensive marbles used in that one space and reconstructing the patterns on the floor and walls. Architect Timothy Liddell put all of this data into a 3D environment to provide a stunning—and unprecedented—visualization of this opulent room, a unique testimony to the tastes of super-wealthy patrons like Poppaea.

Oplontis, diaeta 78. Digital reconstruction. Timothy Liddell and Simon Barker. ©The Oplontis Project

All of these room reconstructions are in the process of being integrated into a 3D model of the whole site. In its current beta version, the 3D model gives a user unlimited access to the entire 100 x 200 meter site, the same access available to the Oplontis Project team under the terms of its collaboration with the Archaeological Superintendency of Pompeii.

Finally, exciting new geological research has revealed the ancient setting of the Villa. There was one clue, partially explored in the Oplontis Project’s first excavation: a stairway descending from the slaves’ quarters to a tunnel, filled with hardened volcanic ash. Using Ground-Penetrating-Radar, we found anomalies on the south of the Sarno Canal suggesting that the tunnel ended in a stairway leading down some 9 meters. But it was not until geologist Giovanni Di Maio sunk a series of cores between 15 and 30 meters below the modern surface, that we knew that the Villa stood perched on a 14-meter cliff above its own private harbor. In the section, we see that the volcanic material to the north of the Villa, beneath the modern town, also accumulated over the parts pushed over the cliff by the force of the pyroclastic flows.

Oplontis, Villa A. North-south section showing Villa on cliff above sea. Digital rendering. ©Giovanni Di Maio

The remains of other Roman villas that Di Maio has documented remind us of Strabo’s description of the villas and cultivated estates that stretched along the entire rim of the Bay of Naples like one continuous city.

Several features distinguish our 3D model from other similar archaeological initiatives. Since it is based on a first-person shooter gaming engine, Unity©, the user can navigate every space at will—unlike the determined paths of most models. The user can also toggle between actual and restored states, change the lighting systems, and meet other avatars. Most important for its use as a scholarly resource is the fact that by pressing the “Query” button, a researcher can directly access the database for the feature on the screen—whether a wall painting, or the finds in one of our 20 trenches, or the results of isotopic analysis of the marble of one of the 19 sculptures found in the gardens.

Oplontis, view southeast corner of pool and diaeta 78, with several sculptures reset in place. Photo Stanley Jashemski 1978_2_27. ©The Wilhelmina Jashemski Archive, The University of Maryland

The original excavations of Villa A at Torre Annunziata aimed to make it into a living museum that the public could visit. This meant creating a new building that looked ancient. Walls had to be rebuilt and colonnades had to be reconstructed to support modern concrete beams, new tile roofs, and reconsolidated fresco fragments. In the process of building this living museum, the pieces of the puzzle that didn’t fit were simply ignored. Today, with digital means, we have put many of those puzzle-pieces back into the Villa.

The 3D model, linked with the database will allow us, and future generations, to find material easily by clicking on find-spots; scholars will be able to share in our work and even add to the information in our database. The model complements the e- book and because the ACLS has graciously offered to make the Oplontis Project publications open access, scholars and laypersons worldwide can benefit from the work of our 42 contributors, coming from wide range of scientific and humanistic disciplines.

A longer version of this article was originally published in Apollo: The International Art Magazine (February 2014), 48-53.

The Oplontis Project

John R. Clarke and Nayla K. Muntasser, Oplontis: Villa A (“Of Poppaea”) at Torre Annunziata, Italy (e-book)

Top image: Oplontis, oecus 15, reconstruction of west wall from fragments, overlay on portion of east wall. Reconstruction by Timothy Liddell. ©The Oplontis Project

From the Humanities to the Digital Humanities: The New Archive (No. 20)

By Maria José Afanador-Llach

How does a humanist become a digital humanist?

Dr. Ece (pronounced “A.J.”) Turnator talks with us about her work in digital history. She earned her Ph.D. in Byzantine History at Harvard University in 2013 and is currently curator of the Global Middle Ages Project and is a CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) and The A. Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellow in Medieval Data Curation at the English Department and UT Libraries. In the Fall 2015, she will teach Introduction to Byzantine History in the UT History Department. My conversation with Dr. Turnator offers insights into the challenges and the exciting new possibilities that the digital era brings to scholarship in history and more broadly in the humanities.

Ece Turnator

During her graduate training Turnator became interested in the workings of the digital world. She studied with Prof. Michael McCormick on the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations (DARMC), a project that makes materials for a Geographical Information System (GIS) approach to mapping and spatial analyses of Roman and Medieval civilizations freely available on the internet. She became the assistant project manager of DARMC, a seminal experience that introduced her to new ideas and methodologies that ultimately helped shape her own research and dissertation.

By the time Turnator started to explore these digital tools, she, like other students, had been seeking training on her own and trying to figure out what tools were best suited to her research. She initially learned how to utilize GIS through workshops that gave her a sense of the scope and potential of the tool. She felt that she needed more than what occasional workshops had to offer and began to take courses in digital methodologies. She recommends that students take advantage of the resources at UT, and take an introductory course in digital humanities (offered at the iSchool) in order to get a proper overview of the methodologies available to them. This advice is relevant no matter what area of the humanities one might be interested in. Turnator explains, “In general, I don’t think we ought to divide digital humanities into departments because the questions asked and the tools used can be deeply relevant no matter which specific humanities field we happen to be in.” Data visualization tools and text analysis tools can be useful to anyone in the humanities, she asserts, “These tools can productively shape research, depending on what questions we pose.”

Distribution of a Thirteenth-Century Fine Ware. (Map created using a GIS)

For example, in her dissertation research about Byzantine economy, Turnator worked with large amounts of data involving archaeological artifacts, ceramic, coins, and textiles. In trying to understand the distribution patterns of ceramics across what is today Western Turkey and Greece, she built a table of ceramic types and mapped them by site. She was able to notice patterns that were difficult to see by using traditional methods and these insights changed the course of her subsequent research.

Sites Studied in Turnator’s Dissertation

Excel Table showing data on Fine Ceramic types derived from sites studied in Turnator’s Dissertation

The Global Middle Ages Project (a much expanded site is under development) started in 2007 by Prof. Geraldine Heng from UT Austin and Prof. Susan Noakes at the University of Minnesota, aims to become a generator of new ideas and questions about the global Middle Ages and work as a tool for graduate students, scholars, and the general public to reflect and learn about the medieval world beyond Europe. In 2013 under the leadership of Dr. Fred Heath, the Vice Provost and Director of UTL, the libraries became a partner of the project. Currently, the new GMA site is being built utilizing the expertise in the libraries. One of the site’s projects in the pipeline is called Virtual Plasencia. Prof. Roger Martinez (U. of Colorado, Colorado Springs) and Dr. Victor Shinazi’s (ETH Zurich) and an international team are working on a 3D redesign of the city in northwestern Spain today. One of the biggest challenges of this and other digital projects, according to Dr. Turnator, is to not replicate our analog habits but to learn to benefit from being in the digital world by understanding how it actually works, and what its limitations are.

There are five other projects in the GMA pipeline:

Lynn Ramey and her team’s (Vanderbilt University) “Discoveries of the Americas
Chapurukha Kusimba (American University) and his team’s “Early Global Connections in East Africa”
Timothy Pauketat (Urbana-Champaign) and his team’s “The North American Middle Ages: Big History from the Mississippi Valley to Mexico”
Christopher Taylor’s (Williams College) “Peregrinations of Prester John: The Creation of a Global Story Across 600 Years”
Nükhet Varlık (Rutgers University) and Abdurrahman Atçıl’s (Queen’s College, CUNY) “A Prosopographical Study of Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Medical Elite”
Thomas Kealy’s (Colby-Sawyer College) “Itinerary Poets in Thirteenth-Fourteenth-Century-Al-Andalus

Another challenge that Dr. Turnator faces right now on the Global Middle Ages project is establishing consistent searching tools for the diverse projects that are and will be in its network. It is necessary but difficult to produce “metadata standards,” that is, categories for indexing content that most medievalists can agree upon so that users can find what they’re looking for on a large network of websites. To that end, she is organizing a workshop funded by CLIR, the Mellon Foundation and UTL, to bring medievalists to UT Austin for a two-day workshop in May 2015. The purpose of the meeting is for medievalists, librarians, and technologists to discuss medievalists’ workflow in research, publication, and teaching. Turnator explains that “the biggest challenge in digital anything is that it absolutely requires collaboration with librarians and other stakeholders on campus to succeed in the long run.” Librarians are experts in long-term preservation, access and in dealing with what are called data-interoperability issues, or the problems that come up when online content is created without consistent standards of data description and definition. That is why having one foot in the libraries and one foot in a humanities department has been so useful for Turnator and for the projects she works on.

Digital Humanities is increasingly becoming a desired and expected skill set for humanists. Job openings at the MLA (Modern Language Association) and AHA (American Historical Association) are increasingly requiring this skill set. Nationwide, humanities departments have begun to incorporate courses to accommodate these emergent needs. At UT, Turnator points out, the School of Information (iSchool) has fantastic resources and courses relevant for humanities students; workshops are available at UT Libraries, TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center), Digital Writing and Research Lab (DWRL), to name a few. So UT has great resources but they may be difficult to navigate for humanities students in their fields trying to fulfill their department-specific requirements.

Turnator also shared her views about how she sees the digital humanities evolving and affecting scholarship. Projects in the digital humanities, she explains, challenge traditional ways of doing scholarship, especially the single author/monograph model. We do not yet have a well-oiled review processes to evaluate digital projects, which are often collaborative, and hiring committees often do not understand where credit is due and tend to ignore them completely in the hiring process; that will change as the field matures. For now good digital humanities projects bring mostly good publicity and fame to established scholars. In the future, formal training will not only help graduates get jobs but will also help forge the path that leads to peer-review and publications that help faculty get promoted based on valued digital projects. She adds “the acquisition of digital skills require formal training and careful study.” We need to train a new generation of humanists who not only know how to build digital projects but also how to evaluate and utilize them. Formal training in these methodologies should be front and center, and just as the methodologies tend to be naturally collaborative, this type of training needs departments, research units, and libraries to bring their expertise to the table and collaborate. When this happens, digital methodologies have the potential to change the world of humanistic inquiry in the long term.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:
Maria José Afanador-Llach discussed her experience at a Digitilization Workshop in Venice and Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web
Charley Binkow discussed digitalized images from the Folger Shakespeare Library
Charley Binkow explored photographs of California’s Gold Rush
Henry Wiencek found a digital history project that not only preserves the past, but recreates it

All images courtesy of Ece Turnator

A Graphic Revolution: The New Archive (No. 19)

By Joseph Parrott

Lincoln Cushing reviewing slides from the Cuban Communist Party in Havana, 1994.

Digital History is more than just a new, innovative way of using and presenting historical data. It offers an opportunity to change the way historians and archivists understand the holding, preservation, and curation of artifacts. Archivist and artist Lincoln Cushing has been quietly working at the forefront of this information revolution, spending nearly twenty years compiling, digitizing, and organizing political posters from Cuba, China, and the United States. Available through the website Docs Populi and his ongoing work with the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), these posters represent a truly global exploration of art, politics, and identity available at the click of a mouse.

The importance of this new archive is clear in Cushing’s first major project, the unrivaled collection of posters from the Organization in Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, or Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina (OSPAAAL). OSPAAAL was founded in 1966 to help promote anti-imperial and socialist causes in the developing world. The Cuban-based organization helped define an imagery of global revolution through its dynamic, brightly colored posters that it distributed in the pages of Tri-Continental magazine. Traveling to Cuba in the 1980s, Cushing was stunned to find that despite their importance, there was no archive or even definitive list of OSPAAAL posters. He spent years scouring various repositories on the island, in the United States, and Europe compiling a list of every poster produced until 1995.

Yet rather than bringing these posters together in a single repository, Cushing chose to assemble the archive virtually. An early believer in employing technology to preserve and disseminate knowledge, Cushing used digital photography to bring the artifacts together online, free for all to access as the artists originally intended. The 300 posters therefore represent not the digitization of a physical collection but rather the best available artifacts assembled from individual repositories and private collections scattered across the globe. The images are presented in high definition, faithfully preserving the intricate details, coloring, and overall quality of the prints.

Posters from the Ann Tompkins collection on the Cushing dining room table, some tightly rolled for more than thirty years.

The combination of preservation and accessibility fits perfectly with the idea of activist posters and provided a model for future work. Cushing slowly expanded his digital archive as new opportunities appeared. A member of the Bay Area activist collective, Inkworks Press, his digitization of its work since 1974 has provided an American perspective on leftist politics. Docs Populi added more than 500 images from the Chinese Cultural Revolution after Ann Tompkins (Tang Fandi) worked with Cushing to digitize her entire collection before donating the physical objects to the East Asian Library at the University of California at Berkeley. Finally, Bay Area activist and collector Michael Rossman insisted that Cushing be involved in managing the more than 24,000 images he donated to the Oakland Museum, a collection representing American causes from the 1960s until today. The result is a truly global archive.

Poster for the Port Chicago Campaign (1983) that worked to stop arms shipments to Central America from the Concord Naval Weapons Station in northern California.

Such posters are good candidates for digitization, because artists rarely copyrighted images and indeed desired widespread reproduction, but Cushing has also used technology to manage the ongoing tension between openness and responsible stewardship. With the Rossman collection, the OMCA wanted to maintain the ability for visitors and researchers to engage with the sometimes intricate details of the prints while still preventing anyone from using the high resolution images for their own purposes. The solution: provide a low resolution image with the ability to magnify details for individual exploration. Online visitors have the ability to explore the posters with the same level of detail they would likely have in an archive, all while preventing misuse, preserving the objects themselves, and making them available to audiences unable to visit Oakland.

In combining these diverse images in a single digital gateway, Cushing has made it possible to explore the transnational dialogue that occurred between leftist artists. Visitors can browse through the individual collections or search by date, subject, or artist and see the transportation and adoption of ideas that helped create visual vocabularies of revolution and counter-culture. Comparison of material from the OSPAAAL and Rossman archives, for example, illustrate how Cuban artists adopted psychedelic imagery to help sell their ideas abroad. One can even follow the evolution of specific iconography, seeing, for instance, how Americans repackaged Cuban depictions of African revolution (itself borrowed from an Emory Douglas illustration in The Black Panther) to protest Gerald Ford’s intervention in Angola in 1976.

Inkworks Press Anti-apartheid poster (1985).

Just as important as finding new audiences and revealing connections is the recovery of information. In contrast to traditional archival practice that only opens public access once the material is fully catalogued, organized, and described, Cushing’s archives have the ability to evolve. The Rossman collection at the OMCA is a perfect example. With more than 24,000 thousand images, fully cataloguing the entire collection will take years. Cushing nonetheless posts the material as soon as possible with minimal descriptions of text, size, and production method that he later supplements with greater detail on the artists and context. This approach opens the collections to the public sooner, but it also provides the opportunity for people knowledgeable on the images to contact the OMCA to provide additional information. This kind of managed crowd-sourcing is, in Cushing’s word, “a very robust way of producing truth.”

The idea of a single digital repository for widely scattered material is especially attractive for decentralized movements and, as a result, Docs Populi is one example of a slowly emerging practice of collecting and centralizing materials on political causes and themes for open access research. While it cannot and should not replace the necessary preservation of documents at the OMCA, the University of California, and elsewhere, it provides a way to bring together scattered information for the purpose of research and education. Cushing’s work provides a model for the ways that new digital platforms can strengthen libraries and archives as they pursue their primary missions of preservation, information collection, and knowledge dissemination.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:

Maria José Afanador-Llach discussed her experience at a Digitilization Workshop in Venice and Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

Charley Binkow discussed digitalized images from the Folger Shakespeare Library

Charley Binkow explored photographs of California’s Gold Rush

Henry Wiencek found a digital history project that not only preserves the past, but recreates it

Links

Lincoln Cushing on the technical aspects of digitization and online exhibition:

http://www.docspopuli.org/Documentation.html

Texas posters from Michael Rossman’s “All of Us or None” Collection, including a great piece from Austin artist Jim Franklin: http://collections.museumca.org/?q=taxonomy%2Fterm%2F154&keys=texas

Interview with Michael Rossman from “Berkeley in the Sixties”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKFzq9xPwiE

All images courtesy of Lincoln Cushing

Digital History: A Guide by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig (2006): New Archive (No. 18)

By Maria José Afanador-Llach

Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)

In the past years, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has produced a myriad of digital tools and scholarly reflections on the impact of using digital media and computer technologies to democratize history. For the Center, democratizing history means to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past. Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, both former directors of the Center, offer a pragmatic and well-documented guide about the ways in which historians can “build the digital future of history in the web” or the “History Web.” The book offers a reflection on why historians should build history websites and the related on-the-ground challenges and opportunities of doing so.

Digital History begins with a brief history of digital history and the ways historians have translated their work to the web with digital archives, online exhibits, online articles with sets of historical documents, historical fanzines, blogs, educational resources, and multimedia products. The authors contend that becoming familiar with what has already been done on the web, defining the genre of the site you are creating, and thinking about the intended audience are basic steps to get started online. The key questions here are: what communities of people do you want to reach and what are your goals in doing digital history? After assessing the different genres of the History Web, the authors then turn to a very pragmatic discussion of how to start a historical website.

In “Getting Started,” the authors highlight the importance of understanding the basic technologies behind the web to be able to match scaled technologies to particular History Web projects. The authors offer basic explanations of the nature of a website—the non-fixed nature of content on the web—the decentralized nature of the Internet, the programming lingua franca of the Internet – HTML — and choices about where to host a website. Each website has a content and purpose, they contend, and an appropriate technology should match each website. They then turn to an overview and assessment of the many computer programs available to make basic websites (such as Dreamweaver and Microsoft’s Front Page) that require varying levels of HTML or other knowledge. Alluding to the potential for interactivity, the authors refer to Flash—an animation software—for creating multimedia narratives combining videos, maps, timelines, photographs and text. Another key issue is a task that historians face day to day: organizing the data. Databases or XML are necessary when one has hundreds or thousands of artifacts or documents to display. A more complete discussion about the possibility of organizing expansive resources using databases or XML is found in the Appendix of the book. The chapter ends with the question of how to fund a digital history project and a reminder of the importance of defining clearly the genre and goals of the project.

Not Even Past brings primary sources, book recommendations, and the cutting edge research of the Department of History at UT Austin to the wider public through digital medium.

The authors go on to discuss the possibilities for manipulating historical data with electronic tools in order for historians to make findings that were not previously evident in analog sources. In this connection, one of the first steps in a digital project is to efficiently produce digital formats. Here the authors assess the pros (advantages of access) and cons (expensive, information is lost) of digitization, the ways in which a text can be digitized, and the existing digital formats. The chapter also offers information on specific tools to make images digital, how to digitize sound and moving images, and they discuss whether you should do all of the work by yourself.

Related to building the repository of digital materials to feed any digital history project is designing a website itself. The authors stress the centrality of designing websites that serve public historical understanding. In “Designing for the History Web,” the authors discuss several design principles that can account for effective online communication. Since presenting content in the web is different from composing paper-based works, the authors stress the need to think about design principles such as contrast, the relationship between features on the page, order, alignment, consistency in color, font, size, and texture. Since the nature of hypertext implies non-linear navigation of contents, every webpage needs a basic navigation tool. Lastly, the authors discuss the site structure, which I believe should be the guiding principle of any web content, even before defining stylistic elements. The information architecture of a website is what allows users to know where to find information in a website. “Building an Audience” is concerned with strategies for attracting an audience to a history website. The chapter discusses the importance of defining an audience, reaching it, marketing strategies, get visitors to comer back, and tracking and assessing the audience using log analysis programs.

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

“Collecting History Online” casts light on the use of the Internet to collect accounts and artifacts from the recent past. The authors argue that the collection of historical documents, images, and personal narratives has the potential to create innovative forms of history in the future. Thousands of historical sources are produced daily on the web. Webpages are ephemeral, newspapers sites change every day, and even many blogs disappear leaving no trace. Gathering material from the web, however, can entail hurdles related to privacy and copyright. “Owning the Past” traces the history of copyright and intellectual property, which the authors call “an ever-evolving set of principles” that raises questions about the rights of producers and consumers on the web. The authors align themselves with the principle of Creative Commons, which allows the distribution of material found online as “a shared storehouse of human creations.” The authors discuss the legal landscape that digital historians should navigate to protect their intellectual property and ensure their compliance with copyright laws. While historians worry about copyright infringements, for-profit organizations such as ProQuest have made massive investments in digitizing the past and selling access to their collections to universities. Questions of unequal access to digital historical materials forefronts a debate on who owns the past and engenders ethical questions around the commercial drive that turns paper-based sources into commodities. This raises issues around the copyright, for example, of twentieth-century materials (almost everything published after 1923 remains covered by copyright), that in the majority of cases only big corporations can afford.

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts between 1676 and 1772.

The final chapter, “Preserving Digital History,” is a meditation about strategies to ensure that digital materials will survive in the future in an electronically unstable environment. Digitization is not preservation, the authors explain, given the loss of information that comes from transforming analog into digital format. A robust reliable storage system is not enough, the authors argue, and the information sciences still have a long way to go towards improving the longevity of digital copies and avoiding the corruption of files.

In short, the book offers a comprehensive overview of the perils of contributing to the History Web and ways to manage the obstacles and produce a useful website. Surprisingly, the book does not situate digital history within the broader field of the digital humanities. This issue has been the subject of debate, as it seems that digital humanists have defined the field mostly around digital literary studies leaving digital history outside the defining features of the intersections between computing and the humanities.

Lastly, rather than reading the book in a linear way, I recommend using this book as a manual in which to find advice on specific practical issues regarding the creation of a digital history project. Very useful assets of the book are the countless links to online publications and digital history projects. Learning about digital history is partially achieved by reading the book. Navigating through the great number of online digital projects, even those in literary studies, I believe, is the best way to get a sense of the various, creative ways other humanists have chosen to preserve and visualize their research in the web.

One question remains: Now that we have a multitude of digital history websites – archives, blogs, data visualizations and collections, how are these digital tools shaping historical research methods? Stay tuned.

Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Online).

Digital Visualization Workshop, Venice 2014: The New Archive (No. 17)

By Maria José Afanador-Llach

Over the summer, I spent two weeks in Venice participating in a digital history workshop organized by Duke University and Venice International University. The objective of the workshop was to introduce participants to a variety of digital tools for historical research and presentation. The participants came from disciplines such as art history, history, archeology, architecture history and information science. We learned the basic features of different software, mostly open source, in hands-on sessions.

Island of Burano, Venice Lagoon

Once we became familiar with the history of Venice and its geography, we started to work hands-on with various digital programs. We used QGIS to make maps and overlay historical maps on locations in physical space. Another tool that we used was Neatline to create exhibits linking images, maps, and timelines. With SketchUp we produced 3D representations of objects. Lastly, we used Google Earth Pro to record a tour inside a 3D map and produce video files. We also learned the basics of blog and website development, and video editing.

We worked in groups to create a digital-historical narrative of a theme of our own choice related to the topic of the workshop: The Venice Lagoon. I worked with an art historian and an archeologist to produce a narrative about the fortification system of the Venice Lagoon. We produced a video and a timeline exhibition using some of the tools that we learned. You can see them here.

View of Venice From La Guidecca

I would like to recommend two of the tools that we used during the workshop and end with a short reflection about what I believe are pertinent questions to ask when considering going digital.

Geo-Referencing Historical Maps

In the first sessions, we learned to overlay historical maps on contemporary maps by geo-referencing them with a free software program called QGIS. Geo-referencing means to assign real world coordinates to old maps. Geo-referencing historical maps can help historians visualize, interpret, retrieve and compare geographic and spatial information. On this webpage of the National Library of Scotland, there are some relevant points to take into consideration about the uses, limits and possibilities of geo-rectifying maps. For example, a possibility is to compare historical maps from cities in different points of time and compare them to present-day satellite images. Also, geo-referencing allows integration of early maps with other topographical information such as height. In some cases one should be cautious of the possible distortions that geo-referencing can cause to historical maps that do not fit contemporary maps with geometrical accuracy. Here you can see a geo-referencing exercise that I made using QGIS with map of the viceroyalty of New Granada—contemporary Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. I marked six points in the historical map and then matched them with points in the real map. For a step-by-step tutorial for georeferencing using QGIS click here.

Creating a geo-reference map.

Image of historical map geo-referenced on top of present day map.

A Geotemporal Interface

If you are trying to figure out a way to interactively visualize and narrate historical transformations, a geotemporal interface can be helpful. In the workshop, we learned about geotemporal storytelling using Neatline. Created by the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia, Neatline expands the functionality of Omeka, which is a content management system. Neatline offers the possibility to create a story through an interface that connects a timeline to a map. You can georectify a historical map with QGIS and then place it on top of the default OpenStreet or Google Map to create an exhibition. Then you can start adding objects (events, photos, documents) to link to the map. The interactivity features include a “Neatline-enhanced edition of text documents.” It works by connecting paragraphs, sentences, and words of your own writings with objects in the exhibit. A fascinating example is the project Mapping the Catalogue of Ships which analyzes Homer’s natural geography of Greece through a map of the itineraries of Book Two of the Iliad. The exhibit links the contingents in the Greek army with locations in the map. For more about this feature you can read about Neatline-text here.

Mac Lab at Venice International University. Venice Visualization Workshop, June 2014.

After my experience in Venice, there are some things that I would recommend for those interested in engaging with digital tools. First, consider how a digital component could enhance your research and teaching.

Do you want to incorporate digital tools to curate your own archival material and maybe then turn it into an online exhibition?
Do you want to create public history contents to circulate in social media?
Do you want to engage digital tools for teaching and as a resource for working in the classroom?
Do you want to visualize your archival research differently to see if you can come up with new research questions?
Do you want to use digital tools to visualize a historical transformation that is not easily discernable in the written text?

Secondly, learning new tools always takes time, and archival work and writing consumes most of our time. However, the Venice workshop helped me realize that I can learn to use software that at first might seem too challenging. If you are seriously considering using digital tools for your work, you should be open to experiment and learn the basics about the tools you want to engage with. I would add that ideally, as it has been happening across the world, we should aim for collaborative work among humanists, computer scientists, graphic designers, and digital humanists. For now, there are lots of open source and user-friendly digital tools to experiment with.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:

Charley Binkow discussed digitalized images from the Folger Shakespeare Library

Charley Binkow explored photographs of California’s Gold Rush

Henry Wiencek found a digital history project that not only preserves the past, but recreates it

All images courtesy of Maria José Afanador-Llach

Student Showcase – Oil and Gas Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico

Maham Sewani and Sania Shahid
Sartartia Middle School
Junior Division
Group Website

Read Maham and Sania’s Process Paper

In 2010 the Deepwater Horizon, an off-shore oil rig operated by British Petroleum, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the succeeding weeks an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf, the largest marine oil spill in American history. This event brought the dangers of off-shore drilling to the forefront of America’s public consciousness, leading many to ask why we even allow such dangerous methods of oil extraction.

Maham Sewani and Sania Shahid, students at Sartartia Middle School, explored the history of this controversial technology with a Texas History Day website, “Oil and Gas Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.” Looking back on the origins of off-shore drilling, Maham and Sania argue this technology has created both economic benefits and ecological perils. Here are two excerpts from their site:

A controlled fire in the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, May 6, 2010. The U.S. Coast Guard conducted the burn to help prevent the spread of oil. (U.S. Military)

Rights and responsibilities of stakeholders within the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico have greatly evolved. Since the mid-1900s, several incidents have resulted in loss of lives, destruction of property, and environmental damage. This has led to the reorganization of governmental agencies, more stringent regulatory framework, and corporate pursuit of technological advances, resulting in improved capability to extract oil and gas in deeper and harsher environments in a responsible manner.

Oil drilling platform off the coast of California, near Santa Barbara (U.S. Department of Energy)

Accidents, changes in supply and demand, technological advancements, jurisdiction conflicts, and competing priorities between energy independence and environmental protection have led to an evolution in rights and responsibilities of oil and gas industry stakeholders in the Gulf of Mexico. These stakeholders include corporations, the federal government, and governments of states bordering the Gulf of Mexico. The evolution over the past 60 years has resulted in significant reorganization of governmental agencies, changes in rights to value derived from mineral resources between stakeholders, and passage of more stringent laws/regulations causing companies to be environmentally safe, while simultaneously pursuing technological breakthroughs for more efficient and effective extraction of oil and gas.

Recent Texas History Day projects:

A documentary on the draft’s controversial history in America

And a story of WWII internment you probably haven’t heard

Student Showcase – Defending Democracy: Government Responsibility vs. Individual Rights

Zakary Piwetz
Senior Division
Individual Documentary
Rockport- Fulton High School

Read Zakary’s Process Paper

What is more important: the responsibility of America’s government to raise an effective fighting force? Or the right of Americans to refuse military service? This is a question that has persisted throughout our nation’s history, from the Revolution through the controversial war in Vietnam.

For Texas History Day, Zakary Piwetz took a closer look at the history of America’s military draft with a video documentary. You can read his process above and watch the video below.

Vietnam era draft card (Wikipedia)

Both of my grandfathers served in Vietnam during the time draft and War protests occurred across America. I was curious about why some people joined the military or were drafted while others refused to serve. The protests seemed like a perfect topic for the theme of rights and responsibilities, hut too much information existed to cover in a ten minute video. To narrow my topic, I decided to cover anti-draft movements throughout American history, focusing especially on the impact of those in the Vietnam era.

My topic fits the NHD theme, Rights and Responsibilities, perfectly because the draft remains the greatest topic for debate over rights arid responsibility in American History. This topic has touched the lives of every American over time; those who felt it was their responsibility to serve, those who protested because they felt it violated their rights, and those government leaders who were responsible for defending both democracy and individual rights. When the word “draft” enters a conversation, every listener has a visceral reaction. For those who lived through the Vietnam Era like my grandfathers, that is particularly true because it divided America like no other time in American History. The draft is still one of the most controversial topics domestically and around the world because of the conflict it stirs over rights versus responsibilities.

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