Week 4: There is a lot of information out there for historians to work with

Roy Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance: Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” American Historical Review 108 (3) (2003): 735-762.

• What digital aspects of your life alone disappear?
• What are the difficulties of preserving digital primary sources?
• How do you know when you have done enough research? Have you ever faced a situation where you thought you had found and examined all the relevant primary sources?
• Rosenzweig argues that we face a future task of writing history in a world in which there are too many records for us to cope with, disappearing evidence, and a broadened audience.
• Are these technical problems, or should we historians truly be concerned?
• Why are digital documents vulnerable?
• Blurring and merging of professional responsibilities. Historians, archives, and museums. Who should be responsible for keeping the machines needed to read old digital primary sources?
• Is it important to read (or at least store) digital primary sources in their original format, or would physical copies suffice?
• How do copyright and ownership issues enter the picture of preserving digital sources?
• Why have historians been ignoring the problems of preserving digital sources?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of letting commercial enterprises have control of archiving?
• How might the challenges outlined in this article shape the kind of historical writing that we will see over the next decades?

David Armitage and Jo Guldi, The History Manifesto, chapter 4:

• Did you read this online or download it? What is Open Access?
• What can you infer from the website hosting The History Manifesto about the authors’ goals and relationship to digital history? How successful do they seem at achieving those goals, based on their site? What opportunities for interacting with The History Manifesto do they make available?
• How does it affect your reading experience to have the outline of the book always available in the left hand margin of the screen? How about the footnote functionality? What was your experience of “turning pages” and “turning sections”? Why isn’t there a “next section” button at the bottom of the page?
• What do they mean by “machine-read”? Should we think of this activity as reading?
• How do their inquiries fit particularly with their other scholarly focus on the longue durée?
• What kinds of unfamiliar historical research approaches do they discuss? Can you imagine yourself needing to use any of them? Wanting to?
• What is Paper Machines?
• Panama Zotero group: again the blurring of historians, archivists, and librarians.
• What is involved in visualizing text-based “data”? Is the visualization enough?
• What does this sentence mean?: “Traditional research, limited by the sheer breadth of the non- digitised archive and the time necessary to sort through it, becomes easily shackled to histories of institutions and actors in power, for instance characterising universal trends in the American empire from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations’ investments in pesticides, as some historians have done.”
• Examples of the “untapped sources of historical data”? Are those sources digitally available? How much work is involved in digitizing them so that historians can work with them in the ways Guldi and Armitage envision?
• How are we ever going to keep track of this hyperabundance of information—and scholarly discussions of it—so that we can know what to go look at? How would you know to go looking for the Declassification Engine, for example? How can you prevent yourself from going out and laboriously duplicating someone else’s tech work?
• “This enterprise points to the hunger in the private sector for experts who understand time – on either the short durée or the long.”
• Does this chapter represent a demonstrated claim or an extended assertion (or polemic)?
• “In a world of mobility, the university’s long sense of historical traditions substitute for the long-term thinking that was the preserve of shamans, priests, and elders in another community.”
• What special skills do historians bring to the discussion of big data? “The reading of temporally generated sequences of heterogeneous data is a historian’s speciality.”
• If you “read” big data broadly, can you still know something deeply?
• Are you persuaded by this:  “Their training should evolve to entertain conversations about what makes a good longue durée narrative, about how the archival skills of the micro-historian can be combined with the overarching suggestions offered by the macroscope. In the era oflongue-durée tools, when experimenting across centuries becomes part of the toolkit of every graduate student, conversations about the appropriate audience and application of large-scale examinations of history may become part of the fabric of every History department.”
• Do you see yourself in this?: “Historians may become tool-builders and tool-reviewers as well as tool-consumers and tool-teachers.”