Week 5: The Perilous Journey Ahead

            This week’s reading was 397-416 in Public History Essays from the Field edited by James B. Gardner and Peter S. LaPaglia, an essay by James T. Sparrow entitled On The Web: The September 11 Digital Archive.  This article addresses the rise in the online presence of museums and historical societies.  It talks about the downfalls of such a shift, like the depersonalization of history, prioritizing digital artifacts over physical ones and possible damage to reputations but also the benefits, such as reaching a broader audience, creating more public interest in history and the ability to interact more with the public.  The article also includes a case study of The September 11 DigitalArchive, including how it came to be, what it includes as digital history, what steps the team had to take in order to make it happen, how it reached out to the public, the reaction of the public, and the steps they are taking to ensure its preservation.   I though this article hit on some real issues that museums face by trying to shift into the digital field, yet also covered the good that can come out of it.

            The other part of the print reading was pages 250 through to the end of the book Mickey Mouse History And Other Essays on American Memory by Mike Wallace which includes the chapters Ronald Reagan and the Politics of History and the chapter The Battle of the Enola Gay.  The first chapter went over the presidency of Ronald Reagan, his habitual lying and attempts to rewrite history, the ability of cinema to completely bungle historical events, and followed up with the reasoning that while mythologizing history makes for a good story, real accounts of history are what allows us to make better decisions in the future.   The second chapter went over the Enola Gay fiasco at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in 1995.  It discussed what the original scripts contained, the response of the Air Force Association (AFA) and subsequent media backlash on the museum and the museums rewritten display.  The chapter discussed the bad timing of the display, the problems of the postponement strategy, and their insufficient attention to the communities they wanted to represent and address.  It also discussed the development and relationship between the Air Force Association and the Air and Space Museum.  I though this chapter did a good job of taking an in depth look at what museums go through; the necessity of maintaining good relationships with other organizations, being able to understand who you are trying to represent and reach, and how big an effect the media can have.  The chapter concludes with what needs to change in the future by learning from this event, such as museums recognizing they will face opposition and should be prepared, to include different perspectives in their exhibits, to adhere to professional standards and for museums to stick together.  One of the sentences that really stuck out for me in the chapter was “More disturbingly, no one, right or left, took issue with the assumption underlying such initiatives—that the federal government had the right to mandate historical interpretations.” (p. 296)

            One of the web readings was DigitalKeys for Unlocking the Humanities Riches, From Ancient Rome to a Valley inVirginia: More Digital Humanities Projects by Patricia Cohen from Arts Beat.  This site lists several well done websites on historical events/places, including Rome Reborn, Railroads and the Making of Modern America, The Dante Project, the Spatial History Lab and The Valley Project.  My favorite was Rome Reborn and the video that goes through a complete digital reconstruction of Rome.

A view of the Flavian Amphitheater and surrounding city. Photo  courtesy of  Rome Reborn.

            The other web reading was “Lick This”:LOC, Flickr, and the Limits of Crowd Sourcing by Larry Cebula on his Northwest History Blog.  The topic was the partnership between the Library of Congress and Flickr and their posting of 3000 historic LOC photographs online and allowing people to tag, annotate and just generally mess with them. Of course, nothing very productive came out of it, as the project allowed unlimited access and was open to the general public.  I noticed in the comments user Patrick Peccatte references his own crowdsourcing project PhotosNormandie and the steps they have taken to make it more inclusive, thus allowing more useful comments to be given. 

            The video Big Data: Drowning inNumbers was a little confusing with all the technical jargon, but I think I got the gist of it.  Digital Data is getting cheaper, bigger and more easily accessible. But it also leads to the problem of less privacy.

            The other video was ProtectingReputations Online, which gave advice on being careful what you post online, as it could come back to haunt you one day.  I thought this was a very good video, and every school should show it, or something like it, to its students so they are aware of oversharing, which I feel is a very big problem in our society. 

            Digital Humanities and the case forCritical Commons was the third video for review this week.  It is a clip of a hypothetical situation in which Hitler was alive today and his reaction to the internet and the ability to share data and information quickly and globally.  I think the idea of this video is to dramatically illustrate the case for publically available copyrighted material by likening the absence of it to Hitler’s control of information and education during the Nazi era.