Month: September 2008

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Googling for History

At the moment we use the verb to “Google” to mean search the internet for a specific topic (my father would hate this usage, since it puts the trademark of Google at risk, just like Kleenex and Scotch Tape…). In the future – “Googling” might instead mean gathering or even owning as much information as one can by means of digitization.

The biggest issues surrounding Google Books are those that deal with the protection of intellectual properties. Although we might appreciate the ability to now search through the texts of millions of books, we do need to worry about the fact that Google has been forging ahead with its digitization project without a great deal of respect for those who created the content. There are safeguards against users being able to access full texts and publishers do have the option to limit access to certain books. However, there is a great deal of market pressure placed on the publishers and authors to follow Google’s lead – being found easily on Google might just increase real sales of books. The long term investment for Google will come when the various books that it has digitized enter the public domain, at which time Google can lift its restrictions and allow or full browsing of the various books.  At that time Google will enter into an area that is already being pioneered by the Open Content Alliance, a network of volunteers and affiliated libraries who are working on digitizing as many public domain works as possible.

Personally, I find the quality of the product produced by the Open Content Alliance to be far superior to that of Google, which often times seems rushed – with missing pages and scans that are often off-center. What the Open Content Alliance lacks is an effective search engine – there is no Google plugin to spread up the search process here… Although you can easily find various authors and titles quite easily – Google brings up searches that include when authors are cited by others or works by related authors. Maybe the two organizations will be able to pull together in some fashion…

The largest advantage that these two organizations have over some other competing digital collections is that they are free to the general public. Unlike ProQuest, which bought digital licenses for most of the large newspapers of the world and charges enormous fees to search through them, Google and the OCA have been able to keep access open – one by means of a business model built on attracting as many eyes as possible to its content and another through the work of volunteers.

Last week, Google announced that it was going to also move into the area of newspaper digitization. Although Google will include content from the major newspapers, and thus compete head on with ProQuest, it is also going to partner with regional and local newspapers who would otherwise not have the ability to digitize their holdings. In many ways this is a boon for the local newspapers. Even thought they are “giving” their content to Google, they are gaining a valuable resource for their own business and exposing their newspapers to a much wider audience (they will also share in the advertizing revenue with Google).

Newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post realized a few years ago that there was no money to be made in charging for access to its archives and have both opened up their own digital archives to the general public – earning more through the advertisements than they ever did through the fees that they charged.

Digital libraries are going to be a part of our future – hopefully they will never replace the brick and mortar libraries of today, but I do hope that we will find such collections as a means to deepen and broaden our own research endeavors.

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The Many Lives of Rosa Luxemburg

I thought it would be interesting to compare the discussions about the Rosa Luxemburg entries that can be found on the English and German Wikipedia pages. The German version of the article is much longer and far better developed than the English version. Likewise, the discussion found on the German version contains many more threads. What is interesting, however, is that none of the discussion threads cross over into the other version. So, while the English version debated things like Rosa Luxemburg’s nationality (was she Jewish, Polish or German) and whether she was born in 1870 or 1871, the German discussions were aimed at topics regarding interpretation – things like her interpretations of Marxism and her correspondence with Lenin. Of course the German discussion also had some rather drawn out flame and edit wars – over whether Luxemburg (a sworn atheist) inadvertently referenced the book of Exodus in the Bible when she wrote her last words “I was, I am, I will be” when she was quoting an 1848 revolutionary by the name of Freiligrath. Another flame war erupted on the German discussion page when the article was voted off the Wikipedia list of recommended reading – apparently for being too politically slanted toward sympathizing with her Communist politics. There is also a humorous question raised by one editor whether it was true that Ruth Fischer, another leader of the German Communist Party, urinated on her grave.

While the German site seems to have a combination of academic and amateur historians (as well as a few political rivals) contributing to the entry, the English site appears to be completely written (or at least discussed) by amateur historians. While the Germans ask for citations from leading scholars and printed material, the discussion on the English site about her birth date seems to have been settled by a Google search – comparing how many websites claimed she was born in 1870 to those claiming 1871. 1871 won out according to Google.

The differences here between the two cultures that we see in the discussions is probably linked to larger cultural differences between Germans and Americans (although with Wikipedia it is close to impossible to know who is contributing). Nonetheless, the memory of Rosa Luxemburg is still a very powerful element in German political consciousness – at least on the Left. There are still yearly parades each January to commemorate her murder in 1919. The fact that the article was removed (or voted off) the recommended reading list was probably linked entirely to the political nature of the article. There were efforts to “neutralize” the site, but these changes seem to have been quickly re-corrected in order to maintain a Left-leaning interpretation of her life. The English version has comparatively less substance, but does not seem to be as controversial politically – although there is a great deal of content taken directly from the Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive, which itself is not known for its political independence.

All of this raises a larger question – is it possible to write about historical political figures without being political? Are politicized articles “bad”? Maybe there should be a portion of such articles dedicated to current debates about these figures and allow editors to take part (each side could group-edit the best version or interpretation and each would be displayed). Although this would not remove the political nature of such figures, the process of politicization would become much more transparent.

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Virtual Museums in Germany

Today I’m going to review two museums that offer an online version of their bricks-and-mortar museum exhibit.  One is a national history museum, located in Berlin, while the other is a traveling temporary exhibit that has toured across Germany since 2003.  In many respects they are not comparable, since the scale of the two sites and the resources available to each are quite different.

LEMO: Living Virtual Museum Online  (LEMO: Lebendiges virtuelles Museum Online)

In the Federal Republic of Germany there are really only three federally funded museums at the national level – the German History Museum (DHM) in Berlin, the House of History (HdG) in Bonn (and since 2000 in Leipzig as well), and the Art Museum in Bonn.  There is also the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, which is federally funded and has no permanent exhibit (other than the building itself), but rather hosts events and temporary exhibits that can be historical in nature, but can encompass any aspect of German cultural life. This virtual museum was actually a joint project between the DHM and HdG, with the DHM curating the pieces from 1871 to 1945 and the HdG those from 1945 to the present.

The purpose of the virtual museum, beyond preparing individuals and groups for their visits, is to provide access to its resources to an international audience, who might not have the ability to travel to Berlin to visit the museum personally. To this end, the “virtual” museum allows visitors to walk  through a wide range of topics – both chronologically and thematically.  A few years ago, you were also able to attempt a virtual walk through of the museum in 3-D.  This was an interactive (and high-bandwidth) production that allowed the virtual tourist to experience the physical placement of items in the museum, push buttons to display more information, and zoom in to see digital versions of paintings and photographs on display at the “real” museum.For those who would like to see what that was like, they did preserve this function as a “guided tour” – but the visitor is no longer in charge of how one “walks” through the museum and all interactivity has been taken away.

Nonetheless, what we do have is a highly functional virtual museum.  The epochs chosen are quite standard to the study of German history. Once you click on an era, say the Weimar Republic, the visitor is presented with a well-written overview of the period and its importance to understanding how the Weimar Republic fit within the larger history of Germany.  The visitor is then given the ability to “drill-down” thematically – they could explore the revolution of 1918/1919, domestic politics, foreign policy, and other related topics.  Once the visitor clicks on the theme, she is again provided with an overview and select primary documents (usually images) on the left that provide additional information.

Throughout each article, there are hyperlinks to primary texts and specialized essays that further enhance the ability of the visitor to learn about the topic they have chosen.  The primary documents range from texts (digitized and viewable as a picture as well), sound clips, and videos.  Often times, there are further “drill-down” options within the themes. Overall, the site is very accessible. Despite the fact that it isn’t as “flashy” as say the Digital Vaults project of the US National Archives, but it provides a massive amount of information on German history – much more than one could ever expect to gather in a traditional history museum – even among the largest national museums.

One very nice aspect of the site is a section called “Collective Memory” or Kollectives Gedächnis.  Here, the website has solicited visitors (both real and virtual) to submit their memories about the time periods and events covered by the museum(s).  Again, not as interactive as the Huricane Digital Memory Bank or even the new project by Der Spiegel called One Day or Eines Tages.  But, since these memories are solicited by email and regular mail and then verified by museum curators, the authenticity of these oral histories take on a greater meaning for professional historians .

Against Dictatorship  (Gegen Diktatur)

Another virtual museum site that is of note here is one that has been traveling around Germany since 2003 on the topic of the two dictatorships on German soil – the Nazi period and East Germany.  This temporary exhibit was funded through federal monies and had a crew of professional museum curators who assembled the exhibit – including several academics who also work at major museums throughout Germany who served in an advisory capacity.

The emphasis in this exhibit is to highlight those Germans who resisted against dictatorship, many of whom fell victim to the regimes they opposed. Within the virtual museum portion of the website, the curators have provided thirty themes or sections, fifteen for each period. The site is not set up to allow direct comparisons between the two dictatorships – the themes chosen in each half of the exhibit do not parallel one another, but there are a few themes that do cross-over into both periods, such as youth opposition.

The texts that accompany each theme are short – assuming they are the same text that a visitor would have found had they seen the “real” exhibit in person – are well-chosen as representative of the topic that is being discussed and thus are paired very well.   For those who want to learn more there are also “drill-down” elements that provide biographies of those involved and there are also primary texts and pictures provided for further reading and browsing. One potential problem is that some of the scanned images are too small to actually read some of the text, especially when handwriting is included. The ability to see the text as well as the original would have been a nice feature here.

An overall critique that needs to be voiced is that the virtual visitor is left without a guided tour of any kind. Visitors are free to pick and choose from what is offered. While there might be an advantage to this approach, the lack of any pedagogical guidance seems like a lost opportunity.  Here we have a great example of a wonderful resource that could reach out to a much larger audience than the real exhibit, but the idea of guiding one through the evidence has been entirely removed from the “museum” experience.

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – German Documents Online

For my first post (and assignment for my Digital History graduate seminar) I am going to address the issue of publishing primary documents on the Internet. Students today (and the general public looking for information on a given topic) are more inclined to go to the Web than to any other source (like a library!). This is OK and has many benefits, not just the speed with which one can find a given document, but the scope of documents that one can collect is substantially greater than in a printed book. Moreover, one can also rely on resources that are already out there on the Web and link to a greater number of documents than if one were to take on a digitization program of one’s own.

However, there are many examples of both positive and not-so-great Websites that have attempted to implement such a collection. A quick Google search returned a host of potential Websites to choose from when looking for primary documents on German history that have been translated into English. I’ve selected three in particular that I think are either severely lacking in some respect, perform the function adequately, or excellently organize information for the end user.

Let’s start with the “Bad” – this is to say that it performs its stated function, but could be much improved. The site I found that I felt best fit this category was the German section of EuroDocs. While I admire the idea of building a Wiki in order to host primary documents, there don’t seem to be any documents that are hosted on the site itself. So, adding content to the site is limited to adding links to documents hosted elsewhere. On the positive side, the links are annotated so that one has an idea of what one might find if you follow the link. Since the Wiki is open for editing, one could add to the library of primary sources, but there is no style guide to help with submissions, nor a way to “lock” a primary source once it has been posted. Why might one want to “lock” a primary source? Well, frankly so that others cannot change the historical accuracy of the original text. The best implementation of primary source documents on the web are those that include both a PDF scan of the original archival document and the e-text version for searching and easy printing (especially if one is working with foreign language documents that have been translated into English).

The second site that I looked at would definitely fall into the “ugly” category. Admittedly, it is a small site that was apparently created for a professor’s students as a gateway for them to access online readings. However, the fact that it is in Google’s top ten hits means that it must attract a relatively high level of traffic. My main gripe with this collection of documents is its lack of organization. Although the documents are listed chronologically, there are no annotations (meaning that the user would need to already know what the document is about before deciding to click on the hyperlink). The layout is also VERY basic – simple titles with a link. The author of the page has obviously not updated this page in over four years, since he lists his book (self promotion of one’s scholarly book on such a page is generally frowned upon in the profession) as “forthcoming” in 2004. He also claims that he cannot vouch for the accuracy of the texts that he lists – OK, as I mentioned before primary sources posted to the web without some sort of authentication is a grey area when it comes to authenticity. But, he says that he can’t vouch for the authenticity for those texts that are not on his site – they are ALL on other sites. If you take a look at the source file (click on View and Source in IE or View and Page Source in Firefox) you can search for his server. The only hit for his own institution is his email address. I could go on and on about the styling of the site, but let’s just say that at a bare minimum when listing this many sources, it would be good to have a clickable table of contents.

Finally, the good – well I would actually say GREAT! Take a look at German History in Documents and Images at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. This is a major project in the field with a great deal of resources that have been put into translating hundreds of German language documents into English and pairing them with scholarly introductory essays by leading historians. In many ways we are comparing apples and oranges, but this site has developed into an excellent resource for teaching German history to students in the United States (and elsewhere) who cannot access the German language versions. The essays are exemplary of how one can meld together scholarly writing for a more or less popular audience with direct links to the primary documents. If you open any of the introductory essays you will find that they are peppered with links that lead the reader to further information in the form of an annotated primary source. So, not only do we have an introductory essay, but each source has been annotated as well. Plus, the whole site can be searched. If you poke around, you will also see that not every section is completed yet, but they are well on their way to building a great resource.