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Social Networking for Historians

Social Networking has taken off over the past decade and has become an integral part of our society. Networking is nothing new, scholars have been doing it since the founding of the universities during the middle ages. When the English Royal Society was founded in the seventeenth century, it was at its root a social networking club, where scholars from many different fields met to share their work and ideas.

In modern times, the academic conference has taken center stage for the social and professional networking of academics. Attending conferences like the AHA, the OAH, NCPH, the GSA, etc. are just a few of the places where historians meet up to exchange ideas and build new relationships with colleagues in the field that they normally don’t see.

Facebook (and all the other virtual social networking sites like it) has now provided a place for academics to meet up virtually, exchange ideas, and host debates. The potential here is great, yet the number of scholars actively using Facebook for this purpose at the moment is probably small. This number, however, can only grow over time and just from my personal network of colleagues in the field I can say that things seem to be picking up.

Before Facebook there was H-Net. The idea behind the H-Net project was conceptualized to harness the technology of email to connect scholars in various subfields of the humanities. H-German, of which I am one of the editors, is one of the older networks (and one of the largest and most active as well). We currently have about 3000 active members mainly from the US, the UK, and Australia, but also Germany and the rest of the world. H-German’s heyday was back in the 1990s, when the flow of discussion was active and scholars (even the most noted in the field) were willing to exchange in debates about the state of the field and controversial books, such as Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” For the most part, those days of heavy list traffic have past. Most of our postings are focused on our well-developed, professional book review program and as a conduit for information on conferences and publications. We are currently working to bring back some of that debate culture by moving to a web 2.0 platform, with discussion boards and other venues where members can more freely contribute (without the intervention of an editor, who is the gatekeeper to access the list).

I have to applaud the recent revamping of the Oral Historical Association’s website (which is associated with the H-OralHistory listserv). They have been able to build in social networking mechanisms into their own site and this mixture provides a nice balance between the push technology of H-Net and social networking. Each user is able to set up a profile, indicating their research interests. When clicking on the tag about one’s research, one can link up with others in the field who share these interest. My hope is that more of the H-Net lists will be able to follow the lead of H-OralHistory and move in this direction.

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Public History on the Web

This week I asked you to explore several web installations that were designed purposefully for the general public and not fellow scholars. These sites all have their strengths and weaknesses, but each does fulfill a stated purpose and I would rank them as some of the best public history sites out there at the moment. My favorite (probably because my dad was an inventor) is the Getty site Devices of Wonder. What I particularly like about this site is the ability of the end user to virtually use each device that is on display. This is something that the web-based installation can do that the physical installation cannot (or at least not without allowing each visitor to handle the object on display, which is a rarity).

This site is an excellent candidate for the best use of multimedia in a display. Although it doesn’t tap into all of the various formats that comprise multimedia, the interactivity that this site has been able to create is among the best I have seen. Among the items on display, one of my favorite objects is the portable diorama – you can insert different slides and then activate the device to see how the scenery changes. I also enjoyed looking over the Grand Panorama of the 1851 Worlds’ Fair, although here I do wish that the resolution was much higher and since they were using Flash, it would be nice to be able to freely pan over the document. Finally, check out the Anamorphic Images (it opens up a separate window), but you can move the cone around and find the hidden picture within the puzzle! This must have been quite a programming feat to replicate the multiple reflections needed to generate the end picture!

As a runner up in the category of best use of multimedia, I would have to give this to the Julia Child website at the Smithsonian. As a “foodie” there is nothing more interesting than exploring the kitchen of a renowned chef like Julia Child. I have been to the “original,” which is housed at the American History Museum in Washington, DC, but the online version of the kitchen offers you something that you don’t get when you are physically at the museum – the view from within the kitchen! I also enjoyed zooming in on the images to learn more about how she laid out her kitchen. The downside to the site is not linking the object database with the flash tour. Since this is built in Flash, being able to open up cupboards and drawers should have been an easy task and then one could explore more about what was in the kitchen by linking the object database (which is a great mixture of Julia Child’s own history and the history of cooking).

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Digital Tools for a Digital (or sort of digital) World

This week I asked you to reflect on how the digital tools that we have at our hands is transforming the way that historians go about their business (or research). There have been many advances in technology that have allowed historians to explore new geographic areas, new methods of research, and manipulate data in new and inventive ways. The other week, I showed some examples of a new digital tool being developed by IBM’s research lab in Cambridge – ManyEyes. If you didn’t have a chance to check it out after class, I encourage you to still take a look. Here is a good example of several different ways in which ManyEyes can visualize data in a way that had not really been available to average historians without access to very powerful computing power.

This election cycle is also producing some interesting digital tools that might be of interest for present and future historians. One is an adaptation of the visualization that we find at ManyEyes and is a visualization of how people are feeling on election day.  At the New York Times, you can enter in key words about how you are feeling and add it to the data pool being collected by contributions from others around the world. You can visualize the results generically or separate out the McCain and Obama supporters. Over at the Washington Post you can track Twitter, video, and news postings that are referenced by place and time. This visualization is rather interesting because you can move the slidebar and see how coverage in different areas changes over time.

An Archivist at the Stasi Archive Puts Together a Stasi PuzzleOther interesting digital tools that have been created for historians are not yet commercially available, but the technology behind them and the potential uses by historians now and in the future are significant. One of my favorite tech developments has been going on in Germany (surprise!). On the eve of the communist party’s fall from power, the secret police (the Stasi) began shredding documents (amounting to some 16,000 sacks of shredded paper). The people at the Frauenhofer Institut, the same people who brought you the MP3) have been working on a digital solution. Funded by the German federal government and working closely with the archivists at the Stasi Archive, the technicians have been working on software that can match together the shredded and torn pieces of paper to reconstruct the original document. It is estimated that if 30 people were tasked with this job, it would take somewhere between 600 and 800 years! You can read more about this story here and here.

The other project that I am excited about was developed right here at UMass! Working with a set of letters from George Washington, the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval developed software that can learn how Washington wrote and translate this into data, which in turn can be searched and manipulated. For many of us who have to deal with handwriting manuscripts (luckily most of my sources are typed, but there is a certain degree of marginalia involved as well as occasional handwritten items) being able to scan, store, and manipulate such documents will be a great leap forward. Just take a look at the sample of late 18th century German handwriting (Goethe’s manuscript of Werther) on the left to see how difficult such sources can be to work with.

Speech recognition remains the Holy Grail of the digital historian. Back in 1998 or 1999 (I can’t remember exactly when this was) I attended a German-American young-leaders conference and had been assigned the job of introducing one of our keynote speakers, Walter Isaacson, who was the Editor of Time at the time. We had arranged to have breakfast together so that I could go over a few things with him and I was just making small talk when I asked him what he was currently working on. He responded that he had just gotten back from a week-long visit to Microsoft for a series they were working on about the next generation operating system (what would become XP). He was visiting their voice recognition lab and he noticed a banner hanging on the wall that read – “Wreck a Nice Beach!”  He asked “Bill” what the sign was for – the response was that the unit can takedown the banner when saying “recognize speech” does not translate into “wreck a nice beach” on the screen! Then, and only then, Microsoft would begin to seriously think about integrating this technology into Windows. I don’t use Vista, but I hear that it does have some dictation software built in that is rather capable. The most robust software for PCs out there today is Dragon Naturally Speaking. For Mac users, you need to use MacSpeech Dictate (which licences the technology behind its software from Dragon). IBM had been developing ViaVoice for both platforms, but sold it to ScanSoft (now Nuance) in 2003. Nuance also owns Dragon, OmniPage, and PagePort. Thus, we really only have one speech recognition technology open to the end user at this point. Although each of these performs rather well, they are all designed to capture dictation and not natural speech. Punctuations need to be spoken – “period,” “comma,” “new paragraph,” etc. Even with a claim of 98% accuracy, an 8,000 word entry (this is what a professional transcriptionist can usually type per hour) will still contain some 180 errors that need to be corrected manually, not to mention all of the punctuation marks that I just mentioned.

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Archiving the Intenet the German Way…

This past week the German Bundestag (parliament) published a law (it was passed in 2006, but doesn’t go into effect until it is published in its final form) that mandated all German websites needed to deliver a copy of all digital content (text, photos, sound, and any other multimedia content) to the National Library in Leipzig, which is the German equivalent to the U.S. Library of Congress. German companies protested the law throughout the legislative process, arguing that it set an undue burden on companies to comply and would result in enormous financial costs. Not only is the law itself interesting – mandating the state to archive the internet – but also how it is going to preserve the internet content. The library has asked that all of the website content be submitted in one of two formats – either as a PDF file or if the content stretches over multiple pages, such as a multi-page HTML website, then the content should be submitted using the ZIP compression format containing all of the related files. This last bit alone raises so many questions – such as which files need to be included and how often do companies need to resubmit their content – every time the website is updated?

One exception to the law is content that is generated by private citizens for private use. But, this raises a whole other set of questions, such as what is “private” on the Internet, a space that is by design “public.” Pundits have been quick to point to the gray area of Weblogs – are they private or are they public. If companies are supposed to archive all of the content, then what happens to “private” blogs that are hosted by for-profit companies like Blogger or even Facebook? Theoretically, companies that don’t comply will be served a letter of warning followed by a fine of up to 10,000 Euros for each act of non-compliance. At the moment, the National Library has issued a statement that it is not going to enforce the statute until it has been able to fully assess its ability to store all of the data that will be flowing its way.

In a related story out of Europe this week – the European Union has decided to take on the Google Book Project by digitizing the contents of Europe’s largest libraries, museums, archives, and film studios – placing this content online. The first incarnation of “Europeana” should be launching November 20th. The European Commission, which is coordinating, but not actually carrying out the project, hopes that the new website will become a clearing house for access to European civilization. Those are lofty goals indeed and to compete with Google might be an even loftier one, but it will be a wonderful (free) resource for those of us living and teaching outside of Europe. At the same time, as per the EU’s goals, the digitization of the cultural objects will also serve to preserve them in a digital age. For more on this topic, see this English Language article from Der Spiegel.

Both of these two recent examples highlight several of the themes that were addressed in this week’s readings. As all three of the readings allude, finding a digital medium that can hold its own over time is probably going to be the greatest challenge for digital archivists. I see a great hurdle being created here by the German National Library – submitting one’s site via PDF or a ZIP file is probably only a temporary fix and does not actually ensure any sort of preservation. With the PDF format, the library is basically asking the owners of the sites to “print” out their site and submit this copy to the library in what is at the moment the ubiquitous e-book or e-paper format. However, will it remain so in the near and distant future? Already there are competing formats, most of which actually rely on less sophisticated coding – using ASCI text and a style sheet instead of embedded formatting. The ZIP file format seems even more controversial – who is going to guarantee that what is submitted can actually be accessed? So much of the rich multimedia content on the web is dependent on specific server-side technologies that would make a stand-alone version relatively useless. Instead, maybe the National Library should consult with the people at the Internet Archive about what might be better ways to archive the content that the library desires…

The Europeana project sounds more feasible, as it aims not to digitize everything out there, but gather together the various digitization projects in Europe and place them under one roof for easy access and cross-referencing. Europeana is in effect attempting to build a multimedia encyclopedia out of the content that has been or is being created in Europe. One of the criticisms raised in the Rosenzweig article was that archivists complain that they cannot archive everything and that someone (i.e. historians) need to help in the process of determining what should be preserved and what can be discarded. In some ways, Europeana is performing exactly this function (at least partially) – it is selecting those aspects of European culture that have been deemed the most important for inclusion, which in turn will guide other archivists and curators to gather more content in order to further enhance the collection as it grows over time.

The immense job of a digital archivist is far from enviable, especially when important digital historical documents have been willfully or even purposefully deleted. One of my favorite Bloggers is Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post. He writes a Blog called White House Watch, which analyzes not just the White House but also the White House Press Corps. Starting in April 2007, Froomkin wrote a series of posts concerned with the deletion of White House emails and how they could impact future historical accounts of the Bush White House. The first article in the series is here and is worth a read.

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Copyright and Copyleft: Balancing Fair Use and Creative Rights

This week’s assignment for the course had us look more closely at the issue of copyright as it pertains to digital history. The issue of “property” as raised in the chapter of Lessig’s book Free Culture offers an interesting historical perspective of how the concept of property has evolved in the United States and how “cultural property” has now taken on similar meaning to “personal property” – two concepts that were initially dealt with by the framers of the US Constitution in very different ways.

Cohen and Rosenzweig apply Lessig’s teachings to the realm of digital history and point out several interesting and important test cases that have shaped the way that digital historians can use historical material under the concept of “fair use” and yet also alert the reader that this is a very “grey” area of law that is in constant flux.

Thus, the question remains – how is a historian supposed to operate within the new context of digital scholarship, yet still respect the lawful rights of copyright holders. This question needs to be an important element in the initial stages of planning a digital history project. If, for example, you are thinking of creating a database of primary sources, then you need to make sure that all of your sources are either in the public domain or within the realm of fair use. For anything that falls outside of these two categories you will need to seek out the copyright holders and negotiate the terms. Good planning in your grant writing will help cover for at least some rights purchases and should be included in any preliminary budget that you create. Of course, not all digital history projects are necessarily driven by primary sources. Your site might be an educational or interpretive site, meaning that most, or even all, of the content is original work. In this respect, you now hold the copyright to the teaching materials.

The less practical and more theoretical issue raised by this week’s readings is the idea that the extension of copyright rights to life plus seventy years has a negative impact on the creativity of society and the growth of scholarship in general. This raises an interesting (if daunting) perspective that we only can be creative and build on the work of others if they are freely accessible. I’m not sure I completely agree – as historians we are used to having to scour through archives and libraries to find the sources that we need. What it appears is that advocates of open access want less to gain access to new areas of knowlege, but rather to take advantage of the digital age to access this knowledge more quickly and in a digital format. We can all see the advantages of accessing information digitally, but does the lack of such access really restrict our creative abilities? This line of argument might have more weight when dealing with images, sounds, and film, where current copyright laws restrict even the concept of quoting such information in non-textual formats. Here, I would agree with the authors that the current copyright asserts too much control over the use of these formats.

Overall, the issue of copyright is a very complicated one. As Cohen and Rosenzweig rightly note, however, digital historians should be aware of these issues, but not focus on it too much that it stunts one’s own creativity to explore the possibilities of digital history.

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Born Digital

This week I asked you to take a look at a few different websites that function as virtual archives for documents and information that have been created digitally – there is no paper back up for this information. All three of these digital archives are very interesting in that they were set up almost immediately after the event in an effort to collect and document the events that were happening in real time.Yet, the archives have remained open and people continue to contribute to them.Part of each of these projects involved uploading “real” documents and pictures, but other aspects of these sites were designed to capture people’s feelings and memories.

I think there is also an interesting parallel here with oral history, but still different. By opening up a forum for people to post their “raw” memories, we see (and preserve) what they felt were personally the most important. There is no historian here to prompt or flush out different aspects of that memory. Nor are there any means to filter or fact check those memories. As someone who primarily works on collective instead of personal memories, I have a hard time processing these individual impressions and extrapolating a larger meaning.

The Flickr Commons is not necessarily an “active” digital archive like the other three examples, but both the larger Flickr site and the Commons component have created a fascinating depository for digital photographs. The commons area in particular is very interesting. The first large donor to the commons was the Library of Congress, who submitted thousands of photographs so that users could comment on them and help the curators at the library identify who was pictured and where these photographs were taken. This raises the issue of “shared authority” that all public historians need to deal with. However, here we see a great example of where the public might have a body of knowledge that curators lack and can provide better, more accurate accounts and descriptions than the professional. I really like how people have marked up the various photos and commented with their own experiences (or the memories that they have of parents or grandparents talking about an event). This sort of community building and social networking are very interesting aspects of these “born digital” archives – the objects on display might have once been analog, but now that they are digital they are creating new digital addendums or annotations.

Let me also raise a few other questions for the class (some that also stem from my own reading of Dan Cohen’s article on the “Future of Preserving the Past.” First, how do we control for authenticity with these “active archives”? Of course preserving the thoughts and memories of the “common man” is important, how do we authenticate (or do we need to) that memory as real or constructed? Secondly, by relying on digital contributions to these digital archives, what do we do with all of the potential analog media that might be ignored only because it is analog (of course things can be converted…)? I also wonder about the opt-in nature of such archives. What if someone didn’t want to contribute their material to a digital archive, but their material was of great importance to the project at hand? Are we creating an artificial bias toward digital contributions and artifacts? Of course, we have this difficulty with normal archives as well – some are public, others are private. There are laws to protect privacy and items can be closed for 30+ years in most western cultures without filing court papers to force their release.

On a more positive note – these new digital archives greatly increase the repository of information for future scholars to use. They allow for searchability that current archives cannot even try to mimic. Finally, the biggest issue with archives that are born digital is the issue of preservation, but we will address this in two weeks, so I don’t want to get into that now even though it is a related issue.

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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.