The future of the past.

 The articles for this week focused on the role of technology in preserving the past. In theory, because of this technology more people can become involved in these procedures. More people can contribute their stories and perspectives, and as a result, we can gain a fuller understanding of the past: a collaborative effort But again, this is in theory, in a perfect world. As all these articles express, while technology gives us the potential to reach out to more people in relation to history, we are far from perfecting a method for utilizing that technology. Considering how quickly things change in the technological world, it will be difficult to keep up. As Daniel Cohen pointed out in his article, we only saved one-thousandth of the 32 million websites that were in existence in September 2001. The sheer amount of information out there is staggering, enough to make your head spin. Organizing all that data, deciding what is worth keeping, is more complicated than ever before.

Folksonomies intrigue me, as I have dealt with them (and contributed to them) in other classes. Folksonomies allow users to create their own vocabulary for searching within a system. Brennan and Kelly write about giving contributors to their Hurricane Digital Memory Bank the power to tag the items they add to the collection. While this method allows contributors to feel more connected to the project and to feel like they have a little more power over their own objects and memories, it can also create problems in the long run. Folksonomies lack authority control. As a result, searching can become less precise than it might be if there was a controlled vocabulary. Joshua Brown notes, “…new media work largely defies one authorial hand, voice or vision.” It’s a collaborative effort, and while the sentiment is nice, it can lead to inefficient and frustrating searches for researchers.

I agree with Cohen when he states that just because there are new methods, it does not mean that the old ones will (or should) die out. He writes, “What will remain in the foreground are the qualitative concerns, especially the question of provenance raised by the solicitation of historical materials from unseen contributors.” We still have to question the ‘truth’ aspect of these new kinds of recorded histories. Use of new technologies will complement older, more traditional methods of recording history. I worked with an oral historian for a spell, and I have seen first-hand the incorporation of new technologies into the field. And while it’s true that digital media doesn’t take up much physical space, the amount of storage needed for recorded oral histories is huge, especially if you want your video and audio files to be high quality. Digital storage is expensive for those kinds of projects. I’m excited to see how these methods will continue to develop.

History in Film.

This week’s reading dealt with the presentation of history in the medium of film. Each article dealt with a slightly different topic: Toplin and Davis discussed popular film and how creative license is often employed when dealing with a historical topic cinematically. Frisch and Glassberg both explored the genre of the historical documentary and the way oral history is used within that style of filmmaking. It is apparent through the articles that the public is invested in history in film. It sparks strong emotion in viewers, as Glassberg shows us through the letters to Ken Burns about his documentary, The Civil War. Both The Civil War and Vietnam relied heavily on oral histories to tell a story. As evident from the letters, this kind of presentation of history captured viewers’ imaginations. I kept thinking about Rosenzweig and Thelen’s study. In their article, The Presence of the Past, they note that when people ranked the trustworthiness of a source, conversations with someone who was there received a mean score of 7.8, while movies and television programs received a 5.0 (21). I feel like these documentaries are an interesting combination of those two things – eyewitness accounts on a screen. Frisch warns that in using these oral histories, we need to be aware that they have the power to create a new authority that may contradict the historical facts. Presentation is key to interpretation.

The articles by Toplin and Davis discuss the more mainstream, creatively interpreted versions of historical films. Both recognize that while the historian has a place in the making of a film, the directors, producers, and writers will take creative license. Characters might be combined, details might be left out, and important events may be skipped because of time constraints. There isn’t as much room for expounding within a two or three-hour time frame; that job is better left to the documentary makers. But where do you draw the line? How do you create an accurate point in history within those constraints? Davis deals with this by writing a book about the process of the making of The Return of Martin Guerre. This gives her the opportunity to discuss why certain things were left out or altered from the fact-based version of the story. She takes responsibility for providing a more in-depth study of a film, “to bring to the debate both an understanding of the possibilities of film and a knowledge of the past” (Davis, 48). This complements Toplin’s article nicely. Toplin goes into the research methods of historians studying film and discusses three different levels of research. At the third level (did anyone else keep thinking of Inception?), historians begin to study the details of the filmmaking process and the production history. This kind of research can give new insight into the interpretation of a film and can help us to understand some of the reasoning behind the alterations of historical fact.

Oral history and sense of place.

Oral History and Public Memory addresses the incorporation of interviews in the process of presenting history. Like many of the other books we have read, Shopes and Hamilton collected a variety of articles discussing oral history and the ways in which these accounts are utilized. They present the articles in three sections, effectively categorizing them as relevant to heritage, identity and community, and the potential changes oral histories can bring about. I really like this format, as I feel I got a diverse overview of the way oral history can be used and the potential impact it can have.

The aspect of sense of place came up frequently in these articles, and I noticed its presence in my own interviewing experience as well. The woman I interviewed kept talking about her neighborhood and how it has changed over the years. She kept pointing in different directions (even though we were inside) and talking me through the geography of what it once was and what it is today. This sense of place, as we've read in the Glassberg book, is a powerful theme in peoples' memories. In the chapter on Aboriginal people of Australia, Maria Nugent writes, "For history to inform heritage, it needed to plot its narratives in space as well as in time" (50). She talks about how you can't really try and prod an interviewee into naming the significance of a place; the significance is embedded in the stories they tell. Sean Field also addresses sense of place in his chapter about Cape Town and the residents of the displaced neighborhoods of Langa and District Six. He describes sense of place as “…an imaginative act that combines ongoing sensory inputs from the surrounding social and physical landscape with a person’s internal world of selected and constructed memories” (111). There is power in physical space, and whether or not that place still exists in the physical world is beside the point. In these interviews, we get examples of the connection to buildings, waterways, trees, and more. By grounding themselves in a tangible space, interviewees create a safe place for memory, a safe place to talk about the past, even if it is difficult. Place becomes a character in their stories.

Selma Thomas also talks about space in here article, but in relation to the presentation of oral histories. She discusses the ways in which oral histories can be presented in museums and how visitors might interact with these unique artifacts. The spot where an oral history is exhibited within a museum is going to affect the way in which a visitor interprets it. A secluded corner will make the listener feel privy to private information, whereas an interview presented in a prominent spot will seem to give the narrative more authority (89). I suppose my point is that space and sense of place are consistently intertwined with our interpretation of the past, and we see this through its presence in oral accounts as well as in presentation of those narratives. 

Archival power.

Archive Stories is a collection of essays that explores the meaning of an archive and researchers interactions with these spaces. Each chapter addresses a different archive and the experience each research had while working within them. An archive becomes much more than a place to house objects as we begin to consider the political, social, and personal relationships between archives, their keepers, and their users. As Craig Robertson wrote in his chapter about his research on the passport, archives mold national character, “prioritizing and privileging specific stories and peoples” (71). The collections are going to be biased from their creation and organization. What should be saved? Who gets to decide? Who gets to see what? How should everything be cataloged? Tony Ballantyne writes about his experience with the archives of Samuel Peal and how that particular collection is being marginalized within the larger New Zealand archives. That collection made him rethink and restructure his view on empire: an event that made him scrap almost his entire project to start fresh. And yet, because that particular collection does not fit neatly into the current national narrative, it is pushed to the margins. The state has great power in the framing of what is considered significant, and significance is in the eye of the beholder. Those with the power get to decide who sees what, as we gather from Ghosh’s interactions with India’s archives. By withholding information, archivists can push the interpretation of history in a particular direction.

That being said, archives are indispensable repositories for history. All of the historians in this book interact with archives and stress the importance of these places for study. I found particularly relevant Renee Sentilles essay about archives and the Internet. More and more, we are conducting research from the comfort of our own homes, trolling the web for sources. Sentilles argues that we lose something essential by limiting ourselves to this form of research. She writes, “losing oneself in a pile of textbooks in the back of a library brings a measure of contemplation that easily surpasses impatiently surfing the Web” (153). Some sort of context is lost. This hit home for me, for I know that I am guilty of conducting much of my research through online databases and the like. The convenience factor is hard to ignore, but perhaps we do miss something. John Randolph ends his essay mentioning how one of the letters within the Bakunin collection has the words “To be burned” written in the margin (226). One can read about this letter in articles online or within another text, but those may not mention this telling detail. Randolph ponders how this is changing as digitization becomes more widespread; the need to visit the actual archive becomes less vital. We’ll be able to see a scan of the document containing that detail.  But I think Sentilles is right – that we will miss something if we stop utilizing archives. That time to think within a space as powerful as an archive, housing history, is invaluable.