The Challenges of Cyberspace and Compiling History on the Web

                Joshua Brown’s Article “History and the Web” was an interesting account of how older historical mediums such as museums, newspapers, and even simply type-faces have begun to conglomerate and amalgamate in cyberspace. Brown points out that much like the woodblock cartoons of popularity in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the internet cartoon or weekly image panel is quickly gaining cultural capital (interests, views, advertisement.) This he claims is partly result of the image heavy context of the web, which spark concerns over whether our culture is somehow degrading from a people who get information through reading versus the quick fix of animations and images. However, Brown makes another characterization of the internet as also being similar to the museum space which was his reason for discussing his 3D, wireframe image, flash driven site; The Lost Museum. Basically, he is arguing that by looking at concerns over passive and active scholarship in images and text, as well as problems over integration of historical information and sources from oral history sound bites, photography, to film, and text we run into many of the same problems we have found in the development of the public history profession. Brown argues, correctly I believe, that in order to determine how to integrate these sources in a streamlined and academic fashion (without leaving out the option of links to more information functioning like an index) we must look at the way past mediums, particularly the museum space, have been utilized to understand how to begin shaping cyberspace.

                Daniel Cohen’s article “The Future of Preserving the Past” is the other side of the discussion Brown started. Rather than concerns over the ways in which to integrate different mediums of public history via the net, Cohen is considering the issues in the very shift in the ways we record and process information in public history, specifically between the Pearl Harbor incident in 1941 and 9/11/2001. Essentially what is at stake is there is a huge wealth of information, images, and accounts due to new technologies making it easier for non-professionals to capture and save historical information. However, this same wealth of digital information lacks the same sort of piece by piece archival process of its analog predecessors, and it is simply too much information to sort and archive efficiently. Immediately concerns of a sources authenticity as well as questions of how to preserve digital media if it exists in no physical location emerge. Although Cohen finds that, for the most part, people do not falsify electronic sources, the bigger question is how do we preserve something that exists in such an unstable format as the web? Essentially, Cohen’s answer is similar to that of Brown’s in that the only solution to save this data and to utilize its wealth and richness of detail is to create a team of archivists and start processing the information. Both of these articles were interesting accounts of how public history scholarship is being changed by the technology of the internet, but at the same time, the answers to this mutating record can be found in the old methodologies of past historic representations.

Film and Public Identification with History

Glassberg’s Chapter entitled “Watching” makes an excellent point about film/television/media, history, and the public’s sense of identity. Burn’s series on the civil war reflected that not only was knowledge of the history of the civil war interesting to the American public, but they were grateful to have someone lay out the facts and the pain of this historical identity. I can not help but think of old Spaghetti Westerns starring Clint Eastwood such as “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” or “The Outlaw Josey Wales” in which the civil war is portrayed, without mention of slavery, as a hardship the south had to bear, complete with carpet baggers and all. However, a large part of the appeal of the western is this iconic relation to American history and identity. One of the first things a student will learn in an undergraduate multi-cultural film class is that the two most recognizable actors in America are John Wayne, with a close second of Clint Eastwood.

Basically the problem is that, in spite of popular appeal and authority with public identity, can the media be trusted to present historical narratives? Frisch’s chapter entitled “Shared Authority” does an effective job of presenting the issue of historical evidence, ie first hand anecdotal or oral history accounts of Vietnam, by describing the difficulties that are inherent in the media art form as an editorial process. Every clip that is played or not played, every quote not juxtaposed with a quote from a opposing vantage, every choice and clip is a manipulation, a persuasion and suspension of disbelief in the authority of the screen. For instance, in Frisch’s retelling of the oral histories of the Vietnamese villagers juxtaposed with the accounts of US soldiers provides the two vantages of the brutality of war versus the “matter-of-fact” demeanor of the soldiers who won the battle.

However, I greatly enjoyed Toplin’s article on the power of cinema to engage and create historical dialogue, controversy, and sometime understanding of actual history=-) When film makes historical and cultural references it is citing a cultural heritage and identity that the viewers participate in and accept as their own. In this way film creates unity of cultural identity and stimulates cultural conversation. The best kinds of art can create catharsis, discomfort, revelation, awe, and wonder history and historical methods of telling narratives are not devoid of these same dramatic and aesthetic qualities as stories or spectacles. The histories we watch are the histories we identify as our own, the ones we are willing to buy on dvd.

The Heavy Hand of the State in Oral History...Until we go to the Museum?

                This week’s Book “Oral History and Public Memory” was another collection of essays focused on detailing the successes and challenges of utilizing oral history in public history professions. One bone I had to pick is with the chapter on the Smithsonian’s use of oral histories in the presentation of Japanese internment in the 40’s. Basically, as I read through the book I got an overwhelming sense of the state presence in the funding and proposal of oral history projects such as in Canada and Singapore. In Canada the state was attempting to craft a narrative which attempted to show the region’s historical past with Aboriginal people. However, emphasis kept falling back to the state’s use of these oral accounts to fuel the idea that this region emerged as a community through the founding of the French and English. Likewise in Singapore, the state started an oral history project, but because all of the communists had been driven out of the country, a lot of the stories of Japanese occupation there went untold. The account of the Ottoman Empire after WWI, the area had been leveled and the only histories to be told were the new people who populated the area, the shifting of state powers had once again limited the histories that remained to be told. 

                Then all of this was followed by the chapter on the Museum and the wonderful success of the Smithsonian in creating a good use of oral history. This chapter began by outlining the museums role as a cultural and educational institution, but said little about the National History Museum’s direction by the US government. Although I think this was an excellent example of the use of oral history to tell a difficult story and get a realistic sense of the past, where did the state go? I would be interested to read an article on how the Smithsonian funds research, such as oral histories, and what narratives are able to be told and which are simply marginalized or ignored. For instance, the Enola Gay exhibit had a great deal of oral history interviews and recordings of presidential speeches, and American soldiers in the war, yet this exhibit would be greatly problematized by such an exhibit as the one on Japanese interment. This, I feel, would be a truly contextualized approach that gave a more holistic view of the past and truly sparked discussion. Also, it would have been useful to have an analysis of the ways the state functions within  large museums like the Smithsonian in order to determine a better way to understand the rationale of governments shaping history to deliver their citizens ideology…but I guess I’ll just have to do that myself ;-)

Archives and the Knowledge-Power Relationship

Sorry for the late post folks, I had some personal issues to attend to.

Archive Stories was an interesting collection of essays about researcher’s various experiences in the archives of nations around the world. One theme seemed to be constant in each essay, the archive is socially and politically regulated source of social power for maintaining social hierarchies. I am reminded of Bruno Latour’s book Laboratory Life in which he analyzed lab culture to discover the way scientist go about procuring funding and legitimizing themselves as professionals, I read this book in a course on Social Constructivism. This is not to suggest that archives are all social constructions, even censored history tells a true story about the past (much like the old saying that even a broken clock is right twice a day.) However, the ways in which we restrict and allow access and the interactions these researchers had with native archivists (whether through research cooperation or simply passports and visas) are telling of the larger cultural issues at hand. 

For instance, in Durba Ghosh’s essay “National Narratives and the Politics of Miscengenation” it became apparent that although the British seemed more anxious to provide links to a multicultural past, a lot of their searches came up empty. Why? Because, even though the UK is now interested in multicultural heritage as a balm to cool its past national sins of racism, the nation’s sins are logged in the archives by the ways in which the evidence which the community knows to have been there was not recorded due to concerns of national purity. The same goes for the account of the German archives; basically the author concedes that to use these archives like they aren’t broken by result of the Nazi party’s reign is ignoring the truth. 

Another prominent theme in this book of how archives reflect social constructions such as the boundaries of a Nation is found in the topic of political censorship, particularly in the Uzbekistan article “Without the Past There is To Future.” Basically, archives are places where international scholars come and throw themselves at the mercy of the government, and the social standards of the archivists. Trying to work on preserving a politically dangerous history is something suited more for soldiers than for mild mannered intellectuals. 

I found Jennifer Milligan’s insight in her article “What is an Archive?” into the works of Foucault and Derrida were incisive and telling of all of the “Archive Stories.” Institutions that regulate knowledge regulate the power of the state, the knowledge-power relationship can be seen throughout the professionalization of academic institutions as the sources of cultivated, properly informed citizens. Of course what it means to be properly informed will be defined by what the state desires from its citizens, whether it is to forget the past or simply to remember it in a certain light. Archives are the raw datum with which these institutions function, and the keepers of this information (censored or not) are important regulators of the social hierarchy, even if they are resistors of the established state, (as was the case in Uzbekistan.)

Drunken Civil War Re-Enactors and Marxist Liberal Invasion!

Overall Bodnar’s article “Celebrating the nation was an interesting analysis of the ways in which Centennial celebrations have been problematized through government bureaucratic organization, personal/regional historical hijacking, and rampant consumerism. The article begins with the history of the American Civil War Centennial which essentially was describe those in the Governmental Agencies involved with organizing the event as not only a misrepresentation of history but a completely irreverent dishonor to those meant to be commemorated. Comments like “they ought to have use live ammo” in civil war re-enactments or that Mississippi’s state focused tourist trap celebration was its “secession in 1961” characterized unmanageable and ultimately doomed attempt at governmental regulation of state economic interests, ie tourism. These efforts may have been doomed for failure merely by the attempt to claim all who fought in the Civil war as heroes during a socially uneasy period, and I’m sure drunken civil war re-enactors and KKK displays next to confederate flags did not help.

However, Bodnar characterizes the American Revolution Bicentennial celebrations as beginning with much nobler hopes of widespread civic involvement and multiple cultural voices in the historical dialogue. Yet, there always has to be a wrench in the works. Rifkin and his People’s Bicentennial Movement is a man after my own heart. Although the article slightly unfavorably characterized him as a leftist upstart, he somehow managed to garner some public and political support to audaciously discredit the ARBA. He basically managed to infiltrate a government funded agency (the ARBA) with representatives of various marginalized social groups and “radical” social views. Although this may have taken away from the ARBA’s plan of a display of national unity, their objections are truly representative of the revolutionary American spirit, and the freedom of speech and assembly that the Revolution was fought for. Kudos to Rifkin.

Basically Bodnar demonstrates that regional and cultural interests inevitably get tied to any project especially when there is federal money at hand to stimulate industry and tourism. However, the main fault of the Civil War Commemorators was their dogmatic adherence to National ideals in order to efface a regional or cultural character to the histories. This simply won’t do because when the government makes decisions such as putting the main Centennial celebration in Virginia, another state is losing out. It is unfair to appropriate history in this way as a commodity that can be sold in order to promote one culture’s agendas but to stymie another’s. However, even at the state level there is always the possibility of misrepresenting a community or under representing a marginalized group.