Theme Issue 60
Digital
History and Theory:
Changing Narratives, Changing Methods, Changing Narrators
Cover image: By Javier Miranda on Unsplash.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MARCH 2023 “DIGITAL HISTORY AND THEORY” CONFERENCE, VISIT THE CONFERENCE WEBPAGE.
Articles
+ STEFAN TANAKA, The Old and New of Digital History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 60 (December 2022).
This article reflects on the expectations and changes that digital technologies have brought to history, activities that are increasingly codified as digital history. Because of the breadth of digital technologies and communicative media, the contours of a digital history are still unclear, so I frame my discussion with two potential narratives that begin from different ideas that emerged from World War II weapons research. One narrative begins with Roberto Busa and the application of a computer to find concordances in the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The emphasis here is on the application of computer technologies to the practice of history. The second narrative begins with Vannevar Bush’s essay “As We May Think” and focuses on digital technologies as a key element in an information system. This beginning invites a parallel between inscription technologies (especially the movable-type press) and knowledge systems. Both narratives imbibe the modern faith in technology to improve; the “new” is better, but the latter better involves humans and societies. Despite important differences between them, both narratives lead to an inquiry into the foundations of our modern knowledge system. In the case of history, the question is whether a knowledge system that was developed in the nineteenth century and designed to encompass and order the world into one system is still apposite in our digital world. I close by suggesting that one such presumption that needs to be reconsidered is the idea of the past as a prior and distant timeform. A shift from “the past” to “pasts” opens history to a broader field of previous happenings and a reconsideration of chronological time, of change, and to other modes of transmission, such as storytelling.
+ SHAHZAD BASHIR, Composing History for the Web: Digital Reformulation of Narrative, Evidence, and Context, History and Theory, Theme Issue 60 (December 2022).
I recently published A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures, a digital book that presents a new way to understand Islam. This article describes the process and conceptual work that went into designing the book’s interface. It emphasizes that hypertext enabled through digital means is not intrinsically more dynamic than print since work in both forms requires equally intensive hermeneutical effort. However, the digital realm provides a more expansive spectrum of tools to formulate concepts and to build on them. Digital presentation can be integrated into processes of theorizing, describing, and advocating that form the core of scholarship in the humanities. The article focuses on three areas—narrative, evidence, and context—that are central to modern historical work. My book’s interface demonstrates that web capabilities are compositional tools whose deployment should be mulled over in a manner similar to how authors treat writing and editing. Moreover, we should take account of the quotidian fact that, in our environment, information and knowledge reach us extensively via computer-based mediation. Whether in books or in articles, academic work is assimilated through piecemeal delivery rather than bound volumes. Instead of romanticizing traditional forms whose import may be diminishing, historians and other humanities scholars can create new arguments by being attentive to the web’s capabilities and to the current social conditions of possibility pertaining to the circulation of knowledge. Facility with digital composition can then feed back into all forms of humanistic thinking and writing.
+ JESSE W. TORGERSON, Historical Practice in the Era of Digital History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 60 (December 2022).
The current digital historical moment is an opportunity to formulate a new theory of historical practice. Our field’s long-standing passive reliance on the widespread explanation of historical practice as deriving information from “primary sources” is unhelpful, incoherent, misleading, and an active inhibition to new opportunities. Our reliance on an incoherent explanation means our students are not given a precise description of our historical practice but instead learn to imitate us by gradually adopting disciplinary norms conveyed through exemplary models and the critique of work performed. Furthermore, our reliance on a misleading explanation of method means we lack a common terminology with which we all can coherently explain to our peers what we actually do. We know this, and yet we have provided no alternative. The current moment offers an opportunity to provide a theory of the practice of history that encompasses contemporary, traditional, and even ancient historical methods: capturing sources, producing data, and creating facts. Wide acceptance and implementation of a sources-data-facts model of historical practice will accelerate student understanding, improve communication with other disciplines, erase the apparent distinction between (so-called) analog and digital history, and provide a framework for the publication of historical data as a valuable end in and of itself.
+ LAURA K. MORREALE, History as Antidote: The Argument for Documentation in Digital History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 60 (December 2022).
The ephemeral nature of computer-enabled historical work is a well-documented concern within the field of history. The quick pace of technological change often renders digital scholarship obsolete, which in turn encourages historians to retreat to the stable and durable comfort of print, even as digital methodologies enrich our research and expand the audience for it. What has been missing so far in the conversation about digital history is a clear understanding of how it differs from traditional historical products, what can be gained from it, and how we might document the work undertaken using these machine-based methodologies. Because it is best understood as a process rather than as a product, digital history must have a history of its own to tether it to the scholarly community and to ensure that it endures past the active phase of any project. This article argues that digital historians should catalog their work using a normalized template following the Digital Documentation Process, a guide for producing documentation that is suitable for computer-based historical scholarship and tailored to its specific parameters. Self-documentation is beneficial to those who create digital history and those who consume it. It is urgent to establish a field-wide expectation that digital history will be consistently documented as a matter of course, lest we lose scholarship that has already been produced and forgo the enormous opportunities that computer-enabled methodologies offer to historians.
+ SILKE SCHWANDT, Opening the Black Box of Interpretation: Digital History Practices as Models of Knowledge, History and Theory, Theme Issue 60 (December 2022).
Digital history is more than just the implementation of algorithmic and other data practices in the practice of history writing. It places our discipline under a microscope and enables us to focus in on what history writing is in the first place: writing about the past under specific social and societal conditions. This article argues for a closer look at the traditions of history writing in order to understand its principles and to determine what the digital condition contributes to historiography. Does the work of historians actually change in principle, or does digital history instead reflect the digital condition under which we operate? The article begins with a reflection on the works of Wilhelm Dilthey and Michel de Certeau to discuss how the society in which the historian writes influences the practices of interpretation. The article then presents what can be understood as the digital condition of our present societies and shows how algorithms function as “black boxes” that influence our social interactions, communication, and understanding of the world. The article’s third part brings together the earlier discussions of practices of history writing and the digital condition in order to examine the role of modeling for knowledge production in the sciences and the humanities. The closing argument then focuses on the use of visualizations in digital history as an example of the operational use of models of knowledge in opening the “black box” of interpretation.
+ STEPHEN ROBERTSON, The Properties of Digital History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 60 (December 2022).
This article offers a definition of digital history that focuses on the core affordances of the personal computer and the process by which those properties come to be exploited. I begin by outlining the two properties of computers that I argue define digital history: they process data and (as Janet H. Murray noted) provide an immersive and interactive medium. I then examine how digital historians in the United States have employed those affordances. That process has proceeded unevenly, with computers having been used as a medium before they were employed to process data, and has produced additive forms—digital archives, digital public history, data analysis published in print—that rely on existing formats rather than on the affordances of computers. While such forms are a necessary step toward a more fully realized digital history, their prevalence suggests that it will take some time for that process to play out. The final section looks to recently published and forthcoming long-form digital arguments for the direction of that development. Examples from Stanford University Press’s Digital Projects series point to some of the ways that the data analysis and the immersive and interactive medium of the computer might be combined.
+ MARNIE HUGHES-WARRINGTON, Toward the Recognition of Artificial History Makers, Theme Issue 60 (December 2022).
Artificial intelligence is a historical discipline. This does not simply mean that its history can be written. It is historical on account of its recursive basis for action: its systems turn to prior beliefs—often through multiple steps or layers—to make recommendations for the present or predictions for the future. Using the two rooms approach of Alan Turing’s imitation game, I highlight the potential for machine and human histories to be recognized via at least the idea of weak artificial intelligence. This recognition illuminates the mixed nature of the logic of history, combining deductions and endoxa. Finally, I note that illuminating and exploring this mixed logic of history signals a turn to historiographical metaphysics with Aristotelian features and, thus, the recognition of histories by professional historians as only part of a historiographical world. This signals that the recognition of machine and human history makers does not simply turn on the acknowledgement of imitation.
+ WULF KANSTEINER, Digital Doping for Historians: Can History, Memory, and Historical Theory Be Rendered Artificially Intelligent? History and Theory, Theme Issue 60 (December 2022).
Artificial intelligence is making history, literally. Machine learning tools are playing a key role in crafting images and stories about the past in popular culture. AI has probably also already invaded the history classroom. Large language models such as GPT-3 are able to generate compelling, non-plagiarized texts in response to simple natural language inputs, thus providing students with an opportunity to produce high-quality written assignments with minimum effort. In a similar vein, tools like GPT-3 are likely to revolutionize historical studies, enabling historians and other professionals who deal in texts to rely on AI-generated intermediate work products, such as accurate translations, summaries, and chronologies. But present-day large language models fail at key tasks that historians hold in high regard. They are structurally incapable of telling the truth and tracking pieces of information through layers of texts. What’s more, they lack ethical self-reflexivity. Therefore, for the time being, the writing of academic history will require human agency. But for historical theorists, large language models might offer an opportunity to test basic hypotheses about the nature of historical writing. Historical theorists can, for instance, have customized large language models write a series of descriptive, narrative, and assertive histories about the same events, thereby enabling them to explore the precise relation between description, narration, and argumentation in historical writing. In short, with specifically designed large language models, historical theorists can run the kinds of large-scale writing experiments that they could never put into practice with real historians.
+ TAMIKA GLOUFTSIS, Implicated Gaming: Choice and Complicity in Ludic Holocaust Memory, History and Theory, Theme Issue 60 (December 2022).
Holocaust memorial sites and institutions have begun to embrace new media and digital technologies as methods of communication, public engagement, and memorialization. Despite increasing numbers of interactive digital media projects focused on Holocaust education, there is a significant gulf between the topics addressed by digital Holocaust works and those conceptualized and studied at a higher level in scholarly Holocaust literature. Most notably, challenging questions regarding the categories of bystandership, complicity, and perpetration are largely ignored in favor of traditional victim-focused narratives. I suggest that, in their eagerness to adopt virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) technologies, digital Holocaust memory projects have neglected the significant potential of nonimmersive video games to address questions regarding bystandership and complicity. By moving away from the perceptual immersion of VR and toward the ludic and simulative arguments of video games, digitally interactive Holocaust projects may be able to lessen the risks of over-immersion and retraumatization that are antithetical to critical historical thinking and understanding. This article examines the 2012 game Papers, Please as an example of how video games can present sophisticated arguments about human agency, bystandership, and complicity. By placing players in a historical problem space laden with impossible moral choices, Papers, Please demonstrates the systemic forces that structure human behavior under extreme, violent, and authoritarian conditions. I argue that Holocaust-based ludic digital media modeled after Papers, Please could explore bystandership and complicity in similarly nuanced and powerful ways, potentially touching on academic Holocaust concepts such as the “choiceless choices” of “the gray zone.” Addressing these topics in ludic historical media could help to bridge the gap between popular and scholarly understandings of the Holocaust in the twenty-first century.
Review Essays
+ N. KATHERINE HAYLES, review of Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, History and Theory, Theme Issue 60 (December 2022).
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition offers important tools to understand and, more importantly, transform the algorithms perpetuating and intensifying discrimination in North American societies. Unpacking her work’s implications, this essay offers seven approximations—ranging from eliminating bias to rethinking the symbiotic relations between humans and computational media—as solutions to the problems she identifies. While some approximations reveal limitations in others, the clashes between them are due to the scope of the frameworks they employ. All are useful in the struggle to comprehend, in both small and large terms, the nature of the profound changes in the contemporary condition as computational media penetrate ever more deeply into the fabrics of our lives.
+ ESTHER WRIGHT, review of Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, edited by Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott., History and Theory, Theme Issue 60 (December 2022).
Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, edited by Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott, was a significant publication in the establishment of historical (digital) game studies, a field that has since continued to grow. This review essay notes some of the key interventions made by the edited collection and its scope in accounting for the complexities of digital historical games. It also reflects on what the book represented at the early stages of the discipline and the ways in which scholarly approaches have developed (or not) in the decade since its publication. In doing so, it focuses on several key areas that arose in Playing with the Past and have remained central to historical game studies. In particular, this essay examines questions of digital games’ relationship to “professional,” written history; whether games can (or need to) teach their players about the past; and the troublesome reoccurrence of and reliance on certain difficult terms, such as “historical accuracy” and “historical authenticity.” This essay argues that all three of these fundamental aspects of our current approaches to historical game studies require further criticality to build on the foundational work of Playing with the Past as well as the vital work published in the field over the last decade.
+ CHRISTIAN WACHTER, review of Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History, edited by David R. Ambaras and Kate McDonald, History and Theory, Theme Issue 60 (December 2022).
How do we adequately capture multivocal history? What are good ways to represent multiple narratives and arguments in an open-ended fashion? The online publication Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History, edited by David R. Ambaras and Kate McDonald, addresses these questions for modern East Asian spatial history. Mainly a tool for teaching and research, the website works by interlinking historiographical information and primary sources. Complementarily, Bodies and Structures 2.0 displays all its contents via a set of visualizations. In this review essay, I argue that this multimodal format is innovative on two ends. First, the site convincingly implements what earlier research on hypertext and visualization has long sought—namely, to exceed traditional text and its limitations to represent intricate matters neatly. This is because of these media formats’ semiotic efficiency in analytically representing complex wholes and their parts. Second, Bodies and Structures 2.0 successfully translates its multivocal concept of spatial history into an interactive multimodal user experience. All in all, it demonstrates that representing concepts is not just about the applied language of narrative and argumentation; it is also about the publication’s form. Bodies and Structures 2.0, therefore, is an exciting work from the perspective of theory of history.