When the Internet was introduced to the world, untold possibilities came to life. No longer did a person have to do research simply from archives or monographs in libraries. Now they could get onto a computer and look up information. This was not just for the everyday person though. Scholars could also use the web to disseminate their findings, whether it be through online scholarly articles or through more informal blogs and digital exhibitions. On top of this a technology was born to research history in a whole new way.
One of the pioneers in this was new way of studying history was Edward Ayers, a professor of history at the time at the University of Virginia and now president of the University of Richmond. His project, called The Valley of the Shadow, explored a whole new idea of studying history which was through the creation of a digital archive. This particular archive documents two counties, on opposite sides of the Civil War, from the time of John Brown’s Raid through the era of Reconstruction. It included original letters, newspapers and speeches, census and church records found in two counties, Augusta County in Virginia and Franklin County in Pennsylvania. Since this time the use of digital archives as research methods has evolved greatly.
The Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) at the University of Richmond has exhibited this new way of studying history. One such way that history is now studied is through computational methods such as probability. Robert Nelson, director of the DSL, visited our seminar and described this kind of work on project entitled Mining the Dispatch. Taking OCR-readable text from the Richmond Times Dispatch from 1860-65, The program “views and generates graphs and charts that reveal some of the changing patterns in the topics that dominated the news during the Civil War in the capital of the Confederacy’s newspaper of record.” This program completely changes how a person can look at history. Instead of reading a historian’s view on studying archives and research, this program uses charts and graphs to show a computational categorizing of main themes presented from one newspaper. Things like this allow for a quick encapsulation of history without the use of a 300-page book.
This is not just a method that makes the creator of such a site important. It is also a means for the people to see history as it occurred. It brings a scientific aspect to studying history that makes it easy for a viewer to understand the main things that happened in history without having to go into great detail. It allows for a person who may not understand the great expanse of a topic to get a basic understanding of it. As a visual person myself. it allows for my eyes to focus on something I can understand almost immediately without a great expanse of attention and studying.
What this subject does not get at though is the deeper details that one can get from the information within the subject. Similar to Wikipedia, digital scholarship such as this allows for a person to see the main ideas of a topic and get a basic understanding, but it lacks the deeper details that allows for complete mastery of a subject. In other words it is better for comprehending big forests than the details of the individual trees. This is why I also think traditional historical scholarship is also just as important as these programs.
In the future I think these two ideas can build off of each other. A person writing a scholarly journal can use graphs and interactive maps as a tool to back up their research. It allows for a person who just wants a basic understanding of what the scholar is doing to view and understand the project, but someone who wants to know more can then read the actual article or book on the subject to better master the concept.
Digital research is evolving in a positive way. Both scholars and an Internet searcher can understand a concept both on its basic levels as well as gaining a complete mastery of the subject. With tools such as the internet historians should continue to evolve methods in which they present history, but they should continue to research dusty documents and present them in leather bound books to allow for mastery of a subject for the coming generations.