This blog post is by guest author David J. Staley, Director of the Goldberg Center at the Department of History at Ohio State University.
Being an historian today is not like it was 20 years ago when I earned my PhD.
How we research
How historians access and use documents has been irrevocably altered. More and more documents (but far from every one) are being digitized every day, which is changing the way we engage in research. Historians have built up a heroic myth of the scholar who, like Indiana Jones, travels the world to sift out documents from dusty archives, unseen by human eyes in hundreds of years…There is certainly less romanticism in sitting in your living room with a laptop searching a database. “The search” as a way to conduct research clearly means greater convenience and less travel, but searching databases is leading to a new way to examine old documents. As more documents are digitized and stored in ever growing databases, those data can be analyzed and interpreted in new ways. In his article for our Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective e-magazine, historian David Steigerwald argued that in the 1950s and 60s sociologists and other social scientists used the concept of “alienation” to describe the root cause of a broad range of social problems. Steigerwald argued that we no longer use the term “alienation” to describe social ills as we once did. Steigerwald’s thesis was based upon extensive reading of a sizable literature, but not nearly as sizable as all of the books digitized on Google Books. We can now query that large list of books for the term “alienation.” And it turns out that the “Steigerwald thesis” is born out: when we search for the word “alienation” using Google’s n-gram viewer, we discovered that the use of the word “alienation” did seem to grow in the 50s and 60s and spiked sometime in the 1980s, and has been declining since.
Google Books Ngram Viewer
This simple example demonstrates that such “data mining” explorations of enormous amounts of texts facilitates new interpretations and new insights, allowing historians to ask and answer questions that would have required an army of research assistants years of combing through innumerable libraries and archives.
How We Represent the Past
The Virtual Wunderkammer on Second Life
When I first started teaching, my students would ask me, rather than reading the book, “Can we watch the movie?” I instruct graduate students today who are entering the teaching profession “Prepare yourself for students asking you ‘Can we play the video game?’” 3-D modeling, virtual reality, simulations, other kinds of visualizations offer a new canvas upon which we can represent the past. At the Goldberg Center, we have been experimenting with such 3-D environments by using Second Life. Within this space, we have created the Virtual Wunderkammer, an analogical collection of objects that one can move through like a museum exhibition. Like its 18th century precursors, our digital “cabinet of curiosities” collects found objects and arranges them in a themed space; the objects here are seemingly unrelated to each other but are associatively joined by the common theme of “embodiment,” that is, each object shows the human body representing abstract ideas and concepts (everything from “Mother Russia” to “Blind Justice” to personifications of ideas.) Virtual worlds allow us display possibilities different from that offered to viewers in physical exhibition spaces: our next plan is to “layer” more objects on top of these, at higher and higher levels. A viewer could then “fly” up into the space to view these objects as well.
Chicago Cultural Center - Claudia Cassidy Theater: Nov. 5, 2:30 PM
Tags: art history, technology, digital humanities, data mining, Second Life, virtual worlds
