The Leisurely Historian…

History isn’t cool.

I was reading through sepoy’s Polyglot Manifesto (part 2) and came across the following:

…what if I reimagined the text anew. What if I scanned, annotated, tagged all five manuscripts and the translation into a comprehensible data-structure
and presented the text so that the reader could peel, as it were, the
layers of various recensions; read the translation against the
manuscripts; follow the thread or theme in and out of various chapters?
And coolest of all: What if my reader could annotate and tag and link
my medieval persian text to another medieval persian text and another
still? What if the texts spoke to one another and threads connect the
reader, the text and the historian?
(emphasis mine…)

sepoy’s using two or three meanings to the term "cool," here, although I think they’re almost inextricably linked in today’s web 2.0 world. The most obvious, there’s the sense of the word "cool" as "hip." In another sense, the word can be used to less specifically mean "novel." And then, of course, because it’s impossible to leave the guy behind completely, there’s the Marshall McLuhan sense of the word– as in "hot" and "cool" media:

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that
extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state
of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition."
A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very little visual information
is provided. the ear is given a meager amount of information. Telephone
is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a
meager amount of information. And speech is a
cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has
to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave
so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore,
low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion
by the audience.  Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has
very different effects on the user from a cool
medium like the telephone.

(From Understanding Media)

I have to briefly digress, and say that the internet, especially in its more recent form as web 2.0, actually completely breaks down McLuhan’s division of hot and cool. Is a hot medium? Well, the computer is actually rather "high-definition," so yes– there’s a very precise relay of information. There’s very little "static." Is it a cool medium? Absolutely– despite the high level of definition, it is more participatory than any electronically-mediated medium McLuhan could have imagined in his lifetime– he passed on in 1980. However, the level of "definition" is illusory, because there is no beginning or end to "the internet," and no singular reading. It’s high-definition from single web page to single web page, "well filled with information," but the "edges" bleed. Hypermedia is almost like frostbite. The internet is so cool it feels hot.

sepoy, and others like him in the Digital Humanities, see the future of our discipline shifting toward a "cooling" of History. Historians like hot media. They like books. They like being able to craft their argument, control the ways their work is interpreted and used. And this is an understandable impulse.

But the argument for the Digital Humanities makes sense to me. By using new media’s ability to increase participation, Historians can raise awareness of History– not as an event or single narrative, or a set of facts in temporal order, but as a process of understanding, as a whole set of methodologies and techniques of interpretation and evaluation, as a form of textual analysis.

There’s a widely circulated quotation from Diane Feinstein during the hearings about the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian back in 1995, "…is it really the role to interpret history, rather than just simply to put forward historical facts…? …I was a history major. In the days when I studied the text… was essentially a recitation of fact, leaving the reader to draw their own analysis…"*

This is the popular view of History, among a large portion of the population– even, obviously, among the well-educated and powerful in this country.

Interactivity and new media give us a chance to help rectify this situation, to show that "doing history" is always, and inherently, a process of making choices, of highlighting and omission, of reconstructing the past in relevant ways, and ultimately, is a manner of understanding not the past, but the present.

_____________________

* This quote can be found in multiple articles, it was a bit of a flashpoint. I found it in an article by James Gardner from The Public Historian (Vol. 26, No. 4) however, the citation for the quote in this article is mis-attributed, so I cannot vouch for the accuracy.

In response to Karin’s question, "Is there hope for those of us with no style?" I just want to offer a resounding "Yes!"

To put it bluntly, having a cool, ultra-high-functioning, slick-looking web page is great. It’s a good goal, after all, attractive things work better. That said, this is a difficult goal. Personally, I’m never going to have a good color sense. I know that about myself, and when it comes to my "art," I’ve found ways around it. You can’t get around it on the web, really. Color’s ubiquitous.

HOWEVER, let’s put aside that goal of the cool, ultra-high-functioning, slick-looking web page. Let’s start by going for something more obtainable:

Let’s start by trying to design web sites that don’t suck.

Blunt, I know, but it’s the truth. And in even better news, there is someone out there who takes it upon himself to show us web pages that suck, and explain what they did wrong. thus sparing us from making the same mistakes. If blogs are a bit much reading for you, he has a YouTube account, where you can watch films where he tries to navigate suck-y web pages and provides color commentary. It’s fun and educational, check it out.

Here’s one I enjoyed:

…And with a new look, that I think is kinda exciting. I finally gave in to the popular belief that serif fonts don’t work online, and that full justifies are bad web design.

Moreover, I added a bit more color to the place, and I’ve got that pretty header up there. That one’s the result of my second-semester History and Web Design class… I wanted to create an overall look between this site and the portfolio site for that class. Something about creating a "personality" or a "brand" for my web-presence.

Not to mention that I’ll probably be setting up a blog over on that site rather than here at some point. So yeah, greetings from the new Leisurely Historian ™!

Look here for some new material in the next few weeks… there’s a couple things I’ve got brewing, and a follow-up to a recent post.

Braudel’s first volume of “The Mediterranean” is a great work of
scholarship. It certainly displays a great mastery of a variety of
topics, a knowledge that is notable in both its depth and breadth. It’s
also a logical inclusion in the syllabus of an historiography class, as
Braudel is fundamentally attempting to shift the focus of what had been
previously considered historical thought—a trend that would only proliferate in the next
half-century, ending in the current state of affairs, where the
sub-disciplines of History are so numerous and compartmentalized that
sometimes it seems they can hardly recognize one another.

Braudel attempts to refocus the discipline, which he seems to see as
overly focused on the political, military, and biographical. His
response is to produce a work that moves from the socio-geographic to
the socio-economic and demographic. It’s definitely well-written,
well-researched, and full of those curious tidbits that keep a reader
interested when reading a rather dry history text.

While my attention
wandered at times, I found the book intensely interesting at others.

One thing that particularly grabbed my interest was the section on mail
and couriers on pages 355-371, as it seemed to give a much deeper
background to something I found interesting in Habermas’s “Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere,” but which Habermas unfortunately
glossed over in a matter of a few paragraphs.

Another was his repeated
use, in his socio-geographic description of the mountain ranges of the
Mediterranean, of the word “civilization.” Unlike Prescott a hundred
years earlier, Braudel seems to use the word in a very value-neutral
sense, as a complex that includes both positive features like improved
quality of life, refinements, etc., but also features negative
qualities, such as greater and more widespread despotism, heightened
class disparity, corruption of the clergy, etc. It seemed a very modern,
progressive view.

All of this aside, however, I had an overall negative response to the
book. It seemed to me that Braudel was over-reaching with this work—he
created a book with an impossible scope, and thus inevitably, the result
is mixed at best. To attempt a history of such a large area is a very
difficult task, and to do so through multiple lenses, without a single
unifying grand narrative or theoretical structure, seems downright
foolhardy.  The result is a book that is meandering, at time confusing,
and desultory in its organization and evidence.

While it may or may not
have been the author’s decision, not indexing the first volume within
the first volume seems to me to be a horrible decision, one that reduces
the use of the book as a reference, while the complaints I’ve listed
above make it highly unlikely I’ll ever decide to re-read the book at
leisure.

That said, as someone who is very interested in historical cultural
geography, the book fascinated me, as it seems to represent just that,
in its nascent state, before the birth of cultural theory and cultural
history.