I am working on identifying the 365 names that are in the 113 extant letters that Ned Brownson wrote to his sister between 1862 and 1864. The significant names are the ones that are mentioned more than once. The approach I am taking is to get through the list once. Then concentrate on identifying the ones that were mentioned frequently. As of today, I am about two-thirds of the way through the first pass.
End of the Semester
How do I feel about the Digital History class at the end? Simultaneously exhausted, relieved, and sad it’s over. Packing 16 weeks of material and absorption into 5 weeks was a challenge, for the teacher as well as the students.
I imagine many of the improvements I would suggest are mostly addressed by just having more time available to try out the software applications, and work on the projects. It would have been nice to have had time in a class working session to practice with WordPress blog posts and media uploads. The projects we did and looked at required some time for reflection. In the five-week format, there just wasn’t much if there was any time for that.
Nonetheless, the class ended with a bang! Our last assignment was to listen to the podcast(s) that interested us from the Tattooed Historian and then write a blog post about our opinion of the efficacy of the digital humanities. I listened to his introductory podcast, and then one he did with Professor Walters, both very informative and worth a listen. See http://thetattooedhistorian.libsyn.com/
Since he lives nearby in Pennsylvania and as a favor to his friend Professor Walters, the Tattooed Historian came down and engaged the class in 2 hours of an interesting dialogue on how one goes about being a cutting-edge digital historian without a Ph.D. Yes. The Tattooed Historian really is tattooed. He has a lot of them, 35 I think, and all of them related to some aspect of his interest in history. One fascinating tidbit was the revelation that he had traveled to St. Louis to find the descendent tattoo shop of the tattoo artist that had tattooed approximately ten thousand soldiers during World War II and then had himself decorated with one of that artist classic designs. The shop still had World War II tattoo patterns even though they didn’t get many requests.
On a side note, I was surprised that many soldiers got tattoos in World war II. During my Vietnam service in the Marine Corps, we were threatened with court-martials if we got a tattoo. So, most didn’t. The Marine Corps logic was that too many tattoo recipients got hepatitis along with the tattoo from the needles and with a resultant weakening in unit end strength.
But I digress. The Tattooed Historian told us that his mission and business model lies in providing an outlet and legitimacy to those who want to pursue history, or research and write history without having to get a Ph.D. or necessarily have history as their primary focus or educational background. He is not suggesting that the History Ph.D. is not of value, just that history can be successfully made without one. And this is where my opinion on the digital humanities comes in. The information revolution, the internet, networked applications, the fall in the cost and the expansion of the availability of digital storage and network access, all have enabled the democratization of history and the broader humanities. Digital archives, laptop and handheld computers, audio, video production, and language translation capabilities have given research and production tools to the masses.
In my own experience, I took a lot of graduate history courses at Catholic University, but I only heard of Christopher Dawson, the first historian who held the Catholic History Chair at Harvard University, and a historian of the western civilization who rivals Toynbee and Quigley, because of Twitter. Another aside, Harvard had to pay to move Dawson’s book and manuscripts collection to Massachusetts from England, Dawson was a Brit, because Dawson’s personal collection of ancient sources was so superior or unique that Harvard’s collection didn’t measure up. Similarly, my American Government Masters was heavy in political philosophy, but again it was Twitter, Facebook, and new translation capabilities that exposed me to the Italian political philosopher, Augusto Del Noce, and the French political philosopher, Simone Weil. Their arguments on the post-World War II course of the humanities make the culture wars of the current day make sense. My own experience has given me an example of the democratization of the humanities and history.
The StoryMap, the Omeka exhibit, the Palladio network analysis that we did as projects in this class were all enabled by the internet, and by my picture taking capability in my cell phone. Many of the images I used or the Palladio dataset I put together were first taken by the camera in my cell phone. I found it interesting that the only items the Tattooed Historian has beyond what I have in digital capability with my laptop and cell phone and installed applications is a small investment in an audio device, microphones, an Adobe audio manager, and a tripod. Technology has enabled the democratization of history, and the humanities we can all access items that were only available to an elite before the internet, and we can all write and publish to a global audience our various histories. The price, though, as with all democratizations will be the need to assess authenticity, a point of the Tattooed Historian, and as one ABD historian once told me, accuracy, the mark of the historian is accuracy.
Working StoryMap and Digital Analysis
The exercise this week is to answer a few questions on the experience of doing the StoryMap project and then comment on the readings about using digital networking techniques.
Doing the Storymap in the time frame with a retreat and Father’s Day in the middle of it made it. An intense experience from a schedule perspective. In other words, I was crunched to get everything done in the StoryMap, and that’s why I am late with getting the Blog in. It came down to time on the StoryMap or the Blog, and the StoryMap won, although I did cut out time to read the articles.
I put together the text portion and the design of what I was going to do from a visual perspective using Scrivener. It was easier to see what I was doing that way. Once I had it about right in Scrivener, I put it in StoryMap and ran it through Grammarly while in StoryMap. My issue with Grammarly interface was sometimes the changes took and sometimes it didn’t. Although it could’ve been me not saving the edited result in StoryMap.
On the visual side, I planned the visuals for each slide and recorded some visual options in Scrivener, Once I had collected a range of visuals, I did a trial and error with them in StoryMap. I attempted to pick the visuals that were most closely aligned to the main point of the slide I was working on. I did try to use both a background and a foreground visual that were related. If I could work photoshop better and had more time, I would put some images together into one composite image to enhance the visual experience, and overcome some of the constraints that StoryMap imposes.
My biggest issue with the StoryMap exercise was staying in the 200-300-word limit. Edward’s text alone on arrival in Louisville started at over 300 words. So, I pretty much violated the 200-300-word guideline.
Overall, I was happy with the project. I didn’t need to spend much time in learning the tool. It’s pretty straight forward. The application has enabled me to undertake and complete a project I wanted to do for my family ever since Edward’s letter surfaced. I still have a few minor edits including the need to get the bibliography correct, and to provide a link to Edward’s original letter and my transcription. But once those are done, the story of Edward’s journey and the ability of anyone to access it will be complete and I can get on to other projects.
The readings this week are on the application of data analysis and visualization techniques to networks in history projects. Graham et al. in The Historian’s Macroscope Big Digital History, give a short history of the evolution of digital technologies to analyze networks and summarize some of their applications. The point they made that really resonated with me was, “Network approaches can be particularly useful at disentangling the balance of power, either in a single period or over time. A network, however, is only as useful as its data are relevant or complete. We need to be extremely careful when analyzing networks not to read power relationships into data that may simply be imbalanced.”
Network visualizations can look make people look more interrelated and intentional than was really the case. People are complicated and the data to adequately describe those complexities is seldom there in real time let alone in archival remnants available to the historian. The digital visualizations can make our analysis using incomplete data look more explanatory and precise than is the case and lead us to draw incorrect conclusions.
Lauren F.Klein addressed the incomplete data problem directly in The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings. She acknowledged that the gaps in the archival record are difficult to address. She reviewed Trouillot’s description that gaps in the archival records can occur in four ways: the making of sources, the making of archives, the making of narratives and the making of history defined as significance. Klein uses the case of James Hemmings, a former slave of Thomas Jefferson to illustrate that gaps concerning James came as much from the making of Jefferson’s archives, and earlier historians making of narratives and significance as from any loss of primary source material.
Klein shows that digital network analysis techniques can be used to show the significance of James role as a cook in the diplomatic household of Jefferson, and his importance to Jefferson. Yet even though the techniques can overcome gaps caused by the was the sources were stored, archived, retold and made significant, the digital methods still can’t help explain why James committed suicide, and never became the cook for Jeffersonian White House.
StoryMap a Journey
Today Professor Walters asked us to review and
comment on these StoryMap examples:
Game of Thrones: Arya’s Journey; Hieronymus Bosch: Garden of Earthly Delights
Before I get into my comments, a quick word on StoryMap. The website is an online capability mostly developed in Java by Northwestern University’s Knight Lab. The Knight Lab is a team of technologists and journalists who support innovation in the news media. For an overview, see https://storymap.knightlab.com/#overview
StoryMap gives one a free capability to make maps of journeys, broadly defined. The web site enables identification of a place and the sequential linking of places. One can input a text description about each location, and provide background and foreground images, or in the foreground case, linked videos. If one can code with Java, then one can add some capabilities and custom views.
On the two Storymaps reviewed, as one of the few people in the Universe who hasn’t followed the Game of Thrones, the StoryMap on Arya’s Journey was all new to me. The good part of the map was that as an outline of the story for the uninitiated, I could follow it. I really liked the attempt to link videos although except for one video, the video links didn’t work for me on panels one and three. Perhaps one needs an HBO account. The content creator of the Arya’s Journey changed the background colors of most the panels to provide a visual that aligned with the tone and content of the text. I got the visual point as an impression, but it made the images less clear, or the background image made the text difficult to read. Nonetheless, a great attempt and the matching of visual to the storyline helped my understanding of the feeling tone of the plot. Arya’s Journey showed me what one could do with videos (make sure the link works) and background and foreground images in combination.
With the Hieronymus Bosch Journey through the Garden of Earthly Delights, I am on the more familiar ground than with the Game of Thrones, but I must admit I never delved into its symbolism the way the content creator of this StoryMap did. The content creator used the Bosch painting as a background map, and then used subsections of the picture as a place. Then the text box was used to explain and interpret Bosch’s allegory. Just awesome! The best item in the journey and one written up by the Guardian (see https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/13/hidden-sheet-music-hieronymus-bosch-triptych-recorded) was the description of Bosch’s painted musical score on the backside of a defendant being judged. Of course, someone on the internet decided to create a choral chant rendition we could hear.(See https://wellmanicuredman.tumblr.com/post/76381088917)
I found the links took some doing to make them work but to listen to 600-year-old music scribed by Bosch was worth it. The chanted lyrics used are modern! The drawback I found was in the way StoryMap presents a map and background image. The image of a Bosch panel was clear on the left-hand portion of the screen and faded to support the text on the right. This StoryMap visual feature made it difficult to find and see all of the image that the content creator referred to in the text. Despite the limitation of the visual, I gained a much better understanding of what Bosch was saying in allegory form by having walked through the StoryMap rendition. I just wish Storymap had a more flexible visual display ability so that more of the image referred to could be easily seen.
Both of these StoryMap Journeys and the innovative attempts of the content creators to use StoryMap to tell a story got me thinking about how to apply some of these techniques to the StoryMap I am working on. What I think I am trying to understand and relate in the story of Edward Hurley’s Journey from Montgomery County Maryland to Louisville, Kentucky in April 1836 is the nature of the United States at that time and the nature of the places. The five visual channels available for that communication are map image, map icon image and placement, text background image, text foreground image, and the text itself.
In April of 1836, the Texas war for independence was happening. The fight at the Alamo just concluded. The long Seminole War was still underway. Andrew Jackson was in the last year of his Presidency. The political parties were gearing up for the election in November. Travel, particularly riverboat travel, was risky. There were 24 states in the Union. Edward’s trip started in Maryland, a slave state on a working plantation with slaves. He journeyed through Pennsylvania, a Free state, though Virginia, a slave state, through Ohio, a Free state, to Kentucky a slave state. He traveled the borderline between slavery and freedom. Abolition had become a powerful movement, and violence was already occurring twenty years before the Civil war began. Each place Edward went through was different with a range of possible themes to emphasize. To bring some of the preceding into Edward’s story, I am going to try using the combination images technique, and links to videos.
Recap & Digital Mapping
To recap, I retired last September from the Army and I am in the transition to my next career as an applied historian. I’ve worked at history part-time during my previous career but I need some serious upskilling. As part of my modernizing, I’ve taken an automated cartography course to make maps, and a military geography course to aid in structuring my book on the Civil war.
Now, I am in a Digital History course at George Mason University (GMU) this summer, to get and become familiar with the tools of digital history: the use of the internet, databases, and software as applied to history. The class is taught by a Ph.D. candidate and digital historian, Stephanie Seal Walters (see her Blog at https://stephanieanneseal.com/ ) which is also why there is this blog.
In a GMU summer session, they compress a semester into 5 weeks. There are two 4 and a half hour classes per week plus all the reading, research, and writing. Sounds tedious. It has been everything but that! Professor Walters has a gift for teaching. Anyone who can not only keep students engaged for 4 and a half hours in the summer but also has them wondering where the time went when class is over has a special gift. This observation is not just mine; I’ve heard from others in the class.
Three weeks in she has had us set up our own history blogs. Set up and use a class collaboration site. Let us leverage her Omeka site where we designed and implemented our own Little Odd History exhibits (I did an exhibit on the 1910 Burke Murder Trial in California). We’ve transcribed early American War department papers from a site that uses crowdsourced transcribers to make progress. (http://wardepartmentpapers.org/s/home/page/home ) Used optical character recognition (OCR) on a newspaper from the 18th century. Toured the GMU Special Collections and Research Center and observed archivists at work and discussed digitization methods and issues. (https://scrc.gmu.edu/ ) We are now on our way to putting together an online Story map. I’m going to show a journey from Germantown, Maryland to Louisville, Kentucky described in an 1836 letter my family found. We’ll end in two weeks with a review of using podcasts as digital tools of the historian.
On the letter for the StoryMap, it’s not totally clear from the letter when Edward left the Clopper farm or when he arrived at Louisville. But from the internal evidence in the letter, it appears he had just arrived, had traveled in pleasant weather to be outside, so I assume that the trip was in April 1836. Edward had been in Louisville for at least a week working. So, it’s probable he got his job Monday following the Thursday he arrived. He had a Stockton and Stokes ticket to Wheeling which would work for an overland mail stage. How he journeyed from Wheeling to Louisville is not stated in the letter, but because he uses the word passage, I assume it was by riverboat. Also, the speed of the journey supports a river travel argument.
In 1836, Edward Hurley (1812-?) was a young man from a Philadelphia family. Little is known about him except that he was born in Philadelphia in 1812 to Thomas Hurley (1758-1817) and Mary Rogers (1768-?). One of his sisters married Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s brother Augustus Taney (1787-1823). Edward lived with his older sister Catherine Hurley Taney (1795-1854) for a time after her husband Augustus Taney’s death. They were both guests on the Clopper farm next to her farm near Germantown, Maryland.
A letter from Edward to his sister Catherine was found recently in the papers of one of Catherine Hurly Taney’s descendants. I transcribed the letter and have permission to use it. The letter describes Edward’s journey from the Clopper Farm to Louisville, Kentucky in April 1836 and his initial activities in Louisville. For an online StoryMap, I propose to map his 1836 journey and highlight some of the locations that he went through along the way.
The letter mentions the Clopper Farm, Maryland, Middlebrook Post Office, Maryland, Hagerstown, Maryland, Wheeling, Virginia, Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky. I would add the river towns of Marietta, Ohio and Vevay, Indiana.
The narrative for each location of the Story map will describe some aspects of the place in 1836, or as close to 1836 as can be found. Travel is from a slave state through free states and to a slave state, which will be touched on in the narrative.
Probable Timeline
8 April 1836, Friday Left Clopper Farm by horse and went to Middlebrook. From Middlebrook, went to Frederick, and Hagerstown, and on to Wheeling by stage.
9 April 1836, Saturday Arrived in Wheeling
10 April 1836, Sunday Left Wheeling for Louisville by riverboat.
11-13 Aril 1836, Monday-Wednesday, somewhere within these dates, Edward stopped and visited friends in Cincinnati for 6 hours.
14 April 1836, Thursday Arrived in Louisville.
15 April 1836, Friday Catherine Taney wrote and posted a letter to Edward.
17 April 1836, Monday Got a job with Morton and Smith.
23 April 1836, Saturday Received a letter from his sister which took 8 days to reach him and Edward wrote the letter we have and finished by midnight.
And that’s it for the StoryMap portion of this blog post.
Although this post is probably too long, these blog posts of mine have been both assignments and a mechanism Professor Walters uses to get us to think about what we’ve been reading and doing and to get used to sharing it near real-time with the world.
This week as we approach mapping, we’ve read Sarah Bond on using digital mapping to understand the history of racism. Bond notes that although the topic has been covered before with manual maps and analysis, digital mapping helps bring together disparate and scattered archives and make them accessible to a larger public than ever before. Both points make sense. However, the example of the Placing Segregation project and the map illustration provided demonstrate the pitfalls in providing visuals without an explanatory context can democratize misunderstanding and misconception as much as educate. The illustration Bond shows is a map of Washington, DC in 1860 and the implication is that segregation of the races is shown. The visual actually shows a large degree of integration which was the case under slavery. In 1860, most slaves were still on farms and plantations not in the city. The black migration to cities is a phenomenon of the labor dislocations associated with the World Wars of the 20th century. The blacks in Washington, DC in 1860 were either a small number of free blacks who were usually integrated with the community, albeit its poorer parts as the map shows, or were house slaves who were residents with their white owners. The point is that racial segregation in cities was much less in 1860 than it became later, and that point is not only missed but the opposite is implied. Leaving the larger readership with a false impression of the history of segregation in the United States. Like many things the utility of technology like digital mapping is a function of how it is applied.
Digital mapping as an interactive computational model used for scholarly inquiry of ancient Roman transportation networks and the cost of transportation given seasonal impacts is the subject of the article on ORBIS by Elijah Meeks and Karl Grossner. ORBIS is a web application that models the transportation network of the ancient Roman world and gives a scholar the ability to query the model and determine the cost of goods flows from any point to another point in the network. The model can be seen holistically or from a particular point of origin. The tool provides an excellent and democratized method for analysis. Again, the risk is the misapplication of historical context. The view and analysis given by the model today is something that was beyond the capability of any of the decision-makers in the ancient Roman world. Ancient Roman understanding of the transportation network and costs would have been far less sophisticated. Roman decision making was less optimized than the decision making that can be done today with the interactive digital model.
The article by Richard White is a geographic information system (GIS) overview interspersed with historiography that left me just sad. In this article, we have a Stanford historian who has just discovered historical geography as if it never existed in the scholarly canon and renames it spatial history. I guess in Stanford they don’t pay attention to publications from Yale: see D. W. Meinig’s stellar historical geography, The Shaping of America: A geographical perspective on 500 years of history. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_W._Meinig ) Granted, digital techniques can be used to further the excellent work Meinig and other historical geographers started, but the digital techniques do not make their work irrelevant or the discipline of historical geography non-existent.
Finally, and more encouraging was Lincoln Mullen’s tutorial on producing thematic maps and using CartoDB as a method for producing them. Most historians will use thematic maps as they are trying to describe the variation of a place over time. All in all, I appreciate the expanded reach and capabilities that digital mapping brings. Given my undergraduate degree in geography and my constant interest in history, I would not think of conducting historical research in other than a geographic context. For me, it always about both space and time.
Building an Omeka site
Once my wife and I stumbled onto her great-aunt’s part in the Willard Burke murder trial, I got interested in researching the trial and the participants. Thanks to some Sonoma County, California blogs, I quickly learned about the trial and the key players. Dr. Burke was the father of Lu Etta Smith’s child. The doctor owned a gold mine in Butte County that had just struck a rich vein. He attempted to murder Lu Etta to get rid of a claimant on his new found riches. Dr. Burke was convicted, sentenced to 10 years in San Quentin, and lost his appeal. His original defense attorney, Hiram Johnson, was elected Governor of California. In 1916, at the beginning of his last term as Governor, Johnson pardoned Dr. Burke. Relieving Dr. Burke of 7 years of the prison sentence and restoring his livelihood as a Doctor.
Which led me to the question, why did Governor Johnson pardon Dr. Burke? The blogs which were built primarily from newspaper articles from the time were either silent or speculative on the topic of the pardon. To possibly find an answer, I needed to see the pardon file if it existed, and any correspondence Governor Johnson may have left on the subject. I learned that the California State arch
Once my wife and I stumbled onto her great-aunt’s part in the Willard Burke murder trial, I got interested in researching the trial and the participants. Thanks to some Sonoma County, California blogs, I quickly learned about the trial and the key players. Dr. Burke was the father of Lu Etta Smith’s child. The doctor owned a gold mine in Butte County that had just struck a rich vein. He attempted to murder Lu Etta to get rid of a claimant on his new found riches. Dr. Burke was convicted, sentenced to 10 years in San Quentin, and lost his appeal. His original defense attorney, Hiram Johnson, was elected Governor of California. In 1916, at the beginning of his last term as Governor, Johnson pardoned Dr. Burke. Relieving Dr. Burke of 7 years of the prison sentence and restoring his livelihood as a Doctor.
Which led me to the question, why did Governor Johnson pardon Dr. Burke? The blogs which were built primarily from newspaper articles from the time were either silent or speculative on the topic of the pardon. To possibly find an answer, I needed to see the pardon file if it existed, and any correspondence Governor Johnson may have left on the subject. I learned that the California State archives had a pardon file, and the University of Berkeley had Governor Johnson’s personal papers. Luckily, I was going to California and had the time for some research.
The results of my research in Berkeley and in Sacramento are what I now am including in the Omeka site. The site when public will share with the world material that has been in the archives for over 100 years and will set straight some distortions that have crept into the historical record concerning the Burke trial and its aftermath. One clear distortion was the amount of prison time that Dr. Burke served (3 years) and how much he had been relieved of (7 years).
The difficulties I experienced in putting the Omeka exhibit together were (1) having more data than was reasonable to display, (2) copyright restrictions, (3) selecting the focus for the 4000 word article, (4) appropriately referring to the items in the exhibit in the accompanying text, and (5) some difficulty getting the illustration function to display properly for text boxes near the bottom of the page.
From a couple of bursts of research, I have about 50 newspaper articles and over a hundred pages of Burke trial material. Deciding which items were the most appropriate to display was difficult. I evolved criteria of topic relevance followed by uniqueness; meaning was this the first time an item would make it up on the web. I had to forgo using some of the items due to copyright restrictions. The Bancroft Library of UC Berkeley forbids reproduction of the items in the Hiram W. Johnson papers. Of all of the items, what came from archival research was usually material that hadn’t been online yet. Beyond relevance and uniqueness, the other criteria I used was online legibility. Did the item display well?
Displaying well is can also be a function of text alignment to the figure or illustration. In a word processor, one can pretty much get text aligned with an illustration so that it displays well and flows with the text. Not as easily done in Omeka.
What I really liked about Omeka, though, was the ability to place annotation boxes on either text or a picture. The capability really enables one to interpret cursive, or a hard to read copy. Hopefully, a future release will enable one to provide article text with the illustration function. I experienced some difficulty in getting annotation boxes to display correctly if there was a lot of text and the box was near the bottom of the illustration. However, breaking up the annotation box into smaller boxes proved a reasonable workaround. All in all, I found Omeka to be an excellent mechanism for displaying archival material.
Murder trial item search
This search began one summer at the beach when my wife told me a tale about a G-string. Not any ordinary G-string found on the beach. No. The G-string in the story was the name of a cat. My wife’s great-great Aunt Blanche File, a retired piano teacher in Oakland, California had a cat named G string. The cat meowed in the key of G and was named accordingly. In the 1950s, Blanche’s teenage grandnieces laughed at the old woman when she would go outside to call the cat. It was funny to hear her calling for G-string. The teenagers thought of her as an eccentric, doddering, old-fashioned woman who wasn’t quite with it any longer. An amusement.
What her grand-nieces didn’t realize is that Blanche had a very interesting and action-packed life. In the 1880s most of Tulsa, Oklahoma, then in the Bad Lands, turned out to watch Blanche get full immersion baptized along with her brother in the middle of the Tulsa River. Her Baptist minister father ran a mission there for Native Americans.
In 1910, with the File family now moved to Oakland, California, and having survived the 1906 earthquake, Blanche was called to be a witness for the prosecution in a scandalous attempted murder trial. A trial followed by the national press. For a few days, Blanche and her testimony became national news. However, the trial and its aftermath were forgotten by her family. Blanche apparently never spoke of it. I only found out about it because I Googled Blanche on a whim after hearing the G-string story, and to me and my wife’s surprise, up popped the newspaper articles about the murder trial from 1910 and Blanche’s testimony. Some Sonoma County, California blogs popped up as well. The scandal is still a topic of discussion and folklore in Sonoma County, the location of the attempted murder. The trial and its story are also still of interest because as noted in a previous post, the defense and prosecuting attorneys are significant figures in California political history.
So where are the items to illustrate the story in a short six-item Omeka post to be found? The participants, and most if not all of their children are long dead. The documentary record can be found in Google books, newspaper archives, the collections of participants papers where they exist, and the trial, appeal, pardon, and prison records are in the California State Archives. Google books and a large number of the newspapers are online, and where they are publicly held as in a State Library system, are accessible as open source. Some of the newspapers are only accessible behind paywalls and come with a copyright restriction. The personal papers of Governor Hiram Johnson are available on microfilm and hard copy at the University of Berkeley Bancroft library. However, no photographic reproduction is allowed. A number of the items I would like to post fall into this category are not useable. An example is the agreement wherein Dr. Burke retained Johnson’s services as a defense attorney. Some of Johnson’s diary entries are accessible online but come with similar use restrictions.
The trial, appeal, and pardon records are only available in hard copy at the California State Archives in Sacramento and when accessed are open source and can be displayed open source. Luckily, I’ve done the research in Sacramento and have photographic copies that can be used from the trial, appeal, and pardon.
Some ideas to pursue for “Little Odd Histories”
I have a couple of ideas on what to look into for a “Little Odd Histories” post. I imagine that they need to be small and odd, and not well known, or known at all. One idea is to describe the players in the pardon of an attempted murderer in 1916 by a California Governor and Presidential candidate. Another is to present the evidence that a fort the Union Generals thought was built by the Union Army was really built by the Confederates—this misconception contributed to a Union defeat. Another might be the rise and fall of the memorialization of the Confederate James Jackson an example of how one gets written in and out of history. And last, for now, were the Confederates so out of ammunition on the third day at Gettysburg that they were reduced to using nails as ammunition. The difficulty with the task is that in the end, nothing is small. In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb related the attempt of a novelist to describe everything that happened on one street corner in Paris at one point in time and failed. Too much to describe.
In the murderer example, the crime was committed in Santa Rosa California in 1910. The trial took all of 1911. The San Quentin prison term of ten years started in 1912. In the story, we have a gold mine, an illegitimate child, a flight to Japan and forcible return of a key witness, and a mysterious woman who attempts to bribe. The conviction. The immediate appeal and its denial. A campaign for pardon starting with the collapse of the appeal. Around it all is the political life of the initial defense attorney who becomes the Progressive Republican Governor of California, a Presidential candidate, and to this day the state’s longest-serving senator. And his opponent, the Santa Rosa district attorney, who becomes to this day the longest-serving Democratic Congressman. The sources here are deep and wide. The question becomes how to focus, what to bring in, and what to leave out.
Alternatively, the fort that I claim was built by the Confederates as the result of a cavalry battle in June of 1864 has little direct source material. What was written about the fortification was written long after the battle. To support my claim requires an understanding of the battle, and the fort’s strategic, operational, and tactical situation. Reference is needed to contemporary maps. A lot to cover to get to support the “Odd” point.
Concerning “Odd”, the idea of tone and seriousness comes into play as does the need to make it readable by a general audience. If I did what happened with the attempted murder, I could take a somewhat playful tone and pursue a line of inquiry that goes: How to get rich? How to get rid of embarrassing claimants to one’s riches? How to blame the victim? How to bribe the victim? How to get rid of the witness? How to position the court battle for success? How to appeal? How to get your friends to get you a pardon? How to outlive them? Each question answered with all. a short paragraph and with an accompanying artifact. The other ideas could be addressed with like questions. The challenge is how to keep it accurate, succinct and interesting.
Digital history: problems of sustainability and ethics
On the broad problem of sustaining audio, video, and text forms stored on digital platforms, Cohen and Rosenzweig list durability and inaccessibility and state that digital materials are notoriously fragile and require special attention to withstand changing technologies and user demands. In other words, it costs money and constant attention to produce, and continue to deliver digital media over time. If an effort to maintain a digital site is not undertaken, technology or procedural change may easily make that site inaccessible. Accessibility can also be impacted by market forces. Commercial operators can gain ownership of data and place that data behind a paywall, or limit access to it entirely through the action of perceived market advantage.
Cohen and Rosenzweig also note that with the use of world wide web come problems of quality and authenticity and that one, “…can find plenty of inaccurate history on the web”. Further, they argue that the technical capabilities of digital media provide forgers or the unscrupulous with an easier and cheaper means of production and delivery.
Mat Honan learned the hard way about the durability, accessibility, quality, and authenticity of his digital media, he got hacked. His stored material was modified or destroyed, although he was able to save about 75% of it. He learned from the experience and advocates for online, off-line, and off-site backups of material, stronger access security methods, and an awareness that ultimately the security of a hosted platform is not fully in the owners’ control. Again, an argument that long-term maintenance of a digital site requires thought, effort, and cost.
Jennifer Howard argued those using digital media need to do so with an eye towards long term archival strategy. Without such a strategy, digital media will disappear into inaccessibility. For Ms. Howard, libraries and digital media centers need to play a role in the long-term storage of digital production, “if it is going to be around to be of use and influence”. In Augustine’s case, his autobiography would not be with us if many librarians of the ancient world and medieval worlds hadn’t preserved copies in libraries and archives. To survive in the long run, digital media may need similar care.
Safiya Noble is disturbed and offended by the lack of hierarchical control in digital media and networks. She argued that that the ability to produce and deliver unregulated speech helps to maintain and perpetuate racial and sexual stereotypes with uneducated or unsuspecting audiences. She advocates for government regulation of digital media content providers like Google. Ms. Noble’s concerns on group stereotyping and the licentiousness of some web content are valid. Whether the appropriate path is for the imposition of some form of censorship, controlled by the government as she advocates is not at all clear. The first question would be, which government? Ultimately, Ms. Noble’s concern, like the other authors is one of the quality and accuracy of the material. My thought is that in free market societies, the selections made by libraries or digital centers will determine the long-term survivability of historical materials on digital media. In societies not governed by the free market, political or ideological concerns will create the criteria, and funding, for preservation.
Defining digital history
For me, digital history is a temporary label that seems to be needed as historians adjust to the implementation and evolution of modern information technology. One imagines that as historians began to move from oral histories to written ones that for a while history was called “papyrus” or “scroll” history, and then after a time as the new technology was adopted, just history again. Similarly, in the move from the written to the printed word—print or book histories, and then with adoption, just history again. In the end, the tool doesn’t necessarily change the ends of researching, compiling, and delivering a history, but the mechanisms, the economics, and what is possible to do with them change in a much more powerful way.
The audience reach of a scroll was superior to the reach of the individual relaying and oral history from memory. Today, we know about someone like Augustine of Hippo even though he perished in the Vandal’s siege of Hippo in 430 A.D. because his writings on scrolls had been disseminated throughout the Roman empire and were maintained and accessible to an educated elite. With the advent of the printed text, Augustine’s writings became more widely available. With digital technology, they are available globally 24/7 in video, audio, and text formats.
In the current transition of history from print to digital, a transition that has been underway for about 60 years now, digital history, to use the transitional term, is the application of the tools of information technology to the practice of history. So, what are the tools? The digital tools are computer and computer-based network hardware and software and the implementation standards that enable far more efficient production, manipulation, and dissemination of voice, video, and text used by historians for some historical project’s end. Historians include using Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig’s broad definition: “amateur enthusiasts, research scholars, museum curators, documentary filmmakers, historical society administrators, classroom teachers, and history students at all levels”. When compared to print media, digital media and networks provide historians and their audiences with more cost-effective methods. These include methods for storage, access to materials, flexible analysis and presentation, more diverse means of analysis and presentation, ease of manipulating data, audience interaction with the presentation, and freedom from hierarchical control.
