Category: Digital History

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Today, I am in transition to my next career as a researcher and writer of different aspects of history, biography, and, maybe political philosophy. I have had a few careers already: Marine during the Vietnam War, international communications satellite controller and engineer, information technology manager, transformational change consultant, small business executive, and US Army acquisition program manager. Through all of them, I was always reading and researching history and brought a historical understanding and context into my various jobs. 

In the humanities, I’ve studied European history, American history and historical geography, and American government with a foundation in political philosophy.  My current historical research interests include: the life and letters of Captain Edward Brownson USA (1843-1864), the role of the Orestes A. Brownson family in the American Civil War, some aspects of the first and second battle of Ream’s Station, Virginia in 1864, the 1968 Tet Offensive and the first digital computer casualty in a war, and an assessment of the Progressive Governor of California, Hiram Johnson’s pardon of convicted attempted murderer, Dr. Willard Buke, in 1913. On the political philosophy front, I am working to master the thought of Italian political philosopher, Augusto Del Noce, and his analysis of the post-World War Two evolution and intertwining of Marxist and nihilistic thought. Not to mention his suggestion that the thought of Simone Weil pointed a way out.

I became interested in history while playing with toy soldiers in the sandbox as a kid during the Centennial of the Civil War with, and my father’s encouragement to read his copy of Bruce Catton’s trilogy on the Army of the Potomac, and some of his historical novels. The interest in history was linked with an interest in politics by a visit to a Congressman’s office on Capitol Hill in the late1960s. Then furthered by an internship with the Virginia State Legislature, and by a college geography project where I studied the settlement patterns of former slaves in Montgomery County Virginia. As an intern, I heard senators refer to the, “War of Northern Aggression”, and I worked near the Home for Confederate Widows wherein five or so of them still lived. In the geography project, I interviewed children and grandchildren of slaves, and through that came into contact with Professor Richard Dickerson who studied the impact of the Freedman’s Bureau schools on the strength of the slave family. Which led to my discovery in the Montgomery County archives of one of the few remaining registers of slave marriages (slaves were not allowed to formally marry under Virginia law), and a related register of manumitted slaves. Both subsequently published by the National Genealogical Society. All of the foregoing immersed me in the Civil War and its aftermath, but as an avocation, my work life was in engineering and management.

Before this class, my online presence was found on my personal Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter sites, on Army Facebook and Twitter sites, and on various Army¸ trade association and news media websites. Because I had a government position, was part of an investment management company, or was consulting with clients with confidentiality expectations, I kept my personal opinions to myself and my communications in those forums were limited and of a technical nature. I used Facebook for family posts. On Twitter, I have a private account, and although I follow over 1000 people, I have posted or retweeted maybe 12 tweets in ten years.

Conversely, I do have a couple of Blogger websites and one WordPress site that I put up between 2009 and 2011 when I had some spare time, and before I went full time into intense Army work. Those sites have historical content related to the history and biography research interests listed above.

The class and the articles from week one’s readings make it clear to me that I need to make all the sites that I control consistent and interrelated. I am in a transition, post-Army retirement, to a new career as a researcher and writer of history and biography. After looking at myself online, it’s clear that my professional identity is anchored in my past career as a management consultant and as an Army acquisition program manager. The exception is the Blogger sites and the one WordPress site, but those do not easily come up in a Google search. My task with this class is to use the class website as the vehicle for working out my new online identity and transferring that identity to all of my other sites. I imagine I can also transition my pre-existing Blogger and WordPress sites into the site I am making for class. Ending the semester with online sites that are more consistent with a historical research and writing identity.