History Beyond the Text

A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources

Sarah Barber, Corinna Peniston-Bird, Sarah Barber, Corinna Peniston-Bird

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415429627
• eBook ISBN: 9781135688714
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Historians are increasingly looking beyond the traditional, and turning to visual, oral, aural, and virtual sources to inform their work. The challenges these sources pose require new skills of interpretation and require historians to consider alternative theoretical and practical approaches.

In order to help historians successfully move beyond traditional text, Sarah Barber and Corinna Peniston-Bird bring together chapters from historical specialists in the fields of fine art, photography, film, oral history, architecture, virtual sources, music, cartoons, landscape and material culture to explain why, when and how these less traditional sources can be used. Each chapter introduces the reader to the source, suggests the methodological and theoretical questions historians should keep in mind when using it, and provides case studies to illustrate best practice in analysis and interpretation. Pulling these disparate sources together, the introduction discusses the nature of historical sources and those factors which are unique to, and shared by, the sources covered throughout the book.

Taking examples from around the globe, this collection of essays aims to inspire practitioners of history to expand their horizons, and incorporate a wide variety of primary sources in their work.

1 Introduction

Sarah Barber and
Corinna M. Peniston-Bird

Spurred on by the sources themselves, and encouraged by subject centres, funding bodies, institutions and pedagogic frameworks, historians are increasingly turning to visual, oral, aural, virtual and kinaesthetic sources. These sources issue challenges to the historian, to the discipline of history and to its practice; yet, in the experience of the editors of this collection of essays, there is still too rarely a clear explanation of why, when or how they can be used. Every year we are faced by groups of Masters' level students open to discover how to incorporate such sources into their own work, but more comfortable with the well-worn notions of empirical evidence, the primacy of the document, and the reification of prose. Over the years we have felt our way through the darkness alongside our students, searching, often somewhat in vain, for insightful readings on approaching less traditional sources of particular value to students of the discipline of history. Seven years after first offering this Masters' level course, we decided to bring together chapters from historical specialists in the fields of fine art, photography, film, oral history, architecture, virtual sources, music, cartoons, landscape and material culture. Each author was asked to explore the theoretical and practical aspects of using the particular primary source while providing one case study or more to illustrate that process. In this introduction we address some of the issues of commonality and distinctiveness exhibited by the sources discussed in these chapters.

Document and documentary

Often discussion of less traditional sources employs language which is not only familiar to historians of documents, but is also taken from it. Hence, one often hears the phrase to 'read' a film or photograph; musicologists argue that the symbols used to represent musical sound annotate in the way of a text.¹ The term 'document' has a history which charts a turn-around in meaning and application. Its root, docere, meaning to teach, determined its early usage to mean 'a lesson, an admonition, a warning'.² The implication within scholastic pedagogy was that a documentary was far from value-free, but carried a deliberate and calculated message. It was directive of the manner in which one should read. Particularly with the growth of the discipline of history, the document became the core tool of historical interpretation and defined the responsibility of historical practitioners. Hence, Arthur Marwick, in his exploration of a discipline of which he felt himself at the core but increasingly alienated from its other practitioners, stressed the division of primary and secondary sources involving precision and facts, and decried the notion that history could 'signify some a priori, unsubstantiated conception' in which historians exist to give meaning to history.³ In his taxonomy of primary sources, Marwick placed above all others 'documents of record'. Such a source is one which 'by its very existence records that some event took place . . . it embodies the event itself, for example acts of parliament, peace treaties, charters and so on, and thus contains 'fact' or 'event', not 'ideology' or 'opinion'; these should be distinguished from 'records' — Marwick cites court transcripts or those of the Inquisition — which are subject to the accuracy of the scribe and the fallibility of the human agents involved in their telling or recall.⁴ This distinction, however, can be masked by the elevation of prose so that, say, the parallels between the minutes of a meeting and a cartoon — both interpretations following certain genre-specific conventions — have not been obvious to our students.

Within the twentieth century, the term 'documentary' came to acquire connotations of dispassion, objectivity and factual accuracy which the original usage did not suggest. In a study of writing, painting and photography, John Corner has argued that 'documentary expression relates to the physicality of the object world', giving documentary a 'distinctive phenomenological character, rooted in obdurate particularity'.⁵ In the 1920s, John Grierson coined the term 'documentary film' —as opposed to 'narrative fiction' and 'avant-garde' — to describe 'the creative treatment of actuality', having witnessed a filmic anthropology of the people of Samoa, produced by Robert Flaherty, and Nanook of the North (who entered popular culture). He bemoaned that a similar record was not made of the lives of industrial, urban Britons.⁶ Grierson's documentary film Drifters was, however, an account of Shetland herring fishermen, and its description emphasised the difference between documentary and artifice: '"Drifters" is about the sea and about fishermen, and there is not a Piccadilly actor in the piece. The men do their own acting, and the sea does its.'⁷

In 1934, Paul Otlet extended the definition of document to objects themselves, provided human beings are informed by the observation of them: the following year, Walter Schuermeyer's definition was 'any material basis for extending our knowledge which is available for study or comparison'.⁸ This was extended by Suzanne Briet in the 1950s, for whom a document was 'any physical or symbolic sign, preserved or recorded, intended to represent, to reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical or conceptual phenomenon'.⁹ Frits Donker Duyvis's anti-materialist attempt to include a spiritual dimension within documentation as 'expressed thought' — which he adopted from Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy — could be said to pre-figure the twenty-first century in which virtual communication can render materiality redundant.¹⁰ The growth of the study of semiotics — the object as sign — resulted in signifying objects' inclusion within the category of document, since before they fulfil any other function, signs have 'first furnished us with information', and for Barthes, objects 'function as a vehicle of meaning' which might be deconstructed to the point of the 'death of the author'.¹¹ A colleague thus queried our title, arguing that the sources we investigate are not 'beyond the text', but are themselves 'text'. In our experience, however, the ways in which this could be true require a journey of discovery for students well versed in the primacy of the written word. Lurking behind their implicit value hierarchy is an assumption of a clear distinction between fact and fiction, document and interpretation: the sources discussed here, however, often remind us that that distinction is not so easy to draw, in any source of any genre. Furthermore, the parallels between prose and alternative sources should not mask differences between them, and the methodologies these require, as these chapters illuminate.

Subjectivity and intersubjectivity

Having strayed from his traditionalist definition, let us return to the comforting security of Marwick. In articulating a definition of the primary document of record as one that 'by its very existence records that some event took place' and thus 'embodies the event itself, he was, in fact, overlaying traditional history in the archives onto the rather more modish concept of intersubjectivity, which can be found particularly within philosophy, psychology, anthropology, performance theory and linguistics. All human communication posits a tri-partite relationship: the person communicating, the manner or means of the communication, and the receiver or audience. Thus, within speech we have the speaker, speech act (utterance), and hearer; in our sources this could translate to, for example, the painter, the painting, and the viewer; or interviewer, tape/transcript, interviewee, and so on. Intersubjectivity suggests the relationship between the three elements, alerting us to potential mutualities.¹² But the discussion so far has focused on objectivity, not subjectivity. It is the level of subjectivity in both the creation and the understanding of such sources as art, film, music, oral testimony, or chat rooms, which supposedly sets them apart. Marwick's definition of the document of record posits an unproblematic relationship between the intention of the author of the document, and its subsequent interpretation by the historian. Elements of human bias, fallible memory, or hidden agendas are subsumed by the accurate and dispassionate recording of events, such that Marwick could be as sure as he could be that his historical document was stripped of elements of human subjectivity, to produce the idealised objective historical fact.

Marwick's respect for the document of record stems from this ability to seem to reduce it to objectivity, but the historian must still continue to ask questions of even the most objective-looking document, and in any event, should human communication, past or present, be subject to such reductionism? Is historical investigation of subjectivities not of equal interest? As part of their craft, historians excel at placing any information within a context: such a context involves subjective judgements of the creator, the object and its receivers. All media are extensions of human expression and a historian might wish to be alert to the implicit elements of human expression, the unanticipated consequences of innovation and technologies, unwitting testimony, or political (a term used here in its widest application) intent. Every change in scale, pace or pattern which an invention or innovation brings to human affairs changes the message of humanity because it brings a change in inter-personal dynamics. Thus, the significance of a news broadcast lies not only in the events described, but also in the reasons behind the timing of its airing and concurrent changes in public perception of, say, immigration, or in the creation of a climate of fear. As Mark Federman argues, 'we can know the nature and characteristics of anything we conceive or create by virtue of the changes — often unnoticed and non-obvious changes — that they effect', and we have a definition of Marshall McLuhan's famous 'Equation', in effect itself a statement on the intersubjective trinity: 'the medium is the message'.¹³

Subjective elements constantly affect the relationship between creator, creation and receiver. Some of these are born of our humanity: how as a historian, can we ever detach emotion from less subjective forms of human expression and should we tiy? An art-work may invoke the sublime, or may provoke pity; a cartoon relies on the audience recognising ridicule, disdain, or burlesque; a piece of music is seldom composed without an intention of stirring some emotion in its hearer. A medium which relies on performance — story-telling, drama, oral testimony, music and song, correspondence in cyberspace — introduces elements which are unique and ephemeral. The historian has also to recognise that the introduction of new technologies — film, the internet, sound recordings — changes the nature of the thing itself by capturing and freezing it.¹⁴

Each type of source has its own history which overlaps and influences those of other sources. The camera obscura, for example, provided a technology deployed by artists to capture an image and to 'distort' a scene beyond what could be taken in by the naked eye, but the process of capturing and fixing that image by discovering photo-sensitive papers and compounds, rather than recreating it using the artist's own painterly skill, led to a series of experimenters —Professor J. Schulze (1727), Thomas Wedgwood (1800), Nicéphore Niépce (1816), Henry Fox Talbot (1834), Louis Daguerre (1837), Richard Leach Maddox (1871) — who transformed the camera and thus the photograph. Other pioneers altered the role of the photograph. In the space of fifty years, key roles for the photographer were established. In mid-century Paris, Felix Toumachon and Adolphe Disderi sparked an explosion of interest in studio portrait photography; a decade later, Mathew Brady and his team processed 7,000 negatives documenting the American Civil War; the United States Congress sent William Jackson, Tim O'Sullivan and others to document the opening up of the West; George Eastman's Dry Plate Company led to the first half-tone photograph appearing in a daily newspaper, the New York Graphic, and in 1890, the publication of Jacob Riis's collection of photographs from the New York tenements, How the Other Half Lives, announced photography as a medium of social history and reform.¹⁵ Together these ousted the painting as the visual medium of record, and blurred the boundaries between fine art and photography. As photographic techniques were employed in art — for example Man Ray's 'rayographs' (from 1921) — artists were freed to explore the abstract and the surreal, and photographers began their own debate about the relationship between documentary and creativity, for example through the creation of the f.64 group (Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Edward Weston and others), dedicated to 'straight photographic thought and reproduction'.¹⁶ All these changes affected the relationship between the photographer and the viewer, opening up the issue as to whether the object might be the camera, the photograph or the subject of the photograph. Finally, from the inception of the 'box brownie' ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Fine Art: the creative image
• 3 The Cartoon: the image as critique
• 4 The Photograph: the still image
• 5 Film and Television: the moving image
• 6 Music: the composed sound
• 7 Oral History: the sound of memory
• 8 The Internet: virtual space
• 9 Landscape: the configured space
• 10 Architecture: the built object
• 11 Material Culture: the object
• Index