Writing, Teaching and Researching History in the Electronic Age

Historians and Computers

Dennis A. Trinkle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317451426
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume focuses on the role of the computer and electronic technology in the discipline of history. It includes representative articles addressing H-Net, scholarly publication, on-line reviewing, enhanced lectures using the World Wide Web, and historical research.

Part I

Redefining History in the Electronic Age

1

From Writing to Associative Assemblages

“History” in an Electronic Culture

David J. Staley

The cartoon used on the call for papers for the Cincinnati Symposium on Computers and History depicts a monk in his scriptorium, illuminating a manuscript with the “old tools” and also with the “new tool,” namely, a computer. This image leaves the viewer with the impression that “monks” (historians) will continue to do the same activities, only aided by a new gadget, which will render their work more efficient but fundamentally unchanged. All that changes in this image is the tool, not the user or his task. This is, I believe, a misleading visual metaphor. In this essay, I will be considering changes in the attributes and requirements of the user of the tool. In embracing electronic communications, Western culture has severed its dependence upon the written word, a condition which has immediate implications for historians. Electronic tools alone, however, have not provided historians with the cognitive skills necessary for elegant communication with these tools. Developing these skills should be a priority for all practitioners.

In order to make this claim, I must clarify my views about the nature of technology. The root of the word “technology”—the Greek techne—refers to the skill or craft of making tools. In Chinese the word is ji shu, meaning the knowledge of a skill or craft. Before using the word technologie, Germans used gewerbekunde—knowledge of a trade or occupation. In each language, “technology” refers to the skills associated with the making of a tool, not the object produced by that skill. In contemporary American usage, in contrast, the word has come to refer only to the object itself. As a result, when considering the impact of technology on our culture, many observers have become far too fixated on the attributes of the object and not those of the user. To my way of thinking, tools are but by-products, artifacts of changes in who we are as users.

The technological environment created by the electronic revolution, therefore, is distinguished not only by the new tools present, but more significantly by the new users required. Every technological environment is marked by certain cognitive skills necessary for an individual to be considered acculturated; the electronic environment emphasizes and places value upon visual skill and associative thought, as opposed to written skill and linear thought. Therefore, this emerging technological and cognitive environment has ramifications for “history”; the practice of representing the past will appear as different to us as do oral epics, although in ways that will also appear quite familiar.

To further clarify the relationship between the user and the tool, I wish to distinguish between “cognitive” skills and “procedural” skills. “Procedural” skills refer to the steps needed to operate the tool; as such, these are the skills that draw attention to the requirements of the machine. By “cognitive,” I refer to higher order thinking skills; these skills draw attention to the attributes of the user of the tool. Thus, fingering a keyboard, strumming a lute, or striking a drum are procedural abilities; “musical intelligence” reflects a higher-order ability needed by a user to perform each of these procedures.¹ It is difficult to foresee the unlimited variety of tools technologists will invent in this electronic culture or the procedural skills needed to operate them. Therefore, historians should not enter the business of teaching apprentices evanescent procedural applications. Instead, our pedagogy might be stated in the form of a categorical imperative: tools and their procedures must enhance cognitive skill.

Cognitive skills, such as musical or linguistic or spatial intelligence, have exhibited little change throughout the human past; we might even consider these higher-order abilities “archetypical.”² These archetypical abilities—artifacts of which exhibit variation across space and time—relate to each other as on a circular continuum, shaped by four cardinal points: written, oral, visual, and kinesic ability. “Cognitive artifacts”—a cave painting or a hypertext—may draw upon varying combinations of these skills, determining their place within the resulting circle. I believe that the cognitive artifacts of the electronic age—many of which have yet to be created—will similarly be located somewhere within this circle.³

My purpose here is not to hasten the end of the written word. I am, instead, attempting to describe the cognitive landscape of the electronic culture, which appears more “visual” than “linguistic.” At this moment in time, the written word is being “crowded out” by electronically reproduced sound and image and movement. I am proposing “cognitive balance and flexibility”: teaching apprentice historians the skillful use of words as well as the skillful use of pictures, sounds, and movement as ways to display “the past.” Such a strategy, I am convinced, will help us to find our way through this uncertain technological landscape.

What follows, therefore, is not a prediction of future possibilities. My training as an historian warns me about the hubris of making predictions. That same training has taught me, however, the value of cautious speculation and anticipation of the shape of the future in order to create a guide or a map of the plausibilities to come. Thus, this essay is the beginning of a discussion, the purpose of which is to help us navigate and orient this terra incognito.

It is almost axiomatic to argue that writing is the foundation of the discipline of history. To my way of thinking, “history” is a disciplined inquiry into the past, conveyed via the written word. I may sing songs about the past, weave tapestries, paint a portrait, or compose a symphony commemorating a great event, but these are not examples of “history” as I would define the term. This distinction is important, for I believe that since the dominant mode of representation in this electronic environment is visual, not written, the very activity of representing the past will be altered by new technologies.

Visual displays of information are not inferior to (or superior to) linguistic displays; however, each display conveys information differently. The psychologist of art, Rudolf Arnheim, argued that humans visualize reality as a “four-dimensional world of sequence and spatial simultaneity.” Language, in contrast, is a one-dimensional medium; when employing language, the mind “cuts one-dimensional paths through the spatial landscape… [dismantling] the simultaneity of spatial structure.” Citing eighteenth-century botanist Albrecht von Haller, Arnheim notes that “nature connects its genera in a network, not in a chain; whereas men can only follow chains, as they cannot present several things at once in their speech.”⁴ Pictures, in contrast, allow us to present “several things at once.” Compare how the relative sizes of three figures in an illustration are depicted simultaneously, versus a linear written account of the same information: “a is taller than b, b is taller than c, meaning a is taller than c.” Both types of representation rely on seeking the relationships between meaningful signs. In the first case, these relationships are non-linear and spatial (i.e., associative), in the second, the relations are linear and sequential (i.e., logical). Language by its very nature linearizes the communicative process, much as calculus linearizes non-linear equations. Visual media, according to Arnheim’s argument, are by nature able to capture these ubiquitous spatial relations.

Although we perceive the world in three-dimensional spatial terms, those of us schooled in a written culture seek to represent this multidimensional reality by cutting one-dimensional written paths across it. This description perfectly describes the activities of historians. Gerda Lerner, in The Creation of Patriarchy, clearly perceived the spatial simultaneity of reality. In seeking a metaphor to use in thinking about the history of women, Lerner looked to the visual capabilities of the computer, which allow us to perceive objects in four dimensions. “Seeing as we have seen,” she argued, “in patriarchal terms is two-dimensional. ‘Adding women’ to the patriarchal framework makes it three-dimensional. But only when the third dimension is fully integrated and moves with the whole, only when women’s vision is equal with men’s vision, do we perceive the true relations of the whole and the inner connectedness of the parts.”⁵ Lerner clearly understands the spatial nature of reality, yet is still compelled to write this history of women. Lerner is hardly exceptional; almost all historians are similarly moved to communicate their understanding of the past by writing about it, including myself, obviously, since this essay is chiefly a written expression. (There are notable exceptions, of course. Many of us make reference to maps in our work. Consider trying to convey the same spatial information in written form. It is possible, but cumbersome and unnecessarily linearizing. Despite their value to us, however, maps and diagrams are supplements to our written thinking.)

Historians generally write about the past in linear terms, since they tend to view that past in linear terms.⁶ And they also believe in cause and effect, that one action leads to one or more consequences. They also believe in the importance of chronology, that the temporal sequence and ordering of events is a necessary first step toward historical understanding. Whigs, Marxists, and Hegelians assume that this linear sequence is also teleological, that these events lead ultimately toward a higher, transcendent goal, and that when this line of development is completed, history “ends.” Historians build such arguments upon a written cognitive foundation that remains largely unexamined.

Writing, however, has not been the sole means humans have devised to represent the spatial simultaneity of reality and, by extension, record past events. Consider these examples: Homeric bards sang of the heroic age in The Iliad; to commemorate the Battle of Hastings, weavers constructed the Bayeux Tapestry, which is a visual (and written) depiction of that event; Thucydides inquired into the causes and consequences of the Peloponnesian War and wrote one of Western culture’s first “histories”; the Sioux created the Ghost Dance to evoke ancient glories and to hasten their return. Each is an effort to represent the “past,” although in each case the “past” has very different meanings.⁷ In addition, each form of representation relies on specific cognitive abilities—oral, visual, written, or kinesic—esteemed by those living in the technological environment.

Our culture esteems the visual. As the art historian Horst Bredekamp observes, “Highly technological societies are experiencing a phase of Copernican change from the dominance of language to the hegemony of images.”⁸ The acculturated of this electronic age favor the visual image rather than the linguistic word and emphasize associative rather than linear thought. Since the tools created in this environment emphasize different intellective skills, historians will need to consider new ways—which are actually quite old—to think about and display the past.

Electronic technology has incubated this cognitive change. The telegraph was the harbinger; the tool “broke up” written words into a binary code of dashes and dots, reassembling them at the end of the transmission. The die had been cast. In the electronic culture, written words were to be disintegrated. The radio—an oral medium—transmitted the sound of words by similarly deconstructing them into electronic impulses, the effect of which being the emphasis on the spoken over the written. Film and television proved incapable of displaying meaningful amounts of text and thus place the spoken before the written word, adding the visual image to the semantic landscape. In short, long before the appearance of the networked computer, the story of electronic communications featured the dismemberment of the written word. The digital computer is the next step in this process.

Enthusiasts like to describe the digital computer as “multimedia”: a “cognitive democracy” of sound, image, and word. Words and writing will continue to be valued, acc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Redefining History in the Electronic Age
• Part II: Scholarly Communication and Publication in the Electronic Age
• Part III: Multimedia Approaches to Teaching
• Part IV: Computers and Historical Research
• Glossary
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Index