Clio Wired

The Future of the Past in the Digital Age

Roy Rosenzweig

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780231521710
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Social Sciences

In these pathbreaking essays, Roy Rosenzweig charts the impact of new media on teaching, researching, preserving, presenting, and understanding history. Negotiating between the "cyberenthusiasts" who champion technological breakthroughs and the "digital skeptics" who fear the end of traditional humanistic scholarship, Rosenzweig re-envisions the practices and professional rites of academic historians while analyzing and advocating for the achievements of amateur historians.

While he addresses the perils of "doing history" online, Rosenzweig eloquently identifies the promises of digital work, detailing innovative strategies for powerful searches in primary and secondary sources, the increased opportunities for dialogue and debate, and, most of all, the unprecedented access afforded by the Internet. Rosenzweig draws attention to the opening up of the historical record to new voices, the availability of documents and narratives to new audiences, and the attractions of digital technologies for new and diverse practitioners. Though he celebrates digital history's democratizing influences, Rosenzweig also argues that the future of the past in this digital age can only be ensured through the active resistance to efforts by corporations to control access and profit from the Web.

NOTES

1. Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past

1. Greg Miller, “Cyberculture: The Scene/The Webby Awards,” Los Angeles Times, March 9, 1998, D3. On Ignacio, see the interview “Dino Ignacio: Evil Incarnate,” in Philippine Web Designers Network, Philweavers, http://www.philweavers.net/profiles/dinoginacio.html; Buck Wolf, “Osama bin Muppet,” ABC News, http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/us/WolfFiles/wolffiles190.html; “Media Killed Bert Is Evil,” http://plaza.powersurfr.com/bert/ (viewed online April 15, 2002, but unavailable as of July 4, 2002); Peter Hartlaub, “Bert and bin Laden Poster Tied to S.F. Student,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 12, 2001, A12; Gina Davidson, “Bert and Bin: How the Joke Went Too Far,” The Scotsman, October 14, 2001, 3.

2. “Bert Is Evil!” in Snopes.com, http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/bert.htm; “Bert Is Evil—Proof in the Most Unlikely Places,” in HermAphroditeZine, http://www.pinktink3.250x.com/hmm/bert.htm; Josh Grossberg, “The Bert-Bin Laden Connection?” in E! Online News, October 10, 2001, http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,8950,00.html; Joey G. Alarilla, “Infotech Pinoy Webmaster Closes Site After ‘Bert-Bin Laden’ Link,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, October 22, 2001, 17; Dino Ignacio, “Good-bye Bert,” in Fractal Cow, http://www.fractalcow.com/bert/bert.htm. See also Michael Y. Park, “Bin Laden’s Felt-Skinned Henchman?” Fox News (October 14, 2001), http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,36218,00.html; Declan McCullagh, “Osama Has a New Friend,” Wired News (October 10, 2001), http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,47450,00.html; “Sesame Street Character Depicted with bin Laden on Protest Poster,” AP Worldstream (October 11, 2001). Nikke Lindqvist, N!kke, http://www.lindqvist.com/art.php?incl=bert.php&lang=eng, provides an excellent chronicle of the unfolding story. Significantly, many of the links on this site, which I first viewed in February 2002, were no longer working in March 2003.

3. Jeffrey Benner, “Is U.S. History Becoming History?” Wired News (April 9, 2001), http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,42725,00.html.

4. Arcot Rajasekar, Richard Marciano, and Reagan Moore, “Collection-Based Persistent Archives,” http://www.sdsc.edu/NARA/Publications/OTHER/Persistent/Persistent.html; U.S. Congress, House Committee on Government Operations, Taking a Byte out of History: The Archival Presentation of Federal Computer Records, HR 101–987 (Washington, D.C., 1990); National Academy of Public Administration, The Effects of Electronic Recordkeeping on the Historical Record of the U.S. Government (Washington, D.C., 1989), 8, 29; Joel Achenbach, “The Too-Much-Information Age,” Washington Post, March 12, 1999, A01; General Accounting Office (hereafter, GAO), Information Management: Challenges in Managing and Preserving Electronic Records (Washington, D.C., 2002), 11, 66. See also Alexander Stille, The Future of the Past (New York, 2002), 306; Richard Harvey Brown and Beth Davis-Brown, “The Making of Memory: The Politics of Archives, Libraries, and Museums in the Construction of National Consciousness,” History of the Human Sciences 11, no. 4 (1998): 17–32; Deanna Marcum, “Washington Post Publishes Letter from Deanna Marcum,” CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) Issues no. 2 (March/April 1998), http://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/issues02.html#post.

5. John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (1965; rpt., Baltimore, 1983), 16–20. See also American Historical Association Committee on Graduate Education, The Education of Historians in the 21st Century (Urbana, Ill., 2004). To observe this broader vision is not to deny the very different historical circumstances (such as the disorganization of archives), the obvious blindness of the early professional historians on many matters (such as race and gender), and the early tensions between “amateurs” and professionals.

6. For interesting observations on “abundance” in two different realms of historical work, see James O’Toole, “Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate: Double Fold and the Assault on Libraries,” American Archivist 64 (Fall/Winter 2001): 385–93; John McClymer, “Inquiry and Archive in a U.S. Women’s History Course,” Works and Days 16, nos. 1–2 (Spring/Fall 1998): 223. For a sweeping statement about political and cultural implications of “digital information that moves frictionlessly through the network and has zero marginal cost per copy,” see Eben Moglen, “Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright,” First Monday 4, no. 8 (August 1999), http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_8/moglen/index.html.

7. Committee on the Records of Government, Report (Washington, D.C., 1985), 9 (the committee was created by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Council on Library Resources, and the Social Science Research Council with funding from the Mellon, Rockefeller, and Sloan foundations); John Garrett and Donald Waters, Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information (Washington, D.C., 1996); Paul Conway, Preservation in the Digital World (Washington, D.C., 1996), http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/conway2/index.html. For other reports with similar conclusions, see, for example, the 1989 report of the National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators, cited in Margaret Hedstrom, “Understanding Electronic Incunabula: A Framework for Research on Electronic Records,” American Archivist 54 (Summer 1991): 334–54; House Committee on Government Operations, Taking a Byte out of History; Committee on an Information Technology Strategy for the Library of Congress, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, and the National Research Council, LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C., 2000), http://books.nap.edu/html/lc21/index.html; GAO, Information Management; NHPRC Electronic Records Agenda Final Report (Draft) (St. Paul, Minn., 2002).

8. Margaret MacLean and Ben H. Davis, eds., Time and Bits: Managing Digital Continuity (Los Angeles, 1998), 11, 6; Jeff Rothenberg, Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation (Washington, D.C., 1998), http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/rothenberg/contents.html. The 1997 conference “Documenting the Digital Age” has also disappeared from the Web, nor is it available in the Internet Archive. The Sanders film is available from the Council on Library and Information Resources, http://www.clir.org/pubs/film/future/order.html.

9. Achenbach, “Too-Much-Information Age.” See also Stille, Future of the Past; Council on Library and Information Resources, The Evidence in Hand: Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections (Washington, D.C., 2001), http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub103/contents.html.

10. Margaret O. Adams and Thomas E. Brown, “Myths and Realities about the 1960 Census,” Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration 32, no. 4 (Winter 2000), http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/winter_2000_1960_census.html. See also letter of August 15, 1990, from Kenneth Thibodeau, which says that recovering the records took “substantial efforts” by the Bureau of the Census, quoted in House Committee on Government Operations, Taking a Byte out of History, 3. According to Timothy Lenoir, it is now too expensive to rescue the computer tapes that represent Douglas Englebart’s pioneering hyperrmedia-groupware system called NLS (for oNLine System)—the basis of many of the features of personal computers. Timothy Lenoir, “Lost in the Digital Dark Ages” (paper delivered at “The New Web of History: Crafting History of Science Online,” Cambridge, Mass., March 28, 2003).

11. Marcia Stepanek, “From Digits to Dust,” Business Week (April 20, 1998); House Committee on Government Operations, Taking a Byte out of History, 16; Jeff Rothenberg, “Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents,” Scientific American (January 1995):42–47. See also Garrett and Waters, Preserving Digital Information. Many Vietnam records are stored in a database system that is no longer supported and can only be translated with difficulty. As a result, the Agent Orange Task Force could not use important herbicide records. Stille, Future of the Past, 305.

12. Most Microsoft software moves into what the company calls the “nonsupported phase” after just four or five years, although it offers a more limited “extended support phase” that lasts up to seven years. After that, you are out of luck. Microsoft, “Windows Desktop Product Life Cycle Support and Availability Policies for Businesses,” October 15, 2002, http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle.mspx; Lori Moore, “Q&A: Microsoft Standardizes Support Lifecycle,” Press Pass: Information for Journalists (October 15, 2002),...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Introduction: Roy Rosenzweig: Scholarship as Community
• Note to Readers
• Rethinking History in New Media
• Practicing History in New Media: Teaching, Researching, Presenting, Collecting
• Surveying History in New Media
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index