(I guess the even broader question would be whether scholarship must be a discourse, and if so, whether the institutions that support that discourse depend on the generic affordances of expressive forms like the essay or the book.)

Anyway, I’m not a historian (I teach New Media in an English Department), so if this session takes a more discipline-specific turn (as the comments seem to), then I may have less to contribute. Either way, I’ll probably try and attend. 🙂

clarissaceglio.wordpress.com/work-in-progress/

Undergraduate Digital Humanities/Digital History Courses:
Having just concluded an undergraduate seminar (From P.T. Barnum to Second Life: American Identities in the Museum) that incorporated digital humanities and technologies in modest ways, I definitely have ideas about what I’ll do differently next time and would love to discuss ideas with others on the challenges as well as the possibilities.

Digital Humanities and Argumentation:
I really like the idea of a session in which we discuss ideas, techniques, etc., for presenting arguments and engaging humanities questions using new media. One aspect of my THATCamp proposal dealt with development of pedagogical tools but the other and more immediately important to my work as a grad student is that I’m in the early stages of developing my dissertation proposal and am trying to envision how to make this a work of digital scholarship either in part or in whole. The hybrid option is more likely to work so far as approval, etc. (An abstract of my current but still very much in-process vision of the project—but not yet its digital aspect—is here: clarissaceglio.wordpress.com/work-in-progress/) Having gained an appreciation for the new dimensions that digital tools can bring to the conceptualization and execution of scholarly work in the humanities, it is my hope that integrating digital humanities into this project will not only augment the types of analysis that can be pursued—and the audiences that can be engaged— but will also expand the ways in which the research problems themselves are formulated—and the arguments made. That said, I’m having difficulty conceiving of what this might be in part because I’m new to this enterprise of digital humanities. So would love to talk about the larger issues and brainstorm ideas.

I teach middle school teachers how and why to use digital (and non-digital) media in their classrooms. I also study design at Parsons. My work examines what it means for the medium to be the message when we’re looking at technology in classrooms, and I actually went the other way in trying to make an argument through the medium itself – I made a handmade book, among other things. I’d love to join you in this conversation.

Your point about digital history being public history because of its accessibility is a good one. Though I titled the post “audiences and arguments for digital history,” I guess I’m thinking more about arguments than about audiences. Your responds makes me realize that framing this in terms of a contrast between public history and more narrowly “academic” history wasn’t very well thought out on my part–obviously both can and do present interpretations and arguments. The question I’m thinking about is why are there comparatively few arguments made through digital history when that’s obviously the norm of print scholarship. Why haven’t, for the most part, digital history projects engaged and intervened in historiographic debates? Michael Frisch raised this issue in the JAH exchange on digital history a couple of years back:

“Sooner or later, doing history involves telling a story, making an argument, identifying a theme or concern, coming to a conclusion. It’s not enough to endlessly celebrate the open-endedness of process, the multiplicity of sources, and the unlimited questions and answers these can support …. The goal is not to displace argument, synthesis, interpretation, and understanding in favor of a celebration of infinite possibility, but to broaden the participation in a dialogic process of engagement, questioning, and reflection on answers.” (www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/95.2/interchange.html, 207 and 209)

Lots of great digital history projects allow users to explore texts or digital maps or digital surrogates of physical objects but far, far fewer are organized around conveying conclusions and articulating arguments and offering interpretations. Why is that?

And even those that do don’t get read and cited very often. Take Will Thomas’s and Ed Ayers’s digital article on “The Difference Slavery Made” in the AHR. That definitely presented a nuanced argument about slavery and the coming of the Civil War. Given that this was in the AHR, you’d expect that it would be widely cited by Civil War historians. A quick search in Google Scholar (bit.ly/aGC9Ox) and Google Books (bit.ly/dwtqpb) make it clear that it isn’t–it’s cited almost exclusively in books and articles specifically about digital history. Why is that? Is it that the form of that digital essay made the argument challenging to fully grasp? If so, is that intrinsic to the medium (“new media”) of digital scholarship more generally? Or is it due to a lack of familiarity with digital scholarship, something like a language barrier where most historians can’t readily engage digital scholarship any more than they can read scholarship written in a foreign language they haven’t studied?

As you say, probably the majority of existing digital history projects have a public historical bent and public history in their organizational and authorial DNA. That’s one reason I say digital history equals public history. In fact, it’s my feeling that if digital history and digital lit have diverged in their interests and methods, it’s mainly a result of different disciplinary origins: digital history (not all, but a lot of it) in public history and digital lit in computational linguistics, textual analysis, etc.

But the second reason I think digital history equals public history is that even where “argumentative digital scholarship” in history has been done (and hopefully will continue to be done), to the extent that it is done online, it is public in a way that traditional books and journals on library stacks were not. As soon as it’s indexed by Google, digital historical scholarship is public history, and digital scholars, like it or not, become public historians with all the responsibility and opportunity that entails. I guess what I’m saying is that even those digital historians who want only to do “scholarship” inevitably end up doing public history and should be thinking about what that means. Maybe that’s something people didn’t sign up for, but to me this is a very exciting opportunity for both sides of the profession to collaborate, to learn from one another, to take our work in new and unanticipated directions, and to make both public and scholarly history better.