How has the digital revolution transformed the writing of history?

If asked,
I suspect most historians would point to the tremendous advantages of
electronic access to published scholarship and primary sources. In this view,
the digital revolution has served primarily to enhance scholarly productivity,
much as other once-new
technologies, such as online card catalogs and
word processing software, facilitated research and writing. Yet, as the essays
in this volume demonstrate, digital spaces offer platforms for entirely new
kinds of research, while “digital-first”
publishing simultaneously accelerates
the propagation of ideas. As Dan Cohen observes, this nascent transformation
in the historian’s craft challenges the academic status quo assumption
that scholarly success and intellectual credibility stem from a PhD and a
published monograph. Even as radically new forms of publication emerge,
print-first
journals and books continue to reign over the profession. It is no
wonder that despite a willingness to explore new media, few historians take
the plunge and immerse themselves in the digital world. Concerned that
online scholarship will be found wanting by their peers and institutions,
most shy away.1 Open-source
knowledge generated through transparent
drafting and review procedures does not yet resonate with the norms of the
historical profession, nor does the notion that quality scholarship might be
freely available.2 Beyond the ivory tower, however, purportedly authoritative
histories proliferate throughout the Internet, accessible to all. Herein
lies an important challenge for professional historians as they confront the
digital age.
Underlying much of the trepidation with digital-first
scholarship may
be the realization that on the web, professional historians are not the sole
arbiters of what constitutes “history.” As academic scholarship (with some
exceptions) lies on library shelves or behind electronic subscription paywalls,
vast swaths of historical information and analysis can be found readily
on the open web. For the experienced scholar, the riches there seem endless.
In moments, I can choose class material from Documenting the American
South, browse the Perry-Castañeda
Library Map Collection, and peruse the
criminal records of the Old Bailey. I can read about 18th-century
funeral
broadsides at Common-Place
or download articles from the latest African
Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter.3 Yet the exponential growth of historical
discourse on the Internet draws on the labors of not professional historians
but, rather, the wider public that edits entries on Wikipedia, contributes to
genealogical discussions on Ancestry.com, posts photos of historic sites to
Flickr.com, and invokes the Founding Fathers or scripture in the comment
pages of the Washington Post.
People with little or no formal training in the discipline have embraced
the writing of history on the web, which raises the question, whose histories
will prove authoritative in the digital age? Since the professionalization
of history in the last decades of the 19th century, college and university
professors have worn the mantle of authority. Through creation
of such professional associations as the American Historical Association
(founded in 1884) and through editorial control of academic journals and
book presses, they have determined which narratives meet their standards
of scholarly rigor.4 At first, the emergence of the digital age did little to
dilute the authority of disciplinary experts in history, but that has begun to
change. Although Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig rightly observed that
“the Internet allows historians to speak to vastly more people in widely
dispersed places,” it can just as easily be said that the Internet allows vastly
more people to speak about history without professional historians.5 The
popular understanding of the past differs greatly from that of academic historians;
it often reflects an effort to muster the past in service of a particular
worldview. As such, it may tell us as much about memory—how
events are
remembered—as
it tells about history.
Ordinarily, historians see history and memory as distinct ways of understanding
the past, the former governed by professional imperatives, the
latter by cultural and familial expectations. David Blight summarizes this
distinction as follows: “History—what
trained historians do—is
a reasoned
reconstruction of the past rooted in research; critical and skeptical of
human motive and action. . . . Memory, however, is often treated as a sacred
set of potentially absolute meanings and stories, possessed as the heritage
or identity of a community. Memory is often owned; history, interpreted.
Memory is passed down through generations; history is revised.”6 Writing
history in the digital age will force professional historians to share a
space (i.e., the Internet) with others whose narratives draw on the “sacred
set of potentially absolute meanings” that characterize popular memory.
Nowhere is this characteristic of the web more apparent than in Wikipedia,
which, for good or ill, provides more historical information to the public
than any other site on the web. When you type any historical topic into the
search engine of your choice, chances are excellent that the first hit will
be Wikipedia. Its extensive entries demonstrate the ways in which popular
understandings shape digital narratives about the past.
Why explore writing history through Wikipedia? Simply put, because
it allows any reader to peel away layers of narrative to explore how entries
have changed over time, juxtaposing revisions for comparison. In keeping
with its self-fashioned
identity as a community of writers, Wikipedia
also maintains discussion pages for each entry that permit even the casual
visitor—as
well as the scholar bent on digital history—to
follow the give
and take between different contributors. In short, Wikipedia invites readers
to peer behind the curtain and, if interested, take a place at the controls.
This open-source
quality has troubled many observers, who question the
accuracy of Wikipedia’s entries and/or deny that it has any utility as a reference
source for students and the wider public. Rather than discuss its
accuracy, however, I wish to explore the process by which Wikipedia contributors
craft entries about the past. Despite protestations that its entries
may not serve as either a “soapbox” or “memorial site,” Wikipedia is not
simply an online encyclopedia.7 Its historical entries serve as virtual “sites
of memory” (to borrow from Pierre Nora), places at which people attempt
to codify the meaning of past events.8 Moreover, as they discuss and debate
the language used to narrate the past, Wikipedia contributors may strive for
a “neutral point of view” (NPOV), but in practice, they judge new entries
and revisions via a moral economy of crowdsourcing.9
How does Wikipedia depict past events? How do contributors resolve
debates about history? What happens when popular understandings (memory)
clash with academic discourse (history)? To answer these questions, I
traced a single entry for the “Origins of the American Civil War” (OACW)
beginning with its first appearance in December 2003, when anonymous
“User 172” posted a dense, 9,700-word
essay accompanied by two images.
Since then, more than 900 other users (some of them automated) have
updated the page,10 which now consists of roughly 19,000 words, 14 images,
four maps, copious notes and bibliography. Because debates about the war’s