1838 Map of Florida

This is the image I'm considering using to overlay my project.

Success!

I now have a list of more than 400,000 Orange County property parcels with building permit dates. Now I need to find an affordable way to geocode all those addresses! I'm currently looking at Texas A&M GeoServices--it appears as though they will allow me to do it in batches of 2500 for free if I credit them, which I most certainly will.

Make sure and go here if you want free geoservicing: http://geoservices.tamu.edu/

Digital Project Progress Report

1. Title: Orlando: from 85 people to 300,000
2. Abstract - There is a field (shown above) that shows the history of building permits on the property for a significant percentage of Orange County addresses--I have seen it go back as early as 1929, and have only found one that indicated no buildings were associated with the address. The employees at the Orange County Property Appraiser's Office are happy to share with me the data, charging only a nominal fee if it takes substantial clerical time to pull. Armed with a csv or .xlsx file with the addresses and dates, I can use www.gpsvisualizer.com to do a bulk address-to-coordinates conversion, and then transfer all of that processed data into visual eyes for a powerful illustration of the property development of Orlando over the past seventy to one hundred years. 
3. Principal Data Sources: Orange County Property Records
4. Visualization Platform: VisualEyes
5. Notes: I almost called this blog post "Getting Earlier than 1994." After an encouraging phone conversation, I sent the following email to an employee at Orange County Property Appraisers (OCPA):

The employee reassured me that I had come to the right place, and if I came by he/she would provide the data I need and I would not even need to pay the $50 special request fee. I was jubilant...and then more than a little bemused last week when I learned that what the employee had for me went back as far as 1994. After about 20 minutes there, I left with the reassurance that they will find where that building permit data is stored, because they could not find it within the data that they were about to give me. I have not heard back from them, and so tomorrow is probably the time when I will have to cut my losses and switch to a modest alternative digital project, their enthusiastic desire to help notwithstanding. 

Environmental Scan

In 1875, there were fewer than 100 people who called the new city of Orlando home. Fifty years later, the Old Cheney Highway still could not accommodate an automobile from one side of Orlando to the other. The first traffic light was not installed at the intersection of Colonial and Maguire Boulevard—less than 2 miles from Lake Eola in the heart of downtown—until 1963. What did the geographic transformation of Orlando look like?

I am interested in this question as a native Floridian who will never cease to marvel at the rapidity of urbanization since the second industrial revolution began to push agriculture to the margins with the speed of a hydraulic piston. In the not too-distant future, I hope to see what it looks like in the context of race. As Orlando has grown, its white citizens used legal and extralegal means of segregating the city racially. Since 1965, most of its citizens seem to this researcher to have made modest progress toward integration and racial harmonization, but varying degrees of fatigue, reaction, resentment, and even despair continue to belie the unity implied by the etymology of the word community.

With that background, I am grateful for three recent works of digital scholarship, the “Human Population Through Time” animation produced by the American Museum of Natural History in 2016, Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America from 2013, and Renewing Inequality: Urban Renewal, Family Displacements, and Race 1955-1966 from 2018—the latter two works come from the exemplary Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond.

Human Population Through Time

This presents the visualization that I am hoping to achieve, albeit at a vastly superior production quality than I will be able to reach. After something of a preamble 100,000 year prologue, it combines a line graph of the human population with a pixel-density map of the major urban areas from the beginning of the Common Era to present. The American Museum of Natural History’s production team were a bit curious in their selections of major civilizations to indicate with an icon superimposed over the map (why Roman and Han Empires, but not Gupta?), but it is not too distracting. The really impressive element is their sourcing. Anything at this scale is going to include a lot of speculation, but they do not trust in one scholar. This is part of the World Population History Project, and its sources and credits page is immense—more than 739 separate sources.

Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America

The New Deal’s Home Owner’s Loan Corporation made incredible maps that color-coded America’s major urban areas in four grades: Best, Still Desirable, Definitely Declining, and Hazardous, color-coded (no pun intended) green, blue, yellow, and red, respectively (hence red-lining). The maps are becoming notorious, and it will be an indictment on Americans if the work of the people at the project do not make them more popularly-known and downright infamous. The following excerpt describing the now-extremely-rough area of Jacksonville I grew up in crystallizes the casual racism well:

The Panama Garden area and the southern portion of Northwest New Springfield are generally considered more desirable residential property than that in the remainder of this Section. The Section is occupied by 100% whites consisting principally of railroad men, City employees, clerical, and the lower-income salaried workers with annual incomes ranging from $1,000 to $2,500. Seventy percent of the occupants in this Section are home owners and there is no shifting of population [read: the whites are staying put and will not sell their homes to any more affluent blacks who might offer them a good price on their homes].”

Mapping Inequality is super strong in showing powerful interactivity and model georectification—it’s fantastic.

Renewing Inequality

I believe this will be the last major historical puzzle piece that can show me by analogy in Daytona Beach, Tampa, and Miami what almost certainly was done here in Orlando—the tragic preservation of inequality and segregation through urban renewal and urban housing developments. I must confess that its user interface is something of a cautionary tale to me of ambition; there is just so much data to sift through it is pretty daunting rather than enticing to this user, and I suspect I am a good bit more savvy than the median digital humanist. Still, all that information is an absolute Fort Knox of historical gold—it powerfully illustrates the scale and pervasiveness of the family displacements of all races in this period.

Links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE

https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=5/39.1/-94.58

https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/renewal/#view=0/0/1&viz=cartogram

And Now, I (AS)SERT...

My thesis research is focused on the peculiarity of the McCoy Air Base (now Orlando International Airport) when it was an island of racial integration within a sea of Jim Crow Orlando. The city’s de jure segregation did not end until the mid-1960s, but McCoy was integrated from its first reopening upon the start of the Korean War until it closed in 1975—some 15 years of a very traditional, conservative institution embodying a radically progressive social change.

The question my digital project hopes to answer is the background—how Orlando developed from 1875 to 1950. To be clear, my research question is far more broad, its chronological scope will extend into the 21^st century. My guiding notion is that context means a firm grasp on the before and after of the historical subject matter. I looked at the “Ask a question” and “Search for Answers” parts of Bill Ferster’s ASSERT model last week, and this week I finish his prescriptive acronym.

Structure

This is by far my biggest challenge in establishing my proof of concept on my timeline. There are several thousand individual parcels of land—far too many to scrape from the property records office, but I have been reassured that The extraordinary requests liaison for the Orange County Property Records Office is out of the office until next week, but once I meet with her I’m hoping I’ll be able to establish a systematic way to get a representative sample of land parcels and their registration with the city to trace through Orlando’s development as a city.

Ultimately, I hope to combine the parcel data with federal and state census data, particularly with reference to race. However, that will be outside the scope of the initial phase of the project. I will need to compile, or more hopefully/realistically find, a database of property records that include the date of a parcel’s earliest registration with the county.

The Holiday Inn on Alafaya and Colonial was constructed in 1989.

Surprisingly, one of the last businesses before Bithlo was built in 1968.

Envision the Answer

Ultimately, I see an animation that shows some 500-1500 land parcels (as many as I can with the time and resource constraints I'm working with) as they were developed over the past 120 years, from the turn of the 20^th century to the present. Once I have addresses and dates, it will just be a matter of curating the best map—probably a composite of geological land survey maps from the early-to-mid-twentieth century—and superimposing it over Google Earth, then using automation software to plot the points over a span of 240 seconds (4 minutes, derived from 2 seconds per year for 120 years). If the data for subdivisions and other neighborhoods is unmistakable enough, I might animate road construction as well, but time is unlikely to permit that, and it might yield a questionable return on investment—wherever land is being registered with the county, a road has likely been built to that parcel. The hope is that the animation will provide a compelling visual answer to the development question of Orlando, and that by going back and forth across the timeline patterns of settlement and development will be recognizable.

Represent the Visualization

Obviously, I will be working with a vector map. The aesthetic questions will be aural—what kind of sound would compliment the data being visualized?—and geometric—what kinds of polygons or dots will best illustrate urban development and expansion? I’m not too concerned about the congruence or apprehension principles, as my question is directly addressing time, and the animation will be playable at variable speed, a standard feature of VisualEyes and other similar software.

Tell a Story Using Data

What is exciting about this stage is that unlike Slave Voyages or many other famous geographic animations, I really am not sure what story will emerge. The basic fact—the steady growth over 145 years from a city of fewer than 100 people to nearly 300,000—lends itself to innumerable narratives and angles. I honestly don’t even know what geographic features may have drawn people in what directions; it will be super fascinating to see the convergence of communities around Winter Park, Lake Eola, and Pine Castle, and perhaps all around Orlando’s 31 lakes. Time, and of course the data, will tell!

ASSERT and Orlando

Orlando, Florida satellite image, and Green Swamp Wilderness Preserve satellite image, showing the same land areas. The images' centers are 40 miles from each other.

How did what we now call Orlando, Florida transform from former Seminole Indian territory with fewer than one hundred permanent settlements in 1885 to a city of more than 285,000 people in 2019? Of course, the simple answer is a combination of human migration and reproduction, but the more compelling answer is visual: less than five generations ago, Orlando's 114 square miles were all wetlands and some 31 lakes, and now they are a jungle of asphalt, concrete, human residences, businesses, and massive amusement parks. The images above illustrate the change starkly. Green Swamp Wilderness Preserve speckled with lakes is the Orlando of 135 years ago.

The question above is my application of Bill Ferster's Interactive Visualization: Insight Through Inquiry, specifically his ASSERT model:

Ask a question
Search for data
Structure the information
Envision ways to answer
Represent the data
Tell a meaningful story

Ferster's work is a powerful synthesis of more than 500 years of tradecraft in visualization, if one starts with Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man circa 1490. I must pay tribute to the design excellence of his introductory chapter: somewhere on page 37 my fascination with his historical survey of visualization theory and practice gave way to impatience--is he going to digest all that for his readers into a practical application? It was not even 200 more words of reading after thinking this before he introduced his ASSERT model, and my confidence in it is immeasurably greater having read his stimulating establishment of his bona fide expertise. Bluntly, I would not have the perseverance to read through (or even skim and distill) the score of theoretical works on data visualization that Ferster summarizes, but I am grateful that he did.

Asking my question is easy, but the search for data is where the challenge begins. Based on a initial foray into the historical maps at the Library of Congress and the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, I am fairly confident that I will be able to start with several dozen maps starting with mid-19th century military surveys and broadly trace out the city's development. Then come the devilish details: what level of detail do I want to shoot for? How comfortable am I with distortions for simplicity of visualization, e.g., animating road development at a constant rate when there were almost certainly delays of various kinds? In the next week or two, I hope to identify my primary sources and the ways I will structure them so as to make them manageable. I'm already envisioning ways I will represent the data, mainly through an animation that connects the historical maps to each other in a transparent way (making the potential distortions recognizable), and then perhaps too ambitiously I hope to provide a zoom feature and an easily adjusted timeline slider.

I've already learned something surprising that will make it into the story: Orlando's population growth is not nearly as much the story of NASA and the Walt Disney Corporation as one would think. Indeed, a line graph of the city's population over time shows no unmistakable spikes in the 1960s and 1970s--just a continuation of a more or less steady natural increase. Hopefully, through the construction of an interactive visualization of the city's growth and development, I will recognize more about the forces that have driven Orlando's birth and transformation geographically over the past 135 years.

Questions for Dr. Ferster:

1. What practical visualization software is the best 'gateway drug' for historians who are interested in but intimidated by interactive visualizations?
2. Even 19th century positivist historians wanted readers to interact with their texts in meaningful ways--how qualitatively different are modern historians' interactive visualizations from traditional prose-text scholarship?

Mapping Segregation in Washington D.C. Review

A typical deed restricted community's racist clause, legally invincible before 1948.

There is no historian of the modern American South more preeminent than C. Vann Woodward. He took the base metal boosterism of Atlanta journalist Henry Grady’s “New South” and transmuted it into the academic gold of “New South studies.” His Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 started many of the conversations that divide academics more than six decades after its publication, however it is the book that came from a series of 1954 lectures for which Woodward is most remembered. In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, he argues--fairly implacably--that the very nature of the antebellum economy made segregation impossible, and so the militant de jure segregation of the South of his day was a relatively new phenomenon. The races had socially commingled before, and so there was reasonable hope that they could again--it was for this argument that Martin Luther King Jr. referred to Strange Career as “the historical bible of the civil rights movement”--that and the fact that Woodward was in Dr. King’s audience when he said it.

Whatever the “forgotten alternatives” were to segregation in the South, it was the reality of Woodward’s day...and now. Indeed, the hope that undergirded Strange Career was part of a movement that saw legally-supported and enforced segregation end and then a push to integrate that census data suggests was exhausted by the early 1980s. It would not be a gross oversimplification to say that the past 60 years has broadly traced an arc of racial progress: from a clash of racist conservatives (conservative strictly with reference to race relations, to be clear) and hopeful progressives, through an apex of idealism with the election of several black mayors in American cities, down to the current Big Sort that tragically makes de facto segregation appear not radically different.

It is in this context that the Mapping Segregation in Washington D.C. Project provides a powerful digital case study. It began in 2014, and has a well-focused frame:

For the past several years, Mapping Segregation in Washington DC has been documenting the historic role of real estate developers, citizens associations (white homeowner groups), and the courts in segregating the city. Our work has been focused on documenting properties subject to racially restrictive deed covenants, which barred the sale or rental of housing to African Americans.

Put simply, Mapping Segregation tells a powerful story. It uses traditional tools of evidence, many legal documents, photographs, and other archived materials. But it also leverages GIS and as the name suggests, powerfully illustrates the painful reality of Jim Crow’s stubborn legacy. If white Southerners have any pathological tendency, it is to convince themselves that the last major steps toward racial harmony were taken sometime in the last generation, always the last generation. The three presentations that form the heart of the project--what they call the “special exhibit”--form a potent prescription to that disease.

It is noteworthy that the scanned images of the deeds and the analytical narratives are necessary prerequisites to recognizing the full significance of the GIS work. The second presentation in particular, “Legal Challenges to Racially Restrictive Covenants” is extremely well designed, combining traditional scholarly writing with digital humanities tools, and a user-interface that is as aesthetically pleasing, for lack of a better term, as it is intuitive. Here is a sample:

My one quibble is that the landing page lacks a comprehensive survey of the project’s scope and aim--one has to explore a bit for the power and content of the material to come into focus. The project leaders, Sarah Shoenfeld and mara Cherkasky, would benefit from some reflection on what routes would get traffic to their site, and how they could compellingly grab visitors with the story from the landing page. Doing so could only help us to recover some of the forgotten alternatives to the racial acrimony and isolation we continue to suffer.

Holocaust Geographies

In April of 1993 the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened. As it closes out its third decade of operation, it still boasts an annual operating budget in excess of $100 million and continues to promote rich scholarship on the most infamous event in world history up to this point, hopefully ever. A little over a decade after the USHMM opened, its researchers “saw potential in GIS for managing and analyzing” enormous data sets they had compiled (p. 7). Marc Jean Masurovsky, a senior researcher at the museum, contacted Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Anne Kelly Knowles, to organize a workshop on using GIS analysis. “The two week workshop brought together nine scholars from historical geography, GIScience, cartography, history, and architectural history to consider how spatial analysis and geographical visualization of the built environment and forced movement of people during the Holocaust might inspire new research questions and pedagogical applications” (Geographical Review, “Geographies of the Holocaust,” p. 564).

Six essays ultimately resulted from the two years of research launched by that August 2007 workshop, and they are combined in Geographies of the Holocaust. In their introduction, the three organizing scholars summarize their distinct contribution in two clusters of dense text, dubiously combined below:

One of the most unusual aspects of our approach to the Holocaust is our conviction that spatial analysis and geovisualization can complement and help specify the humanistic understanding of space and place by exploring and quantifying relationships among things and people to discover and visualize spatial patterns of activity. This complementarity is at the core of our research method. […] By using these methods, we do not claim to be describing the reality of experience; rather, we have done something different by modeling the physical conditions of the reality in which victims, perpetrators, and bystanders operated, in order to ask new questions and see historical circumstances in a new light. (pp. 4-5, 8)

The key questions for me are:

1.     Are the new questions profound?

2.     Is the new light truly illuminating of human experience?

Alas, I’m afraid that the best I can offer is a hung jury on these questions. I fear that I selected the weakest case study for my test case, “Bringing the Ghetto to the Jew: Spatialities of Ghettoization in Budapest” by Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano. Cole is a social historian and Giordano a professor of geography, and unfortunately they both seem to suffer from on of the most acute cases of hyper-specialization I have yet encountered in the academy.

Their geo-chronological frame is Budapest, Hungary, from May to November, 1944—one city for six months. Within their frame they show that Jews in Budapest were confined to ghettos that consisted of the traditional “Jewish” parts of town. Yellow starts were painted onto the sides of apartment buildings, and Jewish movement was increasingly confined, but they still lived fairly integrated within the city’s urban core. According to the authors, this runs contra to the grand narrative of “concentration and segregation” presented by Raul Hilberg in The Destruction of European Jews. To compare to a less academic source, the notion of the “dispersed ghetto” of Budapest contrasts sharply with the depiction of the ghetto of Krakow, Poland in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The essay is strongest when focusing on how this affected the experience of Budapest’s increasingly sequestered Jewish population. “Jews were segregated not only from non-Jews but also from other Jews, and from the means of survival, through the erection of invisible walls of distance” (p. 148). This is a valuable contribution.

Almost totally unaccountably, Cole and Giordano never state the obvious reason for Budapest’s anomalous status from the “classic” ghetto model: it was assembled ad hoc in the last year of the war. The Germans did not even being to implement the ghettoization process until June 16—ten days after the D-Day invasion that added the Western front to the Eastern and Southern. To be fair, they acknowledge that the ghettos were late in the war, but fail to identify that context as at least a major part of the explanation for why time and resources were not spent cordoning off several blocks of the city’s periphery to concentrate the tens of thousands of Jewish people who had not escaped by that point in the war. By this point Jewish victims—two thirds of which would not survive the year—would have looked at the Allied advance with hope, while their Gentile neighbors would have probably experienced some mixture of dread and ambivalence.

In the opening to their chapter, the authors note that Budapest was one of 150 Hungarian cities and towns that went through ghettoization in 1944. Four years after the publication of Holocaust Geographies, the USHMM published a list of 42,500 ghettos and camps. GIS has a role to play in helping to visualize these places and the people who lived within them, but it must not disregard the historical forest for the spatial trees, or one might say rather a different spatial forest. Otherwise the “complementarity” will be lost.

Historical GIS

Playing with a 1953 land survey map and 2019 Google Earth.

I love the chutzpah of Anne Kelly Knowles’s first two lines of her opening essay, “GIS and History” of Placing History. “This book argues that scholars’ use of geographic information systems (GIS) is changing the practice of history. Time will tell whether the argument is prophetic or premature.” The implication is that there is no question of the argument’s truth, only the timeline of it—GIS will change the practice of history. Fortunately, her bravado is well-grounded (pun intended): the book proceeds to demonstrate several non-trivial ways that GIS had already been the primary tool for historical enquiry for many established historians—a demographic anti-futurist almost by definition. So what is historical GIS?

Knowles identifies four key characteristics, which may be summarized as 1) geography significantly driving the history, 2) geography forming a significant part of the historical evidence, 3) the use of a geo-chronological database, and 4) the presentation of maps as part of the historian’s argument. What Placing History needs to show to prove its central argument is that the use of geography for enquiry, evidence, and argument does not merely deepen existing understandings based on the traditional textual sources; it needs to show that in some cases it has challenged existing narratives so compellingly that GIS history has changed the overall historiography for a topic. This it does, but first let’s examine the pedagogical values of GIS.

The late Robert Churchill identifies four “distinct benefits”: 1) the inculcation of “analytical and problem-solving strategies,” 2) the demonstration of the value of the “visualization,” 3) engagement with “social, economic, and political issues,” (he cites the Gulf War, indigenous land claims, personal privacy questions, redlining, and gerrymandering) and 4) an interdisciplinary bridge. The first two points are more compelling to me personally, but his arguments are all valid. Amy Hillier then grabs the baton and argues more practically for all the ways that historical GIS reaches “a technology-savvy generation,” as well as some valuable advice concerning praxis. The use of the 1896 social class maps of W.E.B. Dubois provide a powerful example of the power of GIS in a somewhat counter-intuitive way: Dubois recognized the power of spatial illustration so clearly that he took months of innumerable labor hours to produce what GIS can now reproduce in a fraction of the time.

So aside from teaching history, what is the impact of GIS on history itself? Frankly, I’m amazed by how much it had already done at the time of the publication of Placing History, some 15 years ago. The nature of empire when communication traveled at the speed of a horse (not even wearing a saddle) has been the subject of much historical enquiry going at least as far back as Edward Gibbon. With Richard Taibert and Tom Elliot’s GIS-powered analysis and manipulation of the medieval Peutinger map, our understanding is deepening. This almost inverts Walter Benjamin’s powerful point about the lost of auras in the age of mechanical reproduction—with digital reproduction, I feel closer to the lives of the roughly 50 million citizens, slaves, and subjects of the Roman Empire. Peter K. Bol’s work did much the same for imperial China, as well as stretching my understanding of how insignificant a boundary might have been, even to a provincial governor. What does all this imply for history? I think as we become more comfortable leaning on geographic data as evidence the idea of visualizations as distractions from historical narrative will diminish, and the history will be stronger. No less significantly, historians will begin to appreciate more and more just how profound the old cliché that the map is not the territory really is—when you think about it, the are few things more breathtakingly oversimplifying than a smooth boundary line.

Historical scholarship will not abandon their bias for the written record anytime soon, and I’m inclined to think that’s a good thing. However, maps, spatial data, and GIS are all on the rise, both leading up to Placing History and continuing since. I have long believed that the curious historical relationship between space and time has been under-examined and under-utilized. Speaking extremely broadly, since the rise of the recording industry, popular music seems to entail in some cases a lag of decades from urban centers to least populated areas. When my sister and her husband arrived in the remote village of Kapchorwa, Uganda in 2005, Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers were extremely popular there—more than two decades after their peak popularity in the United states. That is an extremely trivial example, but tracking the movement of more catalyzing culture such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, labor union songs, or private schools since 1954. I think the key will be harnessing movement and sound in the representation of data. This will necessitate historical scholarship not being confined to the physical codex, but to a great extent we’re already there.

Data Mining

Queen Victoria's journals--the work of a single person--amount to over sixty million words. By comparison, the 1611 Authorized Translation of the Bible has 785 thousand words, and the total word count of the seven books of the Harry Potter series is 1.1 million words. So imagine a close-reading purist specializing in the history of the British Empire in the Victorian era. The scholar would need to take 70 hours of work for an initial reading, not counting a single pause to jot down a note--for a single source.

All of this underscores the practical value of machine-powered distant reading. Take the example above, in which the Google Ngram viewer has shown the percentage of books each year starting in 1800 that contain the phrase “social equality” or “racial equality.” From 1920 onward, the relationship between these two distinct ideas is unmistakable. It is also super stimulating to consider the theoretical explanations for the peaks and troughs. Intuitively, the cataclysm of World War II seems to have played a role in a dramatic increase in discussion of social and racial equality. The trough between 1945 and 1953 followed by a wave that peaked in 1972 matches near-perfectly to the grand narrative of the Short Civil Rights Movement.

Data mining is super valuable, but at present its immediately recognizable uses are limited to heuristics (a way to discover lines of research) and stimulating visualization (a way to illustrate a point). I’m a traditionalist and have been involved in critical scholarship for more than a decade, so the following is going to sound, well, overly critical. That said, I want to declare that I feel extremely glad to be a student of history at this moment in history, because we are in the process of significantly increasing our power to make sense of the past. Still, equanimity requires some issues to be acknowledged.

As a begrudging student of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, I must point out that the complexity of language. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the simple fact that I am treating a topic that has been much-discussed by tens of thousands, if not millions of people in the English-speaking world, and yet every single sentence in this blog post is unique—not a single sentence placed within quotation marks can be found using Google, besides this once the algorithmic spiders have found this page. So, to take the example above, social and racial equality may be expressed in innumerable ways—circumspect language, synonyms, ironic expression, and slang all distort the measurement of the ideas that the two phrases I searched for represented. Have Americans thought and written less and less about liberty since 1800, or have they simply preferred to call it freedom?

Optical character recognition will get better, but undoubtedly whole wars have been missed because a computer thought they were wans. I’m honestly not too worried about that, because the distortions are probably statistically uniform across our various samples. My biggest concern is with the samples themselves.

Google proudly declares that they have scanned more than 25 million books. Before the Ngram analysis will be a source of reliable insights for me, I need to know more about these 25 million books. How does the high proportion of scientific journals that many humanists have raised concerns about affect the sample? Is it geographically concentrated in particular areas besides correspondence to the population density? All of these things are major potential issues.

Distant reading already has and will continue to empower us to understand our past--particularly the past century--but we need to keep the insights of the linguistic turn in our minds as we realize that potential.

Digital History Questions

Just to give my many as-yet-only-theoretical readers a little context, I am currently taking a called Digital Tools for Historians, and in this second week we are continuing to reflect on theory. Dr. French has asked that we consider five big questions in light of eight articles spanning the past twenty years of history as an academic field. Below is my admittedly in artful reflections on these questions.

What is Digital History?

Douglas Seefeldt and William G. Thomas answered this question directly and succinctly just over a decade ago (and counting--take a glance at the timestamp of this blog, historians of the future). It is "an approach to examining and representing the past hat works with the new communication technologies of the computer, the internet network, and software systems." The Big Question, to my mind, is whether digital history is best described as a new set of tools useful for an increasing percentage of historians or a fundamental transformation of what historians do. Even with laughable hyperbole like Louis Rossetto of Wired Magazine heralding "social changes so profound that their only parallel is probably the discover of fire," I actually lean toward fundamental transformation rather than powerful new tools. Yes, historians before and after the digital revolution both seek to understand the past, but it seems as though what understanding means has changed. This is a gross oversimplification, but history's focus on explanation has been replaced in digital history with a concern for visualization. 

The sensationally-obtuse economic analysis of Time on the Cross forty-five years ago provides a nifty cautionary tale for historians too in the grips of the insights of Charles Beard. However, we have not yet repented of our preoccupation with quantification. A good friend drolly remarked that social scientists cannot resist taking two unquantifiable aspects of human life (joy, honor, beauty, etc...) and assigning them to the x-and-y-axes of a graph. Digital historians do this less than psychologists, but we still do it. More often we report on the frequency of sets of words and then sheepishly acknowledge we can only infer possible explanations of the significance of word-use. 

How does 21st century Digital History theory/practice differ from earlier applications of computer technology to historical research, such as the data-driven quantitative history (“cliometrics”) of the 1970s?

As we close out the second decade of the twenty-first century, it still seems as though digital history is in something of a pubescent stage. In brief, we are still swimming around in data, unsure of the best tools to make sense of it. My tone has been a bit too sour up to this point, so I'm going to pivot a bit and say that the past twenty years has clearly shown growth and a lot of good history has been done digitally. It's just that we're still waiting for that hockey stick exponential rise on the line graph of powerful digital contributions, and I might be getting somewhat impatient. 

To answer the header question directly, current digital history is far more focused on experience and scholarly networking than turning everything into numbers, though as indicated above I think we still have further to go before we are no longer guilty of overemphasizing measurement and sample size. I think we are also more wisely trying to make as much source-material available to each other for conversation and collaboration rather than just use the new tools for ourselves and refer readers to an appendix for our data and methodology. 

How does Digital History differ from Digital Humanities?

My analysis here is probably going to be pretty facile, but digital history is a subset of digital humanities that is more concerned with understanding the human past rather than human nature most broadly. For that reason, we tend to be more staid and conservative in our approach to the use of digital tools than other digital humanists, and have used tools that fill gaps within our traditional paradigm, e.g., Global Information Systems (generally, "where on earth did this happen" is much more important to a historian than a sociologist). 

What are the promises/perils of doing Digital History?

The promise of Digital History is the ability to reach a wider audience than ever before, having studied a great number of more diverse sources than ever before, having produced for that audience a product that appeals more directly to their senses. Hyperlinking allows connections to be made with so much less work, and storage is so much easier and information more easily-retrieved than ever before, and with every sign that it will get progressively more easy. 

To my mind, the most significant peril is what has happened to performance art, journalism and photography--the barrier to entry is now so low that the supply is overwhelming demand. Just like Broadway, where you can't make a living, only a killing, the structure of the economy within the academy is experiencing a severe strain, and readjustment seems about as vital as it is inevitable. Historians also fret over how much digital documentation is being lost to the maw of archaic operating systems and a lack of back-compatibility, but I'm uncompelled. We already get more data everyday than anyone could review in a hundred lifetimes, so I think future historians will be okay.

Can we make Digital History, as a field, more inclusive?

Professors Sharon Leon and Sheila Brennan argue pretty implacably that yes, we can do a great deal better, Leon diagnosing and Brennan pointing to tools for a cure. While I found Leon's work a tad uncharitable to her field, given that the second wave of feminism just crashed less than two generations ago, it was nevertheless disturbing to read of so many important female contributions that have been and continue to be marginalized. My big gripe is that Brennan and Leon outline a lot of the smoke and just a bit of the fire of injustice women and other groups have suffered from the white male academy, the wood is out of frame. Why are misogyny, racism, and cultural elitism such barnacles on the human heart and mind? If I have learned anything in the past decade, it is that (self) awareness can never be taken for granted.

Open Access and Scholars' Costs of Living

[Since I'm reflecting on copyright law, I will not include any of the images from the surveillance footage of Aaron Swartz entering the MIT wiring closet--you can Google it and imagine it here]

In September of 2010, a software technician working for the digital library JSTOR noticed something highly unusual: more than 200,000 separate “sessions” downloading academic articles from their server, all coming from the MIT library. Three months later, the ‘hacktivist’ Aaron Swartz was arrested for breaking and entering. Swartz had used a connection within a wiring closet to download the articles to his laptop. These charges were later dropped when authorities discovered that 1) Swartz was a Harvard research fellow entitled to access the server and 2) though the closet was supposed to have controlled access, it had been unlocked. However, he was charged with the following federal crimes: wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, recklessly damaging a protected computer, aiding and abetting, and criminal forfeiture—crimes with a maximum possible sentence of fifty years. He refused a plea bargain that would have entailed six months in a federal prison, and on January 11, 2013, the 26-year-old hanged himself before his trial could begin.

The story of Aaron Swartz is a tragedy, one that illustrates in the starkest terms the tension explored in chapter nine of Digital Humanities: A Primer: the altruistic impulse to share knowledge as freely as possible, and the need for the scholars working to acquire that knowledge to make a living. Part of Swartz’s legacy is greater attention to the gravity of this problem. There is much in this knot: the commodification of knowledge, the value of the role of gatekeepers and those who maintain digital infrastructure, the question of scholarly independence from the source of their funding, and what just compensation for work even means, just to name a few.

As an educator who has been immersed in economics for more than a year now as part of my job, I was bemused by this line: “[M]ost scholars see their work’s value in hiring, tenure and promotion (HTP) terms, not in terms of the commercial marketplace, and they are quite willing to distribute their work as freely as possible” (157). In brief, digital humanists must consider the big picture—the context to use a favorite word of historians—if they hope to continue to buy groceries and pay their bills through their scholarship. The following passage succinctly summarizes the current moment exactly as a primer should:

The late twentieth century therefore inherited two vibrant models of access to information and knowledge: one the patronage model sustained by individual, institutional or governmental resources and the other the commercial model built on the ability to produce vast amounts of inexpensive print for the broadest market possible. (159)

Space requires a bit of a leap, so I will just say that for me it boils down to the following: scholars need to consider who we want to write for—the general public or a specialized audience? In almost any topic, there are elementary concepts that will be necessary for the general public but tedious for specialists (they already know all this), and highly technical questions that the specialists will find stimulating and the general public somewhere between boring and intolerable. From that observation, it strikes me that the most efficient division of labor requires honest soul-searching of each scholar. If I am not just fluent but enjoy the most esoteric and complex aspects of my topic, I should explore those areas in writing intended for fellow specialists. If I respect these issues but find the language difficult and/or my interest wanes as the analysis gets more abstract, I should write for a popular audience. Both kinds of scholars contribute something valuable, and both kinds of scholars should write with a mind to bridge the gap between the two groups. ‘Minding the gap’ will make the expert’s writing clearer and more accessible, and the popular writer’s writing more accurate.

None of the above solves the problem of open access and vocational compensation, but it is part of the solution. Unless a new model is forged, experts will need to be content with their writing being hidden behind pay walls of various kinds, and institutions like JSTOR taking a beefy cut, and popular writers will need to be content not being featured in the most prestigious journals.

Sources:

Dean, John, and John W. Dean. “Dealing With Aaron Swartz in the Nixonian Tradition: Overzealous Overcharging Leads to a Tragic Result.” Verdict Comments, 14 Mar. 2018, verdict.justia.com/2013/01/25/dealing-with-aaron-swartz-in-the-nixonian-tradition.

MacFarquhar, Larissa. “The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 10 July 2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/requiem-for-a-dream.