History, for me, remains text-centric, which I hope sounds perverse in a conversation about history and new media. Although I’m not technically accomplished, neither am I a Luddite. And I’ve drunk enough Derridian Kool-Aid to be willing to see most anything as a potential archive. I’ve nevertheless got an old-fashioned hankering for narrative, and I still think prose is king.
Yes, I use digitized information for sources; I work with visual material as sources and to make arguments; I think about material culture, its three dimensions and tactility. I even wrote a book whose primary incarnation was digital. Belongings is an e-book with a print edition. All this, and I can’t let go of the idea that sentence structure and word choice will make or break a piece, regardless of its length, format, or intended audience.
This attachment to text has important consequences for thinking about the digital revolution we’re living through. There are many reasons to embrace the technological innovations that enable multi-media websites, blogs, on-line genealogies, digitized rare documents easily accessible to the public, photo archives, interactive maps, user-generated timelines, and the trusty library catalog. This flourishing of information and ways to present it is all to the good.
Yet general hand-wringing about the demise of the print form, combined with ongoing conversations happening in department meetings, scholarly conferences, academic journals, and the blogosphere suggest that we need an occasional reminder that this isn’t a zero-sum game, word-smiths and techno-geeks are not necessarily at odds with one another, and history’s house has many rooms.
Print + Digital and the enduring place of prose in history
Despite convulsions in both trade and academic publishing, it seems there’s a rough consensus that print and digital forms will coexist into the foreseeable future. Is it just coincidence that Karl Jacoby’s comments on the tensions and potential for print/digital cohabitation share a fixation with “the future of the past” that roundtable participants grappled with at a 2009 AHA session on digital historical monographs?
Anxiety persists about the print/digital mix, however, aggravated no doubt by the challenges currently facing print newspapers. The resulting commentary opens the discipline up to unprecedented opportunities for reflection on methods and audience at the same time that scholars and institutions experiment with new ways of retrieving, storing and presenting both data and interpretations.
The range of digital resources is staggering; the accomplishments of some sites showcase the possibilities; the pace of innovation rapidly re-sets the game. There’s a reason (besides a misplaced video-game addiction) that people are attracted to new media. The seduction is real, but it’s unlikely to supplant print—at least not until there’s a technology that makes reading anything longer than 1500 words and is also fully integrated with other media as comfortable and portable as a book.
As long as historians perceive their discipline to be about the crafting of arguments developed from careful analysis of primary sources in the context of the existing literature, they will need long stretches of prose to do their work. Currently, on-line or computer-based platforms are not the best medium for sustained reading. Kindle doesn’t present images well (granted, I haven’t had the chance to play with Kindle II), so we still don’t have the technological interface to read long text that is interactive, hyper-linked, or image-heavy other than a computer monitor.
Moreover, the structure of most websites combined with user habit on the internet militates against the web as the best place to present long prose, either articles or books. In other words, the digital revolution presents all kinds of possibilities, but the horizon on which new media completely absorbs long-form prose isn’t visible yet.
I struggled with this paradox as I wrote a book destined to appear as a web-site. To complicate matters, this was my “tenure book,” so I felt it had to be conventional in its address to historiography and be intelligible as a book, with recognizable chapter structure, a cohesive narrative, and a sustained argument. At the same time, the freedom of the digital platform gave me latitude to think about how to create something more than a body of prose accompanied by nice pictures, maps, and historical documents.
Rather than an appendix of documents, I incorporated a few documents into one chapter, bringing readers into my process of close reading. In the chapters with photographs, the images and captions provide illustrations for the arguments I make at specific points, but extracted from the text in the separate media gallery, they constitute photo essays that mirror the larger arguments of the chapter.
I was also keenly aware that the presentation of each chapter as a discrete web-page made it more likely that readers might dip selectively into sections, rather than reading the book cover to cover. So I worked toward making each chapter self-contained, without being needlessly repetitive. The possibility of hyperlinked cross-references made this easier on-line than on the printed page, but I doubt I would have spent much time considering the issue of how to make discrete sections comprise a unified whole if I had been writing a print-only book, where I would presume a more linear reader engagement. I found that being able to point readers forward and backwards without encumbering the prose is a productive addition; I will miss such hyperlinks when I next write for print.
As a reader, I skip around in book chapters all the time, but if it seems like I’m missing some crucial piece of background information because I started in Chapter 5, I figure that’s my shortcoming, not the author’s. But in an e-book, where a Google search could conceivably take a reader straight to Chapter 8 for a discussion of criminal incest, while skipping the evidence presented in Chapters 5, 6, and 7 to establish the context of family structures and household formations that made this particular liaison possible, I felt an obligation to help the reader make links to other parts of the book.
Despite my attention to how an e-book functions differently than a print counterpart, Belongings nevertheless has a print edition. I am not excited about reading more than 200 pages of text on my computer screen. Plus, a bound book is more convenient and physically comfortable to read than the sheaf of 8×11 pages you get from printing the pdf version of the text. (The e-book’s pdf print feature does not let you format the pages to bind as book in a do-it-yourself alternative.)
The color charts, maps, and illustrations that enhance my e-book would have been cost-prohibitive in a print-only project, but like any book, Belongings is ultimately about the prose. Until historians abandon the presentation of arguments in prose, we will supplement but not supplant print as a central medium for the discipline.
As we move toward greater print-digital cohabitation, a range of issues bears ongoing consideration. Many of these topics will be taken up in future posts:
• Mutable websites and the problem of a verifiable citation or citation chain;
• The intersection between method, medium and audience;
• Shifting or new audiences for historians as they engage with different genres of writing: blogging, critical essays, op-eds, trade and “cross-over” books;
• Google isn’t making us stoopid , but it is making room for people with multiple skill sets.
