The document discusses digital history projects that aim to recreate historical worlds through contextual information. It analyzes several projects including the Blake Archive, World of Dante, House Divided, and Princeton Dante Project. These projects seek to use images, maps, annotations and other materials to evoke the worlds of their historical subjects. However, they remain tied to books and libraries in their design. The document also discusses Ed Ayers' book The Promise of the New South and its use of "open narrative", as well as Ayers' defense of this approach. It analyzes the challenges of relating historical arguments and data when using digital formats.

1. The Stack of Scholarship:
Ayers’ Experiment
Prof. Alvarado
MDST 3703/7703
25 September 2012

2. Business
• Quizzes graded
– Questions, see me
• Comments
– By Monday evening
– Please write comments, not posts, for the
responses to the readings

3. Review
• Thematic Research Collections
– Remain bound to the metaphor of the library and
the book
– Partly due to remediation
• Other examples
– Blake Project
– World of Dante
– House Divided
– Princeton Dante Project

4. BLAKE ARCHIVE WORLD OF DANTE
• Figure types • Maps
• Comparison viewer • Annotations
PRINCETON DANTE PROJECT
• Commentaries
• Voice
HOUSE DIVIDED
• Contextual mass

5. These sites seek
to evoke world
through contextual
mass
What do they
mean by “world”?

7. World models like
these are “embedded”
in texts
Sites like World of
Dante use
images, maps, and
glossaries in relation
to texts to evoke these
worlds

8. When we tell stories, we also
create worlds
Our worlds express
worldviews, theories of the
world, that are culturally
constructed and historically
specific

10. Historians tells stories too
Histories are written from
various theoretical perspectives
and motiviations

11. The Great Man theory of history

12. Historical Materialism

14. Things do get complicated, though

15. The Promise of the New South
Ed Ayers, 1993

16. What is “open narrative”?

17. Open vs. Fixed Narrative
• What is open narrative?
• Why does Ayers propose it?
• What did critics say of Promise?
• How does Ayers defend himself?
• Does the book have a thesis?
• Is Ayers’ task similar to that of the historian
of the web?
• Are the periods connected?

18. Open Narrative
• Open narrative is not about being unsure of
the facts
• On the contrary, it results from the control an
excess of facts—“hyperempiricism”
• It’s purpose is to expose the complexity and
irony of history, not the absence of historical
truth
• It’s goal is to evoke the world of its
subject, not impose that of the author

19. Open narrative is “postmodern”
Against “metanarratives”
For complexity
Related to intertextuality

20. Picasso’s Guernica (1937)

22. Open narrative allows the
historian to create …

23. To move away from this

24. Did Valley of the Shadow
achieve these goals?

25. No, Ayers put too much faith in
the database to produce the
desired effects

26. The Differences Slavery Made
Created in response to criticisms of
VOTS
But also an experiment in the
academic essay

27. “an applied experiment in digital scholarship”

28. What is the specific problem that
TDSM tries to solve?
What was the experiment about?

29. To give full access to the
scholarly argument
But also to compensate for the
lack of argument in VOTS

30. The task is to relate the
ARGUMENT with the DATA
Why is this so hard?

31. Rationalization Effect:
What is an (historical)
argument?
Why do databases and
hypertext complicate matters?

32. Arguments and narratives are linear
and non-random
Readers expect to follow a logical
or causal sequence of ideas

33. Databases
are random
Databases are “random access”
It does not matter which order you
read them
They are meant to be searched and
“queried”

35. How does TDSM handle the
relationship between narrative and
data?
How does it handle the relationship
between the fixed linearity of the
narrative and the non-linearity of
the data?

36. Darnton’s Pyramid
Concise
account
Expanded
versions of
aspects
Documentation with
interpretive essays
Theoretical and
historiographical material
Pedagogic material (Commentaries,
etc.)

37. TDSM’s “Prismatic” Structure
Historiography
Summary of Points of
Argument Analysis
Evidence
VOS

38. Technology
• XML is used to organize content
– The is is made from one big XML file, 24,000 lines long
– XML used to markup sources and argument
• XSL is used to transform content
– We are not learning XSL, but it is similar to CSS but
more powerful
• GIS is used for map data
– Geographic Information Systems
– Allows maps to display statistical data

39. More “rationalization”
• Historians use three kinds of information
– Narrative (T)
– Historiography, or secondary sources (E)
– Evidence, or primary sources (D)
• Historiography and Evidence organized in
databases
– Documents, tables, maps, etc.
– Libraries, Bibliographies, Digital Collections

40. Categories are used to organize
• Geography
source content
• Politics
– Election of 1860
– Political activtivists
• Economics
– Commerce Missed
– Crops opportunity?
– Labor
– Property
• Social structure
• Race
• Culture
– Religion
– Education (“school”)
– Urbanization (“Town Development”)
• Information and communications

41. Categories are a large part of what
worlds are made of
Ontologies

42. Figure Types in Blake

43. Does the site fulfill the goals of
open narrative?
Does the form match or help the
content?

44. Criticism
• Worst of both worlds?
– Neither random access nor rich narrative
– Exploits neither the potentials of a real library or a
digital library
• Still document-centric
– Subject matter remains buried in the documents
• Not well connected
– Terminal nodes not cross-linked
– No cross-site searching
• It’s strength is in the integrity of the materials
– But criticized for being difficult to use

45. More Criticisms
• Nothing inherently hypertextual about the site
– Readers are shunted into paths
• Thesis is not that complicated
– Modernity and slavery not opposites
• Why not put exhibits inline?
• Why not show points of comparison in context?
– Need for transclusion
• Why explain relationship in historiography? Why
not create links or use tags?

46. The Stack of Scholarship
ARGUMENTS
MAGIC MIDDLE
COLLECTIONS

47. The Stack of Scholarship
ARGUMENTS ESSAYS HYPERTEXT
MAGIC MIDDLE
COLLECTIONS LIBRARIES DATABASES

48. The Stack of Scholarship
ARGUMENTS ESSAYS HYPERTEXT
Work, Programs,
MAGIC MIDDLE
Memory Maps, etc.
COLLECTIONS LIBRARIES DATABASES

49. The Stack of Scholarship
ARGUMENTS ESSAYS HYPERTEXT
Work, Programs,
MAGIC MIDDLE
Memory Maps, etc.
COLLECTIONS LIBRARIES DATABASES

50. The goal is to excavate and expose
the connections between the levels