The Stack of Scholarship: Ayers’ Experiment

Prof. AlvaradoMDST 3703/7703

25 September 2012

Business

• Quizzes graded– Questions, see me

• Comments– By Monday evening– Please write comments, not posts, for the

responses to the readings

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

BLAKE ARCHIVE• Figure types• Comparison viewer

WORLD OF DANTE• Maps• Annotations

PRINCETON DANTE PROJECT• Commentaries• Voice

HOUSE DIVIDED• Contextual mass

These sites seek to evoke world through

contextual mass

What do they mean by “world”?

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

When we tell stories, we also create worlds

Our worlds express worldviews, theories of the world, that are

culturally constructed and historically specific

Historians tells stories too

Histories are written from various theoretical perspectives

and motiviations

The Great Man theory of history

Historical Materialism

Things do get complicated, though

The Promise of the New South

Ed Ayers, 1993

What is “open narrative”?

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?

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

Open narrative is “postmodern”

Against “metanarratives”For complexity

Related to intertextuality

Picasso’s Guernica (1937)

Open narrative allows the historian to create …

To move away from this

Did Valley of the Shadow achieve these goals?

No, Ayers put too much faith in the database to produce the

desired effects

The Differences Slavery Made

Created in response to criticisms of VOTS

But also an experiment in the academic essay

“an applied experiment in digital scholarship”

What is the specific problem that TDSM tries to solve?

What was the experiment about?

To give full access to the scholarly argument

But also to compensate for the lack of argument in VOTS

The task is to relate the ARGUMENT with the DATA

Why is this so hard?

Rationalization Effect:What is an (historical)

argument?

Why do databases and hypertext complicate matters?

Arguments and narratives are linear and non-random

Readers expect to follow a logical or causal sequence of ideas

Databasesare random

Databases are “random access”It does not matter which order you

read them

They are meant to be searched and “queried”

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?

Darnton’s Pyramid

Concise account

Expanded versions of

aspects

Documentation with interpretive essays

Theoretical and historiographical material

Pedagogic material (Commentaries, etc.)

TDSM’s “Prismatic” StructureHistoriograp

hy

Points of Analysis

Evidence

Summary of Argument

VOS

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

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

Categories are used to organizesource content

• Geography• Politics

– Election of 1860– Political activtivists

• Economics– Commerce– Crops– Labor– Property

• Social structure• Race• Culture

– Religion– Education (“school”)– Urbanization (“Town Development”)

• Information and communications

Missed opportunity?

Categories are a large part of what worlds are made of

Ontologies

Figure Types in Blake

Does the site fulfill the goals of open narrative?

Does the form match or help the content?

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

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?

The Stack of Scholarship

ARGUMENTS

MAGIC MIDDLE

COLLECTIONS

The Stack of Scholarship

ARGUMENTS ESSAYS HYPERTEXT

MAGIC MIDDLE

COLLECTIONS LIBRARIES DATABASES

The Stack of Scholarship

ARGUMENTS ESSAYS HYPERTEXT

MAGIC MIDDLE Work,Memory

Programs, Maps, etc.

COLLECTIONS LIBRARIES DATABASES

The Stack of Scholarship

ARGUMENTS ESSAYS HYPERTEXT

MAGIC MIDDLE Work,Memory

Programs, Maps, etc.

COLLECTIONS LIBRARIES DATABASES

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