Week 6: "Arguing" with Digital History

Guidelines for Digital History?

The realm of digital history has evolved abundantly over the past two decades with the creation and evolution of the internet. Sources, as we have discussed, are available in an abundance that we have never seen before. Globalization is finding it's place in the realms of history, meaning new issues take place in the digitization and publication of works and authors.  To best understand and combat potential issues, The American Historical Association created a committee to examine not only “work that can be seen as analogous to print scholarship that is reviewable by peers (i.e. journal articles and books), but also to address the myriad uses of digital technology for research, teaching, pedagogy, and even some that might be described as service” (AHA, 2017). The consensus that the committee came to was a push for a broader understanding of  scholarship in terms of understanding the equality that is needed in reviewing digital media as print; the digital realm is a working evolution, meaning that scholars should focus to keep a standard of scholarship as they already do with print (AHA, 2017). The medium is unique and should be treated that way, with the AHA encouraging departments to understand how the medium affects their scholarship and presentation of their material. Examples of representation include expanding career opportunities to digital historians, evaluating digital sources in their digital medium, and exploring the sophistication of digital tools (AHA, 2017). Ultimately, the guidelines are to promote the individuality of the subject and protect it's researchers from a faulty form of scholarship. 

Digital History and Argument

The goal of this workshop was to further understand how digital history fits into the wider subject of history in it's own, argumentative way. As a subject of history, it needs to find itself in the argumentative platform of historical scholarship to continue conversation and provide unique ideas to the understanding behind questions already asked. The belief shared in this article is along the basis of histography and the publication and reviewing of digital articles in comparison to paper journals; Digital public history should be brought into the historiographical conversation by having it reviewed in scholarly journals alongside existing articles not found in the digital realm (Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, 2017).  Digital history makes it's place in historical scholarship and discussion unique in the sense that the methodology is from multiple disciplines, meaning the digital historian's approach is different than that of the other mediums of history. The committee present understood the tactics of the digital historian to be unique in the sense that digital historians employ methods that do not fully articulate the articles they're citing; Historians, with the rise of digital literacy and search tools, need to expand their understanding of ethical concerns by properly citing sources, expanding on sources in depth, widening the understand of the topic rather than cherry picking from sources (Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, 2017).

Genre Analysis: Examples in Scholarship

Scot French understood scholarship in terms of digital mapping and tools in his own work. French employed an interactive visualization, presenting his arguments by allowing users to investigate specific “themes” and “threads” throughout the correspondences of Thomas Jefferson's views on race and slavery. Digital tools allow the understanding of multiple threads of analysis in conversation with the holistic analysis of sources (French, 2018.) Marcy Galbreath and Amy Giroux composed similar themes, analyzing institutional knowledge transmission and how the promotion of the farm and 4-H record can create a wider understanding of agriculture and it's relation to the United States economy in n the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Marcy L. Galbreath and Amy L. Giroux, 2018). The understanding of genre analysis as a whole points to how historical scholarship can be done with multiple methods, as digital historians impose. 

Networks of Piety and Slavery among Late Eighteenth-Century Rural Maryland Catholics: A Digital Review 

Data map from Bohlmann and Krivulskaya's work, networks of piety and slave ownership.

From the online sources, online exhibition, “Preserving the Steadfastness of Your Faith’:

Catholics in the Early American Republic,” 

I chose this article because it contains maps depicting two subjects: Piety and Slavery. The author uses their maps to find a correlation between Catholics subscribing to the first Catholic bible produced in America and their slave holding status. This technique is a similar tactic I wish to employ in my research with Black soldiers in the Civil War and their enlistment process and their background, making the project interesting to me. Our authors are Rachel Bohlmann and Suzanna Krivulskaya, publishing their work on August 23rd, 2019. Rachel Bohlmann is an American History Librarian at Hesburgh Libraries and started the project, researching and interpreting the data. Suzanna Krivulskaya, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of History at California State University San Marcos and contributed to research, data analysis, and coding for the application (Bohlmann, Rachel, and Suzanna Krivulskaya, 2019). They cite the “Preserving the Steadfastness of Your Faith’: Catholics in the Early American Republic” as their general project behind the creation of the article, a map based tool to show the locations of priests and enslavers, correlating location and amount together. They use maps to illustrate geospatial areas surrounding the states surrounding the D.C. Area. They have pinpoint maps to show cities, churches, confirmed slave sellers and priests whilst using area circles to illustrate the gravity of owned slaves in a specific area. Their argument is never clearly stated, but they cite the argument made by Maura Farrelly that holding people in racialized slavery made democratic republicanism an acceptably safe political system for white Maryland Catholics, who otherwise feared social and political disruptions in post-Revolutionary America (Bohlmann, Rachel, and Suzanna Krivulskaya, 2019). Their data shows that the purchasers of Bibles greatly outnumbered the slave holders in Southern states, showing a great number of Catholics also were slaveholders, promoting Farrelly’s argument. Their work proves the claim by giving a geospatial graphic and representation to the distribution of Bibles and slaves within the state. This brings light to how the development of Catholicism in early America stewarded the acceptance of the democratic republicanism shown by Farrelly. Without these tools, the idea of slaveholders and subscribers to the new Catholic bible could not be visualized, giving light to the understanding of the development of social and political standards in the new America. 

Slave Streets, Free Streets Visualizing the Landscape of Early Baltimore: A Digital Review

Dot density map showing 1820 population by ward.
From Rubin, Anne Sarah, 2021.

The second article I chose relates to map usage as well. The usage of digital tools to map the spatial understanding of inclusion and segregation the streets of Baltimore made me question how proximity and market could be interlinked between whites and blacks, living on the same streets whilst segregated. The author is Anne Sarah Rubin, publishing her work on October 3rd, 2021. Slave Streets. Free Streets: Visualizing the Landscape of Early Baltimore is a project restoring a map of Baltimore following the war of 1812 (Rubin, Anne Sarah, 2021). They investigate four interconnected themes: the lives of free blacks, the lives of enslaved workers, the sites and workings of the slave trade, and stories of fugitive slaves, who ran both to and from Baltimore (Rubin, Anne Sarah, 2021). Specifically, the team and the author employ advanced GIS in mapping not only streets, but also dot maps to understand population distribution and contextualization.  Their primary argument is to show the power of visualization as a story-telling medium, to show how mapping can spatially illuminate relationships of power and place (Rubin, Anne Sarah, 2021). The maps are highly detailed, but they add credibility and backing to the question of spatial history and interlinked ideas in demographics. The maps help us understand perspective and lived-in experience without the detailed analysis of primary sources; We can make inferences to help us analyze primary sources closer. The tools are the fundamental basis of the presentation, without the tools,  there would be no presentation. Without the tools, historians would succumb to analyzing available primary sources highlighting addresses and sales receipts and comparing and contrasting to create a timeline. The process wouldn’t have been interactive and highly based upon excel sheets and data analysis to create correlations. 

References

Arguing with Digital History working group, “Digital History and Argument,” white paper, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

(November 13, 2017): https://rrchnm.org/argument-white-paper/.

Bohlmann, Rachel, and Suzanna Krivulskaya. “Networks of Piety and Slavery among Late Eighteenth-Century Rural Maryland Catholics.” Current Research in Digital History, August 23, 2019. https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v02-09-networks-of-piety-and-slavery/. 

“Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians: AHA.” Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians. Accessed September 25, 2023. https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/digital-history-resources/evaluation-of-digital-scholarship-in-history/guidelines-for-the-professional-evaluation-of-digital-scholarship-by-historians. 

Galbreath, Marcy L and Giroux, Amy L. “Researching Genres in Agricultural Communities: The Role of the Farm Record Book,” Current Research in Digital History 1, no. 1, (August 2018): 3, https://doi.org/10.31835/crdh.2018.16.

French, Scot A. “Notes on the Future of Virginia: Visualizing a 40-Year Conversation on Race and Slavery in Correspondence of Jefferson and Short,” Current Research in Digital History 1, no. 1, (August 2018): 4-5, https://doi.org/10.31835/crdh.2018.15.

Rubin, Anne Sarah. “Slave Streets, Free Streets: Visualizing the Landscape of Early Baltimore.” Current Research in Digital History, October 13, 2021. https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v04-01-slave-streets-free-streets/.