Past-Forward

I am delighted to serve as chair of this panel, “Past/Forward: Collecting, Teaching, and Writing History (in the Digital Universe).” The panel addresses central questions about how new technology and new media are (and are not) reconfiguring the most fundamental roles of the historian as archivist, teacher, and writer. They offer a rich mix of reports from the field of what has been done in these arenas as well as arguments about what yet needs to be done.

One of the limited functions of a conference session chair is to introduce the presenters. But that function has been rendered technologically obsolete here; you can read the online biographies of Jeremy Boggs, Sheila Brennan, and Stephanie Hurter on the about page.

If you read those biographies (along with my own), you will see why it would be inappropriate for me to also take on the role of panel “commentator.” Jeremy, Sheila, and Stephanie are all not only students in the doctoral program in history at George Mason University, where I teach, they also work at the Center for History and New Media, which I direct. Most readers will not be very surprised to learn that I think highly of the work of my students and collaborators.

But let me offer one brief, general comment on a theme that runs through all these fine papers. One of the distinctive features of the digital era has been abundance. Whereas previously history teachers might only have been able to offer their students a limited body of primary sources collected in a classroom anthology, now they can participate in what John McClymer calls a “pedagogy of abundance,” in which students can examine and research in vast digital archives. This makes it possible, as Stephanie’s paper shows, for them to “authentically engage in historical inquiry.” Whereas previously only small bodies of evidence survived from the past, it is now possible, as Sheila’s paper shows, to collect and document current events in abundant detail. And whereas previous previously historians were limited to the page count of print journals and monographs, now historians have the almost unlimited spaces of the web to fill. Moreover, as Jeremy’s paper shows, they have a plethora of new forms (such as blogs) to consider.

There is little doubt that digital abundance is better than analog scarcity. As Sophie Kalish (better known as Sophie Tucker) once said, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Believe me, honey, rich is better.” But should we begin to devote more attention to the problems and dangers of abundance? Some of the problems such as inequality (the digital divide) are obvious and have already attracted considerable interest. But others require more attention. Does the unlimited space of the web leads historians toward “over inclusiveness” and the abdication of their responsibility to find the most important and most meaningful patterns? Will future historians need to reconfigure their research practices to deal with an abundant, but possibly overwhelming, historical records? Have we done enough to teach students how to find significant documents in the massive digital archives they now confront?

It is not an accident that the new economic affluence that appeared in the United States in the 1950s led commentators such as John Kenneth Galbraith and David Riesman to begin writing books and articles that critically probed the “economics of abundance” and asked questions like “abundance for what?” We probably need some similar works on the new digital affluence and abundance that has appeared a half century later.