Digital Public History Narratives with Photographs

This post is a slightly different version of  Digital Public History narratives with Photographs. In: Public History Weekly 3 (2015) 31, DOI:  dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2015-4706. (German and French versions also available in PHW).

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Social Media are “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.”[1] They facilitate various forms of web communication between individuals and communities. They can bring users together to discuss common issues and to share traces of the past. Local communities’ engagement with the past, mediated or not, are made possible through Web 2.0 practices. New virtual contacts could be built when communities are no longer present in physical spaces.[2]

http://public-history-weekly.oldenbourg-verlag.de/

Everybody’s got talent: user-generated knowledge

If social media allow dispersed communities to reconnect online and share their memories, today, understanding how common people use social media and play with history tells us many things about which pasts are important in our present.[3]
Everybody promotes her/himself. TV “reality shows” such as Got Talent[4] are the most followed TV broadcasts worldwide because they select unknown people and connect them with an audience. These shows reveal unexpressed skills and creative capacities the same way online social media websites crowd-source knowledge and reconnect with the past. Like TV talent shows, social media allow different publics to promote themselves, their family history, and their communities.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defined the systematic repetition of similar family photographs as emblematic of popular behaviour and culture.[5] Sharing different generations’ family pictures in social media shapes collective memories.[6] On the other hand, such popular demand for genealogy[7] only scratches the surface of major events in history and is often disconnected from “big history” and broader contexts. But photography, in social media, describes popular behaviours – “selfies” today – [8] and, thanks to linked data technologies, Google Maps, and Street View, adds spatial dimensions and time boundaries to individual memories.

Pinning your images with Historypin, a digital time machine

“Historypin is a digital time machine that creates a new way for the world to see and share history.”[9] Linked data and the Semantic Web connect digital contents, combining primary sources with geography.[10] Old pictures can be “pinned” in the present: family pasts may be re-enacted today. Heritage institutions, but also common people, organize forms of storytelling because the technology is easy. Public historians takeHistorypin seriously to engage with specific communities.[11] Using Historypin, the American National Archives is now everywhere outside the building in the virtual space[12] and solicits everybody’s contribution to historical archives, inviting the wider public to “pin your history to the world.”[13] In Florence, during a public exhibition (2014) commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of the German occupation,[14] citizens brought their documents on site, using the MemorySharing project. Old 1944 documents were scanned and included in today’s maps of Florence. New Zealand soldiers are now re-enacted directly on Google Street View.[15] You can fade the vintage picture[16] to see the contemporary layer of the street.
Could academic historians use the potential of digital public history, with Historypin, a tool that makes it easy to re-enact even difficult pasts? Alon Confino tried to reconstruct the pre-1948 invisible Palestinian past of Tantura, Dor in today’s Israel. Confino studied cadastral maps, aerial photography, and images of Palestinians recorded prior to May 22–23, 1948. But user-generated content from social media would add original Palestinian diaspora documents: re-enacting 1948 Palestinian memories should be possible.[17]

Visual narrative public history

Inspired by a photograph, Michael Hughes’ Flickr project “Souvenirs”,[18] Looking into the Past merges past and present in a unique image.[19] “Ghosting family pasts”, thanks to digital technologies, is very popular for resuscitating memories. Merging old pictures and recent images shortens the digital timeline and activates different regimes of historicity in the present.[20]
Emblematic of many others projects around the world, the Past Present Project in Tumblr[21] publishes family pictures where past and present overlap.[22] Images showing the pastness of places shape a nostalgic present, such as the merged urban temporalities of the Hungarian artist Zoltán Kerényi,[23] or Hebe Robinson’s Northern Norway Echoes, a project placing old family photos from a Lofoten fishing village, abandoned after WW2, in today’s landscape.[24] Sometimes called rephotography,[25] these new images contain different time layers in one unique image. Even WW1 images are “ghosted” in a past-present continuum.[26] The same is done with WW2 images by the Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov in Link to the Past.[27] The author of a website about Krakow “looks for very old photos of the city and takes new ones from the very same spot, so my readers can compare and see what has changed”.[28] Keith Jones, inLiverpool then and now,[29] lets us discover “blended shots”: old black and white images merged with colour images.[30]

Past-present relationships in photographs

The Italian photographer, Isabella Balena, took pictures of the Gothic Line ruins that stopped the allied offensive in 1944 in central Italy sixty years after the event. Ci resta il nome, a photographic journey through the memory of WW2 in Italy is a good example of visual narrative public history.[31] What is important in Balena’s systematic reproduction of monuments and traces of the violent past is to show how the place where Mussolini was shot in April 1945 tells about both presentism and oblivion and is open to the present and new futures.
But photography may also show that the present has lost its connection with the past. Total disconnection with history is what Serge Gruzinski demonstrates with the cover picture of his book, L’Histoire pour quoi faire?:[32] young, post-colonial Algerians playing soccer. Their goalkeeper stands in front of an ancient Roman arch, a symbol of lost memories. The arch does not mean anything to them. Instead, in the context of today’s Isis campaigns, the Islamic State extremists destroy past heritages, so that history could be rewritten and memory cancelled forever.[33]

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Literature

• François Hartog: Régimes d’historicité: présentisme et expériences du temps., Paris: Seuil, 2003 (Regimes of historicity: presentism and experiences of time, translated by Saskia Brown, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
• Serge Gruzinski: L’Histoire pour quoi faire?, Paris: Fayard, 2012.
• Serge Noiret: “Nulla sarà più come prima: considerazioni sul Digital Turn e le fonti fotografiche dal punto di vista della storiografia.” in Gian Piero Brunetta and Carlo Alberto Zotti Minici (eds.): La fotografia come fonte di storia, atti del convegno (Venezia, 4-6 ottobre 2012), Venezia, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2014, pp.248-268.

External links

• 1940-1944 Firenze in guerra: http://www.firenzeinguerra.com (Last accessed 5.10.2015)
• Historypin – a global community collaborating around history: http://www.historypin.org (Last accessed 5.10.2015)
• Flickr Group “Looking Into the Past”: http://www.flickr.com/groups/lookingintothepast/ (Last accessed 5.10.2015)

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[1] Andreas M. Kaplan, and Michael Haenlein, “Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media”, in Business Horizons, 53/1, 2010 pp. 59-68.
[2] Dario Miccoli studies how the Jewish diaspora from the Maghreb is today “reconnected” through the web and social media. See “Digital museums: narrating and preserving the history of Egyptian Jews on the Internet”, in E. Trevisan Semi, D. Miccoli and T. Parfitt (eds.), Memory and Ethnicity. Ethnic Museums in Israel and the Diaspora, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013, pp.195-222; “Les Juifs du Maroc, Internet et la construction d’une diaspora numérique”, in Expressions Maghrébines, 13/1, 2014, pp.75-94.
[3] André Gunthert: “Shared Images”, in Études photographiques, 24, novembre 2009, http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3436 (Last accessed 5.10.2015); “L’image conversationnelle”, in Études photographiques, 31, 2014, http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3387 (Last accessed 5.10.2015).
[4] A list of countries offering, after the USA in 2006 and GB in 2007, an emulation of Got Talent is available in Wikipedia,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Got_Talent; America’s Got Talent (2006), http://www.nbc.com/americas-got-talent; La France a un incroyable talent (2006), http://www.m6.fr/emission-la_france_a_un_incroyable_talent/; Britain’s got talent http://www.itv.com/britainsgottalent; general information in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britain%27s_Got_Talent (All last accessed 5.10.2015).
[5] Pierre Bourdieu, Luc Boltanski, Roger Castel and Philippe de Vendeuvre: Photography, a Middle-Brow Art, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
[6] Richard Chalfen, “La photo de famille et ses usages communicationnels”, Études photographiques, n. 32, 2015,http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3502 (Last accessed 5.10.2015).
[7] Jerome De Groote: “International Federation for Public History Plenary Address: On Genealogy”, in The Public Historian, Vol. 37, No. 3, August 2015, pp. 102-127, DOI: 10.1525/tph.2015.37.3.102 (Last accessed 5.10.2015).
[8] André Gunthert: “The consecration of the selfie”, in Études photographiques, 32, 2015, http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3537 (Last accessed 5.10.2015)
[9] Historypin in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historypin (Last accessed 5.10.2015); see also Hunter Skipworth: Historypin turns Google Street View into a window on the past, June 21, 2010, The Telegraph,http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7854922/Historypin-turns-Google-Street-View-into-a-window-on-the-past.html (Last accessed 5.10.2015); Beat Brüsch: “L’histoire en noir et blanc”, in: Mots d’Image, http://www.motsdimages.ch/L-histoire-en-noir-et-blanc.html
[10] “A global community collaborating around history […]”, http://www.historypin.com/ (Last accessed 5.10.2015). Historypin was created by the non-profit company Shift with support from Google and launched at the Museum of the City of New York in July 2011. “Enabling networks of people to share and explore local history, make new connections and reduce social isolation” was the goal of the company. See Historypin,http://www.shiftdesign.org.uk/products/historypin/ (Last accessed 5.10.2015).
[11] Meg Foster: “Online and Plugged In? Public History and Historians in the Digital Age”, in Public History Review, Vol.21, 2014, pp. 1-19,http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj/article/view/4295/4601 (Last accessed 5.10.2015)
[12] Kris Jarosik: “Primary Sources With Some Help from Historypin”, in The National Archives Education Updates,http://education.blogs.archives.gov/2014/12/16/primary-sources-on-history-pin/ (Last accessed 5.10.2015).
[13] NARA, http://www.archives.gov/social-media/historypin.html (Last accessed 5.10.2015).
[14] http://www.regione.toscana.it/-/1940-1944-firenze-in-guerra (Last accessed 5.10.2015); Filippo Macelloni and Lorenzo Garzella: MemorySharing a Firenze, http://www.firenzeinguerra.com/memorysharing/ (Last accessed 5.10.2015). Francesco Cavarocchi and Valeria Galimi: Firenze in Guerra, 1940-1944, Florence: Firenze University Press, 2014, pp. XXIV-XXV.
[15] The historic centre of Florence on a Google map is now available with new, embedded documents from 1944. This is the direct link with geographical coordinates:
https://www.historypin.org/map/#!/geo:43.789874,11.271481/zoom:13/date_from:1944-01-01/date_to:1944-12-31/ (Last accessed 5.20.2015).
[16] Kaye, George Frederick, 1914-2004. Looking towards the Porta Romana in southern Florence, Italy, in World War II,http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22827427 (Last accessed 5.10.2015)
[17] Alon Confino : “Miracles and Snow in Palestine and Israel: Tantura, a History of 1948.”, in Israel Studies, vol. 17, n. 2, 2012, pp. 25-61, (photos are published on pages 44-55).
[18] https://www.flickr.com/photos/michael_hughes/sets/346406/ (Last accessed 5.10.2015).
[19] Ghosting the Past is the title of a picture showing two generations of the same family pausing on Capitol Hill. Like their grandparents, the next generation visited the same “realm of American memory”. (Looking into the Past http://www.flickr.com/groups/lookingintothepast/ (Last accessed 5.10.2015)).
[20] François Hartog: Regimes of historicity: presentism and experiences of time (translated by Saskia Brown), New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
[21] Christian Carollo’s Past Present Project in Tumblr, http://pastpresentproject.com; The Past Present Project in Instagram,https://instagram.com/sayhellotoamerica/; The Past Present Project in Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pastpresentproject (All last accessed 5.10.2015).
[22] “I wondered,” said the photographer Christian Carollo, “what if I could replicate my grandfather’s photograph 30 years later?”http://pastpresentproject.com/about (Last accessed 5.10.2015).
[23] 25 photos du passé se superposent avec le présent pour vous faire découvrir leurs histoires
http://soocurious.com/fr/25-photos-du-passe-se-superposent-avec-le-present-pour-vous-faire-decouvrir-leurs-histoires/ (Last accessed 5.10.2015)
[24] Hebe Robinson: Echoes, http://www.heberobinson.com/#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&p=1&a=0&at=0 (Last accessed 5.10.2015)
[25] Loïc Haÿ: Quand la rephotographie rencontre le numérique, https://tackk.com/rephotographie (Last accessed 5.10.2015)
[26] Pictured: Fascinating World War One photographs mixed with today’s modern landscapes, April 22, 2014,http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/world-war-one-photographs-mixed-3433146 (Last accessed 5.10.2015).
[27]Sergey Larenkov: Связь времен / Link to the Past, URL: http://sergey-larenkov.livejournal.com
[28] Photos are divided; the old black and white image abuts the new one in full colour. The viewer may cancel parts – or the entirety – of one of the two combined images. (Kuba: Dawno temu w Krakowie, http://www.dawnotemuwkrakowie.pl/english/) (Last accessed 5.10.2015).
[29] Keith Jones: Liverpool Then and Now, https://www.flickr.com/photos/keithjones84/sets/72157632063149974/ (Last accessed 5.10.2015).
[30] Liverpool Then and Now, https://www.facebook.com/LiverpoolThenAndNow (Last accessed 5.10.2015)
[31] Isabella Balena: Ci resta il nome., Milano: Mazzotta, 2004 and http://isabalena.photoshelter.com/#!/about (Last accessed 5.10.2015).
[32] Serge Gruzinski: L’Histoire pour quoi faire?, Paris: Fayard, 2012, pp.21-24.
[33] Isis Video Claims Attack On Unesco Iraq World Heritage Site, https://youtu.be/iAWQHWU1H94 (Last accessed 5.10.2015).

Digital public history: bringing the public back in

This post is a slightly different version of "Digital public history: bringing the public back in." In: Public History Weekly 3 (2015) 13, DOI:  dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2014-2647. (German and French translations also available in PHW).

Digital History has reshaped the documentation methods of historians, especially their means of accessing and storing history. However, this seismic shift has occurred without any thorough critical discussion of these digital tools and practices. Digital history aims to create new forms of scholarship and new digital objects for the web.[1] But we need to ask in which ways—if any—Digital Public History (DPH) is distinct from an innovative digital history?

From Digital Humanities to Digital History

"Digital historical culture" is part of the wider "digital culture" permeating our society through the Internet. The sociological concept of digital culture was developed by Manuel Castells[2] and Willard McCarty[3]. In Italy, Tito Orlandi theorized the emergence of a new Koine based on his further development of scientific and methodological concepts of humanities computing as web-based communication processes.[4] By contrast, the digital humanities provide methodologies and practices that, analogous to the sciences, are suitable for the humanities.[5] These practices and concepts are elaborated within the various disciplines.[6] Thus, after the digital turn, digital historians are confronted with new epistemological issues when analysing  the past.[7] They plan exhibitions with memory institutions (libraries, archives, museums, and galleries) dedicated to presenting artefacts and documents ; they collect, preserve, and curate digitised and  born digital documents for these institutions;[8] they create new tools and software to support their activities; they also use social media; following  the digital turn, moreover, they are not confined to analysing written materials, but also strive to devise new forms of text-mining for processing large amounts of data between “close and distant reading” activities .[9] Digitally connected historians do not perform their profession beyond the discipline: rather, they apply their methods, traditions, and skills to deal with primary sources in different contexts and to reconstruct the past using new types of narratives.[10] Technology facilitates what is still a recognizable history profession, although digital humanities technology is part of a new historian’s craft. Historians, that is, are involved deeply in technological transformations that affect the humanities as a whole.

New practices and new tools

In the field of digital history, we are what we do and what we create. New practices and new tools define the nature and the scope of the field. Importantly, digital history corresponds not only with the tradition of the digital humanities. The question of the originality of our methods, tasks, and ultimate goals within the digital realm was raised already at an early stage in Italy; it was always clear that our priorities were quite different from those of other digital humanists.[11] Digital history, then, is about a proper epistemological dimension, one specific to historians.[12] As historians, we need to create contents, to control those contents, and to use tools in the digital realm that are different from those needed by other digital humanists confronted with literary and linguistic computing, text analysis, text encoding, and annotation. Stephen Robertson, director of the Center for History and New Media has argued, perhaps for the first time ever in the English speaking world, that digital history is different from literary studies and might be considered another discipline. His reflections influenced the 20th anniversary celebrations of the Center[13], held in the autumn of 2014,  which highlighted the importance of digital media for the history profession.[14] Robertson emphasised two points: “First, the collection, presentation, and dissemination of material online is a more central part of digital history. […] Second, in regards to digital analysis, digital history has seen more work in the area of digital mapping than has digital literary studies, where text mining and topic modeling are the predominant practices.”[15]

Digital History vs. Digital Public history

In parallel with what they write professionally about the past, historians have always queried the usefulness of their own practices in reconstructing the past. In so doing, they have explored which (other) methods or techniques might illuminate the past. Which new tools or techniques, when applied to reconstructing the past, could help transform primary sources into narratives? We first need to consider whether the historiographical process has always been communicated fruitfully to the public, not only through the written forms of scholarship typical of academic historians, but also through a differentiation between forms of communication adapted to different audiences using different media, or what Sharon M. Leon calls User-Centered Digital History.[16] Being able to translate the past into history and being able to communicate with an identified audience are essential skills for public historians, who must ask themselves “why do history if it is not for the public?” As a research field, DPH invites us to interpret the past and to prepare it for the future using technology, experiences, practices, methods, and social communication processes that underscore the need to consider what public history has already highlighted, namely, to think about audiences so as to enhance interpretation and communication processes.
Should we go further back in the genealogy of humanities computing (to the 1980s, for instance), which became the digital humanities following the rise of the Internet in the early 1990s? Perhaps not, but what is part of the conversation is to understand whether DPH differs not only from the Digital Humanities, as argued, but also from Digital History. What distinguishes DPH or what I have elsewhere called digital history 2.0 (participative, crowdsourced, networked, socially mediated history)[17] from so-called “academic“ forms of Digital History?

Digital Public History and the Civic Dimension of the Past

Web 2.0 technologies enable us to engage with different communities and their knowledge and memories worldwide, thereby adding a digital dimension to traditional public history practices. After the birth of a participatory web 2.0 around 2004, different communities started to share their past globally without the mediation of historians. On the contrary, after the digital turn oral historians-cum-mediators applied their skills as historians to conveying oral memories.[18] In the digital realm, archivists keep track of civil memories using their specific skills.[19] Might we then conclude that DPH is about how a community of people shares experiences about the past via the web, experiences that are mediated through public historians’ digital skills and expertise, in the capacities as oral historians, archivists, museum staff, etc.? Is this the dimension that defines the field as bottom-up (often crowdsourced), top-down (creation of digital multi/media forms of communicating the past), user-oriented, interactive, and shared? DPH interrelates a public, its past, and public historians whereas digital history offers new digital scholarship without requiring epistemological interaction with the public as an essential condition. Digital History “enriches” the web with new forms of narratives and findings. Unlike 2.0 crowdsourced and connected web, DH is not used primarily to engage with specific publics and to reach specific social targets. DPH instead is above all about producing history in the public sphere through interactive digital means. Taking advantage of the digital turn, DPH aims to bring new voices from the past into the present because those pasts matter and because digital technologies are suited to communicating history via and in the web.

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[1] Franziska, Heimburger and Émilien Ruiz: «Has the Historian’s craft gone digital? Some observations from France», Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea, n. 10/2, 2012,

<http://www.studistorici.com/2012/06/29/heimburger-ruiz_numero_10/> (last accessed 09.04.15).

[2] Manuel Castells: The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. New York, Oxford University Press, 2001.

[3] Willard Mccarty: Humanities Computing. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

[4] Tito Orlandi: Informatica Umanistica. Roma, La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1990.

[5] Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth (eds.): A Companion to Digital Humanities, Oxford, Blackwell, 2004; see (last accessed 09.04.15). Clare Warwick: Digital Humanities in Practice., London, Facet Publishing, 2012; Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan, and Edward Vanhoutte: Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader. London, Ashgate, 2013; Pierre Mounier (ed.), Read/Write Book 2. Une introduction aux humanités numériques, Marseille, OpenEdition Press, 2012,  <http://books.openedition.org/oep/226>, (last accessed  09.04.15).

[6] Statistics, geo-location, the mapping of the past, visual studies, 3D reconstructions, the creation, management and analysis of big series of data’s and of digital primary sources , all these specific elements, part of a "datification" process of the world, are defining the field of digital history v. the broader area of digital humanities. (See Peter Haber: Digital Past: Geschichtswissenschaft im digitalen Zeitalter. München, Oldenbourg Verlag, 2011.)

[7] Philippe Rygiel “L’inchiesta storica in epoca digitale”, in Memoria e Ricerca, n.35, 2010, pp. 185-197.

[8] A recent Canadian report on the impact of the digital revolution has universal value when it says: “Memory institutions are a window to the past. Through stories, physical objects, records, and other documentary heritage, they provide Canadians with a sense of history, a sense of place, a sense of identity, and a feeling of connectedness — who we are as a people […].” “Why Memory Institutions Matter”, in Council of Canadians Academies: Leading in the Digital World: Opportunities for Canada’s Memory Institutions. The Expert Panel on Memory Institutions and the Digital Revolution., February 2015, pp. 4-6. http://www.scienceadvice.ca/uploads/eng/assessments%20and%20publications%20and%20news%20releases/memory/CofCA_14-377_MemoryInstitutions_WEB_E.PDF (last accessed 09.04.15)

[9] Franco Moretti: Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013.

[10] See, for example, different projects (like Digital Humanities Now, http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/ ) that curate the integration of selected blog posts worldwide into new forms of digital scholarship using the PressForward plugin for WordPress http://pressforward.org/ (last accessed 09.04.15).

[11] “Storia e Internet: la ricerca storica all’alba del terzo millennio”, in Serge Noiret (ed.): Linguaggi e Siti: la Storia On Line, in Memoria e Ricerca, n.3, January-June 1999, pp. 7-20.

See also http://www.fondazionecasadioriani.it/modules.php?name=MR&op=showfascicolo&id=12 (last accessed 09.04.15).

[12] Daniel J. Cohen, Max Frisch, P.Gallagher, Steven. Mintz, Kirsten Sword, A.Murrell Taylor, William G. Thomas III, and William J Turkel: “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History”, in The Journal of American History, 2, 2008, pp. 452-91,  .(last accessed 09.04.15).

[13] RRCHNM: 20th Anniversary Conference, . (last accessed 09.04.15).

[14] Daniel .J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig: Digital history: a guide to gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the Web., Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005 and Clio Wired. The future of the past in the digital age. New York, Columbia University Press, 2011.

[15] Stephen Robertson: The Differences between Digital History and Digital Humanities. May 23, 2014 ; http://drstephenrobertson.com/blog-post/the-differences-between-digital-history-and-digital-humanities/ (last accessed 09.04.15).

[16] http://digitalpublichistory.org/ (last accessed 09.04.15).

[17] «Y a t-il une Histoire Numérique 2.0 ? » in Jean-Philippe Genet and Andrea Zorzi (eds.) Les historiens et l’informatique. Un métier à réinventer., Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 2011, pp. 235-288.

[18] In her keynote lecture at the 2nd Brazilian Public History Conference (September 2014), Linda Shopes said that digital history—added to social history and the presence of a targeted audience—is now central to oral history practices. Digital techniques have given back “orality” to oral history. A digital dimension has integrated online histories into web site projects, opened up public history internationally by extending traditional oral history projects, and enhanced the capacity to share interviews in audio/video formats globally and through open access. These practices enable communities to interact in their own language. A deeper understanding of local cultures differentiates international DPH from digital history and, even more, from digital humanities activities, the latter all too often being confined to the English language. See Rede Brasileira de Historia Publica: http://historiapublica.com.br/ (last accessed 09.04.15).

[19] “The materials in them hold us to our values and nourish our debates on civil society. By ensuring preservation, authenticity, and access to their holdings […]  memory institutions help guarantee transparency and accountability. Indeed, authentic records and their availability are at the heart of civil governance. Archives in particular are essential for  addressing human rights concerns, often because these concerns are not identified until well after an injustice has occurred.” “Why Memory Institutions Matter”, cit.

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Storia Digitale o Storia con il Digitale ? E' lecito porre la domanda ?

La storia digitale ha rimodellato la documentazione dello storico e gli strumenti usati per accedervi, immagazzinarla e trattarla senza tuttavia che l’uso critico di questi strumenti -che non sono asettici nel rapporto tra lo storico e le fonti digitali-, fossero questionate a dovere nell’università italiana.

A livello internazionale invece, il terremoto del digital turn ha suscitato molti interrogativi nella professione confrontata globalmente con le incertezze sul futuro di una storiografia con il digitale, tra inquietudine e rigetto. La storia digitale richiede di riscrivere e reinterpretare i metodi professionali e di dominare le nuove pratiche nel digitale.[1] I cambiamenti delle pratiche professionali degli storici sono tali che ci dobbiamo interrogare su quali sia l’impatto di quella storia digitale sulle forme tradizionali di narrazione del passato e sui tempi della storia.[2] Ci possiamo chiedere se, alla luce della diffusione pubblica delle tecnologie, non dobbiamo rivedere in profondità il rapporto stesso che intratteniamo con il passato, la memoria e la storia nel presente.[3]

 Le pratiche degli storici impegnati a dominare -e anche forgiare- la tecnologia, avrebbero avuto come effetto di creare dei ghetti e di impaurire la professione tutta confrontata con il digital turn. Esistono difficoltà obiettive nel gestire le tecnologie digitali sempre più diffuse nel pubblico e usate -spesso egregiamente- all’infuori della professione.[4] Les incertitudes d'une mutation scriveva Rolando Minuti nel 2002,[5] Promises and perils of Digital History, ammonivano Daniel J.Cohen e Roy Rosenzweig nel loro manuale di digital history pubblicato nel 2006,[6] mentre ancora nel 2013, il catalano Anaclet Pons scrive un libro sulla storia digitale intitolandolo El desorden digital[7] in riferimento alla babele di una documentazione digitale difficile da dominare come lo aveva descritto Borges.[8] Questi studiosi interpretano il digital turn e la digital history partendo da una riflessione sui cambiamenti del mestiere di storico tradizionale. L’approccio non è né ottimista né pessimista, ma è quello di chi vuole capire le mutazioni tecnologiche alla luce di un positivismo critico –Cohen e Rosenzweig parlano di “tecno-realismo”-[9] non sottomesso alla tecnologia stessa, ma certamente interessato a essa. Toni Weller nel suo libro “History in the Digital Age”,[10] insegna che non tutti gli storici che utilizzano le risorse digitali e il computer sono “storici digitali”. Egli evidenzia l’impatto morbido della rivoluzione tecnologica applicata alle pratiche preesistenti degli storici e in continuità con le loro tradizioni professionali.[11] In sintonia con queste deduzioni di Weller, i risultati di un importante inchiesta Americana sulle pratiche della storiografia con il digitale sottolineano che “the underlying research methods of many historians remain fairly recognizable even with the introduction of new tools and technologies, but the day to day research practices of all historians have changed fundamentally”.[12]

Sempre dello stesso parere, la versione italiana del manifesto dell’Umanistica digitale nei suoi tre primi punti, recita che “la svolta digitale della società esplora e modifica le condizioni di produzione e di diffusione dei saperi” e che “le Digital Humanities riguardano l’insieme delle Scienze umane e sociali, delle Arti e delle Lettere, […] [e] non fanno tabula rasa del passato. Si appoggiano, al contrario, sull’insieme dei paradigmi, dei saperi e delle conoscenze proprie di queste discipline, mobilitando gli strumenti e le prospettive peculiari del digitale; le Digital Humanities designano una “interdisciplina” che include metodi, dispositivi e prospettive euristiche legate al digitale nel campo delle Scienze umane e sociali. [13] Questo Manifesto stilato durante THATcamp Parigi (The Humanities and Technology Camp, 2010) fu ridiscusso un anno dopo durante THATcamp Firenze (2011),[14] quando umanisti digitali italiani e francesi si confrontarono in un processo di internazionalizzazione della disciplina[15].

Comunque si pensi, riflettere sull’impatto transdisciplinare delle nuove pratiche che costituiscono le fondamenta della transdisciplina chiamata Umanistica Digitale (Digital Humanities) con le tradizioni epistemologiche e filologiche della storia è così diventato essenziale. E di fatti, la "cultura storica digitale" è parte di una più vasta "cultura digitale" che permea la nostra società attraverso la rete internet e sotto varie forme comunicative. Il concetto sociologico di cultura digitale proviene dall’opera di Manuel Castells[16] e anche dai lavori di Willard McCarty all’UCL[17] mentre in Italia, Tito Orlandi,[18] ha teorizzato addirittura la nascita di una neonata koinè, con un nuovo statuto disciplinare basato sull'elaborazione metodologica e scientifica del precedente concetto  d’informatica umanistica che incontra la rete internet e la comunicazione via web.[19]

Vanno così valorizzate le peculiarità disciplinari dello storico digitale: la ricerca di fonti differenti e le diverse trame narrative del web. Se è vero che l’umanistica digitale offre metodologie e pratiche comuni alle scienze che compongono l’area umanistica,[20] è vero anche che queste pratiche e questi concetti sono forse maggiormente elaborati a livello di singole discipline.[21]  Questo avviene riguardo alle diverse tradizioni scientifiche che ritrovano poi nella “république du virtuel”, un universalismo che supera le divisioni tra scienze umanistiche per forgiare nuove pratiche transdisciplinari e strumenti e linguaggi usati in tutte le discipline umanistiche. (Per esempio si usano protocolli aperti e compatibili nei siti della rete come gli standards di marcatura dei documenti,[22] i meta-dati descrittivi come il Dublin Core Project,[23] o i programmi e prodotti open sources[24] come Zotero[25] che favoriscono progetti collaborativi. Le banche dati, le biblioteche digitali e gli open archives sono ora compatibili tra di loro[26] attraverso un’interoperabilità dei loro dati, i cosiddetti linked open data dell’OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting o, in italiano il “Protocollo per il raccoglimento dei metadati dell'Open Archive Initiative”). [27])

Quasi tutte le problematiche tradizionali del mestiere di storico, dalla delimitazione di un’ipotesi di ricerca alla scoperta, all’accesso e alla gestione dei documenti e delle fonti, fino al conseguimento di un impianto narrativo e, soprattutto, alla comunicazione della storia e dei risultati della ricerca, e, infine all’insegnamento della storia, passano oramai in parte o in toto, attraverso lo schermo del computer: queste pratiche si annidano all’interno della ragnatela. La storia digitale si potrebbe così definire come “tutto il complesso universo di produzioni e scambi sociali aventi come oggetto la conoscenza storica, trasferito e/o direttamente generato e sperimentato in ambienti digitali (ricerca, organizzazione, relazioni, diffusione, uso pubblico e privato, fonti, libri, didattica, performance e via dicendo).”[28]

Invece, se si pensa al calcolo statistico, alla geo-localizzazione, alla gestione dei big data, enorme quantità di dati/fonti digitali disponibili come fonti che permettono pratiche trasversali di text-mining al loro interno,[29] -Peter Haber parlava addiritura di processo di “datificazione”-,[30] ai programmi che interrogano le immagini direttamente sui loro pixel, etc., la storia digitale, all’interno della transdiciplina dei digital humanities, non è soltanto fatta dell’utilizzo di nuovi strumenti digitali che facilitano vecchie pratiche. Si tratta anche dello sviluppo di un rapporto stretto con le tecnologie suscettibili di modificare i parametri stessi della ricerca. Lo storico è in grado di porre nuove questioni epistemologiche nell’analisi del passato dopo l’avvento del digitale. Tuttavia, solo una minoranza di storici digitali domina gli strumenti che rispondono a nuovi interrogativi scientifici. Meno ancora essi creano programmi originali che permettono nuove analisi e nuove forme d’interazione con le fonti e il loro trattamento in funzione d’ipotesi di ricerca facilitate dall’analisi computazionale.[31]

Lo storico oggi in Italia come altrove, [32] è storico con il digitale, molto meno storico digitale o umanista digitale,[33] ma è la storia stessa (fonti e storiografia) e la memoria del passato che sono, de facto, diventate digitali a prescindere di come gli storici individualmente e/o come gruppo professionale organizzato, si rapportino oggi al digital turn, ai digital humanities e alla storia digitale. La connivenza virtuosa con le tecnologie nonostante l’assenza di un quadro disciplinare istituzionalizzato per le Digital Humanities come in Inghilterra per esempio,[34] ha avuto delle ricadute diffuse e positive sul mestiere di storico nel suo insieme anche in Italia.[35] E’ certamente la comunicazione pubblica e una diffusa presenza del passato e delle memorie di ognuno in rete per le quali manca spesso la coscienza storica, che questionano il ruolo dello storico di professione nei confronti del mondo digitale.

[1] FREDERIC CLAVERT, e SERGE NOIRET (a cura di): L’histoire contemporaine à l’ère numérique - Contemporary History in the Digital Age, Bruxelles, Peter Lang, 2013.

[2] FRANCOIS HARTOG: Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps, Seuil, Paris, 2012; Pierre Nora intervistato sul significato dei “lieux de mémoire” ribadiva la necessità per gli storici di dare un senso e una vita nel presente alle trace della memoria collettiva della nazione. (PIERRE NORA: Historien Public., Paris, Gallimard, 2011, pp.446-47.)

[3] PHILIPPE JOUTARD: Révolution numérique et rapport au passé, in PIERRE NORA (a cura di) La culture du passé, in «Le Débat», n.177, 2013/5, novembre-dicembre 2013, pp.145-52.

[4] SERGE NOIRET : La digital history: histoire et mémoire à la portée de tous, in Pierre Mounier (a cura di) : Read/Write Book 2. Une introduction aux humanités numériques, Marseille, OpenEdition Press, 2012, p. 151-177, URL: [http://press.openedition.org/258].

[5] ROLANDO MINUTI: Internet et le métier d'historien: réflexions sur les incertitudes d'une mutation. Paris, PUF, 2002.

[6] DANIEL .J. COHEN e ROY ROSENZWEIG: Digital history: a guide to gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the Web., Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005; vedere inoltre degli stessi autori, Clio Wired. The future of the past in the digital age., New York, Columbia University Press, 2011.

[7] ANACLET PONS: El desorden digital: guía para historiadores y humanistas., Siglo XXI de España, Madrid, 2013.

[8]. J.L BORGES, La Biblioteca de Babel in ”Ficciones“, Alianza, Madrid, 1971, pp.89-100. Sull’incapacità di trovare una risposta nella “babele” dell’informazione, oggi nel web, il tema affrontato da Borges nel 1941, vedere il saggio di C. ROLLASON,: “Borges’ “Library of Babel” and the Internet", in IJOWLAC - Indian Journal of World Literature and Culture, 1/1, Gennaio-Giugno 2004, pp.117-120, ripubblicato qui: URL: [http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_papers_rollason2.html].

[9] COHEN e ROSENZWEIG, Digital History, cit., p.3.

[10] Weller distingue tra “those historians who were professionally engaged in digital tools and technologies in their work … and those who did not consider the subject within their remit at all, despite regularly using email, distribution lists, digitized newspapers or images and many other online resources.”, TONI WELLER: History in the Digital Age., London, Routledge, 2012, p.2.

[11] Lo stesso approccio cauto sull’impatto delle nuove tecnologie si ritrova in Italia in alcun recenti riflessioni sul significato della storia digitale. Il gruppo di giovani studiosi che fanno capo alla rivista Diacronie adopera questa visione cauta nel fascicolo a cura di Elisa Grandi, Deborah Paci e Émilien Ruiz: Digital History. La storia nell’era dell’accesso., in “Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea", 10/2, 2012; la stessa cautela si ritrova in un saggio che introduce il numero speciale della rivista storica BMGN nel Benelux a cura di GERBEN ZAAGSMA: On Digital History., in BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review, Vol. 128/4, dicembre 2013.

[12] J. RUTNER e R. C. SCHONFELD,: Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians: Final Report from ITHAKA S+R, December 10, 2012.

[13] Il Manifesto dei Digital Humanities elaborato da Marin Dacos e da chi assistette nel 2010 al THATcamp Parigi, fu presentato e approvato anche al primo THATcamp italiano, THATCamp Firenze all’Istituto Universitario Europeo, dal mondo dell’umanistica digitale italiana. Le proposte del manifesto sono volutamente generiche per identificare un momento di passaggio e di cambiamento e non legare il contenuto del manifesto ad una sola cultura, un solo paese o a pochi gruppi di innovatori. Si veda di M. DACOS: Manifesto delle Digital Humanities, 26 marzo 2011, pubblicato in italiano dopo THATCamp Florence, nel marzo 2011, URL: [http://www.thatcampflorence.it].

[14] THATcamp Florence, 23^rd-26th March 2011.

[15] L’AUICD italiana (Associazione per l'Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale) aderisce all’EADH, (European Association for Digital Humanities), URL: [http://eadh.org], una delle componenti dell’ADHO (Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations), URL: [http://www.digitalhumanities.org/], che raggruppa le associazioni internazionali di Umanistica Digitale; per motivi di diversificazione linguistica e culturale, è stato fondato durante il THATCamp Saint-Malo in Francia nel 2013, un associazione francofona di umanistica digitale, Humanistica con sede in Canada (URL: http://www.humanisti.ca). Il campo è oggi in piena espansione organizzativa ed associativa a livello mondiale.

[16] Sui mutamenti profondi, culturali, sociali ed economici, in corso nella nostra società dopo l’avvento di internet, si veda di MANUEL CASTELLS: La nascita della società in rete, Milano, EGEA-Università Bocconi, 2002 e dello stesso autore: The Internet galaxy: reflections on the Internet, business, and society., New York, Oxford University Press, 2001.

[17] WILLARD  MCCARTY: Humanities computing., Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

[18] TITO ORLANDI: Informatica Umanistica., Roma, La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1990. Per una bibliografia degli scritti di Orlandi rimando alla sua pagina web personale: Pubblicazioni relative all'Informatica umanistica, oltre che alla bibliografia contenuta in LORENZO PERILLI e DOMENICO FIORMONTE (a cura di), La Macchina del Tempo. Studi di informatica umanistica in onore di Tito Orlandi, Firenze,. Le Lettere, 2011.

[19] La nuova disciplina sarebbe da inserire nell’Area 10: Scienze dell’antichità, filologico-letterarie e storico-artistiche, e nell’Area 11: Scienze storiche, filosofiche, pedagogiche e psicologiche. (GINO RONCAGLIA,: Informatica umanistica: le ragioni di una disciplina). Si veda anche il manifesto Proposta di costituzione del settore scientifico-disciplinare: Informatica applicata alle discipline umanistiche (ovvero: Informatica umanistica), e a mia conoscenza il primo manuale italiano per la didattica dell’Informatica Umanistica che ne anticipava già le concezioni, TERESA NUMERICO, e ARTURO VESPIGNANI, (a cura di): Informatica per le scienze umanistiche., Bologna, Il Mulino, 2003.

[20] Il primo manuale (2004) accessibile dal 2007 gratuitamente in linea è di SUSAN SCHREIBMAN, RAY SIEMENS, JOHN UNSWORTH (a cura di) A Companion to Digital Humanities, Oxford, Blackwell, 2004. CLARE WARWICK: Digital Humanities in Practice., London, Facet Publishing, 2012; M.K. GOLD: Debates in the digital humanities., Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2012; MELISSA TERRAS, JULIANNE NYHAN, e EDWARD VANHOUTTE: Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader., London, Ashgate, 2013; sulle pratiche degli storici dopo il “digital turn”, rimando anche a SERGE NOIRET: “Storia Digitale: sulle risorse di rete per gli storici.”, in La Macchina del Tempo. Studi di informatica umanistica in onore di Tito Orlandi, cit., pp.201-25.

[21] PHILIPPE RYGIEL: L’inchiesta storica in epoca digitale, in Memoria e Ricerca, n.35, 2010, p.163-.

[22] Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)  URL: [http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml].

[23] Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), URL: [http://dublincore.org/].

[24] Open Source Initiative (OSI) è un progetto per rendere accessibile la codifica dei programmi e banche dati a tutti, URL: [http://www.opensource.org/].

[25] Zotero, URL: [http://www.zotero.org].

[26] Open Archives Initiative (OAI), URI: [http://www.openarchives.org/].

[27] Open Archives Initiative. Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, URL: [http://www.openarchives.org/pmh/].

[28] GIANCARLO MONINA: Storia digitale. Il dibattito storiografico in Italia, in Memoria e Ricerca, n.43/2, pp.185-202, qui, p.185.

[29] VIKTOR MAYER-SCHÖNBERGER, e KENNETH CUKIER: Big Data: a Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Vedere inoltre di DANAH BOYD e KATE CRAWFORD, Critical Questions for Big Data, in “Information, Communication & Society”, 15/5, 2012, pp.662‑679 e, di KATE CRAWFORD: Think Again: Big Data. Why the rise of machines isn't all it's cracked up to be, in “Foreign Policy”, 10 Maggio 2013. Infine, per un esempio dell’uso della dataficazione a storia vedere JORIS VAN EIJNATTEN, TOINE PETERS e JAAP VERHEUL: Big Data for Global History: The Transformative Promise of Digital Humanities., in BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review, n.128/4, 2013, pp.55-77.

[30] Il concetto di “data driven history” è quello che ha usato il compianto PETER HABER per definire il mondo nuovo della storia digitale, nel suo Digital past: Geschichtswissenschaft im digitalen Zeitalter, München, Oldenbourg Verlag, 2011.

[31] DANIEL J. COHEN, MAX FRISCH, P.GALLAGHER, STEVEN. MINTZ, KIRSTEN SWORD, A.MURRELL TAYLOR, WILLIAM G. THOMAS III, e WILLIAM J TURKEL.: Interchange: The Promise of Digital History, in The Journal of American History, 2, 2008, pp.452-91.

[32] Anche se per loro, la rivoluzione digitale passa da una nuova conoscenza transdisciplinare e dalla collaborazione tra diverse scienze; vedere di STEPHANE LAMASSÉ, e PHILIPPE RYGIEL, Nouvelles frontières de l’historien , in «Revue Sciences/Lettres», n.2, 2014, DOI: 10.4000/rsl.411.

[33] E’ quello che rileva Claudia Favero nella sua inchiesta per sapere “What does it mean to be a digital historian in Italy and in the UK?” basata purtroppo su un numero molto circoscritto d’interviste qualificate in entrambi I paesi. L’autrice delimita nella sua analisi, problemi e contradizioni degli storici che s’interrogano sul loro lavoro con il digitale o che fanno storia digitale, in CLAUDIA FAVERO: Digital Historians in Italy and the United Kingdom: Perspectives and Approaches., in CLARE MILLS, MICHAEL PIDD e ESTHER WARD: Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2012. Studies in the Digital Humanities., Sheffield, HRI Online Publications, 2014.

[34] Defining digital humanities: a reader., cit.. Una critica dell’uniformità culturale dei digital humanities, una definizione alternative e una descrizione degli ambiti disciplinari in Europa e altrove sono forniti da MARIN DACOS e PIERRE MOUNIER: Humanités numériques – État des lieux et positionnement de la recherche française dans le contexte international., Marseilles, OpenEdittion/Institut Français, 2014, pp.29-36.

[35] Malgrado ciò, la valutazione scientifica in positivo dell’Umanistica Digitale che include anche il lavoro degli storici con il digitale, è tuttora penalizzata nei suoi aspetti transdiciplinari dall’accademia italiana. L’Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale (AUICD) ha denunciato sul sito ROARS, “le gravi circostanze emerse con la pubblicazione dei risultati dell’Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale, che rischiano di compromettere in modo serio e preoccupante il futuro della formazione e della ricerca in un settore, quello dell’informatica umanistica e delle digital humanities, concordemente giudicato di importanza strategica per l’innovazione tecnologica e per la conservazione del patrimonio culturale”. (Osservazioni critiche dell’AIUCD sull’ASN).