Showing posts with label Digital Historians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Digital Historians. Show all posts

Monday, 29 June 2015

Définir le champ de l’Histoire Publique Numérique, un atelier à THATCamp Paris 2015

Un atelier proposé pour THATCamp Paris a été voté par les participants à la "unconference" et s'est donc tenu le mercredi 10 Juin 2015 à 9 heures du matin. J’avais proposé -en mon nom et au nom de Mark Tebeau- l'atelier que Frédéric Clavert, un des organisateurs de THATcamp Paris, membre du THATCamp Council, a présenté en notre nom, mardi 9 juin au public quand, ni Mark ni moi n’étions encore à Paris. L'atelier portait sur la définition du champ de la Digital Public History (DPH) ou, en français, Histoire Publique Numérique.
Quelles en étaient les motivations ?
En décembre 2016, l’éditeur De Gruyter – Oldenbourg à Munich publiera un Handbook of Digital Public History dans la série "De Gruyter Reference" en langue anglaise. Mark Tebeau (Arizona State University) et moi-même coordonnerons cet ouvrage de référence international.
Nous avons défini un projet d'index détaillé de chapitres et de thèmes et voudrions aussi choisir les projets d’histoire numérique publique les plus importants internationalement pour qualifier la discipline, ses pratiques et, justement, certaines de ses meilleurs réalisations et objets numériques à l'échelle internationale.
La proposition scientifique du Handbook (abstract) acceptée par l'éditeur est la suivante en anglais.
Aims and Scope for an Handbook on Digital Public History
This handbook will provide a systematic overview of the present state of international research in digital public history. Detailed individual studies by internationally renowned public historians, digital humanists and digital historians will elucidate central issues in the field and present a critical account of the major public history accomplishments, research activities, practices with the public and of their digital context; the handbook will apply an international and comparative public history approach, look at its historical development, focus on technical background and on the use specific digital media, software’s and digital tools; it will offer a glossary of common terms, software’s, practices in the field together with a multi-lingual bibliography adapted to each chapter. The Handbook will analyse connection with local communities and different publics worldwide when engaging in digital activities with the past, and indicate directions for future research, practices and teaching activities. The Handbook will delimit the field extension between digital humanities, digital history and public history through its main theoretical chapters connected with smaller descriptive sub-chapters describing and comparing specific projects internationally.
 Coordinateurs:
mark-tebeau
Mark Tebeau, Associate Professor in the School of History, Philosophy, & Religious Studies at Arizona State University, Director of Arizona State University Public History Program, (Phoenix, AR, USA)
Contact information:
Email: Mark.Tebeau@asu.edu,
Serge Noiret, History Information Specialist (PhD) at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy
Contact Information:
Email: Serge.Noiret@eui.eu
thatcamp2015_vignette_10x10cmQuestions posées aux participants de l'atelier de THATcamp Paris 2015 #tcp2015 :   
  • What should be here which isn’t there
  • What is there and should not be there
  • Key examples for each entry (what do you think each entry should be about)
  • Good authors, volunteers to contact us and suggesting who we should contact
  • This is an International program so essays truly international should come from all around the world
Résultats de l'Atelier de THATcamp du Jeudi 10 Juin 2015
L'atelier "Définir le champ de l’Histoire Publique Numérique" a suscite des questions différentes autour des chapitres, des projets et des acteurs de la DPH. Il a permis aussi de susciter des collaborateurs potentiels pour le Handbook vu que nous sommes, Mark et moi, dans la phase d’attribution de chapitres et de recherche de collaborateurs.
Toutefois, la définition de ce qu'est la "Publi History" a été au centre de la discussion avent même d'entrer dans une interaction histoire numérique, histoire publique.
La question fondamentale, liée a l'architecture du Handbook, a été la suivante: en quoi de nombreux chapitres se différentient-ils de ce qu'un humaniste numérique pourrait écrire ? Quel est la spécificité de l'Histoire Publique Numérique dans chacun de ces chapitres?
Les résultats du FramePAD sur cet atelier et de la discussion à laquelle ont participé: Martin Grandjean, Frédéric Clavert, Sébastien Poublanc, Vincent Auzas, Nathalie Casanova, Léonard Laborie, Lyriane Bonnet sont les suivants. Ils touchent a la fois les demandes des participants et les informations données par les participants eux-mêmes, des participation potentielle au Handbook.
Question qui touche la langue anglaise de l'ouvrage et la relecture des articles ecrit par les auteurs internationaux:  Oui, l'ouvrage sera entièrement en anglais, mais l'editeur financera la relecture des chapitres.
Quelle est la distinction entre humanités numériques et histoire publique numérique ?
Quelle est la relation avec une communauté d'utilisateurs. 
Existe-t-il une histoire publique non numérique ?
 Serge Noiret rappelle l'origine britannique de l'histoire publique: enregistrement des mémoires des mineurs britanniques au moment des grandes crises sous Thatcher: enregistrement de leur mémoire AVEC eux.
Cite l'exemple des commémorations comme celle du 200e. de la bataille de Waterloo les 18-20 Juin 2015, sur le site même de la bataille avec une reconstitution de ses phases avec plus de 5.000 "reenactors".
 Il n'y a pas d'histoire publique sans historiens académiques.
Léonard Laborie: inclure des exemples de projets qui ont été mis en échec? Frédéric Clavert, la question complémentaire étant gestion de la fin d'un projet, la "sustainability" des projets ajoute Serge Noiret.
Voir si on peut inclure un chapitre sur les commémorations du centenaire de la Première Guerre mondiale: avec comparaison France / Royaume Uni. Avec Frédéric Clavert mais pas seul et Marie-Christine Bonneau se portent volontaires. Il faudrait des participants de la Mission du Centenaire scientifiques et de l'Imperial War Museum pour evaluer les projets d'histoire publique plus large.
 Contacter: luccianomelanie@yahoo.fr - talie - Traces de l'Antiquité à Lille et en Eurorégion
 Voir NYC Memory. Équivalent à Londres. Projet Marseille.
 Voir Base de données sur les Monuments aux Morts.
Martin Grandjean à disposition pour l'aspect "Social Media" (Rewriting history in 140 characters http://www.martingrandjean.ch/rewriting-history-140-characters/)
Frederic Clavert demande s'il y a des différences entre DH e DPH dans le domaine des langages numériques. Comment le Handbook fera ressortir la spécificité de l’histoire publique. Dans l’index (TOCs) des éléments sont spécifiquement DPH, d'autres pourraient être autant histoire numérique / DH que DPH. Comment faire ressortir les spécificités.
 On suggère d’avoir des chapitres qui sont écrits par des amateurs historiens directement (généalogie notamment).
Comment justifie-t-on un Handbook sur l'histoire publique NUMÉRIQUE?
Serge Noiret répond que la révolution numérique se retrouve dans les pratiques et objets des historiens publics. cf. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media: forts développements autour et donc avec les utilisateurs - centre de l'histoire publique. L'historien.ne publique travaille avec des communautés et pour ces communautés. 
 
Importance des "Environmental Humanities" pour la DPH: Digital Environmental Humanities, McGill : http://dig-eh.org/projects/ ; pour la partie Européenne : http://eseh.org/ (émanation française : RUCHE : https://leruche.hypotheses.org/)
 
 

Handbook Draft Structure for THATCamp Paris 2015

Introduction

  1. Introduction & Definitions
  1. A Digital Public History of DPH
  1. The Historiographical Foundations of DPH
  1. Manifesto (5000-word culmination): Appendix that gets published separately

 Section 1: Historiography

 Section 1 explores the themes, disciplines, linkages to other fields, as well as the context of public history practice.  In each essay, the writers take on key aspects of the topic, with attention to how the intersection of the digital & public has transformed these fields/themes. It especially considers the theoretical aspects of the fields.
 
  1. Digital Humanities & History In what ways has public history shaped the digital humanities and digital history?
  1. Public History  In what ways has the digital revolution reshaped public history theory, practice, and training? 
  1. International Public History Movement (Local-Global-International)
  1. How has digital public history shape the spread of public history from the United States through the globe.
  1. Oral History  In what ways has the emergence of digital public history reshaped oral history practice?
  1. Public Archeology
  1. Politics (of the past)
  1. Nostalgia (memory today) 
  1. Heritage
  1. Violent Pasts Our ability to document and represent conflict, war, social unrest, inequality, and genocides has grown more sophisticated. 
  1.  Identities The studies of identify formation in terms of class, race, gender, and indigenous cultures remains central to historical work; how has this work been transformed by digital and public history?
  1.  Realm of Memory Memory sites, including monuments and commemorations, have become more accessible in the digital age, producing wider understandings.
  1.  Environment Environmental humanities and sustainability have emerged as central concerns in digital public history in recent years. The NICHE (Canadian Network) as well as projects such as the environment & society portal from the Rachel Carson Center are examples of that work.
  1.  Museums Museums have opened significantly as a result of the digital revolution, providing new modes of engaging public audiences, as well as imagining their function in an increasingly device-driven world.
  1.  Archives/Library Archives & libraries face extraordinary challenges as books slowly disappear and our engagement with them becomes more and more digitally mediated. 
  1.  Communication
  1.  How digital public history has blurred past & present?     How digital public history is confronting periods and periodization?

Section 2: Contexts

Section 2 explores the places and contexts where digital public history is practices; it pays attention to scales of institution, locale (global, regional, national), and theoretical challenges faced in each domain.
  1. Museums What does it mean to practice in specific history contexts, based on scale—w/attention to national/international?
  1. Museum How has digital public history mattered in non-history contexts (such as natural history, art, or other museums, w/attention to international?
  1. Virtual Museum + Exhibitions The emergence of the digital has produced the possibility for the virtual museum and exhibition. 
  1. Archives How has archival practice been transformed? (Think: “what’s on the menu”)
  1. Born Digital Archives Born digital archives have emerged. What are the issues associated with these (for example SAADA.org)?
  1. Libraries (dp.la & europeana) The digital has raised the possibility of the virtual Library at Alexandria. What does digital public history tell us about the implications for large-scale library projects, such as dp.la or Europeana?
  1. Digital Libraries (no connection with real libraries) The Digital library has supplanted the physical library. Or has it?
  1. Technological  Devices matter in the digital age. How does the machine shape the delivery of public history? (Think the history and character of devices and technologies, from the CD to the DVD to floppy disks.)
  1. “Privatized” Public History (market driven PH). Consulting and marketing for a private enterprise, e.g. Getty Archive, Fratelli Alinari Archive; what are the philosophical and practical considerations?
  1. Publishing:  How we publish PH has changed. Consider twitter micro-blogging, open-access, peer review, evaluation, sharing, crowdsourcing, Hypothesis, PressForward. What’s happening to text?
  1. University History Teaching  How have digital & public history have altered the history classroom--both for the instructor and learner; includes emergence of digital humanities curriculum?
  1. Public History & Humanities Training: How do we alter public history curricula to confront the digital turn? What should the new public history curriculum look like, as it pertains to digital history, includes professional development for people in the field?
  1. The Digital Public History Course: What does this course look like?
  1. Pre-University Consider the context of High School, Primary & Secondary Education, perhaps Euroclio.org and project Historiana. How is the digital/public intersection changing & enhancing both approaches & engagement of schools with history, institutions, & publics?
  1. Grassroots Local communities have begun to document and produce their own historical knowledge; how does this transform the relation to the past?
  1. Federal Governments Policy (truly international: US, Canada, & EU)
  1. State & Local Governments (also international)
  1. National Parks & Historic Sites (is this in Federal Government)
  1. Landscape & Space: parks, gardens, cemeteries, monuments; emphasis on local 
  1. Historic Preservation & Cultural Resource Management The field of cultural resource management and preservation continue to focus attention on physical landscapes; how has emergence of a digital public history altered this work, in theory and practice?
  1. UNESCO  How has the digital & public revolution transformed the work of international bodies, such as UNESCO?

Section 3: Practices: Engagement, Communities, & Curation 

Section 3 explores how public history practice has changed and digital practice has emerged as a result of the intersection of digital public history. This section focuses on best practices and approaches, using case studies and examples where possible. The big ideas for this section include public engagement, community building, the evolution of curation, and emergence of big data.
  1. Strategies for the digital & public future (theoretical)
  1. Professional Policies (What are the best practices of digital public history: i.e. open/closed access; open sources; filtering, algorithms, sustainability, programs?)
  1. Law & Ethics (i.e. Ownership & Copyright)
  1. Visualization (a kind of narrative but through visual means) Blogging & Textual Narrative (also video blog, podcasts, micro-blogging, tumblr, twitter)
  1. Mapping
  1. Data Standards & Practice
  1. Collecting & Archiving (best practices)
  1. Exhibiting
  1. Conserving
  1. Funding for the Past in the Future (funding, sustainability, emergence of a field in the funding)
  1. Gaming (Playing and Fun) 
  1. Crowdsourcing
  1. Social Media  
  1. Shared Authority
  1. Community Building & Civic Engagement 
  1. Storytelling
  1. Living History 
  1. Activist History
  1. Narrative Practice: Popular, Fiction (Imagination – Imagined history), 
  1. Genealogy
  1. Curation
  1. Teaching & Training: classroom, pedagogy, and program organization
  1. Organizing/preserving the self
  1. Amateur/non-professional public digital history (everyone their own historian?)
  1. Commercial practice, DPH as Business, Market oriented DPH 

Section 4: Technology, Media, Data and Metadata

Section 4 explores various types of technologies, media, and metadata and how they’re being used in digital public history, with attention to the challenges in each of these domains--including the problems of engaging publics, the challenges of technological change, and modes of constructing historical argument.  This section also explores how the technological itself--both in its implementation and theoritization--is transforming digital public history.  The emphasis is on the emergence of both big ideas and categories of technology, as well as on the ways of organizing, dissemination, and sharing knowledge. With special attention to data and metadata, to hardware and software, as well as tool sets, essays in this section focuses not just on the present but suggests future direction.
  1. Book & Print
  1. Technological devices as mediators of media (also in technology)
  1. GIS (the use of GIS, mapping programs, open street maps, designing maps, interpreting maps, arc-gis, q-gis (web & separate)
  1. Mobile & Locative Media
  1. CMS (various strategies and approaches)
  1. Open Access (Theorizing, Application Programming Interfaces, Data Interoperability, Metadata standards, Licensing such as Creative Commons)
  1. Open Source (Theory, Challengenges, Tools, GitHub, Maintaining Community, examples: Omeka, Drupal, WordPress, etc.)
  1. Linked Open Data (Theory, challenges, taxonomies, ontologies, semantic web)
  1. Standards (Different types of standards: archival, library, data, metadata, etc.)
  1. Materiality and landscape in digital age (including soundscapes & 3-D modelling) Sensory history has gained currency as digital tools have emerged that allow for immersive experiences and multi-dimensional modeling. 
  1. 3D Visualization (prospective, what it means: new modes of presenting and representing past, Second Life, Occulus Rift)
  1.  3D Printing
  1. Game Technologies (Occulus Rift?, soundscapes, connections, implications)
  1. Programming (languages, approaches, should the historian be a programmer?, implications of the need for specialized programming skills--consider the public history context of the need for designers, exhibit developers, marketing specialists, etc.)
  1. Websites (I want a “website.” What does that mean? Consider the transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0 to web 3.0 technology; thinking about characteristics of public history web: participatory/not, open/not, types of content; public engagement/not, links; how web technologies are changing, such as HTML5, including device contexts)
  1. Video (video projects, streaming technologies, YouTube, Vimeo, portable devices, 
  1. Photography (technologies, i.e. phones as cameras, photoshop, FLICKR etc., re-photography, HistoryPin, merging past/present locations (mixing past/present), cinemagraphs, focus on how technologies (both of taking photos and of representing photos, as well as sharing photos) shape the intersection of digital/public history; is this a new form of narrative in its own right? selfies
  1. Audio (oral history in the digital age, transom http://transom.org/ for public radio, SoundCloud, streaming, podcasts, the emergence of sound studies, these three categories: focus on how technologies (both of taking photos/video/audio and of representing photos, as well as sharing photos) shape the intersection of digital/public history;
  1. Social Media (focus on technologies of social media)
  1. Reference/Management Tools (Zotero, Evernote, and other tools for building references, and links.)
  1. Metadata (What is it? and why you should care? archival/library standards and machine metadata.)
  1. Big Data (What this means for public engagement in history and cultural institutions; what does it mean for a digital data driven public history; what does proliferation of data mean for local institutions?)
  1. Aggregation (Wikipedia, but also tools for content Aggregation, in cultural realm this includes such as dp.la, Europeana, new modes of engaging public outside ...)
  1. Discovery & Connection (Connected Histories; Moving beyond Google: technologies for linking, connecting, & discovery of cultural information)
 
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Sunday, 31 May 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.
_____________________
[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,
[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.
[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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Tuesday, 21 October 2014

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]
weller-history_in_digital_age
 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]
THATCamp Paris 2010
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])
images
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].
[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).
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