Week 3 Reaction - Historical Information Online

Reaction-Part 1:  Cohen & Rosenzweig
 

Traditional teaching and learning methods and complementary online opportunities are approaching a point of permanent intersection as their two trajectories approach in an inevitable collision.  Technology is so accessible, entrenched in society*, that it creates challenges and opportunities for traditional pedagogies.  Educators and researchers have new models of incorporating technology tools into their teaching, learning, and research.  Traditional scholarship and classroom opportunities are enhanced by new sources of streaming audio and video, social media, databases with smart search functionalities, and digitized records, photographs, and documents.

Cohen and Rosenzweig, in their chapter on “Designing for the History Web,” encourage historical web site developers to create sites that “enable and inspire [the visitor] to think about and grasp the past,” and to avoid design schemas that “relegate thinking to a secondary status.”  They optimistically assert that “good [online] writing produces willing readers.”  This sounds a little bit like the 1989 movie Field of Dreams and sloga, “If you build it, he will come.”  Critical and engaged reading is not as simple as making a movie or writing well.  Only with careful attention to new relationships and opportunities created by the collision of the traditional learning and technologies, will pedagogy and content be combined to create judicious and analytic online learning.  One inspired tool engaging this early collaboration of scholarship and technology is the Kindle handheld reader, bridging the traditional hard copy book and online ebooks.

Digital historians, among other academics using online content delivery, necessarily need to be attentive to initiatives in the K-through-HigherEd cohort, and actively pursue holistic learning that imparts critical thinking and careful reading whether on paper or online.

*  Accessibility and entrenchment in this case includes primarily the One-Thirds world populations, and within this group, to that subpopulation with contemporary in-home technologies or ready, open, and affordable access to up-to-date technology resources.

Reaction-Part 2:  The Proceedings of the Old Bailey

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey website is a significant effort to organize hundreds of years of court documents into useable online data, a painstaking attempt to provide access and robust searching of these proceedings. The Old Bailey is a “fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.”  A search for “Irish" and "Priest” yielded one Daniel Macarty (also spelled “Macarte,” “Maccharty,” and “Mackarty) who was put to death in 1680 for being a practicing Catholic Priest, against the English Statute of 27 Eliz, a capital religious offense.  Macarty was an Irishman in England, a Papist in a Protestant state, and put to death for high treason as a “Popish Priest or Jesuit.”  He was one of 24 condemned to die, “14 burn'd in the hand, one to stand in the Pillory, three to be transported, and three to be whipt.”  (I cannot reconcile the difference between the 24 condemned and the accounting of only 21 punishments.)

Image of the original document of Danial Macarty's court proceedings.

There are so many questions to ask about Macarty and those condemned with him, but so little information is actually available. How do we turn limited information from transcribed documents into a meaningful and coherent project?  How do we successfully use contemporary computer applications and tools to explore and learn the archeology of words, how language was used, the relations between the dominate power group and dominated, and what may have been missed, lost, or mistranslated? How are complex human variables engaged?

The XML-model of content analysis used by the Old Bailey cannot, on its own, adequately take into account the nuances of relationships between different social hierarchies—gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, age, religion, class, etc.—and the multiplicity of intersections as they truly existed under old English law.  Constructing these intricacies can only be performed by a researcher who respects that the Old Bailey and similar sites are limited tools.  It is the researcher's job to engage in the valuable exercise of interrogating and analyzing the many different voices and lives sparingly represented in the digitized court documents.