Ending our Fences

I've been thinking about barriers between disciplines lately - in particular, what happens when we can tear those barriers down.

Last Saturday I only managed to catch a little bit of the Remembrance Day programming on TV, but I was pleased at the one thing I did see for a few reasons. It was part of a documentary about evidence from the Battle of the Somme in general, and the fate of the (Royal) Newfoundland Regiment's 1st Battalion at Beaumont-Hamel in particular. Most of the part that I was able to catch involved trying to identify and evaluate some of the footage allegedly taken during the battle, a particularly important thing to keep in mind considering that even then war footage was staged for propaganda reasons.

To confirm (or disprove) the veracity of the footage, the researchers drew together people from several different disciplines: historians, archaeologists, archivists, surveyors, video experts, forensic scientists, and I'm fairly sure I'm missing a few. The main piece of footage they focused on was the detonation of one of the great explosive mines at the very start of the battle (visible, very prominently, just under one and a half minutes into this compilation of clips from the battle). This one wound up confirmed as accurate; through piecing together footage, accounts of the battle, a large amount of surveying and GPS work around the mine crater, and talking to descendants of the Somme's veterans who were shown the still-scarred battlefield by their parents or grandparents after the war, and other research which turned up the records of the cameraman who had shot the scene. The confirmation was a spectacular success, as the crew found the exact point, to within a couple of feet, where the cameraman had stood that day. Demonstration of this, fading the original footage in and out on top of the new footage, created a fairly eerie effect, blurring the lines between past and present in an interesting way.

The project also confirmed the veracity of a few other sequences, which turned out to have been shot within minutes of that one, from the same spot, as the cameraman panned the camera to one side to capture some footage of the battalion's disasterous advance. I think that was an unintended discovery, but a good one nonetheless, another brick of This Really Happened in the knowledge wall. Alas, I surrendered the TV at that point to the roomies and the sacred tradition of The Game (and just when they were taking those videos a step further by trying to ID the figures in them - nice!), and didn't get to see what happened next.

But what I saw was some neat enough application.

The day before, a few of the other digital history students and I went to a guest lecture at the university given by Dr. John Bonnett of Brock University. Dr. Bonnett, an historian and Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities, was giving a talk with the triple-fisted title of "new challenges, new opportunities for history: collaborative environments, high-performance computing, and the future of the historian's craft." The talk was, to be honest, a little on the disorganized and ill-paced side, and could've gone better in ninety minutes instead of sixty. On the other hand, we had a time slot of an hour, and Bonnet's hundreds of minutes' advance warning would make it difficult to get across fairly simple topics, never mind the highly-technical ones he discussed.

So what did he discuss? I could be a smartass and say that he talked about new challenges and opportunities for history by discussing collaborative environments, high-performance computing, and the future of the historian's craft, but I should probably give at least some detail. Dr. Bonnett's talk outwardly appeared to be something one would expect to see coming from a computer science (or at least information science), but there was a lot of meat in there which has potential uses in either digital history specifically, or the broader field as a whole.

Much of the first half of the talk was focused on the versatility of various sources of information - even original, primary documents - when combined with new tools and techniques which have become available over the course of the last generation. This was explained in the context of a project (description at another site here, for those who tire of the awkward site design) Dr. Bonnett was engaged in, where various primary sources such as photographs, street plans and so on were used to generate three-dimensional recreations of Canadian street scapes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The reconstruction process also involved some judicious use of educated guesses (a notion I also consider sorely underrated) to fill in gaps, e.g., determining what the east side of a building may look like if photos only show the north and west faces.

The buildings were not the only result of the project; the plan was to produce not merely an exhibit, but a research tool in and of itself. To do this, various other sources including the primary materials used in the original reconstruction, modern sources, various other audio/visual records, and so on can be brought into the reconstruction. On top of this, the reconstructions weren't limited by a specific point in time, either; different views of the street at different times could be changed accordingly. The materials were all brought together in terms of a hub-spoke model, where objects were defined as much by their relationships with one another as in isolation. Done properly, this approach results in a detailed, interactive and highly nonlinear narrative, allowing the user to notice unexpected connections or create and explain their own. There's a lot of potential in this kind of arrangement, to say the least.

The remainder of the lecture had a far more technical focus involving two major concepts: the use of dedicated or distributed networks as collaborative research environments, and agent-based modeling as a source for simulation or experimentation in historical research. I want to go into some detail on those, but it would greatly expand an already-large post. If anyone's interested, prod me and I'll talk about those in a subsequent post. Instead, I'm going to go on to Dr. Bonnett's conclusions from all of this, as well as my own.

Dr. Bonnett made a rather bold - and, in my opinion, accurate - statement about the significance of all of these tools. He argues that the development and proliferation of these sorts of research and collaboration environments is at least as significant to the spread of human knowledge as the development of the book itself. Implications of Sturgeon's Law aside, the changes these sorts of things are potentially bringing into history in particular and communication in general really are a difference of kind, not simply degree. A lot of the results of the digital revolution that's been riccocheting around the world in the last few decades, whether research tools like Dr. Bonnett's or exhibitions for the public which make the most use of new tools (something I discussed in a previous post) simply could not exist, at all, in earlier years. Now they're here, and they're not going anywhere.

I'm convinced that tools and methods of these sorts are woefully misunderstood, in both a passive and a very, very active sense, in the field of history. Modern tools such as computing or other sci-tech applications are certainly studied a great deal in universities - a simple Google search can find a veritable cornucopia of examples of this sort of thing - but not nearly enough effort is being put into applying them, or even understanding them at a level beyond theory. This really does need to change; expanding the discipline's knowledge base in these sorts of directions (and others, such as merely interfacing with other disciplines considerably more than we tend to) will gain scholars and students both a great deal in terms of resources, topics and other opportunities. Avoiding this gains little at best.

While it's more or less taken for granted in an academic environment that we'll tend to erect our little picket fences (or trench lines) between departments or concepts or the like, I'm convinced that doing so too actively is a Very Bad Thing for a number of reasons. Rants about active refusal to learn an available topic at a university aside, I think that there are simply too many potential opportunities for most aspects of history - research, teaching, presentation on both the academic and public levels - to discard or mischaracterize as pointless out of hand. While I don't take things quite so far in the generalist direction as, say, Heinlein did, I do believe that these sorts of changes aren't going anywhere, and we should do a better job of recognizing that sort of thing than we currently do.

Lest We Remember

It is, for at least the next half-hour or so, Remembrance Day: the day of the year so explicitly built around the concept of memory that the notion is enshrined in its very name.

So, of course, I'm going to spend a good chunk of this post talking about its inverse.

At the appropriate hour today in his time zone, a friend of mine in Australia made a fairly simple commemorative post on his personal blog. It consisted simply of the date and time of the Armistice and the word "Remember." I can certainly appreciate the minimalist nature of that kind of comment; it says most of what needs to be said about the date where it really matters. (Myself, I tend to post some form or another of antiwar poetry at whatever online presence I've been loudest at that year.)

What caught my interest, however, was a statement in the discussion comments beneath the post. Someone mentioned that they'd forgotten the date altogether, but seemed to find that alright, because "[w]ar isn't something to be remembered."

My initial reaction to that kind of statement tends to boil down to "the hell it isn't," but that's largely a combination of my inner historian and (as far as I can comfortably carry the concept) pacifist speaking. I'm old-fashioned enough as far as the notion of remembering events goes that I can say I think George Santayana got it right in one without feeling silly. But there's something else in there that warrants thinking about, as there is with all but the most inane statements.

I'm pretty sure everyone reading this - and everyone who isn't - has a few files parked in their brains' storage that they'd like to be able to delete for one reason or another. They might be big things - being on the wrong end of violence (including, yes, war) or a natural disaster, a major personal failure leaving one with a nagging case of the wouldacouldas - or they might not, being simply minor slights or shortcomings which anyone else would consider not a big deal but, to their bearer, ache like an old wound years after the fact. Most people do have a few things that they simply Don't Want To Remember, but we're largely forced to deal with not having that capacity outside of damaging levels of repression. (That is beginning to change, no doubt raising temptation and concern in equal measure in quite a few heads.)

That's forgetting on a very personal and individual level, of course, and I'm (generally) libertarian enough to think that people should think or do as they will in that regard - if we own anything at all, we certainly own our own minds. With statements like "war isn't something to be remembered," however, a larger issue comes up. It implies the recommendation that there are experiences and memories which are best excised not just from individuals' minds, but from the collective memory of entire cultures.

Cultures - families, towns, nations - deal with that issue of things they'd rather not have experienced on a level which may be somewhat more diffuse than you or I do, but the notion is still there. They handle it in different ways, some good and some bad. Witness Japan, still struggling with its role and experiences in the Second World War; witness Rwanda, taking very much the opposite route; witness Canada, which has integrated its current status as a (largely) tolerant and open multicultural society to the point where few people in my generation have the least clue that we have our own moments of shame. Different reactions for each one; Japan is simultaneously trying to remember and forget; Rwanda is drawing its memories out as much as possible to face and address them; Canada has largely successfully forgotten some of its own black marks.

I'm torn on this kind of thing. On a personal level I despise the idea of excising events from the community's memory. I don't like denial, and the idea that [insert concept here] should not be remembered or thought about is something I generally find deeply appalling. Of course, I'm one person; other historians may not have as much of a problem with this, and historians as a community don't exactly have very strong control over the community's memory at large. I'm not hubristic enough to see myself as The Gatekeeper Of Historical Memory. Simply put, the question of what to remember and what to forget just isn't my decision beyond an immediate level: my own mind, those of people I teach or speak to or write to. If a society at large decides that something is to be forgotten, I must admit that while I may have some influence over that decision, in practice I'm relatively powerless.

So here I am, left wondering precisely how to react to the attitude and the concept. I'd prefer not to vanish wailing over the precipice of despair. I believe historical memory is pretty important - especially when we're talking about it in the context of the current holiday, where we mainly remember a series of intertwined conflicts (I was going to say "from this century," but I reminded myself it's been "the previous century" for some time now) where over a hundred million lost their lives in the name of purest good, blackest evil and everything in between. "Really" remembering those events - having those who had been through them in person around to remind us in a more visceral way than a textbook ever could - is only going to become more difficult in the next decade or so as the survivors of that time pass on. What do we do toabout the people who believe that we should gloss over things like that, or forget their existence altogether, though?

Obviously we have it in us to continue to present material others would prefer not to think about. That's one of the fun things about the field, after all. (There's a running gag in political science that if you don't anger someone now and then, you're doing it wrong; I believe that applies to history as well, or possibly moreso.) Of course, on the public history side of things, there's going to be situations where that's not an option. We're likely to be told now and then that we must put such-and-such a face on things, emphasising one set of memories while pushing another set, which may be every bit as relevant and important and interesting, aside. We're going to be told now and then that we should whitewash, distort, forget or refuse to mention and discuss something, as the War Museum and Smithsonian (among other places) have discovered in recent years.

This issue's here, it likely has always been, and it likely always will be. So what do we do about it? Do we muddle through like we always have been or ignore the people who advocate such ignore-ance (to borrow Michael Frish's term), in effect forgetting them? Do we engage, or possibly confront them? How should we respond to having to choose between a representation (or misrepresentation) of history which mandates that we forget something we consider important on the one hand, and our careers on the other?

I have no particular clue at the moment. But then again, it's no longer the eleventh; it's 12:30 on the twelfth, and is starting to feel it. So I'll waive my personal responsibility to answer my own rhetorical questions even as I shout 'em into the darkness, and claim retroactively that it was merely my point all along to stick those questions into your head, allowing them to fester in a multiplicity of minds rather than just one. I meant for that to be the case. Really.

At least, I'd prefer you remember it that way.




And it's overdue, but I mentioned it as a tradition of mine at the start of the post. As it is still Remembrance Day in my head, I invite you all to have some Wilfred Gibson poetry.

I also invite you to think for awhile of that "long war" that consumed most of three decades of the twentieth century (for the Great War was not an isolated one); not just its courses and the numbers, but the reasons, the ideas, the dreams, and most importantly, the people it affected. History is a human thing, comprised of humans' stories and experiences; it cannot exist without us and is diminished when we are. That bloody century we're still staggering out of robbed us of far too many stories and storytellers both; if we at least hope that we do a better job with this century, then we've at least got a better start on this one.

They ask me where I've been,
And what I've done and seen.
But what can I reply
Who know it wasn't I,
But someone just like me,
Who went across the sea
And with my head and hands
Killed men in foreign lands...
Though I must bear the blame,
Because he bore my name.
- Wilfred Gibson (1878-1962), "Back"