A Mind-Bending Web 2.0 Way to DO History and Non-Fiction Writing
Saturday, 24 May 2008 Clay Burell 
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In recent years, postmodernists have challenged the validity and need for the study of history on the basis that all history is based on the personal interpretation of sources. In his book In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, defended the worth of history. –Wikipedia: “History“
–the logic of the above quote is sloppy, in my view. Both sides are right: How can we argue with the Postmodernist insight into the basic “constructedness” of all (yes, all) texts? Textual narratives are written by individuals with biases, blind spots, no direct experience, limited sources, and other imperfections. So any historical or biographical narrative, from Gilgamesh to the Gospels to Tacitus to Thomas Friedman, is
indeed, as the postmodernists claim, “based on the personal interpretation of sources,” and thus should be read with a healthy dose of skepticism and the need for evidence and logic.
But Evans is also right to “defend the worth of history.” It’s silly to think otherwise. That historians are neither omniscient, neutral, or infallible does not mean that history is unknown or unknowable. The evidence from the past – those letters, journals, books, artifacts, ruins, buildings, maps, and all the rest that we call “primary sources” – attests to the basic facticity of a person or event. Socrates existed and was executed in Athens: this seems safe to say, based on evidence from various sources of the time. But the person of Socrates, his character? Plato says “hero,” Aristophanes says “charlatan,” and a modern philosopher says “anti-democratic villain.” One person, Socrates, is defined differently by three different narrators’ personal (and “scholarly”) interpretations of him. And thinking about those interpretations, and ideally creating our own, does have value for us. Pity any democracy, for example, that is ignorant of Hitler’s fear- and anger-mongering manipulation of German voters to get himself legally appointed dictator. (In other words, pity Bush/Cheney’s United States?)
Again, the point: We need history, but we also need to understand the methods and practices of the historian – the search for evidence, its evaluation and selection, its literal “weaving” into, or omission from, narrative “text.”
Schools, as usual, generally score an F-minus in teaching students this “constructedness” of history. They’re too busy stuffing their victims’ heads with the names, dates, and summaries – the “facts” – that those victims will then be tested on. (In most cases, said victims will remember their test grades far longer than they’ll remember the content, since schools largely teach that grades are more important than learning.)
Anyway, this is a round-about intro to a comment thread I’ve been enjoying on Will Richardson’s recent “My Blogging Legacy” post. In that poignantly mind-bending post, Will imagines his children, after he himself has passed away,
. . . . turning to the computer and accessing an avatar representation of me who carried in him the compilation of all my writing, blogging, photos, movies, oral histories and more that I had created while I was alive. And that avatar was able to sort through all of that information and answer their questions, have a conversation with them in fact, in my voice. At some point in the dream, I realized that the avatar was not only feeding back historical data, but was also using the sum of my work to offer advice and counsel in ways that I most likely would have offered were I alive. Even though I wasn’t there physically, it’s like a piece of my brain lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies.
At a certain point, I riffed off Will’s idea, then Christopher Sessums chimed in with this:
I’ve been reflecting on the notion of ghost blogs, i.e., blogs of users who have died. I imagine this phenomena will begin to take on “new life” as the first wave of bloggers move on to that “undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns–” (Shak. Hamlet).
I think about how in meatspace we have a place to go to, to mourn, remember, reflect, pay our respects. What will this look like online?
Your post provides a wonderful vision of how it could be.
Given my own sense of mortality, it makes sense to start thinking/planning now, if only in a brainstorming-sense.
I shot back,
And Christopher, to throw the irresistible local flavor from East Asia in: how will these “ghost blogs” meld with Confucian ancestor worship? The laptop (or holograph) next to the photo of the deceased blogger-ancestor on the altar, behind the incense and candles?
Then Chris wrote:
Wouldn’t that be awesome?
Where do blog posts go when we die? They never cease (provided your ISP is still in business).
. . . . I also like the fact that my identity is dispersed in tiny bytes across the ether. Being a puzzler, i.e., one who enjoys puzzles, I like the idea of searching across multiple forms of representation to create a picture of a person’s life. So I’m not sure I would want my identity isolated in one space, but instead distributed thus requiring those interested in me to explore and put together their own picture of me.
Then I riffed back with a fantasy history or non-fiction writing assignment – biographical writing, specifically. Since Chris then offered – threatened? – to “kiss” me in response (and though I virtually slapped him, I was flattered), I figure I’ll post that assignment idea here. I do think it’s cool enough, honestly, to pass on to any history or non-fiction writing teachers out there. Here it is:
A History Assignment I’d Like to See:
Chris, A belated Eureka-riff re: your “distributed identity”: a creative, project-based biography-writing or historiography teacher or professor could do some cool stuff treating our already-distributed online personae as “primary sources” from which student historians or biographers had to draw to construct a representation of us.
*INHALE*
What I mean is, like, “Write a biographical sketch of X in which X’s public blog represents his/her public life, but X’s comments on others’ blogs represents his/her (more) private life. Construct a narrative of X’s personal life, tastes, and thoughts by analyzing their Flickr photos, LastFM playlists, YouTube favorites, etc.”
I know I’m freer in comments than I am on my blog posts, for example. And that a good reader could infer a lot about me from those other “primary sources” listed above.
It would be even more interesting, from a literacy perspective, to have more than one person construct a biography or history of the same individual. If you and I, for example, had to sift through the same “legacy” Will has confetti’d the web with, odds are we’d construct significantly different identities due to our different selection/omission choices and subjective bents.
Interesting, anyway. Just playing around, whiling away the writer’s block.*
Wouldn’t that be cool? And wouldn’t students learn just how slippery history and biography are by comparing their different narrative constructions? And wouldn’t they learn, sidewise, about how revealing they can be with their online identities, when others decide to sift through them like this, and possibly think twice about what they reveal in all future posts?
—
(*Speaking of that writer’s block, it’s due to many factors: the Project Global Cooling concert went off quite successfully in a downtown Seoul nightclub last weekend, but was exhausting to pull off; I’m in the midst of moving into a new apartment; the last-weeks-of-school madness is full swing; my Airport Express wireless is wonky in my apartment; I’m changing my immigration status; my mother-in-law is still recovering from her stroke; and I’m leaving my school to take a year’s sabbatical, without pay, which necessitates its own host of preparations. Can you say “full plate”? But life is full, anyway, and I’m excited.)
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Tags: biography, Christopher Sessums, history, Plato, Will Richardson Print This Post
No. 1 — May 24th, 2008 at 9:50 am
Kia Ora Clay.
Yes, the ‘old’ postmodernist’s eschewing of the grand narrative looms again.
I look at it this way – it is a present-day culture that simply denies that people knew anything of any worth in the past: a month ago, a year ago, last century or any time well before that.
It has possessed the pundits who claim to have a better vision of what knowledge is, where it comes from and where it’s going. So much so that the very act of writing it (by what ever means) condemns it to the annals of history and so invalidates its usefulness.
Much though I’d like the interesting opportunity to disagree with you, I have to admit that I can’t on this one. However, you may not agree with the furtherance of my opinion expressed here.
Ka kite
from Middle-earth
Ken Allans last blog post..Writing a Great Comment
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No. 2 — May 24th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Hi Clay,
Several years back I wrote in the school Yearbook how I am planning to generate laughter at my funeral. This morning I was thinking about my will after reading about an artist here who had insisted that their death notice be published in the paper after the actual funeral.
I have thought about what would happen to all my online stuff when I bite the dust. And, this morning after reading that article I thought I would attach a CD-ROM or similar to the will containing the instructions and files that I wanted posted online when I die. I then thought why not create an online directory now with an eulogy written by myself complete with images and video? Then my will would only need a direction to post the link in my blog to the directory. Who would reply to the comments? My siblings? My students?
Regards teaching history, I love to recount the past as a living story when I teach history. I take the students back as well as I can. Rarely seated, always walking, talking, gesticulating. I once made a student vomit as I recreated in their minds the horrible, inhumane conditions beneath decks on the second convict fleet to Australia in 1790. The transportation had been contracted to a private organisation. The student ran out the classroom, crossed to the balcony opposite, lent over the railing and let loose with their lunch. In Australian we call that a ‘chunder’ ~ derived from sailors who yelled as they spewed, ‘watch under!’
http://www.historyaustralia.org.au/ifhaa/ships/2ndfleet.htm
I am also guilty of feeding the students with summaries and the like. In fact seven of my classes are being tested this week. I shake my head.
Cheers, John
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No. 3 — May 24th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
One other thing. Pepy’s Diary is like a blog from the dead…
http://www.pepysdiary.com/
Cheers, John
John Larkins last blog post..Only Connect ~ presentation by Mark Pesce
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No. 4 — May 25th, 2008 at 1:53 am
Just when we get used to the idea of creating a virtual self, we get to think about how to reconstruct/interpret another’s virtual tracks and how others will view us through that lens in the future… On the other hand, using virtual tracks as a primary source is maybe not as much a leap as a logical and useful addition to all the other history research tricks (and as such, would probably need same note of caution, especially for students: there’s often more to the story than appears online.)
And the assumption that blogs and other yawps in the ether will live on forever… hmm. Certainly there is a sense that everything we say will follow (haunt?) us, and we should act cautiously in this regard. But to this point, there’s been no such thing as a “guaranteed forever” medium. Things get jettisoned because of volume, “lost” when tracking systems change, altered in the act of “handing down,” and become inaccessible when the technology required to access the original form (think video tapes) becomes rare. These are all issues of physical capacity and permanence, and so maybe blogs, etc. are a new shot at eternity… but can we be sure? (The Wayback Machine exists for a reason, but it’s not getting it all.)
By the way, at least one service for providing electronic posthumous messages is already up and running.
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No. 5 — May 25th, 2008 at 2:41 am
Clay,
Your posting set off several trains of thought for me:
-how apt that it is being published two days before we observe Memorial Day in the U.S. I’ve been on the edge of tears all day, remembering and missing my Dad. I have bits and pieces of his life preserved on paper and in memories. I wish I could have seen deeper into his soul via a blog. Some words are easier to write than to speak.
-as an occasional 18th century reenactor, I’ve experienced firsthand the research that goes into creating a believable historical persona. When you live in the style of a period, you understand much more about the realities of a time gone by.
-I do think about what will happen when I’m gone: who will tell my online friends? How much of the “real” me will my children remember? I try to leave pieces of myself in my writing. I want to live on as a person, not an idealization.
-What fun it would be to read the analysis others might do of my character and personality!
Thanks for giving me points to ponder.
diane
dianes last blog post..On the Occasion of my 200th Blog Posting
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No. 6 — May 25th, 2008 at 7:06 am
Clay, I’m glad you brought this idea of blogging from beyond to my attention. You and Chris are right: it’s a fascinating notion. I think your proposed teaching project is pretty sweet, too.
The lure of immortality through collective memory has always seized people’s imagination. Read the ancient, heroic literature: characters are powerfully motivated by the promise of posthumous fame, of being kept alive in the words of the bards and poets.
I think the revolutionary potential of the web here is that it eliminates the middleman–the singers of tales are replaced. In a world of universally gathered, universally accessible data you’re freed to sing your own tale. Instead of your deeds being memorialized in the words of others, your words become your deeds. Seen this way, web 2.0 isn’t just a matter of allowing regular folks the chance to publish their thoughts–it’s giving those same folks unprecedented power to shape their own legacies.
In a sense, it’s the ultimate victory of the primary source. An online legacy has to be interpreted, sure–but it’s not being funneled through one interpreter: rather, the legacy can be parsed and aggregated like any other large, distributed dataset. Imaging a remix of a legacy, or a mashup of two people’s lives. A little macabre? Sure. But maybe, in it’s way, a little transformative, too.
Of course, this is pretty pie-in-the-sky stuff, now. But it seems like, in a world where a complete picture of a person’s life is increasingly available to marketers, it’s interesting to see how a comprehensively aggregated life-story could be a good thing, too.
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No. 7 — May 25th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Yes yes yes! to the project that you mentioned. I know that I do that anyways with most people I meet online. I look around at all the primary sources that their online activity provides and then I make conclusions of those based on their personalities.
And then, on the flip side, I browse through my own blog, myspace, facebook, etc etc and try to make judgments about _myself_ as if I’m an outside observer to see if I represent who I am correctly. Or it could just be narcissisms. Who knows.
I play this game with my friends where we try to write chapters in a history textbook of the future about ourselves. I tell them about their “historical accomplishments” and they tell me about mine.
In the future, all of our work and communications (probably even the ones that seem private, like email) will be accessible to historians. I wonder what kind of change history will take when most of our private thoughts and activities are blasted wide for all to see?
Reminds me of the Patriot Act for some reason.
Lindseas last blog post..Rain and a full moon
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No. 8 — May 25th, 2008 at 9:35 am
Lindsea,
I find that I always hold back “something”, a part of my makeup that’s too fragile or intimate to share with anyone. The nightmare fears, the private doubts – they never appear in my public persona. I can’t even articulate some of them to myself.
Can we ever truly know another person?
diane
dianes last blog post..On the Occasion of my 200th Blog Posting
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No. 9 — May 25th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
@Jason, I mentioned something similar about the ancient epic heroes’ desire for an immortal name in the comment thread on Will’s post (if you haven’t read it, it’s so worth it). Your comment is more food for thought than I can digest from the shopping mall I’m typing from right now. I checked out your sites, too, and like your style – visual and verbal. Good stuff.
@John, Interesting as always. I’m with you on the summary crams. I’ve been doing little but test prep lately for my seniors’ AP Literature exam, and it’s been a head-shaking experience for me too.
I’d reply to comments on your posthumous self-eulogy. More mind-bending. And I’d pay to see a film of some of your history sections. I enjoy teaching history more than literature, and have missed it all year.
@C. Tschofen, I’ve thought about the lifespan of current web content due to the evolution of the tech formats. Should we really expect the day when our YouTube vdieos, blogs, podcasts, etc no longer work online? That’s a bummer. Points to the beauty of the good old book.
@Diane, In Will’s comments, I wondered if we were shortchanging our descendants by being so text-heavy and video-light. We educators are strangely shy about allowing our faces and voices to express the ideas we choose to confine to text instead. I’d much rather watch and listen, than only read texts. Not an either/or, but it seems to be for us typing types. Do we fear our webcams?
I, too, hold back some. But I hope to get over that (though perhaps in prudent ways).
@Lindsea – You should push this as a learning activity in your school next year.
@Ken, Since we don’t disagree this time, I’ll just close with a smiley
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No. 10 — May 25th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
To the victors go the history books. I’ve always found it fascinating to read the original sources. A book called “Stripping the Altars” published by Yale University Press gave a completely different account of the Reformation in England than the pro Protestant one I encountered in the “book” assigned as an undergrad.
Your project sounds very interesting. An interesting if not bizarre twist might be to pair with a colleague unknown to the students and for the sake of academic work insinuate with the students that Mr or Mrs. X is no longer with us. As they construct his or her views on current events based off of their past blogs and writings they could then at the end meet via skype or visit the actual person and see how close they were to being accurate.
Might be something in that mix that doesn’t mesh with the guidelines for good research but it would add an interesting twist.
Charlie A. Roys last blog post..Catholic Schools and homeschooling?
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No. 11 — May 26th, 2008 at 12:33 am
@Clay: As an experienced edu-blogosphere (surely one of the world’s least attractive words) lurker, it’s with some trepidation that I’ve started my own blog and started throwing some comments out on others’ spaces. It’s great to hear some positive feedback; thanks.
I read the thread on Will’s blog, and was embarrassed to see that, as you mentioned, part of my comment had already been expressed (and more eloquently) in your comment over there. Apologies for not giving credit where it was due.
Jason Priems last blog post..Party like a chemical
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No. 12 — May 26th, 2008 at 2:04 am
Sorry Clay my comment turned into a post – I’m going to put it here because I think its bad manners to put a link to my blog; that is like inviting guest from one party over to your place.
As ever Clay you are engaging in big ideas – in terms of history your post deals with both ‘validity of source’ and ‘bias of interpretation’.
For me source comes down to ‘rent you have to pay! ‘History goes to the winner’- not because the author, but because the audience (the winners or their descendents) will not tolerate (buy, pay the writers rent) an alternative opinion.
The nightly news by this measure is ‘history on amphetamines’. EM Gombrich suggests (and I paraphrase) that there is no ‘spirit o the times’ just artists responding to the needs of an audience.
I would refine the above maxim to ‘history goes to the audience’ and then suddenly history gets exciting – because you are starting to consider recorded history in the terms of popular audience.
‘The Persians’ (472 BC) written some 15 – 20 years after the Greco-Persian war (If you seen ‘300’ then you’ve seen one of the battles) could be considered a celebration of Greek supremacy or an attack by Aeschylus, on Athenian increasing imperial aspirations. Would Shakespeare have written a sympathetic view Richard III; given that the grand daughter of the winner (of the ‘War of the Roses’) was one of his patrons? That said, a US audience would not tolerate as sympathetic portrayal of Osama Bin Laden as Shakespeare gives Richard III.
If we could educate a contemporary audience to understand this, then their perception defined by ‘postmodernists’ would be less about content, than context.
At this point I roll out Dawkin’s concept of ‘memes’: ‘packets of information’ that are amoral, apolitical and perpetuate because the audience (infosphere) allow them to exist. Aeschylus and Shakespeare took their social criticism as far as they could because ultimately they needed to put ‘bums on seats’. The audience would not have tolerated a more defined ‘meme’ of criticism. What make them genius is that they still criticised, ‘paid their rent’ and assured the life of their meme by balancing potency of message against audience – respect!
Then we move to interpretation – ‘we learn from history that we do not learn form history’ – because we teach history in (left-brained) dates rather than in (right-brained) patterns.
If we look for patterns then our history teachers should set enquiries like: ‘Find the common patterns of human behaviour in the Peloponnesian war, WWI and the ‘War on Terror’ and based on evidence suggest an alternative path the US could pursue to assure its influence on the world will not fade in the same way that the Athenian and British empire?’
That said most history teacher who have come to enjoy patterns over dates; would challenge that I have not chosen the two most relevant wars to diagnose our current situation? So even at its most developed, interpretation of history is opened to folly and may simply end up as literary analogies. I’m about to ‘cross the Rubicon;’ so hold on.
This is what happens if you try to bring a hard science rational to social phenomena, believing the past in some ways, (like two parts of hydrogen to one part of oxygen always make water) will provide us with a guide to the future.
This is where the collaborative aspect of your wikiography starts to get shaky for me – The ‘aggregation of the many’ is not necessarily empirical evidence in terms of the scientific method and does not justify the historical validity of your aggregated life over other sources. It may go a long way to getting to a ‘truer truth’ than your own autobiography, but it may not be superior to well researched authorship.
Clay wikiography as told by his friends, enemies and everyone who ever read his blog or Clay told by the aggregation of his Twitter posts interpreted by Prof X with PhD in Twitterology. My truth about Clay will be in the version I prefer – so I am with the post-modernists (depressing bunch as they are) on that one.
The value I place on the historical ‘meme’ will be a function of the transaction I am currently engaged in. The life of Clay when talking to his friend, peers and even his enemies will have greater value if I quote the wikiography. The life of Clay as told by Prof X will have greater value with an audience who value Prof X’s opinion.
The patterns I use from history are only valuable in so much as they help me solve the challenge I am confronted with in the present. This is the way our students consume all knowledge – will it help me to achieve what I want to achieve? The relevance or authority of the source is defined by the transaction. This is where yours and Will’s posts have their potency.
I find it increasingly difficult emotionally, despite my daughter’s requests, to watch the video I made with my,now deceased, mother holding my new born daughter. Yet my daughter is enriched (which was my intention all along) by the viewing and the questions about my mother and my life as a child that result. This has personal relevant and very specific functionality. My concern with the ‘prosumer’ is that as we move from the personal do we lose relevance and just become another faulted historical text?
My belief is that beyond the personal, we should blog, podcast, vlog to solve problems in front of us now, not for the future. – Shakespeare wrote to solve the problem that confronted him, get the biggest audience, he did not write (lots of evidence of you want it) for posterity and neither should we. The human condition will persists and someone may find use in the artefacts we leave behind. But let history decide.
I am concerned that that beyond the private family audience all that we write i just propaganda and subjectivity is not mitigated by collaboration.
Gilbert Halcrows last blog post..Web 2.0, the Axolotl and Communication Literacy
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No. 13 — May 26th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Clay another great post, out of the forty plus posts in my reader, I chose only this one to which to respond. I really do hate to continually mention my example of being dismissed from my current job for my online activity, and I promise to “get over” it soon and move on, but currently it is Monday morning and I am in my bedroom in my pajamas rather than in front of a group of kids where I belong, so I am still bitter, but I digress.
I only mention my case again because I have always argued that our online personalities are a reflections of our histories. So this assignment you have concocted is brilliant in that it shows people that a person is more than one blog post or opinion or “inappropriate” art project on Flickr. People are now a collection of what the web says they are. Sure we have a say in that image, but sometimes it may get out of our control. It is crucial that we see each other in a complete light and research each other’s stories. Just as we would want our students to use a variety of sources to understand historic figures, we would hope that we could see each other, bloggers and online personalities, in the same light. How much of a person’s blog one must read to get a full picture of who they are? How accurate are these sketches? Your idea raises many great questions!
I was thinking about what people would find if I was person X in your assignment. Sure there may be one or two things that may ruffle some feathers, but over all I think there is enough historical data of which I could be proud. I love this project and think it would be fantastic for students to do it at the beginning of the year on their teachers. Just think of it, what would be worse: to have students find a collection of your ideas and work on the web or for them to find nothing. The latter would almost be like you don’t even exists in their eyes and with 21st century students, perhaps you don’t.
Your post has spurred me to start a wikipedia page on myself to set the record straight. I will send you the link when it is up and running, so perhaps you can join me in writing my history.
Intrepid Teachers last blog post..First Trailer
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No. 14 — May 26th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
@Gilbert, Never ever apologize for long comments (unless they’re the lousy, rambling, pointless variety, which yours is clearly not
). And always feel free to copy and paste comments from here to your site too. There’s no orthodoxy here, thank Goodness. Beyond that? I _love_ the insights about audience and bums in seats. How far you can push the envelope before you’re pushed out of it – there’s the challenge. (Dammit, every time I try to comment on this thread, either the shopping mall yesterday or, now, the end-of-day bell interrupts. More later, I hope.)
@Jabiz – Another great addition. In the army, we had a notion called the “total soldier concept”. It meant that two soldiers violating the same regulation would be punished differently, based on their totality as a soldier. In the same way, there’s the total online identity, as you say.
And the danger of cherry-picking to distort that identity (or identity construct).
When the Comment Challenge started, I got a lot of comments that showed the commenters didn’t “know” me like my regular visitors. It was somehow disturbing.
Okay, off to some faculty meeting. Boo.
Thanks again.
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No. 15 — May 26th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
@Charlie, Jeez, how could I overlook commenting on your riff of “reviving the (purported) dead” so the students in this imaginary activity could interview the ghost to see how close they got, in the ghost’s eyes, to an accurate representation/construction. That’s such a cool idea. (But you see the challenge, right? Practically everything is time-stamped online, so there’d be gobs of editing entries to conceal that. Maybe we should just wait for one of us to croak. Tell you what: I’ll write my own biographical sketch before I give up the ghost, and password protect it for just teachers, so students can’t cheat. And I’ll have John Larkin or some other web-executor distro that password to teachers who want a real dead guy to work with.
Talk about the eternal teacher
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No. 16 — May 27th, 2008 at 12:53 am
@Clay
My comments come from having spent the first part of the Memorial day weekend here in the states watching cheesy horror films featuring the return on the dead. I see the practical problems and I imagine many of our students are better detectives than postmodern literary constructionists.
Charlie A. Roys last blog post..Catholic Schools and homeschooling?
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No. 17 — July 28th, 2008 at 2:30 am
[...] put me in mind again of Will’s post, “My Blogging Legacy,” about how all his digital offerings may one [...]