A New and Familiar Form of Scholarship

Abstract

A New and Familiar Form of Scholarship Edward L. Ayers (bio) Congratulations, first of all, to the staff of the William and Mary Quarterly for advancing our profession's experiments in digital history. The OI Reader is an elegant tool and Simon P. Newman's article an elegant use of that tool's capacities. Those of us interested in what the digital world might offer our ancient and honorable profession have been waiting for innovative and engaging work of this sort. Anyone who has tried to reconstruct the world of those held in slavery through the fractured documentary record has to be impressed with and grateful for the evocation of that world in Newman's article. The sounds, images, animations, and enhancements on display in "Hidden in Plain Sight" are a natural and welcome extension of the work of imagination demanded by those who write about a society where some people were not meant to be seen. I imagine that I was invited to join this conversation because I have been advocating such experimentation for a long time. Stumbling into the digital world in the early 1990s, I happened to be standing nearby when the World Wide Web appeared. With the help of skilled friends and allies, I began building a website, The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, in 1993, about six months after the Web's debut.1 The project extended the fundamental premise of historical scholarship— accountability to a fully transparent documentary record—to its logical culmination. Because the Web at that time could not transfer images, sounds, and animations with adequate fluidity, in 2000 Anne S. Rubin and I published a CD-ROM that integrated music, photographs, and animated maps. In 2003, William G. Thomas III and I published an experimental peer-reviewed digital article for the American Historical Review, "The Differences Slavery Made."2 [End Page 4] Our digital article differed in almost every regard from Newman's. Whereas "Hidden in Plain Sight" deftly integrates art and sound into a familiar article form, Thomas and I turned the entire concept of the article inside out. We displayed the ropes and pulleys of historical scholarship. We did not merely refer to other scholarship—we quoted extensively from it in a separate component of the article, described our relationship to it, and linked from that scholarship back into our analysis. We did not merely quote examples from our evidence; instead, we gave access to all of it in databases, graphs, tables, and entire document collections. We disassembled each of the components of our article into explicit arguments with which fellow scholars could engage. In short, we foregrounded the hypertextual and digital elements of the article, addressing our fellow historians more than a general audience. We did so in part to show that digital capacities actually enhanced scholarly contributions and could do so more rigorously than print on paper. No one has emulated our experiment. It asked too much of its authors as well as its readers, perhaps, or challenged the conventions of historical writing too frontally. That is why Newman's article and the OI Reader are so welcome. They persuade their way into professional discourse rather than barging in. Over the fifteen years between the American Historical Review article and Newman's piece, of course, we have lived through several more turns of the digital revolution. The once-rickety Web now delivers gigabytes of information in an instant. It dispenses more video than text, and sound and image are prominent. Simple animations have grown into multiplayer video games of enormous complexity. And apps such as the OI Reader integrate communication and presentation in stylish and seamless forms. The Quarterly has done its part well. The app installs in seconds and works fluidly. The layout evokes the familiar and elegant appearance of the journal, while the note-taking capacity offers a feature no print journal can. The standards and collaboration characteristic of the Omohundro Institute are evident in the acknowledgments and final product. Newman's article takes advantage of the visual and audible capacities of online media to enhance our ability to imagine hidden lives. Every tool serves a particular purpose...