By bringing history into the digital world, educators can engage students in different ways than a textbook and introduce historical concepts and ideas without creating the educational equivalent of eating your vegetables. The digital world is rife with opportunities and challenges for history educators. Digital tools allow students to interact with history and historical thinking in a medium they are increasingly comfortable with and expect to use. Conversely, familiarity and high use of the internet can become a distraction and disseminate misinformation.
The digital world educators and students navigate both allows the imaginative big game prize for Roosevelt and the evaluation of the fake, based on the millennia apart dinosaurs and Roosevelt lived. He would probably have loved to hunt one though, and the faked photograph can also be used to look at Roosevelt as a sport hunter and a conservationist. It is a fanciful example, yet it illustrates the manipulation in the digital world and how to use that manipulation. Continuing with this photograph, here are more ways it can be used as an educational exercise:
Review Wikipedia on “Triceratops.” Note when and where it lived. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triceratops
Compare another biography of Roosevelt to the Wikipedia page and look for similarities and differences.
Using the Talk and View History buttons, study the origins and changes to the Wikipedia page. What information can they draw from who the editors are?
Study the Theodore Roosevelt Hunting Library at the Library of Congress https://guides.loc.gov/theodore-roosevelt-hunting-library/about-the-collection
As educators, understanding the information and presentation of the information available to students creates a space for learning about how to evaluate information and sources. Instead of considering the digital world a place of potential disinformation, it can be used as a place to hone analytical skills and the habit of historical thinking.
Having said that, the digital world carries with it the risk of students learning “bad” history that is hard to dislodge in their developing brains. The ready availability of conspiracy theories and challenges to what history can be taught already bring challenges into the classroom; the digital world can amplify this. Education, and education on history, is difficult in light of the political and cultural wars being fought nationwide. But the digital world also brings the opportunity for educators to teach history and historical thinking in engaging ways.
Storytelling can be an engaging component of history education and historical thinking. Telling a compelling story and using film or digital projects allows learners to interact with history differently reading based learning. Making history entertaining does not diminish it but can offer an opportunity to approach a subject differently. In a learning environment, film and digital storytelling can be the launching point for working on historical thinking and analysis.
When I taught leadership to ensigns a lifetime ago, we usually ended the course with a movie about leadership and crisis, from The Caine Mutiny to 12 O’clock High. These work well to lead into a capstone type discussion for while they entertained – Bogart and strawberries is funny on the surface – they opened further discussion points on crisis leadership, relationships, and followership. A tool for learning history and historical thinking, films can do the same thing. I reviewed Hacksaw Ridge for an assignment, and it would be an intriguing one for a class. Were I teaching it, I would tee up assignments relating to conscientious observers, reading first-hand accounts of the Pacific campaign, discussion of attitudes toward the Japanese, and the toll of the war on the home front. Another potential topic is what is left out. The movies tight focus on Private Doss and his company did not afford a look at another part of the tragedy at Okinawa, the mass suicide of civilians afraid of what the American troops may do to them.
Part of the assignment would be learning about Bedford, Virginia, home to a memorial to the “Bedford Boys” who died on D-Day and the National D-Day Memorial. Bedford is a typical small town, but in June of 1944 suffered the highest per capita loss on the beaches of Normandy.
Film and digital history projects can bring a different perspective and, hopefully, develop empathy. It is a very human reaction to identify with the characters in a story, so that can be channeled into a wider view of the world being portrayed as well as the challenges faced by the people living in it. Creating digital history projects also allow students to engage with material differently, thinking about not only the sourced information, but thinking about the audio and visual representation of the subject.
Dismissing film and digital projects as space fillers in a learning environment misses out on an opportunity to take history off the pages and encourage interest in further learning.
In all the readings we have been doing on historical thinking and thinking about teaching history, a core element was the tension between the why and the what of history. Wineburg described thinking about history almost as a dartboard, with what as the bullseye and why and how as the next rings. Structurally, these build a narrative about thinking about history, not in terms of the memorization, but the reading and analysis core of historical thinking.
The elements of historical thinking that show up across the readings in similar ideas if not exact language are:
Accounting for multiple perspectives and narratives,
Primary sources used and analyzed
Sourcing and the perspective of the primary source
Understanding historical context
Progress and decline
Making the connection between evidence and the claim being made.
Humanizing history
The heart of this is primary sourcing – learning and understanding how to read primary sources, both in the literal way and intellectually. Placing primary sources in the context of their time and developing an understanding of the why and what of the source. Every account is colored by the author’s intent and point of view and should be viewed in the context of their time. Starting with primary sources and thinking about history as a human narrative allows practitioners to frame compelling narratives.
Some fundamental questions in the teaching if history relate to how to incorporate historical thinking in the classroom. First, how does teaching move from the memorization model to a historical thinking model, allowing students to learn the procedural part of history, the reading, writing and analysis of history. Setting up ways for them to explore history and determining the gaps their basic knowledge and how to develop them.
Levesque noted that history is often presented to students in a prepackaged (“crafted”) form, leaving the question of how can the “crafted” history be used to teach. Think it can be used as a starting point, or to provide a narrative to be studied and challenged.
The final question is, if history is made of multiple narratives, how that can be combined to create depth of historical knowledge and historical thinking. Another of Levesque idea was teachers as coaches in their students’ learning, an easy idea to propose but challenging in practice. To coach students in historical thinking, educators have to think through asking the right questions, again, to identify skill gaps and to engage students in the learning the process of history.
George Mason’s Gunston Hall: Home of American Rights, https://gunstonhall.org. Visited January and February 2024.
George Mason IV built Gunston Hall between 1754 and 1758, near the Potomac River on one of the properties he inherited from his father. The Mason family was an important one in the Chesapeake Bay area, with properties in Virginian, Maryland and the area of Virginia that would become West Virginia. While Mason is less famous today than his neighbor at Mount Vernon, both the physical and digital sites for Gunston Hall seek to emphasize his contributions as a founding father in his own right.
On the Banks of the Potomac: George Mason’s Gunston Hall.
Situated in present day Lorton, Virginia, the road to the house sets the stage for discussing the house and grounds, as the drive leading to the visitor center showcases the allee of cherry tr ees framing and drawing the eye to the house. The grounds are open to walk around, hike and picnic, but the house itself is only open with a guide. The site is designed for the visitor center to introduce the visitor to Mason, his times, beliefs and accomplishments and exhibits that tie them to more recent events.
The overarching story is George Mason as an author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and a leading proponent of the principles in the Bill of Rights – the tour guide was quick to assert Mason wrote them, Madison pushed them through. The physical space in the visitor center leads the visitor into a museum through exhibits on the era, with artifacts ranging from tea boxes and rifles to copies of indenture agreements and furniture. Thought was clearly given to encouraging interaction with the space and ideas, with hands on activities in the visitor center including using stones and scales to vote on term limits in the Senate and a desk with pamphlets and letters to Mason that guests are invited to pick up and bring to the corner that is a replica of Williamsburg’s Raleigh Tavern to read and discuss.
The artifacts throughout are generally well explained and how they relate to each other and the message. One display on the Stamp Act and non-importation agreements had a replica of the “No Stamp Act” teapot (the original is on display at the Art Museums at Colonial Williamsburg) paired with a group of items that would have been subject to non-importation. This tied in with the house tour, as one of the collection was a reproduction of the wallpaper in the public room of the house. The museum centered on Mason as a founding father, the house introduced him as a family man and an important man in the area.
Playing cards with label from the Stamp Act exhibit, Museum at Gunston Hall. Both an excellent example of items the Stamp Act would effect as well as a good sense of humor.
Timed tours of the house start at the visitor center and a guide leads visitors down the drive flanked by rows of cherry trees, not the originals, but lead to an introduction to the house and grounds as examples of Mason’s emphasis and the style of the time for symmetry and order. The house tour started in the main hall with an overview of the layout and architecture. THe guide usually brought groups through the public spaces, leading to the private, but was flexible enough that when part of the group ventured to the private rooms first, she pivoted to those spaces and adjusted the narrative. The house tour focused on the Masons as a family and how the house signaled their wealth and status, from the discussion of the jade green paint in the private rooms to the oriental carvings and chinoiserie in the public dining room. The explanation of why the paint color was important (it was an expensive hue at the time) and the classical themes in the carvings demonstrating education and refinement kept the group interested and asking questions. The tour worked well letting the guests decide the direction; the usual flow would have been a little more effective as it led to the family quarters on the second floor, accessed by either the grand staircase or the very small, very tight servants staircase spiraling up.
In historic houses, especially ones that are thought to be mostly original, rarely are visitors encouraged to touch objects. At Gunston Hall, the site had activities set up in the house, and one of the adjacent buildings, to allow visitors to explore spices through scratch and sniff cards by a spice chest, read letters or do a jigsaw puzzle in Mason’s office, and pick up and study a tea service. In the laundry, one of the open outbuildings, visitors were encouraged to look at the items for the laundress and feel the different textures and quality of pieces representing a Mason daughter, her governess and an enslaved woman.
According to the guide, Gunston Hall was home to at least several dozen enslaved persons. The house was built at least in part through slave labor – the museum includes a brick with a fingerprint – and the elaborate carving was done by an indentured man from England. He is recognized throughout the museum and tour, allowing a discussion of what it meant to be enslaved vice indentured. The contradiction of the rhetoric of the founding fathers and the economic reality of slavery is neither highlighted nor avoided. The tea set activity, for example, includes a note that it would have been washed by an enslaved servant, with dire consequences for breakage. The challenge for the site is how little is known about the Gunston Hall enslaved in particular, as only thirteen names are known.
Once visitors leave the house they are on their own to explore the garden and outbuildings, complemented by explanatory signs in many places and placards with QR codes to offer information.
Gunston Hall on the Web
Gunston Hall’s website leads with its perspective, with the landing page quoting Mason in the Virginia Declaration of rights and the subtitle on the logo “Home of American Rights.” The site is generally easily navigable for general topics and supported by Metro Nova Creative. Gunston Hall is a public private venture between Virginia and the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, although they are barely mentioned on the website. Each page accessed has a sidebar with the page’s content and buttons to return to “Guide for Visiting” and “Upcoming Events.”
The site targets education, with each page offering a deeper look at a subject, such as the history of the gardens and current plans and use.Once past the landing page, the site is divided similarly to the physical site with “Learn” and “House & Grounds.” Learn from Home is a drop down and button in two places, “Learn” and under “Parents” in the “Families and Teachers” tab. The Learn section focuses on Mason and the development of the Bill of Rights and includes digital exhibits and lessons for distance learning. The section has great resources from foodways to using primary sources. Activities include recommended ages and instructions, such as making a kite similar to the one staged in Mason’s office and designing a battledore: https://gunstonhall.org/learn/learning-from-home/investigating-primary-sources/colonial-learning-make-your-own-battledore/. The website does include a George Mason University student digital project “The Enslaved Children of George Mason” as part of its section on Mason and Slavery,
The challenging part of the site is that at a high level it is easily navigable, but in some areas it takes a lot of digging to find what you want. On one visit to the website, there was a virtual tour of the house, locating it again for a question was challenging.The most in depth Mason biography was found not under the tab that said George Mason, but rather three dropdown menus into the House & Grounds page.
The website supplements the physical site well. Slight navigation issues aside, Gunston Hall clearly rose to the occasion when most schools pivoted to virtual education by providing a website rich in resources for educators and families to explore Gunston Hall, colonial times and the basis of the Bill of Rights.
In September, I provided a definition of digital humanities that truly needs revisiting and revising, due to both feedback and questions on the definition and due learning(reconsider word) over the past several months. My original post can be found here: A Definition of Digital Humanities | Online Portfolio (kejacobsen.com) or in the posts listed to the left.
I took a trip down the Google rabbit hole after seeing the term “transdisciplinary” in a definition for digital humanities while rereading Burdick, et. al. I had probably read it as interdisciplinary, the term mostly used in related writing. Transdisciplinary, according to Radakovic, refers to “a research or educational approach that seeks to challenge disciplinary boundaries to create a holistic perspective that provides opportunities to connect across scientific and nonscientific communities1.” Given its roots in computing for the humanities and its expansion into multiple forms of media and digital tools, the idea of a holistic approach resonates with me. Exploring several types of digital humanities over the semester has helped develop a better understanding of the scope of the field. It has still left me with some questions I am still not sure of the answer.
For a definition, Digital Humanities is a collaborative, transdisciplinary field that uses digital tools and methods in research and presentation of studies in the humanities. The humanities can be understood as the study of things humans have created. It can be literature, history, religion, law, linguistics or the arts.2 Based in computing and computer technologies, digital tools offer methods of understanding, exploring, analyzing, sharing and presenting information and research. Digital humanities projects use the same tools to educate and engage audiences, often including the general public. The unanswered question is where is the line between a humanities project presented digitally and a digital humanities project?
In an earlier post, my experience with building a community through shared love of a podcast led to a question on what about podcasts, or crowdsourced projects for that matter, causes that effect. The transdisciplinary nature of those mediums may be the answer, as they add a social element to digital humanities. They can be perceived as establishing a relationship with the user that engages and draws them in. Whatever the audience, the strength of digital humanities is finding new approaches to research, analysis and engagement that grow and change with new technologies, regardless of the age of the subject matter.
‘
N. Radakovic, W. I. O’Byrne, M. Negreiros, T. Hunter-Doniger,, E. Pears, & C. Littlejohn . (2022). Toward Transdisciplinarity: Constructing Meaning Where Disciplines Intersect, Combine, and Shift. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 71(1), 398-417. https://doi.org/10.1177/23813377221113515 ↩︎
Jeffrey R. Wilson, “A New Definition of the Humanities,” Insider Higher Education” October 23, 2023. Online at https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/10/25/new-definition-humanities-opinion ↩︎
In May 1940, the German Army crossed the border into the Netherlands; five days later the small nation capitulated and the Bezetting, or occupation, began. The Arnhem Postal History Project offers a view of everyday life in this period, through postal covers, postcards, correspondence and documents. The collection consists of several thousand items, this study uses the 86 pieces in the Forced Labor group and four from the Operation Market Garden and the Aftermath group. The data set is made up of postmark information (date and location), addressee names and addresses, sender names and addresses, and where the item went through German censors if marked, and the associated latitudes and longitudes. The project uses kepler.gl to map the items as an experiment in mapping and understanding the data set.
Forced Labor
All of the countries occupied by the Germans had seen impressment for labor in factories and on farms, and as the war continued, replacing those conscripted for military service. Laborers were taken from Russia, Poland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands; the numbers included the Jewish citizens of those nations as well, forced to labor in the concentration camp system.
In the immediate aftermath of the invasion and early days of the occupation, Dutch prisoners of war were used to clear rubble and do repair work while awaiting disposition.1 Attempts to recruit volunteers met with limited success, leading to impressment of civilians for labor details, both small and large. Among the ways of increasing manpower was the Opbouwdienst, a program to keep discharged soldiers employed through working on roads and drainage. The program became the Nederlandse Arbeidsdienst (NAD) that offered exemption from being sent to Germany for six months’ service. By the spring of 1942, NAD service was compulsory, with harsh punishment for those who tried to evade it, or avoid being called for service in Germany. 2
Conscripted workers worked in factories, on farms, on the construction of defenses (for example the “West Wall” defensive positions in the Netherlands and Denmark), and public works projects. While some did choose to volunteer for work with the promise of better pay and food, much of the labor did not. The workers suffered poor working conditions and risked injury or death from the Allied bombing campaigns.
The tremendous losses suffered during the Russian campaigns as the war progressed, particularly the loss of 500,000 men at the Battle of Stalingrad, put a strain of German resources. The necessity of raising more troops and replacing lost equipment from that campaign increased the demands from commerce and industry to make up the shortfall in labor. This labor shortage led the German authorities in occupied countries to ramp up efforts to recruit or conscript workers.
When larger number were needed, German authorities conducted razzia (raid), rounding up men in the streets and at home. Men and women rounded up in the razzias were impressed into labor predominantly in Germany. Men were required to register and report for voluntary work, and when that failed, razzias were used to fill the quotas.
Order delivered in Rotterdam, 9 November, 1944 with translation from Google translate. Arnhem Postal History Collection.
One of most notorious razzias occurred in Rotterdam November 10-11, 1944, which rounded up 52,000 men for service in agriculture and industry in the eastern provinces of the Netherlands and Germany. During “Aktion Rosenstock” all roads and bridges out of Rotterdam and Schiedam were cordoned off, preventing escape from the cities. 3
Correspondence to and from Labor Camps
Using a sample size of 90 items from the Operation Market Garden and Aftermath and Forced Labor (volumes I and II) from the Arnhem Postal History Project, we can get a snapshot of what forced labor looked like to the families and friends of those sent to other location in the Netherlands or Germany for work.
Map 1: Routes taken by correspondence and volume over time
Map 1 is an overview the ninety pieces, this shows the breadth of the forced labor programs, with correspondents not only in the Netherlands, but as far away as Trondheim, Norway. The Trondheim piece is the earliest of the group, unfortunately the letter that accompanied the postal cover was lost.
Envelope from Trondheim to Arnhem. The postmark date is June, 1942. This letter was censored in Hamburg, indicated by the “f” in the stamp.
Map 2: Cluster graph of sender locations
Map 3: Cluster graph of addressee locations
Maps 2 and 3 break out the locations of both the senders and the addressees.
A close examination of the Map 1 will show a some outliers of interest; there are a few arcs connecting labor camps to each other. The correspondence was between J.J. Buurma, forced to work in the Mauser armament factory near Berlin, and J.J. (Hans) Sprey, in the Mauser factory in Oberndorf am Neckar. The second pair was Arie Pot, at a camp near Munich, writing to L. (Bertus) Ruijt in a factory near Köthen.
Map 3: Burma and Pot letters
Censorship
All media and mail in the Netherlands was subject to German regulation and censorship. Most of these items were censored in Cologne, Germany, with the exception on one piece, again the Trondheim cover, censored in Hamburg.
Map 4 below is a visualization of the effect of censorship. The red lines trace the correspondence from the sender to the censor’s location, in these examples either Hamburg or Cologne. The green lines represent the movement from the censor to the destination.
Map 4: Effect of censorship on correspondence pathways
Although several items have additional postmarks that indicate passage through the censors was frequently fairly fast, the omnipresence of the state ensured control of information throughout.
Challenges: Mapping the Data Set in Kepler.gl
Mapping the data set included several challenges related to georeferencing and quantity of data for visualizations.
Georeferencing turned out to be more difficult than anticipated, in part due to many of the addresses being simply a camp name. The visualization still works, mapping to the city or town named on the item, but for granularity it would be a problem. Georeferencing in both Excel and Google docs required add ins, I used a free script from GitHub and created the extension in my Google doc.
The sample size of the data set created two challenges. Setting up the kepler.gl filter for the timeline had a steep learning curve, as my first several tries failed. Working through the problem, I had to shift to month/year instead of month/day/year. The second challenge of the data set was that the bulk of the collection was related to four separate groups of people, accounting for 59 of the 90 items and lines. The effect of this was fewer distinct lines of travel for the items.
Person 1
Person 2
Forced Labor Assignment
No. Items
Louis Bernaards
Marie Pilings/Andrea Bernaards
Worker in Mauser factories
14
T.J. Verseveldt
Gezina Cornelia Sjouke
Worker at BMW airplane engine plant
19
Hendrik van der Zee
J. and A.J. van der Zee
Worker in Mauser factories
22
Dik den Otter
E. den Otter
Razzia after Operation Market Garden
4
Figure 1: Correspondence pairs and where forced labor occurred used for Map 5.
Map 5: Correspondence paths filtered by largest groups of correspondents
Conclusion
The Arnhem Postal History Project collection offers insight into both the postal history and the social history of the Netherlands. The Forced Labor group, although a small sample size, demonstrates the effect of German labor policy in occupied countries, sending men to factories in German, usually involuntarily. Censorship created delays in mail delivery, adding to the challenges of separation.
Kepler.gl was an effective tool to visualize the data. The size of the data set limited what conclusions could be drawn, but the maps did provide a good snapshot. The layers and filters allowed different views of the information to help develop further lines of research, such as a drill down on the correspondence between men in labor camps writing each other. Overall, kepler.gl worked well to map the correspondence and is a useful tool for digital humanities projects.
Paul Glaser, Dancing with the Enemy: My Family’s Holocaust Secret, 38–41. ↩︎
Kees Adema and Jeffrey Groeneveld, , The Paper Trail: World War II in Holland and Its Colonies as Seen through Mail and Documents, 277–84. ↩︎
My Zoom book club, a spinoff of the podcast, decided we wanted to do a meet up, in Colonial Williamsburg, to celebrate our group and the podcast that brought us together. After a wonderful weekend, including dinner and a ghost tour with Liz Covart, almost half of us tested positive. We share well, apparently, a weird book and podcast loving COVID cluster.
Ron Carrington as President George Washington with members of Poor Richard’s Book Club, 23 April 2023.
Podcasts allow humanities scholars to engage with the public differently as a medium as they have an ability to reach wide audiences that may not traditionally interact with the digital humanities. In this picture are a music teacher and a professor who teaches teachers, a Canadian farmer and his wife, two lawyers, a family counselor, a nurse, and the Australian contingent, a healthcare advocate, a surveyor, and their son (Ii’m the one kneeling second from the left). A group brought together by a mutual interest in history and a podcast that not only made several people want to read the book discussed, but read it with other people. Podcasting offers an opportunity for humanities scholars to explore and are of their interest and research in way that can be both entertaining and educational. I was introduced to both Ben Franklin’s World and Revolutions as assignments in class. Through another non-scholarly podcast, I started listening to Dressed with fashion historians. And through The Green Tunnel I am learning about the Appalachian Trail even though I despise camping and anything more than and easy day hike.
Podcasts can be an introduction to the humanities, and reach a wide audience due to their accessibility. They allow a digital scholar to present their research or scholarship in a format that anyone can access and they can explore and share areas of interest in smaller, more digestible bites for a public audience. The medium of podcasting allows a more personal connection and engagement with the audience than most others in the digital humanities.
The popularity, reach and the less academic sound of podcasts should not be mistaken for less rigor. Podcasts are as much a tool as the others used in the digital humanities. Like the mapping and visualization tools, it requires its own set of data and research. The product may not be a graphic; it is still a synthesis of data and research. The script writing aspect requires the use databases and search tools as wells as an understanding of permitted use and copyright law. The addition of show notes to most podcasts can tie them further to related tools, as they may be part of a larger humanities project and make use of the other tools to supplement the discussion.
Podcasts are a versatile tool for the humanities scholar, as it can generate interest in a topic or bring in a new audience. They provide the public an opportunity to learn and explore something new and different and can open a door to learning more and exploring other interests. Their availability on the same platforms that most people are listening to music on opens up the potential audience for the podcast and potentially other projects.
And we are all recovered and reading Alan Taylors’s The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies.
WIkipedia’s reputation has improved from its inception, a site with the radical idea that non-experts should be able to contribute to knowledge on the world wide web. Not long ago, I would not consider Wikipedia a valid resource, but while I would not use it as a main source, I have found it is often a jumping off point for research. Understanding how Wikipedia entries is important in evaluating the value of an article and its accuracy. Given that chat bots also use it as one of their large language models, the ability to review entries and how they develop is useful.
Using the Digital Humanities page as an example, the “Talk” and “View history” sections provide insight into the development of the page and its contents. “View history” allows the viewer to see how the site has changed, as well as a side by side comparison of what each change did to the site. It also identifies the editor, linking to their user page and frequently a description of their expertise.
Digital humanities: Revision history at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Digital_humanities&action=history
In the screenshot above, examples include a 27 November 2022 edit for unsourced material being added; a 3 June 2022 addition on Analysis of macroscopic trends in cultural change was added, then changed slightly.; and on 5 January 2022 entries reflecting the rendition of the unsourced work with comment, and the subsequent removal of it again. The 27 November 2022 change is made by ElKevbo, the third highest contributor to the site, and/or his biography, works in the digital humanities and higher learning.
Adding to this are comments in the “Talk” section, a discussion of what content should be added. I particularly liked the following post, discussing areas to improve their understanding and that of other users:
Technology, criticisms, & future at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Digital_humanities
The section also discusses some of the editing decisions and collaboration, such as an early crowdsourcing event at THATcamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) in Australia making several edits. The first large batch of edits were made by the in the field thinking and learning about the digital humanities.
Understanding the source of the information, and that Wikipedia editors are trying to maintain community standards, lends credibility to the entries. AI crowdsources information through the text it was trained on, including Wikipedia. While it synthesizes information rapidly, and by using large, internet based data files, it is still only as good as the crowd it is using. Its inability to show sources makes it another useful starting point, but not necessarily an ending point. I queried Chat GPT about its use of Wikipedia, with this response:
I don’t have direct access to the internet or specific databases like Wikipedia in real-time. Instead, I’ve been trained on a diverse range of internet text available up until my last update in 2022, which includes information from sources like Wikipedia. My responses are generated based on patterns and information learned from that data.
If you ask me a question about a topic, I’ll generate a response based on the knowledge I’ve acquired during my training. So, while I can’t access Wikipedia directly, I’ve learned from its content and can provide information based on what I’ve previously read and absorbed.
Wikipedia, a world of words askew, A dance of data, a linguistic brew. No capital chains to bind its grace, In ee cummings’ style, it finds its place.
A symphony of facts in a tangled rhyme, Hyperlinks weaving through the sands of time. No rigid structure, just free-flowing streams, In Wikipedia’s garden, knowledge dreams.
Lowercase whispers tell tales untold, As wikis unfold, in pixels bold. Syntax surrenders, conventions flee, In this textual playground, wild and free.
Beneath the letters, a universe blooms, A kaleidoscope of knowledge looms. No need for order, no need for rule, Wikipedia dances in the vastness, cool.
A symphony of voices, a chorus untamed, In cummings’ spirit, where no word’s framed. Wikipedia, a poem of pixels and links, In the language of chaos, information syncs.
wiki leaks words, a cacophony, a melange of info sprawling unchained un bridled in its verve un stop-pable unwavering it grows
words dance in links a tap dance of thoughts meandering through time space no capitals or spaces just the pulse of info in a torrential race
oh, wikipedia! encyclopedic cacophony where knowledge meets chaos in a glorious blend of facts and conjecture yet a haven for seekers in a digital splendor un matched and profound
The poems above illustrate both the questionable and good about AI crowdsourcing. The Chat GPT prompt was “write a poem in the style of ee cummings.”The first try has the syntax and rhythm of Cummings, but it was not until the second try that it picked up the trait Cummings is known for, the lack of capitalization. AI did not recognize initially, although the Wikipedia entry on Cummings describes it, with several examples of poems.
The challenge of crowdsourcing, through a Wikipedia or Wikipedia of the future or AI, remains the expertise and the biases of the crowd. Lockett engagement with her students at Spelman as being motivated by realizing how many gaps in information existed about their college and those like it, and Black women in particular1. Crowdsourcing brings a myriad of experiences, expertise and interests to the world in a very shareable way, however moving into the future, identifying the gaps and blind spots will be critical to their overall effectiveness as a tools.
Lockett, Alexandria. “Why Do I Have Authority to Edit the Page? The Politics of User Agency and Participation on Wikipedia.” In Wikipedia @ 20: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution. Edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner (MIT Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12366.003.0019Links to an external site.., p 213. ↩︎
Working with three different digital tools highlighted the ways digital tools can help understand data as well as develop new lines of research. Using the same set of data, the WPA Slave Narratives Project, connections were explored using Voyant 2.0, kelper.gl, and Palladio. Each of the tools offered a way of understanding the information and had value as a stand alone analysis, however they also complement each other.
The tools revealed different aspects of the narratives. After working with Palladio and seeing the connections between topics and demographics, I think taking the topics that appeared most often (or least) in the Alabama example would be interesting to run the data again in Voyant 2.0 and see what the context was. I was surprised at the religion-Sunday-church-wedding -baptism connections, and think bringing Voyant’s analysis in for similar trends in other states may offer insight. This struck me as baptism was the item mentioned least, and may be worth exploring, as both religion and church were fairly strong topics, why was baptism less so given it is a tenet for belonging to many churches. It may also suggest church as a safe space or as a monitored space, threads worth pulling using text analysis combined with network analysis.
After listening to a graduate student presenting her research on African Americans and migration in South Carolina this afternoon, I think I would like to test use of the three tools in conjunction with each other on a related question. Specifically, I would like to use them to develop visualizations of the movement of the formerly enslaved, whether they traveled a few minutes from the place of enslavement or chose to build a life in another location completely. The Alabama sample, for example, shows limited movement, until you take into consideration that the interviews took place over a short period, in Alabama. Kepler.gl and Palladio can show where those that remained in Alabama did not tend to travel far, but the entire data set would help expand the geospatial view. Voyant would be a useful tool to add the context to the data, and potentially add some information on those who left as part of the Great Migration.
Palladio is open source software that allows users to visualize data through mapping, graphs, and tables. Data can be represented as points on a map, connected by arcs and scalable, in a list or table form and in a gallery grip layout for organization. There are also timeline and timespan filters that it did not explore.
One of the interesting features in graphs is the dynamic interface, allowing manipulation of the network graph to isolate or drill down on nodes and connections. For example, in the graph below, the topics and work performed data sets were compared highlighting some of the differences in experience and points of view (Figure 1)
Figure 1Figure 2
Figure 2 shows the relationship between where the person was interviewed compared to where they were enslaved. The grouping suggests limited movement between the two locations, and highlights an area to compare the WPA interview data to census data to understand the paths of movement and whether the Alabama data set is representative of all the movement post-liberation. Comparing this to census data from 1860/1880 and 1930 might be an interesting follow up to this visualization.
Palladio was fairly straightforward to use, with an excellent tutorial page to help with adding data, data structure and the different functions of the software.
Digital Humanities issues, tools, and resources
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