-------- Original Message --------
From: Nick Eiteljorg <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: ADS and the future
To: William Kilbride <[log in to unmask]>
>Simon Schama, of Landscape and Memory fame, says:
>
>.... I don't want a Nintendo school of history. But I do think that the
>eventual, in some cases, imminent arrival of digital archives and the
>accessibility of these primary source materials not just to the academy,
>but to any informed lay user, may well be the biggest democratiser of
>historical knowledge since the invention of printed texts. And many of
>the formal hierarchies dividing "professional" and "amateur" history -
>between the world within the academy and the world beyond, might crumble
>...
>
>
>Is this an accurate analysis? Are we interested in democratizing the
>past in the way he suggests, or will this undermine our positions as
>(self selecting?) arbiters of the past and result in chaos? If he's
>right, and we do want to bring about the democratization mentioned, how
>can we best achieve it?
>
I certainly hope it's an accurate analysis. That's one of my real
motivations for trying to build an archive. There are many ways to
read democratization, though. It can mean making very detailed
information available to everyone, but it can also mean making that
information available to a much wider circle of scholars - including
those with poor research libraries, those looking for comparanda in
sub-specialties they have no experience with, and so on. I am eager
to see both kinds of democratization, but I am optimistic enough that
I also see higher-level abstraction pointing down the chain of
abstraction to the details, one step at a time, so that a naive
student can follow the chain of argument DOWN from the level of
abstraction he/she encounters to the most detailed data supporting
that abstraction. That kind of democratization is very appealing to
me, in part because I would like it in fields I know just enough
about to be dangerous - and not enough to know whether the
abstractions are as insupportable as I may think. That kind of
democratization does not imply dumping masses of data on unsuspecting
Web crawlers but instead suggests that we may be better able to
connect information and knowledge.
I confess, though, that making it possible to work one's way down the
chain of abstraction will be very difficult indeed. But we can start
the process with the archives.
Nick Eiteljorg
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|