Am I Creating a Website, or is the Website Creating Me?

In our readings for Digital Humanities this week, we read two thought-provoking articles. In “History in Hypertext,” Edward Ayers speaks with hope about the types of narratives historians can tell with the advent of the digital age. He uses as an example Bush’s “memex” and also Darnton’s layered, electronic book that might contain words, pictures, notes, et cetera. We have read other articles this semester alluding to new types of historical narratives, but we have not necessarily learned exactly what that means, other than creating mixed media presentations of history, which one can do without digital technology. Supposedly, there are many unexplored possibilities for doing history in the digital age… or are there?

This brings us to our second reading, which included selections from Ted Friedman’s book Electric Dreams (the title of which reminds me of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I wonder if that is an allusion?). Friedman explores the possibility of technological determinism; rather than biological or environmental factors making a person into who he or she is, technology is the determiner. Part of this is that humans learn the logic of computers and react accordingly, which begs the question who is really in charge, the computer or the human?

I may have an answer, but to get to that answer, let’s explore it in correlation to my project for this class. Is my project for this class a new way of looking at history or is it merely a product of the technology that has shaped—or, shall we say, determined—my life? In a way, I think it is both.

As the creator of my own website, I have the choice to develop it into a new way of presenting the information to my audience. I can organize and design it the way that I want to and, in that way, have the option to do history in new and exciting narrative ways. Because I am designing my site to follow the organization of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, my audience will follow that organization as they explore my site. My site will have a logic that my audience will be able to follow, which will determine what they click on. In this way, they are affected by technological determinism.

I, too, however, am affected by the internal logic of computers, and technology determines how I interact with Omeka. As far as website-building goes, all programs work relatively similarly so that if one makes a blog with one hosting service and a website on another, there will be familiar options on both: options to create pages, to add text, to add images. Some hosting services will offer more complicated add-ons, but the basic concept is the same from site to site. This is the internal logic of website making that I am responding to when I work on my project. My previous experiences with technology has determined how I interact with Omeka.

Within Omeka, I can only do as much as the site will allow me. I do not have total and complete creative freedom. To create a history website that was totally and completely unique—a new way of doing historical scholarship—I would have to build a website from the ground up without the help of a hosting site or previously-made templates. Those who made Omeka have the advantage of creating something new with digital technology, but the logic that they programmed into their site-building software stops me from creating something totally new, yet when I launch my own website, the logic that I created the site with will lead my audience to interact with my site in a similar way to how I interact with the Omeka software.

This post has gotten far more meta than I intended it to. Are we creating our own websites? Yes, but only because we have internalized the logic of the software needed to build our sites. The technology is determining what we can and can't—what we do and don't—do.

Can our audiences experience history in new ways through our sites? Perhaps not because technology that they previously encountered has determined how they will interact with our websites. 

In order to be completely free from technological determinism, and in order to truly tell historical narratives in new ways, we must be the first to come up with a new medium. We must be the Vannevar Bush of our age. 

Or, perhaps, as the Bible says, there is nothing new under the sun.

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Archive or Record?

The website Documenting Ferguson is a record, but is it an archive? I do not believe so because anyone can easily contribute to the site and also because it has not been given to archivists to maintain, store, and keep as long as possible for the sake of posterity. The website is hosted by Omeka, so if the creators of the site decided to stop paying Omeka to host Documenting Ferguson, the website would disappear. Additionally, if Omeka went bankrupt and stopped hosting website all together, Documenting Ferguson would disappear, too. A real archive would be hosted on a more stable site that is in no danger of going out of business. Since archivists would be looking after it, the site would stay in business longer, too, and as the years progress, the archivists would change it to adapt to new technologies.

Documenting Ferguson is not an archive, but it is a record because it documents information that consists of opinions, facts, and ideas—namely, that of the Ferguson shooting in 2014. As a record, Documenting Ferguson’s site is well done in terms of content, structure, and context. The website’s content is provided by contributions from people who have pictures, audio clips, video clips, or other media connected with the Ferguson case. When you click on an entry in the collection, it brings you to a page with metadata surrounding that item, such as a title, a description, creator, and date added. The collection is extensive; it spans seventy-nine pages. It may not be scholarly, however, because anyone can add anything to the site. While Documenting Ferguson is a website intended for members of the Ferguson community to remember what happened in their own words, it is not as credible, say, as an official report because anyone could post anything on the site. As far as I could tell, there was not a lot of moderation on the items that could be added to the collection. If I were to use this site in a project on the Ferguson shooting case, I would use it to add a personal element to the story, but I may not use it as evidence to back up a claim.

The structure of the site is fairly straightforward. It has only four pages. The “View the Collection” page is the most important aspect of the website, as that is where the information is actually stored. You have to view the collection by date that the specific picture or story was added. There is also a way to view it by tag. Neither of these ways to use the site are very user-friendly, as it is hard to find specific things on the site, yet it does inspire scholarship because a historian has to come to his or her own conclusions based on the things that he or she finds in the website.

Documenting Ferguson could use a little more context. I have never been extremely familiar with the case, so it would have been nice for me if there had been a page summarizing the events of the case to give the items in the record more meaning.

While Documenting Ferguson does not, in my opinion, fit the criteria of an archive, it is an important record. It may not be the most academic source in the world, but that is not its purpose. Its purpose is to allow the people of Ferguson to share their perspectives on the shooting. As such, this website is an important cultural record, especially for continued discussions of racism and police brutality in the United States. I hope that its creators continue maintaining it because this could be an important historical artifact one day.

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