Making Arguments with Digital History | Week 5 of History in the Digital Age
Introduction: Arguments with Digital History
This week in History in the Digital Age, we are looking at the topic of “Arguing with Digital History” and examining current research in digital history. The readings centered on how digital history challenges methodologies and narrative forms of what we might deem as “traditional” history. Traditional historical scholarship centers on having an argument situated within a conversation with other scholars on a particular subject, period, and so forth. The readings for this week really centered on needing to acknowledge, or recognize, how digital history projects do present arguments while engaging with digital tools and practices. A white paper from 2017, ‘Digital History and Argument’ breaks down how digital history projects are doing this and what can be done to recognize that work.
As part of this week’s readings, I looked at two digital history projects through an open-access journal called Current Research in Digital History (2018-2023). This journal (in addition to the white paper listed above) comes out of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and the journal publishes works on various digital history projects that seek to provide an argument. The two projects I looked at are Erin N. Bush’s “Attracted by the Khaki”: War Camps and Wayward Girls in Virginia, 1918-1920 and Anelise Hanson Shrout’s (Re)Humanizing Data: Digitally Navigating the Bellevue Almshouse. I selected Dr. Bush’s project based on my own previous scholarship on World War I, and Dr. Shrout’s based on the abstract provided.
Erin N. Bush’s “Attracted by the Khaki”: War Camps and Wayward Girls in Virginia, 1918-1920 (2018)
Dr. Erin N. Bush is an Associate Professor of US and Digital History and the History Graduate Program Coordinator in the Department of History, Anthropology & Philosophy at the University of North Georgia (found on Dr. Bush’s personal website). Dr. Bush’s article in the Current Research in Digital History centers on Virginia’s public welfare reformers during World War I, and the anxieties and fears surrounding the increase in prostitution and sex delinquency near military training facilities. Dr. Bush’s article is clear in argument, arguing “that the war provided the needed rationale to fund the expansion of state institutions and their programs to reform delinquent girls.” Additionally, Dr. Bush used maps with “the data to show that social engineering that targeted delinquent girls in Virginia spread beyond both its war camps and its cities” into other areas, including rural parts. Dr. Bush highlights the work of previous scholars, and expands upon how the data Dr. Bush is using, and using with digital tools, demonstrates there has been too much of a focus on urban areas. The data that Dr. Bush uses includes census data, admissions data from the reformatories in the area, and data from sentencing jurisdictions.
Utilizing spatial tools, specifically mapping, support Dr. Bush’s argument, providing a visualization of the data to clearly see how these programs and institutions went beyond urban areas and into rural locations. Without the use of digital tools, it is still possible that Dr. Bush could support this argument, as demonstrated in the article- listing the locations and explaining whether they are urban or rural, but the visualization of the map, the use of digital tools, truly enhances Dr. Bush’s argument, putting the evidence on page in a different and visual format.
Anelise Hanson Shrout’s (Re)Humanizing Data: Digitally Navigating the Bellevue Almshouse (2018)
Dr. Anelise Hanson Shrout is an assistant professor in digital and computational studies at Bates College. Dr. Shrout’s research interests include nineteenth-century origins of international humanitarianism, as well as the "internet age" and how we can/do interact with sources and students in a digital age. (from Dr. Shrout’s personal website). Dr. Shrout’s article in the Current Research in Digital History centers on the use of “computational methods to reconstruct the experiences of incarcerated immigrants” who were placed in Bellevue Hospital Almshouse in the 1840s as “vagrants”, "recent emigrants”, and as “destitute.” The paper’s argument is clear, arguing that these individuals placed in Bellevue formed communities within and demanded medical care and claimed social support. The data that Dr. Shrout utilizes includes Bellevue’s own data of these individuals, including immigration records. As Dr. Shrout argues, these men and women were “rendered… archivally mute” by immigration officials, “reducing people to characteristics associated with immigration status.” Dr. Shrout states that the quantification of this is not a only twenty-first century theory artifact, but something that was done contemporarily. For example, as the officials in New York City saw immigrants coming in as, as Dr. Shrout shows, “potential liabilities,” they were thus viewed and written that way in the contemporary data.
Dr. Shrout’s visualizations, as with Dr. Bush’s, as telling and provide a stark visualization on the argument and narrative presented. Additionally, as Dr. Shrout states, “help[s] to make visible the forces working on immigrants, and reveals possible sites of resistance to those forces.” I do believe that, again, much like Dr. Bush’s article, this work can be done without a digital component, but the digital component enhances the argument, and provides a way to tell stories in a way that “being[s] to fill the gaps in an historical narrative” that is largely overlooked, or, places individuals “as unfortunate subjects of xenophobia, religious intolerance and state control.”
Conclusion
To conclude, again, I think these works are able to convey their argument without digital tools, but the addition of digital tools only enhances the arguments, providing visualizations that offer a different way of not only looking at data, but looking at the individuals of the data, bringing in, to quote Julia Laite, “human complexity into a larger analysis” (Laite, “The Emmet’s Inch: Small History in a Digital Age,” Journal of Social History, Summer 2020, pg. 964).
