For this post, I cannot help but think about how some of these new technologies would have affected the creation of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Pulitzer and Bancroft prize winning book, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, published in 1990. I have used this book to teach undergraduate history majors how historians do what they do. I use this book primarily because there is an accompanying website, dohistory.org (which I just noticed this semester that the site is hosted by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at GMU,) that provides the reader with the actual documents that Ulrich used to create her book. This includes a digital copy of the diary upon which the book is based. One can read the diary in its original form (18th century handwriting and spelling included) or one can click a button and get the text in nice modern computer type (the 18th century spelling is still there.) The search function kept giving me an error message though. It also splits these documents up into broader topics that Ulrich dealt with in her book. There is also a film that goes along with the book. The site itself is a nice example of digital public history that allows several different audiences to engage with the text and its creation.

In watching the film with my students, some were confused by the scenes of Dr. Ulrich “making sense” of the diary by having a large sheet of paper with different topics, people, and places listed on it and how she was going through the diary and circling these different pieces of information and making these connections of who was where and what they were doing and how all this changes from 1785-1812. You can see an example of this as the background to the introductory page to the book on dohistory. A student asked “isn’t there an easier way of doing this?” I wanted to give my Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own answer and say, “it’s the hard that makes it great!” I did not give that answer. Instead, I said, “yeah, I would think there is.” Of course, the questions remain, and the reading, and the notetaking, but in finding those connections, it seems if Ulrich had access to network analysis tools, if she could have uploaded that information she collected and find those connections between people, places, and events. I will freely admit that I am a novice at best in the digital world, but it does seem that the technology exists where maybe an update to the dohistory site can show how the same analysis work could be done and illustrated graphically. Of course, if I was Ulrich (wishful thinking there) I am not sure how I would feel about that.

I also thought of her work because we can now see the value of getting the stories of under represented populations out through public history projects and allowing a broad audience to participate in the creation and understanding of historical knowledge through more than reading books. I was particularly taken with the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative project. Like dohistory, the LDHI is housed within an academic setting, in this case the College of Charleston. Unlike dohistory, the LDHI also partners with numerous other academic institutions as well as public history organizations and community organization. This approach allows for the project to continually grow with new exhibits and partners. It also provides the ability of the community to get engaged to uncover histories that may never be known. How many scholars looked at Martha Ballard’s diary and said “meh, nothing here” until Ulrich recognized the significance? How many stories would not be known without the historians asking and listening to “outsiders”? The technology allows for greater reach in sources and audience. The challenge may come in limiting what one is doing as a digital public historian so as not to create a hodge podge of information without a clear purpose or narrative.