Case Statement - National Council on Public History

Folks,
Hello, I am Dan Kerr (@drdankerr), the associate director of the public history
program. My introduction to digital history comes through my work with oral
history. I have worked in digital audio production on the radio, have experience
with video editing, and have created a website for the Shenandoah Valley Oral
History Project. I am currently teaching the History and New Media course at
American University. It’s my first time teaching the class.
I have had the benefit of reading of few of the early statements (not all of them yet)
and I have found them to be compelling. Rather than repeat what has already been
said about the importance of collaborative and practical work, I would like to add
that I think courses in digital history should seek to defetishize technology.
Students should be able to realistically appraise the possibilities and limitations of
various new media platforms. I argue that it is in some ways more important to
know what various tools cannot do then what they can do. By understanding these
limitis, students are better prepared to participate in the process of innovation.
I also think students need to learn how to critically evaluate digitized and born
digital source material in a sophisticated and critical way. While the plethora of
materials that are now at our fingertips is truly astounding, my sense is that this
growth has been coupled with a positivist ideal that the web represents reality. My
questions are: What isn’t represented on the web? Who isn't represented on the
web? What are, what we might call in oral history, the silences? How does that
change over time? For example, this recent billion-­‐pixel image of Mt. Everest
promises to let you “soar thousands of feet above a glacier and view it in its entirety,
or zoom down to the ground and explore pebbles embedded in the ice.”
Presumably, it captures everything. A Flickr search of Mt. Everest reveals nearly
19,000 more photos. Of those images, there are only 273 that use the tag porter (the
people who do all the labor bring goods, food, etc. to the trekkers) and only a
fraction of that number shows images of porters engaged in their work. Only 17
images are tagged toilet and only two of those are actually photos of toilets. Only
seven are tagged with the term garbage and none of the images that appears are
actually of garbage. My sense is that both the billion-­‐pixel image and the combined
19,0000 photos on Flickr of Mt. Everest do a very poor job representing the very
real social and environmental conditions in the region. So how do we interpret all
these pixels and photos. What do they say about the era in which they were
produced? Related questions could be, how do we know who is taking what photos?
Are men and women photographing different things? What about locals versus
tourists? How can we mine the data to get at more sophisticated levels of
understanding on this new mass cultural framing of a place?
I am also very interested in having my students understand that the issues of
ownership on the web are very much in debate – as evidenced by the recent suicide
of Aaron Swartz and its aftermath.