This is in response to the talk on Thursday.
The presentation covered a digital humanities initiative led by Dr. Shelley Fishkin and Dr. Gordon Chang, which aimed to recover the lost history of the Chinese workers who built the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s. The massive project intends to bring together all of the available data on the subject to create a cohesive historical narrative for the Chinese workers whose labor has since gone unrecognized; Who were they? How were they recruited? How did they get to America? What were they looking for here? It’s interesting to me that despite the significance of the transcontinental railroad, both to the economic prosperity of its’ many stops and stations and also to the cultural identity of a united America, we know so little about the people who built it, in part due to the fact that there are next to no primary sources from that era to draw on for historical research. In the words of Dr. Fishkin, their goal is to “reconstruct the lived experience of people who wrote no records themselves.” To do this, they have to make use of digital archives and tools. The bulk of their research came from photos, immigration records, private letters (what little there were), investigations into the villages where these immigrants would’ve come from, and surveys from the descendants of these workers. They also took advantage of cooking vessels, game pieces, and opium pipes recovered by archaeologists to get a better understanding of what daily life might’ve been like for the laborers. All of the data and references they gather are consolidated into a single digital media package online where it’s available for the public to discover. The web page takes full advantage of online databases, digital news archives, ancestry.com research, digital magnification and enhancement of film stock, digital maps, timelines, and so many more tools made available by digital technology.
Online communication enables data sharing between academics at a level never before possible in the history of mankind, and the crowd-sourcing of historical data and interpretation is a phenomenon that will allow us to continue to shine light on the dim and forgotten moments in history. A project of this scale is something that would be significantly more difficult without the use of digital tools. While the research team created physical exhibits with the same data to display in-person, I think the sheer amount of information here is something better explored in a digital space where you can scroll without limit and have the full range of multimedia to work with, and it’s a project that couldn’t exist anywhere but the connected world we live in today.
I like the way you address how much the Digital Humanities field is a result of the changing times. With all of the digital tools continuing to make their way into our everyday world, it is important we use them to our advantage to get further in fields than we have before – which is exactly what Digital Humanities has done.
Next time in your blog, I would love to hear more of your opinion on these changing times and the new technology – I love your writing style and would enjoy hearing your own voice and take on subjects like this.
This was a very insightful comment on what we did in the lab a couple weeks ago. I agree, by having these digital tools available to easily find descendants of those people, records and more helps to fill the gaps of history that all can admire and explore through a click of a button.
As I appreciate more in person artifacts, these resources are more equipped to be viewed online by more individuals, thus they are able to share with a bigger variety of people. Do you think sites like ancestry.com has changed the way we view ourselves and history? So many people have done it and it has helped people to learn their historical background that can all be viewed online. How has that shaped the importance of digital archives to you and possibly for others?
When I read the title of this post, I had to take a moment, because I thought the same thing not too long ago during our discussion of social annotation and the use of digital humanities. When we talk about the word “digital”, we almost always speak of the application of digital technology or communication, but not what it means to ‘be’ digital. But research projects like the one you mentioned show just how useful and empowering the digital world can be in studying the humanities, and in re-framing history especially. Do you think digital humanities is the future of the field, since digital tools can connect more people than traditional, analog modes of communication? I think projects like Dr. Fishkin’s and Dr. Chang’s holds great promise in bringing the humanities to more people, while bringing the labors of people often forgotten by society to light.