Reflection/Conclusion
Although I did not spend days poring over the vast spaces of the internet, in a time when “digital” also comes with the expectation that stuff happens a lot quicker, I am very surprised by how little I was able to find of projects where digital humanities scholars are connecting with public storytellers. Six hours of searching on the internet is ALOT of time searching on the internet, given the sophistication of search engines and the lightning fast speed of databases. If one can't find something close to what they are looking for in this amount of time, even when changing search terms constantly, then the absence is telling.
I don't doubt that DH scholars are fostering communication and connections elsewhere, but my specific question was to look for digital projects that actively promoted a connection between everyday storytellers and DH scholars. Many digital humanities sites publicize and list hundreds of DH projects, but these projects are clearly made for other scholars and with the input of other scholars in mind, not the everyday people. The vast majority of the DH projects I encountered, and I saw a lot of them, aimed to break down institutional or disciplinary barriers rather than barriers between Pipe-Men and Hairdressers. The humanities have certainly found ways to use the digital as a way to promote and better understand scholarship, but it is very clear these areas are marked by boundaries which prevent the public from gaining entrance.
The projects that do encourage public participation and submission (listed above) are primarily oral history based projects which either aggregate or collect first-hand accounts after disasters. These digital memory banks revolve around the environmental and social tragedies that have happened during the digital age, including the attacks on September 11, Hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans and the earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan. These web sites certainly capture the stories of everyday people, but not the every day.
In Why Collecting History Online is Web 1.5, Sheila Brennan and T. Mills Kelly discuss a case study of the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. They opened the discussion by saying “It seems like only yesterday that we were transitioning from the first-generation, read-only web to the "read-write web" of Web 2.0, that fosters community and collaboration where users participate in online content creation. But does Tim O'Reilly's idea of Web 2.0 really work for the collecting and preserving of history online? Not really. We, as digital humanists, however, are comfortable with that.”
So why do they think Web 2.0 can't work for digital humanists collecting submissions for a digital archive? The answer, which they go on to elaborate, is that there are problems that go along with collaborating with non-archivists.
To summarize their findings: 1.Non-archivists are less likely to provide contextual information or metadata with their submissions, which makes sorting extremely time consuming. 2. The interface of a project must be as easy to use as the other media a non-archivist is familiar with or they are likely going to turn away. 3. It takes a lot of time and manpower to drive traffic to the web site, filter out spam, build relationships and develop specialized tools. 4. The length of time to utilize grant funding is limited, which may be less time than is needed to continue the project.
Despite the shortcomings that go along with open, collaborative projects with every day people, they still figured out a halfway point. This is why they call it Web 1.5.
“We can ask the public to participate in the collecting and saving of the past, and ask them to help organize it by creating tag clouds of their own making, while at the same time we can protect those contributions from third-party editing by those who may disagree with a perspective that is unlike their own. And, for all the potentialities of online collecting and democratizing the past, remember that any project still requires a great deal of analog hands-on history work.”
I think this insight might be very telling into why I had such a hard time finding DH projects that seek and encourage public participation and digital storytellers to share their every day experiences. I think that this lack isn't due to scholars purposefully trying to maintain barriers from the world of the every day. What seems to be happening is a combination of several things. Considering the amount of manpower, time and money it takes to create a digital project, how could scholars justify recreating the wheel (any social network) for any project other than a digital archive which focuses on a huge public issue? To find these necessities to create a project centered on an environmental disaster seems far more feasible than to create all of this for some small community which doesn't receive much media coverage. I still think that a digital humanities project which actively seeks and encourages public participation in creating scholarship through storytelling would be extremely interesting, however after exploring and writing this paper I now realize how big of a project that would actually be. The institutional barriers alone would likely deter any project of this type.
In conclusion, the question this paper began with ended up being one that took significant searching and reflection to answer. Even with as much data as there is on the internet, the sophistication of search engines hasn't necessarily caught up, which is particularly evident when trying to find a rare gem. There are several digital humanities sites which list projects, but most of these projects are only academic in scope and audience. The ones that do encourage digital storytelling in the way we have attempted to understand it these past few weeks are all centered on creating digital archives of stories after environmental and social catastrophes. Goals and ideals are important, theory is important, however real world realities such as manpower, funding and institutional support might always rain on our parade.
I don't doubt that DH scholars are fostering communication and connections elsewhere, but my specific question was to look for digital projects that actively promoted a connection between everyday storytellers and DH scholars. Many digital humanities sites publicize and list hundreds of DH projects, but these projects are clearly made for other scholars and with the input of other scholars in mind, not the everyday people. The vast majority of the DH projects I encountered, and I saw a lot of them, aimed to break down institutional or disciplinary barriers rather than barriers between Pipe-Men and Hairdressers. The humanities have certainly found ways to use the digital as a way to promote and better understand scholarship, but it is very clear these areas are marked by boundaries which prevent the public from gaining entrance.
The projects that do encourage public participation and submission (listed above) are primarily oral history based projects which either aggregate or collect first-hand accounts after disasters. These digital memory banks revolve around the environmental and social tragedies that have happened during the digital age, including the attacks on September 11, Hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans and the earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan. These web sites certainly capture the stories of everyday people, but not the every day.
In Why Collecting History Online is Web 1.5, Sheila Brennan and T. Mills Kelly discuss a case study of the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. They opened the discussion by saying “It seems like only yesterday that we were transitioning from the first-generation, read-only web to the "read-write web" of Web 2.0, that fosters community and collaboration where users participate in online content creation. But does Tim O'Reilly's idea of Web 2.0 really work for the collecting and preserving of history online? Not really. We, as digital humanists, however, are comfortable with that.”
So why do they think Web 2.0 can't work for digital humanists collecting submissions for a digital archive? The answer, which they go on to elaborate, is that there are problems that go along with collaborating with non-archivists.
To summarize their findings: 1.Non-archivists are less likely to provide contextual information or metadata with their submissions, which makes sorting extremely time consuming. 2. The interface of a project must be as easy to use as the other media a non-archivist is familiar with or they are likely going to turn away. 3. It takes a lot of time and manpower to drive traffic to the web site, filter out spam, build relationships and develop specialized tools. 4. The length of time to utilize grant funding is limited, which may be less time than is needed to continue the project.
Despite the shortcomings that go along with open, collaborative projects with every day people, they still figured out a halfway point. This is why they call it Web 1.5.
“We can ask the public to participate in the collecting and saving of the past, and ask them to help organize it by creating tag clouds of their own making, while at the same time we can protect those contributions from third-party editing by those who may disagree with a perspective that is unlike their own. And, for all the potentialities of online collecting and democratizing the past, remember that any project still requires a great deal of analog hands-on history work.”
I think this insight might be very telling into why I had such a hard time finding DH projects that seek and encourage public participation and digital storytellers to share their every day experiences. I think that this lack isn't due to scholars purposefully trying to maintain barriers from the world of the every day. What seems to be happening is a combination of several things. Considering the amount of manpower, time and money it takes to create a digital project, how could scholars justify recreating the wheel (any social network) for any project other than a digital archive which focuses on a huge public issue? To find these necessities to create a project centered on an environmental disaster seems far more feasible than to create all of this for some small community which doesn't receive much media coverage. I still think that a digital humanities project which actively seeks and encourages public participation in creating scholarship through storytelling would be extremely interesting, however after exploring and writing this paper I now realize how big of a project that would actually be. The institutional barriers alone would likely deter any project of this type.
In conclusion, the question this paper began with ended up being one that took significant searching and reflection to answer. Even with as much data as there is on the internet, the sophistication of search engines hasn't necessarily caught up, which is particularly evident when trying to find a rare gem. There are several digital humanities sites which list projects, but most of these projects are only academic in scope and audience. The ones that do encourage digital storytelling in the way we have attempted to understand it these past few weeks are all centered on creating digital archives of stories after environmental and social catastrophes. Goals and ideals are important, theory is important, however real world realities such as manpower, funding and institutional support might always rain on our parade.