A New Foreign Country: The Challenges and Risks of Making History in Digital Media for Historians and Librarians
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"A New Foreign Country" is a paper that was presented at the Australian Library and Information Association Conference in 2000 by Dr. Paul Turnbull and Chris Blackall.
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Summary
Turnbull and Blackall focus their work on the use of digital media by historians as a way to present historical arguments. The authors form a discussion based on the advantages and disadvantages digital media present over the printed monograph, history's contemporary medium of choice. According to the authors, the monograph lasts much longer than any sort of compendium that relies on internet sources facilitate an argument, as such histories often fall victim to a phenomenon known as "link rot," in which links no longer become useful after their linking site is re-designed, moved, or simply deleted. In terms of evaluating resources, web-based histories provide a distinct advantage over the printed monograph, as sources can be accessed almost immediately and with relatively little effort. Turnbull and Blackall conclude their work by envisioning a series of possible outcomes for the way history is conducted for the future, one in which historians use the shift toward digital media to revive an interest in printed monographs, and another where historians adapt their monographs to fit an audience increasingly comprised of digital natives (i.e. shorter books withe topical subjects, more accessible writing styles). The third, more likely, vision is one in which historical studies are published in hybrids, where "a study appears in print, but may also exist in a digital form that is longer, addressed more to professional colleagues and for whom it provides extensive quotations, references and possibly even raw data from which the researcher has drawn their conclusions." Regardless of the outcome, Turnbull and Blackall believe that historians will have to be better prepared to embrace history in the Digital Age.
Selected Quotations
"Irrespective of the genre, the value of [a historian's] writing as historical knowledge is decided by peer review. Books and specialist articles in particular are published by academic or commercial publishers only after anonymous review by two or more scholars with expertise in the same or cognate fields . . . On publication, a book or article enters the realm of historical discourse, where it is read and digested by other researchers. They may choose to review the work for a journal, incorporate its findings within their own research, or critically appraise its worth within their own writings. And so historical argument proceeds."
"With the print-based monograph, we can be assured that the matrix of information in which the book is anchored, and from which it derives much of its significance and meaning, will remain stable for the foreseeable future. It is likely to be more secure by virtue of bibliographical software and on-line resource finding aids making it easier for writers of books and paper-based journals to ensure they provide accurate references to print-based materials."
"Locating historical information in digital forms remains a time-consuming and frustrating business should one venture into the digital landscape beyond the on-line public access catalogues of major research libraries."
"It may be that what we will see will be hybrid or flexible publication, in which a study appears in print, but may also exist in a digital form that is longer, addressed more to professional colleagues and for whom it provides extensive quotations, references and possibly even raw data from which the researcher has drawn their conclusions."
"[Historians] will need to see that the principal advantage of computerization for the historian is not the ability to put words on pages as authors would wish, but the facilitation of processes for creating documents so that they can be seamlessly integrated within digital libraries, easily found and delivered to readers . . . Once history postgraduate training involved attending seminars on theory and methodology. Now many also attend sessions on writing for more diverse audiences. We would do well to think of a future in which postgraduate training includes understanding how to prepare historical scholarship for the virtual environment."
Access
You can access Turnbull and Blackall's paper for free through the ALIA(Australian Library and Information Association) website, available here, or simply by following this link:
http://conferences.alia.org.au/alia2000/proceedings/turnbull.blackall.html
Works Cited
Turnbull, Paul, and Chris Blackall. A New Foreign Country: The Challenges and Risks of Making History in Digital Media for Historians and Librarians. 2000. Web. 17 Oct 2011.
