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November 07, 2006, 08:42 AM ET
Digital History 2.0
Historians are great at telling stories, but they’re lousy at pictures, asserts Edward L. Ayers, a history professor and dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia.
While other disciplines have found ways to represent complex phenomena using illustrations that overlay many types of information, Mr. Ayers says, history has for the most part focused on written narratives, linear stories that set forth an overriding argument. But since life is messy, and the lives of so many individuals are sure to be influenced by a variety of forces in ways that are hard to describe, pictures might prove to be history’s next frontier.
Imagine, he says, a social weather map plotting the movements of people as multiple historical forces come into play. And like the weather maps on television-news broadcasts, perhaps the data could be set in motion, so that effects of various social warm and cold fronts could be observed.
“I think of the past as at least as complex as anything in nature, and yet we restrict ourselves to analog means of describing it,” says Mr. Ayers. “So I thought, if this works for physical natural processes, why couldn’t we be able to see social processes as well?” See the complete article, from The Chronicle.
Categories: Research
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