Postmodern version of Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle, the rhetorical tetrahedron. The Greek terms pathos, logos, and ethos compose the original three-part model.
ChloeGui, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
September 25, 2023
As a librarian who’s just been eagerly reading a job ad for a Humanities and Social Science Librarian, I’ve been quite interested in the vantage point this course in digital history has given me regarding how historians see themselves, and the boundaries between their discipline and the social sciences, especially since the advent, availability, and ubiquity of so many digital scientific processes and tools (GIS and other types of data analysis) historians can now choose to utilize.
The Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship By Historians, published by the American Historical Association in 2015, advocates for the appropriate recognition for new modes of scholarship, such as collaboration, digital publishing, multimedia projects, and discusses how these new methods and projects should be considered as part of the hiring, promotion, and tenure process within history departments. The document sets forth questions members of departments and institutions can use to inform themselves about these new digital dimensions of scholarship and how they can be integrated into existing systems.
The AHA Guidelines also detail specific, relevant steps history departments can take to learn how the “digital context” of their profession is changing, including having workshops with librarians and other campus partners interested in establishing the use of new technologies, getting away from the requirement that review materials always need to be printed out, and grasping that there may no longer be a ”final version” of a digital work. The Guidelines also recommend similar new responsibilities for both scholars and the AHA. Most of the guidelines for scholars involve aspects of self-management concerning both the time commitment of acquiring digital skills, and need for better communication—of goals, of progress, and of how a project will contribute to scholarship. For the AHA, among the most important priorities in 2015 were the formation of a Digital Working Group that could advise departments and recommend qualified external reviewers to help in evaluating the work of candidates for tenure and promotion.
Two years later, in 2017, an even larger group that included many of the same scholars who were involved in creating the AHA’s 2015 Guidelines got together to produce the Digital History and Argument white paper. Digital History and Argument attempts to critique and direct both practitioners and evaluators of digital history work. It sets out to describe what they are doing, what they should do, and how it should all be integrated into the scholarly and cultural world.
While considerable attention is paid to an Aristotelian concept of “scholarly primitives” elaborated by John Unsworth that bridges and attempts to align the techniques of digital history practices with those of traditional scholarly practices, I am struck by another Aristotelian concept that pertains specifically to argument, that old chestnut of composition classes, the rhetorical triangle.
It seems clear that part of the implicit goal of these AHA and Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media policy statements is to define and separate the humanities from the sciences and the social sciences. Cameron Blevins attributes the lack of interpretation and argument in digital history to both the legacy of cliometrics and the open-ended nature of pedagogical and public history work. But it is also true that history as a discipline is having to incorporate aspects of the scientific method into its work without losing its soul.
You can see the authors struggling to clarify their thoughts about this throughout the 2017 Digital History and Argument white paper, in the use of phrases like “dedication to persuasive accounts of the past,” and “part of the historiographical/scholarly conversation,” and “rarely provides the complexity of explanation historians seek.” The rhetorical imperative to make us, the readers, care, also partly explains the reluctance of the white paper to embrace “quantitative” methods on their own, and the desire to interweave data and methodology with narrative and explicit analysis; successful argument persuades by using more than the “logos” corner of the rhetorical triangle; persuasion requires interpretation, emotion, the expression of cultural values, and what one writer in our readings has characterized as “grace.”
I’ve found the work of Miriam Posner, footnoted in the AHA white paper, Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction, useful and interesting in her efforts to grapple with these issues.
I’ve chosen to comment on following two articles from Current Readings in Digital History partly for their connections to the Digital History and Argument white paper and to the writer Cameron Blevins, who tried to elucidate the reasons for the lack of argument in digital history and argued for change. I also picked papers which were not already in the spreadsheet of articles profiled, and because I think these papers epitomize certain ideals and tendencies in contemporary digital history.
Women and Federal Officeholding in the Late Nineteenth–Century U.S.
This is a slightly earlier CRDH publication dated 23 August 2019, written by an experienced digital historian, Cameron Blevins, whose work has been featured in Week 3 of our course, when we discussed the “Pasts and Futures of Digital History.” His paper there pushed vigorously for (more) argument in digital history. Here he uses the datasets he’s marshalled/created/curated to investigate a research question about the entry of women into the federal workforce in the late nineteenth century. In 2018, Blevins praised Benjamin Schmidt’s ability to blend new analytical methods using data and visualizations with new interpretations and arguments about maritime history. So it’s interesting to see Blevins successfully do the same thing himself.
I noticed, though, that he, like Ben Schmidt, is mostly a one-man band in this effort—his resume/about/notes show almost no collaboration. Most, if not all, of the data work has been done by Blevins himself.
CRDH’s most recent publication, dated May 17, 2023, this paper was written by a team of four: Edward J.K. Gitre-Associate Professor of History-Virginia Tech, ”working on several book manuscripts,” Brandon L. Kramer-sociologist/data scientist, Chase Dawson-software and data engineer, and Gizem Korkmaz-data scientist/economist. I think it’s notable that all three of these data professionals have left academia. The article abstract immediately links to a well-developed, extensive, easily accessible (for now!) website at Virginia Tech entitled The American Soldier in World War II, with many options for exploration and learning. After a “trigger” warning that the material may be disturbing, the opening page announces its purpose: “Essays from leading historians introduce you…”—it’s clear this website has a definite public history orientation. The CRDH scholarly article focuses on one aspect of this much larger, grant-funded digital history project at Virginia Tech, and offers handwritten letters with text and text correlation networks. Lots of colorful, interesting, and easy to interpret visualizations demonstrate how segregation affected the inner lives chronicled in the letters White and Black soldiers wrote.
The temporal connection of this data to race riots in 1943 in several America cities over Jim Crow segregation, as well as the insight this project gives into soldiers’ contemporaneous attitudes and their cognitive dissonance in fighting for democratic freedoms abroad while denying them to a part of the deployed fighting force provide a perspective that’s compelling and impressive.
Geospatial Librarian 