“WordPress!?! Aauggh!” – Our fellow historian Chris Nelson on Slack
To me, these two words, and emphatic punctuation, aptly capture my feelings towards using WordPress. But why? In the early aughts my best friend in high school and I shared a WordPress for typing class where we would practice keystrokes and create stories. Like an improv-group brought to blogging one of us would write a chapter then the other would write the next chapter, exchanging control of the blog and plot. At the time, I found the process of picking out a theme thrilling, publishing posts took on a giddy air, and the fact that someone could “discover” our little blog made us feel both nervous and excited. We left our WordPress behind within a year of graduating high school and both my friend and I migrated to Facebook (now that we had college emails addresses which were required at the time.) And so, WordPress faded from my mind until I took HIST 390 at George Mason University.
Here was where the “Aauggh!” sentiment kicked in. Over a decade later the tool seemed almost clunky compared to the fresh excitement it had offered in high school. Now picking out themes and posting and learning the ins and outs of the site management felt tedious. It wasn’t WordPress that had changed, rather the character of the internet and how I now approached it. In reading Adam Crymble’s book Technology and the Historian Transformations in the Digital Age I found evidence of how and why that change had taken place. In his chapter on the Rise and Fall of the Scholarly Blog he discusses a political blogger, Hossein Derkhshan, who was imprisoned for writing about the Iranian government. Upon his exit six years later he found the Internet to be a very different place: “the way people found content had changed dramatically” (Crymble, 151). Crymble locates this as being the result of “filtered algorithms” which are especially chosen for viewing by the popular social media sites (Crymble, 151). In more than decade that had passed between my interaction with WordPress my attention and appreciation for it as a tool had evaporated. I now felt that it was a borderline ineffective tool which required too much of my time to use.
Reading Crymble and his history of DH I found his call to action to investigate “structures of power on the Internet” to be a powerful one (Crymble, 151). Most importantly because I had gone from an active participant in my high school days, writing and posting, to a passive recipient who was merely consuming content. Much of Crymble’s text had a similar effect on me. I enjoyed his emphasis on getting the geneology of DH correct, that it was begat by at least two streams of thought (statistical and linguistic) and how historians work to incorporate digital media in the classroom and make their own classrooms to learn how to use digital tools effectively. I found his categorization of DH in “research, collection management, teaching, learning, and communicating” to be helpful in battening down this tricky term. (Crymble, 165).
Yet most helpful in cinching what DH is was our classroom discussion. In my group, Asha Isable, came up with a brilliant metaphor to help describe the qualities of DH. She likened it to a physician attempting to diagnose a syndrome by looking at various characteristics. Not every presentation of the syndrome will be exactly the same, but there was bound to be some overlap. For example, not every historian will be helping with collection management digitally, but they may create a project which is presented digitally – not the same, but still both digital historians! Our other group member Xaioyi Sun brought in her expertise as an Art Historian and discussed how online exhibits were now more accessible than ever before (a crucial feature in this time of COVID.) Finally, Kenzie Hool rightfully discussed some of the potential dangers of digital history with the advent of AI and misinformation. In sum, reading Crymble’s work was enlightening, but our class discussion between fellow historians was engaging and exciting. I feel more confident going into the digital world with these historians by my side.
