Chapter One: Exploring the History Web

I just want to tell interesting vignettes about historical topics, but I do want my information to be taken serious. Cohen and Rosenzweig suggests at the end of their chapter on "Exploring the History Web" that

"Before you begin the more practical steps in the journey outlined in the next seven chapters you need to know why you are taking that journey, who you hope will join you, and where you hope to go."

Why am I traveling?

I like to write (and maybe a little of I like to hear myself talk), but this originally was an exercise in writing. History is a topic I love and that I love to talk about. This is a chance for me to practice a craft that I love (writing) on topics I love (history, science, history of science, craft). It also give me a chance to contribute to the "History Web," a space that as a historian I think I will inhabit and lurk around for some time to come.

The other problem is my own lack of self confidence in continue to be a "good" historian. I've been out of school for some time, and hope to never go back (maybe). I don't even know if "traditional history" is what I would do if I did go back. I often times feel like an amateur--and I am truly. I am a more of a nerdy history enthusiast than a history. Keeping up with the new scholarship is particularly hard when it's your fifth job.

"The amateurs may have leapt ahead of the professionals in using the web as a vehicle for original publication, but their interpretations often look backward rather than forward. The amateurs could learn some historiographic lessons from the professionals while in turn teaching those who practice history as a vocation to think beyond traditional forms of publication."

Where do I fit? And maybe that's why I am traveling. To find out.

Who's coming with me?

Well, my mother is obviously coming along. She's my biggest fan. I also hope that the rest of my family and my friends join me. I'd love to work up a little following, and I think that it will start with them. I have lots of history colleagues, who I used to meet for beers and wax philosophic on any number of topics. I miss that, and wonder if this is truly the way that we will do that in the future.  Electronic beers and digital history.

Where to?

I'd like to improve my crafts--both writing and history, but really where I think I'm going is a way to set up learning modules for the Western Civilization courses that I teach. I'd like to create pages on topics, that include my lecture notes, (video or audio of my lectures? that sounds "ew"), images, podcast, interesting articles, websites devoted entirely to the subject, primary sources, and on an on. I would like to use this as a place to begin my classes, as well as a place to find fun and hopefully funny historical commentary.

So it look like I am really looking at making teaching resources website, but it definitely already has the problem that much of the History Web has. 

"If categorizing sites is so difficult, why bother? One good reason is that it forces the incipient History Web creator to think about genres themselves, what Phil Agre calls the “expectable form that materials in a given medium might take.” Genres imply, in Agre’s words, “a particular sort of audience and a particular sort of activity” and are “the meeting-point between the process of producing media materials and the process of using them.” To pay attention to genres is to think about how what you are doing relates to the audience you are hoping to reach—something less necessary “in the old days, when media were few and their uses evolved slowly,” or when they evolved in an ad hoc, organic way."

Living the Past through Your Controller

Here's a couple of GREAT articles that I've found on history and video games.

http://www.notevenpast.org/discover/“you-have-died-dysentery”-history-according-video-games

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2010/nov/19/assassin-s-creeed-brotherhood-history

Jeremiah McCall has recently put a book out on the uses of and kinds of games that can be used to present history, called Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History. He has lots of other great ideas, early research, and teach methodology on his website.

http://gamingthepast.net

The articles under "Theory and Practice" are great. In one article "Student-designed text-based simulation games for learning history: A practical approach to using Inform 7 in the history classroom," he discusses the use of a program Inform 7 to create AND have students create text based simulation games. In many of the article he focuses and stress that the interactive ability of video games, helps students to work critically with facts to "do" history. He writes,

History students, consequently, are taught most authentically and meaningfully when they learn to study history as a discipline rather than a subject. This entails moving far beyond the rote learning of teacher’s and textbook’s assertions about the past and developing several critical skills:
    * The ability to evaluate and analyze evidence about the past
   * The ability to combine pieces of evidence into a plausible interpretation of the past
   * The ability to discriminate between the critical and trivial parts of a historical event or process
   * The ability to use these skills to develop defensible, coherent, and meaningful interpretations of the past.
 Taught this way, students come to appreciate the discipline of history as a lens through which they can view the world. They learn to “do” history by forming their own justifiable conclusions about the past. In the process, students learn fundamental skills of analysis, interpretation, critique, and synthesis that will serve them well.

In Gaming the Past, McCall includes an appendix, listing different video games, their status, uses, time periods of historic simulation that can be used in a classroom setting. He also has some lesson plans for doing so outlined.  Many of this same information can be found on his website. (As a side note, I actually "checked out" the book for a month through Amazon Kindle App on the iPad. Here's me learning new things!)

In both articles "'You Have Died of Dysentery'-History According to Video Games" by Robert Whitaker and "Assassin's Creed and the Appropriation of History" by Keith Stuart, one of their major focuses is the incredible graphics and the players submersion into a stunning and rich historical environment.

The question is about the validity and value of that kind of history. Do "counterfactual" histories have a validity? 

I feel like I need to do some more research on how historians, view history through film and historical fiction. I have some general ideas about that, but not as much as I would like. I think that the lens through which to begin investigating history in video games, but I also think that there is something more at stake with the history through the video game.