History and Theory最新文献

How do we adequately capture multivocal history? What are good ways to represent multiple narratives and arguments in an open-ended fashion? The online publication Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History, edited by David R. Ambaras and Kate McDonald, addresses these questions for modern East Asian spatial history. Mainly a tool for teaching and research, the website works by interlinking historiographical information and primary sources. Complementarily, Bodies and Structures 2.0 displays all its contents via a set of visualizations. In this review essay, I argue that this multimodal format is innovative on two ends. First, the site convincingly implements what earlier research on hypertext and visualization has long sought—namely, to exceed traditional text and its limitations to represent intricate matters neatly. This is because of these media formats’ semiotic efficiency in analytically representing complex wholes and their parts. Second, Bodies and Structures 2.0 successfully translates its multivocal concept of spatial history into an interactive multimodal user experience. All in all, it demonstrates that representing concepts is not just about the applied language of narrative and argumentation; it is also about the publication's form. Bodies and Structures 2.0, therefore, is an exciting work from the perspective of theory of history.

Holocaust memorial sites and institutions have begun to embrace new media and digital technologies as methods of communication, public engagement, and memorialization. Despite increasing numbers of interactive digital media projects focused on Holocaust education, there is a significant gulf between the topics addressed by digital Holocaust works and those conceptualized and studied at a higher level in scholarly Holocaust literature. Most notably, challenging questions regarding the categories of bystandership, complicity, and perpetration are largely ignored in favor of traditional victim-focused narratives. I suggest that, in their eagerness to adopt virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) technologies, digital Holocaust memory projects have neglected the significant potential of nonimmersive video games to address questions regarding bystandership and complicity. By moving away from the perceptual immersion of VR and toward the ludic and simulative arguments of video games, digitally interactive Holocaust projects may be able to lessen the risks of over-immersion and retraumatization that are antithetical to critical historical thinking and understanding. This article examines the 2013 game Papers, Please as an example of how video games can present sophisticated arguments about human agency, bystandership, and complicity. By placing players in a historical problem space laden with impossible moral choices, Papers, Please demonstrates the systemic forces that structure human behavior under extreme, violent, and authoritarian conditions. I argue that Holocaust-based ludic digital media modeled after Papers, Please could explore bystandership and complicity in similarly nuanced and powerful ways, potentially touching on academic Holocaust concepts such as the “choiceless choices” of “the gray zone.” Addressing these topics in ludic historical media could help to bridge the gap between popular and scholarly understandings of the Holocaust in the twenty-first century.

Digital history is more than just the implementation of algorithmic and other data practices in the practice of history writing. It places our discipline under a microscope and enables us to focus in on what history writing is in the first place: writing about the past under specific social and societal conditions. This article argues for a closer look at the traditions of history writing in order to understand its principles and to determine what the digital condition contributes to historiography. Does the work of historians actually change in principle, or does digital history instead reflect the digital condition under which we operate? The article begins with a reflection on the works of Wilhelm Dilthey and Michel de Certeau to discuss how the society in which the historian writes influences the practices of interpretation. The article then presents what can be understood as the digital condition of our present societies and shows how algorithms function as “black boxes” that influence our social interactions, communication, and understanding of the world. The article's third part brings together the earlier discussions of practices of history writing and the digital condition in order to examine the role of modeling for knowledge production in the sciences and the humanities. The closing argument then focuses on the use of visualizations in digital history as an example of the operational use of models of knowledge in opening the “black box” of interpretation.

Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, edited by Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott, was a significant publication in the establishment of historical (digital) game studies, a field that has since continued to grow. This review essay notes some of the key interventions made by the edited collection and its scope in accounting for the complexities of digital historical games. It also reflects on what the book represented at the early stages of the discipline and the ways in which scholarly approaches have developed (or not) in the decade since its publication. In doing so, it focuses on several key areas that arose in Playing with the Past and have remained central to historical game studies. In particular, this essay examines questions of digital games’ relationship to “professional,” written history; whether games can (or need to) teach their players about the past; and the troublesome reoccurrence of and reliance on certain difficult terms, such as “historical accuracy” and “historical authenticity.” This essay argues that all three of these fundamental aspects of our current approaches to historical game studies require further criticality to build on the foundational work of Playing with the Past as well as the vital work published in the field over the last decade.

This article offers a definition of digital history that focuses on the core affordances of the personal computer and the process by which those properties come to be exploited. I begin by outlining the two properties of computers that I argue define digital history: they process data and (as Janet H. Murray noted) provide an immersive and interactive medium. I then examine how digital historians in the United States have employed those affordances. That process has proceeded unevenly, with computers having been used as a medium before they were employed to process data, and has produced additive forms—digital archives, digital public history, data analysis published in print—that rely on existing formats rather than on the affordances of computers. While such forms are a necessary step toward a more fully realized digital history, their prevalence suggests that it will take some time for that process to play out. The final section looks to recently published and forthcoming long-form digital arguments for the direction of that development. Examples from Stanford University Press's Digital Projects series point to some of the ways that the data analysis and the immersive and interactive medium of the computer might be combined.

Artificial intelligence is a historical discipline. This does not simply mean that its history can be written. It is historical on account of its recursive basis for action: its systems turn to prior beliefs—often through multiple steps or layers—to make recommendations for the present or predictions for the future. Using the two rooms approach of Alan Turing's imitation game, I highlight the potential for machine and human histories to be recognized via at least the idea of weak artificial intelligence. This recognition illuminates the mixed nature of the logic of history, combining deductions and endoxa. Finally, I note that illuminating and exploring this mixed logic of history signals a turn to historiographical metaphysics with Aristotelian features and, thus, the recognition of histories by professional historians as only part of a historiographical world. This signals that the recognition of machine and human history makers does not simply turn on the acknowledgement of imitation.