#ed ayers

SEGMENTS

MAKING A SPLASH

In 1907, Australian competitive swimmer Annette Kellerman was arrested on an American beach for wearing a one-piece swimsuit that bared her legs. OR WAS SHE? Scholar Christine Schmidt tells us about Kellerman’s first six month long sojourn in the United States, and her attempts to popularize swimming.

FREE THE BEACHES

The State of Connecticut has 253 miles of coastline, but in the early 1970s just seven miles of it were accessible to the public. Andrew Kahrl’s new book “Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s most exclusive shoreline,” tells the story of the political battle to open up the state’s shoreline.

FOR THE KIDS

Brian talks to historian Meghan Crnic about “marine medication,” a healing method utilized at children’s seaside hospitals in the late 19th century.

SHIPWRECKED

Peter Ferdinando’s research into the Ais people of Florida has complicated the story of the encounter between early colonizers and indigenous people in Florida. He explains to Brian how the Ais managed to grow their sphere of influence in the face of European arrivals.

LIFE’S A BEACH

Review: Ayer’s The Long Race

The Longest Race: A Lifelong Runner, An Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance Ed Ayers A lifelong runner uses his training, and running, of the JFK 50 miler as a way to ruminate on the nature of running, both as an activity and as a metaphor for political action. Ayers has been running competitively since the 1970s and his ruminations on the glory days of the 70s running boom,…

The work that Ayers spearheaded propelled the field of history, specifically Civil War history, into the digital age. The book that Ayers was originally going to write had nothing to do with computers, and in fact barely had a thesis, but he discovered that he needed to learn computers and statistics just to deal with the huge amount of information and sources that he was working with. This necessitated collaboration with computer scientists, graduate students, faculty, and web designers. Ayers utilized digital archives, hypermedia, and robust hypertext to integrate military and social history into an innovative project that compares two intertwined communities above and below the Mason-Dixon line during the Civil War. Ayers claims that these tools and perspectives by no means exhaust the possibilities for digital history. He suggests that historians might move toward social science again because of the dynamic and interactive nature of digital technology, which helps to alleviate some of the vagueness and narrow classifications that older social science technology allowed historians to see. He discusses the first effort at social science history and how it fell into decline in part because historians could not reconcile the abstraction that such technology imposed when used with their deeply held social and professional beliefs. Ayers argues that many social science methods focus on generalization and tendency, while history is about continuity and context. Ayers claims that satisfying explanations and studies must be “dynamic, interactive, reflexive, and subtle, refusing to reify structures of social life or culture. The new technology permits a new cross-fertilization.” 

 This project showed that these new technologies could show us hidden patterns and trends that challenge existing historiography. This particular project shows the importance of slavery as a dividing factor during the Civil War, and the individual communities of Franklin County and Augusta County. The Valley challenges that popular notion that states’ rights and not slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War. The South fought to protect slavery, even though North did not fight at first to abolish it. The war was not about state’s rights, though north did fight to sustain justice, power and authority of the federal government. In his recent article, “The Causes of the Civil War, 2.0,” Ayers expresses concern that slavery as a cause of the Civil War is widely accepted and emphasized in most textbooks and agree upon by most historians, yet still almost half of the United States thinks that states’ rights was the issue. 

 Ayers thinks that history may be better suited to digital technology than any other humanistic discipline. He states that changes in the field, far removed from anything to do with computers, have created a situation in history where the advantages of computers can seem necessary. There are a number of challenges that any digital project, especially this one, entails, including structure, publication, organization, technical issues, and academic challenges. Ayers and Thomas did not want computers to be only a distribution device, rather they wanted the technology to shape the argument and approach. The challenges in publication and academia were focused around the concern that there was no discernable thesis, or not organized in a way that readers could understand the thesis. Ayers and Thomas both expressed the difficulty of both writing and publishing the Valley of the Shadow Project in any semi-traditional journal, but also the problem of reading the “article.” The requirements of a non-linear, component-driven structure worked against other historians and audiences reading specifically for an argument. Some readers saw the new format as a way for authors to abandon the historian's responsibility to interpret incomplete and disparate information." These readers misunderstood the amount of work that is required for such a project, but were also blind to the new conceptual tools and perspectives that such a vast amount of accessible archival information brings about. It revealed a problem: scholars wanted to track the argument of the “article” and found it almost impossible, because it has no linear structure. Despite this, Ayers has faith in the new technologies and sees them as tailor-made for history, due to “the growing bulk and complexity of our ever more self-conscious practice, efficient vehicles to connect with larger and more diverse audiences.” 

 The diversity of audience and communication is very important to Ayers and Thomas. Historians deal with a multiplicity of populations, topics, and approaches in ways unimagined a few generations ago. New narrative techniques that stem from the digital humanities are engaging larger audiences with broader diversity of historical subjects. With the use of the internet and digital public representations and archives, the huge increase of information, resources, and analysis on new topics, populations, and cultures can be spread to the general public. In this way, the democratization of history can reconnect with the populace. Ayers also sees benefits from communication hubs like H-Net, as a healthy way for historians to discuss, connect, engage, and reinterpret material. The internet has been a way for historians to deepen and broaden the professional conversations of the field. He likens the simple and straightforward H-Net to a “perpetual annual conference,” and many born digital projects and books that have come about since then have the benefit of peer feedback from distant colleagues and numerous fields. 

 Most of the projects developed since the Valley Project by the Virginia Center for Digital History are usually full archives with most of the existing primary material featured, sometimes with interpretation and written analysis, but sometimes the thesis or point is in the juxtaposition of certain documents or images, or a visualization. And occasionally the thesis or argument is unformed and open for interpretation, like the original Valley of the Shadow archive without the accompanying book or article. In most of these cases, there are a number of interpretations and narratives that can be derived from the material available within the project. Ed Ayers wasn’t afraid to publish the information and research before the book because he was confident that no one would write the same book from the material that he did.

The digital turn has dramatically transformed our understanding of what constitutes as a scholarship in the humanities. Some subject fields have adapted to this shift more quickly than others. The collaborative nature of born-digital projects is perhaps the greatest source of concern for traditional historians. When a new methodology emerges in an established field, it becomes necessary for researchers to self-appoint themselves as advocates who take it upon themselves to explain the direction and goals of the paradigm shift they represent. One of the uncontested visionaries of the digital history movement is Ed Ayers of the University of Richmond. As Ayers explains in a 2005 reflection on the development of his groundbreaking Valley of the Shadow Project, “Past human experience is as complex as anything in nature and likely much more so in its variability and unpredictability. Studying the past is like studying scientific processes of which we have the data, but for which we cannot run the experiment again, in which there is no control, and in which we can never see the actual process we are describing and analyzing” (Ayers, 93). He goes on to explain that the only way to rise above these institutional challenges is to develop better instruments. According to Ayers, “Just telescopes redefined stars and microscopes redefined cells, so might we be able to use digital tools to gain a deeper and more precise understanding of the patterns of complexity in human behavior of the past” (Ayers, 93).

It is with this perspective in mind that we can begin to analyze the overarching themes and ideas of Dr. Ayer’s oeuvre. Similar to the other giants of digital history such as Roy Rosenzweig, Daniel Cohen, Bill Ferster, and William Thomas III, among others, Ayers is a traditionally trained historian who from an early period in his career realized the potential that digital scholarship bore. In What Caused the Civil War?, he describes the inspiration behind his decision to create a cross-comparative study of two communities during the Civil War that were separated by the Mason-Dixon line, but less than two hundred miles. While at the University of Virginia he proposed a project that would examine the similarities and sympathies of the citizens of Augusta County Virginia and Franklin County Pennsylvania, in an effort to redefine previous conceptions of the wartime perspective of individuals living along the border region between the Union and the Confederacy. As he reflected on the scope and scale of the project, “with its close attention to millions of details, its determination to find patterns in masses of scattered records,” Ayers realized his project “would be perfect for computers” (Ayers, 71). The end result was the award-winning Valley of the Shadow Project. The multimedia nature of the project creates a fascinating intersection between a wide array of ephemeral sources ranging from maps, photos, music, newspapers, diaries and letters, census and tax records, and muster rolls to name a few. The result is a research project rooted in hypertext theory and an excellent embodiment of Jay Bolter’s “hyperlink theory.” Although users are able to navigate through the bevvy of sources and construct their own narrative based on their interests and findings, researchers in the early edition of the program had a more difficult time in accessing specific items of interest. In a 2003 review of Valley of the Shadow and its corresponding CD-ROM, Richard Lowe recommends, “an overall search ability would have enhanced user access to the nearly 600 mega-bytes of information” (Lowe, 430).

The comparative size of The Valley of the Shadow and it’s 600 megabytes, along with the limited micro-history perspective it entails pales in comparison to the breadth of Ayer’s latest endeavor, A Digital Atlas of the United States. This project compliments the vision of John K. Wright’s idea for how to enhance Charles O. Paullin’s 1932 Atlas of Historical Geography of the United States. Wright suggested, “The ideal historical atlas might well be a collection of motion picture maps” (Schulesser). Ayers describes Paullin’s atlas as “so far ahead of its time” in the way “it suggests how people use geography” (Schulesser). In the spirit of Paullin and Wright’s visionary work, the University of Richmond is currently developing a decade-long mapping project that will utilize the latest GIS mapping tools to create, “A historical atlas that enfranchise the entire nation” (Schulesser). One cannot help but be overwhelmed with anticipation of the end result of Ayers’ current endeavor. Over the past three decades he has continually proved himself to be one of digital history’s greatest visionaries.