Friend or Foe? Technology and Historical Research

 

Is technology a friend or foe of historical research? It depends on the use to which it is put and how well it retains information for future generations.

Some of my best historical research comes from letters, diaries, and journals. I’m very concerned that they are being replaced with electronic documents that may not have the same permanence.

Let’s start with the telephone.

Before the telephone and afterwards while long-distance calls were still expensive, most people used letters to communicate with those who were far away. Although letters are often lost or destroyed, some remain and are valuable historical resources. Consider, for example, the letters between James Madison and Thomas Jefferson while Madison was drafting the Bill of Rights. Jefferson was in Paris at the time, but we know his thoughts because he put them on paper and sent them to Madison. Unless they are specifically recorded, telephone conversations don’t have that same permanence.

On the other hand, the telephone does has some advantages for historical research. Interviews can be conducted over the telephone so the researcher does not have to spend time and money on travel, making it possible to conduct interviews that might not be feasible otherwise. Furthermore, the interviewer gains additional knowledge about the interviewee’s thoughts and feelings from hearing the person’s inflection during the call. With ZOOM and similar services, even more information can be obtained by watching the interviewee’s facial features, nervous hand gestures, and so on.

Then there is photography. In the days of film cameras, the only way to see your pictures was to develop them. That increased the chances that the negatives and the prints would be retained as historical records. Think of the photographs taken by Dorothea Lange and her colleagues to record the Japanese-American experience in the internment camps during World War II, as shown by the second image above. With the advent of digital cameras, there is no need to create a permanent copy of a photo unless you want to hang it on your wall. And if you take the photo on a cell phone, you don’t even need a hard copy to share with friends and family.

On the other hand, digital cameras do have their advantages. Every image on a film camera costs money to develop and print, so my father rarely took more than one shot per subject on his 35 mm slide camera. Since he couldn’t see the images in advance, he missed some good pictures because he didn’t realize the one he took hadn’t come out. With digital cameras, you can not only see a low-grade copy of the image immediately but you can take dozens of shots of the same subject, increasing the likelihood that you'll get a good one.

Word processing programs also have their pros and cons. In this case I’ll start with the pros, which I believe far outweigh the cons. I remember the days when I had to type on a typewriter. Correcting errors was miserable because I had to erase them and type the correction in the same spot as the original. If there were significant changes, it was a matter of retyping the entire page, which was a disincentive to rewrites. (I won’t even get into the misery of using carbon paper.) Now, with word processing programs, changes are easy and my manuscripts go through several drafts.

The con for word processing is that it’s too easy to rely on it to preserve your work. Unfortunately, systems crash, or human error can erase an entire document. That’s why I back my work up with a print copy and one on a thumb drive. Of course, it’s possible to lose paper manuscripts, too. Hemmingway tells of the time his wife put both the original and the carbon of most of his unpublished manuscripts in her suitcase to take on vacation. She thought she was doing him a favor, but when her suitcase was stolen (and never recovered), those manuscripts went with it. (The story is from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.)

The final piece of technology is the web. Many people replaced letters with email, although those are becoming outdated, too. People used to write diaries and journals in blank books, and many of those have survived to increase our knowledge of history. Now they have been replaced by blogs. Obviously, there are ways to retain both emails and blogs for perpetuity, and I’m thankful for the ones that have been archived. Still, many of them seem to eventually disappear into the ether.

Again, however, the pros are significant. Many historical documents have been scanned and are available on the internet. This means that a researcher does not have to travel to a distant library (which may be cost prohibitive) but can read them in the comfort of his or her home. There are still some documents that can only be read in a brick-and-mortar facility, such as when I spent several days at the Concordia Historical Institute in St. Louis while researching a story about a German-Lutheran girl living in Illinois during World War I. I enjoy that kind of research, but it isn’t always practical. So it’s nice to be able to find historical documents online.

Still, it will be a loss to researchers from subsequent centuries if we don’t leave enough permanent records for them to discover more than dry facts about our lives in this one.

Bottom line? Technology is both friend and foe of historical research.

I’ll leave it to you to decide how it balances out.

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The first image at the top of this page is a Frank T. Merrill illustration for the 1896 edition of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It is in the public domain because of its age.

The second image shows a mess line at Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California. It was taken by Dorothea Lange on June 16, 1942 as part of her official duties as an employee of the United States government. Because it is a government document, the photo is in the public domain.

The Next Book I Read Will be Authored by a Robot

It won’t be long before our electronic books will be authored by robots. That’s an exaggeration, of course, because machines can’t think and never will. Unlike the fictional HAL, machines can only follow the instructions their human creators have programed into them.

Still, sometimes it seems as if machines are taking over, and it isn’t always a pleasant experience.

When we left New York City last week, we decided to get lunch at Newark Airport. An entrée cost $30 at a sit-down restaurant, so we headed for the food court. The prices were better, but the service was highly automated, and not in a good way.

After we figured out what type of food we wanted, we ordered it from a pad. We’ve done that at other places, but this menu didn’t include any drinks and we couldn’t find any place to order them from.

Paying was an even bigger problem. The person behind the counter was there to make up the orders and nothing else. Another patron finally told us that we had to pay for our food at one of the self-checkout kiosks. It wasn’t until we had scanned the order ticket and charged our sandwiches that we discovered we had to get our own drinks and scan them in, as well. Even the “on tap” Coke that flowed directly from a machine was purchased by scanning the code on the correct size cup and paying for it before pouring the drink. But when I tried to use cash to pay for my drink, I was told I would have to use a different checkout station. So I gave up and charged that, too.

We weren’t the only ones who were frustrated or confused, and the food court paid somebody to stand by the self-checkout machines and explain how they worked. The concessionaire may have saved on one or two employees, but at what cost in customer satisfaction?

Robots will never write books without help from a human creator.

But when did technology replace customer service?

From Pen to Typewriter to Windows 8

My laptop went into hospice care last week. It's an essential tool for my writing career, and I was terrified that it would die at the most inconvenient moment. So I replaced it.

 

I exaggerate, of course. A computer isn’t an essential tool. Shakespeare wrote with pen and ink and Hemingway used an old-fashioned typewriter, yet they both managed to produce master works that are still selling today. And when I’m away from my computer, I use pen and ink, too. So a working laptop isn’t a necessity.

 

But it is a huge convenience.

 

Typewriters were the technological preference of most individuals when I was in college. They were imperfect time-savers. To make corrections, I used an eraser, whiteout, or correction tape. Not very professional looking. So I had two alternatives: (1) hire someone else to type my papers or (2) type each page until it came out error-free. I was too cheap (or too poor) to do the first, so I chose the time-consuming second option.

 

Then there was that back-up copy. Before the invention of carbon paper, it was done manually. I used carbon paper, but that had its problems, too. Correcting the copy was a messy job that often left an unreadable blob where the error had been. Thank goodness for the invention of the photocopy machine.

 

I’m sure it was even worse in Shakespeare’s time. Imagine re-copying everything in long hand.

 

Now the computer saves our changes and spits out back-up copies in seconds. Sometimes it even makes changes automatically—whether we want them or not. (I’m a big fan of turning off most of the auto-correct options.)

 

In my 30 or 40 years of computer ownership, I’ve progressed from DOS to various versions of Windows, including Vista, XP, and, most recently, Windows 7. Now I have to get used to Windows 8.

 

New technologies can be daunting, and we have to be careful not to rely on them. But I can’t imagine going back to my typewriter days.