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.
__________
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.
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