Challenges Presenting the Past in a Digital World
We are in an age of everything. Information has never been easier to achieve, but the obvious increase in information access has not allowed us to see a similar correlation in the efficacy and accuracy of that information. You can find false information on every topic in the same results as the most accurate and well supported information. Therefore, weeding through the inaccuracies is one of the most important aspects of not just digital research, but research in general. As Sam Wineburg said in his 2015 American Association for State and Local History annual meeting keynote address, “We live in an age when you can practice historiography without a license.” So here are some strategies that can help create good faith historiography:
First, to steal two more concepts from Wineburg, using web tools to help determine the primary author and audience for certain websites, such as using whois.com to find out the author/organization behind a webpage or other tools to discover people who link to the website in question. (For those wondering, it even works with this website, though the ownership of the domain does not show me, but the host site that I rent the domain from).
Another strategy that I find really helpful is to try and find another source that corroborates or refutes a claim that I’m considering using in my work. By doublechecking that someone else has an opinion on something, it helps to combat the possibility that the author could have made up that information (especially since citations are pretty sparse on many websites, especially for individual claims).
As a digital humanist, another problem that sometime occurs when searching for research on the internet is projects of different mediums. This is not neccessarily to fact check these different mediums, but for instance an article published from a reputable academic journal is more likely to have digital longevity than a reputable public journal (many of which are pay per view with limited free articles). Those pay-per-view pages will make it difficult to double check if you ever decide to revisit them without printing the page (either to a pdf or hard copy). Another problem with different mediums is digital sustainability, sometimes websites lapse their domain and everything they hosted can be gone in the blink of an eye. While it’s possible in some cases to check on other websites like the wayback machine for a search engine crawl that “saved” a page, sometimes it’s out of date, and sometimes it isn’t saved at all.
As previously mentioned with pay-per-view sites, you can sometimes “save” an article by printing the page, which can help if the site goes down too, but it’s much harder to save other types of media like program code, videos, audio files, and more, which don’t always have easy “download” buttons to add it to your personal archive.
Another issue is bias. Bias is rampant on the internet, where being a troll or bigot is par for the course amidst the anonymity that the web provides. Unfortunately, even for people who aren’t actively engaging in troll or bigoted behavior, it’s sometimes a bit more insidious than one might imagine. Even the most good faith internet user can be thwarted by the wrongdoings of others (like gender and race bias in crowd-sourced websites like Wikipedia), or more sneakily the hidden biases in internet algorithms. For instance, Google, as well as many other search engines, is designed to show you ads before non-sponsored entries, which inflates the companies willing and able to pay. Youtube has also had issues regulated it’s user-created content versus the algorithm that determines what videos might interest a viewer (often accidentally pushing extremist viewpoints, or “shadow-banning” content that seems not be advertiser friendly even when it is educational content meant for all audiences).
In addition to so many things that can go right with digital searching (the internet is the biggest and most expansive “library” that exists), there’s also so much that can go wrong, either with bad faith or sloppy information, archival issues, or bias. Even with these problems, I still wouldn’t give up the convenience and tools that the web provides myself and my research.
