Introduction

In the 21st century, digital history is experiencing growth like never before.  Online resources, the use of big-data to build historical processes, and leveraging citizen input in crowdsourced settings define the activities of digital historians today.  Commensurate with the influx of digital history is the inculcation of multidisciplinary studies that favor a ‘new new history’ that seeks to incorporate varied and oft-silenced voices in the historical and cultural sciences that shape the national narrative for a modern and dynamic U.S. history.  For example, over the past several decades the National Parks Service has worked diligently to incorporate digitization and multidisciplinary approaches into its framework for preserving and presenting national parks, historic sites, and national monuments, creating a homogenous online presence that presents the traditional facts and information about all of the parks, and also incorporates meaningful, curated stories and other content about the people and events that have traditionally been ignored or silenced.  Other players have been active in digital history, too, including Washington State University and other institutions of higher learning, producing novel ways to view crowdsourced data and historical perspectives using tools that were previously unavailable, such as through The Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project (SCRLHR) (https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/index.htmgton.edu). This paper will provide insight into how projects like the one at WSU and others are indicative of the new approach that historians are taking in incorporating new voices and multidisciplinary inputs into digital histories and some observations about the future of digital history and its critical importance to a vibrant and dynamic national history in the United States.

Argument

Peter Wood, conservative historian, pushes back on this drive toward a ‘new, new history’, objecting to it as a product of 1960’s liberalism, a “radical left” invention, and an unauthorized rewriting of history that is politically loaded – that “embodies political correctness and a ‘revisionist’s view’ that was anti-Western in character and radically deemphasized important matters such as the Constitution.” Couched in the language of patriotism, his denouement of a more inclusive history reads as political and radical, itself.  Wood rejects the conceptualization of American history as innately imperialist, as “academic self-dramatization”, and, stretching, as more rigid than traditionalist history.  Concluding that a ‘new, new history’ is “something that will do lasting damage to the education of many of the nation’s most intellectually talented young people and damage to the nation as a whole,” he is as shrill, racist, and politically fraught as he claims the new intellectualism that inform a ‘new new history’ is purported to be itself.

A closer look at the intersection of history, race, economics, and the American dream tells a different story about the effects of inaugurating a new new history for malleable young minds than Wood would have us remember.  The SCRLHR website is a window into the innovative promise of a new new history wrapped in big data and the unheard voices of people impacted by redlining in the 20th century U.S.  The landing page lays down the gauntlet, with special sections on segregation, the Chicano/a movement, LGBTQ activism, activities of the Ku Klux Klan, and Filipino and Asian activism in Seattle during the mid-20th century through today.  A modern digital history reflects all, some, or more of these features and incorporates the oral and written history of participants into its historiography.  The first highlight is ‘Segregated Seattle’, where the visitor can read stories of the alarming rates of redlining in Seattle with news and information about the restrictive covenants that supported this segregation, and the direct impacts that the project had on laws that work to rectify this pervasive historical trauma to build toward an inclusive Seattle and Washington State.  Digging further into the special section on segregation the visitor is presented with a two-minute video describing the impact that redlining has on wealth today in Seattle and offers a deep dive into bigger-data with maps that provide a ground-level view of these racially restrictive covenants’ using maps and crowd-sourcing to highlight the effects on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.  Capital Hill, a particularly lively and relatively expensive borough in the Seattle area surfaces the language of the covenant that white ownership “shall never be used, occupied by or sold, conveyed, leased, rented or given to Negroes, or any person or persons of the Negro blood” (1927-2928).  Using these resources visitors have an instant window into the seeds of previously little-known structures that would flower into their neighborhoods and civic spaces today.

Public historian and public humanities expert Sheila A. Brennan defines this new new public history at the Inclusive Historian website as being composed of “digital histories…immersive websites for learning and games…digital exhibits and publications…collaborative digital public history…and computational analysis” indicating a need for data, cloud, and statistical analysis experts to command the systems that host ever-expanding back-end, cloud-based management infrastructure. 

For the SCRLHR this means technology like Tableau Public.  Tableau manufactures software that allows consumers of data-driven results an easy-to-use interface for presenting big-data as simple, readable charts and tables.  The software’s purpose is to provide data-driven experts with new and additional insights into crowdsourced, business, or web-driven data sets that can scale to cloud-sized. Multnomah County in Portland, Oregon uses Tableau to provide everything from health to public housing data-driven insights to inform decision makers and County officials. Organizations across the Pacific Northwest are world-leaders in cloud-based data-driven informational and historical analyses that expose and expand upon the narratives to which real people with lived-experiences in today’s world can relate.

Like governments today, the SCRLHR leverages crowdsourcing to generate the datasets that populate its user-friendly maps.  The University of Washington partnered with Zooniverse to aggregate documents and other evidence and begin a campaign of asking interested individuals in the U.S. public to review this evidence for racially restrictive language in Seattle covenants. A collaboration between U.S. and British institutions, Zooniverse is a platform for aggregating user-generated data from participating institutions’ enormous amount of scientific, historical, and other artifacts.  Through this crowdsourcing activity, the SCRLHR presents Tableau Public maps that are generated when contributors, such as citizen-social scientists, review and mark relevant language in documents owned by the project.

This ultra-dynamic and textured view of neighborhoods in Seattle informs local law.  For example, the 2015 Fair Housing Testing Act had resulted in the issuing of citations to at least 23 property owners that had discriminated against renters, in its first year.  A results-oriented new new history enabled by big data and the voices of people previously unheard was directly responsible for the passage of this ordinance, whereby the Seattle Office of Civil Rights (SOCR) “contracted with the Northwest Fair Housing Alliance of Spokane to conduct a total of 97 tests, focusing on several different protected groups: familial status, disability and use of a Section 8 voucher.”

Conclusion

Instead of a rigid ‘founder’s chic’ history that portrays a national history dominated by Big Men and significant events, a more malleable and dynamic approach to crafting U.S. history using digital historical tools is in order.  Other products in the social sciences that are forerunners to the model that Zooniverse uses to aggregate data are REDCap in the statistical sciences, and JSTOR for historiography, all ripe for ingestion into future big-data projects that aid and abet the crafting of a new new history for the next generation of historians. These historians will inevitably embrace big data to help structure their narratives and other work product.  The social and cultural sciences will play a huge role in American politics as technologists generate and make available such technologies as data lakes, augmented and virtual reality, and artificial intelligence that grows more efficient every day.  By embracing these tools historians position themselves to suss out and accurately document the epiphenomena that results and that tell a more varied and diverse story that aims to reach people wherever they may be, and that ultimately leverages big data and other technologies to tell a more complete and fulsome history of us.