Teaching with Technology

http://mcel.pacificu.edu/jahc/2008/issue1/vajcner.php

This week I have delved into an earlier issue of the Journal of the Association for History and Computing, that of April 2008. In the article I have chosen; “The Importance of Context for Digitized Archival Collections,” the author, Mark Vajcner, discusses the dilemma for archivists related to the widespread use of digitized records. As I mention in my title above, the key is trying to maintain context for documents.

While I am not an archivist, I can understand Vajcner’s concerns, because they seem to relate to a wider problem in today’s digital world. That problem is that original documents and records, once digitized and available to anyone on the worldwide web, can be pulled out of context and published or be relied upon separate from the general source from which they came. This is a real problem for archivists whose entire field has historically been built around publishing huge volumes of data, mainly for use by researchers and historians.  Traditionally the researchers and historians have access to a vast  bundle of archived data and can study and analyze it and reach conclusions based on the context of the documents cited.

Now what happens is that these documents once digitized can be pulled out of archived collections and used for any number of reasons by researchers, historians, or anyone else (I would think this might include website creators, politicians, people with agendas, etc). This affects the validity of the document when looked at in isolation and raises questions about  its veracity and authenticity.

Vajcner cites two situations reported on in another article as examples of some of the concerns. One of the situations was the movie "Forrest Gump" in which the lead character is inserted into film clips and portrayed as meeting with three American presidents. This is something that obviously did not happen but was engineered from some primary source clips. While this might appear to be a harmless entertainment usage, it does show the concern about the usage of primary document when taken out of context. The second situation raised a bit more concern when the Oliver Stone movie, Natural Born Killers in 1994 used archival footage of a native Indian canoe with a shaman in a bird costume. Unfortunately the context in the movie had no relation to particular circumstance of the archived footage.

In his conclusion, Vajcner states:  “the ease by which digital documents may be altered and then re-published focuses a new importance on authenticity and originals … Archivists will need to be more active in ensuring that contextual information is linked to digitized materials. ” Unfortunately this will not prevent anyone with an agenda, including researchers and historians from pulling documents out of context to make a point. It does underline the concern raised by Jenkins in our earlier class readings of the need for teachers to take our tech savvy, young  students and provide to them a series of skills including the ability to judge the authenticity and validity of a document or source. The issues of authenticity and veracity of a document is not just of concern to archivists, but should be one which all of us, especially teachers  can appreciate.

So, the value of knowing the context of digitized documents is at least as important as the importance of location in determining the value of real estate. Otherwise, you might have Forrest Gump turn up in a  painting of the surrender of Lee to Grant at Appomattox as an interested party!