The uptake of Web 2.0 services at the start of this century has brought new freedoms in terms of museums’ relationship with the public. Historically, museums, like so many institutions, have understood their role as containing, controlling and regulating public interaction with a protected and guarded resource. Authority has been generated through this controlled interaction. The very notion of mediated access rests on the intermediary role of curators and institutions. However, social media now facilitates far greater dialogue between experts and the public, levelling the traditional hierarchies and moving from the one-way information flow to a two-way relationship. Today online communities of interest give new value to the electronic dimension of institutions, sustaining the interest base and attracting visitors through the door. The changing nature of museums, bringing with them shifting notions of curatorship, has prompted radical changes in museum practices. Museums are not only guardians but are entrepreneurs – linking, facilitating and marketing collections.
Digital interactivity has triggered a transformation whose impact is greater than that of any other innovation in the history of technologies of communication. According to a 2016 Ericsson Mobility Report, over 90% of the world’s population will be covered by mobile broadband networks by 2021. “The world has been redrawn,” claims the Internet critic Andrew Keen, “as a distributed network.” It is becoming evident that we too are being redrawn as human beings, as individuals, and as citizens. At the heart of the change from analogue and print to digital is the capacity for connectedness that information technology brings – connectedness of information in and between databases, between experts and the public, between communities across the world, and between the arts and the sciences.
The online version of Volume 18 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which tells the life stories of hundreds of significant and celebrated Australians, will be launched tonight at The Australian National University. Featuring articles on 670 individuals with surnames from L to Z who died between 1981 and 1990, the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) presents a colourful mosaic of twentieth-century Australia. Included in the ADB are explorers, farmers, criminals, ballet dancers, speedway riders, and authors and politicians such as Patrick White, Christina Stead, William McMahon and Billy Sneddon. Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Young, who will officially launch the latest version of the online Dictionary, said that the stories and lives featured in the ADB illuminate major themes in our recent history. “A vast range of people are consulting the Australian Dictionary of Biography online – researchers, students at primary, secondary and tertiary level, genealogists, and people watching documentaries and historical dramas on TV,” he said. “Since going online in 2006, the ADB now attracts 70 million views a year.”
This article considers how traditional physical memorials to war and other catastrophic events differ from online memorials in the Web 2.0 environment and it asks what the benefits and drawbacks of each may be. There has always been an awkward fit between the public statements embodied in monuments to those who died in war and the personal stories told by individuals who returned. This disjuncture serves to demonstrate that the two ways of remembering traumatic events—the collective and the individual—have traditionally been poles apart and often contradictory. Gradually, over the past two decades, with the increasing influence of critical theories that have questioned national and other dominating discourses—and also with growing interest within the field of clinical psychology in what is now labeled post-traumatic stress disorder—there has been an increasing interest in the vast underlayer of personal stories that national narratives have shut out or silenced.
War memorials are the most familiar and visible means of acknowledging and respecting the trauma of large scale, violent conflict. In practically every town in Australia, however small, monuments to war are found. These are haunting, poignant reminders of the brutality of war and the fragility of life. And yet, their reassuring solidity and prominence shields us from the reality of lost lives and suffering by casting war in terms of abstract and stylised notions of heroism, loyalty, sacrifice and glory. While it is usual for the names of the dead to be listed on these monuments, their individual suffering is blended, ritualised and distanced in a symbolic and generalised tribute. It is not surprising then that there has always been an awkward fit between the public statements made by these monuments and the personal stories told by individuals who returned.
This paper surveys the digital history field, highlighting trends across historical, cultural and literary studies, heritage, archaeology and geography, as well as library information, screen and media studies, multimedia production and interaction design. This broad field is increasingly relevant to museum practice as museums experiment with digital modes of presentation and communication, including virtual exhibitions and other online extensions of the physical visitor experience.
The profile of oral history research has grown dramatically over the past two decades. One of the reasons for this is that there has been a diversification of modes of public access and delivery. The increasing use of digital media means that oral histories are now reaching far greater audiences, and these histories are being presented in more direct, more stimulating and richer ways than have before been possible. In fact, the digital revolution is rapidly transforming history as a genre and set of practices, and oral history is a key player in this process. Because oral histories lend themselves to digital forms of delivery much more readily than conventional, text-only, representations of history, oral history has come to be a central focus for digital history researchers.
The aim of the Interactive Histories research program is to seek ways of using interactive media for experimental content delivery in projects with a broadly historical focus. The focus to date has been on oral history projects (including virtual tours of heritage sites, museum installations and multimedia documentaries) and on theoretical research investigating emerging frameworks for historical representation enabled by interactive technologies. Planned projects include digital storytelling in local communities and the development of Indigenous and cross-cultural digital resources. Central to the two projects being presented here is the production of multimedia works designed to maximize public access to oral history material.
Interactive digital technologies are transforming the processes of research and production across all major academic disciplines. The changes are most significant in traditional disciplines. In that of history, online public access to digitised historical resources has meant that the materials of history are now available to anyone who has access to the internet. Previously, the study of archives was only open to the dedicated specialist with access to the world’s major library collections. Digital technologies have not only enhanced access to resources, but they are also enabling the development and growth of new kinds of content delivery and new modes of historical narration. Although the book is not likely to be superseded any time soon, the book now competes with experimental digital works that are relating history in new and highly interactive ways.
Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), a landmark text written nearly a decade ago, set out to investigate the potential for interactive story forms at a time when digital interactivity was, for the first time, in the hands of the mainstream. Her book, which analyses a range of non-linear narrative models, continues to inspire those who wish to imagine the future of digital narrative textuality. The study of interactive narrative is now a vast field in its own right. Today there is extensive, vibrant debate on the evolution of digital narrative story forms, with theoretical commentary coming from perspectives as diverse as new media theory, literary studies, cinema studies, media arts and humanities computing.
Paul Arthur is Vice-Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow and Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He speaks and publishes widely on major challenges and changes facing 21st-century society, from the global impacts of technology on communication, culture and identity
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