Digital History Center Strives to Connect With the Public

Books are the gold standard of historical scholarship. Claudio Saunt, a specialist in early American history, has published three of them. As a sort of epilogue to his latest book, however, the University of Georgia professor decided to try a different approach: What would happen if he distilled more than a century of American Indian history into an interactive digital map?

The result was a lesson in the power of public history, and a case study for a profession grappling with how to encourage and evaluate digital experimentation.

Mr. Saunt’s map, “The Invasion of America,” depicts how the United States captured 1.5 billion acres from indigenous people between 1776 and 1887. With each click on the map’s timeline, viewers can watch as the continent-spanning native territories dwindle to a patchwork of reservations.

It’s a familiar story, one Mr. Saunt has taught for 20 years. But this interactive version managed to reach an audience far greater than any lecture. Since its June debut, “The Invasion of America” has attracted more than 90,000 unique viewers, from as far as the Seychelles and Burkina Faso. Vox, Slate, and The Washington Post have all mentioned it. A YouTube video about it has been viewed nearly 77,000 times.

“At its peak, we had like 300 people a minute getting on there,” Mr. Saunt says of the site.

Mr. Saunt’s map is one slice of a bigger digital-history push emerging out of Georgia’s Center for Virtual History, much of which has yet to be released. The center’s scholars strive to capture the voices of historical actors not traditionally represented in archives, like slaves and American Indians, through projects that map the past and involve the public in analyzing historical data.

The effort, based at eHistory.org, grows out of the research interests and personalities of the center’s co-founders. One is Mr. Saunt, a San Franciscan who recently published West of the Revolution (W.W. Norton), a history of 1776 focused on events beyond the British colonies. The other is Stephen Berry, a Civil War-era historian who can get so animated discussing the 19th-century South that it sometimes seems as if he has forgotten to breathe.

Among their center’s projects is a new website called IndianNation. Mr. Saunt thinks of it as a kind of “Facebook of the Dead.” The site houses a page for every American Indian counted in the census of 1900, when the Indian population, at 237,000, reached a historic low. The hope is to recreate this community by enlisting descendants and students to share stories, photos, and letters documenting the lives of its members.

Mr. Saunt and Mr. Berry see such collaborations as a new kind of research, a humanities analog to the “citizen science” projects that have drawn on regular people to help analyze data about, for example, the stars. Other scholars have mounted related experiments, like crowdsourcing the transcription of records from the early republic’s War Office or the weather observations contained in old ships’ logs. To Mr. Saunt, however, transcribing weather data “doesn’t seem like the most interesting kind of work.”

“What we wanted to do was to give people stuff to do that’s a little bit more engaging,” he says, “to make them historians themselves.”

Career Barriers

These efforts come as historians are having an important conversation about the role of technology in their research. At issue are the profession’s systems of hiring, promotion, and peer review. The question is how those systems should change to better support digital work.

There’s a tension at play. On one hand, historians want to experiment, and many universities are establishing centers for digital scholarship. On the other hand, the career-advancement machinery of the profession is set up to encourage and reward traditional books and articles, not creative approaches to new technology.

The issue has percolated for years. It affects other fields, too, and has been taken up by groups like the Modern Language Association. But it’s attracting fresh attention thanks to a new project the American Historical Association has undertaken to create guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship in hiring, promotion, and tenure.

The current situation “makes no sense,” argues an AHA write-up about the project. “It robs our discipline of the innovative energy that many historians either keep under their desk until they’ve safely published that second book or simply leave to others willing to take the risk.”

In particular, younger scholars trying to establish their careers can be discouraged from pursuing digital projects, notes Edward L. Ayers, a historian and president of the University of Richmond, who chairs the committee of scholars working on the new AHA project.

“It’s generally more senior people who are doing” digital scholarship, he says, “when, in fact, more junior people might be more creative.”

Neither Mr. Saunt nor Mr. Berry would qualify as “junior.” Both are established historians with CVs that check the familiar boxes: articles in specialized journals; scholarly books, followed by trade ones; research support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Mr. Saunt writes about race, colonialism, and American Indians in the 18th and 19th centuries. His books include a study of the transformation of the Creek Indian population in the Deep South, as well as a volume that looks at the history of race in America through five generations of one native and African-American family. Mr. Berry has specialized in the Civil War period, writing books about the motives of Southern soldiers and the effects of the conflict on Lincoln’s family.

Both scholars seem pleasantly immune to the technology-will-revolutionize-everything rhetoric you often hear from proponents of digital innovation. At the same time, Mr. Saunt and Mr. Berry share a firm belief in the power of mapping, both to make sense of the past and to give new life to the traditional source materials of scholarship.

For example, in 1899 the Bureau of American Ethnology issued a series of maps detailing every cession of indigenous people’s lands to the United States between 1784 and 1886. Those publications, a standard source for historians, were the basis of Mr. Saunt’s “Invasion of America” map.

Similarly, during the Great Depression, employees of the Works Progress Administration interviewed more than 2,300 former slaves across the country. These narratives are “the greatest source we have on the African-American experience of slavery and its aftermath,” Mr. Berry has written. But outside of the interviews themselves, he says, little is known about the men and women who left this testimony.

The historian and his colleagues plan to change that through a “participatory archive” called “Born Unfree” that will draw on scholars, students, and the public to create biographical profiles, maps, and teaching materials devoted to the former slaves.

Another of Mr. Berry’s ventures takes inspiration from the Civil Rights Cold Case Project, which reinvestigates old murders. What Mr. Berry did was digitize all the 19th-century coroners’ reports he could find for six South Carolina counties. The records, which lay out how people left this world, present a unique window into the Southern past. That’s because they capture the deaths of non-elite people who might otherwise have left few impressions on the historical record, like slaves and poor whites.

Mr. Berry is building an online project, called CSI Dixie, that analyzes those records in an experimental form: a “deconstructed monograph.” It will include a digital archive, original scholarship, and a magazine-like travelogue that chronicles his journeys to the sites described in his materials.

As established historians like Mr. Berry publish in such experimental forms, that should help younger scholars earn credit for their own digital innovations.

But scholars, if you’re hoping such digital experiments will help sell your traditional books, don’t count on it. That, at least, is one lesson from Mr. Saunt’s experience with “The Invasion of America.”

Each user of that website sees what amounts to a pop-up ad for his West of the Revolution book. Mr. Saunt monitored book sales while the site was getting 300 hits per minute. They barely budged.