Monday, November 23, 2009

Web Review

The Official Anne Frank House Website
www.annefrank.org
Designed and constructed by The Anne Frank Stichting
Reviewed Nov. 23, 2009

To young scholars across the world, Anne Frank is the face and the voice of the Holocaust. The personal confidences in her diary touch people in all corners of the globe and give the history of antisemitism a personal relevance for millions of people. The Anne Frank House recognizes her valuable contribution not only to history but to social consciousness. Because of the compelling nature of her story, the Anne Frank House designed a website that provides a moving experience, secondary only to visiting the museum itself.

The content of the website is primarily instructional. These features are primarily directed to the curious and casual visitor. In addition to discovering the basic facts about the museum, a visitor also has access to brief biographies of Anne Frank, her family, their benefactors, and the others in hiding. These biographies are enhanced with images that portray the people mentioned in Anne’s diary, their secret attic, and their surrounding community in Amsterdam. The creators of the website have recently developed the Anne Frank channel on YouTube, which provides access to interviews with witnesses of the events surrounding Anne’s life, including Otto Frank. The channel also features the only known video footage of Anne herself, in which she gazes out of a balcony, only a few weeks before going into hiding. Through the biographies, images, and videos, the website creates a unique personal connection between the visitor and Anne Frank.

The website’s most useful features cater directly to teachers and their students. The “Anne Frank Guide” is a useful tool for middle and high school teachers to use The Diary of Anne Frank as a means to teach students about the Holocaust. This page provides condensed historical information about Anne Frank and World War II in conjunction with suggested activities and lesson plans. Furthermore, the site provides unique guides for eighteen different countries, each in their own language and containing specific facts about how that particular nation was impacted by the war. The guide also takes the events of Anne’s diary out of their context and demonstrates how they can be related to present-day acts of genocide and, with equal importance, acts of humanity.

Students benefit from the interactive aspects of the website. A section on homework help allows accessible information about Anne Frank and World War II and provides a quiz. A graphic novel on the Holocaust dilutes the horrific event to an acceptable context for very young visitors. But, more importantly, the website encourages young people to relate Anne’s experience to their own life. The site has a forum for responses and discussion of the diary and its history. Additionally, the Anne Frank Tree allows guests to “leave a leaf” on Anne’s interactive monument. On a virtual leaf, a visitor chooses a theme that characterizes Anne’s legacy, such as humanity or courage, and then leaves his or her name along with a brief message or picture. These are then added to the tree, which visitors are free to peruse for inspiration.

The Official Anne Frank House website provides an educational and meaningful look into the life of an extraordinary young woman and the history that shaped her. Through its ease of use and caliber of content, it achieves a quality of experience that is rare on the internet. This website is a valuable resource for all audiences.

Digital Discord

I think it is ironic that all of our readings about the benefits and harms of digital history are accessible online. I wonder if the authors feel that the negative effects of digitalization won't apply to them? Or if they are compelled to embrace it because the technological forces are simply too strong to resist? It's likely just a simple matter of the good outweighing the bad.

Virginia Heffernan provides an interesting, general overview of these pro/con points in her NYT article, "Haunted Mouses." She laments that expanding accessibility to the internet is also promoting expanding accessibility to misleading information, gruesome images, and an entirely unhealthy thirst for information (regardless of its credibility). I think Heffernan is missing a crucial point-- there is a market for misinformation that has existed long before the internet. While the age of constant connectivity provides a new and tempting outlet for sensational media, we can still find tabloids at every supermarket checkout and elderly relatives relating memories that have been colored by time.

I have more appreciation for Nate Hill's criticism in "Hyperlinking Reality," in which he comments that the internet is not being used to its full potential to bring communities together. His bar code experiment attempts to counteract the isolating effect of technology by allowing members of communities to interact in a particular space, despite the differences in time, effectively creating a new kind of virtual community.

Speaking more directly at historians, Dan Cohen and Roy Rozenweig attempt to address the many questions about academic communication via the web in their online book, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web. Cohen and RozenWeig are strong proponents of using the internet as a tool for historians and seek to advise the historical community on overcoming some of its inherent difficulties which they identify as: "quality, durability, readability, passivity, and inaccessibility." Despite these obstacles, the authors hail the internet as a new means for opening previously closed sources to a wider population and igniting a curiosity about history in the public. While I believe their book serves as an effective guide for setting up a historical website, promoting it, and perfecting it, I fail to see how they address the initial dilemmas they put forth in the introduction. For instance, they do not give any potential solutions to how the historical community can deem a site for the public credible, nor do they pragmatically address the class divide that makes the internet more available to one social class than another.

In "Wiki in the History Classroom," Kevin B. Sheets addresses one of the scariest popular sensations facing history teachers: Wikipedia. Instead of cautioning his students against Wikipedia, he used the popular "Wiki" website to allow his students to create their own page about a particular topic. Through their contributions, deletions, and edits, students learned Sheets' intended lesson: history is a conversation. And, though Sheets never mentions this, I believe that this type of lesson could also teach students to be critical of sources they find on the internet.

As I said in my very first blog post, I love the internet. I love that this week's readings cost me absolutely nothing on Amazon or the Temple Bookstore. Accessibility of information on the internet is one of the best advances to emerge from the 20th century and, hopefully, as we move forward, we will develop a societal intelligence about how and when to best use this information, both academically and personally.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Has the moon lost her memory?

Alison Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture is an interesting look at how new technology can simulate memory of history for the modern consumer. Having just watched Milk, I am totally into this idea.



Milk provides an open window to an otherwise less accessible historical moment. The narrative, combined with the sensory experience of the film's music and camerawork, allows the viewer to feel a certain set of emotions and develop ideas in sympathy with the movie's main characters. It is overwhelming to think of the combined effort hundreds of people to produce this particular experience. But to what extent is this "synthetic memory" history?

Landsberg would love Milk because it taps into modern resources to create "universal property," making the experience of Harvey Milk and the struggle of the 1970s gay rights movement a collectively experienced historical event. She states, "These mass cultural commodities...have the capacity to affect a person's subjectivity" (146). Landsberg looks at this effect through rose-colored glasses, assuming that the producers strive to create sympathy for progressive politics. While this assumption is absolutely true in the case of Milk, I think it is also important to note that the prosthetic memories she hails could have equally isolating effects for an identity group, depending on the cultural context in which they are viewed.

In "The Generation of Memory: Reflections on 'The Memory Boom' in Contemporary Historical Studies," Jay Winter partially credits the rise of the study of memory to the rise of identity politics. He claims, "The memory boom of the late twentieth century is a reflection of this matrix of suffering, political activity, claims for entitlement, scientific research, philosophical reflection, and art."

Winter's slightly more cynical view of memory is an essential component to a thorough examination of its value in the historical community and the greater public. His recognition of the origins and nature of memory and its uses compliment Landsberg's argument in that it recognizes that memory, like all forms of history, works from an angle. No matter how effectively a filmmaker, author, song writer, museum curator, or other medium works to present a historical moment in its entirety, there will always be sympathies, prejudices, and limitations that inhibit the viewer from fully understanding the personal experience of that moment.

That being said, I agree with Landsberg that the use of technology and mass culture can provide an incomparable tool for forming a more accepting and socially progressive society, particularly at the point where more and more young people are using these mediums to acquire and develop their world view. This might be, as Landsberg recognizes, a Utopian hope, but to quote Milk:

"If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door... And that's all. I ask for the movement to continue. Because it's not about personal gain, not about ego, not about power... it's about the "us's" out there. Not only gays, but the Blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us's. Without hope, the us's give up - I know you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living."

Sunday, November 8, 2009

How We Gonna Pay?

Eric O'Keefe's New York Times article, "Auctioning the Old West to Help a City in the East" reports a unique effort to raise money for Harrisburg, PA. The city's mayor worked to develop an impressive collection of Old West artifacts to open a new museum. However, due to budgetary dilemmas, he helped create an auction to sell the artifacts and fundraise for Harrisburg. It seems ironic to me that while museums have extraordinary difficulties finding financial resources, the value of their exhibits can assist a state capitol.

In "The End of History Museums, Part B," Cary Carson addresses some of the financial difficulties of museums and how various sites have addressed these problems. Carson notes that attendance at history museums has dropped drastically in recent years, depriving these museums of a primary source of income. In order to combat this, many museums have taken a proactive stance by expanding educational programs, creating visitor centers, and renting their facilities for private affairs.

Carson is extremely critical of the latter effort. He believes that the focus of history museums should be the history, not a staged event. I disagree with this perspective for two main reasons: First, the continued operation of a museum must be the primary concern of its administration and, if an event can help the museum without hurting its mission, the benefits outweigh the costs. Second, even if the historical aspect of a museum is relegated to a "sideshow" for a non-historical event, the ultimate message of bringing history to the public is still accomplished. Even in a museum's purest state, it is unrealistic to attempt to control all of the circumstances involved in a guest's experience. Ultimately, the efforts for a museum to be an event site as well as a historical site provides at least a short-term resolution to pressing financial concerns.

Even as we look at how museums need assistance from their communities, it is equally important to historically examine the communities in which they exist. Nancy Raquel Mirabal writes in "Geographies of Displacement: Latina/o's, Oral History, and The Gentrification of San Fransisco's Mission District" that economic progress in San Fransisco has rubbed out the historic and cultural roots of certain parts of the city. She hails the attempts of historians to recapture the story of the mission district by interviewing its former inhabitants and tracing the changes that have occurred in the space that they once called home. This is an extraordinary endeavor that deserves acknowledgment and imitation in similarly evolving urban areas. It demonstrates that financial success can be as damaging as financial distress.

From fundraisers and developments to ticket prices and paying the rent, it looks like even the most idealistic of public historians will never be free of the money woes.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Interpret with Love (and song?)

Freeman Tilden's Interpreting Our Heritage is a fantastically cogent exploration into the principles and effective methods of interpreting a historic site. In several short chapters, he defines his six key principles and how they have been applied to various historical interpretations around the United States.

Tilden attempts to boil the practice of interpretation down to the essentials so that this book might serve as an instructional guide to interpreters. He relates interpretation to a teachable art, while careful to outline that, "the interpreter should [not] be any sort of practicing artist--that he should read poems, give a dramatic performance, deliver an oration, become a tragic or comic thespian, or anything as horribly out of place as these. Nothing could be worse" (55).

The above quote made me laugh, first because I recently viewed the one-woman show at the National Constitution Center, which was certainly a little tough to swallow, and second, because a certain amount of my love for history derives from musicals such as Sondheim's "Assassins" or McNally's "Ragtime". I wonder if Tilden would argue that interpretation that happens on a stage rather than a historical site would be considered art instead of history? Would "Assassins" be any different if it were performed at Ford's Theatre?



Handler & Gable, in their explanation of the difficulties of interpreting Colonial Williamsburg, clash with Tilden. Tilden gives the audience equal authority over their reception of information at historical sites, whereas Handler & Gable consider interpreters responsible for controlling the information presented as well as the means by which it is presented. They argue that history can never be presented perfectly, as sites and perspectives and knowledge are constantly changing. However, I tend to agree more with Tilden in that a well-crafted exhibit could speak to audiences not just in the present, but over a wide span of time.

Patricia West, in her discussion of Louisa May Alcott's "Orchard House" presented a wonderful way in which a historical site can be interpreted with (as Tilden encourages) love. The transformation of Orchard House into a public historical site gave the opportunity for "little women" everywhere to visit "Jo's" house and simultaneously learn about the historical context in which Alcott lived. However, West also critiques the site for refusing to acknowledge some of the more controversial aspects of Alcott's life, such as her participation in the suffragette movement. I wonder if, because this site is popular because of a work of art, Tilden would be critical of its use as a means of historical interpretation?

Little Women is also a pretty awesome musical. Just sayin'.