The Future of History

History on the Web comes in a variety of forms, from sites dedicated to specific events or figures to online encyclopedias to blogs that briefly spark historical conversation before quickly moving on to another topic. Business history is not immune to this trend. Many companies today will find that their pasts (and presents) are being dissected on the Internet without their permission. Information on the Web is passed as quickly as the click of a mouse, and as we discovered, it comes from a variety of sources. In this issue of It’s History! we offer a range of viewpoints and insights from new media academics and practitioners, which should prove useful for companies as they consider a place for their history in the blogosphere.

History in the Public Domain

New media has taken history out of the historian’s hands and given an unmistakable, public voice to ordinary citizens. Tens of thousands of history Web pages can be found in Yahoo!’s Web directory. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web states that there are likely more authors of history Web pages—many of whom are not credentialed historians—on the Internet than there are authors of history books on bookstore and library shelves.

In many cases, new media’s impact on history has been positive. Recently, it has helped save important aspects of America’s war history from disappearing from our collective memory.

The Veteran’s History Project began in 2000 as a means for the Library of Congress to collect and preserve America’s war history. The project evolved in 2007 when the Library of Congress partnered with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in support of filmmaker Ken Burns’s documentary The War. Prompted by the need to preserve a history that was quickly vanishing, Burns created The War to tell the story of World War II from the perspectives of roughly forty men and women who lived it, both overseas and at home. In support of the project, PBS and the Library of Congress conducted a massive outreach campaign, appealing to veterans and their families nationwide to share their stories. More than 3,000 original World War II stories were submitted.

While the subject matter surely encouraged such an overwhelming response, the technology made sharing stories easy. PBS used an online story collection tool called StoryShare, which enabled users to upload their stories and images to a searchable database. Interviews were also videotaped by local PBS stations and added to the database. Entries are available to the public on PBS’s Web site. Users can search through the entire collection or refine their search using options such as story type, branch of service, and frontline location.

Caveat Lector

One of the seemingly obvious drawbacks to opening up the recording of history is the issue of credibility. Who is fact-checking the hundreds of history pages on the Web? Only people who choose to do it themselves. According to T. Mills Kelly, the associate director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, “We’re just collecting. It’s not up to us to decide. If somebody is writing about it, it’s up to them.”

The academic community, which historically has taken responsibility for policing published research via peer-reviewed journals and strict citation standards in footnotes, often throws up its hands in the online world. There is simply too much information, being created too fast, in too many locations. The message to corporate bloggers and anyone else venturing into the new media arena is clear: caveat lector—let the reader beware.

“The Last American Pirate”

Reading and writing history blogs requires a new media set of navigational tools. While much of the information they contain is accurate, informed, and offered by well-intentioned netizens, the online world has more than its share of fraudulent information. Some frauds may be harmless pranks, but they underscore how easy it is for falsehoods to spread virally on the Internet. In his fall 2008 undergraduate course “Lying about the Past,” T. Mills Kelly and his students decided to test the gullibility of the Internet community by creating a historical hoax. “I‘ve always been interested in hoaxes myself, and in the age of the Internet it’s so much easier to perpetrate a hoax,” he explained. After half a semester of lectures, reading assignments, and papers, Kelly tasked students with creating their own hoax and turning it loose online.

Students christened their hoax, which dealt with a fictional man named Edward Owens, “The Last American Pirate.” Owens was supposedly an oyster fisherman who lived in Virginia from 1852 to 1938. To survive the depression that began in the 1870s, Owens took up pirating in Chesapeake Bay. “After my fortune took a turn and I had lost my job during the market crash, I turned to that way of life that I am not proud of. With a small cache of guns, I robbed several ships on the Chesapeake Bay over the years with the help of a few men that I have remained close to until this day,” stated his last will and testament. Owens noted that he never killed or hurt anyone, and went back to work as soon as the economy rebounded.

“I told them they had to decide what to do to spread it,” Kelly said. The students chose to create a fictional blogger, Jane Browning. Browning claimed to be a student who had happened across the will while researching the pirate for her senior project. In the process of chronicling her research, she “found” and posted Owens’s will. In addition to creating the blog, the class posted on pirate Web sites, Wikipedia, and other Internet sites.

Kelly stated his aspirations for the hoax in the course syllabus. “What’s our goal? Buzz, of course! We want our hoax to be picked up and spread around the Internet like wildfire! But I’ll settle for the following scenario. Somewhere in the United States, during the happy talk segment of the news—that part right at the end where the newscasters chat and smile—one of the newscasters says to his or her colleagues, ‘Now here’s something I bet you didn’t know…’”

The class anticipated their hoax would spread throughout the network of Web sites dedicated to pirates. Unfortunately, the pirate community just wasn’t interested. But, the academic community fell for it—hard. “Somebody at the University of Maryland-Washington… found the student blog by Jane Browning and thought, ‘Wow, here is a good example of the kind of work our students ought to be doing,’ thinking that Jane Browning was a real student. He then posted something on his blog, which friends of his wrote about, and somebody twittered about it. [It] just sort of mushroomed out of control among academics,” Kelly explained.

Kelly saw irony in the fact that “the people who should be teaching their students to be more skeptical about things they find online were not being skeptical… They applied none of the critical thinking skills that they are constantly pounding on their students.” Kelly ultimately put an end to the hoax by revealing it in an interview with Jennifer Howard of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Pioneers of Blogging

Who wrote the first blog and when is the subject of much debate within the new media community. One possible start date is December 8, 1993. That’s the day Swarthmore College student Justin Hall picked up a stray copy of the New York Times in the student lounge and was “blown away” by the concept presented in an article titled “A Free and Simple Computer Link.” The article described Mosaic, a new software program that helped users navigate the Web. “Before Mosaic, finding information on computer data bases scattered around the world required knowing—and accurately typing—arcane addresses and commands like “Telnet 192.100.81.100,” the article explained. “Mosaic lets computer users simply click a mouse on words or images on their computer screens to summon text, sound and images from many of the hundreds of data bases on the Internet that have been configured to work with Mosaic.”

After using Mosaic to surf the Web, Hall read up on HTML and created “Justin’s Home Page.” Like many early personal Web sites, the page shared links to other sites Hall found interesting. It also included information on Hall himself. But rather than limit that information to a few static “about me” paragraphs or a series of subject-oriented pages about his interests, Hall hit on the idea of posting regular updates, chronologically organized, with personal thoughts and stories about his day-to-day life as an intern for Wired magazine.

That format—personal stories mixed with links to other pages of interest—proved popular. The chronological organization made it easy for regular visitors to quickly pick out updates. And the combination of a consistent, individual tone with fresh content drew visitors back again and again. To Hall, this was no surprise. “Sharing stories gives guidance,” he wrote in 1996. It also gave context to more informational posts. “To claim to be the arbiter of cool, or the voice of the digital revolution, how does that differentiate you from some guy claiming the same thing two clicks away?” It doesn’t, he concluded. But by revealing themselves and building links to others in the online community, Web site authors could build a reputation and show, not tell, their audience why their thoughts were worth listening to.

The reputation-building process was particularly important for writers who occasionally wanted to use their Web sites for more commercial purposes. In 1997, Dave Winer launched Scripting News. It was not his first venture into online publishing; since 1994, he had been e-mailing regular essays which he eventually hosted at a site named DaveNet. But while DaveNet had begun as a personal project, Scripting News gave Winer an opportunity to publically demonstrate the products of his software company, UserLand, as well as discuss industry trends. One of UserLand’s contributions was syndication, a significant advance that allowed readers to aggregate content from multiple sites. Instead of visiting each site of interest regularly in hopes of catching an update, they could simply refresh a single page.

Winer relied on Scripting News as his only promotional tool, and it did not disappoint him. In February 2009, he wrote, “We had reasonable sales—probably over $1 million while I had the blog. We never took out an ad, or hired a PR firm… All I did was what any blogger does—talk about what I’m doing. And that’s the role of a blog, it’s a way of communicating what you’re doing… People get a real feel for who you are and how you think and what you’re like as a person.”

When Winer started Scripting News, the term “blogging” had not yet been invented. He referred to the site simply as his home page. It was John Barger, in 1997, who inadvertently coined a term for what the time was still a relatively obscure practice. Looking for a title for his site RobotWisdom.com, he chose “Weblog.” Barger’s view of a Weblog, however, did not encompass all that blogging had come to be. To him, the sole purpose was to create a “log of all the URLs you want to save or share.” Pages sharing personal thoughts might be included in those URLs, but they should be posted elsewhere, not included in the Weblog itself.

In 1997, there were only a handful of Weblogs online by anyone’s count, and an effort to promote a standard definition still seemed feasible. But the number grew. In 1998 and 1999, several companies—Winer’s included—released Web-based tools that allowed even those with no HTML familiarity to write and post their own entries. Weblogs—rechristened “blogs” by Peter Merholz early in 1999—exploded from a few dozen to hundreds, then thousands of individual pages.

Delivering Heritage

In the early 1860s, Wells Fargo used the Pony Express as a means of delivering vital information. Though Express riders became obsolete with the invention of the overland telegraph, they remain an icon of America’s western expansion, as well as Wells Fargo’s heritage. The Pony Express is an early example of the company’s use of innovation techniques for information delivery. Today, the company continues that trend by using new media techniques to share its history and thus convey its corporate values and mission.

Wells Fargo offers an abundance of historical information on its site, including information about the Wells Fargo archives and a feature called “This Day in History.” The company also runs its own blog, written by company archivists and historians.

Plenty of companies offer online newsrooms that contain rich content like Webcasts, podcasts, white papers, case studies, recent news appearances, transcripts of events, and images, all available through syndicated RSS news feeds. But what is all too often missing is the sense of history that Wells Fargo so aptly captures. Companies should be following this lead and leveraging social media to help define themselves using historical content that reinforces their brand. There is no silencing the conversation on the Web. By sharing their heritage in this forum, companies can help direct the dialogue.

History Headlines

Twistory?
Getting an historical grip on new media isn’t always easy. Take Twitter—the “micro-blogging” service, which limits messages to 140 characters, appears at first glance to be the antithesis of a medium with historical resonance. Yet the Financial Times noted that in the case of two recent historical events of global importance—the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai and President Obama’s inauguration—Twitter played a part in capturing the historical moment. “This has turned big global news events into a new form of shared experience. Traffic on the Website jumped during the inauguration as users who were there, or watching it on television, turned to the service to talk about their feelings—a contrast with Google and Facebook, which saw dips in traffic during the event.”

During the siege of Mumbai last year, Twitter became both an eyewitness news source and a place to respond. “You get this picture of what’s happening really quickly,” said Frank Eliason, director of digital care at Comcast, the U.S. cable television company. “On Facebook you can search groups, but you can’t search what people are doing or saying.”

Europe’s Great Works Move Online
The Europeana Project is under way in the European Union, as reported by the International Herald Tribune. The EU is collecting and digitizing artifacts that encompass 2,000 years of European history from 1,000 of Europe’s finest museums, libraries, galleries, and archives. Currently, Europeana has only digitized roughly 1 percent (three million pieces) of its collection, but it hopes to reach ten million items by 2010. “Just imagine the possibilities it offers students, art-lovers or scholars to access, combine and search the cultural treasures of all member states online,” said Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, which is co-financing the project. In addition to preserving European history, team members at Europeana hope the project will renew interest in the subject. “Actually, it encourages use of museums, because you give people a taste of what's there,” stated John Purday, who worked on the project.

Obama Shapes Presidency with History
According to the New York Times, President Obama is using history to guide his approach to today’s challenges. The incoming president read Lincoln to prepare for his inaugural address and studied the way in which Franklin Roosevelt conducted his first one hundred days in office. In fact, Obama has gone so far as to examine FDR’s tone and the words he used to reassure an anxious nation. Obama particularly connected with the idea of having a “conversation with the public,” though his version of “fireside chats” will incorporate the latest new media, manifesting themselves as YouTube videos and other modern communication tools. Though President Obama’s message is rooted in history, his methods of communicating embrace the technology of the present.

Letter from the Founder

One curious thing about being associated with The History Factory is that, when you tell someone what you do for a living, they’re more than likely to share—typically with great enthusiasm—a choice anecdote about their love of history. Stories I’ve heard range from the oral history they recorded with their grandparents or the documentary they made of their fraternity in college to their family’s summer tour of Civil War battlefields or the genealogical research they’ve conducted.

For the practitioner in heritage management, the popular interest in history can be both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing when your client intuitively accepts the notion that history has the power to touch people’s lives. It’s a curse when, because they took history courses in grade school, high school, and college, they think they are qualified to actually do what you do. (I’m certain that commercial airplane pilots and brain surgeons do not have this problem.)

In any case, I concluded long ago that it was a heck of a lot better to harness the popular interest in history than to fight it. First, you can’t ignore the sheer number of people that can be reached. According to a Maritz marketing research poll conducted at the millennium, approximately 60 percent of the U.S. population was interested in family history. More important, about 35 million people were using the Internet to conduct their family history research.

Anyone who has spent any amount of time on the Web knows that the available historical resources go well beyond genealogical. The delivery of historical content is no longer limited to the traditional sources of libraries, museums, and archives. And the breadth of historical content is absolutely staggering. The Internet Archive, Wikipedia, and YouTube are replacing the Library of Congress and National Archives as the keepers of our collective memory. Flikr has become the world’s largest “shoebox,” filled with photographs of the most ordinary as well as extraordinary events on our planet. Finally, there are one hundred million bloggers—“citizen historians”—documenting and interpreting the microscopic details of world history in real time. If you want an analysis of the history of Apple’s advertising, a scholarly critique of the evolution of bell-bottom trousers, or daily rehash of the 300-plus-year-old diary of Samuel Pepys, you can easily access it on the Web.

It is against this backdrop that I’ve recently been trying to come to grips with—and, frankly, trying to find ways to leverage—the implications of this amazing phenomenon called the blogosphere. (According to Wikipedia: “The term was coined on September 10, 1999, by Brad L. Graham, as a joke.”) As I have done when orienting myself to the previous technological advances that now seem so commonplace—e-mail, the Internet, social networks—I find myself relying on “reverse mentoring” (turning to much younger and more technologically literate family members, colleagues, and friends) to help me understand the opportunities and limitations.

This issue of It’s History! reflects the ongoing dialogue I have been having with a number of The History Factory’s staff about blogs, micro-blogs, “tweets,” and “twidgets.” I am struck with how passionate—and how opinionated—many of our young staffers are about the subject. In a departure from previous issues of It’s History!, we invited a guest editor—Blanca Myers, a senior at Amherst College—to join our team. Blanca is curious about the impact the Web and new media are having on advertising, marketing, PR, and communications. She is involved in developing a new blogging platform for the greater Amherst College community in an effort to centralize the content being produced by students, faculty, staff, and alumni. As an intern, she tracked viral content on the Web and contributed short editorial pieces for Buzzfeed. And I’ve become a big fan of Blanca’s art and music blog called “Madame Lamb.”

I hope you enjoy this issue of It’s History! as much as our team has enjoyed creating it. We view this as the beginning of an ongoing dialog, which we’ll maintain in our brand new blog, www.businesshistorymatters.com. We hope you’ll engage in the discussion.

The History Factory is a heritage management firm that helps organizations discover, preserve and leverage their unique histories to meet today’s business challenges.

Blanca Myers: How does new media change the role of history in our society?
Dan Cohen: As with businesses making their services and products come alive using new media, history can come alive with the proper use of digital tools. For the first time, the average history enthusiast—say, the person interested in the Civil War—has incredible, free tools at their disposal that can change how they view and interact with the past. They can get maps of all kinds, look at records once only available in hard-to-visit archives, interact with professional historians online, and produce their own interpretations. That's why the Center for History and New Media believes in a powerful democratizing impact of new media.

Blanca Myers: How do you interpret the role of the historian in the future of history?
Dan Cohen: There will always be a role for the historian as expert. Even with all of the archives and digital tools at the disposal of the amateur, the dedicated professional historian, who has years or even decades of experience sifting through the historical record and synthesizing the events and course of the past, will be valued for illumination and understanding. Indeed, one might argue that in an age of abundant digital records, the expert is even more valuable as a guide through the sea of documents on the Web.

Blanca Myers: How can today’s business leaders capitalize on new media?
Dan Cohen: Obviously we are long beyond the days of getting a business online. At this point, businesses should be using social media (such as Twitter or Facebook) aggressively, to join in a conversation with their consumers and their market. It’s not enough to have a pretty Web site anymore; making that site look alive, lived in, and in-the-moment through social media tools is critical.

The Forefather of Blogging

Heritage blogs capture first-person accounts of history in the making and enable far-flung commentary and dialog on historical events. In some ways, heritage bloggers are the new-media heirs of some of the great diarists of history. If today's technology had been available in the 1660s, for instance, is there any doubt that renowned British diarist Samuel Pepys would have traded quill pen for computer keyboard and blogged about the Great Fire of London and the decimation visited on London society by the Great Plague?

As the Chief Secretary of the Admiralty and a member of Parliament, Pepys kept a diary of his day-to-day affairs between 1660 and 1669. In what would become a primary characteristic of the blogosphere, Pepys mixed keen observation with political satire and sarcastic asides, giving his commentary a tone similar to that of modern bloggers. One entry from February 9, 1665, demonstrates this style:

Thence to Westminster, to the Exchequer, about my Tangier business to get orders for tallys, and so to the Hall, where the first day of the Terme, and the Hall very full of people, and much more than was expected, considering the plague that hath been. Thence to the ‘Change, and to the Sun behind it to dinner with the Lieutenant of the Tower, Colonell Norwood and others, where strange pleasure they seem to take in their wine and meate, and discourse of it with the curiosity and joy that methinks was below men of worthe. Thence home, and there very much angry with my people till I had put all things in good forwardnesse about my supper for the Houblons, but that being done I was in good humour again, and all things in good order.

Blogging, it might be said, is not an altogether new form of information distribution. In some cases, modern blogging technology has given life to old documents. Today, one can read Pepys’s diary as a blog, with daily entries from 1665 appearing, in most cases, on the corresponding date in 2009.

Technology Timeline 1440: Johan Gutenberg completes his invention of the printing press. 1690: The first American newspaper, Publick Occurrences, is published. 1876: Thomas Edison patents the mimeograph machine. 1967: Newspapers begin use of digital production processes. 1969: The first message is sent over ARPANet—the first iteration of the Internet. 1980s: The fax machine becomes widely used in offices and corporations, to quickly transmit documents. 1984: Apple unveils the Macintosh computer. 1993: The World Wide Web is launched, enabling email, Web sites, and software applications to be widely used. 1995: CNN launches Web site, an offshoot of its 24-hour news channel. 1997: The term “weblog” is coined, and later shortened to “blog” in 1999. 1998: Google launches its first public search engine, and is recognized as “search engine of choice” by PC Magazine. 2002: BlackBerry is the leading wireless handheld device, giving consumers instant access to email and the Internet. 2006: Twitter, a micro-blogging site, is launched, enabling people to share news stories and personal status on a continuing basis, via cell phone and Internet. 2008: The Internet tops printed newspapers as the main source for national and international news.