More About the Aims: History Education, the New Historical Record, and the Idea of 'Source Lab'
But we no longer live in that world. The new historical record being created by the Internet is exploding both the size and nature of history's archive. Digitization makes inaccessible information suddenly accessible. And the kind of sources available is changing as fast as the number. Personal papers as well as official acts, archives of the intimate and the marginalized as well as the public and the privileged, images, sounds, movies as well as texts: whole new worlds of the past are being made available to explore. Neither scholarly presses nor professional researchers can keep pace with the scale of these changes, on their own.
But why do we need a renewed attention to publishing, if we can just read the Web? Isn't the raw availability of information provided by the Internet enough?
Not if we want to write good history. As wonderful as the new historical record being assembled by the Internet is, it seems almost fiendishly designed to strip its artifacts of their original context and place in the past. Millions–billions?–of digitized documents occupy the no-man's land of our World War I film. They appear to viewers without any information about who made them, why, for what purpose, with what results, or where they are preserved today. And a source whose origin, nature, importance and evolution over time you don't understand is the very definition of a bad source. You can't trust the judgements about the past you make from such artifacts, until you understand their own history better.
In effect, the Internet has provided a solution to one traditional goal of historical publishing–getting people access to sources they need to understand the past–while sidestepping or even ignoring another: providing people with the context they need to use the sources to explore the past. And as reported by many instructors, students are less interested in reading "the readings" than ever before: which if you think about it, only makes sense. In a world where history is everywhere and nowhere–and in whose production they have no involvement–why bother to think about any one thing systematically or seriously?
The idea behind the SourceLab initiative, then, is that scholars have to address this problem, and that one great way to do it is to carve out an experimental space–a laboratory–within undergraduate education. Building good editorial practices back into students' undergraduate work won't annotate the whole Web of course. But it will improve our ability to respond rapidly and continuously to the new historical records appearing on the Internet. Classroom teachers, researchers, and the public will be able to identify new sources that interest them as they come, and history departments will have an expanded ability to prepare them for use, turning bad, de-contextualized sources into good ones. And by becoming the makers of good source editions, students may well learn to become better and more enthusiastic readers of such documents, appreciating each bit of the past for what it alone has to say.
