Letters 1916-1923 and the ethics of education in digital humanities projects
challenges of ethics and interpretation
Friday, February 16 at 9:30 AM – 3 PM
Conference Room, Graduate School, Ellen Wilkinson Building, Manchester University, UK
At an interdisciplinary workshop hosted by Manchester University, Monika Barget will talk about the “ethics of education” in the Letters 1916-1923 project and in public humanities projects in general:
In the face of criticism by some professional historians and history teachers that public humanities projects do not meet established criteria of ‘aperspectival objectivity’ (Luc Boltanski), this presentation explains how the Letters 1916-1923 three project empowers its users and volunteers to reflect upon the source material as well as the complex cultural process of ‘creating history’. Contemporary media criticism can be reconciled with theories of emotional learning and active humanitarianism, making public humanities projects a cornerstone of 21st-century historiography.
Please contact the organizers to register for the workshop: livesofletters.wordpress.com
Extended version of the conference paper:
Letters 1916-1923 and the ethics of education in crowd-sourced digital humanities projects, presented by Monika Barget on behalf of the Letters 1916-1923 Project (led by Prof. Susan Schreibman) at the “Lives of Letters” workshop, Manchester University,16th February 2018
The Letters 1916-1923 project collects letters from a comparatively recent and eventful period in Irish and global history. In many cases, the people whose letters we publish have got living relatives who knew the correspondents in person and want their memories to be honoured. But family members are not the only ones who develop deep emotional attachments to the letter writers. As our project is an on-going public humanities project, the users’ exposure to the material is sudden and strong. We digitize and publish letters which might otherwise have been destroyed or forgotten, and many users tell us that they are touched by the life stories of the famous, lesser-known or anonymous people whose letters they read. This individual and immediate confrontation with the objects of our research is inclusive and democratic, but it also raises the question if public humanities projects meet academic ideals of “aperspectival objectivity” (Luc Boltanski).
Above all, the recent extension of our project timeframe from 1916, the year of the Easter Rising, to 1923, also increases the likelihood that we put sensitive or politically controversial material online. Our new project timeframe includes the rise of nationalism in Ireland after 1916, the Anglo-Irish War, and the Irish Civil War between a pro-treaty Irish Free State and forces of the anti-treaty IRA. In 2016, for instance, participants of the German national convention of historians (“Historikertag”[1]) lamented a growing discrepancy between the availability of historical sources in our digital age and society’s inability to “read” history. Are letters written a century ago and never intended for publication always self-explanatory? Are modern readers able to contextualize expressions of misogyny or religious discrimination? Can readers understand the cultural norms of early 20th-century letter-writing if they are no longer familiar with the genre? Fearing that a hard-won academic consensus and institutionalized criticism are ultimately sacrificed to ever more eclectic interpretations of history by Islamists or leaders of the “new right”, many professional historians and history teachers do not want to see public humanities projects such as Letters 1916-1923 replace traditional history education in schools and universities. It is therefore an on-going, interdisciplinary debate if and how historiography may be emotionalized. Public humanities projects such as Letters 1916-1923 can appear methodologically anachronistic – a throw-back to Enlightenment Europe and above all the Scottish Enlightenment, which advocated the necessity of passion and compassion to education and cultural progress. More recent theories – mainly in reaction to the propaganda wars fought in 20th-century dictatorships – have been more skeptical of human emotions and deep personal involvement. In her famous study “The politics of Pity”, political theorist Hannah Arendt, for instance, criticized “spectacles of misery” presented in modern media because they triggered feelings of superiority or strategies of avoidance.
French sociologist Luc Boltanski’s mid-1990s theory of “distant suffering”, however, reconciles contemporary media criticism with a re-evaluation of emotional learning. Tracing philosophical critiques of sentimentalism from the later eighteenth century to the late twentieth century, Boltanski has developed a forward-looking theory of action and commitment, which anticipates what digital humanities are hoping to achieve.
Applying Boltanski’s observations to the scope and material of the Letters 1916-1923 project, I will argue that our users’ active participation in various volunteer roles empowers them to reflect upon the source material as well as the complex cultural process of “creating history”. Luc Boltanski’s central argument is that totalitarian regimes do not thrive because of excessive pro-regime propaganda, but because vast majorities of the population cling to an “illusion of innocence”, deliberately ignoring alternative information about the crimes committed by their governments. An active avoidance of communication and emotional detachment certainly ensured that Nazi Germany could continue arrests and deportations.
The real challenge of media-transmitted events is not that they appeal to their recipients’ emotions, but that they tend to create emotions in isolation. Western audiences who watch reports about suffering children on TV, for example, do not automatically know how their peers react to the same reports and what reaction is expected of them personally. They will only act if they are addressed as “members of a nation whose collective wealth is the result of the exploitation of poor nations” – that is if their isolated confrontation with a certain event is perpetuated and collectivized.[2] Boltanski does not judge these narratives of “causal responsibility”[3] (p. 17) as true or false, but he points out that they are almost always at play if distant and passive spectators become actors, and must therefore be carefully observed. For digital humanities projects like our own, this can imply providing a public forum where experiences and expectations can be discussed and feeling of insecurity uttered. For Boltanski, only an active spectator is a good spectator, and he is critical of an aggregation of things and actions if it neglects the “constitution of groups”.[4] In the Letters 1916-1923 project, we use an outreach mail address, Twitter, Facebook and face-to-face-communication at our outreach events to foster discussion among our users, and we are considering new possibilities of deliberate cooperation among transcribers. This could also help us face the second challenge of people’s personal and immediate encounters with private co