Thread by @DrSCutrara

Hi All!
Thankyou to @PMTC2021 for organizing this #PandemicMethodologies conference. I look forward to engaging more this weekend!

My name is SamanthaCutrara & I am a HistoryEducationStrategist -not a historian!- &th4 come to the convo thinking about ways to mobilize the past.

Today my tweet contribution to the #PandemicMethodologies is called:
"‘We’re time travellers, people!’: The ghosts of wonder, administration, and audience in working with digital sources"

I am going to tweet about three topics related to thoughts on 'time travelling' and history:
1. The wonder and access re online sources
2. The work involved with digitizing
3. The audiences (we imagine) for presenting this work

#PandemicMethodologies

The idea for this #PandemicMethodologies contribution came from a tweet thread I created last October, related to a cemetery I visited in Barrie ON and how the research I did afterward took me from Barrie to Scotland to India and to my backyard in Toronto.

https://twitter.com/DrSCutrara/status/1320906894660243456

I thought about this more analytically after reading Avery Gordon's "Ghostly Matters" (@UMinnPress).

Gordon explores "ghosts" and "hauntings" in the historical/sociological imagination as a "dense site where history & subjectivity make social life" (8)

upress.umn.edu/book-division/…

When I thought about the research I could do in my apartment - (for us all with stayathome restrictions) - I thought of the ghosts haunting that work.
Ghosts of access and digitization.
Have we exorcised our wonder at being able to do this work at all?
#PandemicMethodologies

The worked involved with the digitization and access of historical sources is enormous:
finding
stabilizing
digitizing (ie placing on &waiting for a scanner)
uploading
creating infrastructure for
developing metadata
transcribing

are all included.

#PandemicMethodologies

Where do we place and narrate this work, this human labour, in our use of historical records?
Use of = Analysis, exhibition, teaching, etc

#PandemicMethodologies

How can we make the "social life" of these docs and our use with them more visible than 👻 in our work?
Especially when they are the only sources we use
#PandemicMethodologies
[Gordon: "ghosts" & "hauntings": the "dense site where history & subjectivity make social life"(8)]

Also, what of our own labour?
Few ppl interacted w my thread bit.ly/3qru0Xs

Does it matter it took me 1hr+?
& I spent the time bc I imagined a large(r) audience?

How does who/how we imagine our work speaking to influence how/what we speak?

#PandemicMethodologies

How has this changed during the pandemic when we all (like it or not) became #digitalhistorians and #onlineteachers?

Are we haunted by the idea public access/audience?
(We are💯haunted by traditional scholarly access/audience too, of course!)

#PandemicMethodologies

We can travel across place and time w/ online sources made available by many people.

Why arent we reveling in this AMAZING thing we are able to do?
Why arent we revealing all the work that has made this so?

How can doing so ENHANCE our historical work?

#PandemicMethodologies

BC we all encountered more online work during covid...
I think that highlighting what is left unsaid, or unseen, in our work may invite new considerations for how we engage in doing history – research, teaching, curation, etc – in our (post)pandemic world
#PandemicMethodologies

I encourage engaging in the work of #digitialhumanities if you are intrigued by these ideas.

This could help you get started:
pressbooks.library.yorku.ca/dhssinstructor…
I REALLY encourage creating a #metadata assignment for your students to think more about this!

#PandemicMethodologies

I have found the idea of (post)pandemic really useful to flag how even when its "over" it will not be "over" - This has forever become part of generational memory.

How can we use this rupture to engage differently in future history?

We'll all be haunted.

#PandemicMethodologies

Many thanks again to @PMTC2021 for organizing this #PandemicMethodologies conference!

Happy to take any questions, comments, gif reactions etc!