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from Wired magazine, may, 1998    
          I N T E R V I E W  |  Issue 6.05 - May 1998
        
 Pixeling Dixie

    Edward Ayers isn't just bringing the Civil War to the Web - his online
    archive is changing history.
    
      By Amy Virshup
      
     Edward L. Ayers is still fighting the Civil War. For the last seven
     years, the University of Virginia historian and his team of grad
     students have been creating The Valley of the Shadow, an
     "intentional archive" on the Web
     (jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/). The Valley lets users
     straddle the Mason-Dixon line, following the inhabitants of
     Staunton, Virginia, and Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, before, during,
     and after the conflict. Along the way, scholars, Civil War buffs,
     and the simply curious can move from almost 4,000 pages of
     digitized newspaper articles to transcriptions of the 1860 Census
     to tax records to registries of free blacks to the compiled service
     records for both Union and Confederate soldiers to VRML battle
     maps. (W. W. Norton is publishing The Valley, a CD-ROM/book
     version; part one, The Eve of War, is due later this year.) Ayers
     hopes The Valley, in whatever form, will lead to a new
     reconstruction - not just of his story of the war, but of history
     itself.
     
     Wired: Why change the way we think about the Civil War? 
     
     Ayers: We have contradictory notions about the conflict that we
     carry around in our heads. We know that it was a horrible time, a
     brothers' war of massive death and destruction. But we also have
     the other story, that we went through this ordeal to emerge a
     better people, that it was a crucible of American greatness. That's
     the part I have trouble with.
     
     This sounds like the same "narrative illusion of a seamless story"
     you tried to shatter in your 1992 book The Promise of the New
     South. With The Valley you're trying to change the rules again.
     How? 
     
     Even a historian can be hostage to the way we've learned about the
     war. We have in our minds these Currier & Ives prints. Of course,
     battlefields aren't "battlefields" - they're a railroad cut, or a
     wheat field. Or somebody's yard. It's made me understand how deeply
     the war penetrated every single part of society. Everything's
     connected to everything else.
     
     The past has been increasingly popularized by television, the old
     "new way" of doing history. How has TV shaped our thinking? 
     
     Each medium, even each way you tell a story, forecloses certain
     opportunities. Ironically, people think of television as a step
     toward digital information, but in terms of narrative it may be
     even more linear than print. With a television screen, you feel the
     need to tell a story. A story necessarily starts somewhere and goes
     somewhere else. You can't stop it, you can't branch off of it, you
     can only go where it leads.
     
     In The Civil War, for example, Ken Burns has foreclosed the
     opportunity for you to have your own thought. Burns met with us
     when he was in the final stages of his Jefferson film, and he told
     us that he doesn't want people constructing their own stories. He
     wants people to look at an image for just as long as he thinks
     necessary, to hear just the music he wants them to hear - and it's
     art. We have a more constructivist idea of how you might make art.
     
     So there's no narrative to The Valley? 
     
     There is a story: the war comes and sweeps all these people up into
     it. But you can also make your own story through the process of
     triangulation - comparing fragments from a diary to an article in
     the newspaper and then connecting that to the Census. While, alone,
     those might just be inert information, combining them somehow
     electrifies all three. And it may be a story that you are the very
     first person to have seen.
     
     What have you personally discovered? 
     
     People on the project kid me for loving the three-dimensional maps,
     but that comes closest to what I envisioned from the beginning:
     kind of like the Holodeck on Star Trek, with so many coordinates of
     space, time, and other humans that you could imaginatively locate
     yourself in that world. The Valley is trying to give you enough
     ordinates to get your bearings in this place we call the past.
     
     More information and more access certainly "democratizes" history.
     But isn't something lost when you can rewrite the past with a click
     of the mouse? 
     
     Life is short. People are curious about the past, but there's a
     finite amount of time they'll spend living in the past unless they
     have a passion for it, like I do. In Promise, there's a moment when
     a boy listens to a lynching on the first Edison talking machine. I
     still recall finding that story: sitting in the Georgia Department
     of Archives and History at a formica table, flipping through
     someone's old typewritten memoir, "Memories of a Presbyterian
     Picnic," or something like that, and all of a sudden saying, "Whoa,
     look at that!" I still get chills up my spine.
     
     Part of The Valley's purpose is to enable that passion, that moment
     of excitement. To say: Here, in a couple of hours, see what it's
     like to be able to piece the past together, and the great
     satisfaction of making a pattern from what looks like the chaos of
     the past. Or making what looks like a simple assertion about the
     past complicated. The main thing is to see the past through your
     own eyes and not have to take someone else's word for it. Whatever
     cost comes from speeding it up and putting it behind glass I'm
     willing to pay.
     
     Even if it means strengthening the voice of, say, the KKK? 
     
     What makes history different from other disciplines is the almost
     superstitious belief in evidence. I have faith that the historical
     record is capacious enough that no single argument, of whatever
     sort, can withstand the weight of overwhelming evidence.
     
     Has the digital revolution accelerated this process? 
     
     The greatest obstacle new media faces is its own hyperbole. As a
     historian, no matter how postmodern I might be, I don't throw
     around words like "revolution." A railroad is a revolution. Is this
     a new railroad? Is this just TV on steroids? We don't know yet.
     We're in the crystal radio stage of this technology, the kinescope.
     
     So what's the future of history? 
     
     Think about what an old typewritten letter looks like to us now.
     Email, though it now seems transparent, will look ridiculously
     antiquated at some point. Historians will find our handprints all
     over this stuff. They'll see humanity struggling to use new tools
     in what may seem a crude and affecting way. That's one of the
     things historians discover: We're always in history, but people at
     the time never recognize it.
       ______________________________________________________________
     
     Amy Virshup ([log in to unmask]) is a senior editor at SmartMoney
     magazine. She wrote "The Teachings of Bob Stein" in Wired 4.07. 
     
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