Writing About History

I'm starting to think that I'm now two thirds computer scientist and one third historian, even though I don't do any academic level historical work at the moment. I've been doing a not inconsiderable amount of research lately, and am writing various things about history as usual. The thing that interests me about history is not so much the facts and dates, nor the power players and the nations and empires, but more the process of discovery and the warp and weft of every day affairs. I'm more interested in geographical than social history, though the two are of course very tightly interwoven; and on the other hand I'm rather fond of anything antiquarian, including now the original antiquarians themselves.

One point I thought of recently concerning the antiquarians is that they didn't focus very much on their own times, though they did a lot to make sure that traces of the recent past that would otherwise vanish would be saved. I think of people such as Michael Drayton and John Aubrey in this manner, perhaps entirely unfairly. So when I do historical work I wonder whether I ought to preserve more of my own times, and whether it even makes sense to do that given that we live in the information age—we're presumably recording more now than at any other period in history, to the extent that we'll probably be making it difficult for future historians to wade through all the data. If the data even survives that long, of course, given debacles such as the BBC Domesday Project where the data from the 1986 project was unreadable after just a dozen or so years whereas the data from the original book was of course still readable after a thousand years.

Anyway, so the natural consequence of me researching history is that I tend to regurgiate it in the form of writing, and showing things as they were is very difficult because we tend to frame things in modern terms, as is only understandable. For example, we call Newton a scientist even though science wasn't even called that, and the natural philosophy of the time was very different in many ways to our post-enlightenment science, and the separating and scientific honing of disciplines (e.g. Alchemy into Chemistry, Astrology into Astronomy).

I think that some of the design methods that Tufte espouses can be ported over into the realm of history. Show things in context, target high data density, and the like—with design you're often showing things how they were, even if that were was not so long ago, so the same principles quite easily apply to history.

One design method, or perhaps more accurately a construction method, that I often use when designing content rich websites is to put all the information on a single page to begin with until any one section merits becoming so big that it should have its own page. So if I'm interested in a particular subsection, I'll work on it until I can split it off into its own page, then summarise it in place on the original page, with a link to the new location. This means that links don't break, etc., and the overall narrative flow of the original document should be retained. This works best, especially, when the document is already well organised.

As for organising the information in the first place, there's always a big pull towards chronological information in history. This is usually fine, though today for example (actually in researching the Drayton and Aubrey paragraph in this post) I was frustrated in my attempt to find out the name of a particular 17th century investigator of Shakespeare because the facts that the 17th century investigator had found out were the ones by which the information was sorted, and it was harder to recall which period of Shakespeare the later antiquarian found facts about. Eventually I just gave up and used Aubrey, having leafed through some Honan and Halliwell-Phillipps—always fun distractions to be found therein anyway.

So chronological is a good method, but not foolproof. You can't really anticipate the reasons why people are going to be looking up data or otherwise approaching your works, so on the other hand a good approach is to structure the work according to the process of your own discovery of it. After all, are not the discoveries of historians something to later be discovered themselves? This links back to my point about the antiquarians having become part of antiquity themselves now; but it's perhaps best not to get too obsessed with meta-history when just reporting on history itself is difficult enough.