Ed Ayers - Futurist of the Past
The digital turn has dramatically transformed our understanding of what constitutes as a scholarship in the humanities. Some subject fields have adapted to this shift more quickly than others. The collaborative nature of born-digital projects is perhaps the greatest source of concern for traditional historians. When a new methodology emerges in an established field, it becomes necessary for researchers to self-appoint themselves as advocates who take it upon themselves to explain the direction and goals of the paradigm shift they represent. One of the uncontested visionaries of the digital history movement is Ed Ayers of the University of Richmond. As Ayers explains in a 2005 reflection on the development of his groundbreaking Valley of the Shadow Project, “Past human experience is as complex as anything in nature and likely much more so in its variability and unpredictability. Studying the past is like studying scientific processes of which we have the data, but for which we cannot run the experiment again, in which there is no control, and in which we can never see the actual process we are describing and analyzing” (Ayers, 93). He goes on to explain that the only way to rise above these institutional challenges is to develop better instruments. According to Ayers, “Just telescopes redefined stars and microscopes redefined cells, so might we be able to use digital tools to gain a deeper and more precise understanding of the patterns of complexity in human behavior of the past” (Ayers, 93).
It is with this perspective in mind that we can begin to analyze the overarching themes and ideas of Dr. Ayer’s oeuvre. Similar to the other giants of digital history such as Roy Rosenzweig, Daniel Cohen, Bill Ferster, and William Thomas III, among others, Ayers is a traditionally trained historian who from an early period in his career realized the potential that digital scholarship bore. In What Caused the Civil War?, he describes the inspiration behind his decision to create a cross-comparative study of two communities during the Civil War that were separated by the Mason-Dixon line, but less than two hundred miles. While at the University of Virginia he proposed a project that would examine the similarities and sympathies of the citizens of Augusta County Virginia and Franklin County Pennsylvania, in an effort to redefine previous conceptions of the wartime perspective of individuals living along the border region between the Union and the Confederacy. As he reflected on the scope and scale of the project, “with its close attention to millions of details, its determination to find patterns in masses of scattered records,” Ayers realized his project “would be perfect for computers” (Ayers, 71). The end result was the award-winning Valley of the Shadow Project. The multimedia nature of the project creates a fascinating intersection between a wide array of ephemeral sources ranging from maps, photos, music, newspapers, diaries and letters, census and tax records, and muster rolls to name a few. The result is a research project rooted in hypertext theory and an excellent embodiment of Jay Bolter’s “hyperlink theory.” Although users are able to navigate through the bevvy of sources and construct their own narrative based on their interests and findings, researchers in the early edition of the program had a more difficult time in accessing specific items of interest. In a 2003 review of Valley of the Shadow and its corresponding CD-ROM, Richard Lowe recommends, “an overall search ability would have enhanced user access to the nearly 600 mega-bytes of information” (Lowe, 430).
The comparative size of The Valley of the Shadow and it’s 600 megabytes, along with the limited micro-history perspective it entails pales in comparison to the breadth of Ayer’s latest endeavor, A Digital Atlas of the United States. This project compliments the vision of John K. Wright’s idea for how to enhance Charles O. Paullin’s 1932 Atlas of Historical Geography of the United States. Wright suggested, “The ideal historical atlas might well be a collection of motion picture maps” (Schulesser). Ayers describes Paullin’s atlas as “so far ahead of its time” in the way “it suggests how people use geography” (Schulesser). In the spirit of Paullin and Wright’s visionary work, the University of Richmond is currently developing a decade-long mapping project that will utilize the latest GIS mapping tools to create, “A historical atlas that enfranchise the entire nation” (Schulesser). One cannot help but be overwhelmed with anticipation of the end result of Ayers’ current endeavor. Over the past three decades he has continually proved himself to be one of digital history’s greatest visionaries.
Ayers’ 1999 article “The Pasts and Futures of Digital History” is infused with a number of portents of what was to come. In this short article he more or less predicts the coming of “hypertextual history,” which would manifest itself several years later in the form of Wikipedia (Ayers). In a 2003 article he co-authored with former Valley of the Shadow colleague William Thomas III, they both argue a compelling case for born digital volumes and the application of electronic articles. The stated goal of introducing this radical new process of publishing historic scholarship was intended to “open the process of scholarly inquiry, to allow readers not only to confront our argument but also to work with its evidence and its constituent parts” (Thomas and Ayers). This mindset has since manifested itself in an array of born-digital volumes and projects, most notably Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki’s groundbreaking e-book Writing History in the Digital Age. The colorful career of Ed Ayers without question serves as a fascinating and essential inspiration for members of the second generation of digital scholarship. In following the rhythms of his career and the insightful projections of the latest developments in the subject field, historians are able to grasp the endless array of possibilities that the application of digital tools provide in the present and future.