Mobile Apps for Historians - Don’t re-invent the wheel
Originally published at Mike Cosgrave. You can comment here or there.
On #twitterhistorians this morning there is a question from Adam Crymble -” What should a mobile ap for historians be able to do?” which is important and interesting. It is provoked by the fact that there is grant money to spent, in Canada, on such an app for Environmental Historians, and they invited ideas and suggestions. They appear to be going down the road of a portal app, and I’m not sure that is the best thing to do.
Sean Kheraj asks: “What kind of features would you use in a mobile application for environmental historians? Are there important blogs, podcasts, and news sources that we should include in this app?” which looks to me like a portal app, and I don’t like those - too many apps out there are no more than collections of bookmarks or feeds, and no matter how well you do that, it is still just a niche portal (wicked pun there - read Sean’s blog and you’ll see why!). If I was doing that, I wouldn’t spend grant money on it; I’d set it as an assignment for a class of MA students and combine the best elements. To remain useful, any portal app for any discipline needs to be something you can tear down and rebuild every three years as technology, user behaviour and disciplinary perspectives change. The history of grant funding application building in all humanities disciplines is littered with the corpses of tools which became outdated almost before they were complete.
There are a great many tools which all historians use, but trying to develope a better mobile version of X just for historians wouldn’t work in most cases. No one with a modest grant is going to develope a better twitter for historians - money, contrary to official expectations, does not spawn great ideas.
It seems to me that the best starting point for any discussion of what historians need in a mobile app is what is distinctive about our disciplinary ways of knowing, of explaining events? And how, in practical terms do we do that on a daily basis?
What we do is causation, in complex events with multiple causes and incomplete evidence. We mostly work with documents, but really now we can use any bit of data that can be digitised and marked up. Tagging is good, but tagging with proper XML based standards is what we need. Old school research manuals still talk about taking notes on index cards, but I never actually met anyone who did that.
There are tools out there that do the notecards idea (Evernote, Catch notes) and allow external tagging of the ‘note’, but not internal markup with an XML based ontology. There are very expensive (overpriced?) tools which allow you to tag parts of visual, audio or video data. There are tools which allow visual representation of relationships - mindmapping tools like Thinking Space are good for that, and The Brain is awesomely cool but, also, alas, closed source, proprietary software so it is never getting my data. There has even been an effort to create a markup for historical events.
None of these are quite right for historians, yet. They don’t all come together in one package, and they certainly won’t all come together easily in the first version of a 2mb app on a 7″ screen. But it must be possible to develope a cloud based toolkit with a mobile client that will start to move towards that. Something that will allow you to tag parts of your note with an XML based ontology that embodies your causal interpretation, and allows you to visualise the relationships that translate ‘facts and dates’ into knowledge. We are some way short of being able to have the sort of gadget that Asimov envisaged for data manipulation in “Second Foundation”, but since mobile devices will in a reasonable time allow us to project on any flat surface, at a quality that real people can work with, we might not be too far away from it. If you have read Second Foundation, you will remember their little data toy; if not, it is your assigned reading for this week!
Happily, there will be an official announcement in a week or two of a Phd programme in Digital Humanities here in Ireland, which will allow me to recruit someone to have a go at something like this. Watch this space.