As a self-professed history nerd, I was quite content to investigate the origins of the oft-used phrase, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." I initially read the phrase in David Lowenthal’s book on the practice of history, The Past is a Foreign Country (snappy title, no?), but couldn’t remember the footnoted author who actually wrote it. I said history nerd, not history hot-shot.
Thanks to Google and my book-hoarding tendencies, it took no time at all to discover that the British writer L.P. Hartley introduced the phrase in his 1953 novel The Go-Between. Not having read it, I can’t speak to the context in which Hartley threw it out there. But I can speak (or at least try) to what it means to the emerging convergence of the digital humanities and the discipline of history. I can’t even begin to imagine all of the compelling and exciting ways in which historians will use the digital humanities, but like Anthony Grafton mentions in the New York Times’ first article in its series Humanities 2.0, ”‘It’s easy to forget that digital media are means and not ends.’“ For example, Standford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters (or, as I like to call it, Networking 1.0), is a great visualization of how thoughts and ideas traveled over time and space through letters. It doesn’t replace reading those letters and learning about those ideas, but it maps them in a way that supplements knowledge about how the Enlightenment spread. Basically, the map’s cool and all, but context is everything. So while my biggest hopes are that the digital media will expand the accessibility to historical documents, theories, and methods of practice, thus engaging people from outside the history majors’ clubhouse, I do have some doubts. My biggest fears are that digital media will be touted as some kind of magical passport to this foreign country known as the Past (a place we all want to see, but can never afford), and that the art of making connections and discoveries for one’s self will be lost.
This is an incredibly broad topic and I’m sure that my thoughts and opinions will develop and shift as I learn more about what exactly the digital humanities are, and how they’re making history even cooler. That being said, the past is indeed a foreign country, and we are all illegal aliens. The best we can ever hope for is a tourist visa.