So why use this site as a blog, when it will eventually turn into a more polished digital project? Why should a historian write in such an informal fashion, sometimes even to share incomplete thoughts?
When my student Fletcher Warren and I tried the same tactic ten years ago, the summer before we published our digital history of Bethel at War, I opened our research blog by asking if there was anything markedly different about doing history digitally. So let me start this post where I started that one, by quoting Sherman Dorn’s chapter in an open-access book on digital history…
For Dorn, the sheer diversity of projects clustering under the heading of “digital history”
uncovers history as more than a polished argument about the past. Presentation of historical scholarship as an argument presumes a finished product. But most time spent on historical scholarship is messy, involving rooting through Hollinger boxes, begging someone for an oral history interview, coughing through a shelf of city reports or directories, rereading notes, drafting manuscripts, sorting through critical comments, revising, and so forth. A published work does not materialize from a vacuum, and all that preceded and underlays it is legitimately part of historical work. Public presentations of history in the digital age reveal the extent of that “preargument” work, often in an explicitly demonstrative fashion or allowing an audience to work with evidence that is less directly accessible in a fixed, bound presentation. Digital history thus undresses the historical argument, showing that all our professional garments are clothing, even those not usually seen in public.
This blog very much fits Dorn’s “preargument” theme. Before we’re ready to present anything like a polished product, Fletcher and I are using this forum to share first impressions of sources, to think aloud about questions as they emerge and develop, to keep a record of our research, and to invite participation by readers in the middle of the process.
Likewise this fall! Sometimes I’ll also engage in what Dorn called “nonargument scholarship,” using the blog to share artifacts and events before I’m ready to interpret their meaning. But it’s the “preargument” idea that still seems most important to me.
I’ve been blogging in one form or another since 2011, and almost always with the idea of using that kind of writing to “think in public.” Not just for my own sake, to help me work through my conclusions, but to help “undress the historical argument” and make it more visible for a public that increasingly distrusts academics. As I argued in a 2019 blog post for Patheos,
To think in public is to confess uncertainty in public, to reveal ignorance in public, and to make mistakes in public. That’s hard enough for anyone who’s tempted to treat expertise as the measure of their professional ability, but it’s especially worrisome for Christian scholars whose work already invites the scrutiny of suspicious constituents.
But not thinking in front of such publics is riskier. Keeping private what we do only invites misunderstanding and distrust; it just deepens the “distribution problem” separating us from the rest of the church.
That’s an especially important consideration for this project, since it’s not just institutional history, but public history — done not just by one Bethel professor about other Bethel employees and students, but for and with the people of Bethel.
If I’m going to dredge up historical versions of present-day debates or critique how the university or its denomination behaved in the past, then I want to do whatever I can to warrant the trust of community members — by inviting them into the process by sharing feedback here, but also by making the work of historical research and interpretation as transparent as possible.
One goal of this blog is to help involve members of the Bethel community in doing the history of Bethel, so comments are always welcome! Just know that if you leave a comment at the project blog, I’ll take that as expressing your permission to quote it in the project.
The Women of Bethel 