After reading “The Polyglot Manifesto,” by Manan Ahmed, I remembered myself few years ago (and by few I mean three years ago) when I was still a sophomore at George Mason University taking History 100: Western Civilization. Here, the university adopted the new way of presenting history (by graphics and lectures in a video tape), which would be a way to communicate the past-ese in the present-ese’s new technology. My personal interaction with these video tapes did not meet the purpose or the goal of this new way of presentation. I only watched the first half of tape one, and I attempted to watch the rest but never did. Was it my own fault that I didn’t listen to a lecture for an hour without being able to have an interaction with it? Or should I blame it on my generation’s advancement towards another kind of technology?
Well, for Manan Ahmed’s purpose (as he requested), I looked at Jaroslav Pelikan’s last passage, in his article The Historian as Polyglot, where he mentions the usage of computers; he says:
“and thus (to invoke as well an even newer dialect of present-ese, the language of computer-ese) that we are able to ‘toggle’ between past-ese and present-ese –as, I hope, we have just succeeded in doing”.
Here, Pelikan wrote the article in 1993. It was the time when computers where becoming popular and advancing. He was able to see the advancement and suggested that historians should move towards adopting this newest technology and be able to populate history through it.
Now, the newest way of presenting history in the present-ese is by using the internet (or if I want to follow on Pelikan’s footsteps I will call it the language of internet-ese). So, instead of just reading a book, which is still primary, and instead of watching a lecture on a tape, which is unsuccessful, costly, and outdated!, using websites (updated hopefully and interactive) can populate history throughout the world. It is not just about digitization, googling, and tagging, but it is about having an interactive history; for example, using flash, javascript, and other programs to present history in a new light. History is about the past, but studying history does not have to be historic too!
