The challenges facing digital history
As technology becomes more powerful, more accessible, and more widespread, discussion regarding digital history and its place in society becomes more frequent. Some recent articles, such as the Times Higher Education website's mildly downbeat analysis, have highlighted concerns regarding the ultimate aim of digital history and – equally important – its intended audience (or “impact” and “outreach”, as the article describes it). And whilst there will always be a place for the more specialised service and powerful research tools aimed at academics, researchers and students working in a particular area, in every service, whatever the audience, a key component of digital history is and must continue to be accessibility. Widening an individual's access to history, whether that individual be a specialist or a member of the public, has to be a defining aim in the construction and delivery of the service.
The cornerstone of history will always be source material. For centuries, individuals studying a particular period were obliged to seek out their sources in archives, museums, and private collections, wherever these were found: Mohammed would go to the mountain, and those who could not found their access to history severely limited. The advent of digital history, driven by the spread of internet access and accelerating bandwidth speeds, means that today, access to sources is no longer limited to the individual with the money and connections to visit far-off or closely-guarded repositories. Digital history is the democratisation of history. The Fondation Napoléon's digital library features over sixty rare and out-of-print publications that can be consulted and downloaded entirely free of charge. Napoleonica.org now has hundreds of digitised files taken from Napoleon's correspondence with Bigot de Préameneu, Vivant Denon archives, and proceedings of the Conseil d'Etat, all of which are fully-searchable and again, freely accessible. And although fee-paying and somewhat muddled in its target audience,1 the British Newspaper Archive, which contains around three million newspaper pages digitised by the British Library, allows users to rediscover and relive the stories and concerns of any day between 1620 and 1900.2
With accessibility however comes the issue of usability. It is no longer enough to make historical material available: users accessing the service need to be able to do so with ease. In releasing into the public domain fabulous, previously restricted troves of material, some early services (highlighted by the Times Higher Education article) appeared to forget the end-user experience, with limited searchability, baffling site construction, and a general lack of communication. These flaws are particularly important when the issue of public funding is raised, as in times of economic hardship, value for money and relevance come to the forefront. The democratisation process, if done properly, should not lead to debasement – the dreaded “dumbing down” of history to suit the lowest common denominator – but rather its vulgarisation. Greater access to the building blocks of history can only improve society's understanding of who we are, where we come from, and indeed, where we are going. There is no greater thrill than the thrill of discovery, and digital history can do more than anything else at this current time to encourage the spread of such a historical experience. The “enlightenment effect” of history must be the driving force behind the digitisation process. At the same time, the thrill of discovery can encourage us to step away from a uniquely tactile enjoyment of a historical object – what it is made of, who owned it, how old it is – which can at times dominate a public's access to history (particularly here in France), and focus once again on its content and the insight into our history that it can provide. Digital resources liberate the content and discourage fetishism without discarding a user's emotional engagement with the source. And ultimately, engagement with history is what we are all trying to achieve. History does not exist in a vacuum, as a dull collection of dates, deeds and deaths, but rather as an interaction between what has been, what is now, and what will be. Technology has made the world smaller. And technology is in the process of making history less a domain for the initiated, and more an ever-wider gateway to understanding the society and indeed world in which we live.
Since 1996, the Fondation Napoléon has been dedicated to delivering an ever-widening range of digital history services: napoleon.org, a website offering articles and resources of historical interest to all users, academic and general public, remains a centre for Napoleonic interest on the internet. But napoleon.org is just one weapon in the Fondation Napoléon's digital armoury.
Napoleonica.org
Mindful of the importance of primary sources in understanding history, the foundation undertook to digitise a number of archive collections, each of which is freely consultable and searchable. Napoleonica.org, in partnership with the French Conseil d'Etat, Editions Lamy and the RMN, offers five original collections: Vivant Denon's administrative correspondence; previously unreleased administrative documents from the Conseil d'Etat during the First Empire; previously unpublished correspondence between Napoleon Bonaparte and his Minister of Religious Affairs, Bigot de Préameneu (with annotations from Jacques Olivier Boudon); the Houdetot album, a collection of 225 portraits sketched by the young Conseil d'Etat auditor, Frédéric-Christophe d'Houdetot; and documents relating to the proclamation of Empire. Thierry Lentz has frequently argued the importance of this last collection: in his article “Napoleonic legitimacies and the proclamation of Empire”, he points out that the transformation from Consular Republic to Empire was entirely legitimate. The basis for this constitutional legitimacy is consultable and dissectible in all its minutiae via Napoleonica.org. More recently, 200 years ago in bulletin n° 611 of the napoleon.org newsletter was put together using the firm foundations of the sénatus-consulte of 13 March 1812, also available in full, via Napoleonica.org.
It is, however, worth devoting some words to the approach necessary in order to access these texts, particularly as the portal is almost exclusively available in French. Primary sources should be the basis for all historical research, be it amateur or academic, but it is no secret that Napoleonca.org was developed primarily with researchers and history professionals in mind. Taking for an example the sénatus-consulte on the Garde Nationale (see our YouTube video for a walkthrough), the first step is to access the “Informations” page and choose the Conseil d'Etat collection. From the subsequent page, the “Recherche détaillée” allows the user to launch an advanced search query. “Recherche plein-texte” consults the contents of the texts stored in the database, and the keywords “garde nationale” were inserted into the search field. Date ranges (using both the Republican and Georgian calendars) and the sort criteria can also be set (pertinence, chronological or reverse chronological), so users can ensure that the search results that are returned are focussed. In this case, the date range 1 March 1812 – 31 March 1812 was used. Once the search results have appeared, the list can be narrowed further using the category filters available at the top of the screen – in this particularly example, only one collection was consulted, so the results were already filtered to a certain extent. The one document returned in the list was the one required: “Projet de décret sur l'Organisation de la Garde nationale”.
Napoleonica. La Revue
The second component – offering a complementary analysis service to the primary source archives – to Napoleonica.org is Napoleonica. La Revue, the Fondation Napoléon's academic international review, available for free via Cairn.info. The review is now into entering its fourth year, with eleven issues released and nearly one hundred articles and reviews in English and in French.
The Fondation Napoléon Digital Library
The recent development in mobile media devices – ranging from tablet PCs via e-book readers to multimedia-enhanced smartphones – has presented a convincing argument for the merits of digital resources, and in particular digital books. As capacity has increased and weight has decreased (the latest, fourth generation keyboard-less version of the Amazon Kindle has a two gig flash-drive and weighs just 170g), digital book sales have exploded. Amazon recently confirmed that it now sells more digital copies of its books than hard copies3 whilst global ebook sales are expected to be worth $9.7 billion in 2016.4 The Fondation Napoléon Digital Library now features two sections: one offers access to more than five thousand Napoleonic documents found on the internet, and the second is a digital repository for the documents that the Fondation Napoléon has digitised. The search engine includes documents taken from the Fondation Napoléon's archives as well as items uploaded by other libraries and archive centres, including France's Bibliothèque Nationale, the Spanish Biblioteca Nacional and Brown University Library's Center for Digital Scholarship. The search engine has a simple interface, allowing the user to specify the document's author, title keywords, and the document language. Those looking for John Augustus Atkinson's watercolour print of Napoleon's retreat from Leipzig can very quickly find its online location using the search engine.5
As well as developing this search engine, the Fondation Napoléon has also digitised a number of rare and out-of-print documents taken from the archives. With well over fifty documents, ranging from offprints, almanacs and reference works to maps, illustrations and doctoral theses produced by the Fondation Napoléon's study grant winners, the repository is an excellent way of consulting some of the harder-to-find works of Napoleonic history. Moreover, the majority of these documents are consultable via our online ebook reader with a powerful, integrated zoom function. The beauty of the Livre du Sacre, with its highly detailed sketches and descriptions of Napoleon I's coronation ceremony, is magnificently realised and users can zoom right into the busy crowd scenes to find three men in attendance, chatting amongst themselves. Details of the full utility of the zoom function can be found in a short article on napoleon.org. Offprints, our latest additions to the library, are available as PDF files that can be downloaded and read on the user's computer or mobile media device: some of the more eye-catching documents digitised include E. Letellier's curious treatise on the “origins” of Napoleon Bonaparte's name (“Encore une singulière Découverte : d'où vient le nom de Napoléon et celui de Bonaparte, les deux noms alliés ensemble depuis 2500 ans, prouvé par un grand nombre de monnaies gauloises de l'ouest de la France et de l'île d'Albion”), and a certain army surgeon's “Réflexions sur la mort de Napoléon, suivies de quelques considérations sur l'empoisonnement”, particularly topical in the French press at the moment.