September 23, 2004

Technology makes history

Multidisciplinary class of history and computer science students creates electronic essay on Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago

By Wendy Leopold

When Daniel Burnham showed his 1909 Plan of Chicago to the city’s business elite who commissioned it, he presented a proposal that influenced Chicago development for almost a century and remains a landmark in American urban planning.

Looking north on the south branch of the Chicago River. Showing the suggested arrangement of streets and ways for freight by boat at different levels.

Last spring Burnham’s document was the focus of an innovative, multidisciplinary class at Northwestern that attempted to accomplish by putting together students of history and computer science what they couldn’t accomplish alone.

Called “Using Technology, Making History,” the experimental class was taught for the second time by urban historian Carl Smith and Brian Dennis, assistant professor of computer science and journalism. Its goal was to work toward the creation of an electronic essay about Burnham’s Chicago plan that made full use of the multi-media capacities of the Web and would serve as an entry in the online version of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Chicago.

Smith, the Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of American Studies, has considerable experience doing scholarship on the Web. The curator of two historical Web exhibits for the Chicago Historical Society, he found the extended experience of working closely with computer specialists in Academic Technologies one of the most exhilarating in his career.

“Using Technology, Making History” was an attempt to provide a similar experience to undergraduates in the humanities and computer science who were interested in learning how to effectively do and think about scholarship for presentation on the Web.

The 1909 Plan of Chicago by Burnham and his design associate Edward Bennett proved an ideal subject because its illustrations and relation to the history of Chicago’s built environment offered rich possibilities for the kind of multimedia presentation and analysis at which the Web excels.

What’s more, the Chicago Historical Society and Art Institute of Chicago generously digitized crucial resources in their collections on or relating to the 1909 plan.

The interpretive digital essay about the Burnham plan that evolved from the class made use of primary sources from the plan itself as well as photographs, maps, documents, letters and illustrations relating to the plan and the development of Chicago.

For example, the students explored a wealth of materials regarding the publicity of the plan, including meeting minutes of the Chicago Commercial Club, newspaper reports, Burnham’s own speeches and the Wacker Manual of the Plan of Chicago which was required reading for students in the city’s public schools.

The online essay on the Burnham plan includes text, galleries of digitized primary source materials, and rich “electronic maps” or “cornerscapes” that could never take shape in print format. Dynamic maps, for example, will allow “digital readers” the opportunity to visually compare the recommendations of the 1909 plan with the realities of Chicago’s built environment today and at different periods during the last century.

“The most gratifying thing about the class was the extent to which the computer science and history students worked together,” said Smith. Computer scientist Dennis agreed, admitting that at first the professors imagined their students would fall into two distinct and separate camps.

A self-described “technology wonk” who is interested in information dynamics on the Web, Dennis initially envisioned the class “as the geeky, tech types that think with their left brain versus the technology-averse, right-brained historians.”

The students, however, defied those stereotypes. Many of the computer science students showed an interest in historical research while some of the historians had a sophisticated knowledge of computer technologies.

Katy Schumaker, an American Studies major in the class, nevertheless saw the class as a meeting of two different types of minds. Although computer literate, she had never before been involved in Internet presentation or developing an interactive Web site and doing so proved to be not only educational but a good deal of fun.

“It was fun to be in a class with students who normally are studying totally different things from the things I study,” said Schumaker. “Even if we didn’t know how to implement it, when we had an idea about presenting content on the Web, we were encouraged to discuss it.”

Having both a professor of history and of computer science, added senior Schumaker, “was great because we never felt limited by the things we didn’t know how to do.”

“The course opened each type of student to a different perspective on scholarship,” computer scientist Dennis explained. “Computer science students learned what it is to ‘do history.’ Students in the humanities got an introduction to new, very exciting ways of presenting historical arguments and documentation.”

To participate in the class history students were required only to have a knowledge of word processing and the Internet. “We didn’t expect them to have fancy technology skills. Many wound up having them, many learned them, but they didn’t need them because they worked in small groups with students from both disciplines who combined their skills,” said Smith.

Like the Chicago Historical Society and Art Institute, libraries, museums and cultural institutions around the country are making commitments to digitize collections. And they are doing so not only with an eye to preservation but also with faith that scholars will create valuable new practices from the close examination of primary source materials in a digital environment.

“Using Technology, Making History” is one step in defining those practices, according to Bob Taylor, director of Northwestern’s Academic Technologies. Taylor and his staff have worked with the Encyclopedia of Chicago online team at the Chicago Historical Society for more than two years.

At Northwestern, the professors and students in “Using Technology, Making History” came to view the alliance between computing and history as a natural extension of both disciplines that holds remarkable promise. Each field is invested in designing good “information architectures,” organizations of content and technologies that will better enable people to make sense of historical information.

As the tools for authoring and publishing content directly through a Web browser improve, computer scientist Dennis envisions a future in which more primary materials are available on the Web and better technology tools exist for working with those materials. “I look forward to a time when amateur historians and history buffs may bring untold aspects of Chicago’s rich history to light and tell the city’s story in exciting new ways,” he said.