In the 2009 January/February addition of Atlantic Monthly an article (End Times, by Michael Hirschorn) described the current dismal state of the New York Times (the flagship of American newspapers) and other newspaper stalwarts:

“The thinking goes that existing brands–The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal–will be the ones making that transition, challenged but still dominant as sources of original reporting. But what if the old media dies much more quickly? What if a hurricane comes along and obliterates the dunes entirely? Specifically, what if The New York Times goes out of business–like this May?”

With more than $1 Billion in debt, $46 million in cash reserves (as of October) and $400 million in debt coming due, it seems that Wall Street Investment firms and banks aren’t the only bankrupt entities in New York. It is very plausible that the NYT will cease to exist or change its structure dramatically (such as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette no longer delivering print addition beyond a certain radius). It may just come back as a digital newspaper (remember this) or sell off its other assets to hold off its creditors. The NYT isn’t the only financially strapped paper (Seattle Times, The Tribune Company, and countless others). Regardless, the coming year will be froth with change in the newspaper world. So, with the impending doom and gloom, is there a chance for newspapers to survive. The answer is yes and its comes in the form of a Shakespearian quote, “what’s in a name.”

What do I mean by this? Simply that major newspapers have something blogs and other web 2.0 generated entities do not provide, name recognition and continuity. The NYT bridges the gap of paper and digital. People are comfortable believing something that used to be in paper and that now is in digital. Linguistically, the NYT and other major newspapers have already framed and controlled the argument of validity by having their names equating with some aspect of truth, because of their longevity and continuity.

This leads many people to associate the NYT as a concrete symbol of truth, that also espouses what I call, “truth of fact.” Truth of fact is the ability to cognitively create a culturally belief in which an entity can be trusted to report an existence of an event, person, place or thing. It doesn’t mean that it can tell us causality or how factually true every aspect of such a report may be, just that what it reports happened or that it exists. (Now some people will argue that it can do both, that is not the point of this blog.) It also creates an organic relationship with society as opposed to a simply positivistic one. The new forms of newspapers (blogs) cannot create in a matter of a few years, what took newspapers decades. So, what are we left with?

In order to survive newspapers with name brands will move completely over to digital and cut off their more expensive paper editions (the nytimes.com is already one of the top 5 online new sources). Once they move their revenue generating to web advertisements and devote themselves to a complete web product, most large newspapers will do fine, granted probably in a much smaller scale.  This in many ways is a good thing, as newspapers will be forced, to some extent, concentrate on quality reporting, such as investigative news (that really no longer exists). News bloggers I believe will resemble free-lance reporters (if they don’t already), who will benefit from the name recognition of being associated with a major newspaper.  By becoming reliable and trustworthy news sources, some bloggers will enjoy the elevated status that comes with seeing their story linked from the NYT home page or any other major paper. In addition, I would not be surprised if major news outlets will not be treated with some preference by large search engines.

Now none of this may happen and we could be left with no newspapers. However, if such a scenario were to happen, I don’t believe we would have information news anarchy for very long. People and society tend to strive for some level of order in all things. The new technology is causing, like all previous societal technological transformations, the taking out of the old and bringing in of the new. It happened with the introduction of the car, radio, and television. How this societal change will play out is anyone’s guess but as an archivist, I look forward to seeing how we not only maintain the old but how we deal with the new information mechanisms.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpbGmTSVZeM]

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For the last five months, the Archives Staff has been creating ocr’d pdf’s of all the Jambar Newspapers (1931-present). The first stage of the project was to have all the Jambar Newspapers scanned and put in pdf files. The second stage had the archives staff take the images and apply optical character recognition to each issue: which allows for each issue to be completely searched. Once that was completed, the staff uploaded the images to Dspace for immediate viewing. The third and forth stages (yet to be finished) of the project will see the creation of tiff images and meta-data, with an in depth abstract analysis, which will be added to each issue on Dspace. Click on above image to go to the Jambar Archives.

Coinciding with the African American Delta Heritage Archival Project, we are making available two digitized recordings concerning the experience of African Americans in Youngstown during the Depression. As we move forward with this project, we will be making more recordings available. The following are the two selections from the oral history collection (Courtesy of the YSU Oral History Department):

Rev. Lonnie A. Simon and the Depression Experience

Edward J. Stonework and the Depression Experience

One part of this presentation was a series of posterboards of different sizes, each containing photographs, news clippings, and biographies prepared for the presentation, as well as other ephemera relating to thirty-nine African Americans who have made contributions both locally and nationally, spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Local groups and institutions of pertinence, such as the McGuffy Centre, were also highlighted. This collection was graciously loaned to the Archives & Special Collections of Youngstown State University’s Maag Library in 2008 to be digitized and made publicly available online.

The biographies compiled by the Delta Heritage Project form a community portrait when viewed as a whole. We can see the story of a group of people who fought with determination and dignity to attain the equality upon which the United States of America was founded. Given our nation’s troubled history, this struggle naturally could be expected to appear as a common thread throughout such a collection as this. In a more general sense, however, we see people who lived their lives. In total, the Delta Heritage Project is a picture of human life, complex and multi-faceted, set against the backdrop of our city.

On an individual level, these aspects reveal themselves to be diverse, as well.  In archival practice, records such as those that make up this collection are arranged thematically into specific categories, called series. For the Delta Heritage Project, the biographies were processed by the series “Persons by Occupation,” with several different occupations (such as “business” and “media”) serving as subseries. The process of defining a person in this manner can be a difficult judgment to make. The breadth of experiences of many of the individuals profiled by the Delta Heritage Project is that more boldy underscored when posed with the singular question, “What is this person’s occupation?” For instance, Herb Washington appears in the subseries “Business” as the owner of twenty-one local McDonald’s restaurants and the Steelhounds hockey team; however, he was also a professional baseball player and has long been involved in politics, from protesting the lack of black officials and faculty as a student athlete to serving on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Youngstown Chamber of Commerce. Dr. Ron Daniels is placed in the “Arts and Letters” subseries for his vast scholarship, but he is also the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights–and even ran for President of the United States in 1992 as a third-party candidate. When reading through the biographies created by the project, it becomes clear that community service alone could be rightly applied as a category for most of the people being commemorated. In addition to being lawyers and laborers, businessmen and broadcasters, however, they were also soldiers, protestors, scholars, volunteeers, actvists, athletes, role models, and more.

The materials preserved in the Delta Heritage Project Collection offer inspiration and information that is candid and close-to-home. In this collection, one sees that individual lives are truly the basis for “community.”

Additional resources of pertinence available through Maag Library and the YSU Archives include:

Delta Heritage Project Finding Aid

Delta Heritage Digital Archive

Delta Heritage Project Exhibit Page

The following links are to articles from the Jambar Digital Newspaper Archive (Courtesy of the Youngstown State University Archives).

Hugh A. Frost named executive director of the McGuffey Center

Edna Pincham breaking ground for new honors facility at YSU

The following links are to oral histories dealing with African-American migration to Youngstown. (Courtesy of the Oral History Department at Youngstown State University).

Katherine and Governor Bowers, interviewed by Michael Beverly

Mary Albron, interviewd by Michael Beverly

Leroy and Ethel Adams, interviewed by Michael Beverly

Erskine Crenshaw, interviewed by Michael Beverly

Ernest Rheins, interveiwed by Michael Beverly

McCullough Williams, Jr., interviewed by Michael Beverly

Herbert Armstrong, inteviewed by Michael Beverly

Reverend Lonnie Simon, interviewed by Michael Beverly

Isadore Blakeny, interviewed by Michael Beverly

Edward J. Stonework, interviewed by John A. Parker

Reverend Lonnie A. Simon, interviewed by John A. Parker

Frankie Halfacre, interviewed by Michael Beverly

Oscar Handlin opens his essay, “The Uses of History,” by saying that the world has a desire for facts, for knowledge, and also for reassurance and relevance.  This need for reassurance and relevance can be a problem for historians seeking the truth.  Historical data becomes distorted as historians try to meet these demands. To make the past usable, to “solve the world’s problems,” historical data has to have a scientific approach, a formula.  Historical truth is NOT influenced by the desires or visions of the viewer.  Historical truth is evidence.  This evidence forms a record; the record is the truth.  Oscar Handlin says evidence is chronological, evidence is vocabulary, and evidence is context.  He says without a record, there could be no “counting of time, no reading of words, and no perception on the context, and no utility of the subject.” Fact is something of common ground for all historians despite the difference in their interpretation.  Scientific methods must be used to distinguish between fact and opinions.  Handlin warns the historian to be careful of the difference between fact and interpretation, and confronts the arguments of falseness in historical truth.  Such is false when influenced by external pressures (as in Stalin’s imposition on Russian history), when opinions get involved with evidence, when information is manipulated for convenience, when the distinction between fact and interpretation disappears, and when it becomes a means to an end of someone’s preconceived notions instead of arriving to the truth based on the evidence alone. All these external pressures and choices are the basis of William McNeill’s opinion of historical truths or myths.

McNeill’s essay, “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians,” emphasizes the falsehood of historical truth, seeing history as evolving through the discovery of new data and exposure to intellectual choices and subjective judgments on the arrangement of historical facts.  These judgments and choices have nothing to do with scientific methodology.  The scientific method of finding historical truth is meaningless and is of no use to the historian. Unlike Handlin, McNeill believes all the “evidence” becomes nothing but a catalogue; it has to be put together for the reader in order to be understandable, credible, and useful because facts alone do not give “meaning or intelligibility to the record of the past.”   Everything evolves, causing emphasis on what is important to change.  Previously important facts become “background noise” while others remain constant.  This picking and choosing of facts is what makes history elastic and evolutionary.  Every culture has its own version of truth; truth about its own culture as well as the “truth” about other cultures.  Truth to one is another person’s myth (mythistories).  Therefore, all these outside forces of culture, background, relationships, society, etcetera, affect what is true whether the individual realizes it or not. Because of this, history tends to be biased and, according to McNeill, the past is influenced by the way an individual wants it to be.  History (or myth) becomes self-validating.   What historians need to do is to view history and group identities on a more general scale. Specialization with a focus on documents should be avoided.  Historians need to view history as ecumenical and parochial.   It evolves as groups evolve.  The main important figure he states is “ever-evolving mythistories will indeed become truer and more adequate to public life, emphasizing the really important aspects of human encounters and omitting irrelevant background noise more efficiently so that man and women will know how to act more wisely than is possible for us today.”

This is what makes history interesting and dynamic, not static.  It makes for new and fresh versions of history.  How one views historical truth can influence his or her outlook on events and people in history. Can history be based on science and knowable things (Handlin’s chronology, words, and context) or can that even be manipulated by the people of that time because it reflects their “truth,” which can be other’s “myths”?   What about things which are “common ground” to historians and people?  Everyone can say “Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.”  Is this based on scientific evidence or is it an evolution of an important fact that didn’t become “background noise,” whereas some other facts may have? Is history true? Such is not up to the historian only, but also to the reader’s interpretation of the historian’s interpretation, which is all influenced by theories of historical truth.

Over the last several centuries the primary focus for diplomatics has been the document and all of the elements that it embodies. Diplomatists have used the document to analyze the relationships between it and persons, procedures, functions, acts, and the overall system that creates them. In essence the study of diplomatics is akin to using the inductive method of philosophy to analyze a specific subject or area without any previous notions or ideas (a-priori), such as what a botanist or biologist might do. So, instead of imposing some sort of meta-theory on to a body of documents or records (such as the macro-functional approach does) the archivist uses only what is available to them (for further reading on the meta-theory and empirical debate, see my previous post on this subject, Postmodernism and Logical Positivism in Archival Thought).

Duranti divides her work into six sections: first explaining the origin and nature of diplomatics; secondly, describing the relationship between fact, act, and the function of documents; thirdly, discussing the public and private nature of documents; fourthly, elaborating on the procedures of document creation; fifthly, how to actually analyze a document, and concluding with the further uses of these tools.

Throughout her book, Duranti creates an argument for the superiority of her method (as opposed to macro appraisal) based upon the empirical study of documents. “It is by studying the form of documents objectively, that we come to know and understand the administrative actions and functions generating them without prejudice.” All documents have extrinsic and intrinsic elements that help an archivist not only appraise the document itself but draw conclusions about the contextuality of how, where, and why those documents were created.

While this method has been accused of being radically empirical (and its followers of being logical positivists, running very much against the predominanting postmodernist philosophy), this form of analysis does give the archivist “objective” tools, enhancing his ability to not only analyze documents but to understand the context in which those documents were created. However, these tools like everything else, is limited by the person wieldying them. No amount of mechanisms can eliminate the subjective form from any analysis.

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