History Engine

The History Engine (http://historyengine.richmond.edu) is a pedagogically oriented project that captures and organizes “episodes”—concise narratives about often local events (e.g. the burning of abolitionist literature in Charleston in 1836 or the reaction of Chinese immigrants in New Orleans in 1911 to an imperial decree instructing them to cut off their queues)—about the past written by undergraduate students. Instructors at any university are welcome and encouraged to use the site in their courses. First and foremost among the goals of the project is to facilitate an exercise where students practice some of the basic skills of historical research: they analyze primary documents, situate documents within a larger historical context, and compose thoughtful narratives that tell a story about the past and convey that story’s significance. Yet collected together in the History Engine database, these individual episodes amount to more than the sum of their parts, and taken they illustrate the scholarly potential of social software. As thousands of these episodes are written, the site paints a portrait of life in, currently, the United States throughout its history that is both wide-ranging and deep, one that is fully accessible to scholars, teachers, and the general public. More than that, because each episode is associated with metadata—the time and place it happened, tags or keywords that identify the issues addressed in the episode—the History Engine database is growing into a rich vein for data mining and visualization. Episodes can be placed on maps, plotted on timelines, visualized topically in word clouds, etc.—visualizations that aim to reveal larger historical patterns by drawing upon a wealth of material.