mediated history

These articles were all about authenticity and accuracy, with the most interesting being Photography as a Weapon.  I never really understood how many things could be altered in order to mislead people for a variety of reasons. I mean, I kind of knew about them separately, but the article illuminates how  easy it could be to intentionally deceive people with little to no effort, as well as the troubles we have doing accurate authentication, since the forgeries can be forged so easily and so well.

The Wikipedia video about the additions to the Heavy Metal Umlaut was great.  The article itself is such a “pop culture” focused article that I don’t know how people would fact check it, and it seemed like half of it was people adding and removing interesting, yet trivial, information.  The most interesting part f the video was how many times he went through revisions and there were large chunks of vandalized text.  Not just misinformation, but vandalization for the sake of ruining the article.  By now, everyone knows that Wikipedia is an amazing platform to start looking at a topic, as long as you follow the links to more scholarly and specific articles or journals, but this video shows how much effort it can take to create a clean, accurate article on the internet.  It also shows how this work needs to be constantly checked on to prevent people from ruining the article, which is a new dimension for historians who work with the internet.  Wikipedia might be a special case,since it’s open to contributors, but with electronic documents instead of physical ones, the possibility of someone tampering with historical documents could become a real possibility.

This brings together two different problems historians can face when authenticating.  Of course, photography in our time is not constant, and pictures are fabricated all the time, but we have come to see this as a possibility and we become skeptics  much easier when seeing things on a computer screen.  Physical copies command some sort of authority, but interpreting those images or documents is a real possibility, and having a skilled forger make a fake physical copy of something, like the fake Hitler ledgers, can fool people for years with no one in place with the authority to correct it.  There is a huge, famous incident where this happened in physical anthropology, motivated to spread misinformation and promote racist ideas too, it’s the perfect example.  In the early 1900s, British scientists were trying to find the ancestors of humans, but no one was looking in Africa or Asia because they assumed that, because whites were so dominant in their times, the human ancestor would have to have come from Europe since they were  so well off.  After about 20 years of digging up random spots in England, they decided to alter a chimpanzee skull and claim it was from a place called Piltdown in East Sussex.  It was pretty clearly a forgery, but anthropologists are so inclusive and scholarly that the Piltdown Man, the fake skull they created, was never questioned until 1953,  which was like 40 years after the nationalist and racist misinformation about human evolution spread all through out western civilization.  So, while people are extra skeptical about information found online, it is a good idea to check the non digitized versions as well.

~ by aledere1 on September 17, 2012 .