Virtual Sesquicentennial: #Invasion63 Goes Live

I teased this project a short while ago, and now that May has arrived history has begun coming back to life. Over the next three months, the men and women who walked Gettysburg's streets and crossed the Pennsylvania College campus will reenact their lives in the last few moments before Gettysburg changed irrevocably. As May creeps along, more characters will rise from the grave and begin reliving the past.

But this reenactment isn't about goofy clothes. It's not about marching around and pretending to shoot at one another in a grotesque weekend fantasy. It's not about action at all.

This reenactment is all about thought, particularly the thoughts of men and women 150 years ago. What was their life? What did they experience? And how would they have shared that had an iPhone been in their hands in 1863?

This is a virtual reenactment of Pennsylvania College's battle.

And it all began when Adams Sentinel editor Robert Harper joined Twitter 150 years too late:

@AdamsSentinel kicked things off with a few headlines.
Then Lieut. James F. Crocker of the 9th Virginia Infantry came back to life to celebrate Robert E. Lee's victory at Chancellorsville. And then he and the 9th Virginia began a march northward from Suffolk to join Lee in #Invasion63.

@real_JCrocker jumped on celebrating Lee's victory at Chancellorsville.
As the month goes on, professors will complain about too many faculty meetings, students will look forward to their graduation in August and one Gettysburg citizen will tag along as Pennsylvania College's students march off to war. Classes in the summer session of 1863 begin next week. Stay tuned to Twitter, both via the hashtag #Invasion63 and the master list of #Invasion63 accounts hosted by Pennsylvania College's official Twitter account.

Tweet along with history.

Because the past will haunt your keyboard this summer, but only if you let it.

Big Interp: Processing Massive Meaning

The past uses the future
to see the past.

There's been this term bandied about in the historical circles I've been running in of late: Big Data. As far as I've gathered, it's the byproduct of our information age, when more and more data gets fed into more and more machines and is accessible at the fingertips of more and more inquiring minds.

But I'm not a new social historian. I tend to aim for the micro-historical, not the grand and sweeping systematic conclusions. It means that much of what I produce is ignorant of this new boon for the historical profession. I make, as Brian Jordan lovingly put it once, "brick-in-the-wall histories." My work is the basis upon which, when joined with that of hundreds of my comrades, helps folks like the soon-to-be Dr. Jordan make broad structured conclusions.

I actually love that role. It means that what I do has deeper impact, but that I don't need to fuss with those broader conclusions quite as much.

But the follow on from my role as a brickmaker is that I understand the value of big data, I just can't understand the mechanics of big data.

But I am starting to imagine the scale of Big Data through Big Interp. What does an interpretive project look like when it grows into a massive, sprawling beast? I've been working on one of those projects for nearly a year and a half now. Imagine trying to figure out the inner workings of dozens of peoples' everyday lives 150 years ago, their comings and goings, their ideas, thoughts and beliefs, their fears and thoughts. It's impossible, but not. Tracing people on a landscape becomes far easier than you might think, trust me.

So the project is starting to coalesce. Big Interp, what it means to craft a highly complex web of meaning, which virtual visitors can "pluck" from any individual thread and see the reverberations, just might happen. If all goes well, you'll want to make sure you have a Twitter account by early May. You'll want to make sure you're ready to watch history unfold. You'll, hopefully, be able to relive the Gettysburg #invasion63 through a few curious observers' eyes.