Hello Jeremy, That is a good question, and something that history students tend to pick up on a craft basis. Here are some of my personal practices. I don't claim that they are authoritative, but they are within the mainstream. When presenting quote from an oral history or memoir I always introduce it in the text as "X later recalled that," "Towards the end of her life, Y claimed that," or "Decades later, Z told me that." I try to do that every single time I take a quote, fact, date, or detail from an oral history unless I have been able to independently verify it from original documents. That may seem clunky, but oral histories are very much less reliable on factual detail than primary sources and I believe the reader deserves to know the difference without having to dig in a footnote. Particularly if the footnote lumps together multiple sources so the reader can't be sure which information is from a later memory. That's one of the things popular histories don't do. For example, Isaacson has a passage where he says that during the 1945 preparation of the "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" Eckert and Mauchly asked "why von Neumann seemed to be preparing a paper based on ideas that others had helped to develop," to which Goldstine replied that the First Draft was JvN "just trying to get these things clear in his own mind." If I was writing the passage I would make sure that reader knew if this allegation and the reassurance were quoted from letters written at the time or from a memory recorded many years later after a hugely divisive decades legal struggle with Eckert and Mauchly lost. I'd also make it clear whose memory it was. If Goldstine reported this then I'd view it very differently from if Mauchly said it. This is not something I'd flag as an error, just a difference in craft between scholars and journalists, but I think it's illustrative of why readers (and historical subjects) deserve some flagging of where quotes and claims come from. How to deal with errors? That depends on how prevalent and important they are. For example, I mentioned in passing in an earlier message that Isaacson says the ENIAC ran its first calculations for Los Alamos in October 1945. He probably got that date from Jean Bartik's memoir, which makes the same error but is basically in the same category as an oral history. She's remembering things years later, but not doing any archival research to check the details. Sources like that are good for personalities and color but terrible for dates. When we make final revisions to our ENIAC book I don't think we need to mention either error as the correct date is still more commonly given. Also as we reference the ENIAC service log book and Isaacson and Bartik don't reference anything it should be clear to readers which is the more reliable claim. We don't want to come up as pedants cluttering our text with attacks on everyone who ever got anything wrong about ENIAC. (I still wish Isaacson had bothered to check though, as a lot of people will read his book). Here's an example of an error we did need to deal with in the text. In his classic book _The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann_, Herman Goldstine gave September 16, 1948 as the date when ENIAC first ran a program in its new EDVAC-like programming mode. Goldstine checked a lot of dates and details in his book, and his wife Adele Goldstine was one of the people who planned the conversion. The actual date was 30 March 1948 for a test program (or 17 April for a useful one). People who love arguing about "firsts" care about the difference between September and March because the Manchester Baby ran its first program in June 1948. We care about it because if Goldstine was right then hundreds of details in our book wouldn't make sense. So we mention that error in the text, as it's a consequential one for our own story and Goldstine's mistake has been widely repeated. For example, as of now, it is still wrong on the Wikipedia page for ENIAC. The error also played a part in how the history of ENIAC has been understood over the decades. To his credit, Isaacson got that date right, though he immediately spoiled things by crediting ENIAC with an imaginary delay line memory. There are other errors which deserve to be flagged in a footnote but not to clutter the text. One example of that: the back cover and online description of Bartik's memoir claimed that "In 1946, Bartik headed up a team that modified the ENIAC into the first stored-program electronic computer." I had some doubts about the usefulness of the "first stored program computer claim" and our own account demonstrates that "headed up" is an exaggeration. We did not bother to dispute those in our book -- people have their own opinions and our readers can judge. On the other hand 1946 is clearly the wrong year, even with reference to the book's own text. People might reasonably expect Bartik to be an authority on her own career, so we acknowledge the discrepancy in a footnote and I also mentioned it in an interesting exchange with Tim Bartik, her son, who believes that his mother's memory was infallible. I notice that the press has updated the online description to say 1947 rather than 1946, so this exchange actually did some good. Finally there are differences in interpretation with other scholars. These may deserve to be made explicitly, and help to explain why your new history changes our understanding of history and makes us see things quite differently from the work of professors A, B, and C. The different interpretations may rest on what you believe are errors or omissions in their readings of sources, but differences in interpretation are often more important and less clear cut than factual mistakes. Best wishes, Tom -----Original Message----- From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy C. Reed Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2014 10:19 AM To: members@sigcis.org Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] how to document history mistakes? (was Re: Issason, Acknowledgements, and Crowdsourcing) On Wed, 8 Oct 2014, Mike Willegal wrote:
Though we are lucky enough to be able to talk to many people that experienced the events, first hand, I have found that interviews done 30, 40 or 50 years after the fact is fraught with the difficulty of people remembering exactly what happened. Many people ?remember? what has been most frequently reported over the past decade or so. Researchers in Civil War history have found the same thing and are more and more relying upon contemporary evidence such as journals, newspapers and letters.
For the book I am authoring, I started keeping track of mistakes, such as wrong dates and misspelled names, in my sources, including from previous "history" articles and books and my own interviews. I have found only around 20 mistakes. In some cases, I have found that my interviewees have misstated facts and dates (in most cases from the events they personally participated in the 1970s and 1980s). I have gone back to the interview subjects with my other cited facts and they have agreed with me, but they state that they don't remember. Some of the mistakes are in the contemporary documents (such as misspelled surnames in court documents) or history papers having wrong dates or misarranged chronologies (such as saying some software was invented after it was shipped) even when only a couple years removed from the events. Do you have any advice on how to document history mistakes, so later researchers don't hit the same issues -- or so later historians don't follow the wrong path? Some ideas I have considered are to add footnotes or comments to my bibliography that explain that the cited source or even sources misspelled some name or stated a wrong date and then explain briefly where the correct or assumed correct details came from. I don't think I want to explain about the mistakes in the content itself as it will be distracting. A different type of mistake is where someone acknowledges someone more significantly than they deserve or maybe more than the recipient believes. In other words, taking more credit and giving more credit than is due. For example, for over 30 years, for a software technology, various "stories", corresponding release notes, and histories said a developer had invented the work. When I interviewed him, he told me he didn't know why the developer who really did the good work gave him the credit but he wanted me to be clear in my work that the other person was the proponent and key inventor behind the technology. I wasn't able to interview the other person, but since my contact did fully partipate in this software technology, I plan to use his version of the story. Explaining about the different versions of the story may be distracting in my book. (But also thinking about it from another view -- maybe both of them wanted to credit the other.) For what it is worth, the person who documented the credit is well known for acknowledging many others in his detailed software release notes, interviews, and documentation. It has been very useful for me to find others to interview -- but in many cases, they told me their work was insignificant. I guess some people like to give credit to many others for their own work, which may cause mistakes in history. How do you document history mistakes? Jeremy C. Reed echo 'EhZ[h ^jjf0%%h[[Zc[Z_W$d[j%Xeeai%ZW[ced#]dk#f[d]k_d%' | \ tr '#-~' '\-.-{' _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members