Current Research in Digital History

I was interested in the History of Early American Landscape Design project, which was reviewed in the most recent issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities (March 2023, v.4, n. 3) by Ann E. Komora. The goal of the project is to, essentially, make connections between descriptive language and descriptive imagery to see if they match the same early American gardens. As Therese O’Malley, project director for the History of Early American Landscapes DH site, explains in an article posted on the “about” page of the project,

“The goal of this digital resource is to study the decisive or original meanings of words found in authoritative texts, such as treatises, and to compare them with depicted and actual examples in order to understand the extensions, variations, and derivative meanings that arise through use. We can extrapolate from these clues to gain a more complete understanding of individual landscape features and the appropriate vocabulary to describe them….In this search for organized meanings, this website focuses on two bodies of primary materials, one literary and one visual.” (The Evidence of American Garden History)

The project stems from Keywords in American Landscape Design, (O’Malley, Yale University Press, 2010), in which O’Malley pioneered the concept of using keywords to link images and written descriptions of gardens. Using MediaWiki and Zotero, the website allows others to contribute to this work, with an end result that makes it feel as if you are scrolling through an unusually well-written Wikipedia article on the subject. The funding is provided by the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., which, of course, is a national institution that is able to provide ample funding for website maintenance, continuity issues, etc.

As Komora points out, the site does a good job of providing information on the political and social contexts of each landscape and landscape feature, making the site fairly straightforward to navigate on. However, the problem of collecting and organizing data, of course, always has pitfalls, and Komora mentions that it could be annoying to scroll up and down from the material to the citations. Additionally, Komora brings up that, despite the best efforts of the historians involved in the project, the places represented were largely owned and “designed” by white people of considerable means. This, of course, is a problem of what material culture survives and what doesn’t, as well as the larger issue of Indigenous and Black folks being unable to purchase or hold land on which to build leisure gardens.