Digitalizing Historical Consciousness

I will be honest; I dislike authors who write like Claudio Fogu in Digitalizing Historical Consciousness. As Shakespeare once pointed out, brevity is the soul of wit, and in this essay, Fogu is anything but witty. To me, the purpose of writing is to communicate your ideas. In order for this to happen, the reader has to understand what you have written. Writers like Fogu seem to go far out of their way to insure just the opposite. Consider the following sentence; “Quite grand in scale and endowed with a system that reproduces and modulates the sound of Latin speech, as one is ‘driven’ around the Roman Forum, the digital Forum lacks systematic means to make a ‘rigorous and systematic distinction between proofs and probabilities,’ which (in theory) constitute the epistemological creed of microhistorians.” (Fogu, 114) I will be perfectly honest and say that I have no idea what the author is trying to say in this sentence.

However, I will try to discuss what I believe that the author is trying to say in this essay. I believe that Fogu is addressing the idea that historical simulation is different from historical representation in several key ways. When a person plays a video game, they are not reliving a perfect historical reenactment of a particular event. Take the JFK Reloaded game for example. Although I have not played the game myself, I can assume that there is some sort of learning curve associated with trying to shoot the President. It seems likely that the player generally gets better at it with each successive attempt. In fact, the player is getting better at playing the game and not necessarily better at doing what Oswald did so many years ago. A keyboard and mouse do not behave in the same way as a sniper rifle.

Oswald, on the other hand did not get successive attempts to improve his performance. Likewise, he was holding a sniper rifle and not a mouse or keypad. The video game in this case does not recreate the situation experienced by Oswald. It does however educate the player as to some of the variables that existed in Dallas the day Kennedy was shot. In the essay, Fogu discusses the attempt to perfectly simulate the sun-angle in the simulation of Rome on a given day. Fogu quite correctly points out that the light inside a Roman building on a certain day would have as much to do with the weather patterns [rain, cloud cover, etc.] as would the sun angle at a particular hour. I may be completely wrong about this, but I believe that Fogu is trying to say that in this way, historical simulations may mis-lead as much as they educate.

If that is what the author is saying [and I’m not completely sure that it is] then I agree. However, historical simulation does have its role. You may not be able to simulate the Roman Forum as it was at a particular moment, but you can give the visitor and idea of what is was like in general and leave it up to them to make the leap as to what it was like during a particular historical event. You cannot recreate exactly what Oswald dealt with as he assassinated the President, but you can further educate the visitor of the exhibit or player of the game on some of the intricacies of a specific historical event.