This reflection piece discusses the project Feeling the Past, which I created during the spring semester of 2020. The project was part of the module History in a Digitized World (DigiZeit) by Martin Dusinberre and Daniel McDonald, tutored by Leyla Feiner. DigiZeit is an exclusive module for students of the master's degree History of the Contemporary World / Zeitgeschichte at the University of Zürich.

I will assume that the reader has played Feeling the Past recently. This can be done on the Lives in Transit website here. In the paper—after a brief description of the thought process behind the project—, I reflect on selected challenges and essential insights and contextualize them using contemporary literature to gain new insights for writing history in a digitized age.

Objects and the Source Selection of Historians

During Summer 2019 I completed an internship at the Historisches und Völkerkundemuseum St. Gallen (HVM), where I encountered a large number of fascinating objects and histories, but a significant lack of academic writing thereof. I also observed that at least the teaching at the University of Zürich if not also at other universities focuses strongly on textual sources, which for example is reflected in the Grundlagenpapier (Universität Zürich, Historisches Seminar, 2013). The Grundlagenpapier aims to serve as the basic methodological groundwork for young historians studying in Zürich. Yet, in chapter 6 titled "Quellenkritik und Quelleninterpretation" the focus almost exclusively lies on text as source (p. 38ff). Similarily in chapter 7, "Einführung in die Quellenkritik / Quellenanalyse"—even though there is a specific section for "Bilder / Artefakte"—most of the content of the section relates to using images as sources and only very little instructs the reader how to work with objects (p. 42f).

Objects often tell different stories or stories closer to the people of the past. If a historian is for example interested in the history of psychiatry, they would first and foremost consult the writings of patients, nurses, and doctors, detailing the experiences of key actors. But if they also examine the medical equipment used, suddenly new actors outside the conventional medical sphere appear; people like the hypothetical seamstress who created the straitjacket shown in the game. This important part of history is lost when disregarding objects as historical sources. This motivated me to create a project which tackles these issues and comments on the source selection of historians.

Based on my observations, I found two key reasons for the current situation: accessibility and lack of awareness. In comparison to most textual sources, more information is lost representing objects digitally. In general, they already can be considered more demanding to gain historical insights from, so the digital representation of an object confronts the historian with more challenges than text. Text-based sources are more convenient in a digital environment and will therefore be reproduced and used more frequently. As already illustrated, working with objects is only marginally taught in university and up until recently historians have perceived close work with objects part of other disciplines rather than their own "toolkit" (Findlen, 2020, p. 271). Thus reaching out to collections or museums and using their objects as sources is only rarely considered by students, who later become researchers and teachers. Knowledge of the contents of collections, similar how one might be aware that certain documents are in a specific archive, is a rare occurance. This contributes to the fact that objects are not as present in the mind of the historian during the source selection.

The goal of the game Feeling the Past is to illustrate the possible benefits of working with objects as sources to motivate historians to consider a wider range of sources in their future work. It tries to achieve this by bringing historians into contact with objects to see their possible benefits for themselves. In essence, its goal is to accomplish what Peter N. Miller described in the conclusion of his book "History & Its Objects" (Miller, 2017, pp. 200/201):

What I learned in that instant was that our histories are deeply connected to objects. Of course, I could have learned this from books, but in the end I learned about the power of things from the things themselves.