Where WTF? Meets A-Ha! — Nowsliding & DIY Personal Digital Cultural Preservation

Inter-generational Storytelling Can Trigger Noncorporeal Time Travel… It’s Back to the Future for the Rest of Us

I want to tell you two stories of how I learned about the nature of Time and its role in shaping our personal memories and interpretation of Events that are steps along the path of both our own Lived Experience and the Great March of History…

If we were cultural heritage preservationists or #DigitalHumanities researchers, we might turn to the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model created and maintained by the International Council of Museums for its formal ontology so we could all talk together about the (E5) Events, (E52) Time-Spans, (E53) Places, (E21) Persons, and (E70) Things that document our cultural heritage.

But my purpose here is not to dive further into the fascinating Deep Weeds of how “the experts” talk and think about the nature of Time and its impact on our memories and interpretation of Events. Rather, I want to relate two tales — one of 10-year-old Lil’ Jimmie and the other of Old Man Jim — to provide a personal perspective on what might otherwise be an abstract or academic topic of exploration.

Story #1: Lil’ Jimmie, Age: 10 or so…

I had my world rocked as a youngster by my maternal grandfather, Newton Reed Henderson. Newton was our family’s “Steampunk Geek” ancestor known only to me by his “leavings” — photographic equipment, homemade stereopticon lanterns, hand-crank motion-picture cameras, innumerable musical instruments, personal diaries and photo/story albums…and shelves of well-worn books despite his having just a 4th grade education. These were the #cidocCRM’s E24 Physical Man-Made Things by which I got to know my Grandfather Newton.

Given that I may have inherited a strong dose of Newton’s intense focus on self-motivated learning — a trait that led to far too many hem- and sleeve-tugging questions — my parents and Newton’s widow, my Grandmommie Julia Henderson, were happy to send me off to Julia’s garret to sift through the voluminous “cultural artifacts” that were Newton’s possessions. This unleashing of my curious mind into a veritable Smithsonian of Newton was undoubtedly a clever rouse by my elders wanting to have a few moments of peace and quiet during our Sunday afternoon visits.

On these “garret-diving” occasions — once I had learned to read — I would flip through Newton’s many photo/story albums, especially the ones with photographs he took on assignment for the Baltimore Sun newspaper. Though taken on behalf of his newspaper employer, Newton then made copies of his favorite pictures to create personal photo albums annotated with his “back-story” commentaries. One afternoon, I flipped a page and was smacked in the eye with an image that made my head spin.

The Picture That Rocked My (Kids’) World was an image of General Sickles, the great Civil War general, who played a significant role in the battle of Gettysburg.

In this picture, General Sickles is being wheeled to the stage for the commencement of the Great Gettysburg Reunion of 1913. What sent my head in a spin was the clear evidence in this picture — a famous Civil War general was being wheeled to the stage by soldiers who were clearly in World War I era “doughboy” uniforms!? WTF!@!#$%??? Seriously, if my little head could have exploded, it would have.

Let me try to put my 10-year-old thinking into perspective. At my short-lived, innocent age, here’s what a “lifetime”—my lifetime—looked like when compared to the “Century-size” compartments that were conveniently used to introduce young minds to the Great Story that is told through the Study of History.

How easy and reassuring it was to plop the Big Events of History into their respective Century-sized “event boxes.” The Civil War with General Sickles was smack dab in the middle of the 19th Century “box,” while World War I, with its Doughboy-uniformed soldiers, was definitely in “my” current 20th Century “box” — horses and muskets were “so ancient” compared to tanks and machine-guns.

It would be a while yet before I dwelled on the horrific thought that I would be a decrepit old man of age 50 (!!!) when the amazing would happen… when we would transition from the 20th to what would surely be Buck Rogers’ 21st Century of our SciFi Future!

Within the limits of my lived experience at that time, human generations where distinct layers, like the rings of a tree, each clearly demarked from the other; kids, adults, and old folks. It would be years before I learned and appreciated how generations are ill-defined and overlapping; that a single lifetime could span so much History… that General Sickles would one day be wheeled on stage at a Civil War Reunion by WWI-era Doughboys.

Little did I know that almost sixty years later I would be learning another powerful lesson about our personal perception of Time and of the Events that are found along its path.

Turns Out I’d Been Nowsliding & Didn’t Even Know It

The #cidocCRM Conceptual Reference Model for Museums gave me an entry point for understanding how deeply #DigitalHumanities scholars think about and pursue new knowledge about the nature of Time, Events, and the People and Things that “pass through” and interact “within” them. But this ontological lens on our perception of the March of History (both of historic and personal proportions) is only a thin slice into the depth that serious #DigitalHumanities scholarship and research has taken this exploration. To better understand how #DigitalHumanities scholars and researchers think about Time and Events, and the March of History we find ourselves square in the “meme-space” that is #eResearch and #eScholarship.

“You nowslide, too, when you imagine and project the future or interpret and recall the past.” — B. Nowviskie

In her groundbreaking dissertation, “Speculative Computing: Instruments for Interpretive Scholarship” (U. of Virginia, 2004, #OpenAccess PDF, 14 MB), Bethany Nowviskie describes “nowsliding” and its emergence as a core concept in the work of the Temporal Modeling Project:

“Nowsliding is a neologism for an interpretive exercise all of us undertake constantly — on which, to some degree, our understanding of ourselves and of our lived experience depends. Likewise, it is an exercise intimately familiar to students of imaginative literature and other content areas in which subjective interpretation of time and temporal relations is a shaping factor. The Temporal Modelling Project defines nowsliding as the subjective positioning of the self (or of any interpreting agent such as a fictional or historical personage or perspective) along a temporal axis and in relation to the points, events, intervals, and inflections through which experience is classified and time made meaningful. You nowslide when you picture your world at the present moment and, some ticks of the clock later, again at another ever-evolving present. You nowslide, too, when you imagine and project the future or interpret and recall the past.”
 — Bethany Nowviskie, Digital Humanities Ph.D. dissertation, U. of Virginia 2005 (bold added by me, here, for emphasis)

So it now seems that the mind-blowing experience of my first sight of Newton’s Sickles/Doughboy photo was a nowslide-induced whiplash experience that gave Lil’ Jimmie the insight I needed to adjust my 10-year-old understanding of Time, Events, and the Great March of History. I needed to see how generations overlap, how Actors in historic Events may lead lives of Century-leaping Time-spans, to understand the Ripple Effect of the not-so-distant Civil War echoing into the experience of those who would soon endure the First World War.

This first Nowsliding Tale explored how Century-size “historical boxes” and multi-generational time-spans can confound the subjective experience of an impressionable 10-year-old boy. Part 2 of my Nowsliding Tales documents a nowslide-induced facepalm experience and is found in the W&L Tall Tales publication here on Medium.