History in Pictures
John Dower is using the Internet to change how we look at the past
By Mara E. Vatz

If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine the power of a thousand pictures. John Dower, the Ford International Professor of History and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is using the Internet as a kind of slide projector to make available hundreds--soon to be thousands--of images that previously had made only limited public appearances in classroom slide shows, museum exhibits, or textbooks. Not only is Dower's project changing the way we look at images, but it has the potential to change the way we view history.

The project began three years ago, when Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa, professor of linguistics and Japanese, received seed money from the Alex and Brit d'Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in MIT Education to explore new ways of using technology to teach humanities. They used the funding to develop Visualizing Cultures, a new course that abandons textbooks and slides in favor of a compelling and innovative website where students can view images from Japanese history--Dower's area of expertise--accompanied by interpretive text. More than just a history class, the course addresses broad questions about how historians can use visuals to understand the past. And because the site is hosted on MIT's OpenCourseWare, Dower's work is freely accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.

Now, thanks to a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the New York City-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Dower will be adding up to five new units to the Visualizing Cultures site over the next three years. The grant, which is part of a Mellon Foundation initiative to deepen and extend humanistic scholarship, will also enable Dower to spread his ideas beyond the halls of MIT through collaborations with other educational institutions and museums.

Images as Historical Texts
Some of the images featured in Visualizing Cultures' main "exhibit," Black Ships and Samurai, are woodblock prints, paintings, lithographs, maps, and scans of historic documents. Together, they tell the story of U.S. commodore Matthew Perry's mission to Japan in 1853. The pictures come from scattered sources--museums, rare books, and private collections. Physically displaying them together would be next to impossible, and publishing them in a book would be exceedingly expensive, says Miyagawa. "So we needed a different outlet for this kind of content, and the Web is the obvious choice," he says.

But, Miyagawa adds, "We don't just put visuals there and hope that the viewers will get it. John Dower wrote this remarkable analytical text that teaches you how to see the visuals." Indeed, the images on the Visualizing Cultures site, unlike those in a conventional history textbook, are not just illustrations of the text; they are also its subject. "You can look at visuals as what we call texts," Dower says. "You look at them to see how people at the time viewed their world." Where an art historian might concentrate on the high art produced during a particular historical period, however, Dower is interested in more-common, everyday images; those on the site allow students to explore issues of racism, war, and nation-building in a way that would be impossible by any other means.
The site is also a case study in how to organize and display vast quantities of visuals. In a section of the website devoted to images of Perry, Dower juxtaposes Japanese woodblock portraits of the commodore with American photographic portraits. In one well-known woodblock portrait, the whites of Perry's eyes are blue--a detail that might easily be overlooked were it not for Dower's supporting text. He explains that "Westerners were sometimes referred to as 'blue-eyed barbarians,' and it is possible that some artists were a bit confused concerning where such blueness resided." Or, he goes on, Perry's eyes may appear blue because "in colored woodblock prints in general...ferocious and threatening figures such as monsters and renegades were frequently stigmatized by the same strange blue eyeball."

With the Mellon Foundation grant, Dower plans to expand the Visualizing Cultures site by adding up to five new units. Two, Yokohama Boomtown! Life in Treaty Port Japan and Ground Zero 1945: Drawings by Atomic-Bomb Survivors, are already under way. Dower and Miyagawa will also continue working with MIT's Academic Computing division to develop better ways of organizing the images, making it easier for students to sort through troves of visuals.

Dower hopes that other institutions will use his website as a template for creating their own online exhibits, and he and Miyagawa are working with Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to establish a site similar to Visualizing Cultures using materials from the museum's collection. Dower says that adding images and text to a searchable database and displaying them online in this format will give a sense of permanence to otherwise ephemeral exhibits.

Though Dower himself is far from a technophile, he sees the value that technology can add to the study of humanities--and vice versa. "We keep talking about this being the information age, and the question is, what's the content?" he says. "So much of the stuff up there is junk, and much of it is disorganized." Dower hopes to bring a sophistication and richness to the Internet and in the process enable students and the general public to reconsider how they think about culture and how they look at the world.