1. Methodological Handbook

What is microhistory? Microhistory takes a specific look at a place, person or event in history that illustrates or explains larger themes in macrohistory (conventional history). In microhistory, we study habits and routines rather than deliberate actions, underlying mentalities rather than explicit views. For microhistory the exception is more interesting than the rule, including the everyday, the overlooked details – all this that can prove to be as important as the "grand" recognized history. This is why the sources of microhistory (diaries, letters, photographs, oral stories etc.) are many times ambiguous as they reflect a polyphony of voices.

Why is microhistory important? Certain political events and social realities cannot be explained adequately by existing macro historical models. Historical accounts do not speak for the experiences of all members of the event, society, or culture being studied. The individual becomes thus the centre of microhistory accounts, in contrast to macro-history where the focus is on groups/society as a whole. Due to its analytical and narrative approach, microhistory can subvert hierarchies established by political views and historical traditions.

Did you know that… Microhistory, as a distinct approach to scientific historiography, grew out of wider post-war concerns about the failings of Western modernity while also contributing to the overarching project of a “history from below”. Led by a group of Italian historians, it gained traction in the ‘70s and received its international breakthrough in 1980, when Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms was first translated into English. The book has since appeared in over two dozen languages, making microhistory – or at least Ginzburg’s take on it – a truly global academic phenomenon.

Starting your microhistorical investigation. Microhistory starts with a concrete case study (person, place, event) that is being closely explored. This process that is guided by microanalysis (putting the case study under a microscope) and agency (condensing and sharpening the topic through ownership), enable to ask different questions than mainstream history. Neverteless, there is not one established method for conducting microhistorical research. This methodological guidebook includes 4 methods inspired by artistic research and film/media studies that due to the critical and investigative way in which they treat their subject matter, can fruitfully be deployed for a microhistorical investigation. The chosen case study for the exemplification of the 4 methods is ‘Anne Frank house’.

2. Journaling/diary

What is a diary: The diary method collects qualitative information on a historical theme by having participants record data about their everyday experiences. When participants record their observations/perceptions in the moment, we learn something different about their experiences than might be gained from other methods.

How to create a diary:

Keeping a diary is not only for personal purposes. It can prove an effective instrument to explore and note down impressions of places, people and events connected to the historical theme you are investigating. In doing so, the diary enables you to approach your topic from a different angle, which addresses better the needs of microhistory, as it is more reflective and personal. Keeping a diary does not have to be dull and you can go beyond the paper format, using ipads or even your phone/existing apps. Organising your diary about your historical project might be tricky, so a few essential steps need to be followed.

1. Planning and preparation

Define the focus of your research and the long-term phenomena that you need to understand. Define a timeline, select tools to capture data and organise work.

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE: Decide on thematic focus, historical phenomena you want to investigate, the timeline of your diary and tools you will use to collect data.

2. Implementation

Keep records in your diary throughout the agreed timeframe. You can use a variety of tools to record your impressions and experiences of places, people and contexts related to the historical theme you are investigating:

Walking

Walking helps to explain how place is conceptualized, theorized and materialized. So, if your topic deals with a historical place, then this is a great tool to use. Take time to walk around and reflect on your ideas and sensations in relation to the place you are visiting. Write your reflections down. You can also observe the communities of those places and include reflections thereof in your diary.

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE: visit Anna Frank house, its surroundings and the neighbourhood, noting down your reflections.

Creative writing/drawing

You can use writing also in a more creative way, for example by imagining a story connected to a specific historical place or context you are studying. You can also draw maps of the place or make sketches of angles and landscapes that attract your attention. Recording your impressions through writing and drawing frees your imagination and enables you to capture details about your theme that you might have otherwise missed.

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE: Use your imagination to “write/draw” your response to the theme you are investigating.

Interviewing (oral history)

If you need to collect first-hand testimonies, interviewing is a good method. In microhistory, interviews are part of what is called oral history. If you decide to conduct interviews, there are some fundamental steps to follow:

Identify the people who are relevant for your subject area, making sure they have a first-hand experience of the historical places, events you are exploring. Think who is relevant and knows more about your researched topic. The right persons are not always official people but can be also your grandparents and friends.

Prepare beforehand by compiling a series of questions you want to address to interviewees. Try to stick to these questions but don’t be very rigid. If interesting remarks appear during the interview, try to find out more about them, even if you divert from your list of questions.

Keep it short and to the point. It is not recommended to have interview that last more than 30 minutes. Doing so will create a high degree of complexity in the analysis of your data.

Video-record the interview. Video is a highly expressive medium, so capturing facial expressions and bodily gestures of interviewees is essential in conveying the emotional charge of the dialogue.

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE: You can directly interview people of the neighbourhood about Anne Frank’s house and also collect existing interview material.

! Remember that oral history is different from other historical sources. The following elements differentiate oral history from other methods: narrative, subjectivity, credibility and authorship.

c. Analysis and presentation

Because diaries capture data over a longer period, they generate a large amount of information. After you finish your logging period, take some time to reflect on your activities and how these helped you explore your topic. You can create a slide-show presentation with extracts from your diary to present your project to others. You can use also other storytelling strategies and become as creative as you want in showing your results to others. You can prepare a poster, a small video incorporating elements of the diary or even stage a performance/play/re-enactment while the material collected through your diary is projected behind you on a screen.

! Incorporate your drawings, writings, videos and images in a coherent way in the storyline of your diary. Find a storyline or narrative that best reflects the argument you want to make about your topic and stick to it. In presenting your results to the public, only our imagination is the limit!

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE: decide on the format in which you want to present your diary to the public

3. Desktop documentary

Most of the times working with archival footage, imagery and written historical sources limits our workspace to the screen of our computer desktop or tablets/ipad. It is a natural condition for these resources to be used within these technological containers through which they have been generated or to which they have become a home after being digitised. A good approach for working on your project and not leaving your computer or tablet/ipad is by using the desktop documentary method.

What is a desktop documentary:

The desktop documentary (desktop film) is a new audio-visual format. Briefly put, this format represents audio-visual works which use the graphical user interface of the computer as their visual basis. From a purely aesthetic perspective, the desktop documentary can be defined as an ‘in-between’ media object which is constructed and watched as though it is a film while presenting a visuality akin to that of the computer interface. In filmic terms, it treats the computer screen as both a camera lens and a canvas, realizing its potential as an artistic medium. Desktop documentary seeks to both depict and question the ways we explore the world through the computer screen. Given that an increasing part of microhistory resources can be found online (recorded interviews, digitised photos, letters and diaries etc), the desktop documentary can provide an interesting method to research a historical theme by looking for sources online.

! Note that desktop film is quite new, so the following process (inspired by Prof. Kevin B. Lee) is only a suggestion of how to approach the process, but not prescriptive. You can develop your own personalised process.

How to create a desktop documentary:

0. Preparatory actions (optional steps):

Study the ways to tell a screen story

The best way to get a sense of how desktop documentaries are built and how they work is by getting acquainted with how filmmakers tell a screen story. As a new practice, desktop documentary experiments with a variety of practices and aesthetic forms, that vary from project to project. A good resource with examples of desktop films is the screen stories library.

Turn your own screen life into a story (start from your own experience)

While you watch examples of desktop documentaries note down the topics and techniques that stand out for you in this method. Make two separate columns and note down your remarks. After this, think how you could turn your own computer screen life into a story. For this, use the PechKucha technique, which consists in taking an experience such as a day in your life related to screens, create 20 shots of your daily experience of screens and select only 6 seconds of each shot. See what kind of story you could create using these fragments of videos.

1. Project development (necessary steps)

Choose a historical theme (a monument, event, figure) that you would like to engage with.

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE:

Think what you would like to find out about this object online and formulate it as a question.

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE:

Search online for an answer to your question. Document the search process by using a screen recording software (e.g. OBS, Quicktime Player, VLC). The process can be authentic (you simply record the screen while searching for data), staged (you have previously done the search and are now re-enacting the process in a quicker and targeted manner), or a combination of both. Look both at the process of how you are searching online, as well as at the content of the material. Once you are ready, reflect on what kind narrative all collected resources bring to light, or on the contrary, what historical gaps do they highlight? Which questions does this material raise?

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE:

! The desktop documentary is not only the screen of your computer. Different applications on your computer (Spotify, iMovie, Social media messaging platforms etc) represent distinct ways of framing your desktop space. While you reflect on the storyline of your project, reflect also on the applications you use to retrieve or consume the resources.

Edit your video

The final video should not be longer than 3 minutes; the question should thus be kept relatively concrete and specific. You can choose to leave your video as you have recorded it or use editing

software like iMovie, Final Cut etc (others) to include some effects.

Tips to keep on track…

! Remember: The most important thing about desktop documentary is to show our minds at work. How we think, how we process, how we express our ideas, our experience, our understanding of media and the world. Follow these 6 questions to guide you throughout the development of your project.

1. What themes, experiences, topics are more interesting to explore from a historical perspective (and not just explain)?

2. Who is the story about? You or others? What does screen interaction reveal about relationships and identities within historical accounts?

3. Where? What websites and platforms will be featured? What will your story say about them as well as about your topic? (How are historical accounts hosted and displayed by these repositories?)

4. When? What role does time play in your project? Are you looking at the past through the present lens or do you try to recreate an experience of what it would have felt to be in that specific moment in the past? Do you want to simulate a live, real-time experience? Is your tempo slow, fast, contemplative?

5. How? What visual presentation techniques and storytelling methods do you want to try out? What are the formal strategies?

6. Why? What is it really that you want to discover? What does your story reveal about desktop life itself?

! Embrace the glitches in your online search. Mistakes and errors can lead to new and exciting methods of aesthetic and conceptual exploration. Notice what’s cool and keep it.

4. Video essay

The video essay represents a more dynamic and complex method of exploration.

What is a video essay: A video essay is the concise, free-form audio-visual equivalent of the written essay. It can be constructed from audio, visual and textual material to build an argument

and address an issue. Video essays can contain film clips, video (personally recorded material), voice-overs, still images, written work and music. Video essays can capture details or phenomena and show how they relate to a larger context.

How to build a video essay:

1. Understand your topic.

The video essay treats its subject matter in a critical and investigative way while at the same time reflecting its processes and its considerations. You should first consider your topic carefully. Undertaking research and reading the relevant literature on the chosen topic will help you to construct your argument better. This process will enable you to define how the video essay will present your ideas and way in which the video will be framed.

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE: read the relevant literature connected to your historical theme and look into the main resource categories that can help you frame it.

2. Frame your argument

In this step you need to decide how to communicate your ideas. This forms the style of your visual essay. For example, you could decide to use a voice-over with a range of images to document the development of an issue. You could use archival material or stock footage to frame the historical period or aspects of your argument. You can begin to make decisions about the best way in which to relate to your argument. An appropriate style for the content and argument is vital.

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE: use your sources to decide how you want to present your theme/argument

3. Plan

Once you’ve built your argument you can draft a rough plan of the video. Decide what specific content you need and the sources to procure them. You can map out each part of the video for how it will introduce the argument, discuss the relevant materials and reiterate the ideas at the conclusion. You can use a storyboard to help you to envision the project, adapt, edit and refine before producing the materials. A storyboard can take a number of formats, but it most frequently resembles a comic strip. In this format, the action is sketched out in a basic drawing whilst a description of the visuals, text and production notes can be made alongside it. After the storyboard you need to produce a script for the video. A script is a written version of a play or movie, representing practically a plan for your work. A script is necessary for any spoken word elements or any text that is displayed. More guidance about how to write a good script can be found here and here.

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE: build a storyboard and decide on the style of your elements. Create a script that will guide you in the construction of the video.

4. Develop and edit

You can then use the various resources you have identified previously to extract the content for your script. There are a range of sources for images, sounds and video that you can use and a significant part of planning the video should be spent on development. A reminder to reference sources either in the video credits or with an accompanying bibliography.

! Films, photographs, or videos are never neutral accretions of visual information. They are charged with political, cultural and social values that you can exploit in your project. This phase enables you to critically reflect on the aesthetic but also deeper conceptual meanings of your resources.

The final step after you have collected your resources, is to create a coherent sequence of your argument. In this phase, the essay can be structured and shaped according to storyboard and script. As with all editing processes, decisions can be made here to change, adapt and alter as is required.

Tips! For more tips on editing, you can go here. Editing programmes can be found on both Windows and Mac computers: Windows Photos, iMovies. Other free resources that you can use to develop your essay are:

Audacity – A open-source audio editing programme that allows a user to record, edit

and import audio onto a video

Wikimedia Commons – a database of audio, video and image files that can be used

for free without copyright restrictions

Creative Commons – a source of audio, video and image files that can be used for free

under the Creative Commons License

flickr – the creative commons area of the site provides images files that are free to use

Vimeo – the creative commons area of the site provides video files that are free to use

! Alternatively, you can use Power Point or other web applications to build your video essay. You can run your presentation on your screen and record it using screen recording software (e.g. Media Player). Remember not to make your video essay too long. A good video essay is between 6 and 15 minutes long!

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE: example of a video essay provided by Alec Stewart, on the character of Anne Frank (example created using a video recording software).