History on the net? Bring on the H-Bot

Is the internet an accurate source of historical data? Most history professors are sceptical, avoiding internet sources. But it could soon revolutionise the way history is assessed, taught - and even researched. The latest issue of First Monday carries an article by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig which shows that on at least basic historical facts, the internet can provide a surprisingly accurate indication of the historical consensus. Here is the abstract from Web of lies? Historical knowledge on the Internet:

Scholars in history (as well as other fields in the humanities) have generally taken a dim view of the state of knowledge on the Web, pointing to the many inaccuracies on Web pages written by amateurs. A new software agent called H-Bot scans the Web for historical facts, and shows how the Web may indeed include many such inaccuracies—while at the same time being extremely accurate when assessed as a whole through statistical means that are alien to the discipline of history.

For a new application, the H-Bot does remarkably well. When tested on the 33 multiple-choice questions from the fourth-grade NAEP American history exam, it got 27 answers right, a respectable 82 per cent. As the authors note, "the average fourth grader does far worse". And "...its successors are likely to reach 95 or even 99 percent." Why should we care? In part, "because these developments have significant implications for us as teachers and researchers".

In a very short time, when cell phone access to Web-based materials becomes second nature and H-Bot (or its successors) gets a little bit better, students will start asking us why we are testing them on their ability to respond to questions that their cell phones can answer in seconds. It will seem as odd to them that they can’t use H-Bot to answer a question about the Pilgrims as it is today to a student who might be told that they can’t use a calculator to do the routine arithmetic in an algebra equation.

The genie will be out of the bottle and we will have to start thinking of more meaningful ways to assess historical knowledge or “ignorance.” And that goes for not just high school instructors and state education officials but also the very substantial numbers of college teachers who rely on multiple-choice questions and Scantron forms.

The nature of historical research, too, will change:

These mathematical methods and other algorithms drawn from the computational sciences also suggest new techniques for historical research and new approaches to teaching history in an age in which an increasingly significant portion of the past has been digitized.   

It surely won't be long before an economics professor or grad student with a software bent develops the Econ-bot and takes economic teaching down the same path... and if they don't, Google will.

Comments

[CurlyWurly]

Google rankings can and are regularly manipulated. So I suppose some clever folk could probably trick the H-Bots algorithm into preferring a certain version of history. I am quite curious which social group will be the first to try and succeed in doing so ?

[Mike Martin]

Yes, Google rankings can be manipulated by so-called google bombs. The best known early example, back in 1999, was when a search on "more evil than Satan himself" gave the Microsoft home page as the top hit. (The search now gives top billing to a CNN report of the incident.)

The folks at Google are continuously on the lookout for manipulations like this and take steps to prevent them from influencing page rankings.

Sometimes though there is only a narrow line between a google bomb and a validly ranked page.

Try a google search on "french military victories" for example.

But at all events, a single misranked page is unlikely to influence a consensus conclusion on a historical event.