In an ideal world, professional historians would serve as the primary designers and procedural authors of these virtual spaces. It would be unrealistic, however, to assume that a historian could master all the technical requirements to construct a virtual reality display alone. This would be like one person designing, contracting, and building a sky-scraper. It would be more realistic to assume that the historian-as the procedural author-would serve as the "architect" of the virtual reality edifice, the one who conceives of and designs the structure that others construct. Unfortunately, it is just as likely that, as with many "historical" films researched by historians but ultimately designed by nonhistorians, historians working with virtual reality are more than likely to play a supporting role as consulting members of a collaborative team directed by nonhistorians.

Were we able to listen to the acoustics of a virtual re-creation, for example, our understanding of the qualities of that space would be enhanced. Sonic and hap tic interfaces would situate the sensations of the body in space as important for making certain kinds of historical arguments and scholarly observations about the past

Despite our best efforts, we can never hope to make the past truly "come to life." Virtual reality as a model for historical inquiry opens up new vistas of interpretation, but it is as limited as any other representation of the past.

The Dillingham Commission recommended that Congress enact re-strictions on immigration, principally because of what it claimed to be the unassimilable character of recent migrants. This unassimilability differentiated them from the older type of immigrants. It wanted tougher assessment of potential immigrants in their country of origin, to find out about criminal records and mental aptitude.

To assess assimilation, three measures were employed by the Dillingham Commission:54 learning English, acquiring U.S. citizen-ship, and more nebulously, the abandoning of native customs. On all three criteria, the new immigrants were found wanting. In addition, patterns of home ownership were contrasted between new and old immigrants, with the Commission concluding that "as a rule the races of older immigration from Great Britain and northern Europe are more extensive home owners as a whole than the members of races of recent immigration."55 The failure of new immigrants to assimilate was explained by the absence of families and the predominance of sin-gle men: "i

"social observation" coincided is not ex-plained. One measure of political radicalism commonly cited by crit-ics of immigration was radical newspapers in foreign languages. The numbers of these publications increased throughout the 1900s and 1910s; a survey in 1922 found that the number doubled after 1918 (see Table 3.1).

By the 1910s, the medical routine had changed. The importance of phys-ical indicators of mental illness in alignment with the abovementioned new approach in psychiatry affected the daily visits in Toptaşı Asylum. This system was significantly different from the one applied in Süleymaniye Asylum and during the earlier years at Toptaşı Asylum. For instance, the daily medical visits were no longer public. What replaced them were more individualistic; they were done at the patient’s bedside. The responses of the patient were no longer the primary means of diagnosis; physical indicators and other factors replaced them. Everything was “objectively” recorded, and hung on the patient’s head plate (see Figure 7). The medical staff worked independently, but hierarchically, reporting within a complex but regulated organizational chart. Assistant physi-cians prepared the patients for the physicians, a practice that prevailed for many decades to come, particularly in university hospitals. There was also a pharma-cist assigned to each section, who would be present at the time of the visit, record the prescription in a notebook, and have the physician approve the medication.

An 1875 document by a “Commission,”16 written as a response to a crisis after the Asylum administration refused to admit around twenty patients and returned them to the police, confirms the condition of the building.17the report identified a number of problems: capacity shortfall, building’s state of disrepair made it inadequate for use, and insufficient funds for day-to-day expenses, including patients and attendants’ needs.

Figure 3: 1893 Expansion Project. Drawing showing: Top left: Elevation of the female section (E), Bottom left: Plan of the second-floor addition of the female section (E), Top right: Elevation of a new male section (L), Bottom right: First and second floor plans of a new male section (L).

The reorganization of the asylum’s space and time, as mundane as they might seem, offers novel insights into the functioning of the asylum, and, in turn, into the theory and practice of Ottoman psychiatry

Indian institutions, just like private European homes in the East, were inhabited by a great number of servants, wardens, gardeners, cooks, cooks' assistants, punkah-wallahs,71 and numerous other staff, with pets such as deer and monkeys being allowed to 'kindle natives' gentler sentiments', and with water-carriers and sweepers and night-soil removers creating an atmo-sphere, that would not fit in too well with the idea of a Foucaultian panop-ticon nor with the ideal prototype of the asylum as refuge and retreat, as advocated by representatives of the asylum reform movement in Britain dur-ing the early nineteenth century.7R

The spatial expression of madness in British India was defined both by race and issues of social class, caste, and communal background.

TICAL GEOGRAPHY OF RACIAL DISTANCE: MAINTAINING PRESTIGE BY MAINTAINING DISTAN

The aim then was to find a programme that could automatically link the database of plague mortality to the data from the census. In this way, we hoped, it would be possible to dem­onstrate clearly the chronological spread of plague and also to show clearly the relationship between patterns of mortality and morbidity and the socioeconomic and topographical profile of different streets within the parish. This was where the DECIMA project came in.

DECIMA in order to map the spread of the plague through San Lorenzo, explaining some of the problems he encountered and the methodologies he devel­oped while working with Henderson's extensive database

Besides, I was sur-rounded by others in like bewil-dered, discontented mental states in whose miseries . . . I found my-self becoming interested, my sym-pathies becoming aroused. . . . And at the same time, I too, was treated as an insane woman, a kindness not hitherto shown to me.

The movement for deinstitutionaliza-tion, starting as a trickle in the 1960s, became a flood by the 1980s, even though it was clear by then that it was creating as many problems as it solved. The enormous homeless population, the “sidewalk psychotics” in every major city, were stark evidence that no city had an adequate network of psy-chiatric clinics and halfway houses, or the infrastructure to deal with the hun-dreds of thousands of patients who had been turned away from the remaining state hospitals

14,000

Erving Goffman, in his fa-mous book Asylums,2 ranks all these together as “total institutions”—places where there is an unbridgeable gulf be-tween staff and inmates, where rigid rules and roles preclude any sense of fellowship or sympathy, and where in-mates are deprived of all autonomy or freedom or dignity or self, reduced to nameless ciphers in the system.

Memoryisessentialforouridentity,whetherasindividualsorasasociety,butitremainstroublesomeasevidencebecauseitalwaysisinformedbywhathashappenedintheinterimbetweenaneventandtheactofrecall.

Italsofavorsinstitutionalorofficialdatabasesastheprimarysourceofinformationabouttheworld.

YetitisthishistorythatmakesusawareofboththelimitsandpotentialofGISforthehumanities-·andhowmuchitstillmustchangetosuitourneeds.

The cottage concept was derived in part from the town of Gheel, Belgium, where a church dedicated to the eighth- century Irish saint Dymphna had attracted lunatics seeking a cure.89 For centuries, the people of Gheel looked after the mentally ill who came to worship at the shrine but, exorcism notwithstanding, remained mad and never left town. This integration of insane patients into the community continued into the nineteenth century. In 1848, a correspondent for the American Journal of Insanity recounted the good character of the host families and the rapid recovery of the insane, who were employed in cultivating the land.90 Galt later touted the cottage plan in the same publication: "At the village of Gheel, in Belgium, situated thirty-five miles from Antwerp... it was well-known that the insane, amounting to many hundreds, have been placed under the management of the villagers, instead of having them in one large building, as elsewhere. These lunatics have nearly the same freedom as the citizens of the commune, going everywhere at large.""9 Galt described how some of them went to bars for a smoke or a glass of beer, and yet "their presence does not excite attention" (Figures 26, 27). Galt identified two types of patients who would benefit from cottage life-tranquil, chronic patients, and others who did not respond well to the linear-plan asylum

The New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum

Each asylum was surrounded by acres of picturesque gar- dens.

A few doctors employed the moral treatment in preexisting buildings, but as they refined their needs, the professional society of super- intendents began to argue for purpose-built structures that would serve the patients and staff

I look at asylum buildings in the United States in order to demonstrate that psychiatrists considered the architecture of their hospitals, especially the planning, to be one of the most powerful tools for the treatment of the insane.

he challenges include addressing fundamental questions such as

the mere use of digital tools for the purpose of humanistic research and communication does not qualify as digital Humanities. nor, as already noted, is digital Humanities to be understood as the study of digital artifacts, new media, or contemporary culture in place of physical artifacts, old media, or historical culture.

digital Humanities refers to new modes of scholar-ship and institutional units for collaborative, trans-disciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publication.

Where is the investment in the online equivalents of the Carnegie libraries, settlement houses, and other great philanthropic undertakings that promote the enfranchisement of all sectors of society?

still-unanticipated effects of social medi

As every act of engagement with a digital world generates its own trail of data and metadata, the crucial tasks of forgetting, of strategically looking away, of ignor-ing, of letting go and even of erasure will become more critical.