I am very pleased to have been asked to present this opening talk to our day on Virtual Histories. I do feel a bit of an imposter, however, as I am not a historian by trade. And, to be honest, I do not know much about technology, either. I was challenged to ask this basic question because after spending a few enjoyable hours on the Web, looking up the projects in which many of today's speakers have been involved over the last ten or twenty years.
History is always a simplified illusion of what actually or expressly was.
But such bases of data, built of facts or documents, do not a history make, for they lack the aspects of context and interpretation which turn an attempt at record into an attempt at history. As Carr says, some element of interpretation necessarily enters into every historical fact. He stresses that all history is contemporary history, for we can only see the past through the filter of our own present, through the filter of current problems and preoccupations, increasingly, I am sure he would have added today, through the filter of our technologies. But it tells that century's story mainly through the eyes of Athenian citizens. And while political and artistic life is well represented, we could go on, private life is only spasmodically accounted for.