Marie Antoinette, Queen of France

This is a screen capture from my favorite movie of all time: Marie Antoinette, by Sofia Coppola
Image Courtesy of The New York Times {http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/movies/13mari.html}

Diamonds, desserts, murders, and affairs; the story of Marie Antoinette has it all. I decided to base my final Digital History project on the life of Marie Antoinette because I have always been intrigued by her life and brutal demise. I mean really, what's more glamorous than France in the late eighteenth century? I decided to create a digital timeline because when I created a timeline for our Data Visualization week in class I felt that it was a fun way to create an easy-to-digest educational tool. I decided to shake things up a bit by creating two timelines, both using historically backed evidence and information, but with two totally different conclusions about who Marie Antoinette was as a person and a Queen. Marie Antoinette is the perfect example of a historical figure who is totally polarizing - both loved and hated by the public. 

 I labeled my timelines "Good Queen" and "Bad Queen." Though I am sure Marie Antoinette falls somewhere in between these two harsh binaries, there is more than enough evidence to push her into either label. My main goal with this project is to show that sometimes digital tools can be used to persuade an audience based on personal motives or beliefs, regardless of the evidence used. This type of project has been done before by exploring the way graphs can be altered to prove a particular point. By looking at each of the timelines, it can be quite convincing that Marie Antoinette was either an inherently good person, or an inherently bad person. I used two books for the information in the timelines, both of which are two of the most critically acclaimed historical monographs about Marie Antoinette. I based most of my evidence on the books Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser, and Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, by Caroline Weber. I also watched a useful book talk by Caroline Weber on YouTube titled "Marie Antoinette, Queen of Fashion" created by the University of Michigan. Because there isn't an aesthetically pleasing way to include a bibliography in a timeline (there's a FLAW!), I have created a works cited at the bottom of this post.

Marie Antoinette is a figure who will likely always be used by history teachers and public historians to grab an audience's attention, then teach them about topics like women's history, royal politics, the economy in eighteenth century France, European alliances and intermarriages, and even the lives of peasants and ordinary women trying to navigate the French Revolution. Using primary sources within digital projects goes to the core of what makes public history great: accessibility. When historians use digital scans of primary source documents, photos, and art, we are able to bring this to people all over the world without access to these collections. Though sometimes there is a drawback to this; all digitally compiled collections have some sort of mediation between the creator and the audience, and this mediation (or context) can totally change the way the primary sources are understood. Whether it's the order in which the sources are presented, or the interpretation by a historian through a blog post or article, it's important to understand that accessibility doesn't always come without strings attached. The goal of my project is to bring attention to this double-edged sword. My timelines each present a different argument; that Marie Antoinette was a terrible and hateful Queen, and that she was a gracious and kind-hearted girl caught up in the politics of Royal life. What's the truth? That's for the audience to decide.

This is the goal with public history: to take an intriguing story like the life of Marie Antoinette, and use it to teach many different types of history. I hope that through my project, the audience or readers are able to better understand the persuasive manner of digital tools. I think it is easy to look at an aesthetically pleasing and well-made digital project and assume there is not a hidden agenda behind it. Just as we mentioned in class, even the tool itself can be problematic through hidden themes or languages built into the tools (here I am thinking of the master/slave coding language and other built-in themes). Digital Humanities tools and projects may appear to be trustworthy because they look so well-made. For example, most people would obviously not trust a website that looks like it hasn't been updated since 2003; however a brand new digital project with the same information looks much more up to date. This is such an odd difference between digital projects and books. It is ingrained within students to trust a book written in 1998, but we would never look twice at a website created then. With my project, I was hoping to draw attention to this oddity by showing that timelines can be purposefully manipulated to show two different extreme versions of the same person's life - all while using the same evidence and information.

In conclusion, I hope that my timelines plant the seed of curiosity in the reader, and perhaps the next time they encounter a timeline, graph, or any other digital project, that they approach it with a healthy dose of skepticism. At the end of the day, Marie Antoinette's life has been sensationalized and over-broadcast so much so, that I'm sure in reality she lies somewhere in between "good" and "bad," just like any person. 


Works Cited:

Fraser, Antonia. Marie Antoinette: The Journey. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2006.

Weber, Caroline. Queen of fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. London: Aurum, 2008.

TimelineJS:

"Knight Lab." Timeline JS. Accessed April 27, 2017. https://timeline.knightlab.com
A helpful website for investigaing color-coding and finding the correct hue for your digital project:
www.colorhexa.com

*For photo URLs, email author


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