Revisiting “Ghosts of the Garden”: Sport History, Modernizing Technology, and the Promise and Perils of Digital Visualization

In this paper, I re-examine a digital visualization titled “Ghosts of the Garden” and argue that my experience is representative of the potential and pitfalls of trying to work in a new digital medium. Moreover, I show that digital sport history represents a paradox to the profession of sport historians: on one hand, technology liberates historians from expressing and representing experiences only in words; on the other, it subjects and disciplines them to constantly evolving technologies. I begin by looking at the promise of visualization in sport history, which contrasts with Western notions of what counts as culture, scholarship, and history. Second, I examine the technological challenges that digital, posttextual visualizations and digital sport history, more broadly, present to scholarly sport historians. Finally, I look at the paradoxical epistemological and pedagogical issues that digital history raises for sport historians.