Traditional understandings of historical interpretation which foreground progress and narratives of causation have, of course, been importantly complicated in this century, and especially over the past three decades. But how do we as teachers who have found this work important to our own scholarship ask students to develop, exhibit, and wrestle with new forms of historical interpretation? Quite often we avoid this question and ask our students to produce narratives and to think about history in the same forms we might have requested of them thirty years ago.
The construction of the "Dictionary of Sensibility" and similar hypertextual "dictionary/anthology" projects of this form require students to challenge their conventional understandings of historical interpretation. The "Dictionary's" formal qualities compel students to break away from the idea of history as a narrative of causation; hypertext used in this manner inhibits sequentiality and, therefore, complicates the notion of narrative. Agency also becomes a much more complex and conflicted concept for the student. Actors fade into the background while the stage on which the actors perform is rendered more elaborate and consequential.
The form of historical interpretation in such projects is better described by the adjectives "imagistic," "hypertextual," and "conceptual" than "narrative." This description often incites questions about rigor. Is a project of this sort historically rigorous? Certainly, it is experimental. In its most successful moments, it requires students to understand the historical as Walter Benjamin urges us to understand it: "The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again." But even as the project fails to accomplish this goal it allows for the foregrounding in the classroom of questions of historical knowledge: what might this knowledge look like if we loosen the strictures on it of progressive narrative?
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