So thanks for a great conversation on the first half hour or so of Dan Cohen’s talk (from Coalition for Networked Information, December 2010), “The Ivory Tower and the Open Web.”
And if you want to catch the rest of it…
Have a great break, see you in the future!
Reading for Tues 12/6: Loewen, Ch 10 and Elliott, “Our Memorials, Ourselves” (PDF)
What is historical memory? How do historians contribute to it? What is the responsibility of historians and what does it mean for them to act ethically in their profession? What good is history, anyway? What is “good history” anyway? History is, in part, a public trust; what will you do with it?
Reading for Thurs 12/8 is Williams, Ch 19.
Your final paper #3 (the annotated bibliography), along with your completed portfolio are all due on or before Tuesday, 12/13/11.
Final journal prompt, for Thurs 12/8 please write on these questions:
1) The student learning outcome for this class was:
By the end of this course you will understand how historians work and how history is made. You will also feel confidence in approaching your own historical investigations because you will possess the practical skills and methodological tools. Over the course of the semester, you will build and polish a portfolio of your work, a solid foundation for more advanced and independent future work in the hsitory major/minor and beyond.
Discuss how you have met this outcome through your class participation, journal writing, and your written assignments.
2) What part(s) of the course have been the most useful, memorable, or interesting to you?
3) As we offer this course every semester as a requirement of the major and minor, what suggestions for improvements to this course do you have? What do you think majors/minors should learn to do in this course?
For our second meeting with Dr. Barnard’s BI 203 Genetics class, please read “Homo Sapiens: Francis Galton’s Fairground Attraction” (PDF), from Jim Endersby, A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology. On Thursday, 12/1 please meet in ST-102 for our class time. You will be working in mixed groups of 3-4 students, brainstorming how to convey key information or concepts from this chapter to a public audience. The biology students need your historical perspective and your public history expertise, and you need their scientific perspective and know-how in order to craft an effective and responsible project.
Journal entries for this week are due on Thursday, 12/1 also. There’s no formal prompt, but you might use it as a chance to reflect on our recent reading or class discussions or to think about the topic for your third and final paper, which is due on 12/13 (see Paper #3 Guidelines under the “Paper Guidelines” tab, above).
We continue our tour of the historical profession with public history this week.
Public history,as the name implies, is history as practiced by people trying to make the past available to various publics. It includes national parks, historical sites, museums, archives, nonprofits, historical societies, and the like. See the National Council on Public History, or the Public History Resource Center for more discussion of the scope and goals of public historians (see also http://beyondacademe.com). The latter site offers this definition (from NYU’s grad program in public history website):
Public History is history that is seen, heard, read, and interpreted by a popular audience. Public historians expand on the methods of academic history by emphasizing non-traditional evidence and presentation formats, reframing questions, and in the process creating a distinctive historical practice… Public history is also history that belongs to the public. By emphasizing the public context of scholarship, public history trains historians to transform their research to reach audiences outside the academy.
This week we will explore who public historians are, and how they go about making the past (often the past of a particular place like a building or a battlefield) usable to the people who use their site–or their website. How do these professionals balance the needs, capabilities, and agendas of the different “publics” who need to know about that past? How do they create a shared sense of the past that acknowledges the complexity of what happened “here and then”?
Williams Ch 17 is our reading for Tuesday’s class on 11/29 and we’ll lay out the main concepts and considerations of public history, using Williams as a jumping-off point for our discussion.
Optional reading: you might also find these links to be helpful context in thinking about the issues that public historians face:
1994′s Enola Gay controversy on the History News Network
“What’s the Point of a Museum Website?” Koven Smith, from the “Ignite Smithsonian” event, April 11, 2011
On Thursday, 12/1 we will meet once again with the Biology 203 Genetics class in their classroom, ST-102. The assigned reading — for the students in both classes — is another chapter from Jim Endersby’s book A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology, this one about Darwinism and the Victorian era and the life of Francis Galton (PDF here). The genetics students are reading it for what they can learn about the practice of science from Galton and his colleagues, and how they might apply that in their own biology-related professions. We have slightly different purposes in reading this secondary source as professional historians:
You’ll be working in interdisciplinary teams in Thursday’s class, to brainstorm something to bring this chapter’s information to life for a public audience. Examples might include: a plaque, a museum exhibit, a website, a tour, an event, a poster, or an online digital collection. Both Dr. Barnard and I will be assessing your group work together to see how well you can work across disciplinary lines and creatively design something with utility in the real world.
Note: You’ve got 2 more journal entries due before the end of the course, both on Thursdays (12/1 and 12/8) not Tuesdays. I’ll give you a writing prompt for the one due on 12/8 which will serve as a reflection/wrap-up for the course. Please remember to be adding to your portfolio, as we agreed — I will assess those on Tuesday, December 13th which is the “final exam day” and also the due date for the 3rd paper. Anyone with partial portfolios or missing assignments on that day will receive an incomplete for the course.
This is the view I woke up to this morning. I’m in San Francisco for a really big academic conference, the American Academy of Religion meeting concurrently with the Society for Bible Literature (Twitter hashtag for the meeting: #sblaar). If you want to follow along all the scholarly adventures, the conference program is here (I’m speaking on Monday, panel #A21-104). But I’ll be back in time for our class on Tuesday.
On Tuesday the 22nd, our only meeting this week, we will talk about film and history: historical film, how historians and filmmakers (and perhaps other categories – news media? YouTube users?) use film and the moving image to craft historical narratives and interpretations, documentaries, and films that made history (in the dual sense of the word).
Reading: WIlliams Ch 13 and “Making Sense of Films”, by Tom Gunning. The Williams raises at least one question you can ponder over the weekend: what is a discussion of film doing in a chapter on “Speculation”? Is that the right place for it?
Our reading for Thursday, Nov 17 is Joan Wolloch Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (PDF) as an example of a scholarly article employing historiography.
You’re looking not just for the content of the article, which I hope you’ll find both interesting and provocative, but (mainly) at how she positions her work as new and ground-breaking. Note that she discusses, critiques, builds upon and challenges previous work of other historians, and how she suggests some areas for future research. Her article is foundational to the field of women’s studies and has, itself, been revised, critiqued, and built upon many times since its publication.
I’ll also bring some examples of academic CVs so you have some models. Natalie Houston’s post is one-stop shopping for advice on how to write a strong CV – and see also the list of links & further resources at the end of her article: “Creating and Maintaining your CV” for ProfHacker, a Chronicle of Higher Education blog 9/14/10.
Sometime last fall the New York Times realized that some historians and humanities scholars are doing sophisticated and interesting things with mapping, data visualization and other digital tools for scholarly analysis. They were intrigued by what they called “an alliance of geeks and poets.” Of course, a large community of digital humanists (many using Twitter, Wikis, blogs and other online social media) had known about this for a long time. There are scholarly consortia like the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC, pronounced “haystack”), and there are university “think tanks” like HyperStudio (MIT), ScholarsLab (UVA) and the Center for History and New Media (George Mason U), which sponsors THATCamp “unconferences” and there are lots and lots of individual scholars mapping historical data in new (often technologically-assisted) ways.
In this post and for our class discussion on Thursday 11/10, I wanted to highlight just some of the projects such scholars are working on, and places you can go to learn more about how digital technologies can help historians make maps (of all kinds) about the past.
One of the projects mentioned in the NYT article is the digitalization of the Bayeux Tapestry (all 224-feet long of it), a project of a medieval scholar at Drew University, Martin K. Foys. A CD-ROM digital edition of the artifact can be purchased for about the cost of a textbook, but as one user notes… it’s also been installed in the virtual world of Second Life. (See also “Electronic Medievalia,” The Heroic Age, June 2005).
Another was the Stanford Mapping the Republic of Letters project from Dan Edelstein and Paula Findlen, tracing (and mapping) the trajectory of thousands of letters from the pens of European Enlightenment writers. Here’s a brief video explaining the project:
Other innovative projects work with recreating or layering historical maps, and creating digital environments of the past. Some examples include:
Check out Alexander Chen’s mesmerizing art/programming/mapping mashup titled “Conductor,” which combined New York subway train schedules, HTML5 + Javascript + Flash programming, and some cool acoustic string sounds to show us the music of the subterranean cityscape. It’s a beautiful and creative way to display a complex system and visualize some highly technical data. Here are some other gorgeous & smart methods with which historians could experiment:
Some blogs, websites, or programs that map data in interesting, quirky or beautiful ways (HT on some of these to my brother, a programmer with an artist’s eye for these kind of things):
And two more, aggregating many different examples of compelling data visualization:
Here’s a way to spend a free afternoon: delving into some of these lists of tools, methods, and “toys” for digital humanities scholars. There’s enough here to happily occupy any computer-savvy historian for decades.
Want more? I’m teaching a Winter Session course in January 2012 called Intro to Digital Humanities, which will work/play with some of these tools and help you begin to build your own.
Finally, however… a caution. A map is only as good as its data; the scholarship you bring to the creation of a digital artifact is only as good as the questions you ask and the methods you use. “Lying with maps” can indeed happen. See, for a humorous example, “Passport Ownership Cures Diabetes” – which reminds us that correlation does not equal causality!!
(Image credit: Screencap from VisualComplexity‘s latest projects, taken 3/30/11).
This week, for our final methods workshop we are looking at how to interpret visual images. We’ll be focusing on maps, because many of the issues that arise in working with maps are shared with using other visual images as historical evidence. There is no journal entry due this week (although if you are in the habit of writing don’t feel you have to stop). Do, however, make sure that your portfolio by this point contains your Essay #1 and your reflection on that essay.
Reading for Tues, 11/8: David T. Stephens, “Making Sense of Maps” (HistoryMatters). If you’d like to take a look at some, and/or do the exercises recommended in the reading, begin with the sites below.
Finding and Using Maps Online:
HistoryMatters List of Maps Online
Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library (which is the source of the map below, an 1886 “road and bicycle” map of Worcester County)
Reminder: Your paper #2 is due in class on Thursday, 11/17. Guidelines can be found here.
Our reading for Tuesday 11/1 is a chapter from Susan Douglas’s book Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, titled “Radio Comedy and Linguistic Slapstick” (PDF).
Read not only for content (in this case, her chapter is about radio comedy and some of its notable programs and stars), but also for method: HOW is she writing about sound? HOW is she using radio programs as historical evidence? How does she construct an argument using evidence which she cannot “show” us as text or illustrations, but must describe for us–since we cannot hear it along with her? In one sense, Douglas must translate the shows into a written text, just as the shows themselves must translate physical comedy and “sight gags” into linguistic/aural comedy and “sound gags.”
For Thursday 11/3, you’ll have an assignment to listen to at least an hour of old-time radio or other recorded sound from the past and we’ll have an in-class workshop on using radio broadcasts as historical evidence. I will have some audiotapes, CDs and other media formats which you can borrow, or you can chase down old radio through some of these links:
OTR.net – Old Time Radio Network
RUSC.com – this is the best old-time radio website, but it’s by subscription only. You can get a 3-day trial for $2.95 which will work for this week, their library is vast.
America in the 1930s (a UVA Project) has very good resources, including a “Day on Radio,” with all the programming from one representative day in 1939 for one station.
All the programs of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater of the Air are online, including the 1938 Halloween “War of the Worlds” broadcast that so terrified the East Coast (More on that here, here, and here).
National Jukebox – a new digital archive from the Library of Congress’s Recorded Sound division. It currently contains more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine company from 1901-1925.
Thomas Edison’s Attic is an archived radio program and podcast that replays old recordings (wax cylinder, phonograph and other now-extinct exotic formats) from the Edison National Historic Site’s collection – lots of interesting old American sounds from 1888-1929
Rand’s Esoteric OTR is a blog & podcast of the author’s gigantic collection of transcription disks (records of radio shows meant for later playback), many of them from Armed Forces Radio during WW2. A great source for high-quality web broadcasts of old radio programming; he’s no longer making new posts but the old ones are all still there.
Other resources, museums and archives for radio history:
National Archives Guide to the Records of the Federal Communications Commission (known as the Federal Radio Commission from 1927-1934)
Vintage Radio Scripts can be found here
Old Time Radio Researchers Group
Paley Center for Media; Museum of Television and Radio (NY & CA)
Museum of Broadcasting (St. Louis, MN)
Museum of Broadcast Communications (Chicago)
American Museum of Radio and Electricity (Bellingham, WA)
National Museum of Broadcasting (in development, Pittsburgh PA)
Image credit: K. G. Photos, used under Creative Commons license
Links for some of the radio comedy artists Douglas mentions:
George Burns and Gracie Allen
Amos ‘n’ Andy (Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll)
Texaco Fire Chief (Ed Wynn and Graham McNamee)
Abbott and Costello, “Who’s On First”?
Easy Aces (Jane and Goodman Ace)
Jack Benny
Choose one of these Supreme Court cases, and have looked it over before class. Since we’ll be working with them throughout the class period, in groups, please have a way to access it during classtime (electronic or print out a copy). Links take you to the case on Oyez.org.
Marbury v. Madison 5 U.S. 137 (1803)
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific RR 118 U.S. 394 (1886)
Miranda v. Arizona 384 U.S. 486 (1966)
Loving v. Virginia 388 U.S. 1 (1967)
McCleskey v. Kemp 481 U.S. 289 (1987)
Also: I asked everyone to go to the library reference desk this week and spend some time looking at and flipping through the red bound volumes of the Library of Congress Subject Headings. I mentioned this to the ref librarian and she said great, but asked me to remind everyone that those volumes cannot walk away from the reference desk; you need to use them there.
Thanks, see you Thursday!
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