The Apprentice Historian

So out of shape and Twitter illustrated

Ouch. That's the sound of my blogging muscles straining and sweating. I am so out of the habit of blogging that just getting something going is a struggle this semester. So let me start with baby steps and see where it goes.

For those of you wondering about just what is the utility of a web 2.0 application like Twitter, I found an excellent example. Shannon Ritter over at Penn State's Terra Incognita blogsite posted a hard-to-argue-with example of how Twitter can and should be used in higher education. I experienced something like this first hand this summer at the THATCamp conference I attended at GMU.

Check it out!

New Semester, New Professor

Fall 2008 has kicked off at this point, and I find myself in Professor Copelman's HIST 610 "The Study and Writing of History." This is one of the only required courses in the program, the foundational class where young historians are taught the craft. Almost everyone, students and professors alike, tends to approach this course as a burden or a vegetable that has to be eaten but probably can't be enjoyed. As a result, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I did a lot of research with my fellow students to find the professor who did the best with the 610 obligation and settled on Dr. McGrath. When I registered for class this summer, I was sure that I selected her Section 003. Whether it was my oversight or something screwy with the GMU registration application, I wound up in Copelman's Section 001. And too late to change anything, since all of the other 610 sections were chock full of students. Oh, well. We're making the best of the situation.

Speaking of that, I really enjoyed Professor Copelman's exercise last night. We read the chapter on the Watercress Girl from Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, volume 1. After further examination, we concluded that the watercress saleswoman was pulling a con on old Henry, who was predisposed to see her as a pathetic waif with little hope. It was clear from his writing that he pitied the girl, and after we examined her comments it became clear that she was not as bad off as Hank assumed. An excellent example of why we as historians must read sources, especially primary sources, skeptically and with a constant eye for not so much bias as subjectivity.

That, of course, led us to our other text, Peter Novick's That Noble Dream, a historiography of the objective question in historical writings. Can a historian be truly objective — divorcing himself completely from his own nature and nurture to write simply the facts? I think that is an impossible standard, and Novick does too given that "my way of thinking about the past is primarily shaped by my understanding of its role within a particular historical context, and in the stream of history." Objectivity is more of a myth, says Novick, never achievable but worthy of consideration because it "has served to safeguard and enforce norms of scholarly rectitude; it vouches for the efficiency of scholarly rituals." We should strive for the Holy Grail of objectivity, but not be disappointed by our failure to realize it.

Games/Gaming

Games in Teaching, games in general. Skeptics and enthusiasts.

Playing History. Many games are being developed, but there is little collaboration or peer review. Teachers at all levels need to know where to find games that relate to their topics. Teacher-centric metadata; free content; good/appropriate content -- these are the focuses of Trevor and Dave's Playing History concept.

One of the challenges in designing solid gaming experiences is that the real world does not always function in a algorithmical manner. Game designs are inherently algorithmic. With today's games, as much (if not more) of the experience is around the meta-gaming or the social interaction amongst players.

Research Methods

"The day will come, not that far off, when modifying humanities with 'digital' will make no more sense than modifying humanities with 'print'" -- Steve Wheatley, ACLS

What are the new Research Methods? In New methods for humanities research, John Unsworth wonders why we need new research methods. Last century, historian found things in archives and brought them out to the public. Now with the information deluge that's out there, is that still valid? One still needs expertise to find information, but it's not a "finding" expertise. It's now a filtering, sorting, selecting, categorizing, indexing, prioritizing expertise that is needed.

Discerning bias is another critical skill (sort of a sub-set of filtering). Familiarity with conceptual/theoretical approaches in the field is critical. Scholars need to work on alerting students to bias or problems with data. Students may not be aware that the open source web is only a part of the total internet -- that there is a whole bunch of legitimate data that is owned or otherwise controlled by people who want to make money off of it.

How do you cut across fields? Is there similarity between processes? How do you cross-fertilize from other fields? A tool called Pronetos is attempting to facilitate this kind of cross-fertilization. This kind of networking can help to identify and publicize data sets that are not online already (gasp! you mean not everything is in Google?!?).

Going back to the quote, is the adjective "digital" important? Does it add anything? Since we are so early in the "digital" game, "digital" helps to define us, to set us apart. And we are still actually defining what it means when one discusses "digital humanities." Other disciplines are struggling with defining "digital" as well. It remains to be seen what kinds of connections can be made.

The tools to follow research paths (like Zotero) and do "documentary triage" (reading several sources at once and trying to determine priorities) are still in development. (An analog database could be considered a table with several books laid out for comparison.) And humanitarians have to get over the fear of sharing their ideas -- the whole idea behind creative commons is to get your ideas out there and people will attribute it to you. Getting your name associated with an idea stakes your claim to the subject. It's important to do that so that you or others are not wasting your efforts working in parallel with someone else. Of course, the tenure process is currently working against this. But that's a bigger fight.

Do humanities departments who want to do "digital" right need to have a marketing department to make sure that the metadata is correct and in all of the formats and to make sure all of the search engines are finding it? Libraries do that now, to a certain extent. Does the humanities need a centralized "Facebook" to build networks? Or does peer review serve that purpose? See Nature's issues with on-line peer review, and please note that the group here generally disagrees with Nature's conclusions.

This was an excellent discussion, btw.

Dork Shorts

Best name for a session. Ever.

The idea being a series of short overviews of digital projects or code. Here's what was discussed:

World Digital Library, a joint project with UNESCO and Library of Congress. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research. Accessible in seven different languages.

Coding on New York Public Library's Digital Gallery. Trying to find the policy, code that makes this as accessible as possible to everyone. What's the api going to look like that allows digital access to the collection?

History Wired from the Smithsonian is about data visualization. This is a mashup using a mapping engine created for Smart Money magazine. Also from the Smithsonian, The Object of History website that created high school curriculum units about objects at the American History Museum.

Introduction to Omeka by Jeremy Boggs. Omeka is a web platform for publishing collections and exhibitions online from our own Center for History and New Media. Create collections of digital information. The Object of History (see above) is an example of a site created with Omeka. Also, Making the History of 1989.

American Social History online. Built a site with tools for digital historians, including collaboration tools. This site focuses on finding, gathering, and collecting distributed and disparate scholarly content in American Social History. Works with Zotero, Google Maps. Includes word clouds, federated search, etc.

Typographia is a very interesting project from an assistant professor a NC State. It's an exploration of Raleigh, NC through typography. He took pictures around town and digitized them with text. Worth a look.

JGAAP stands for Java Graphical Authorship Attribution. It is a Java-based,modular program for textual analysis, text categorization, and  authorship attribution. It is trying to figure out who wrote what.

Teaching Digital History

In this THATCamp session, there were several professors who discussed their adventures in teaching a class on digital history.

Jeff McClurken (at U of MD) taught a senior seminar down at my alma mater, University of Mary Washington, entitled Digital History. Among the projects produced by the different groups there is a collection of works by James Farmer.

Bill Ferster from UVA discussed his digital history seminar entitled Jefferson's Travels. That class produced a fascinating tool to help visualize a particular history called The History Browser.

And of course, Paula Petrik's History and New Media courses, to which this blog owes its origins.

Some of the overlapping issues:

• Students are often uncomfortable with the lack of milestone grades.
• The myth of the "digital generation" — students who are comfortable with the tools are few and far between. "There are many things not on Google" causes a crisis of faith.
• Group dynamics is often as important as digital skills. This is a particular issue since historians don't necessarily play well together.
• The tools change, the mindsets don't — we're teaching procedural thinking, and coding is a way to reinforce procedural thinking.
• This is a new approach to learning, not just history.

We wrapped up with Patrick Juola and his idea that math is a base skill for digital history. He advocates for teaching math a different way, including an intro to advanced math concepts. This textbook/class hits the "septembers" of several advanced math syllabi.

The final thought was how do we build upon the skills and products of digital history? How do we get the academic institutions to accept the work of digital history? How do we assess the quality and/or acedemics of digital history? The collected group in the room seemed to be quite the digital history brain trust, so the feeling was that we should work together to help move the bar.

THATCamp

Funny name, serious thinking. This weekend finds me at THATCamp, an event conceived at GMU's Center for History and New Media. Short for “The Humanities And Technology Camp”, THATCamp is a BarCamp-style, user-generated “unconference” on digital humanities. The idea is that a bunch of people get together and bring ideas they want to hash out. There are 75 people here from all over the world, all wanting to discuss New Media and the humanities. Right now, we're working on figuring out what sessions will make the schedule. Then it becomes a more conventional conference, with sessions and conversations on a variety of topics.

What interests me is the dozen or so sessions on technology and teaching. I'll be back with more once we've settled on the sessions and I get an idea what today will be like.

It's funny how easy it is to get out of the habit

After two straight semesters of weekly blogging, I was sure it was an ingrained habit. Guess what? Not so much. And not even a summer break to blame it on. Well, here's my effort at starting again.

This semester (Spring 2008), I have yet again engaged Professor Petrik to learn me some history. She took a group of the "History and Cartography" class and decided to do a one-off, intimate readings-style class with us. The goal was to dig deeper into the conjunction of history and cartography with a digital twist. I have continued my research into American closets for this class, building on my work from last semester. My classmates, all veterans of Professor P, have settled on some very interesting topics: Ammon Shepherd is plotting the locations of Nazi tunnels in Germany, breaking relatively new ground on an under-researched story; Don Fields is doing some amazing work with isochrones (maps showing lines of equal time), and he taught himself the heavy-duty GIS application called ArcView, no mean feat; Marty McGuirk is mapping battlefield maps across time and showing the difference between different published maps of the Battle of Monmouth (American Revolutionary War); and Karin Hill is mapping the travels of a 19th century sailor through his tattoos.

The really interesting part about this class is our experiment with self-publishing. We are skipping the peer review process (gulp!) and going straight to press with our research. We will publish our book using the online publishing facilities of Blurb. The idea is to demonstrate how easy it can be for historians who can speak "digital" to get themselves some credibility. The question, of course, is how legitimate that credibility will be. Regardless, it will be showing up on my CV under "Published Author," so that will count for something.

To further legitimze our cred, we'll be presenting the results of both our research and our experiences in self-publishing at the 2009 AHA annual conference in New York City. We're all, needless to say, very excited about the opportunity! Stay tuned – the final project for the semester is due on 7 May.