Making History Podcast: The Blog

November 17, 2009

Twitterpated: Using Social Media at Academic Conferences

Filed under: digital humanities — Jana @ 1:55 pm
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Cross posted at History Compass Exchanges

After mulling around the coffee and muffins in the reception area and feeling awkward because I didn’t know anyone at the conference, I headed into the lecture hall where I eyeballed the walls for electrical outlets. I would need a power source if I was going to type through several hours of conference proceedings. I saw another attendee settling in and plugging in her laptop, so I sat down nearby and asked if she would mind sharing the outlet (she didn’t).tweet

So began my day of twittering the “Nowcasting: Design Theory & Digital Humanities” conference held at UCLA last month. My first volley of the day:

@janaremy audience is assembling & positioning themselves around available power outlets (my kind of conference!) #nowcasting

After a few initial tweets I realized, through hashtag searching, that there were several other twitterers in the room. By following the other tagged tweets I discovered a website that was liveblogging the conference happenings, too. Within an hour, I found about a dozen people in the audience actively writing about the conference events as they unfolded. We were not only twittering our impressions, but we were in a dynamic conversation about issues raised by the talks. One person with a digital camera was taking occasional pictures of the presentations & posting the links. Another was sending links to the various speakers’ publications. As the conversations evolved they added more depth to the conference presentations than I gleaned from the talks themselves. In turn, I was getting to know the various personalities chattering about the conference, and by the end of the day after learning the “in-real-life” identities of my fellow twitters, we chatted at the closing reception and have since then become better acquainted via continued interactions on Twitter and Facebook.

Not every conference that I’ve attempted to liveblog or twitter has gone so smoothly. For example, my intention to post updates on the 2009 American Historical Association conference was thwarted by the high cost of wireless access at the venue (what history grad student can afford a $129 hotel room plus a $15 daily internet access fee?). A few months after that, when I tweeted the happenings at another history conference, I couldn’t find anyone else who was also doing so (hashtag searches weren’t helpful this time), which made it feel like I was simply having a conversation with myself rather than creating community with fellow attendees. For example, in one panel about digital humanities my sense of alienation was evident as I sat in a nearly-empty room in what, in my opinion, should have been the session generating the biggest buzz:

@janaremy Only 4 women in audience of Digital Humanities panel. Why? #WHA

@janaremy Wondering why they didn’t find a commenter who knows more about Digital Humanities than just Powerpoint & online syllabi (sigh) #WHA

The positive outcome from tweeting that conference came later, when my twitter feed funneled into my Facebook page status updates. Colleagues who weren’t at the conference responded to my tweets, creating an opportunity for follow-up discussion about the digital tools that are useful for scholars. Later, I also reflected on my experience with a blog posting about the panel.

My latest experiment with using twitter is in my role as the “Online Media Chairperson” for an upcoming Digital Humanities conference at Yale. Recently I created a twitter account dedicated solely to discussion of the conference, and started tying that presence to other digital humanists on twitter through “following” them, especially those users included in Dan Cohen’s comprehensive Digital Humanities twitter list. Within 30 minutes of my launching the account Dan tweeted an announcement about our event and numerous users began following @PDP2010 or “re-tweeting” Dan’s message. I don’t exactly know yet how the twitter account will augment attendance or ongoing discussion for this conference, but I’m excited to be experimenting with this technology and to see how it might create possibilities for scholarly collaboration that begin before the two-day event and carry on for long afterward.

I’m curious, do any of you have experiences with liveblogging at conferences or advertising academic events via twitter? Or do you have any advice to offer on how to use social media for academic networking and collaboration?

November 13, 2009

The Past’s Digital Presence: Feb 19-20, Yale University

Filed under: digital humanities, events, history — Jana @ 7:27 am
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Make sure to mark your calendars for this upcoming conference:

The Past’s Digital Presence: Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities
February 19-20
Yale University

Full Conference Program Available Here

How is digital technology changing methods of scholarly research with pre-digital sources in the humanities? If the “medium is the message,” then how does the message change when primary sources are translated into digital media? What kinds of new research opportunities do databases unlock and what do they make obsolete? What is the future of the rare book and manuscript library and its use? What biases are inherent in the widespread use of digitized material? How can we correct for them? Amidst numerous benefits in accessibility, cost, and convenience, what concerns have been overlooked? Graduate students from around the globe will address how databases and other digital technologies are making an impact on our research in the humanities during this interdisciplinary symposium.

Keynote Speaker: Peter Stallybrass, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania

Colloquium Speaker: Jacqueline Goldsby, Associate Professor, University of Chicago

Closing Roundtable:
Rolena Adorno, Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Spanish, Yale University
Edward Ayers, President, University of Richmond
Willard McCarty, Professor of Humanities Computing, King’s College London
George Miles, Curator, Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

For the latest updates on conference happenings, follow PDP2010 on twitter.

October 23, 2009

The “Wired” West: Digital History at the Western History Association Annual Conference

Filed under: digital humanities, history — Jana @ 9:35 am
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Andrew Torget and Brent Rogers, speaking on a WHA panel titled “Exploring and Visualizing the Mid-Nineteenth Century West Through Digital History,” each showcased their laudable efforts at using digital tools in historical research.

Torget, perhaps best known for his efforts on the Valley of the Shadow archive, spoke primarily about his latest work on slavery in Texas. As he addressed the specifics of his project he also spoke of the potential of digital history, even as he acknowledged its limitations. I especially appreciated his explanation of how data must be contextualized. As in the example of his current project, knowing when the numbers of slaves increased doesn’t answer the how or why–that’s where the work of the historian figures in, because as he said “digital data is agnostic as to causality.”  With this type of project his data sets are transparent to anyone who might want to challenge or build upon his work, which is quite different than a traditional history project where the work behind the project is generally hidden from anyone but the historian himself. Torget repeatedly emphasized that digital projects such as his foster greater collaboration among researchers.

Rogers’ presentation centered around the use of available digital tools: Wordle and TokenX. He applied these in a textual analysis of documents related to the Utah War.  His presentation offered a solid example of how a researcher with limited programing background can still use digital tools to enhance their research.  My own observation about Rogers’ work was that as he showed the outputs of his text mining, the visuals from Wordle were difficult for many audience members to understand–they wondered why some words were larger, or sideways, or in different colors?  For those of us who are used to seeing ‘word clouds’ this was self-evident, but for a different generation of historians this was mystifying.

In the Q&A portion of the session I asked the panelists what digital tools they thought every graduate student should know.  The initial response was fairly vague, Torget noting that you should learn that tools that are most relevant to your work (and my pained sigh…what if you’re on your own with this and you don’t yet know which ones are most relevant?).  But Torget and Rogers did suggest the following links to specific tools or to sites that host a variety of tools:

Wordle
MIT-Simile project
Stanford’s Spatial History Project
Tools from GMU/CHNM
Google suite tools
ArcGIS (though offered with the caveat that it can be overwhelming and KMZ is much more easily learned)
Both SHANTI and UNL Tool Reviews were recommended as good places to learn more about digital tools

The session ended with a note of frustration about the way the academy continues to dismiss the efforts of digital humanists.  Torget lamented that such projects are always done ‘on the side’ and don’t count towards tenure and suggested that there should be larger conversations happening at the AHA to affirm the value of digital projects.

As an audience participant in this session I found it disheartening that it was not more widely attended, that the audience had very few women (none were on the panel itself), and that there were only two projects featured (as opposed to other panels which typically had 3 or 4 presenters).   In my experience, data or text mining projects are best presented in an informal environment where audience members  can ‘play’ with them and experience their varying levels of functionality–so I’d like to see next year’s WHA offering a ‘hands-on’ session to teach participants how to access and use existing projects.*  It would also be ideal for the WHA to offer a training session for members who are new to text or data mining tools, especially for those of us who are affiliated with departments that don’t have strong digital presence.

*Note: I found it ironic that a conference titled the “Wired West” had very few presentation rooms with projector setups and no free wireless offered to attendees.  Though I understand that this was due to the budgetary constraints of the hotel venue, perhaps such services can be negotiated into the contracts for future WHA conferences, so all participants have access to digital resources.

September 23, 2009

Inspiration Points: Death on my nightstand

Filed under: books, inspiration points — Jana @ 9:02 am
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It’s certainly just coincidence that as I was reading through Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing last night and considered her ideas about writing being about facing one’s own mortality, I realized that the books on my nightstand all seemed clustered around the theme of death. On top was the Atwood, and underneath was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, my bookmark showing me about one-third of the way through the tome, and below that is Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations.  Extending the theme even further might be the book in my handbag, Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, a novel revolving around the mystery of anonymous phone calls to the main characters, each saying “Remember you must die.”

Perhaps the death-thread among these books is coincidence. Or perhaps it’s the logical happenstance of a historian’s life, especially of a historian like myself who studies medical history and the effects of infectious diseases (I have, of course, already gone “on the record” about my own preoccupation with death, religion, and writing). However, I suspect that Atwood might not see this is merely coincidence.  She writes:

Why should it be writing, over and beyond any other art or medium, that should be linked so closely with anxiety about one’s own personal extinction?

Surely that’s partly because of the nature of writing–its apparent permanence, and the fact that it survives its own performance–unlike, for instance, a dance recital.  If the act of writing charts the process of thought, it’s a process that leaves a trail, like a series of fossilized footprints.  Other art forms can last and last–painting, sculpture, music–but they do not survive as voice. ..and what that  voice most often does…is tell a story, even a mini-story.

Essentially Atwood argues, and artfully so, that our own fear of death is what inspires writing, and she also likens the author’s process to that of an underworldly journey, as a process of facing the possibilities of one’s own mortality.

As a historian, however, I suspect that much of my writing is also motivated by a desire to memorialize the lives of others, rather than to immortalize myself.  I crave knowing that others have felt  passions, joys, and heartaches that are similar to my own.  I find their stories are so worth the telling, and there is pleasure in knowing the intimacies of their individual lives. In my writing about the past, I cement my own place on the present. As Atwood says, “the dead may guard the treasure [of the past], but it’s a useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more–which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm of the readers, the realm of change.”

As I am currently in the midst of dissertation writing–a process which can feel, at times, like an underworldly experience (especially on the days when self-doubt triumphs over efficiency), perhaps it’s not a complete coincidence that such morbid reading materials landed on my nightstand.  A fellow PhD student loaned me the Atwood, knowing of my interest in writing and my recent read of Alias Grace.  The Magic Mountain seemed a must-read after I saw so many references to it in other academic writing about nineteenth-century medicine, and Schama’s writing is repeatedly recommended by the historians that I’ve interviewed on the MHpodcast

What about you, do you find curious–or disturbing–themes among the books on your nightstand?  Do you agree with Atwood’s assertion about the permanence of authorial voice and/or the role of the historian as someone who can bring stories “back into the land of the living”  and the “realm of change?”

Writing History Event: “The Invisible College in the Digital Age,” Sept 24 at Yale

Filed under: podcast — Jana @ 6:15 am

From the Writing History group at Yale:

We’ll be discussing “The Invisible College in a Digital Age,” with writer, historian, and fellow graduate student Jana Remy from the History department at UC Irvine. Founder of the “Making History Podcast.” Remy is interested in how digital media can help foster more vigorous (and creative) communities of writer-historians.

Join us this Thursday, 4:30pm in HGS 204.

August 10, 2009

Increasing Grad Student Participation in Conferences

Filed under: resources — Jana @ 4:14 pm
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While at the PCB-AHA this week, one of the conference organizers asked a group of us about ways to stimulate the attendance and participation of graduate students.  This question knocked around in my brain a bit as I talked with my cohort members later and as I spent hours traveling home (having bought a cheap flight with a long layover that was hundreds of miles out of my way).  I also reflected on the THATCamp model and wondered if there might be some way to integrate the successes of an unconference to make a traditional academic conference more helpful to grad students.  Here are some of my ideas:

1) Travel money: Yes, the reality is in the current economic climate, many of our universities have very little, if any, money allotted for conference travel.  Everyone from my UC Irvine cohort paid for the PCB-AHA out of their own pocket, opting for the cheapest of travel options (train or discount flights because few of us have cars that work well enough to travel the desert in mid-summer) and then sleeping two to a bed to offset the pricey conference hotel rooms.  The most frugal of us also brought along homemade sandwiches to defray meal expenses.

2) Banquet registration:  None of my fellow grad students were able to afford the banquet options at the conference.  Perhaps a system to ’sponsor a grad student’ at the banquets would be helpful, as I suspect that many of us lost networking opportunities by not being able to attend. I could imagine a scenario where a senior-level faculty member would not only pay for the meal of a grad student, but also take said student under their wing at the meal and introduce him/her to other faculty members in their field.

3) Facilitating pre-conference collaboration for carpooling & room-sharing: A listserv or FaceBook group for grad students looking to share costs for travel to a conference would not only make the conference less pricey for student attendees, but could also foster other pre-conference collaborations, which leads me to point #4…

4) Fostering informal  ‘unconference’-style student forums:  One thing that I’ve learned from my work on the MHpodcast is that there are numerous graduate student concerns that could be benefit from cross-campus conversations.  This booklet from the AHA is one attempt at addressing the needs of graduate students.  However, facilitating focus groups at conferences would be even more helpful than a pamphlet in addressing specific grad student concerns.  This could be organized in an ‘un-conference’ manner either by having students form interest groups prior to the conference through FaceBook or via an informal brainstorming session at the beginning of the conference.  With either method, grads could propose groups based on their subfields of history or on topics related to the graduate experience (such as applying for external funding, using Zotero, dissertation writing, balancing parenting with academia, etc).  Conference organizers could support the topic groups by setting aside a room for group meetings–perhaps a lounge or a room with a roundtable setting. These meetings would also fit nicely into mealtimes, so if a grad student discount could be arranged at the hotel restaurant or bar, that would be helpful (in my experience, the high cost of eating at the hotel venue typically prevents students from doing so).

In compiling this list, I should say that none of these suggestions are, in any way, meant as a critique of my PCB-AHA experience. This conference has the well-deserved reputation of being an accessible and friendly venue for graduate student participation. I am certainly grateful for the support and collegiality that I experienced while presenting my paper and attending various conference sessions and I’m already looking forward to next year’s event.

July 3, 2009

SAHS: dynamic & going digital

Filed under: digital humanities, events, inspiration points — Laura Mitchell @ 7:53 am
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The Southern African Historical Society biennial meeting displayed dynamism, renewed energy, and increasing interest in digital initiatives.

Scholarly society meetings have a routine. Even without looking at the program, you know what to expect. The attractions of camaraderie, connection with colleagues, and a smattering of provocative new papers outweigh the formality of panels and predictable plenary sessions. Last week’s biennial meeting of the SAHS defied old stereotypes and exceeded conventional expectations. The constellation of individuals, institutional presence, and publications showcased innovative scholarship, new initiatives, provocative thinking, and commitment to making historical research relevant in both public and academic contexts.

SAHS President Jane Carruthers pours libations for the ancestors at the first conference dinner. Clive Glasser looks on.

SAHS President Jane Carruthers pours libations for the ancestors at the first conference dinner. Clive Glaser looks on.

Formal remarks and casual conversations emphasized the symbolic and practical importance of renaming the group the Southern African Historical Society, signaling ongoing attempts to re-situate South Africa in the region—and by implication in the wider world.

The meeting, hosted by UNISA in Pretoria, ended a week ago, and my agenda since then has been crammed with new research, lots of meetings, and learning to navigate Johannesburg. And yet, I’m still thinking about this meeting, and how inspirational it was. I was motivated by coming into contact with energy, dynamism and renewed commitment to studying a wide range of issues that illuminate the Southern African past.

Although I encountered familiar faces, this was not the SAHS meeting of years past. There were many new participants: post-graduate students working at honors, masters, and PhD levels in Southern Africa, the UK, and the US. There were also presenters from Zimbabwe, Botswana, the UK, Canada, and the US, as well as more South Africans of color—students and faculty—than I remember from previous years.

It’s impossible to summarize the contents of a full program that ran three parallel panels per session; one person will always miss more papers than one can take in. But given conversations that I heard in several specialized panels, it seems that the plenary roundtable on “Interrogating the Archive: Problems and Possibilities,” resonated across thematic, spatial, and temporal boundaries, prompting conversations that will continue beyond the conference, into new research and new popular/political initiatives. At least one can hope.

The people of Southern Africa are creating change faster than many observers can register the ongoing transformations and digest their importance. Consequently, ensuring the preservation of records, cataloging what’s available, and securing transparent access for scholars and members of the public remains incredibly important, as is ongoing discussion of the multiplicity and centrality of “archives” to public life.

To that end, the on-line Archives Platform launched by Harriet Deacon on server space at the University of Cape Town should prove invaluable for local heritage activists, scholars in the region, and scholars from further afield who are interested in aspects of African studies and/or the changing terrain of digital scholarship. If you’d like to subscribe to the Archives Platform newsletter, contact harriet at conjunction dot co dot za.

It was also heartening to see a plenary session devoted to Zotero. The possibilities of ground-up collaborations to create shared catalogs of archival records, digital resources, and essential reading lists bodes well for current students and scholars alike. It seems a particularly rich field for current graduate students, who can create intellectual collaborations regardless of location and without the need for travel to bridge the distance between the main training locations in South Africa, the UK, and the US.

Jane Carruthers re-instituted the practice of a presidential address; she used the opportunity to encourage academic historians to take a more active role in public debates about heritage and history in Southern Africa, saying, “History does not have sole rights on the past.” She also reflected on historiographical turning points—a clear reminder that we’re empowered to make our own histogriographical moments, and current political fluidity offers ample opportunities.

Keynote speaker William Beinart provoked conference delegates to think beyond the nationalist narratives that have predominated in South African history, drawing upon the practices of African history, social history, and environmental history to craft new narratives “from the ground up.”

Incoming SAHS President addresses the Society at the closing session.

Incoming SAHS President Julie Parle addresses the Society at the closing session.

Given the enthusiasm of conference delegates, the dedication to the profession and the Society in evidence among the new slate of officers and executive committee members, and an enlarged editorial team ready to make the most of the South African Historical Journal’s new on-line presence through Taylor & Francis, we all have a lot to look forward to during the two years until the next SAHS meeting.

May 27, 2009

Challenges of change-ability: New Frontiers of Digital Scholarship

Filed under: digital humanities, research — Laura Mitchell @ 6:58 am
Tags: ,

“History’s house has many rooms” is the phrase I used in a previous post to describe the increasing print-digital cohabitation. If we accept that both that both print and digital forms will continue to evolve and to coexist, neither able to supplant the other because the platforms offer different, complementary advantages, then perhaps we can move the conversation past the anxiety about what form future scholarly dissemination will take, and instead find comfort in the promise that it will take all kinds of forms.

The diversification of media is good for the discipline, giving historians choices about how to present both historical arguments and primary sources. As Daniel Cohen notes in this month’s  Perspectives,

it is clear that the fundamental activities of the historian—researching, publishing, teaching—have been forever altered by the transition to digital media and technology.

This flourishing of forms simply makes more visible the kinds of strategies already available in a print-only era: aim for a specialist journal devoted to time, place or thematic interests, or a generalist journal? As with breaking news, the proliferation of venues and increasing ease of self-publication (like this blog) means that editorial boards no longer control access to dissemination, so you can take your message directly to your audience.

Having more choices naturally complicates the decision-making process, though. Which available medium reaches your intended audience (including members of a tenure committee)? What puts you in the most direct dialog with other scholars, or with members of a wider public? What makes your work most accessible? What form best preserves your work and provides some assurance of long-term availability? Where is your work most likely to be seen and reliably cited? Thinking through answers to these questions points again to a continued mix of print and digital forms to tell new stories about the past and represent its artifacts.

I’ve already made a case for the continued relevance of print forms. Here I want to reflect on the opportunities and challenges of going digital. One of the many seductions of creating historical interpretations for web-based media is the possibility of direct and nearly immediate interaction with interested readers. Another seduction is the expanded possibility of “getting it right,” quickly correcting mistakes or responding to suggestions without having to wait for a publisher to issue a second edition.

Several comments in response to Karl Jacoby’s praise of the mutability of digital formats suggest the allure of correction is strong, compounded by the sense that you’re not bound to stick with positions you no longer defend. True. But neither are you bound by published positions in print, even if the article exists to remind you of old errors. Subsequent publications can modify or critique your own previous work. This isn’t likely, though, since few of us want to tread and re-tread in exactly the same intellectual terrain. Given the exigencies of peer-reviewed publications and the competition for spots in major journals, it’s usually not worth the time to develop an article that clarifies or adjusts what you’ve already published. So it’s attractive to be able to simply alter what’s already out there.

The mutability of digital forms creates a thorny problem, though: how to create a sustained chain of citations if the evidence or arguments in the cited work may change? Columbia University Press made the decision to make the Gutenberg-e series of books immutable, once published. Granted, the series was hatched in the long-ago days of Web 1.0, before the premium on interactivity. This decision also speaks to an attachment to existing notions about “the book” as an entity, in which changes might be desirable, but require a defined second edition.

For historians, the ground slips right out from under our disciplinary training if either argument or sources are open to changes at will. We have citation problems with evidence or arguments entirely rooted in a mutable website—another reason to want some fixed form of published scholarship, whether print or digital. Roy Rosenzweig’s illumination of this problem, published half a decade ago in the AHR, retains its salience.  A post a month ago on Inside Higher Ed reiterates the issue’s currency.

Historians are not likely to abandon our attachment to defined, reproducible citations, but as Rosenzweig’s article shows, we can find ways to make the changing evidence part of the stories we tell. But that’s only if the changes leave a trail. Without something like the explicit change history on Wikipedia, or the skills of a forensic computer analyst borrowed from CSI, historians laboring in digital trenches must take care to keep their own copies of sources they discover on the web, and work assiduously to assure that resources they create remain stable (or at least traceable).

How we might accomplish this is still open to discovery, but that shouldn’t put us off the task. We should instead be excited about the prospect that some of the forms of the future haven’t been invented yet, even as we grapple with the challenges that come with figuring out what to do with the technology already at our disposal.

May 20, 2009

What’s print got to do with it? New frontiers of digital of scholarship

Filed under: books, history, writing — Laura Mitchell @ 9:20 pm

History, for me, remains text-centric, which I hope sounds perverse in a conversation about history and new media. Although I’m not technically accomplished, neither am I a Luddite. And I’ve drunk enough Derridian Kool-Aid to be willing to see most anything as a potential archive. I’ve nevertheless got an old-fashioned hankering for narrative, and I still think prose is king.

Yes, I use digitized information for sources; I work with visual material as sources and to make arguments; I think about material culture, its three dimensions and tactility. I even wrote a book whose primary incarnation was digital. Belongings is an e-book with a print edition. All this, and I can’t let go of the idea that sentence structure and word choice will make or break a piece, regardless of its length, format, or intended audience.

This attachment to text has important consequences for thinking about the digital revolution we’re living through. There are many reasons to embrace the technological innovations that enable multi-media websites, blogs, on-line genealogies, digitized rare documents easily accessible to the public, photo archives, interactive maps, user-generated timelines, and the trusty library catalog. This flourishing of information and ways to present it is all to the good.

Yet general hand-wringing about the demise of the print form, combined with ongoing conversations happening in department meetings, scholarly conferences, academic journals, and the blogosphere suggest that we need an occasional reminder that this isn’t a zero-sum game, word-smiths and techno-geeks are not necessarily at odds with one another, and history’s house has many rooms.

Print + Digital and the enduring place of prose in history

Despite convulsions in both trade and academic publishing, it seems there’s a rough consensus that print and digital forms will coexist into the foreseeable future. Is it just coincidence that Karl Jacoby’s comments on the tensions and potential for print/digital cohabitation share a fixation with “the future of the past” that roundtable participants grappled with at a 2009 AHA session on digital historical monographs?

Anxiety persists about the print/digital mix, however, aggravated no doubt by the challenges currently facing print newspapers. The resulting commentary opens the discipline up to unprecedented opportunities for reflection on methods and audience at the same time that scholars and institutions experiment with new ways of retrieving, storing and presenting both data and interpretations.

The range of digital resources is staggering; the accomplishments of some sites showcase the possibilities; the pace of innovation rapidly re-sets the game. There’s a reason (besides a misplaced video-game addiction) that people are attracted to new media. The seduction is real, but it’s unlikely to supplant print—at least not until there’s a technology that makes reading anything longer than 1500 words and is also fully integrated with other media as comfortable and portable as a book.

As long as historians perceive their discipline to be about the crafting of arguments developed from careful analysis of primary sources in the context of the existing literature, they will need long stretches of prose to do their work. Currently, on-line or computer-based platforms are not the best medium for sustained reading. Kindle doesn’t present images well (granted, I haven’t had the chance to play with Kindle II), so we still don’t have the technological interface to read long text that is interactive, hyper-linked, or image-heavy other than a computer monitor.

Moreover, the structure of most websites combined with user habit on the internet militates against the web as the best place to present long prose, either articles or books. In other words, the digital revolution presents all kinds of possibilities, but the horizon on which new media completely absorbs long-form prose isn’t visible yet.

I struggled with this paradox as I wrote a book destined to appear as a web-site. To complicate matters, this was my “tenure book,” so I felt it had to be conventional in its address to historiography and be intelligible as a book, with recognizable chapter structure, a cohesive narrative, and a sustained argument. At the same time, the freedom of the digital platform gave me latitude to think about how to create something more than a body of prose accompanied by nice pictures, maps, and historical documents.

Rather than an appendix of documents, I incorporated a few documents into one chapter, bringing readers into my process of close reading. In the chapters with photographs, the images and captions provide illustrations for the arguments I make at specific points, but extracted from the text in the separate media gallery, they constitute photo essays that mirror the larger arguments of the chapter.

I was also keenly aware that the presentation of each chapter as a discrete web-page made it more likely that readers might dip selectively into sections, rather than reading the book cover to cover. So I worked toward making each chapter self-contained, without being needlessly repetitive. The possibility of hyperlinked cross-references made this easier on-line than on the printed page, but I doubt I would have spent much time considering the issue of how to make discrete sections comprise a unified whole if I had been writing a print-only book, where I would presume a more linear reader engagement. I found that being able to point readers forward and backwards without encumbering the prose is a productive addition; I will miss such hyperlinks when I next write for print.

As a reader, I skip around in book chapters all the time, but if it seems like I’m missing some crucial piece of background information because I started in Chapter 5, I figure that’s my shortcoming, not the author’s. But in an e-book, where a Google search could conceivably take a reader straight to Chapter 8 for a discussion of criminal incest, while skipping the evidence presented in Chapters 5, 6, and 7 to establish the context of family structures and household formations that made this particular liaison possible, I felt an obligation to help the reader make links to other parts of the book.

Despite my attention to how an e-book functions differently than a print counterpart, Belongings nevertheless has a print edition. I am not excited about reading more than 200 pages of text on my computer screen. Plus, a bound book is more convenient and physically comfortable to read than the sheaf of 8×11 pages you get from printing the pdf version of the text. (The e-book’s pdf print feature does not let you format the pages to bind as book in a do-it-yourself alternative.)

The color charts, maps, and illustrations that enhance my e-book would have been cost-prohibitive in a print-only project, but like any book, Belongings is ultimately about the prose. Until historians abandon the presentation of arguments in prose, we will supplement but not supplant print as a central medium for the discipline.

As we move toward greater print-digital cohabitation, a range of issues bears ongoing consideration. Many of these topics will be taken up in future posts:

• Mutable websites and the problem of a verifiable citation or citation chain;

• The intersection between method, medium and audience;

• Shifting or new audiences for historians as they engage with different genres of writing: blogging, critical essays, op-eds, trade and “cross-over” books;

• Google isn’t making us stoopid , but it is making room for people with multiple skill sets.

May 13, 2009

What’s Not New About Swine Flu

Filed under: books — Jana @ 7:39 am
Tags:

By Nick Bravo & Jana Remy
Shockjock Jay Severin just got suspended by his radio station after a disturbingly xenophobic and racist tirade that, for all its hate, remains surprisingly unoriginal. Here’s what he said: “We should be, if anything, surprised that Mexico has not visited upon us poxes of more various and serious types already, considering the number of crimaliens already here.”

And here is what Saturday Evening Post columnist Kenneth Roberts said, not last week but in 1931: “They are the criminal Mexicans, worthless in labor and always a social problem. They are also chronic beggars and sizzling with disease. This class should never pass the immigration officers on the border.” We are now, just as then, in the throes of an economic crisis where anxieties become attacks and the targets prove to be the nation’s most vulnerable populations.

As a careful look through U.S. history shows us, discourses about disease often serve to further marginalize already the already oppressed. The books described below tell us why epidemics like the swine flu are nothing new in American history, and remind us that now–as in the past–disease affects not just human bodies, but bodies of people.

Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, Decade of Betrayal (University of New Mexico Press, 1995)
The often-forgotten Mexican repatriation drives of the 1930s targeted Mexicans for allegedly stealing US jobs–a claim augmented by stories of disease. “As a consequence of the horrendous working condition…lack of even the most rudimentary sanitation and housing facilities, and prolonged malnutrition,” the line went, “Mexican families suffered from a variety of serious illnesses…” Balderrama and Rodriquez describe a then that could easily end up like our now: thousands of Mexicans being forced out of Los Angeles during a period depression and health scares.

Katherine Bliss, Compromised Positions (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001)
Bliss examines Mexico City’s attempts to regulate and reform prostitution in the post-Revolution era. Moral judgments about prostitutes and prostitution fell directly onto the women themselves (never their clients) and were often expressed through concerns about venereal disease, most notably syphilis. Bliss shows us how panics about morals and pathogens justify intrusion into private lives and police the vulnerable, not the affluent.

Mike Davis, The Monster at Our Door (Holt, 2006)
Speaking prophetically, Davis details why the avian flu promises to be far more lethal than the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. Offering easily digestible scientific details showing why an avian flu epidemic is imminent, Davis’ book may feel far too prescient for those readers obsessed with the current H1N1 outbreak.

Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana (Hill and Wang, 2002)
Killing over one hundred thousand people and decimating native communities, Fenn charts the spread of the disease across the continent and explains how and why this disease was so virulent, especially as it “extinguished the accumulated wisdom of generations” of native peoples by completely disrupting their community structures.

Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? (University of California Press, 2006)
Did you know Los Angles had a bubonic plague outbreak in 1921? Do you know who they blamed for it? Mexican immigrants. The city burned and quarantined Mexican neighborhoods yet, strangely, the quarantine did not apply to Mexican railroad and agricultural laborers, Call them dirty and diseased and dangerous, but don’t let that get in the way of their remarkably cheap work.

Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years (University of Chicago, 1987)
This classic history of three New York City cholera outbreaks (1832, 1849, and 1866) highlight how clean water, developments in sanitation, and a strict use of quarantine eventually resulted in the city’s success in staving off an epidemic. Rosenberg shows how public sentiment shifted from seeing cholera as the “poor man’s plague,” to removing the blame from the victim by via a science-based approach.

Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides (University of California Press, 2001)
In early twentieth-century San Francisco, according to Nayan Shah, public health officials insisted that “disease was exclusively un-American and nonwhite,” and consequently targeted Chinese immigrant communities. White domesticity and health appeared synonymous, and those left outside this domesticity could be justifiably maligned and excluded in the name of disease eradication. For disease, feel free to read racial other.

Michael Shaynerson and Mark Plotkin, The Killers Within
(Back Bay Books, 2003)
The abundance of antibiotics in animal feed (24.6 million pounds a year) is a leading factor in the rise of these drug-resistant bacterial strains such as “flesh-eating” bacteria. Like the rural Mexicans who are faulted for the genesis of the current strain of swine flu, people who work with animals bear much of the blame for overuse of antibiotics in livestock, though fault hardly seems warranted for those who are simply supplying the world’s demand for cheap meat.

Alexandra Stern, Eugenic Nation(University of California Press, 2005)
In 1917, a Typhus outbreak led public officials to quarantine the entire length of the US border, and also facilitated the creation of the US Border Patrol. The quarantine was specific to one disease outbreak, the sanitation stations remained status quo through World War II. Officials along the border stripped migrants and treated them with kerosene—an “unforgettable passage.” Stern tells how the United States was imagined as an Anglo body, Mexicans as racial and pathological contaminants, and the border and its officers as the immune system.

Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs (Harvard University, 1999)
Following the advent of germ theory in the late nineteenth century, cleanliness became like religious fervor as middle-class housewives sanitized their homes to prevent the spread of disease. Magazine articles reinforced the notion that domestic efficiency would prevent illness, particularly those believed to be harbored by ‘unclean’ immigrant households. Tomes writes, “if a disease affects only some segments of society, especially those already stigmatized for other reasons, its prevention potentially arouses far more hostility and conflict,” which is certainly apparent in the current pandemic.
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Nick Bravo is a Ph.D. candidate in Twentieth-Century Chicano/a History at the University of California, Irvine.
Jana Remy is the founder of the Making History Podcast and is finishing her dissertation in American medical history at UCIrvine.

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