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 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 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.

“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.

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.

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.
———

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.

ZOTERO II: HANDS-ON WITH YOUR OWN WORK
Tues., 4/28, 12:30 – 2:00, 137 Humanities Instructional Building, UCIrvine
Now that you’ve heard about Zotero, experimented with it a bit, or even begun to use it as your bibliographic software, bring in your work to help answer your questions and to give you tips on organizing your materials, importing items into your library with the click of one button, tagging and sorting items for later retrieval, annotating, and inserting references into Word documents. Bring your laptop computer and your research.
Discussion Facilitator: Jana Remy, Graduate Student, Department of History

12:45 pm, Tuesday the 28th of April, HGS 204, Yale University

With the end of the year fast approaching with finals, quals, and/or papers, we invite you to a lunch ’study break’ discussion with Dava Sobel, ’science’ writer and best-selling author, of Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love. In addition to discussing her works, Dava Sobel will also have a few words on the Galileo exhibit currently on show at the Beinecke. Grab a free lunch, commiserate with fellow writers, and discuss why the past matters to public history. Science, like any other cultural product, has a history; come find out how one writer has balanced story and fact for a broader audience.

Last night I heard Pico Iyer speak about his latest book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. This morning, still musing on his words, I read through some of his writings that I found readily available online. His piece “Writing Undoes Me” struck a deep chord. As I’m spending several hours each day writing my dissertation, I feel the elusiveness of language. It’s so frustrating, to find that each time I craft an argument I’m a bit less convinced of its veracity. Iyer writes:

The deeper I’ve entered into this process, in short, the harder it’s become for me to believe in it. Writing is the practice I maintain going to my little space (at a schoolgirl’s desk decorated with Hello Kitty images and pictures of Brad Pitt), and stilling myself and my monkey mind to see what remains when everything burns away. It feels, often, like a journey into and through the jungle, each day providing some new revelation, often contradictory of the previous ones, till finally I’m out on the other side, and see that the revelations of impermanence were impermanent too. The more I practice writing, therefore, the less I believe in it. The more I get down what I believe, the less I really have faith in it. All the words, the hours at the desk, are just gestures, it comes to seem, to the emptiness that lies behind the curtain at the back of the stage, unseen by spectators and even actors. I write and write and write and what I come up with is a sense of the arbitrariness of everything that’s written; I know I’ll believe something else tomorrow. It’s no more to be relied upon than that play of light through the trees.

Writing is a form of meditation, I sometimes tell myself (though no doubt I could say the opposite the next day). But it’s a form that deconstructs itself, so finally you come to feel that writing is just the convulsive exercise you do to get to the place where all writing ceases. You can take a notebook into your retreat, I can imagine a wise man saying, but when you emerge, you’ll only want to throw away everything you’ve scribbled.

Writing in the Age of Globalization:
A Conversation with Pankaj Mishra and Laila Lalami
Moderated by Kavita Philip
Time and Place: April 20, 1:30-3:00, Humanities Instructional Building Rm 135, UC Irvine
Sponsored by UCI’s International Center for Writing and Translation
Co-sponsors: UCI’s History Department, Working Group in African and Middle Eastern Studies, and Bookstore
(Open to all interested members of the university and larger community; books will be available for sale and signing.)

Laila Lalami is the author of an acclaimed collection of short stories, Hope & Other Dangerous Pursuits, and a novel, Secret Son, which is coming out this month. An Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at UC Riverside, she has been an active blogger (writing as “The Moorish Girl”) and has contributed to the Nation, the Boston Review, and other periodicals.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of The Romantics: A Novel (a novel) and author or editor of several other books, including Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond. He is a regular contributor to both the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books, and he has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, and many other newspapers and magazines.

Kavita Philip is Director of UCI’s Critical Theory Institute and an Associate Professor of Women’s Studies. She is the author of Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India and co-editor of several other books, including Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization. She is an Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Director of the Critical Theory Institute.

An interesting interview with Jill Lepore about her recent novel, Blindspot, co-written with Jane Kamensky. An excerpt:

FM: You two decided to write the novel as a birthday present for a friend?

JL: He was actually our graduate student mentor at Yale, John Demos. When an academic retires, his graduate students usually hold a conference to celebrate his work. Jane and I decided that for our piece of the conference we were going to write character sketches that were a send-up of 18th-century genre fiction. It took us a week to write these character sketches, and it was fun. So we kept going, and before we knew it we’d batted back and forth 100 pages….

Part of the conceit of the novel is that it was supposed to be written as if it were written in 1764, and so there’s a lens through which the characters see the world that’s not entirely bearable for a contemporary reader. Most modern readers aren’t out there reading “Clarissa.”

I love the idea of two historians getting carried away with writing a novel, as if such things had a life of their own. And as a side note to Lepore: I’m a huge fan of Samuel Richardson and epistolary novels, so I suppose I’m a rarity among contemporary readers. Go figure.
(H/T Cliopatria for the interview link)

Are you as excited as I am about Zotero’s latest release? Version 1.5 is now available. What’s most exciting about this is that the next time I do a Zotero workshop I won’t have to preface every statement with “when they release version 1.5…” The possibilities of the web application are particularly exciting to me (and as soon as I finish this post, I’ll be exploring the possibilities).

Additionally, I felt this rundown of Digital Humanities, especially the section on OpenAccess initiatives, was helpful in summarizing the state of the field. Do you find the momentum for this building at other campuses like it is here at UCIrvine?

Earlier this month I attended UCLA’s Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities. Rather than braving the freeways and heading to Los Angeles, I attended Tara McPherson’s lecture Second Life. The technical difficulties of the SL world made it difficult for me to get as much out of the lecture as I would’ve liked, but it still offered a good entree to Vectors Journal and the efforts of those who are on the forefront of ‘multimodal’ scholarship. Perhaps you’ll join me/us–virtually or in avatar form–for the next lecture on March 9th.