I opted not to travel this holiday season because I had a lot of work to get done.  I decided that I would keep the holidays simple and spend several hours each day writing, then spending evenings with my family and friends.  It seemed the most responsible way to spend the two weeks of UCI campus holiday and furlough–my partner also being a campus employee had similar plans to spend the holiday season getting caught up on his various online projects.  My family is, perhaps, more Internet-dependent than most.  All four of us are avid bloggers, three of us are active twitter users, and two of us base most of our professional lives on online technologies/media.

However, on December 23rd we realized that our Internet service was out.  This is not an entirely unusual occurrence–our Internet service is randomly unavailable on a regular basis, but such outages rarely last more than 3 hours.  However, this outage proved to be more persistent.  After about 30 hours of outage I started calling the helpline (getting a recording) and emailing various members of Housing and IT administration.  I received a fairly prompt reply from Housing personnel and learned my message was the first that they’d heard of the outage.  My spouse, when calling to related tech services around campus learned that the OIT helpline was barraged with calls about the outage but their hands were tied because they had no jurisdiction over campus housing.

To make a long story short: due to furloughed campus employees, there will be no Ethernet service for graduate housing until after the quarter begins on January 4th.   The personal consequence of this is that my works efforts are highly stymied for the time being (short bursts of connectivity happening whenever I want to hang out in the one laundry room nearby with access). While the consequence for me and my family is mostly superficial, it’s far more dramatic for some of my colleagues–those who are teaching in Winter quarter can’t access course materials, rosters, or set up class websites until after the quarter has begun. Those of my colleagues who are headed to two of the largest hiring conferences in the Humanities (the MLA and the AHA) can’t access program information or correspond with interviewers. And those of us graduate students with funding deadlines can’t turn in applications or communicate with our recommenders.

Typically when our Internet is down we head to the campus to get access. However, due to the furlough the campus is completely shuttered, as is our local public library, too, due to the state budget crunch.

I feel as though my internet woes are somewhat minimal…a blip on the radar of the world’s real problems. But it’s one more thing that’s adding to the burden of those of us affiliated with the UC. With layoffs, cutbacks, furloughs, and budgetary woes, the UC is no longer offering a stellar academic experience. Instead, it’s becoming an educational albatross.

Cross-posted from History Compass Exchanges

I’m a historian because I’m haunted. The words and names from the archives surface in my thoughts and dreams…as I immerse myself in their world, their stories become mine. Am I like a clan storyteller, curating and re-telling the memories from long ago? Or am I merely that eccentric cat lady with no life of her own, her piles of papers and a worn laptop offering ample space for escape from the real world? Though I now sit in an overstuffed chair in my suburban living room with the ambient sound of a lawnmower outside, I am not really here. I am at the sickbed. Hearing a young child’s chest heave and rise, reminding me of my son.

The cough brought our pediatrician running down the hallway. It was the third time I’d brought in my newborn baby out of concern for his stuffy nose and congestion. He had stopped nursing. There was the faintest tinge of blue at the corners of his lips. Dr. Yu speedily unzipped my son’s pajamas, and placing a stethoscope over his tiny chest and heart. Then stepped back for a moment, watching the labored rise and fall of our son’s breathing, his ribcage dipping down nearly to spine each time he coughed. We all watched. Each intake of air a deep gasp from within his belly. What happened next is a blur of memory, my fear eclipsing exact recall. A rush to the nearest Children’s Hospital and an exam by an infectious disease specialist. Isolation due to the risk of contagion. Learning that our son was infected with a disease that was often fatal, with a name that only faintly registered in my memory: pertussis. As we were to learn later, it’s the “P” part of the DTP immunization that most babies receive at their two month checkup. Our baby was only four weeks old.

The specter in my research today is not pertussis, but a different letter of the vaccination alphabet. The “D” for diphtheria is hovering around my living room as I shuffle through the account of physicians’ failed attempts at treatment. The disease called the “strangling angel” caused leathery membranous wings to grow in the throat, eventually coating the mouth, nasal passages, and windpipe. Its sounds are much like those that I remember from pertussis: the forced breathing that is dreadful, but not as dreadful as the silence. Those long moments when all sound stops.

Now reading from The Lancet, an 1859 account of diphtheria: “When the surgeon is summoned, he finds the throat and mouth covered with yellow or brownish leathery exudation. Within a few hours a hoarse, barking cough, and a change in the tone of the voice are marked; oppression of the breathing supervenes; then paroxysms of suffocation, more and more frequent; the cough is stifled, and the voice also dies out. As…suffocation is felt, the poor child turns from side to side, throws its arms into the air, clutches its mother violently, and struggles furiously to gain breath, then falls exhausted in the bed, and gaining strength from momentary repose, renews the hopeless struggle to the end. Perhaps, in a violent fit of coughing, it expels a false membrane from the air-tubes, which has extended down to the fifth division of the bronchi; then it breathes easily, smiles again, and sleeps, but soon wakes to resume its struggle with death-it may be again to expel the membrane, and finally to triumph. But such a happy victory is wholly exceptional, and when once the grip of the disease has closed upon the air-tubes, death claims its prey.”[1]

My son survived. Our pediatrician later explained to us that he had only heard a pertussis cough once before, while practicing overseas. Our infectious disease doctor told us that if Dr. Yu hadn’t heard the distinctive cough and recognized it for what it was, we would have lost our son. A few weeks spent in an isolation ward with a steady flow of oxygen and feeding tube restored his vigor–his slight propensity to asthma is the only legacy of that time. I’m not the only person haunted by children dying of infectious diseases. “Of all the horrors…that of a child struggling under [diphtheritic] strangulation, is, perhaps, the most painful,” wrote one California physician in 1863.[2] Back then, many doctors had simply given up trying to find an effective treatment for the disease, the proscriptive advice in medical texts varying so widely so as to make any practitioner’s head spin.[3] From various texts, the remedies were:

Take spirits of turpentine, 1 ounce…[4]

nitrate of silver, if used at all, is employed in a weak solution…[5]

Many of the German physicians…advise gargling the throat with the brine of Holland herring…[6]

the disease vanishes under the influence of Cimicifuga…[7]

Carbolic or phenic acid is the best remedy…[8]

Dr. Edward Adamson states that he has treated fifty-five cases of diphtheria by the internal administration of the officinal tincture of iodine…[9]

per sulphate of iron as a topical application…[10]

Ice is applied in a bag, or by means of a lump cut to fit, and placed saddle-wise across the throat…a piece as large as a hen’s egg, secured in contact with the neck by a strip of oiled silk, and covered afterwards in front with flannel. It is not to be removed till relief is established, and it may be necessary to prevent reaction after its removal by the application of cold water…[11]

As time went on, more invasive options–tracheotomy surgery or intubation–held some promise for success. But these procedures were risky, because “diphtheria was the only disease in which the practitioner of internal medicine was likely to find himself called upon to wield the knife.[12]” Success rates for tracheotomy tended to be contingent on the skill of the physician as well as whether it was too late for any effective treatment. Despite an understanding of the appropriate procedure for a tracheotomy, it was relied on only when strangulation was imminent. Thus, this was not a procedure that doctors had time to prepare for. A physician wrote that the need for the surgery was so urgent, after cutting the hole in his patients’ neck, he risked his own health by laying “a handkerchief over the wound made in the trachea and, with the lips, suck[ed] the secretions from the larynx.”[13] Another doctor admitted to similarly aspirating the throat of a patient with his own mouth, adding that afterwards he chewed on a plug of tobacco and “indulged freely in spiritus frumenti [whisky] as an antidote” to the germs he received from his patient.[14] One can only imagine the desperation of a physician cutting through a baby’s throat and putting his own mouth on the baby’s neck, trying to force air from his lungs through the baby’s membrane-coated passageways. Blood on hands, blood on his lips, blood pooling around the body of the strangling child.

The editor of the San Francisco Medical Press explained how he performed the tracheotomy with marked success. Before the surgery his young patient’s skin had a bluish tinge due to lack of oxygen, and afterwards she breathed freely. However, due to the strain of the illness on her body, she died of secondary complications within a week of the surgery. The editor continues to advocate for tracheotomy, however, and explains the success of the surgery in this case because it spared the patient from death by asphyxiation. He writes, “Now from the result of this case, (though fatal,)…we have much to vindicate it from the odium which strongly in its favor, if this were not sufficient, is the relief which it instantly affords the patient struggling with all the throes of death by asphyxia;–for, of all the horrors which are presented to[the] eyes of the Physician, in his pathological experience, that of a child struggling under croupal strangulation, is, perhaps, the most painful, and invokes from the heart the keenest feeling of sympathy.”[15]

Diseases like diphtheria tended to afflict urban communities more than sparsely-settled areas. Like many other infectious diseases, it spread via contaminated water or milk supplies as well as by human contact. In the more sparsely settled regions of nineteenth-century America, diphtheria was still feared, even though the threat was more remote than in densely populated areas. The nearly-exponential growth of nineteenth century California communities experienced numerous waves of diphtheria outbreaks, triggering a response from the local medical community as well as from regional public health organizations. And it wasn’t until the 1890s that an antitoxin for diphtheria became widely available. Within another two decades a successful vaccination for the disease meant that the number of cases on the United States dropped to an almost negligible amount. The strangling angel no longer haunted American children, or at least that’s how it seemed.

The young nurse taking my health history shook his head. He’d asked questions for over an hour, detailed queries that included a thorough recounting of my sexual history, my overseas travel, and of my extended family’s medical issues. My own coughing spells frequently disrupted our conversation. The nurse was the first to connect the dots between me, my mother who had recently visited her firstborn grandchild, and my father who was dying of cancer in a San Diego hospital. A pattern emerged: although we were all immunized as children, those shots wear off over time and leave us vulnerable (my husband, alone, immune due to recent boosters received before living in Asia). The hospital in an international border town was a likely vector for a disease that had all-but-disappeared in the United States. Like with diphtheria, adults carried a mild form of the disease, which was rarely life-threatening. Pertussis infected my son through me, through my mother, though my father, but mostly through forgetting. A decade ago, before a worldwide flu epidemic and drug-resistant TB, who knew that such diseases were still mingling amongst us? Or that they would continue to return, like that strangling angel…

“an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread…Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”[16]

—————————————-

[1] “Report of the Lancet Sanitary Commission on Diphtheria: Its History, Progress, Symptoms, and Treatment.,” The Lancet 73, no. 1850 (February 12, 1859): 169-170, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6T1B-49HF759-4GB/2/07561f0d20eec18ff9b1ab19c39e8524.

[2] Wm. H Sherwood, “of Croup following Diphtheria: Tracheotomy—Successful Termination,” The San Francisco Medical Press 5, no. 1 (April 1863): 24-26.

[3] Physicians were “apathetic and hopeless in regard to the treatment of diphtheria to a degree not experienced in any other disease,” said Evelynn Maxine Hammonds, Childhood’s Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880-1930, (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 36.

[4] “Diphtheria,” Farmer’s Cabinet, February 14, 1867, http://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/HistArchive/?p_product=EANX&p_theme=ahnp&p_nbid=K58H51UFMTI1ODU1NTU5MS40MjEyNToxOjE0OjE2OS4yMzQuMTIxLjg5&p_action=doc&s_lastnonissuequeryname=2&d_viewref=search&p_queryname=2&p_docnum=27&p_docref=v2:108BD1FCD7E9FA90@EANX-108D96155CA30E00@2403012-108D96184C9ACA98@0-108D961970141EE8@Diphtheria.

[5] “Editor’s Tools: Treatment of Diphtheria,” The San Francisco Medical Press 6, no. 1 (April 1864): 31.

[6] “Diphtheria: History of the Fell Disease–Some Suggestions as to Treatment that May be Valuable,” Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco, CA), February 2, 1887, http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/885/414/81067853w16/purl=rc1_NCNP_0_GT3000872395&dyn=16!xrn_35_0_GT3000872395&hst_1?sw_aep=univca20.

[7] Cimicifuga, commonly known as Black Cohosh, was a medicament popular with eclectic practitioners in the mid-19th century. “Editor’s Tools: Treatment of Diphtheria.”

[8] Ibid.

[9] “Tincture of Iodine in Diphtheria,” St. Louis Courier of Medicine 14: 256, http://books.google.com/books?id=E6QRAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#PPA256,M1.

[10] “Editor’s Tools: Treatment of Diphtheria.”

[11] Ibid.

[12] Anne Hardy, “Tracheotomy Versus Intubation: Surgical Intervention in Diphtheria in Europe and the United States, 1825-1930.,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 66, no. 4 (1992): 538, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ahl&AN=A000376044.01&site=ehost-live.

[13] Francis Long, A Prairie Doctor of the Eighties Some Personal Recollections and Some Early Medical and Social History of a Prairie State (Norfolk Neb.: House Pub. Co., 1937), 60.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Wm. H Sherwood, “of Croup following Diphtheria: Tracheotomy—Successful Termination.”

[16] “On the Concept of History / Theses on the Philosophy of History – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Concept_of_History_/_Theses_on_the_Philosophy_of_History.

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).

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?

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.

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.

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?”

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.

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.

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.