Archive for June, 2008

Creepy Treehouse

June 30, 2008

When pursuing my normal, chaotic trampolining from blog to blog, I was stopped dead in my tracks by the following phrase: “creepy treehouse”. I absolutely love the terminology. After some further investigation, I was fascinated to learn that the phrase has gotten significant play, and has sparked intense discussion across the ed-tech blogosphere. The basic definition covers a range of characteristics, but the one I think is most fitting as it applies to digital scholarship is “adj. Repulsiveness arising from institutional mimicry or emulation of pre-existing community-driven environments or systems.” (For more see History Hacks, Technagogy, and Munkering)

The now-classic example is Blackboard’s attempt to embed an application within Facebook that would connect students to their courses. Great perhaps in theory, but from a student’s perspective, it’s absolutely an example of “creepy treehouse.” There are certain times I will run across well-meaning attempts to utilize digital tools or elements of Web 2.0, but often there is just something “off” about them that smacks of inauthenticity. Some examples that come to mind are the “Chat with a librarian on AIM” feature at my school’s library, or an older example of a well-meaning teacher constructing a webpage for their students to learn from, complete with garish WordArt and animated GIFs, and often hosted by Geocities. I am the first to admit that there is a fine line between the successful incorporation of these tools and the unsuccessful construction of a creepy treehouse. And that line is also blurry, jagged, and constantly shifting. What exactly determines that Blackboard’s Facebook initiative is creepy treehouse, while the both popular and respected iTunes U is a fun, enjoyable treehouse?

One of the major flaws of creepy treehouses is often a heavy-handed, rigid, top-down approach to utilizing technology that is itself inherently fluid, flexible, and often geared towards a bottom-up or horizontal structure. It reminds me of the field of advertising. As recently as a decade ago, the status-quo was for a major advertising firm to come up with a centralized, coherent ad campaign for a product. Now, the industry works within an age of viral marketing, where consumers are invested participants in the entire advertising process. While effective, top-down advertising campaigns are still successful, they are much more vulnerable to the criticisms, critiques, and resistance of a digitized consumer populace. Similarly, digital academic treehouses for students can still be effectively constructed, but they run the increasing risk of being considered, well, creepy.

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Text Analysis of Venture Smith’s Narrative

June 22, 2008

After reading Lisa Spiro’s latest blog post addressing text analysis for comparison based research, I decided to try out some of these tools for myself. For my text I chose the narrative of Venture Smith, who was the subject of my senior thesis. Smith was an eighteenth-century black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery as a child in Africa, labored as a slave in New England for several decades, then managed to buy the freedom of himself and his family and become a successful businessman. He narrated an autobiography near the end of his life that is becoming more and more widely used by educators. Following Spiro’s example, I went over to Wordle and created a word cloud of the narrative. Here are the results:

Venture Smith Narrative word cloud

A cursory glance at the cloud shows some basic results. The first recurring text theme was that of MASTER, not surprising given the amount of time he spends discussing his time as a slave. The second theme was that of time (TIME, YEAR, YEARS, AFTER). As an elderly man at the time of his narration, this is also not surprising, and supports the overall sense of reflection one gets from reading the text. Finally, the third theme is that of money (MONEY, POUNDS, PURCHASED, BUSINESS, PAID). One of the striking, and at times disconcerting, aspects of Smith’s narrative is a near-obsessive focus on all things financial. He recounts detailed transactions, including placing the purchase of his pregnant wife’s freedom in terms of the money he saved from not having to purchase his yet-unborn son.

I then went over to TAPOR and used a basic word frequency tool to examine the list. The advantage of this tool over the word cloud at Wordle is that you can set more parameters, including the exclusion of “stop words,” such as “a, the, and, etc.” that comprise the majority of text. Controlling for these stop words, here are the top twenty words in Venture Smith’s narrative:

What is surprising is the sheer frequency of the word “master,” far outstripping any other other word. If we combine “money” and “pounds” together, it would be roughly comparable, however. The middle column displays the location within the text, divided into segments. For example, it shows that master was almost exclusively utilized during the middle third of the text, or a close correlation to the middle chapter of the narrative describing his time as a slave. Simiarly, “money” and “pounds” come up most often during the last third of the text, during which time Smith was a free man and likely more concerned with financial issues.

In order to move beyond simple text frequency, I decided to examine some key words. My thesis explored the role of land and property in Smith’s life as a freeman, so I used TAPOR’s visual cocollator tool and created a basic diagram of the words that appeared most often in the two sentences surrounding the word “land”. From there, I decided to link up a similar visual diagram for the word “time” in order to see any links between these two often-used, but seemingly unrelated phrases:

The two main words that linked “land” and “time” were “money” and “purchased.” It is interesting that the common connector between these two elements of Smith’s life seemed to be a financial one. Or perhaps it points to the fact that his focus on money seemed to permeate many other aspects of his worldview and identity. If I had more time I’d like to do a comparative analysis, similar to Spiro’s, to other contemporary black narratives (Olaudah Equiano, John Marrant, etc.). A lot of room for possibility here.

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Review: Placing History (I)

June 21, 2008

(This is the first installment of my review of Placing History. See the second and the third parts.)

I finally got around to sitting down with Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship, edited by Anne Kelly Knowles. The book addresses the growing field of combining Geographic Information System (GIS) software with historical scholarship. ((Technical aside: GIS is a broad term for digital analysis of geographic information – most commonly used for making maps – that allows users to input, store, and analyze a huge range of spatial data in a mind-boggling number of ways. Personal aside: I have a been using GIS software for about two years – I employed it extensively in my undergrad research and took a geology class constructed almost entirely around ArcGIS analysis.)) Broken into chapters comprised of individual studies conducted by a variety of scholars, it’s the more modern version of Knowles’s 2002 volume, Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History. The chapters of Placing History range from the quantitatively analytical “Scaling the Dust Bowl” and “Mapping Husbandry in Concord: GIS as a Tool for Environmental History,” to the more big-picture, theory-based “Combining Space and Time: New Potential for Temporal GIS.”

Originally I was planning on finishing all of the chapters before I posted a review of the volume as a whole, but I was too blown away by the introductory chapter of the book, “GIS and History,” written by Knowles. She gives both a wide-ranging and deep analysis of the field. Knowles begins the chapter with the optimistic assertion that, “scholars’ use of geographic information systems (GIS) is changing the practice of history.” From there she gives a brief history of the field, then delves into its current state. I think her greatest accomplishment in this chapter is to balance the obstacles to historical GIS with its huge potential for innovation and scholarship.

On the obstacle end, she writes that one major impediment to historical GIS is the fundamental divide of time vs. space – history is largely a study of subjects within a temporal framework, whereas GIS works largely within a spatial one. And she admits that, “For all practical purposes, historical GIS remains an ad hoc subfield that scholars discover serendipitously.” One reason may be a common complaint of historians concerning geography: that maps are too often seen as stand-alone, objective vessels of information. Instead, Knowles brings up the great point that any serious use of historical GIS requires rigorous examination and discovery of spatial source material, as much as any historian would need to employ in utilizing any diary, letter, or tax record for their research.

Nevertheless, Knowles does a great job of clearly outlining both the advances that have been made and the possibilities for the future. I agree with her basic outlines of the three types of historical GIS currently used:

1. History of land use and spatial economy, ex. outlining agricultural shifts in response to economic or environmental changes.

2. Reconstructing past landscapes, ex. analyzing Robert E. Lee’s line-of-sight (what he could see) during the Battle of Gettysburg.

3. Infrastructure projects, ex. scientists compiling historical landuse datasets in order to track global warming.

In actuality, though, it is nearly impossible to generalize the range of possibilities for historical GIS. The major constraint is really one of imagination and resources – are people aware of all its possibilities, and do they have access to the software/expertise. Finally, she struck a real personal chord in me with her observation that “The most exciting thing about historical GIS is often the ‘eureka’ moment when someone sees data mapped for the first time.” Much like discovering a long-sought after name or date or reference within a manuscript or microfilm, suddenly witnessing your hard work take a physical, visible shape on a computer screen is truly special.

I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the case studies and writing up a brief review, but for a superb introduction to the field of historical GIS, I couldn’t ask for anything better than what Knowles has produced in the opening chapter. At some point I would like to write a post solely dedicated to brainstorming ideas about the ways GIS could be utilized for history in particular and the humanities as a whole, in the vein of PhDinHistory’s blog post, “What I Would Like To See in Text Mining For Historians.”

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City of Memory

June 20, 2008

Hat tip to Tellhistory for their link to the City of Memory site. Constructed by City Lore, a cultural heritage non-profit, the site uses a map of New York City as a base layer over which is laid individual “stories” represented by dot markers. Clicking on a dot brings up a window with more information about that story, often including poems, images, audio, or video. Roughly half the stories were uploaded by the site’s curators, while the other half were uploaded by individual users. Some of the stories are physically linked on the map if they belong to a common theme. For example, there are six dots/stories in the Chinatown area, and each one brings up a different aspect of the area, narrated on video by a guide.

The entire site is very well-done. The design is crisp and professional, and the random sampling of stories I clicked on worked seamlessly. I also liked the separate tab within each story to see the site overlaid onto a more detailed Yahoo map. The very Web 2.0 feature of allowing useres to contribute stories follows the same vein of other projects such as CHNM’s September 11 Digital Archives project, and I think is a phenomenal development for public history. Finally, the idea of using a map as a base layer for the project seems to work well, as it serves to geographically place these memories in a way that makes them more accessible.

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Testing Citizenship

June 19, 2008

HNN’s Cliopatria blog posted a link to a set of ten sample questions posed by the U.S. civics test for immigrants attempting to become naturalized American citizens. The test was revamped and released this past October, with more input from a variety of organizations and sources. According to the NY Times, its content was improved by emphasizing “basic concepts about the structure of government and American history and geography” and the social diversity of the United States.

After scanning the ten questions, I was left both unsatisfied and intrigued. On the disappointment end, from an historical standpoint, how does knowing that Woodrow Wilson was the president during WWI make you a better citizen? If you were composing a ratings system for skills necessary for studying history, I like to think that simple fact-recall is relatively far down the list.  While the test claims to have cut down on trivia-based questions, there are still some relatively inane questions. One of the test’s main architects even makes the straight-faced claim that they chose only “landmark moments of American history that apply to every single citizen.” Right. Every single citizen. I actually winced when I read that.

On a more positive note, it made me think about how citizenship tests are a fascinating source for examining concepts of an American identity. The test offers a snapshot of how Americans view themselves, or more importantly, how they want to view themselves – for example, the article mentions that “pilgrims” are now referred to as “colonists.” When did this change? What was the impetus behind it? I’d love to see an in-depth study (existing or future) of how citizenship questions have transformed over the years in response to an evolving social/cultural/political climate.

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Webcams, Ithaka, and Facebook

June 18, 2008

First, an encouraging article from the Chronicle discussing the decision by some professors to experiment with the form and length of their lectures. Dalton A. Kehoe, of York University, decided to post his lectures online. After receiving negative feedback from his student, he realized he needed to shorten the online lectures and break them down into 20-minute sections. I love this idea. The willingness to experiment and alter what you’re used to as a professor is a truly admirable trait. And I also think that broadcasting your lectures would allow for a critical element of self-evaluation that too often gets lost as educators settle into their individual comfort zones.

Next up is a post at the AHA titled “Links, Spaces, and Changing Habits of Historical Research.” It highlights two reports from Ithaka, one discussing how different disciplines approach research, while the second study analyzes the changing place of online sources in journal citations. The first one was a little discouraging. According to their report, history ranks near the bottom of a variety of categories in using digital resources in pursuing research, including a resistance to relying on online tools such as e-only journals and Google Scholar. Meanwhile, the second set of articles finds that history articles published online do not have any greater chance of being cited by other scholarly articles. While Robert Townsend attributes this to the fact that an alarmingly high percentage (18%) of links to online sources no longer function, I would also hypothesize that there is an unwillingness to even cite E-journals and other digital sources, as these are still seen as sometimes illegitimate sources of true “scholarship.” I have had several professors that would have criticized a bibliography for having a purely online source. In this vein, I look forward to the remainder of Mills Kelly’s postings on “Making Digital Scholarship Count” (Part 1, Part 2) as a way to combat this perception.

Finally, hat-tip to Jesse Lemisch for his posting on HNN, Historians and Facebook: In the Halls of an Electronic AHA. It’s encouraging to see a 71 year-old dive into something like Facebook and recognize some of its potential for academics, especially for historians. I also think Mr. Lemisch represents a the trend towards “aging” Facebook, as more and more older people start to use it, in place of the original demographic of college-aged students. It will be interesting to see if Facebook emerges as a widespread resource for scholarly collaboration and connection, or if it remains largely within the social sphere.

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Souped Up Web Browsing

June 15, 2008

Last week’s Economist contained the Technology Quarterly, which I always look forward to. Included in this one was an article titled “Rummaging through the internet,” which discussed a variety of new applications and software being developed for browsing the internet. I decided to try out a couple. First up was Hyperwords, which is a browser add-on that allows you to basically turn anything on the screen into a multi-faceted hyperlink. So I could highlight the word “Economist” in the opening sentence of this blog, which would then raise several different menus and sub-menus, including the option to search for the phrase on Google, Wikipedia, a variety of digital media sites (Flickr, Youtube, etc.), a thesaurus, various shopping sites, or a finance page. All of these can be previewed directly from the pop-up menu. In addition, I can translate it (temporarily) into a different language, immediately post it into an email or blog post (along with a link), or see web pages and blog posts that are linked to the page. Finally, I can highlight the word, its occurrence both within the current page or in other open tabs, or only show sentences or paragraphs containing that word. There are a lot of other, smaller features that are pretty neat as well.

All in all, it’s an impressive piece of software. There are quirks and limitations – the Google preview page, for example, is a little barren and the window is often made up mostly of Google’s ads. The number of menus and sub-menus gets overwhelming and a little cluttered, but it can all be customized. Finally, I decided to take out the Hyperwords toolbar because I didn’t like its interface with Google searches. Nevertheless, the entire project is one with some far-reaching implications. While it does go back to the idea of the internet facilitating a horizontal (sometimes at the expensive of a vertical) mode of information gathering, it really has the potential to soup up your browsing experience.

The next application the article mentioned was Cooliris’s Previews and PicLens. I have more mixed feelings about these two. The Previews option for Cooliris is nice, but clunky at times and slow to load. After some experimentation, I finally reached the conclusion that it didn’t really give me a sizeable enough advantage over regular browsing. Meanwhile, PicLens is a truly beautiful design that allows you to view images from certain compatible websites (Flickr, Facebook, Google Images, YouTube, to name a few) in a quasi-3D wall of pictures. In this wall, you feel like you’re in a museum, except with the ability to zoom in and out, scroll through, and play a slideshow with relative ease.

Screenshot of using PicLens to browse the results of a Flickr search for

PicLens to view results of Flickr search term “History”

My only complaint was that pictures took a little while to load, so the wall wasn’t “complete” even after twenty seconds or so. Nevertheless, it’s a really gorgeous design that kind of feels like you are working on a poor man’s version of Tony Stark’s engineering computer in Ironman.

The two applications from Cooliris (Previews and PicLens) are both interesting, but I feel that PicLens and other “3D” browser apps are the only ones that have the potential for substantial impact. As the Economist article notes, 3D browsing allows people to take advantage of their spatial memory and thought-process. I’m not going to unequivocally agree with Edward Bakhash, who is quoted in the article as stating that 3D developers are going to “help usher in the next paradigm”.

I think about applications for history and scholarship, and I think about being to fly through archived primary documents using PicLens. I have to admit, it would be a lot cooler and faster than filling out a special collections retrieval slip and waiting for a librarian to retrieve it. Hyperwords I think has a more practical application for scholarship, as it really enhances the speed with which you can navigate during online research. If you don’t know a word, you can find out its definition and synonyms in less than a second without leaving the page. If you are curious about a historical figure you come across, you can similarly find out who they are on Wikipedia or Google incredibly quickly. And lastly, I think the feature of being able to highlight words, only show certain sentences or paragraphs, or even search for those words in open tabs opens the door to a whole lot of advanced digital searching. It isn’t that these kinds of applications don’t already exist, it’s that it streamlines the process of using them. While it perhaps does not lend itself well to in-depth exploration of a narrow topic, it really expands the power of web browsing.

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Whittaker Chambers and Osama bin Laden

June 13, 2008

While reading about some of Barack Obama’s more radical detractors, I visited sites that were at best stupefying and at worst racist. One theme that really struck me was this continuing perception that he is a Muslim, or at least a strong Muslim sympathizer, a perception that has become so insidious it has led someone to create a great response to the ridiculous question: http://isbarackobamaamuslim.com/.

Although I’m fascinated in a gawking-at-a-car-crash kind of way by these attacks, my mind quickly wandered into the realm of American history and arrived at the not-so-novel realization that the politicized use of “Islam” has completely supplanted the use of “Communism” as a means of fear-mongering and smear tactics. That parallels are striking. The idea of East vs. West, a global struggle (a la Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations), with each being a nebulous, trans-national ideology that looms over Western ideals of individualism and democracy.

None of this is particularly original, and has been echoed by others. However, the parallel truly symbolizes a yawning generational gap in the United States. Quite simply, I belong to a generation for whom communism is an utterly abstract, impotent, and, frankly, quaint relic of the past. Instead, many people sadly view the “Muslim world” (as it is problematically termed) with the same fear, unease, and condemnation with which many people viewed the “Communist world” for much of the twentieth century. I had thought about the rapid plummet of Communism as a viable ideology before, specifically when one of my classes read Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of Whittaker Chambers and the professor was absolutely shocked to find that not a single person in this upper-level American history course knew who Chambers was before the class. At one point in the near past, your opinion of Whittaker Chambers stood for perhaps the singular litmus test of your political sympathies. Now, anyone under the age of 25 would be hard-pressed to know anything about him, much less his historical significance. Older generations find this difficult to believe.

Whittaker Chambers, along with crawling under your school desk for an air raid drill, belongs to an era that has become largely irrelevant to twenty-first century American culture. If someone were to call me a commie pinko, I would likely receive it with the same mild amusement and perplexity as if someone called me a square – while I may know on an academic level what the insult means, it packs absolutely no punch. However, Obama’s extremist critics have demonstrated an effort to lay the seeds of a McCarthy-esque political witch hunt in which Islam has taken the place of Communism. However, my youthful optimism keeps telling me that these smear attacks will never reach the critical mass necessary to create a sizable impact on the 2008 elections. And for the most part, I believe it.

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More Stupider

June 10, 2008

While driving today, I caught part of a discussion on the Diane Rehm show about how a “climate of distraction” is eroding our society and political system. (Audio here). The two guests were Maggie Jackson, author of “Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age” and Rick Shenkman, author of “Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter.” Jackson talks about how people are distracted through a world of “hypermobility” and “McThinking” that is breeding a generation of Americans who don’t know how to critically think, evaluate information, and delve in-depth into issues. Meanwhile, Shenkman, is largely in agreement and bemoans the fact that the American populace is growing dumber and less engaged, especially with politics and civics. The entire show also mirrored an article I just read by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic Monthly, titled “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?”

Jackson, Shenkman, and Carr, to varying degrees, all sound a frustratingly reactionary alarm against a digital age. I acknowledge the validity of some of their concerns, but my basic complaint comes down to one of what and how we value as “intelligence.” It is less that I disagree with the value they place on traditional forms of intelligence, but that they refuse to recognize (with the exception of Jackson) a new form of intelligence. There remains a deeply entrenched idea of traditional scholasticism within the academic community – an idea that remains somewhat stuck in an analog age. Quite simply, a lot of people don’t consider the ability to move quickly and critically within the digital realm, to locate and evaluate sources of information on the internet, as a legitimate form of intelligence.

Carr writes that “there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation” on the Internet. I completely disagree. If I had the choice between sitting down for three hours and reading a book on a historical topic, versus spending those three hours researching the topic online, I could make a strong case that I would be able to get a much richer, balanced, and in-depth understanding of the topic through Firefox than if I would through Oxford Press. Blogging in general, the give and take of reading, evaluating, and reacting to other people’s thoughts, is decidedly a form of “fuzzy contemplation.” While I wouldn’t discount the value of a traditional monograph, I believe that alternative and new forms of scholasticism and intellectual inquiry are too often dismissed.

Meanwhile, Shenkman focuses on politics, and while he makes some decent points about the uninformed nature of the American electorate (the continuing myth of a 9/11-Iraq connection, for one), I think he overemphasizes the dangers without recognizing the benefits. This is surprising to me, as I greatly respect what he has done in the field of digital history, specifically founding the History News Network. Nonetheless, I found myself disagreeing with him during this show. Specifically, he mentions the “myth of the people” that has become solidified since Reagan, in which politicians celebrate “the voice of the people as the voice of God.” This spurred some particularly narrow-sighted callers, all of which skated blindly and contentedly into the realm of blatant elitism. Being a history major, it reminded me of the debate between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, with Shenkman and the callers largely falling into the worst traps of the Federalists. Would giving voting rights to all free males give way to violent, chaotic mob rule? Wouldn’t a propertied, monied class of citizens be better fit to act as caretakers of the young republic? While I don’t think they would agree with these statements, a lot of what was said on the program smacked of a modern-day form of this elitism.

The problem is not the internet. The problem is what our educational system values as learning. We are largely educated in an increasingly archaic system that doesn’t teach us how to properly use digital technology. Just as I believe that history is anything but memorizing the details of wars, kings, and explorers, I believe that the internet is anything but skimming gossip headlines, Youtube videos, or profile pages. Approaching history and the internet actually require and facilitate many of the same basic skills – a critical evaluation of sources, connecting disparate ideas, and identifying broader themes and patterns. The more I write, the more I realize this topic touches on so many others – gated academic communities vs. open-access, evaluating history curriculums, the digital participation gap, a technological generation divide, etc. I look forward to delving into more of these areas in the future.

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The Blank Canvas

June 9, 2008

When I sat down to write my first blog post, I was immediately struck by a sense of paralysis. It reminds me of the “blank canvas effect,” the intimidating prospect of attempting to create something within an empty space and running the risk of making a mistake. Every art teacher I’ve ever had always urges the same remedy: pick up your pencil, pen, or brush and fill up that space until you aren’t afraid of making a wrong mark. So here are those marks.

A quick introduction to the road to my decision to begin a blog. I am a recent graduate of Pomona College who majored in American history, and am one of those people who was genuinely excited about their major. My interests led me to uncover history-related sites and blogs such as the History News Network, American Historical Association, PhDinHistory, Easily Distracted, and Tenured Radical. I am also fascinated by the rise of the digital age, and how it affects traditional scholarship. It was this interest that led me down the path to begin subscribing to digital humanists such as Dan Cohen, Tom Scheinfeldt, Mills Kelly, Lisa Spiro, Bill Turkel, and Jeremy Boggs.

After months of reading blog posts and listening to podcasts, I realized they were influencing how I thought, studied, and reflected as much as any class I had ever taken. My approach to history, scholarship, and learning in general had been transformed for the better. This realization ultimately inspired me to take a crack at joining and contributing to this thriving online community. It’s an intimidating prospect, but at least I’m no longer staring at a blank canvas.

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