Propaganda Redux

Gathering the work together,

2006-12-11T08:22:00.000-08:00

We are now down to the wire and I am trying to get all the parts together. Nervous old me. So here is a list of my digital skills, final projects, and where to find them. If all else fails, please email me your home street address, and I will present this entire thing with hand puppets! Yes, I will!

Digital Skill #1: This blog. Please note I have been very good at keeping up with the readings, yada, yada, yada. To which you answer "who do I look like, Santa?"

Digital Skill #2: WebPage and Domain name. I did open a new website, but we could not get it working correctly yet. So here is the stop gap until that is corrected:
http://www.huntergriffith.com/Prism.html
This is also the Home Page of my final project. My proposal is there too, along with my Photoshopped image.

On this page, you will also find links to:

Digital Skill #3: Video. This is a video interview we shot for the "1989" website in November. Our subject, Maria Bucur tells her eyewitness account of the December Revolution in Bucharest, Romania. Dr. Bucur was shot in front of a green screen so we could manipulate the background in Boris FX. The background images were stills shot by photojournalists in Romania during those turbulent days--we downloaded them off the Web. The video editing was done in Premier, and the audio had to be cleaned up in Sony Sound Forge. The original is good quality- the compression to get it on the site stinks. This is a problem to be fixed-because the final product for "1989" must look better.

Digital Skill #4:Photoshopped Image. I posted this item a month ago, but here is the link to the explanation and the photos. Please be sure to look at the before image--my husband wanted to be sure and be part of this, too. In case of problems with my website, please look at
http://propredux.blogspot.com/2006/10/photoshopped-and-im-out-of-cashthe.html

Digital Skill #5: Wiki. I edited the page on Jan Zizka http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_%C5%BDi%C5%BEka

A little about my Blog

2006-12-09T19:31:00.000-08:00

Mainly kept to record my weekly readings for Clio Wired, I hope to expand it into a catch basin for my ranting ideas about history and myth. Because I truely think the two are very related. Because people understand narratives best, and history and myth are just two styles of narratives. It's just that we normally reserve history for those events for which we have evidence, while myth captures those qualities which cannot be measured, like aspirations and beliefs. They are two sides of the same coin, and who can tell where the back of the coin stops and the front begins?
The picture of me is from the Saint Lawrence Cathedral in Nuremburg, Germany. Before I traveled to Europe the first time in 1992, I had alot of ideas about medieval architecture, the most prominent was that these massive stone structures were made by faceless hordes of peasants. Yes, many people worked on the cathedrals. But just like the Egyptians who built the pyramids, they were NOT faceless wretches struggling under the lash. We have records that list their names. And they themselves left their own signatures. Like this guy next to me, Adam Kraft. Kraft was a master stone cutter who worked on several projects for the Parler family of architects, including the St. Lawrence Cathedral. One of his greatest works was this stone tabernacle I am kneeling next to. This massive structure is seventy-five feet tall. And even at that height does not get very close to the cieling. You just have to take one look at the pride on Kraft's face to understand how the workers felt about their masterpiece. I would like to bring that kind of understanding to my students, that feeling of understanding two aware people--even though they may be separated by hundreds of years or different languages can have share a human experience. Even though we may walk into a building with preconcieved notions, it is quite possible to walk out with new attitudes. Takes a little bit of looking, a little bit of research, and a very open mind.

2006-12-09T19:19:00.000-08:00

Oh yes... marketing

2006-11-27T13:25:00.000-08:00

"Product without marketing is scrap, but marketing without product is fraud." That was the mantra my husband and I repeated every day when we worked for a manufacturer who created woodworking machines. Marketing is the engine that gets the train going--just because the rest of the train is up to speed doesn't mean it's time to unhook the engine. Marketing is the smart and clever part of business. The rest is just bean counting. And there is no reason for marketing on the Web to be as scientific and saavy as marketing in your grocery store. Cohen and Rosenzweig gave a thorough overview of research at the back end-counting visitors and the like. But what about researching the front end-so far much of what I have seen falls under the "let's run it up a flag pole and see if anyone salutes" flavor. The chief engineer at the factory we worked at would get a good idea for a machine and obsesively spend valuable design and engineering and production time on it. That's a great way to exibit your genius, but a lousy way to sell a machine nobody else wanted! Just because you are interested in a product or topic, don't suppose everyone else is too! There are ways to apply focus group information or just informal interviews with prospective clients to the front end of the product--the creation of the beast. Find a need then fill it. Much easier than convincing someone they really need something they never even thought of before. CHNM's web sites do that-they are not just about providing content. They give added value--they fill the existing needs of students and teachers in creative ways. And they have a staff out plugging their wares--look at any collection of articles about history on the Web, and you will find a large portion are written by CHNM staffers- Cohen, Rosenzweig, Schraum, etc. Sure, they are tooting their own horn--but CHNM is seen as a leader in the field. Don't get all cynical--of course it is good marketing. But they also put out a good product. See rule one..."product without marketing is scrap..."

Thank God for Bridgeman!

2006-11-19T20:24:00.000-08:00

One great source of up to date information on copyrights is organizations that cater to documentary producers. My husband and I belong to one out of the San Francisco area, and they have some very good pro-bono lawyers who will give decent information. That is where we learned about Bridgeman. They also help provide "errors and omissions" insurance policies to cover those little "oops, I forgot to get Harold to sign the release and now he is suing us for ..."
This has been the most concretely helpful chapter-worth buying the book. Pity it wasn't published before 1923! Really, the struggle to get permissions is the biggest headache in any production. Sometimes you get lucky, copy an image out of a book, then find where that same image had been published in a ninteenth century book. As long as our Federal Government doesn't subpoena our library records, there is little or no way to prove you didn't get the image out of the older work. Unless the newer publication has some sort of watermark or identifier built in. This cat and mouse game adds untold costs to any publication--that is part of the reason why your textbooks cost so much! We once spent $3000 for 29 seconds of a Czech film shot in the 1950's-one that never has nor probably ever will be released in the US. That money went just to purchase the broadcast rights for five years. Our film was later picked up by a distributor for direct to home sales, and the rights holders of the film wanted another $3000 for five more years. We edited the scene out. Did it hurt? Hell yes! But we refused to be black-mailed every five years.
Music is another raquet. The rights to use any recognizable piece of music are obscene. We found a publishing house who speciallized in classical music recorded by good but little known orchestras (Lower Slobovia Chamber Orchestra). So we got music for soft-core prices. Came right off the CD, recorded on non-digital instruments (violins) and sounded great. My favorite music-for-video story came from a friend who shot a gathering of kite-enthusiasts in Long Beach, WA. Some hippie in a Volkswagon van was hanging out at the gathering playing a hammer dulcimer for tips. He was good, too! So my friend stuck a mike under the sound board of the dulcimer, and turned on his camera for an hour. Then he stuck a ten dollar bill in the guy's jar, got the musician to sign a release and voi-la -- instant soundtrack. Remember, many times it is the performance, not the song that is covered by copyrights. Can you get a garage band or a friend with a synthesizer to record a particular piece? Lots of starving musicians out there. Just be sure to get the release signed! The technology has changed radically since the days of music libraries and needle-drop charges--back when scratching an LP was a bad thing! Unless you need a particular piece, a soundtrack can be manufactured to fit in the digital realm. Very cool.
Oh yeah, I can't pass up giving out one very important piece of advice for using inexpensive talent on camera--check out the person first! Very embarrasing things can happen. Like the time we shot a full day using a model for a training tape on how to run woodworking machines safely before we noticed our model was missing a finger. Yup, he lost it in another woodworking machine. Or the on-camera talent we used as spokesperson for a hospital emergency room before we learned the guy had been involved a few years earlier in a messy DUI accident where a young kid had gotten killed (the ad agent was responsible for that screw up). OK, sometimes getting rights doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

A few hours of sleep and a pot of coffee later...

2006-11-14T08:25:00.000-08:00

Gotta love a historian who can put his point across in vigorous and simple language--I grant both Carl Becker and James Gardner that critique. And thanks to Tom for putting them together--I had read the Becker piece before, but after the Gardner piece, I found new sentiments take precident. For example, "Berate him as we will for not reading our books, Mr. Everyman is stronger than we are, and sooner or later we must adapt our knowledge to his necessities (Becker, 234) as opposed to Gardiner "...we need to help them [the public] understand that scholarship, interpretation, and controversy are central to what we do... we want to share the end product, but not the process." (15) What is all this saying? Here is my two cents. Obviously from the surveys, the public mostly hated the history they were taught. But they do not hate history for its own sake, and are rather motivated in pursuing historical topics that spark their interest. We, the guardians of history--and I include archivists and curators in that group--have a certain set of skills that we aquire at higher levels of education or on the job. These are techniques that are normally witheld from the public, but we use them to judge what is history and what is not. So when it comes time to teach elementary and high school kids history (and every school district insists that we do teach it for the good of the community [inculcation]), those who are not trained as we are choose to teach the kids names, places, and most importantly, dates. Thus passing on to the students those aspects of history that are easiest to quantify and most visible, but for a historian these elements are merely starting points of an investigation. My (not original to me) idea, and one that is supported in powerful ways by the Center for History and New Media, is to turn this equation over, and teach the skills first! Sure, it will be giving away some of our authority, but hey, most fifth graders do not have the attention span to think through the complex problems, so our jobs are pretty safe. Besides, who would you rather have voting for president: a critical thinker who could weigh the issues, or someone well versed in the Whiskey Rebellion? Remember, narrative without facts is fiction, but facts without narrative is a laundry list.

A nice mixture of sweet and sour

2006-11-13T19:29:00.000-08:00

Who could not feel a bit misty eyed while reading Rosenzweg and Thelen's The Past as Presence? I couldn't help but think of my grandfather and his stories, and wonder if we all had some relative that got us interested , even a little, in history. However, in trying to become a "professional historian," I have frequently found the need to downplay those personal involvements. So we attempt to study other facets of the past, but we secretly have a box or two of letters, pictures, etc. that we mean to digitize, label, index, and send off to other relatives. My biggest problem with "everyman as his own Historian" lies in the concept of self-interest. The one factor almost every story in R & T's survey dealt with a special interest each subject had in a certain part of history. I think the main difference between an enthusiast's scope of knowledge vs. a professional's is that a professional does not necessarily get to stop researching a subject if they do not like the answer, or they may not be so interested in the period. Professionals ask more questions, while enthusiasts stick with the easiest answers. I have plenty of friends-you probably have some too, who KNOW everything there is to know about WW II. Except what they really know is an impressive set of dates, names, tactics, technologies, and places--but they haven't a clue why these came to pass. Because it is not sexy to learn about the failures of the Wiemar Republic or the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. History takes a lot of hard, dusty work in places most folks do not want to wander. And I am not just talking about archives. History takes those quiet moments of contemplation (in the shower is my favorite) when the uninterrupted mind moves those pieces around until they fit. Even the ugly, nasty pieces that haven't worked anywhere else. Part two of this rant will continue in the morning, when my brain is less fuzzy.

Gutenberg-e and the direction of monographs

2006-11-06T15:26:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Eisenstein, in her seminal book "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change," observed that Johann Gutenberg went bankrupt publishing the exact same type of book the scribes were already creating. The printed book did not catch a wide audience until after printers and authors started experimenting with size, format, ephemera, etc. And all this took time. For example, it wasn't until 1560 that someone thought to number both the chapters and the verses in the Bible. I keep thinking of Eisenstein's book as we study digital history. We too, are in this experimental phase, and who knows how different electronic publishing will look--and sound--in the next few decades. I do not think we have found the most exemplary use for electronic media yet, but the market and the demand will slowly coax innovation out of the most clever and supple-minded experimentors in the field.
Peter Mannings' article brought up several ideas worthy of extensive commentary, but I found his most intriguing comment dealt with the publishing of junior scholars' work over senior scholars' (paragraph 50). Would a senior scholar be willing to take more chances than someone still looking for tenure? The despirate struggle to achieve that tenured position is one of the more entertaining aspects of working around academics. Not meaning to sound cruel, but the older faculty (at other colleges I've been to--present company exculded) frequently use this opportunity as a rite of passage (see hazing) through which to force their younger colleagues through. And while experimentation may be out of the question for a novitiate struggling to fit in a hidebound system, are more senior scholars up to learning a few new tricks? Actually, I have seen mature historians open new avenues of thought and presentation, and really create some outstanding work. But usually in cooperation with younger colleagues. Part of the problem with the monograph concept is that is is frequently the work of a single individual. Now, put the energy and innovative spirit of a fresh Ph.D together with a mature (and crafty) professor, and that may be when sparks start to fly. After all, early incanabula came into being as a collaboration between the author and the printer. Too often, the author got all the credit. But much of what we now think of as a book came from the craft and invention of the printers.
Is the monograph a dead form? I hope not, because with some ideas it takes time to ferment into full-blown concepts. Lately I have found articles reflect bold research done on smaller aspects that don't require the full treatment. And boy, do I appreciate not having to wade through a full book to find a small idea. Both are necessary. Looking at the problem from the perspective of a first-year Ph. D student, I'm jealous those authors in the article found such fascinating research topics that could extend into book form. I have yet to find such a good idea. Darn their eyes!

Photoshopped, and I'm out of cash...The REAL entry

2006-10-29T19:14:00.000-08:00

Here is my assignment for the Image Skills. The picture is from a 1907 commentary on the 16th century incanabula titled "The Jena Codex." The original is locked up in the Czech National Museum in Prague, and if you can pay for a ticket, I'll be happy to give you a tour. We had gotten several high quality large format slides of other images from the original, but we needed this one, and so we have to try to match this copy of a copy with those high quality photographs. But we also didn't want to make it too showy--you can loose the sense of a printed work if you take the fix-its too far.

ftp://huntergriffith.com/Misha/

As you can see from the "before" image, I had to rotate the image--turning allows you to take full advantage of the landscape format of the camera. After cropping out my husband's thumbs (thanks honey), I found the camera had not been positioned exactly in the center of the image, and consequently we had some keystoning problems. A little skewing took care of that, but the original illustrator did not make his border quite straight, so it still looks a bit funky. I tried to remove the red border to correct that problem, but the red border lines work as a matte to set the colors off, so I chose art over construction. Several parts of the image-the banner and the man standing on the left (Constantine) were out of focus, so I had to select them separately and use the unsharpen mask. One of the odder cleanup tasks was to fix the blackening caused by the gilding techniques- -what ever the material they used to gild the illustration has started to turn black, but the cloning stamp fixed that right up. We also shot the image with existing light, because the library would not allow us to use flash or instruments. A bit of daylight-balanced light snuck onto the top of the image, turning it a bit bluer than the rest. I did some dodging and playing with hue to balance it out. Hope you like the image--my husband says he has a few hundred more for me to work on!

Thoughts on Final Project

2006-10-27T11:14:00.000-07:00

So after a couple of weeks kicking this idea around, I think I'm ready to put it into narrative form. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I have given my project the title "History's Prism." This website will be a wiki for historians. Just as a prism divides visible light into its component colors, "History's Prism" can be used to break the narrative of history into separate versions, reflecting particular dogmas or different sets of sources. Where Wikipedia takes submissions from disparate contributors and tries to edit these into a single version of history, "History's Prism" seeks to gather as many different versions of core events and save each as a separate entity. The goal here is not to get one definitive version of history based on the aggregate contributions of many. It is a method of looking at an event through many lenses.
The home page of the website would consist of a search able time line. The entries on the time line would be either "core events" or "core themes." A core event is an event defined by the contributing scholars, and could be as big as the Battle of Hastings, or as small as the publishing of a book. The core themes, also determined by contributors, could cover issues not limited to singular events, such as the migration of African-Americans to the North after Reconstruction. The granularity of the listings is a factor of contribution, but cross-referencing between themes and events is a must. As a wiki, the environment will expand to fill the demand-until it overloads the server, that is.
Once an event is selected or included, the user is directed to a separate page that handles the information. One method of presentation I wish to avoid is the stacking of one element below the other. This smacks of establishing a hierarchy of accuracy, and I want to avoid it. I saw one method of positioning information on the screen that put a single piece of information in the center, and the multiple relevant entries circled and moved around the center, but were tied to it with visible links. It looked very much like a sea urchin that was used as a note spindle. (For those of you born after the invention of Post-it notes, the spindle was a big pin that sat on a desk, and you could impale notes on it as a way of keeping them from spreading around and getting lost. If you are still in doubt, see the Rod Steiger movie "The Pawnbroker.") I do not know what this format is called, or even if it far beyond my lousy computer skills, but if anyone else is familiar with it, please let me know-Josh? I just really love the non-hierarchical nature of the arrangement. Also, the events could be tied to other events, or to themes. So I could follow a link from the theme of "British Colonialism" to "American Revolution" to events like "Cornwallis' Surrender" to "The Battle of Yorktown." From there, I could find contributions on maps, uniforms, weaponry--whatever the contributors chose to link to that core event. I envision the contributions to be anything from articles to scanned primary sources to maps to movie clips to bibliographic essays of books. The contributions need be no more than simple bibliographic information, although a small description would be nice. The main idea is that this site is all-inclusive, and each entry links to the core event. It takes some of the most useful parts of bibliographic index, but unlike the index, it can be expanded. Some editing will be necessary to prevent nuisance additions. This would be a nice mash-up with Zotero, Google Earth, Flikr, etc, and make use of RSS technology. I see it as a good repository for students writing papers, posting the bibliographic info, and exploring links.
One of the main strengths I see is this--for each core event, different viewpoints are linked there for everyone to compare. This site needs to expose Methodology, not Content. In other words, it is an opportunity to explore historiography, not just history. This is why I want to avoid a hierarchical structure. I would like to see Marxist interpretations sharing space with progressive histories. Dr. McGrath, GMU's Byzantine specialist, insists that a thorough review of all the relevant material is the first critical step in creating a long format research project. "History's Prism" can provide a platform for sharing that information.

Changing into our pedagogical hats.

2006-10-23T20:30:00.000-07:00

Our Images--to the left, historical figure before Mills Kelly's lecture. To the right, after lecture. Actually, that is fifteenth century priest/reformer Jan Hus, and his hat-the birretta was the preferred headgear of the sartorially salient medieval scholar. Our four-pointed "mortarboards" are based on this design. Clearly, some people (yours truely) should not be allowed anywhere near Photoshop. Frantishek Palacky, the great Czech historian, must be rolling in his grave.

We get so tied up and excited with our research, we forget our main purpose for existence is to pass on our hard-won knowledge. Thank goodness the powers-that-be see a need for teaching history. However, I tend to be pretty cynical about this situation, and while most of us are in this field because we love it, certain entities find history to be a profound tool in the inculcation of proper U. S. Citizens. Morally, it could be worse-no historian will ever be asked to build a bigger and better bomb.
That said, I have found few people that anger me more than a resentful teacher. I have had great teachers, poor teachers, and teachers who were profound thinkers but couldn't organize a ham sandwich. I happen to really adore that last type. But I can recall a few individuals who were angry about having to teach, and these a$$#^%es left scars that may never heal completely. So number one, except for those fortunate few who work in archives and museums (and I realize even those havens have their drawbacks), we must resign ourselves to a life of teaching, and perhaps even learn to like it.
So I heartily applaud David Pace's fine article about real efforts to get historians trained in teaching methods. The institution from which I received my M.A., California State University, Chico, started as a normal school (a school for training teachers) and the Education Department was one of the best funded, best run, and most critical components of that school. However, who wants to study Education when Clio beckons? We were fortunate to have a compulsory semester of teaching history in the classroom. I'm not sure how many others schools enforce that idea. And I have noticed younger professors tend to work harder at course preparation, but I can't necessarily draw a causal relationship between that and more modern, scientific approaches to training teachers. But I will support Pace's contention that there is a difference between helping students better retain the historical facts they will need, and the critical thinking skills necessary to analyze source material. How do we balance these two disparate yet important needs--worse still, how do we teach these skills to huge classes when the requirements for the course call for covering all of Western Civ in two lousy semesters? Had you asked me which skill was more important, retention or analysis, when I first started my study of history, I would have told you the first was most inportant. Now, I am sure the second is more important. Ask me again in five years.
Dr. Kelly's experiment at Texas seem to have been the kind of study Pace was looking for-testing methodologies in teaching, and getting measurable results. I'm pretty sure one of my professors at Chico State took the article to heart, because she asked us to critically examine several Russian-based web sites. We saw first-hand how perilous research trips to the Internet could be, and it was a very valuable lesson.

Maps, I love maps!

2006-10-16T19:59:00.000-07:00

I must admit, I find maps sexy. I can look at them all day. Given the opportunity to go into the military, I'd immediately sign up as a navigator in the Navy. Except I get violently sea sick, so that is not really an option. So I thought this assignment would be just ducks-until Schwartz's article on Railroads and Population in England. Now I know why I want to become a cultural historian, not a social historian. I realize this sentiment is anathema at GMU, but no one seems to read this blog, so I figure I'm safe from everyone except Josh. Schwartz created a good primer for the use of statistical data and using maps, but I find this kind of history to be, well, dull. He shows how to choose the proper format of graph or map, and how to set up equations. However, I am currently reading E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class for historiography. This book, written in 1964 covers approximately the same time period. But Thompson's analysis is quite different, because he covers such factors as food prices, wages, religious practices, and political awareness. Schwartz may be using raw data and primary sources, but he covers only a few factors. Thompson uses secondary sources, along with personal annectodes and close readings of the literature reportedly read by the working class and the upper class at the time. Who is more accurate? Don't fall into the trap of --"well, Schwartz can show his findings mathematically." Remember, he is dealing with means and averages. If the average American family has 2.5 children--what does that .5 car seat look like? Seriously, I can appreciate Schwartz's approach, and I can immediately see the value in it. Someday, I just may have to hold my nose and use his methodology.
I'll take my family to Yorktown this coming weekend--its the 225th anniversary of Cornwallis' surrender. Supposed to be great. I'll visit Williamsburg and report on the pod-cast. It is a good idea--but is it meant to take the place of live demonstration, or to be listened to at one's leisure at a later time? We'll see.
I hope David Ramsey will adopt me, and I can move into his house--can you imagine all those maps? His site is terrific-the internet tour will fill an hour of your time, and you won't regret it. I can see so many classroom applications for his software. As I have written in an earlier blog, combining maps with computers allows you to show changes over time--and that can really enhance any lecture. Think westward movement, railroad construction, colonization, sea voyages, and you start to see the myriad of possibilities.
Thank goodness for Google maps. In 1998 we did a project in the Czech Republic that called for demonstrating an army's movement over terrain. Our plan was to get a good quality topo map, and put it in World-Builder. The map store in Prague would not sell Americans topographic maps--seems they were still a bit touchy about the NATO/Warsaw Pact thing. So we had to find a frienly Czech to go in a buy one for us. And yes, we did feel like kids hanging outside a liquor store! Now I can get that free. Gotta love this technology!

Mash-up or fender bender?

2006-10-02T20:51:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I was not terribly impressed with this weeks' readings. I guess the concept of Remix comes naturally to me-I used to make properties for plays and films, and we always had to find unusual ways of building something very normal. Yee's page I found almost incipherable-so I watched part of his presentation. Actually, it was his Power point with his talk in voice over. Couldn't even make it into the meat of his talk-did anyone else try to sit through it? What was his big point? The video compression of his slides made them almost illegible. If he had something great to say, he went about it the wrong way.
I also made the mistake of printing out Miller's "Interoperability" paper to read on the bus. After mis-reading the title, I spent several moments wondering why someone would want an "Inoperable" program. I fear "Interoperability" is somewhat less "all-pervasive" term in the circles I run around with.This man loves jargon-the more inscrutable, the better. The meat of that work was in the hyper-text. Either do a better job of explaining what your concept is, or just hand me the articles you so frequently cited. Thirty-six citations in a three page work is too much! This article was too much like the MBA articles from the Harvard Business School my husband used to bring home. All sizzle, no steak, why am I paying so much for this meal, I'm going home now.
At least Semantic Humanities and Dr. Cohen valued the narrative tradition. Now that we have gotten everyone used to playing on the web, let's figure out how to get some real work done! Web 2.0-I can imagine a time when people could fix their own cars, and turn their Model As and Ts into custom vehicles for their work--just like my Great Uncles Cigo and Grazzi did when they installed two five-gallon barrels under the bench seat to smuggle moonshine into town during Prohibition. Anyway, time to get started creating resources on the web-I agree it is no longer enough just to stick stuff up. And I love the idea of getting others to do the work. So really, Dr. Cohen is advocating we clever computer-saavy folk learn to make more powerful frameworks for information, and letting interested parties fill in the blanks. Oh yeah, and let everyone use all the data. Sounds good to me, when do we start...

So what is at the Bottom?

2006-09-22T09:47:00.000-07:00

The readings this week on databases was indeed deep and wide. Remeniscent of swimming in a lake, realizing you cannot touch the bottom, and wondering what really is down there in the dark green? Scum, sunken ships, debtors in cement overshoes? Exabites indeed give me a cold chill. But I couldn't help wondering-yes it is a lot of information, but how much of it is worth saving? Sure, the IRS needs some of that info and court cases hinge on scraps of evidence. But what about that text message I sent to my husband on August 9? Ironically, as historians, we wish we had access to all those private conversations between Napoleon and Josephine, or just a few more tavern bills from the early fifteenth century. My mentor's research for her doctoral program included searching Tsar Peter Alexivich's account books of his grand embassy through Europe. She loved finding out how much the Russian treasury had to pay out for damages done to castles after particularily riotous parties. Clearly, we must be overtly concerned with databases. Our very livelyhoods depend on the condition of the primary sources currently locked away in archives. One point these articles did not bring up is the rush by certain archives to label important works as "National Treasures" and completely removing them from the hands of researchers. This process is happening at an alarming rate-occasionally before top quality scans of the works get made, whether for lack of funds or fears of harming the work. I was able to view an incanabula from 1483 in the Library of Congress last year, but they would not allow me to photograph the book, nor would they make digital images of it for fear of harming it-even though I was prepared to pay their posted rate. Ironically I was able to find a second copy of this work on the West coast, and had total access to it because someone had put the wrong publishing date in the card cataloge. Their records indicated the book was published in 1960! I wasn't about to dissuade them.
Crane's article "What do you do with a million books?" breifly touched on the problem of how to save the data in formats that allow the researcher the best suitable access to it. Beyond the problem of getting all the archives in developing nations--central Europe, for example, on board this movement. They have more pressing issues to spend their limited funds on. Crane's ideas I want to discuss is the desirability of the most effective levels of granularity and of noise to convert these files to. The outrageous amount of material covered in each book will make it imperative that some sort of mechanical process, much like Dan Cohen's search tools, will be necessary to determine what are the key words for each document. Because of the nature of the English language, with its lack of organized spelling techniques, any book published before the nineteenth century will demand customized solutions for the varieties of spelling. This is a problem, as I understand these words, of both granularity-how many individual bits of information to use to search the book, and of noise--the unique peculiarities of the characters and the computer's ability to read them. Both these issues affect the researcher's ability to browse through and to actually use older books. To say nothing of the complexities of images and of marginalia. Will we see a day when we can access handwritten works via computer-based databases? For now, save up your frequent flier miles so you can go gaze upon the primary sources--and don't forget your white gloves.

Treading on toes

2006-09-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

So when you get to visualizing history, you are treading on my toes--because that is something I like to think I know a few things about. Please forgive the lateness of this post, but I am still struggling with a broken computer and no web access at home, so all my posting time has to be taken from my lunch hour at Research 1. I found this week's readings to be both satisfying and maddening. At last, a few names I'm familiar with-Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault- inserted exactly where they would be most at home--in a discussion of the use and structure of language. It is such a great pity they are not here to sort out our digital age. The discussions on hypertext got my brain working. And to think Barthes had presaged it--of course he did. The drift away from the strictly Manechean bilateral structure of the world was started in those countries who had been crushed in two consecutive wars and had been frozen out of their assumed places in the world heirarchy by the Cold War. While Americans stayed with the us/them mentality, the French were constructing elegant multilayered multiuniverses in the form of literary critique. So plod along all you want with linear narrative--the future belongs to those who can navigate in more than two dimensions. Hypertext offers a great way to structure story, but the audience will have to catch up. Janet Murray's chapters gave a glimpse at how that new audience is being trained. The end of the passive observer, the beginning of the active prowler. Will Narrative dry up? Experience shows old technologies stick around for as long as they have a use--I still keep paper and pen handy because it is faster and more convinient to jot down ideas on the bus than to pull out the laptop. And nothing beats written narrative for forming an argument-I will discuss this more below. But to free up the audience to move between ideas as their interests carry them-this presents a magnificent new way to teach. Actually, medieval scholars were very well aquainted with a sort of hypertextual system. The document in question, usually scripture, would be inscribed on the center one-third of the page, while surrounding the text in the very wide margins would be commentary from previous luminaries--St. Augustine, etc. The problems for modern readers with this format is that the scribes frequently failed to properly cite the commentary. They knew many of these arguments from memory, and expected those who later learned the text to memorize it too. One also frequently sees representation of medieval scholars with multiple books open on large desks or special revolving book holders. Hey, when you can't get your hands on a Dell, you do what you must.
Instead, we get computer heads. OK, I want to master my computer, but those who have control of computers currently simply refuse to see that some of the applications they are trying to use the computer for already exist in our world. For example, working with images and video. Early attempts to create computer-based video editing systems frustrated those already working in the broadcast and film fields, because the computer heads who created the software came up with entirely new lexicons and systems while ignoring existing systems that were already in place and worked well! It wasn't until the programmers were forced to admit they didn't know everything and learned from real experts about helpful concepts like trim bins. I realize Guttenberg went broke trying to replicate what the scribes were already doing. However, the early and more successful printers didn't throw out the baby with the bath water--they figured out how to warm the water and get the baby clean. Enter my frustration with Staley. I have yet to find a book I dissagree with more than this one--from the first sentence of the introduction, I was on the defensive. Honestly, I have not finished the book-I will before class. Perhaps he gets better later on in the book. But I find his wholesale trashing of narrative a bit disturbing. How does one create an argument with pictures? Also, from what I have read, he denies that the meaning of images changes over time. With words, we can look them up in a dictionary for definitive meanings, or even use aides like the Oxford Dictionary of Old English to see how writers in the past used words. Hey, we can even form definitions of words from their context. But with pictures-anything goes. Images can be subjective and can change over time and differ between groups. For example, the greek masks of tragedy and comedy. Ask an older adult, and you may get some answer that deals with the theatre. But usually not the original symbol of the duality of the god Dionysius, or that they were part of an ancient religious observation. Ask a person under thirty, and they will immediately give you the answer "laugh now, cry later" which is gang slang for revenge. So how do I ensure my audience understands what I mean when I use a symbol? For that, I need context. And that takes narrative-even in a short form of label. Images are tools, and very helpful ones. But don't tell me I can tell the story I need to tell with just images.

Propaganda Redux

2006-09-11T19:33:00.000-07:00

So I started this project-deconstructing a web site-after trying to troubleshoot two computers that a bored eleven year old has played with. Goodness knows what kind of junk has been seen on my computer-it makes a mother shutter. Now that I have one of the computers somewhat running, let us give this HTML stuff a try. I wanted to deconstruct the BBC international page, but all it gave me was one line of jibberish. Figuring that must be html for "back slowly away from the code," I returned to an old familiar--my Alma Mater's site--Cal State Chico.http://www.csuchico.edu I printed out the source code, so I could look at both at the same time.
The biggest difference I noticed between these text-based constructions and the CAD programs I have worked with is the lack of reference points. An architectually-derived program will always set an absolute reference point, i.e. the Cartesian Coordinate 0,0. A CAD program will let you put that point anywhere, but every other line in the drawing will reference that point. Hey, if it got the pyramids built, I'm for it. But just to start in the upper left corner and make everything relative to that just seems too existential for my taste. I am also curious about the gaps between lines of code--if several spaces are skipped, does that mean the text or images skip the same amount of space? Also, the first few lines of code clearly refer to the headers on top, but the next few lines of code refer to a set of images two-thirds of the way down the page. Does this mean the directions do not have to go in order? An area for searches and e-mail connections in the top right corner-they just send the respondent to different addresses-hey, that looks pretty easy.
Next comes a trickier part- separate categories on the left side with drop down menus. How does the text tell when the mouse has moved over this area? The instructions seem very short for a complex operation. Also, the boxes change color. I can't find any code for changing color or for the ingredients of the drop down boxes. They seem to be included in the .gif portion of the code. I noticed one area near the top that is changed frequently has links to the school's box office and newspaper-that is a very nifty system.
Then the code goes back to the separate pictures near the bottom that send the viewer to various departments--here the addresses are clearly laid out and the instructions talk about swapping images. Then we end with disclaimers and street addresses. Nothing fancy. I realize I have too greatly simplified this, but without a code book, I could not determine what the fiddelty-bits were completely about. However, it is no longer total jiberish-I think I could learn this. If only I could get my systems up and running.

History soon, but first some site reviews

2006-09-04T18:24:00.000-07:00

Italian historian Benedetto Croce argued that without narrative, there can be no history. The facts surrounding events are essential, but the narrative gives them contex, viewpoint, and helps the reader understand the author's version of historical events. Conversely, narrative without facts can not be history, either. We saw examples of both these truisms last Tuesday evening in the "Clio Wired" seminar at GMU. The website dedicated to the two counties involved in the Civil War (am I allowed to say that in Virginia?) is a terrific storehouse of information. The layout, formatted like the structure of a three story museum, gave the viewer a clear and readily understandable way to move between types of information and the relevant time periods. We had a roomful of historians, myself included, just itching to work with all that impressive raw data. But that was just the problem-it was raw data, like the cellophane-wrapped trays of meat in the butcher's display case. It will not be "history" until a specialist takes it home, spices it just right, and slaps it on the barbecue. I found the site exemplary for what it was, but one could not expect a novice, without guidance to come away from the site understanding there experiences of the participants. The other site, the National Geographics' web site on Pearl Harbor, I found had some very major problems. First, the film footage and graphics were so close a copy of the US war films of the time, I thought that was what we were watching. I didn't have a problem with the duplication of art style, but with the duplication of WWII era style of writing commentary. I considered the verbiage too inflammatory, and frankly too banal for the work to bear the NatGeo's logo. Tell us the phraseology was from the period, or use the space to give more useful information. On to my main criticism--the area for the general public to record their views and remembrances.
Within the vulgarities and base comments were some rather moving stories. However, these stories were discredited and abused because the space was neither policed nor cleaned up. Shame on the National Geographic for letting someone's cherished memories be defaced and dishonored in such a way. In addition, these eyewitness accounts, just put out to air, suffer the general difficulties shared by oral histories- one person's memories without the ability to truely check the facts. Historians and journalists have methods to deal with these problems, but the authors of the site seemed simply interested in giving their audience a purile experience.