Inactive: Revise and Dissent
Friday, January 30, 2009
Libraries and copyfraud
For the last week, I've been exchanging emails with curators at the Huntington Library about their use policies for digital images. For the Darwin Day 2009 Main Page effort on Wikipedia, I've been putting together a list of portraits of Darwin. Although a number of websites have significant collections of Darwin images, there isn't any single comprehensive collection. One interesting shot I came across is an 1881 photograph, possibly the last one before Darwin's death, that was allegedly "rediscovered" in the mid-1990s when a copy was donated to the Huntington. Press releases and exhibition descriptions invite people to contact the Huntington to request images, so I requested the Darwin photo. The response I got was typical of how libraries and archives deal with digital copies of rare public domain material.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Did Obama Promise to Restore the Health of the Humanities?
In a word, no. His big promises are about bringing back "sound science." And I agree with him--to a point. It is a fresh of fresh air knowing that, at least in federal policy-making circles, ideology will now be subservient to the findings of solid research. This heralds a revolution in so many areas, especially in health, education, and welfare. But where does that leave the humanists?
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Gort of the interplanetary police force
[Cross-posted at Airminded.]
I recently rewatched one of my favourite science fiction films, The Day the Earth Stood Still -- the 1951 original, of course, not the currently-screening remake (which I have yet to see, but tend to doubt that it will improve over the original in any area other than special effects). I can't remember when I last saw it, but it must have been before I started the PhD because otherwise the climactic scene would have leapt out out me and smacked me in the face, as it did the other day ... (Warning: spoilers ahead.)
Sunday, November 23, 2008
The scientist in TV dramas
This is a widely-acknowledged Golden Age of American television drama (led, of course, by cable shows, but with network fare that also has its high points). (I'm two discs in to Deadwood right now, which is the one show that is usually mentioned in the same sentence as The Wire in terms of really great shows.) One remarkable thing that's happened recently, especially this season, is the flood of scientists as main characters. Several established shows have main characters who derive much of their identity, and personality, from being scientists: House, Bones, and (to some extent) Mohinder Suresh from Heroes. More than earlier shows in the same genres (medical dramas, forensic science dramas, superhero dramas), these shows and their characters explore the meanings of what it is to be a scientist in modern society.
But two new shows this season, Fringe and Eleventh Hour, are about science to an unprecedented extent (even including The X-Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation, but excluding CBC's ReGenesis and the four-episode British version of Eleventh Hour, neither of which I've yet seen).
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Teaching History Courses Online
More and more history courses are being taught online, especially at two-year colleges. It remains to be seen whether faculty will adjust to or resist this change. If you are interested in this trend, and thinking of becoming involved, I suggest you consider the below questions. You will want to find answers to these questions before you take the plunge and become an online instructor.
Monday, November 10, 2008
How is History Doing at Teaching with Technology?
Are history faculty stuck in the pedagogy of the past or have they embraced new technologies in their teaching?
Saturday, November 1, 2008
A Mysterious Methods Book for Library Research
I recently read a book that I think should be required in every historical methods graduate seminar. Surprisingly, though, a search for this title in Syllabus Finder revealed that there are more theological seminaries than history departments that assign this text. In fact, I found only two online syllabi for history courses that listed this book. For more information about this mysterious title, read on.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
The Historical Tourist
More than a month into the semester, I'm still struggling to get a dissertation-writing/research schedule down, but I think I'm starting to make a bit of progress.
Part of the problem stems ostensibly from the fact that I took a trip out of town during the third week of the semester. I've never done this before - in fact, I've never even done a research trip during a semester (aside from over spring break last spring, which doesn't count). It was more than a bit odd to get through those first few weeks with the knowledge that I was about to leave town, so I left efforts at a regular dissertation schedule aside and focused on simply getting through the things that had to be done.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Wikipedia's epistemological methods
A colleague of mine recently asked me about Wikipedia's policy on sources and evidence, Wikipedia:Verifiability (WP:V). In short, the threshold for including content in Wikipedia is that it be "verifiable, not true". Truth alone, without appropriate evidence that fits with the Wikipedia community's standards, is not enough to justify adding something to Wikipedia.
You can interpret this in a number of ways. For some, it's an embodiment of post-modern notions of truth and subjectivity (people disagree about truth, so we don't let people simply add what they know to be true, instead relying on authority). For others, it's just a practical concession to the sociological nature of Wikipedia, in which some people are more objective and more capable than others (and those are the people that know how to leverage authority effectively). The Verifiability standards could also be taken as a fundamentally rhetorical, rather than epistemological, policy: communal standards of evidence ensure a basic level of apparent reliability, since readers can be pointed straight to relevant authorities. (Citizendium, in contrast, as has looser evidentiary standards and relies in part on the personal authority of its Authors and Editors.)
Monday, August 18, 2008
Unwritten books
[Cross-posted at Airminded.]
I'm often surprised by the books that historians haven't written. The years I am researching are between two and three generations distant, yet it's not hard to find (what seem to me to be) big, important topics which deserve to have academic monographs devoted to them, but have somehow been neglected. Sometimes this might be a matter of historiographical fashion: the cultural turn in military history is still relatively young, for example, and not all areas have been touched by it yet. In others there already exists a detailed account, which was written decades ago and seems to have obviated the need for further research. Sometimes the gap in the literature seems inexplicable. And, OK, sometimes the topic isn't all that big and important, it's just obscure ...
Here are some of the unwritten books I think I know of in my field:
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Life in Archives Mode
I realized this morning that, by the time we reach October 1, I'll have spent an average of 1 week on the road/trips for each of the past four months.
While that's mostly research-related, it was surprising. I haven't traveled much in several years, although I do love it.
This week, my research has brought me to the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
A Revealing Look at OAH Finances
Lee W. Formwalt is stepping down as Executive Director of the Organization of American Historians. His latest article in the OAH Newsletter reviews the past decade. One of the surprising things revealed in his article is the extent to which the OAH has been losing younger historians.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Academic Jobs Wiki
If you will be on the job market this coming school year, you should visit the wiki for academic jobs in history.
Friday, July 18, 2008
How to Survive Graduate School, Part I: Online Resources and Books
[Cross-posted from (Almost) Me, PhD]
This time four years ago, I was finishing up my last month of work at my full-time job, which meant that although my work was getting done, I was anxious for grad school to start and spent too much time looking for tips and resources online.
That was when I first discovered H-Net, which can be one of a historian's best friends. I immediately signed up for H-Grad, H-Women, H-Minerva, and a slew of other listservs. If you're not yet familiar with H-Net, I highly recommend - and not just because I currently am one of the H-Grad editors.
Since I found it, H-Grad has been the best source for me to find information on conferences, funding opportunities, events, and field-specific resources. H-Grad's traffic is pretty light, and I also recommend H-Announce, if nothing else, because you'll get a daily email with all the latest conference calls and other stuff. H-Announce is pretty much how I've learned of all three of the conferences at which I presented, as well as the encyclopedia entry-writing opportunities I have this summer.
Also...H-Net's completely free. I didn't bother joining the American Historical Association or the Organization of American Historians until last fall - not because they didn't interest me, but they were less useful in terms of resources and benefits.
So H-Net was the big find that summer, and the one I've stayed with consistently. It's still probably the best resource out there for budding historians (and occasionally has stuff of interest to folks in American Culture or English or other humanities and social science-related things; for example, H-Grad is NOT limited to historians, but to all grad students in the social sciences).
I also read Getting What You Came For. The big problem with that book? It's terribly outdated, and it's not really humanities-focused.
The BETTER book is >
First-year students in my program don't teach. And, on top of that, I had an alternate arrangement in the fall of my second year, so I didn't actually take a teaching assistant role until second semester of second year - nor did I discover the next resource until after that semester ended.
If you'll be teaching at all, definitely check out First Day to Final Grade. This is geared towards graduate students who teach, and it covers all types of class formats. I look over it at the start of every semester now.
My resources, then, don't amount to a lot: one book (Graduate Study for...) on being a grad student, one book on teaching, and H-Net. Those are the key ones. This summer, I'm probably adding Writing your Dissertation in 15 Minutes A Day, but it's still on my to-read list.
But if there's one final resource I could leave you with for part one, it would probably be a few websites on how to gut a book. If you're unfamiliar with the phrase, it's time to get acquainted: gutting a book will absolutely save your life when you're a graduate student.
Here are a few websites I've seen, but they're not the only ones. Next time, I'll move on to the big issues of organization, reading, and - my two favorite words! - time management.
How to Gut a Book
David Lavery's How to Gut a Book
"Inspectional Reading"
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Egregious ranking analysis?
[Cross-posted at Airminded.]
The Research Quality Framework (RQF) was a proposal by the previous Australian federal government to introduce a set of metrics by which the research output of university departments can be measured. Something like the Research Assessment Exercise in Britain, certainly in principle (I don't know enough about either to say how alike they were in practice). The new federal government scrapped the RQF earlier this year. It's gone, dead, buried. Instead we're getting something called the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative, which is completely different, and much better. Personally, I think I preferred the RQF -- more interesting possibilities for backronyms there.
I don't really have an objection to this type of thing, in principle. But as everyone knows (including, I'm sure, those who devise them) performance metrics can lead to perverse incentives. The average length of time people have to wait for elective surgery would seem to be a good one for hospitals, but not if they start turning people away rather than hire more doctors or expand facilities in order to reduce this metric. Or even worse, start turning them out before they are fully recovered.
So the precise metrics used matter. And one of the ERA metrics seems to be causing a lot of concern: the ranking of journals, both international and Australian, in terms of quality. Publishing in high quality journals scores more highly than publishing in low quality journals, and in the end this presumably translates into more dollars. Seems fair enough on the face of it: obviously most historians would prefer to publish in high journals whenever possible anyway, with or without an ERA. But who decides which journal gets what rank?
The short answer is: not historians. The longer answer is the Australian Research Council (ARC), which is the peak body in this country for distributing research grants. In the first instance they are relying on journal impact factors (a measure of how often articles from a journal are cited by other journals), which at first glance would seem to discriminate against historians, for whom monographs are a hugely important means of publishing research. Maybe there's a way of correcting for that, I don't know. Anyway, there are four ranks, ranging from C at the bottom, through B and A, to A* at the top. [Spinal Tap reference here] A* is defined as follows:
Typically an A* journal would be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of a very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted. Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions.
This is supposed to represent the top 5% of all journals in a field or subfield. A is like A*, only less so, and represents the next 15%; B, the next 30%; C, the bottom 50%. I can see a danger for perverse incentives here, at least for Australian journals (international journals won't notice a couple of submissions more or less): C rank journals might get even fewer quality articles submitted to them, because these will be directed to the A*s, As and Bs first: how can they then hope to climb up to B? So ranking journals in this way not only measures the quality of journals, it might actually fix them in place: a self-fulfilling metric.
At least the ARC is seeking input from historians (and indeed, all researchers in Australia in all fields) about the proposed ranks, but what effect this will have is anyone's guess. The ARC has already extended the deadline for submissions from next week to mid-August, so they're clearly aware of the 'large interest' the journal ranks have aroused.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
From Coursework to Dissertation in 3.5 Seconds
As the other new Revise and Dissent blogger, I figured it was time I introduced myself and said something here. I'm Tanya Roth, a fourth-year PhD candidate in history at Washington University in St. Louis.
This past April, I (finally!) passed qualifying exams, which means I:
1. am now done with coursework
2. have received formal approval for my dissertation topic and
3. advanced to candidacy.
I spent three years waiting for that moment when I'd transition from PhD student to PhD candidate and ABD. But anyone else out there working on a dissertation may agree with me when I say that now I think that might have been the easy part!
Thursday, July 3, 2008
A Low-Cost Method for Phone Interviews
My dissertation topic deals with the 1960s, so many of the people I am studying are still alive. I am gathering oral histories from these individuals to gain a behind-the-scenes perspective on the events I am researching. They also add an Indian voice or perspective that is not always found in the official documents I come across in the archives. If you are in a similar situation, you might be interested in a method I came up for conducting interviews by telephone at almost no cost.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
The great stoush
[Cross-posted at Airminded.]
The 15th Military History Carnival has been posted at Cardinal Wolsey's This Day In History. This time around, I'd like to contrast two styles of blog conversation. The first is at Crooked Timber, on the differing memories of the Great War in America and Europe, and the bearing this may have on attitudes to war and peace: not only the post itself but the 170-comment long discussion thread, which features regular Airminded commenter Chris Williams. (See also the cross-post at John Quiggin's own blog, and some comments at Trench Fever.) It's a good example of somebody posting some interesting ideas which resulted in a thorough discussion (though not without its frustrations, and it's a shame that Crooked Timber threads seem to close after such a short time). But while intense, it's pretty localised in time and blog-space.
Compare this with the reaction to a post (which had nothing to do with military history and so wasn't in the Carnival) at Mercurius Rusticus attacking the role and influence of women in the history profession, and gender history in general. The post has now been taken down (Ralph Luker quotes some of it), apparently permanently, though it was up and down a couple of times before that, and for a while the whole blog was closed to all but invited readers. (Another post, quite innocuous as far as I could see, was taken down after being mentioned at in a comment at Cliopatria.) Mercurius Rusticus himself (and presumably he's a he) seems uninterested in discussing or defending what he's said in any sensible way: his comments on the matter to date have all been written in the style of a 17th-century scholar, or so I take it. Which is amusing enough but, unless this is an accepted style of discourse amongst early modern historians, seems pretty disrespectful to his interlocutors. As is his most recent post.
But the thing is that this hostility to debate doesn't matter too much, because there are plenty of other places for people to respond, comment, point and laugh. The ones that have come across my feed reader include: Cliopatria (here, here and here), Tenured Radical (here and here), Historiann, Early Modern Notes, Investigations of a Dog, Europe Endless, and Progressive Historians. Mercurius Rusticus isn't doing himself any favours with his evasiveness, but in any event the historioblogosphere is doing a good job of analysing the issue without his further input.
My own attitude is pretty much the same as it was in a somewhat-different context two years ago:
I would have thought that anything that happened in the past is a ‘worthwhile’ subject for study by historians. Anything!
If gender history isn't your thing (and I've already confessed that it's not an approach that I often adopt myself) then just don't do it. I simply don't get why any historian would be offended by the fact that other historians choose to do things differently to themselves -- let alone feel the need to attack them for it. History is such a vast subject that we need to illuminate it from as many angles as possible in order to approach a true understanding of it.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Mowing devils, old hags, and phantom airships
[Cross-posted at Airminded.]
Nick at Mercurius Politicus has an excellent post up on the The Mowing-devil, an English pamphlet from 1678 which is famous among forteans because it contains an illustration of something that looks a lot like a crop circle, three centuries before the term was coined. If it is an account of the mysterious appearance of a circle in a farmer's field, then it is evidence that crop circles long preceded the activities of circlemakers Doug and Dave, and so are presumably a real, and as yet unexplained, phenomenon.
But Nick's analysis suggests that the anonymous writer of the The Mowing-devil was not presenting an account of a strange but true event, but rather a cautionary tale about class relations in rural England. He concludes that
In short, The Mowing-Devil is probably not the representation of an early crop-circle that enthusiasts want it to be. In focusing on the woodcut, they’ve missed a much more interesting side to the text that tells us something about late seventeenth-century popular politics and religion.
Deleriad, a folklorist, made an interesting comment:
Although your analysis of the narrative is pretty reasonable I think it’s also worthwhile applying Hufford’s notion of the experiential source hypothesis. Put simply, it works on the basis that people explain anomalous experiences within the pre-existing worldview of a particular culture. So for example, encounters which might once have been explained in terms of fairies are nowadays explained in terms of aliens, lights in the sky which were explained as zepplins at the dawn of the 20th century are now explained as UFOs and so on.
Now, I'm aware of David Hufford's work, though mainly by reputation: The Terror That Comes in the Night (1982), a study of old hag folklore in Newfoundland, is a book I've heard much about. Hufford's experiential source hypothesis (ESH) was put forward as an alternative to the prevailing cultural source hypothesis (CSH), which would explain supernatural claims almost entirely in terms of pre-existing beliefs, or else misperceptions, hoaxes or hallucinations.1 According to the CSH line of thinking, as I understand it, The Mowing-devil is probably best explained by something like Nick's suggestion, or maybe there was an early modern Doug and Dave having a laugh, or something like that. The ESH, by contrast, would posit that that something odd happened in Hertfordshire -- for example, a circle appearing overnight in a field of crops -- and that the writer of The Mowing-devil described it in terms that he and his audience could understand -- for example, a devil with a flaming scythe who appears after a farmer's ill-tempered rejection of a workman's offer to mow the field. To simplify grossly, a CSHer would say there's no reason to believe that anything freaky is going on here, so let's look for a mundane explanation; an ESHer would respond that this attitude risks throwing the extraordinary baby out with the ordinary bathwater.
So what should historians make of all this? I don't think we can make much at all.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Great New Web Site for Historic Census Data and GIS Files
I started using a great web site in my research. It is called The National Historical Geographic Information System. This web site provides aggregate census data, from 1790 to 2000, which you can download for free. With funding from the National Science Foundation, NHGIS has also made GIS shapefiles available at no cost on its web site.
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