I recently read an interesting article by Ian Milligan on the ActiveHistory.ca website entitled “‘Local Effort Brings Our Past to Life’: Halifax Chronicle-Herald.” The article briefly related the efforts of a Nova Scotian historical association to put out a book of local history and donate it to children in grades 4, 5 and 6 in their area (a similar initiative was carried out by my local historical association several years ago). Using this act of charity as a springboard for discussion on the importance of local history, Milligan posed a number of thought-provoking questions in his article, the first of which being “[s]hould local history have a bigger role in history curriculums?”
The truth is, the role of local history in our curriculum (at least at the secondary level in Ontario) is already well-established. Although we currently only have one mandatory history credit in high school (don’t get me started -- that’s a rant for another day!), it does include a strand entitled “Communities: Local, National, and Global” which explicitly includes the study of local history. The larger description for this strand is as follows:
Communities may be viewed from local, regional, national, and world perspectives. Communities interact with one another through commerce, cultural exchanges, colonization, war, and international agreements. These interactions are the basis of today’s globally connected world. Over time, communities and their interactions have changed because of factors such as changing technologies and patterns of human migration. It is through the study of communities that students begin to understand who they are in time and place.
And, while the inclusion of local history is explicitly laid out in the Communities strand above, there are multitudes of opportunities for teachers to include it when covering the expectations in the other strands (Change and Continuity, Citizenship and Heritage, and Social, Economic, and Political Structures) as well.
Since teachers are legally bound to the curriculum as laid out by the Ontario government, it is not a matter of should but of must; it is part of our responsibility as secondary school teachers to include local history in our lesson plans in order to ensure that all curriculum expectations for the province are being met. The problem is that few teachers do and those that do often don’t do so effectively. Usually, as Milligan points out, the inclusion of local history within the majority of history courses is done on a purely superficial level, achieved by tossing a short anecdote or trivial fact into a larger discussion. Rarely is local history given centre stage.
Perhaps the question that we should really be asking is “how do we, as teachers and historians, go about incorporating local history in more meaningful ways within history curricula?”
I believe that one way to do this is for schools and teachers to allot time not only for discussing history on a local level with their students, but also showing it being done. I realize field trips are difficult and time consuming to organize, but as educators we should be exposing students to local archives, historical societies, historical architecture and historic sites and/or monuments. This type of exposure to local sources of history would fit seamlessly (I think) into the Historical Inquiry section of the curriculum and is therefore easily justifiable to administrators.
At the end of his post, Milligan wonders if local histories are only important when tied into the larger narrative of provincial or national history or, if by approaching local history in this way we are undermining its importance in the lives of everyday people. I think this is a valid concern. But, for now, in a time when high school teachers should be including local history in their lesson plans, but often get away with ignoring it altogether, I think we have to take the inclusion of the topic wherever we can, and build on that.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Saturday, December 19, 2009
When You Look Into a Digital Abyss, Does It Also Look Into You?: A Look at Historical Abundance on the Internet
It seems fitting that this blogging assignment on the abundance of materials available on the internet will be my last post of the semester. Assigned in September, it’s taken me nearly four months to get past more than a sketchy outline of what I wanted to discuss in this post. It’s not through lack of trying though – I’ve probably sat down at my computer to write it more than a half dozen times only to find myself quickly distracted by an errant thought or query which led me to an internet search for information which led me to a hyperlink for a related topic which led me to either another hyperlink or another question and so on and so on until the time that I’d set aside for writing that day had run out.
Over the course of the semester I have likened this process of traveling from hyperlink to hyperlink to that of Alice falling down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland – you never know what weird and wonderful things you’ll see during your trip, nor do you end up quite where you expected to when all is said and done. I’m not complaining; I’ve come across hundreds of amazing websites, useful tools, interesting articles and countless pieces of fascinating information this way. In truth, I think that my education and knowledge base are probably significantly broader as a result.
But this “infinite archive,” [1] as the internet has been described in recent years, is something of a double-edged sword, especially for academic and public historians. In the words of Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig [2]:
As Cohen and Rosenzweig point out, in the past historians had to build their craft on the sometimes tenuous threads of the surviving evidence, a harsh reality which certainly restricted historical research. I also think that the caveat “that they could get their hands on” needs to be added to the aforementioned quote. Historical records and artifacts did not rest in a single, central and easily accessible location. As a result, historical research was often regional, not necessarily in terms of topic but in terms of sources used to support the arguments of historians. It’s not unreasonable to think that historians in the past could become acquainted with all of the materials available to them on their subject in their area and still be missing that critical document or artifact that had the potential to either cement or refute their claims.
Thankfully, these constraints of time and distance have largely been removed by improvements in technology. With the growth of the internet and the sheer abundance of information that is now available online, academics in even the most remote regions of the world suddenly have access to primary and secondary sources they may have previously been unaware even existed. For instance, the internet and massive digitization efforts have made it possible for students of history, like our own Megan Arnott, to be able to research and write on the Medieval Era without ever having to leave her home in Canada. Further, through email, chat rooms, Twitter, Facebook, Google Wave and any other number of social networking tools, Megan (and historians, in general) are better equipped than ever to quickly and easily communicate and collaborate with colleagues around the world.
Unfortunately, this is where the “‘problem’ of abundance” that Cohen and Rosenzweig speak of comes in. Those same digitization efforts that seem amazing at the outset do have their drawbacks – even as early as 1996, the internet had become “a sprawling megalopolis that no one person could fully explore” [3]. With thousands, if not tens of thousands of new websites added to the internet each day, how does an historian keep up?
The short answer is, we can’t. Instead, we must do as Cohen and Rosenzweig suggest and work, as historians in concert with computer programmers, website designers, researchers, publishers, museum curators, librarians and archivists to create “sophisticated statistical and data mining tools to do some of the looking” for us [2]. And, while the internet currently acts as an amazing archive of human record, no singular database has yet been created in which all historical records within it are stored. Because of this, I believe that it is the job of public historians to support the creation and use of these data mining tools and smaller databases in order to help make as much of the digital record as possible both knowable and useful to academics and the public alike.
Another issue that must be considered in connection with the growing abundance of historical sources on the internet is that of authority within the study of humanities and social sciences. As we discussed in class earlier in the semester, while the constraints of time, distance and availability no doubt frustrated historians in the past, they also helped to make the professionalization of history what it is today. For instance, with the scarcity of information came a tight control on existing intellectual materials; museums, archives, and libraries, especially those housing extremely rare items, were often restricted to only the most respected historians in the field (and largely only those associated with a trusted institution). This resulted in the control of scholarship resting in the hands of the few. It likely also served to privilege certain interpretations of historical events.
But one of the more amazing “gifts” to come out of the abundance of materials on the internet is the growth of democratization of the historical process. As more items that were previously inaccessible to the general public are digitized and compiled in databases like the Internet Archive, more grassroots historians are popping up each day. They read, research and comment on what they see and learn, adding a unique perspective and voice to literature on a variety of historical topics. They now have not only the ability to share their interpretations of historical events, but now they also have the primary and secondary sources to support it.
Don’t get me wrong, even the internet hasn’t been able to overcome the entrenched intellectual hierarchy which privileges the contributions made to the field by professional scholars in universities and other elite institutions [3]. I’m not even arguing that it necessarily should. After all, academic historians have spent years training in proper research methodology and historiography. But neither should the amateur historian be dismissed out of hand. As someone who is untrained in this type of research, I believe that there is a lot that historians can learn from these amateurs about how those outside of the ivory tower interact with history, what they need and want from it, and perhaps where academic research needs to go in order to satisfy the interests of the wider public.
And that’s where I believe public historians come in. I think the task now falls to us to mediate between the two groups (the public and the academics) in order to ensure that the contributions of both sides are acknowledged, valued and made accessible to the other.
Sources:
[1] Turkel, William J. Digital History Hacks: Methodology for the Infinite Archive (2005-08). [Weblog.]
[2] Cohen, Daniel and Roy Rosenzweig, “Web of lies? Historical knowledge on the Internet,” First Monday, Volume 10, Number 12 - 5 December 2005, http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1299/1219.
[3] Cohen, Daniel and Roy Rosenzweig, “Exploring the History Web,” Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting to Past on the Web, http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/exploring/1.php.
Over the course of the semester I have likened this process of traveling from hyperlink to hyperlink to that of Alice falling down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland – you never know what weird and wonderful things you’ll see during your trip, nor do you end up quite where you expected to when all is said and done. I’m not complaining; I’ve come across hundreds of amazing websites, useful tools, interesting articles and countless pieces of fascinating information this way. In truth, I think that my education and knowledge base are probably significantly broader as a result.
But this “infinite archive,” [1] as the internet has been described in recent years, is something of a double-edged sword, especially for academic and public historians. In the words of Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig [2]:
The digital era seems likely to confront historians—who were more likely in the past to worry about the scarcity of surviving evidence from the past—with a new “problem” of abundance. A much deeper and denser historical record, especially one in digital form, seems like an incredible opportunity and gift. But its overwhelming size means that we will have to spend a lot of time looking at this particular gift horse in the mouth... (2005)
As Cohen and Rosenzweig point out, in the past historians had to build their craft on the sometimes tenuous threads of the surviving evidence, a harsh reality which certainly restricted historical research. I also think that the caveat “that they could get their hands on” needs to be added to the aforementioned quote. Historical records and artifacts did not rest in a single, central and easily accessible location. As a result, historical research was often regional, not necessarily in terms of topic but in terms of sources used to support the arguments of historians. It’s not unreasonable to think that historians in the past could become acquainted with all of the materials available to them on their subject in their area and still be missing that critical document or artifact that had the potential to either cement or refute their claims.
Thankfully, these constraints of time and distance have largely been removed by improvements in technology. With the growth of the internet and the sheer abundance of information that is now available online, academics in even the most remote regions of the world suddenly have access to primary and secondary sources they may have previously been unaware even existed. For instance, the internet and massive digitization efforts have made it possible for students of history, like our own Megan Arnott, to be able to research and write on the Medieval Era without ever having to leave her home in Canada. Further, through email, chat rooms, Twitter, Facebook, Google Wave and any other number of social networking tools, Megan (and historians, in general) are better equipped than ever to quickly and easily communicate and collaborate with colleagues around the world.
Unfortunately, this is where the “‘problem’ of abundance” that Cohen and Rosenzweig speak of comes in. Those same digitization efforts that seem amazing at the outset do have their drawbacks – even as early as 1996, the internet had become “a sprawling megalopolis that no one person could fully explore” [3]. With thousands, if not tens of thousands of new websites added to the internet each day, how does an historian keep up?
The short answer is, we can’t. Instead, we must do as Cohen and Rosenzweig suggest and work, as historians in concert with computer programmers, website designers, researchers, publishers, museum curators, librarians and archivists to create “sophisticated statistical and data mining tools to do some of the looking” for us [2]. And, while the internet currently acts as an amazing archive of human record, no singular database has yet been created in which all historical records within it are stored. Because of this, I believe that it is the job of public historians to support the creation and use of these data mining tools and smaller databases in order to help make as much of the digital record as possible both knowable and useful to academics and the public alike.
Another issue that must be considered in connection with the growing abundance of historical sources on the internet is that of authority within the study of humanities and social sciences. As we discussed in class earlier in the semester, while the constraints of time, distance and availability no doubt frustrated historians in the past, they also helped to make the professionalization of history what it is today. For instance, with the scarcity of information came a tight control on existing intellectual materials; museums, archives, and libraries, especially those housing extremely rare items, were often restricted to only the most respected historians in the field (and largely only those associated with a trusted institution). This resulted in the control of scholarship resting in the hands of the few. It likely also served to privilege certain interpretations of historical events.
But one of the more amazing “gifts” to come out of the abundance of materials on the internet is the growth of democratization of the historical process. As more items that were previously inaccessible to the general public are digitized and compiled in databases like the Internet Archive, more grassroots historians are popping up each day. They read, research and comment on what they see and learn, adding a unique perspective and voice to literature on a variety of historical topics. They now have not only the ability to share their interpretations of historical events, but now they also have the primary and secondary sources to support it.
Don’t get me wrong, even the internet hasn’t been able to overcome the entrenched intellectual hierarchy which privileges the contributions made to the field by professional scholars in universities and other elite institutions [3]. I’m not even arguing that it necessarily should. After all, academic historians have spent years training in proper research methodology and historiography. But neither should the amateur historian be dismissed out of hand. As someone who is untrained in this type of research, I believe that there is a lot that historians can learn from these amateurs about how those outside of the ivory tower interact with history, what they need and want from it, and perhaps where academic research needs to go in order to satisfy the interests of the wider public.
And that’s where I believe public historians come in. I think the task now falls to us to mediate between the two groups (the public and the academics) in order to ensure that the contributions of both sides are acknowledged, valued and made accessible to the other.
Sources:
[1] Turkel, William J. Digital History Hacks: Methodology for the Infinite Archive (2005-08). [Weblog.]
[2] Cohen, Daniel and Roy Rosenzweig, “Web of lies? Historical knowledge on the Internet,” First Monday, Volume 10, Number 12 - 5 December 2005, http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1299/1219.
[3] Cohen, Daniel and Roy Rosenzweig, “Exploring the History Web,” Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting to Past on the Web, http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/exploring/1.php.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Reflections on a Semester of Digital History
Growing up, whenever I had a problem with the computer, I would go to my big brother and ask him for help. Far more tech savvy than I, Dave (who later went to school for computer programming) usually had the answer or at least an idea of how to go about finding it. However, in the way of big brothers, he also quickly lost patience in my constant requests for help and eventually resorted to pointing at the DOS manual every time I asked him a question and telling me to figure it out for myself. At 12, 15 and even 18 years-old, I stubbornly refused to go anywhere near those 1000+ pages of incomprehensibly techno-babble. That’s likely how I ended up in the Public History program at UWO faced with a course in Digital History, only passably competent with computers and the internet and with not the slightest idea of how either of them really worked. More importantly, nor did I have the first clue about how I could make either of them work for me in my future career(s) in public history and teaching.
Fortunately, over the course of the semester my understanding of and competence with digital tools has increased enormously. As has my understanding of how these tools can and should be used by academics and public historians to inform and improve upon the practice of history. Through readings, assignments and class discussion, I have had the opportunity to learn skills such as HTML, CSS, website design, image manipulation, data mining, visualization techniques and digital mapping skills. I have reconnected with my love of blogging and resigned myself to using social networking tools (like Twitter) as a method of staying connected with peers and colleagues and as a way to quickly access and/or share information about developments being made in the field. I’ve learned more about copyright than I probably ever needed to know and took part in conversations about the merits of open versus closed sources, augmented versus virtual realities, web 2.0 tools, crowd sourcing, mashups, the Deep Web and dozens of other topics that I didn’t even know existed before I took this course.
But learning is rarely a linear or simple process and along the way I encountered my share of frustration with the course material. Some of what I read flat-out remained outside of my grasp of understanding (like those pesky APIs I just couldn’t visualize). Or, like Braden, some of what I thought I had grasped through readings proved fleeting as I listened to my peers discuss what they had taken away from this or that author’s work. Still, just being exposed to some of that material was learning enough... for now.
Of course, my most constant frustration during the semester was the roadblocks I always seemed to hit when working with the digital tools for one of our mini assignments on the basics of digital history. Even on those tasks that seemed simple at the outset, I knew that there was something there, lurking, lying in wait to trip me up the instant I got smug and thought I had it nailed. But, while understanding why historians should use something is great, actually being able to apply that understanding to the manipulation of the tools for the betterment of the field, is critical. This is why, even though several of these assignments made me want to join Shelagh in throwing my laptop across the room, I applied a considerable amount of what I like to think of as plucky “stickwithitness” (“stickwithitness” being the homely cousin of “truthiness”) and (usually) came out with something concrete to show for my efforts.
Except for this one time...
For good or for bad, I often used writing or editing posts for this blog as a way to put off doing other, more pressing work for one of my classes this semester. I’m not sure what assignment it was that I was putting off, but at the end of October, I suddenly decided that it was the perfect time (read: the worst possible time) to redesign my blog layout. Inspired by a fancier layout used by one of last year’s crop of PH students, Krista McCracken, I decided to hunt up a new, more artistic layout for my blog. The one I eventually settled on was Notepad Chaos (although, as a history nerd, the cheeky ‘40s pinup-inspired Hello Sailor was a close second).
Although it took me the better part of an evening to choose my desired layout (something fun yet reasonably professional), that was the easy part. After downloading the file, I realized that it was zipped and I didn’t have any software (like WinZip) on my computer with which to unzip it. I got that problem squared away and overcame several other minor hurdles to get the layout up on my blog only to discover that I wasn’t able to personalize the darn thing like I could with standard Blogger templates.
Before our Digital History course, this type of obstacle would have been it for me; I didn’t have the tools, knowledge or confidence with which to troubleshoot this type of problem. As a result, my past inclination would have been to throw in the towel and either accept the template as is or revert back to my original Blogger layout. However, after being introduced to the basics of HTML via the W3 School’s HTML Tutorial for our first webpage assignment, I was now able to take that shaky next step.
I viewed the page source for the layout and tried to scan it for code that looked familiar, altering pieces here and there and then previewing the results to see if I’d managed to change the design elements that I was hoping to. The process was one of painstakingly slow trial and error, but I eventually got the superficial stuff (font colours, sizes, date-stamps, etc.) the way I wanted it.
My satisfaction was short-lived, however. I loved the colourful background of the layout, but I wasn’t happy with the 3-Column design. Compared with the 2-Column design that I had previously been using in my blog, I found the new layout crowded and distracting to the reader. I wanted to get rid of that third column (both in terms of its content and the coloured square that differentiated that space from the rest of the page’s background). I also wanted to extend my text boxes so that I could write in lines that were more than 3 inches wide, thus visually shortening my often lengthy blog posts. I struggled with it for longer than I care to admit, fixing the text problem but remaining stumped by the background issue. Eventually I had to admit that I was euchred – I could slap some make-up on her, but I still didn’t have the skill to give the old broad a facelift.
(Note: I’m pretty sure that the piece that I needed to be able to manipulate was in an image file rather than in the HTML code and therefore out of my reach).
In the end, I decided to go back to a clean and simple Blogger template (which is not as easy a process as one might think). At one point I was forced to delete my blog in order to reinstate the original format and then spent the next forty nearly heart-stopping minutes unable to find the file and fearful that I had lost the entire thing. Thankfully, I eventually managed to recover it.
I didn’t relate the above anecdote in order to pat myself on the back but as an attempt to illustrate how useful I feel this Digital History course, especially its more hands on aspects, has been. In just under four months I was able to learn, understand and utilize basic principles of HTML and apply that knowledge within a new context with confidence. Even more surprisingly, I now had not only the skill but also the inclination to troubleshoot in areas I never would have thought myself capable of. It’s these more intangible outcomes that I know I will carry with me into future historical or educational endeavors. And the best (and perhaps most daunting) part is that this is only the beginning; even after taking this class, I have barely scratched the surface of what historians are capable of using the internet for.
One of the things that I will definitely take away from this course is the belief that the internet is not an unknowable and scary place that historians should avoid at all costs. In fact, those that retreat back into their cramped offices filled with dusty books and use computers only as a modernized typewriter on which to peck out their latest article, are doing themselves and their field a disservice. Thankfully, as time passes more and more historians seem to be embracing the internet and everything that one can do with it - the future is looking bright.
Fortunately, over the course of the semester my understanding of and competence with digital tools has increased enormously. As has my understanding of how these tools can and should be used by academics and public historians to inform and improve upon the practice of history. Through readings, assignments and class discussion, I have had the opportunity to learn skills such as HTML, CSS, website design, image manipulation, data mining, visualization techniques and digital mapping skills. I have reconnected with my love of blogging and resigned myself to using social networking tools (like Twitter) as a method of staying connected with peers and colleagues and as a way to quickly access and/or share information about developments being made in the field. I’ve learned more about copyright than I probably ever needed to know and took part in conversations about the merits of open versus closed sources, augmented versus virtual realities, web 2.0 tools, crowd sourcing, mashups, the Deep Web and dozens of other topics that I didn’t even know existed before I took this course.
But learning is rarely a linear or simple process and along the way I encountered my share of frustration with the course material. Some of what I read flat-out remained outside of my grasp of understanding (like those pesky APIs I just couldn’t visualize). Or, like Braden, some of what I thought I had grasped through readings proved fleeting as I listened to my peers discuss what they had taken away from this or that author’s work. Still, just being exposed to some of that material was learning enough... for now.
Of course, my most constant frustration during the semester was the roadblocks I always seemed to hit when working with the digital tools for one of our mini assignments on the basics of digital history. Even on those tasks that seemed simple at the outset, I knew that there was something there, lurking, lying in wait to trip me up the instant I got smug and thought I had it nailed. But, while understanding why historians should use something is great, actually being able to apply that understanding to the manipulation of the tools for the betterment of the field, is critical. This is why, even though several of these assignments made me want to join Shelagh in throwing my laptop across the room, I applied a considerable amount of what I like to think of as plucky “stickwithitness” (“stickwithitness” being the homely cousin of “truthiness”) and (usually) came out with something concrete to show for my efforts.
Except for this one time...
For good or for bad, I often used writing or editing posts for this blog as a way to put off doing other, more pressing work for one of my classes this semester. I’m not sure what assignment it was that I was putting off, but at the end of October, I suddenly decided that it was the perfect time (read: the worst possible time) to redesign my blog layout. Inspired by a fancier layout used by one of last year’s crop of PH students, Krista McCracken, I decided to hunt up a new, more artistic layout for my blog. The one I eventually settled on was Notepad Chaos (although, as a history nerd, the cheeky ‘40s pinup-inspired Hello Sailor was a close second).
Although it took me the better part of an evening to choose my desired layout (something fun yet reasonably professional), that was the easy part. After downloading the file, I realized that it was zipped and I didn’t have any software (like WinZip) on my computer with which to unzip it. I got that problem squared away and overcame several other minor hurdles to get the layout up on my blog only to discover that I wasn’t able to personalize the darn thing like I could with standard Blogger templates.
Before our Digital History course, this type of obstacle would have been it for me; I didn’t have the tools, knowledge or confidence with which to troubleshoot this type of problem. As a result, my past inclination would have been to throw in the towel and either accept the template as is or revert back to my original Blogger layout. However, after being introduced to the basics of HTML via the W3 School’s HTML Tutorial for our first webpage assignment, I was now able to take that shaky next step.
I viewed the page source for the layout and tried to scan it for code that looked familiar, altering pieces here and there and then previewing the results to see if I’d managed to change the design elements that I was hoping to. The process was one of painstakingly slow trial and error, but I eventually got the superficial stuff (font colours, sizes, date-stamps, etc.) the way I wanted it.
My satisfaction was short-lived, however. I loved the colourful background of the layout, but I wasn’t happy with the 3-Column design. Compared with the 2-Column design that I had previously been using in my blog, I found the new layout crowded and distracting to the reader. I wanted to get rid of that third column (both in terms of its content and the coloured square that differentiated that space from the rest of the page’s background). I also wanted to extend my text boxes so that I could write in lines that were more than 3 inches wide, thus visually shortening my often lengthy blog posts. I struggled with it for longer than I care to admit, fixing the text problem but remaining stumped by the background issue. Eventually I had to admit that I was euchred – I could slap some make-up on her, but I still didn’t have the skill to give the old broad a facelift.
(Note: I’m pretty sure that the piece that I needed to be able to manipulate was in an image file rather than in the HTML code and therefore out of my reach).
In the end, I decided to go back to a clean and simple Blogger template (which is not as easy a process as one might think). At one point I was forced to delete my blog in order to reinstate the original format and then spent the next forty nearly heart-stopping minutes unable to find the file and fearful that I had lost the entire thing. Thankfully, I eventually managed to recover it.
I didn’t relate the above anecdote in order to pat myself on the back but as an attempt to illustrate how useful I feel this Digital History course, especially its more hands on aspects, has been. In just under four months I was able to learn, understand and utilize basic principles of HTML and apply that knowledge within a new context with confidence. Even more surprisingly, I now had not only the skill but also the inclination to troubleshoot in areas I never would have thought myself capable of. It’s these more intangible outcomes that I know I will carry with me into future historical or educational endeavors. And the best (and perhaps most daunting) part is that this is only the beginning; even after taking this class, I have barely scratched the surface of what historians are capable of using the internet for.
One of the things that I will definitely take away from this course is the belief that the internet is not an unknowable and scary place that historians should avoid at all costs. In fact, those that retreat back into their cramped offices filled with dusty books and use computers only as a modernized typewriter on which to peck out their latest article, are doing themselves and their field a disservice. Thankfully, as time passes more and more historians seem to be embracing the internet and everything that one can do with it - the future is looking bright.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
My Inner Feminist Hates Jane Austen
I know that as historians we are not supposed to judge the past by the standards of the present, but in this instance, I just can’t help myself; the piece of my personality that’s a little bit feminist hates Jane Austen novels. I think her male characters could benefit from being socked in the jaw a time or two and I dislike her female characters enough to think that they might actually deserve the idiots they end up married to.
This week’s experiment in data mining reminded me of a paper I had to write for my first year English Literature course on the theme of love and marriage in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. After reading the novel, I ended up going through the book page-by-page and physically highlighting all of the sections pertaining to either love or marriage before I began to formulate my arguments and write my essay. Needless to say, it was an extremely tedious process and one I’m not eager to repeat.
But now it seems there’s a simpler way to gather the same information using a free, Canadian-made digital data mining tool. Using a plain text copy of the novel available on the Project Gutenberg website, I copied the URL into TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research)’s Word List and Concordance Tools, and ran three different word/pattern searches for “love,” “marriage” and “money.” I was interested in seeing how many instances of each word were present in the novel, if the words were used in relation to each other, where in the novel the majority of these three words were used, and if that would help me to come to any new conclusions about the themes of the novel.
The first thing I found out from using TAPoR’s Word List Tool was that the word “love” was used 91 times, “marriage” 66 times and “money” only 29 times in Pride and Prejudice. Considering that we know money was a major factor in the marriages of the period in which Jane Austen was writing, these results were somewhat surprising. I then used the Concordance Tool to tell me where and in what context each word was used. “Love” was used most often in the first third of the novel, with a small spike again towards the very end. “Marriage” spikes mildly towards the end of the first third of the book but is practically off the charts in the last quarter of the book when Austen is working to tie all of the relationships between the characters into neat little bows. And “money”, of course, is mentioned most often just as the discussions about marriage start to heat up.
My favourite aspect of the Concordance Tool is that although you can set the program to only return the specific words you are looking for, it also lets one look at their search results in terms of the context of the words, lines, sentences or paragraphs surrounding the specified words. Essentially the tool allows a historian to look at a text both quantitatively and qualitatively.
The one downfall, as Sara mentioned in her blog post about TAPoR, is that the returned search results lack page references. I understand that this is due to the fact that one can currently only use a plain text copy of a text with the TAPoR tools, but it does seem like an aspect of the program that could benefit from some improvements. This improvement would be especially beneficial for those in an academic environment who must be careful to adhere to copyright protections and site all of their sources in footnotes/endnotes and bibliographies.
This week’s experiment in data mining reminded me of a paper I had to write for my first year English Literature course on the theme of love and marriage in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. After reading the novel, I ended up going through the book page-by-page and physically highlighting all of the sections pertaining to either love or marriage before I began to formulate my arguments and write my essay. Needless to say, it was an extremely tedious process and one I’m not eager to repeat.
But now it seems there’s a simpler way to gather the same information using a free, Canadian-made digital data mining tool. Using a plain text copy of the novel available on the Project Gutenberg website, I copied the URL into TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research)’s Word List and Concordance Tools, and ran three different word/pattern searches for “love,” “marriage” and “money.” I was interested in seeing how many instances of each word were present in the novel, if the words were used in relation to each other, where in the novel the majority of these three words were used, and if that would help me to come to any new conclusions about the themes of the novel.
The first thing I found out from using TAPoR’s Word List Tool was that the word “love” was used 91 times, “marriage” 66 times and “money” only 29 times in Pride and Prejudice. Considering that we know money was a major factor in the marriages of the period in which Jane Austen was writing, these results were somewhat surprising. I then used the Concordance Tool to tell me where and in what context each word was used. “Love” was used most often in the first third of the novel, with a small spike again towards the very end. “Marriage” spikes mildly towards the end of the first third of the book but is practically off the charts in the last quarter of the book when Austen is working to tie all of the relationships between the characters into neat little bows. And “money”, of course, is mentioned most often just as the discussions about marriage start to heat up.
My favourite aspect of the Concordance Tool is that although you can set the program to only return the specific words you are looking for, it also lets one look at their search results in terms of the context of the words, lines, sentences or paragraphs surrounding the specified words. Essentially the tool allows a historian to look at a text both quantitatively and qualitatively.
The one downfall, as Sara mentioned in her blog post about TAPoR, is that the returned search results lack page references. I understand that this is due to the fact that one can currently only use a plain text copy of a text with the TAPoR tools, but it does seem like an aspect of the program that could benefit from some improvements. This improvement would be especially beneficial for those in an academic environment who must be careful to adhere to copyright protections and site all of their sources in footnotes/endnotes and bibliographies.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Putting Out the Welcome Mat
Several months ago I used Google Sites to create a professional webpage for myself and forgot to post the web address (http://sites.google.com/site/catherinecaughell/home). The information on the webpage is pretty bare bones at the moment and it's not exactly what I want stylistically, but it should provide a solid start for any similar effort I make in the future to expand my professional presence on the web.
However, should I decide to move forward on this project and correct some of the things about the website that I'm not happy with, I doubt that I'll be using Google Sites for it. Yes, the process this time around was easier than writing HTML code from scratch, but I found the whole website clunky to work with and their layout options were unforgivably boring. I also found their FAQ/Help section largely unhelpful. I'm usually pretty enthusiastic about Google and all of the techno gadgets that their people come up with, but this time I just found my whole interaction, as well as the end result, underwhelming.
However, should I decide to move forward on this project and correct some of the things about the website that I'm not happy with, I doubt that I'll be using Google Sites for it. Yes, the process this time around was easier than writing HTML code from scratch, but I found the whole website clunky to work with and their layout options were unforgivably boring. I also found their FAQ/Help section largely unhelpful. I'm usually pretty enthusiastic about Google and all of the techno gadgets that their people come up with, but this time I just found my whole interaction, as well as the end result, underwhelming.
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