How to Read Walks

“Any one may mimic the common French walk by twisting and tripping and ambling on tip-toe,” explained a journalist, “but real grace is not to be caricatured.” Indeed, from such a point of view, a person’s walk could be the surest evidence about their character.

Those who took this view advised gymnastic exercises designed to enhance the bodily systems as a whole. Alexander Walker and his wife offered a series of advice books for young ladies, outlining the proper exercises for perfecting the circulation between the “locomotive organs” of feet and legs to the “nutritive organs” of the trunk and “intellectual organs” of the head. From this point of view, the gait displayed more than mere professional or geographical origins to be overcome by dumbbells and stretches; posture and gait rather demonstrated how a subject had synthesized experience, whether into a false and affected demeanor, or into a graceful and holistic expression of psychological well-being.

From this point of view, observing strangers’ gaits was key to making sense of their psychological condition. Grant entered the halls of Parliament to describe the “steady pace, but…most ludicrous carriage” of Sir Francis Burdett, when he had received a public chastising by Maurice O’Connell. With his spirit sunk, he walked “as if he had been performing what soldiers call the dead march.” It was impossible for the politician to conceal his emotion, and the attempt to mask it manifest in stiff and uncomfortable posturing. Elsewhere, urban observers called upon posture to unmask the duplicity of entire ranks of people. James Grant, the journalist, laughed at the “would-be dignified step and consequential air” with which unemployed supporting actresses looking for work walked around Covent Garden, while Dickens characterized the “indescribable public-house-parlour swagger, and a conscious air,” of the actors. Thespians’ awkward posturing made visible and public the fact of their artificiality. “They always seem to think they are exhibiting,” Dickens chided. William Cobbett suggested that the exaggerated movements of soldiers stationed in Whitehall revealed truths their military training tried to hide: “those upstart beardless boys, with false whiskers, the bloody-livery servants of the public, that strut and swagger up and down St. James’s street all day with the long sword clinking at their heels upon the pavement, that their puny arms can scarce pull out of the scabbard.” They “wear on the heels” stiff leather boots that “hide their spindle shanks and false calves.” While military training disguised the boy as a man, the keen urban observer could see through the artifices of shoes and posture, reading the motions of walking as a key to character.

Theorists of physiognomy extrapolated such studies of walking into a science of character. Alexander Walker’s aesthetic philosophy of physiognomy drew most of its examples from the public display of bodies in public, especially those of women. Walker discussed gait as evidence of the relationship between internal and external beauty, explaining how “external indications as to mind may be derived from figure, from gait, and from dress.” Philosophy discerned the Kanting sublime in the perfections of strolling strangers. The critic would notice how the “vulgar woman” revealed by her gait “a character of mind and countenance,” belying the “inappropriate mask in which her milliner or dressmaker may have invested her.” Gait and posture therefore offered tools to revelation of universal truth freed from the particular circumstances of dress.

Reading public physiognomy depended on generalizing from the particularities of shoes, feet, and gait to the general truths of an individual’s character. Thomas Hood’s novel Tylney Hall played with reading strangers in a double sense. Assured the “taper waist” and “graceful easy carriage” as to a creole woman’s “good blood,” English squires in a novel trust her long enough to ask her to read their fortunes with regard to marriage. The creole woman discerns their fortunes accurately, the novelist suggests, by “narrowly watching the looks” on their faces. “These fortunetellers are excellent physiognomists,” explained the protagonist. It was appropriate, as well as ironic, that the squires should allow themselves to be read by a creole whom they themselves had just read on the street, for Englishmen everywhere were experimenting in the science of reading fortunes by watching physiognomies.

The Technologies of Management

It is difficult, looking backwards, to conceive of gravel roads and footpaths as carefully engineered devices of high technology.

The gleaming surface of the Great North Road which connected London to the industrial centers and provinces of the north, shone bright yellow with gravel: granite gravel, to be sure; gravel carefully sorted, hardpacked over a deep foundation, molded into a gentle rise to coax the rainwater into channels on either side of its surface; but nonetheless, a gravel road all the same. Properly broken, sorted, and washed, layered in “very light coats,” with broad pebbles lying flat and their interstices jammed “closely with stone chips well driven in,” the nineteenth-century gravel road formed a monolith, a “solid smooth hard surface,” which extended from London’s hub like the spokes of a wheel, welding together Edinburgh, London, Manchester, Bristol, and Holyhead into a single concrete surface. Clean gravel depended on knowing that London loam was particularly sticky so London gravel hard to clean; on knowing the difference between gravel and limestone and flint; on a magisterial knowledge of the belts of rock of different counties. But even the cleanest gravel was useless if it only covered a few miles of road surface.

The true beauty of this surface was its extension, when complete, across the length and breadth of nation, transforming it from a simple piece of architecture into a machine integral to an economic and human system, where gravel, wheel, and animals delicately interacted in a larger machine: upon the gravel the carriage wheel ran “upon the nail,” in other words, the very center of the wheel’s diameter; the vertical wheel minimized the teeter of the carriage; the straight direction of the carriage minimized the wear upon the vehicle, the strain of the horse, and the “jolt and rattle” given to the bodies of the passengers. It was stunning, seen properly, as a demonstration of perfections of scale: great tons of gravel reduced to exact similarity at the very cusp of the age of mechanical reproduction; great tracts of surging and sinking territory reined into similar straightness, firmness, and altitude; the same molded into uniform composition over hundreds upon hundreds of miles: dependable, omnipresent, the first transformation of space on the scale of a nation.

British roads, so well designed a century before similar surfaces in other advanced nations, so tightly associated with Britain’s booming manufactures and trade, have inspired many biographers. These narrators have been impressed by certain features of the roads’ evolution, fetishizing the role of the commanding engineer and his intellectual designs for a firm foundation, broken into precise layers of clay, freestone, gravel, and sediment, which by employing pure mathematics and science to the problems of everyday life, created the first tracks capable of enduring the seasons, and so lifted up and forward the carts and stagecoaches of British commerce straight from the medieval mud and into the modern era. On the basis of this reasoning of individual intellect and its collective consequences, a cult of celebrity grew up and encircled John Loudon Macadam and Thomas Telford by the end of the nineteenth century, and that lasting antique glow has been used to illuminate stories of the industrial revolution down to the later years of the twentieth century. Such accounts romanticize the engineer as a man of science, invention, and mathematics, and they pointed to his recipes for road foundations and gravel surfaces as a demonstration of logical skill. As a result, these stories, common enough in today’s textbooks, extol the everyday knowledge of foundation-building and gravel making, hardly works of intellectual prowess. These historians miss the point: gravel was not what was so stunning about road-making at all.

The mathematics necessary to design these roads were very slight, and the material technology very ancient; Rome had built roads upon the same principle: a deep foundation, light layers of even stone. By the eighteenth century, these pavements had crumbled, their fragments sunk deep beneath the mud, occasionally unearthed by work-crews digging new foundations, except in rare exceptions, like the Ermine Road which surfaced from the gloomy earth in modern Brockworth and Barnwood, where it formed part of the nineteenth-century Gloucester Road, a remnant of routes belonging to another time. Indeed, contemporaries found the irony “worthy of remark” that “after the lapse of many centuries” Britain’s modern roads, so boasted of as a marvel of engineering, were pioneered “by adopting the plan of the ancient Romans.”

Great roads came and went with the empires that built them. The ancient problem, as the modern one, was principally one of governance and management, necessary to carve wider streets from the parcels of hundreds of city property-holders, necessary to coordinate and enforce uniform behavior among road laborers across dozens of parishes and hundreds of miles over months, seasons, and years. Such problems plagued the turnpike trusts, local courts, and parliamentary committees that attempted highway development in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain. A single, technologically proficient stretch of built street was nothing more than an architectural folly; a road only became a technological marvel when it conveyed wheels, carriages, animals, and people over hundreds of miles, rendered into a monolith by the inflexible hand of management.

Consumed by the details of construction, historians of engineering until recently missed the grandeur of infrastructural scale, and therefore failed to inquire what technologies of management and money made it possible. The real problem was one of the massive administrative apparatus required to implement regular repairs evenly dispersed over large tracts of territory. Any administration that would solve this problem faces an uphill battle against irresponsibility, neglect, and time: carriages, horses, and pedestrians everywhere are content to travel as the condition of roads literally crumbles beneath them. Those institutions that successfully preserved economically productive roads from erosion and degeneration have been historically rare and economically significant. Romans had required householders on either side of the road to maintain the road in front of their farmland, and enforced their laws with military rigor. Medieval roads throughout Europe disintegrated, maintained sometimes by a provincial king, sometimes by feudal duty, and sometimes by monasteries that counted bridge and road-repair as an earthly act of charity. Feudal obligations and church structure had been demolished in England by the Tudor reforms of 1553, nominally replaced by a parish system which had no authority to enforce its power, over which no authority extended. By the eighteenth century, Britain’s Roman roads had all but crumbled. Still distinguishable as straight trackways, little if any of the road surface, most of it long since buried, was usable by eighteenth-century Britons. Roads and bridges come and go with the empires that build them. The problem of road maintenance has been everywhere bound up with creating lasting structures of management and responsibility capable of insuring continued investment against the hordes of would-be free-riders. The gleaming surface of the Great North Road was a sign that Britain had successfully solved anew an ancient problem in state authority, the management of labor, and the regular extension of projected plans over the ordinary landscape.

Insuring uniform deployment of clean gravel over hundreds of miles involved road-builders in questions of labor management and government responsibility. Britain solved such problems through a series of different institutions – military, entrepreneurial, and parliamentary – which delivered human control and centralized capital into the hands of that ancient parish officer, the road surveyor. Military engineers in Scotland used parliamentary funds and well-organized gangs to turn boulders and carve foundations. The successful turnpike surveyors of the eighteenth century brought military discipline and entrepreneurial funding to bear in the local counties. By the nineteenth century, local surveyors for both parishes and turnpikes had access to the experiences of both.

The British century of road-building developed through the minute application of control to human labor. Thomas Hughes, writing his road manual of 1837, pointed that in his “systematic mode of improving the road” the “principal ingredient” of “effectual improvements” was “labor.” Modern surveyors began uniformly to adopt such measures, consulting manuals by both civil engineers like Thomas Hughson and John Loudon Macadam, and by politicians and landholders like Henry Parnell and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, whose long exposure to problems of management in the role of highway advocates made them as well-acquainted with the principles of foundation maintenance as any engineer or surveyor. New tools for sorting rocks and grading curves helped the rank-and-file workman to conform to the designs for proper drainage invented among the engineers. Primitive tools then merely made the bodies of labor conform to the needs of design, thus making the discipline and use of human labor more productive and efficient. Thus contemporary writers could identify the “great advantage attending Mr. MacAdam’s model of road-making” was the discipline of “human labour,” and point to the changes in whereby the majority highway budgets, previously dedicated to the rental of horses, were now dedicated to paying for more efficient and productive forms of human labor. Modern civil engineering emerged at the crossroads where state control, institutionalized capital, and disciplined labor gathered and expanded over territory.

Visions of Government: A Nineteenth-Century Road Trip

In terms of the spectacle of modern engineering, the most impressive route that a visitor to London in 1830 could take were the parliamentary routes to Scotland and Ireland.

Setting out from the stagecoach yard before the gleaming marble temple front of the General Post Office in London, with the dome of St. Paul’s looming overhead, the stage coach would rattle over new-paved streets of smooth flagstones, only recently carved, through parliamentary order, from the former slums of St. Martins-le-Grand. Where thieves and prostitutes had hidden a decade ago, Aldersgate Street and Goswell Road, lined with glassy shops selling trunks, books, and food for the traveler, drew the stagecoach north, past the Angel Inn on Islington’s High Street. Wide highways continued north, avoiding the imposing northern hills that had killed horses twenty years before, and cutting through the new monumental canyonway bridged John Nash’s soaring Highgate Archway. From there, the coach passed into the wide, smooth toll roads of St. Alban’s, bright with granite gravel. Within memory these turnpikes had been full of zig-zags and potholes, but in the last ten years they had come under parliamentary control, and now they were straight, smooth, and regular, with neat fences on either side and generous footpaths for pedestrians all the way. North of London, one could continue north towards Edinburgh or northwest towards Wales and the steamboats to Dublin.

The trip to Scotland was well paved, from London north all the way to the Isle of Skye. Turnpikes under parliamentary control took the passenger as far north as Birmingham, or less far if he went the eastern route. But those turnpikes were slated for parliamentary control, and soon, some hoped, the same straight highways would shoot clear north to York and then to Edinburgh. In the Highlands, where the rocky hillsides housed only a few poor shepherds and crofters, travelers found signs of advanced industry. 1117 bridges connected straight, wide roads, as far out as the islands, bringing them all into contact with the ports and capital, at a cost of £1,150,000, or roughly the equivalent of all tax revenue collected in Ireland in one year. These parliamentary roads counted for about one quarter of all roads in Scotland. Wales and Ireland too were well connected. Iron and stone bridges of arches of spans as wide as 150 feet bridged the Dornoch Frith and River Spey, these marvels of modern engineering contrasted against primeval territory “where the rapid river cleaves for itself a passage through the solid rock.” Parliamentary roads opened the Highlands to “shoals of travellers” every summer, who marveled at the remote vistas now made accessible to traders and tourists: “rugged heights, brawling torrents, and fearful mountain-passes, undreamt of out of the Highlands themselves half a century ago.” Now these natural wonders were “exposed to the gaze of the wearers of pink parasols, and transferred to their scrap-books.”

The road to Holyhead through Wales, “the best in the kingdom,” was even more marvelous from the perspective of engineering. Flat roads, “as even as a ‘parquet’,” had been made by “cutting down large hills and filling up deep valleys” navigated past “floods of foam” in the “dark waters below,” past “towering cliffs,” “grotesque groups of upright rocks,” and “somber woods, …here and there concealing the torrent.” The line included cutting into sheer rock, “in some parts 30 feet in height, with high breast and retaining walls, stone parapets laid in lime-mortar…. So that this formerly frightful precipice is now a safe trotting road.” Tall embankments lifted the road above mountain cataracts and tempestuous coastal sands. Thomas Telford’s soaring Menai Straits Bridge, which stretched 1717 feet to the island of Anglesey, where Parliament had constructed a new harbour. Seven stone arches bridged the “deep rapid tidestream” below, carrying the roadway 53 feet above road level, and across a roadway carried by iron rods hanging from four suspended chains 1714 feet long, each of which weighed 121 tons. A visiting Scot observed, “In standing upon the bridge, suspended by massive chains, and beholding a stately vessel passing, at a depth of 100 feet below, it is impossible not to feel impressed with the magnitude and boldness of the attempt.” Another tourist was struck how “a coach going over appeared not larger than a child’s toy, and that foot passengers upon it looked like pigmies, the vastness of it proportions” Another visitor immediately felt a surge of “national pride,” to such a transporting degree that “this stupendous bridge instantly reminded me of St. Peter’s church at Rome.”

These smooth pavements, soaring bridges, and steep embankments were built by parliamentary engineers, maintained by parliamentary surveyors, and financed through local divisions under the control of parliamentary commissioners. An immense enterprise, administered by hundreds of men commanding millions of pounds deployed over thousands of miles, the parliamentary highways were the physical face of a new form of government.

Profession and Memory

Going back home always determines a psychological collision between the present and the past. Sometimes those collisions also involve former visions of the future. Home for me is Dallas, Texas, where I grew up, and where I planned my professional career as a politically-engaged historian, insofar as I could imagine such a thing at the time. Today I’m working from the library at Southern Methodist University, where I took classes on medieval politics and theology as a high school student. The past is in the landscape, and it brings me back recollections of other versions of my future.

These tree-lined drives and narrow library stairs are hallowed avenues to me. The wan light and aging archives bring back earlier adventures in the library, the fantasies they inspired of being a professor, and the quaint outline of that future: I was destined, I was sure, to be every bit as articulate, noble, committed, terrifying, and inspiring, as those members of the faculty I saw as a teenager. Walking through them today I'm still overpowered by the whiff of what I saw then: a life of curiosity, of engagement, of wonder. I get tired of my dissertation, as all PhD students tire. Old places, though, have a powerful effect on me. They reconstitute for me some memory of value, infused with a real desire for learning, purpose, and application. Going home is salutory for my sense of the future.

This year, I go on the job market as a British Historian. My dissertation on the highways and streets of industrialization, their cultural and political efficacy (halfway finished), will be sent off to half a dozen universities – History Departments of course, perhaps urban planning and political science departments as well. Political think tanks too. Probably art history and political post-docs. Anything dealing with politics, community, and culture. A wide swath of intellectual territory; a wide trajectory of hope.

Revisiting my hometown is a stark reminder of the reasons I took this path. I believed firmly, as a teenager, that professors were the moral and social equivalent of clergy – the greatest authority figures and intellectuals in our small, Methodist town. Professors were arguers of the world, oracles of justice, interpreters of political struggle. Professors were supposed to be socially worldly, applying their knowledge across the contemporary landscape: they were adept anthropologists, skilled at interpreting contemporary culture in advertisement and song; they were stewards of Aristotle and Augustine for a latter age, interpreting the ancients so as to defend the rights of women and minorities. They were brave, engaged, and learned men, combining wisdom, intelligence, and passion.

This compassion, pluralism, engagement, and curiosity marked out the university faculty from everything else I knew as a southern girl growing up in a Republican town. In Dallas, Texas, the university faculty were the few individuals who could compare Republicans and Democrats with an objective and generous analysis. They could reason about how feminism and civil rights reflected the values of the ancient world. They could demonstrate how social change happened gradually, accumulating out of the instances of writing, activism, and politics of myriad individuals. They were the only people I knew in inward-looking Dallas who could contextualize the prejudiced South, the adventurous Southwest, the idealistic West Coast, the learned East, and embattled Europe, fit to make a Texan aware of her national and global role as a tester of boundaries and translator between Old South and New West. They were my guides, and they became my role-models. At eighteen, comparing such professors with the narrower clergy, schoolteachers, engineers, and accountants who filled my parents’ middle-class life in Dallas, Texas, SMU’s professors’ worldliness, dedication, and experience filled the greatest figure I could describe by way of a well-lived life.

From Dallas, and from a kind of adolescent hero-worship of those professors, I went on to Harvard, Cambridge, and Berkeley: to new political horizons, new battlegrounds, new friends, and new alliances. My studies changed from the classics to continental philosophy to history; my mentors from worldly Southerners to idiosyncratic Yankees to agnostic Californians; my politics from communitarian Methodist to socialist to classical liberal. What remained across that individual journey was one general cast of mind I’d learned at eighteen: a respect for the intellectual who tried her best to respond to politics, and to engage her community. I left Texas at eighteen, impressed to my guts with the intellectuals who managed that in this reclusive and tradition-oriented place. Come Autumn, I’ll be entering the job-market with the same agenda: politics, mind, and community.

Academia, politics, and community are the crux of my writing, my life, and my intention. I’ve spent the past five years building my relationships with activists, applying myself to problems of political participation and rule, and reconfiguring my intellectual interests to reflect on the contemporary political landscape. In the same timeframe, I’ve also been drilling myself in the methods and practices of well-written history, aiming to become a story-teller of those narratives that help us establish where we are in relation to our ancestors, ideologues, and forebears.

Simply put: I read the newspaper. I correspond with friends in politics. I give talks in the community. I write history. At 28, this is one woman’s approximation of the ideals she fixed in her mind at 18. Ten years of study, ten years of commitment, and ten years of love: preparation for a lifetime of thinking, work, and engagement.

Google Book Search in the Garden: Folkways and folk history

Yesterday morning a camera crew with Google Book Search showed up in my garden and asked me some questions about the way digitalized archives are changing the relationships between knowledge and society. I described my own work: how the full-text search capabilities for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books are allowing scholars to recognize historical patterns about subtle variables (like walking) that would have never shown up before. Pedagogy is changing too: we're able to introduce hundreds of undergraduates at a time to rare books that previously only ten to twelve advanced students in a seminar would have ever seen.

But the big changes will be those that take place well outside the academy. For most of its existence, the academy has seen itself as a field for training the leaders of the future and the children of the elite. Only these happy few were granted access to the library, the archive, and the manuscripts. Sometimes a diligent outside researcher could make his way in: but more often the traditional archives required letters of recommendation for a researcher to even set foot inside the library's hallowed halls. These constraints are all the more real outside of America, where letters of reference are taken vary seriously; French historians describe the long process of waiting for access to the Bibliothéque Nationale; Jennie Johnson, a Fulbright Fellow in China, has told me about a several-month wait for access to the university library, after which she was told that without a PhD she would not qualify for access to the English-language archives. Throwing the doors of the library open means a world of access not only for scholars, but more importantly, for those who have never had access at all.

From the white towers of academia it's easy to wonder whether clerks, consultants, and bus-drivers really want access to sixteenth-century incunabulae and government memos after all -- don't we have to threaten our undergrads with bad grades to get them into the library? Common wisdom holds that only academics will participate in the digital turn of rereading the archive, that the hoi polloi only care about news and fandom. But I predict a different path.

Digitizing the world's archives, not merely the great books but also the government records and ephemera, puts academic-level power in the hands of ordinary citizens. While library research has limited importance to most of them, other kinds of research form an organic feature of ordinary folkways in contemporary America. When church-going Christians meet for their weekly or monthly Bible study, they rarely meet with only the Bible in their hands. More often, they come with some appendix: another translation (or three), a book of poetry that enlightens a related train of wisdom, a manual of Bible history that provides some richer context for making sense of the past. These meetings can turn into furious exchanges of information and perspective, as participants strive to understand more deeply the lessons of scripture. Evangelical blogs are now buzzing about the possibilities of comparing nineteenth-century biblical literature, and republishing a list of relevant books compiled by one scholar in particular. The poetry, history, and legacy of Christian history is being expanded for these people, and so is the opportunity to debate.

Gardeners also check the historical record. Associations of seed-savers were plowing through ancient Burpee catalogues of seeds long before the internet republished them, searching for evidence of tomato and green bean strains that had since been discontinued by corporate seed producers. Many of the original strains had been bred to better survive particular regional conditions -- low water and high heat, or the clay soils of Texas, for example -- and many were bred for "heirloom" qualities of flavor and color once prized but then forgotten in the frenzy for mass-production farming. Garden manuals from the past, out of copyright and now searchable on Google, offer another nursery of new ideas for the small-scale and sustainable gardening community.

Similarly, conspiracy theorists of assassination -- the group with the most significant popular following -- have traditionally circulated among themselves facsimiles of government reports, not only from the Civil Rights era, but also from earlier periods of American political history thought to illuminate a tradition of political corruption and media manipulation at the highest level. On internet forums and blogs, the flood of report-sharing spirals, as conspiracy theorists and their debunkers compare contemporary news stories, published histories, government documents, and republished photographs, accusing each other (and the press) of photoshopping and otherwise distorting the historical record. As the digitized historical archive gives them more material, the participants have access to a far wider class of evidence from which to assemble their picture of a historical tradition of government corruption.

These kinds of folk-research are going to change, just as surely and certainly as academic research is changing. History, often the monopoly domain of academics, also exists wherever geneaologists recite the narrative of their family history and wherever union leaders examine the relationship between politics and public opinion. Usually history with poor sources produces bad story-telling: incoherent and non-persuasive; and this is one reason why academic historians have kept their role as mediator for so long. Access to sources offers a chance for folk-history to become real history, and that means the proliferation of believable, grounded, persuasive historical accounts about all the things the folk care about -- Bible research, sustainable agriculture, and political corruption included. That new kind of history represents a very powerful trajectory indeed.

How Jaman is changing the world of film

Film festivals online aren’t always all they’re cracked up to be. Any of us who’ve spent hours trolling through college dorm life on YouTube in search of the truly interesting can testify. To get to really disappointing, however, you’d have had to have seen the glossy flier PBS left in my local video store. “Online film festival!” it read. “Watch dozens of online independent films! Submit your own!”

At last, I thought. Art has been liberated by the internet. No more searching for random masterpieces in the haystack – no more tramping out to film festivals unknown in strange parts of Berkeley and the Mission – no more waiting until the wisdom of my arthouse friends trickles down to me, third-hand and worn. I’m going straight to the source. PBS has a film festival and I’m gonna be there.

The online film festival turned out to last all of one hour. One very unsatisfying hour. One could watch exactly the first five minutes of any of thirty films that had been screened somewhere, some time about a year ago. One could also compete ruthlessly (I imagine) for some incredibly small piece of funding if one wished to make one’s own film, to be deposited into the never-to-be seen closet of PBS. TO be fair, it’s not really PBS’s fault. Unlike the BBC, which has been putting its documentaries from the last thirty years online (Yay public works! Hoorah for intellectual riches!), PBS doesn’t own the rights to its own films; it screens, it doesn’t produce, and it doesn’t own. So no time soon is anything from PBS going into the public realm. Nor has any smarty-pants startup figured out how to let PBS filmmakers opt-in to a wide-release online program.

Not so for the Tribeca Film Festival, which is cutting a swath a river wide in the precedents of the future. Thanks to a new film service called Jaman, which kicks Youtube’s ass in terms of design, Tribeca is live online, for real. You can download the whole of every film playing, and then you have a week to watch them – afterwards you can rent or buy any of the fabulous independent documentaries and movies for $1.99 a week, or buy the download for $5.99 forever. Downloading is quick, efficient, and beautiful. Jaman plays fullscreen with a charming and easily navigated interface, and even promotes Web 2.0 community by allowing users to comment on their favorite films and form up into film-groupie clusters to better discuss their faves.

Tribeca is a festival you may never have heard of, because it’s quite young as film festivals go. Started in 2002 to commemorate the 9/11 bombings, it advertises itself as a festival about community and international community – and isn’t that indeed a praiseworthy way to commemorate and atone for the lives lost in the twin towers. In fact, next time she runs for president, I’m definitely voting for Jane Rosenthal (a.k.a. Ms. Tribeca Film Festival Founder) over George W. Bush, hands down. In the jurors’ selections, these noble ideals pan out in the form of gorgeous footage, hypnotic storytelling, and truly diverse ideas – (I am stunned into squealing ecstasy while writing this by the shadow-puppet, found-footage world of a nineteenth-century Hungarian adventurer searching in Tibet for truth and international community, in Tibor Szemzo’s A Guest of Life) --- because in the world of film (let’s face it), there are still a lot of talented people doing the kind of intelligent, creative shorts that might play once on PBS but then disappear into the never-never land of hard-to-find DVD’s. That is to say, there’s a lot more talent than distribution. The traditional distribution channels, tailored to blockbuster violence-and-sex dramas, aren’t changing any time soon. But new distribution channels, like Jaman, are changing that. They’re opening up a middling realm where semi-educated people (like me) can learn about, ingest, and enjoy the world of independent, spontaneous goodness.

What that might translate into – and here’s the coolest part – is more exposure, more discourse, and more money for those starving filmmakers, our friends, who at the moment compete at obscene rates of thousands to one to win the not-very-lucrative sums of money available from ITVS (PBS’s documentary wing) – or failing that, produce their beautiful works on a next-to-nothing budget. All very creative, to be sure, but imagine what they could do with cash. The so-called free market of traditional Hollywood production and monopoly distribution, ingrained in old ways as they are, has not been kind to them. But on a truly even playing ground, deserving beauty tends to find an audience. Which the Tribeca Films surely will.

So this is something we need more of in the online world: the promotion of new, raw genius to new audiences. And the siphoning back to the producers of that genius of cash. At least small sums of cash. Because who, in this state of love in which I now am, would not want to send five dollars to Mr. Szemzo in Hungry to insure that he produces more such glorious films, and perhaps to buy a spot on his mailing list? If Tribeca and Jaman are promoting international connections and community in this way – not only spreading information and enabling consumption, but also building up sustainable, small-scale economic ties between individuals around the world – they are indeed living up to the ideals upon which the Tribeca Film Festival was founded. Such an effort would indeed be a worthy monument, perhaps the most worthy possible, to the lives of those who have died as a result of global misunderstandings.

Jo's Favorite Books on Esoteric Landscape

In this post, we go down the rabbit hole to investigate the landscapes people see in out-of-body meditations, the landscapes of the paranoid and schizophrenic, and the landscapes of other times and places.

Landscape scholars (like me) spend most of our time writing about (literally) concrete subjects -- like the rise of eminent domain, how railroads connected the nation, or how project housing demoralizes communities.

But somewhere at the bottom of this concern is the fact that landscape is a common structure of consciousness. Everybody sees the common landscape. Right?

Here, in random meditative order, are the most important books that helped me think about what we see when we look at the landscape -- and what we don't see.

#1 -- Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi'ite Iran (French title, Terre céleste et corps de résurrection: de l'Iran mazdéen a l'Iran shî'ite, 1960, English version, 1977).

Corbin investigates the imaginary geographies of Ancient Persia, where Zoroastrian and Shiite scholars regularly described out-of-body flights through concretely-imagined landscapes. Numerous sheiks describe the same cities and rivers on the other side of death. They agree that this “esoteric” landscape is the concretization of Persian values, imagined as a real space. Acknowledging the concreteness of their perceptions, however, leads them to question whether any part of common experience is not structured by the perception of value.

They speculate about the necessary concreteness, authenticity, and predominance of this world – indeed, that the centers, borders, and sites of importance that we collectively perceive in this world are also another collective dream, a map of our values.

The capital cities and mountains of the real Persia, they suggest, are no less an externalization of Persian values than the map of the Persian afterlife. They agree, then, that this earth is an angel – a collective dream, whose contours we agree on only in the same way that we agree on the contours of imaginary geographies.

Five stars.

What you see, where you go, what places you know to exist, where the borders of the known world lie – all of this is a product of collective dreaming; everything is in the realm of perception, according to the Zoroastrians.

Persian mystics raise heckles among readers who see them as the dreamy commentary of the contemplative soul. This isn't easy going for your standard college graduate. The mystics are so interesting, however, because their out-of-body flights tell them (and us) a great deal about the role of landscape in organizing knowledge.

As Corbin explains, mystic experience depended upon a shared concept of values mapped out in space -- a map of an imaginary world so real that one sheik after another could, it seemed, visit it. Persian mystics claimed to share common visual experiences of their flights through the ether, consistently visiting the same imaginary world in their hallucinations, over hundreds of years. The mystic map of the universe is resilient, Corbin suggests, because place organizes our imagination on an extremely basic level.

This insight about a shared map of value, how it structures what we perceive and what we don't perceived, has been at the root of some of the twentieth century's deepest questions about how consciousness works. Artists, geographers, philosophers, and psychologists have codified the value-laden connotations associated with various places. A continuous trend of collective emotions, values, and ideas associated with place is quite clear. What are these common perceptions of geography, and how are they structured?

In the “Maps from Memory” group on Flickr, artists share their own maps from childhood or from travels in the past.


In addition to those maps of our own heads are maps of collective experience and reckoning. Artists share their diagrams of the known world, and their diagrams of mythic places that never were. What’s so striking about these images is their resonance with a common experience. The “simplified map of London,” for example, deals better with London’s history than many long treatises I know.



So if there are common emotional maps of today’s places, surely there were similar value-geographies of places in the past. And surely the story of how a certain place became important, and what it meant to people, and what they did there, is a subject of immense importance to the cultural historian.

We can name the stories of certain places in history that rose to great importance. The medieval cult of saints and holy wells, for instance, or the pilgrimage to Santiago. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the eighteenth-century road network gave us idea of a path whose destination one shares with strangers. The nation-state as a natural and eternal shape upon the earth is a nineteenth-century landscape. Agorophobia and claustrophobia are constructs of the late nineteenth century. If the map in your mind and the paths your feet work are both the products of collective dreaming, that dreaming still takes place in history.

THE VALUE-LANDSCAPE OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
M. Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Culture -- the entire plant world of Ancient Greece was mapped according to the values and alchemical properties each was said to possess. An immense body of Greek myth refers to designating the position of each plant and each God within this hierarchy of value, from the wet to the dry, the bland to the spicy.
Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. The Black Hunter : Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. – includes a synoptic map of the Greek city, from the sacred interior to the outside world of barbarians, in between which is the liminal space of the forest, of wild animals, where young boys in puberty are sent to come of age, protecting themselves against beasts, without weapons, before they are allowed to ascend to the places of power in Greek politics.
Tilley, Christopher Y. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments, Explorations in Anthropology. Oxford, UK; Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1994. – on monoliths, processional rocks, and observation ledges by the sea in Ancient Britain
Yates, Frances Amelia. The Art of Memory. Chicago,: University of Chicago Press, 1966. – on the memory palaces and memory maps used to organize knowledge of the entire world

VALUE-LANDSCAPES OF THE MODERN WEST
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space -- Bachelard reviews all of Western literature from the high to the low and excavates the psychological trace of a collectively imagined landscape, where hidden secrets and tunnels are in the basements of all the houses in the world, and ancestors in its attics.
Michael Bakhtin, The Chronotope – Nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels dwell excessively on the landscapes of the gothic (remote castles and houses in ruins where individuals are inextricably connected to the remote past)
Henry Glassie, Passing the Time at Ballymenone – In modern Ireland, the real houses, streets, urban centers, and hills are each intricately connected to an imaginary map of witchcraft, safety, and community.
Paul Carter, Repressed Spaces – Agorophobia was only invented after 1890 when individuals associated with psychology

THE GEOGRAPHICAL THEORY OF VALUE
Quite solid, continuous, and static maps of value exist in the modern world. When people draw a map of a place they used to know, they draw the particular locations that are associated with their own memories. Even modern societies have monuments where the venerate collective memory, central cities where industry is concentrated, and social spaces where they play. A shared social map of the world exists, and divides all the world into political centers, social borderlands, and sites of memory.

Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF PLACE
Jung and Reich wonder, what are the archetypal kinds of place and boundary that structure our experience? What primal places characterize the collective imaginary map of the West? Eliade points to the axis mundi, which characterizes every map in the West from the ancient world to the present. There is, they insist, a collective imagination of the geographical world. Reich notices that psychological disorders cause people to hold their bodies differently. Paranoia, for instance, causes the subject to stop perceiving the outside world. What range of ways do we understand our bodies? If there is such a thing as a collective map, there is also a range of individual attitudes towards that map. These collective and individual attitudes structure how we hold our bodies, what we perceive of physical reality, and what we build in the physical environment.

Carl Jung, Aion
Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis and Orgonomy.
Mircea Eliade, Sacred and Profane

New Tools in Old Disciplines: Working Magic with Google Books, cont'd

The earlier post about Google Books on this site is creating quite a buzz among librarian and historian communities online -- partly because famed tech blogger Tim O'Reilly reported my having "dissed" the experience of libraries for virtual research, partly because Google Books is so hot, and partly because the image of libraries disappearing for computers raises hackles among academics everywhere.

The fears start flying. Will historians neglect the skills of traditional research because they've discovered the internet? Probably not. We spend years training in arcane research methods, and we make our names by doing something new, which even today generally means finding some measure of unknown documents in the archive. Will the material archives disappear? That's a fear, because any time a university can cut funds, it will, and then, as Rick Prelinger can testify, entire corpuses of periodicals and log books from the eighteenth century are jetissoned in the dumpster. Are internet archives going to be exhaustive? Definitely not, and in no case is every last spare bit of paper -- the forms, the doodles, the enormous maps -- getting scanned. Some of the fears are legitimate, and some of the fears are false. All give evidence of a rapidly changing world.

The real excitement around tools like Google Books is the possibility of applying new tools that are now simply not available with the other kind of text. The word-count and documentation databases I mentioned are now only a dream -- Google's caution with copyright laws puts them out of the realm of possibility for the moment. But should those become possible, they will open up a realm of research possibilities that are now only experimental in the humanities.

To give but one example, it is now possible in the text-searchable, online Oxford English Dictionary to find all words with "road" or "walking" in the definition that had their origin between 1810 and 1840. I discovered a variety of pieces of slang pertaining specifically to the way people walk down the new streets -- suggesting that they were parading, performing, acting in some way so new to the culture that an entire vocabulary had to be invented to explain what they were doing. By traditional methods, most of these would never have turned up; they're too far apart in occurance, we tend to focus on polemic rather than slang texts, and the shift would have escaped me. This data from the OED is now a major piece of evidence in one of my chapters, allowing me to advance conclusions I would not have been able to make before.

Similar searches on the Dictionary of National Biography have allowed me to perform acrobatics with the networks of different professionals in the 1780s, people like artisans and innkeepers who rarely turn up in traditional historiography, about whom the data is scarce. These professions make brief appearances in the DNB, and by tracing the lives of a hundred innkeepers in the 1780s, patterns of politics, religious belief, and marriage emerge that suggest that innkeepers, with their access to horses and carriages and strangers, were among the best-connected and most political people in the nation. We are only beginning to see what this kind of research can do.

Doing this sort of number crunching on texts yields amazing results. In the future, historians will demand access to the full text of Google Books for exactly this reason. If Google doesn't provide it, many of its competitors -- including the Internet Archive -- may. So a fertile world of sorting searches is ahead of us.

The rosiest scenario includes tech geeks and academic researchers teeming up to talk about framing the search queries. The raw text in the Dictionary of National Biography, for example, has no fields except the entry for "name" and "years." I have to sort through myself to find the number of children, the profession, the religion, the political beliefs, and the books he wrote. But sorting this kind of material against each other in searches is immensely powerful. Did Quakers have more children than Catholics? I don't know, but the archive does. And if the DNB has too few variables to be the right resource for this sort of search, a variety of local archives and court records around Britain are now going online, with exactly that potential. These include the entire proceedings of the Old Bailey court in London, 1674-1834; the census, 1801-1964; the British Parliamentary Papers, 1688-1905, and the LSE Booth Archive (maps of poverty in the 1860s). More often than not, historians like myself with no technical background are in charge of creating the data fields and search algorithms. We rarely find what we want, because we don't know how to use the technology to get what we want. The marriage of technocrats and historians could be a happy one.

Right now, none of these archives talk to each other, none allow tagging or comments from researchers, and those that have tried to provide fields or tags have done so by hand, over years, at immense expense with little to show. To this sort of labor, some open databases provide a vista of solutions. GoogleBase and Freebase are the two important ones now. In open databases, even small archives can contribute the raw data from their holdings, and anyone -- from the genealogist to the professional historian to the computer scientist looking for a Masters Thesis project -- can start putting together the evidence into interesting patterns, and then sharing those tools with others. Analytic tools like Swivel, Pipes, and DabbleDB can start finding patterns immediately. The miracles to come will happen when data starts talking to data, bubbling into new patterns yet undiscovered -- when we start getting entire life histories of shoemakers and Quaker populations out of the traces they left across a dozen government and local databases, when we start discovering shoemakers across vast swathes of England who knew each other and were talking, and when we start following the spread of religious or political ideas across those networks. We must believe that there are patterns locked in the data that are burning to get out, and we must apply all the tools we have to release them.

Google Books blew my socks off because it was able to contribute something new to my research after I had already circled the world for this information, pillaging a variety of specialty libraries, among them, Harvard's Dumbarton Oaks landscape collection, the Maps Collection and Center for British Art at Yale, the Royal Institute of British Architects Collection, the Victoria and Albert, the British Museum, the Cambridge libraries, and the Public Records Office. I was also going through whatever ILL could bring me through the well-organized mechanisms of the University of California. I've seen ephemera and political documents pertaining to the road that were never looked at by any of the thirty major historians who wrote about the road in the course of the twentieth century. It is utterly a delight, then, to encounter other books that did not turn up in my exhaustive ramble through the traditional methods. New tools in old disciplines can do us a world of magic.

The Visual Sinews of Cognitive Reasoning

In the nineteenth century, “object lessons” were given children to encourage them to describe the material world is one example. Object Lessons originated in Switzerland with the child-learning experiments of Pestalozzi, but his first disciples were in England, where the technique was rapidly absorbed in schools.

Primers instructed teachers to display objects of particular shapes, textures, scents, and tastes – ivory, camphor, and pepper – to children, with the purpose of helping them describe the object’s attributes. By apprehending the categories of the material world, children would work up to more abstract forms of characterization, manipulating them according to their own ability.

Object lessons spread quickly as a means of teaching. By the 1830s, Poor Law Committees were recommending the object-lesson as a means of communicating with delinquent youth. In time the object lesson primers absorbed the language of gait, walk, and personal description. By the 1860s, when the primers began to appear in great numbers, the object-lesson instructed children to observe where postmen were going with their letters, how individuals dressed, and how they walked. Applying specific words to these answers, the attention to material detail shaped a forming critique of individuals based on their dress and appearance. Object lessons taught an entire generation of Londoners in the nineteenth century how to be suspicious of strangers on the public street.

On the internet, visual organization of information has entered a new golden age. Visually displaying information is more important, because it can save precious time, condensing reams of data into a single screen. It's also important simply to attract traffic to a website. New experiments in visual organization abound. Many of my favorites, have, of course, to do with delicious -- the grouping of tags into broader categories of learning. A fantastic blogger, Infosthetics, makes a gorgeous record of the juiciest, candyest innovations, and also records everything fascinating in his delicious stream. The great thrust of work now is to show connections within databases like delicious, where users are making their own connections between categories, but computers can find connections between users and categories that the humans haven't found yet.

The nineteenth-century record should sensitize us to how much, from generation to generation, our understanding of what objects and visual information convey can change. Where will we go next, beyond finding connections within the data pools? Maybe the nineteenth century is still instructive. The objects themselves have meaning, but those associations paired with objects are grander categories of meaning still: the touch, taste, smell of objects in the primers. The child doesn't have to know that there are five categories of sense, or how those senses work, to be aware of the phenomena he experiences, and to start collecting those experiences to chart larger meaning. What meaning we get from objects may reside in categories of which our conscious selves are not yet aware.

Cryptic as those categories appear, they have been the subject of much research in psychology and anthropology for the last two centuries. The study of how to manipulate those psychological categories was the subject of intense effort in social engineering.

For all of those reasons, one more website is attracting my attention these days. Brian Hawthorne's LikeBetter shows users infinite pairs of different photographs, and asks them which they like better. After endlessly clicking your preference for barns over bridges, or he-man over GI-Joe, you've given the computer enough information to assess, with a great degree of accuracy, whether you are left-handed or right-handed, college-educated or not, a Republican or a Democrat.

So what are the categories of knowledge that fall in between my preference for a Massachusetts barn and the fact that I went to college? How do visual experiences wire to cultural categories, and what are those cultural categories? There's a subject for research.

How Delicious is Changing Academic Research

As of a recent post on Google Books and the research of History, our quiet little blog here on academic history, activism, and spirituality has suddenly gotten more notoriety than it's accustomed to. Hi world! Thanks for stopping by. To carry on with the thread of how information travels for academics, and what the 'net is doing, let's talk about another of my favorite sites for research, del.icio.us.

Delicious is the Rome, Jerusalem, and Paris of my existence as an academic these days. It's where I make my friends, how I get the news, and where I go to trade. All this from a little server that does nothing but share bookmarks in public.

Why? Two reasons it's cool. 1) It sorts things. 2) it makes them public.

1) it sorts things.

For two years I've been using Delicious as an information organizer. It's produced an impressive encyclopedia of the most interesting information, images, articles, citations, books, and subjects on the internet to which I might want to refer. Consider my dissertation tag, under which are a wide variety of online images and google books that I'll be using for my research. Not only can I come back to them, but I can also find related subjects -- dissertation material related to walking -- navigating seamlessly from one to another. As an improvement on the index card system, or on my own terrifying piles of articles (even now ornamenting my bookshelf), or even on the folders within folders within folders of word documents, this represents a definite improvement.

I've been building a taxonomy -- the way some people use wikis, the way my boyfriend uses that utterly cool personal software, "the brain;" the way my father uses his vertical file, the way my DC friends use their rolodexes -- so I sort out all the information I take in, annexing technology to memory, sorting factoids and spare threads and notable evidence in neat, interlocking piles where I can find information again, draw connections, and create new connections.

The result is a navigable taxonomy of my thoughts. If I want to find my stuff on the history of "walking," the taxonomy already knows that my material on walking is associated with other categories of knowledge which I've tagged nearby.

After a year of using delicious for my own bookmarks, helping other people find things becomes remarkably easy. Many of the link lists below are simply cut and paste over from delicious. Lists of citations for colleagues are cut and paste from delicious into email. The forty American history students I teach are instructed to go to my delicious page for writing help, research help, maps, and images relating to the class.


Second reason delicious is cool:

2) it makes things public.

Not only can you look at your own bookmarks, but you can also look at others'. When you find something noted to be queer and interesting, you can find out what other topics that same person thinks to be queer and interesting.

What's rapidly happening with these shared tags is academics finding each other in rapid numbers. I have some twenty people in my network, at least half of whom I've never met in real life. They include:

* Javier Arbona, a graduate student in Geography who's also at the University of California, Berkeley
* Travis Brown, a graduate student in literature
* LeahB, an editor at Cabinet Magazine, my favorite periodical
* bibliparis4, a librarian at one of the public universities in Paris

Each of these is another intellectual putting together rarified connections about strange pieces of thought somehow related to my world.

I found them because they were, like me, publicly tagging with some arcane tag that I also use. c19 -- the nineteenth century tag. vernacular -- a tag used by other people who work with ephemera.

Every morning, I log into my delicious network and read the links that my small army of admired, clever, canny, eccentric brains has put together for me.

What's more, I'm developing what I'd consider an actual working relationship with these other scholars. A few of them have added me to their own networks. Day to day, I watch their reactions to Bush, I get a sense of where their research is going, and they get a sense of mine. It's low-level, low-commitment hanging out with high levels of information exchange.

And this is something different than the social activity I know anywhere else on the internet.

Normally, if you want to meet people on the internet, the connections are typically time-limited and action-specific. You want a date, you want sex, you need a friend of a friend for networking in Argentina. You meet up online and then you meet in real life. Or you meet online at Myspace and then, unless you have a crush on the person, forget to ever go back again. But my scholars are folks I'm seeing on a regular basis in the course of my regular research. This is the nearest thing to running into someone else at the card catalog yet.

I don't check in with them. I don't have, nor do I really need, the capacity to send email to them. Some of them I may actually encounter at academic conferences later, and we'll share more of a bond, through our years of doing collaborative research, than many scholars who have labored through the years in adjoining offices.

As Hannah Arendt understood, the modern democratic state happened when people in public spaces began interacting, and thus began taking action together. For this reason, she identified the medival carnivals and fair days of Europe as the seat of literature, culture, debate, and politics. The rule goes like this: make a public, get action. Today, Delicious does for the internet what open-air markets did for medieval society. Low key, high-information, continuous-formation community building.

All hail the bookmark market.

Ephemera is Sexy

Rumors from my documentarian friends about the madman documentarian who runs ATA (Artist's Television Access) down the street, the hub of the ephemeral film movement -- he, Prelinger (the archivist), and others started collecting garage fulls of ephemeral film, stitching them together into new films, yes, and mostly emphasizing the mythic tale of 1960s consciousness raising out of the homogenous world of Wonderbread in the 1950s. And the creatures who direct archive.org are really quite canny. But still, the fact remains that there are garagefulls of ephemeral film in San Francisco.

Man. That is a sexy concept to a historian. Historians generally base their first go at what was going on in particular decade (say, the 1960s) on what the journalists who were there said. But journalists don't always get it right. Or cover everyone who's doing something interesting. And if journalists covered Civil Rights, they didn't tell much about how conversations about sex, race, self, and responsibility were happening in peoples' living rooms and back yards. And nobody talks about what it was like to walk down a street (or a beach) in the 1940s. So we historians get perfectly psyched at the phrase "garagefull of ephemeral film." My skin is already crawling!

As a nineteenth-century historian ("a nineteenth century-ist"),I'm stuck picking at traditional social history, blogging about Google Books, which really is fascinating for what it can do with the ephemera of the nineteenth century. Since no one else in the discipline has caught on to the obvious, I might try to make myself famous doing it.

When I find collections of twentieth century ephemera online, they up here. Here's a sample:

Accidental Mysteries: extraordinary vernacular photographs

Cabinet Magazine Online - Leftovers/ Ca Redemption Value: Craig Baldwin's Found-Footage Films

"It generates a critique by using the material left behind by the enemy. Like jujitsu, using the weight of the enemy against himself… I don't want to just reiterate some sort of consensus. I want to strike a blow against consensus."

An Object Lesson in Colonial Pedagogy, Parna Sengupta

brief history of the object lesson in c19 pedagogy, excellent footnotes on the history of object study and fetishism

Vintage NYC Postcard Gallery - Irving Underhill

New York City, 1900-1910, in glamor shots of skyscrapers and insect-like crowds below

Fruit From Washington - Fruit Harvest and Patriotic Posters from Depression Era and War Years

history of nutrition and home farming from the view of national propaganda

Fort Smith National Historic Site - City of Fort Smith Postcards (U.S. National Park Service)

Fort Smith, Arkansas - vernacular architecture in postcards...

Prison Postcards

from Kent state - some online

The Beginnings - ephemera from San Francisco in 1965

sf mime troop, acid test, ming the merciless, and other ephemera.

Oztrading.net - Oz magazine It Magazine Sixties Hippy Counter Culture

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American Memory Collection Finder Search

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early ephemeral films - westinghouse, cocacola advertising, animation....

Playa de Marianao, c 1940? postcard

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Havana (Prov.): Beaches: Playa de Marianao
5 Habana. Playa de Marianao. Marianao Beach
1 postcard
Note: Verso: No. 64. Edición Jordi

Habana. Calle Obispo (Pi Margall). Obispo or Pi Margal Street

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street scene in old havana. c 1940?

The Cuban Postcard Collection

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The Cuban Postcard Collection is a continuously growing collection of postcards of Cuba and the Cuban experience outside of Cuba produced from the turn of the 20th century to the present. It includes real photo, printed photo, and artist drawn postcards a

History of Media Librarianship: A Chronology

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the first map libraries, the first postcard libraries

The Museum of Unworkable Devices

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Journalism's Greatest Hope

7:40 PM
j guldi: WOW
7:45 PM
Chloe Cockburn: hullo
j guldi: wow, this is like the best journalism in our lifetime...
j guldi: an actual intelligent use of history...
j guldi: what planet have i been on? i've never heard of this guy?
Chloe Cockburn: yes i think it's quite elegant
Chloe Cockburn: i hear him mentioned now and then but i didn't realize he was this good
Chloe Cockburn: i've heard this argument before of course but he says it very well
j guldi: beautifully
j guldi: mentions debs but doesn't distract by going into socialism, communism...
j guldi: a coherent narrative drawing americanism into one coherent idea, against which he polarizes bush
j guldi: liberals usually get wishy-washy in outrage without feeling able to identify with a public
Chloe Cockburn: indeed
j guldi: so there's no reason for a public to listen to them
j guldi: can we get more people like this?
7:50 PM
Chloe Cockburn: clone him!
j guldi: yay!

Falwell's Ghost, in California

I was explaining the Bible to jerry. That's his coffee table.

Jerry: "so is this the part where it says, I am your angry task-master, you must obey me and kill other people?"

Jo: (goes silent)

No.

(pause)

It says, I am the way, the truth, and the light. It's a mystical statement. It's practically exactly the way the Tao de Ching begins, the Road you can name is not the real road; the name you can say is not the real name. It's mysticism. Where are you getting this stuff, anyway?

----


Seriously, you do-gooder Christians with big well organized churches have a lot of basic disinformation evangelism to do. Jerry's smart, in touch, and we've been having this conversation for six months. He's pretty exemplary of at least 50% of the well educated and liberal out here. I get to have a similar conversation in San Francisco every time I meet a stranger who discovers that I go to church : how could I believe that crap? hasn't anyone told me yet that it's patriarchal and power-hungry? Don't I know that it's all about killing and hating? Decades of exposure to Falwell (the only Christian voice to penetrate to the unconverted) have done a lot of damage.

Hearing the wrong Christians interviewed on Fox News and chatted about in the New York Times means a version of Christianity twisted beyond recognition. The New Testament, in the churches of the South and Midwest, has relatively little to do with hating or excluding. Instead, it focusses on the main substance of the Christian scripture, becoming a good listener and expressing loving speech through a connection with a force of love bigger and grander than that expressed by any given particular human over the course of his life. I realized something strange in the midst of this conversation with Jerry. I've spent most of the last ten years learning how to talk about the Christian Right and Christian Left, to draw political lines about who's right and who's wrong. But I wasn't cultivating my speech about love, or honing my testament to the deep, spiritual, inward experiences I've had.

I'm shocked when other people don't understand think Christianity is an institution whose prime purpose is the cultivation of those experiences in a supportive community. But I myself am part of the problem. I'm used to drawing lines in the sand between those Christians there with their hate-preaching, and our Christians over here. I'm great at describing when, how, and why those divisions arose. But on a regular basis I'm not part of the tide of those actually sharing, or enthusiastically advocating, the kind of ecstatic experiences I regularly experience in my readings of the Sermon on the Mount, the psalms, the Sufi scriptures, and the Tao. Evangelism is supposed to be about the healing of broken souls, the outreach to people with a certain hollowness in their lives.

Religion is not just about politics, that much seems obvious. The political aspect is important and dear to those of us trying to distance ourselves from the angry harmful nonsense of Falwell. Activists tend to be warriors and statesmen in this game, drawing lines and collecting help. They (we) tend to blame the media, exhort pastors to preach on political topics, and encourage a healthy, political body in the church, engaging the progressive world view. They tend to leave the preaching, meditation, witness, exultation, sharing of experiences, deep listening, and descriptions of love to priests and preachers.

Maybe too much. Maybe Falwell has won because too many Christians on both sides, right and left, engage the politics without the love.

How Google Books is Changing Academic History

Google Book Search is a relatively recent phenomenon... six months ago, right? About six months ago I was pottering around there, finding a few illustrated nineteenth-century texts, a lot of contemporary books for sale, and not much of too much interest.

Six months turns out to be a long time in book land. In that period of time, Book Search has accomplished enough to transform the academic profession.

I was idly trying a search on "roads" to see what sort of a literature would turn up for the period of my dissertation research, 1740-1850. I didn't expect much. I've spent the last two years wandering through the Yale, Harvard, and California libraries, the British Library, Britain's National Archives, and the immense reserves of North American Inter Library Loan reading every book on London, pavement, or travel I could get my hands on.

Surprise. In a single idle search I just added twenty extra full-text books to my list.

Which are, by the way, full-text searchable --

-- and subject to word-count analysis --

-- and replete with full illustrations --

-- and instantly digestable into visuals for powerpoint presentations.

Hallelujah, GoogleBooks. And holy mackeral! Good work.

By now, the first half of the nineteenth century exists in a very complete form on Google Books. In the last six months, while academic history has meandered in its habituated paths of grinding research, the possibilities of scholarship have been utterly transformed.

To give just one example, this little puppy -- Henry Parnell's A Treatise on Roads (1833) -- one of the key texts for my dissertation exists on our campus in Berkeley's transport library, a quaint but understaffed, spare room
hidden on the third floor of the engineering building, far, far away from where historians ever go. It wasn't actually on the shelf when I got there, so it took some patient emailing with the transport library librarians before the book was found, returned to the correct place, held at the desk for me, to be picked up during the library hours specific to that particular institution (10am-4pm, M-Fr). Wild with enthusiasm at having at last obtained it, I held the volume prisoner at my desk in San Francisco for six straight months, unruffled by overdue notices, until at last the plaintive emails from the circulation desk were too much for me to bear. Research in my world is very often a personal matter of haggling for more time with the particular librarian in question. They're used to us, and I figure they need a good struggle to keep them alert. But thanks to Google Book Search, these days of scavenger-hunt and tug-of-war are drawing to an end.

Time for a professional dialogue about the new kinds of research these texts have opened up. For a very vast vista has erupted before us, and with it, a more serious set of comparative questions as a standard for social history, and new levels of rigor to be expected from the individual researcher. No longer can historians afford to stay in the empty, lonely world of the weary scholar, pouring of close readings of dialogue. Time for all those structural analysis skills to come back in full force. Quantitative and open databases of word-count and thematic analyses. Open databases of pictures, tagged by keywords and available for classroom use.

What this signals, by the way, is the opportunity for a new age of scholarship. Cultural and image analysis used to be painfully time-consuming, heavy lifting, involving rare kinds of access, full fellowships, immense travel, and long waits for delicate books. Comparison between different cultural sources was even harder, placing absurd demands on the cultural historian's personal memory and note-taking skills. Cultural historians, despite their many skills, stood second in depth of research on any particular topic to political historians, for whom one visit to a Parliamentary archive and one visit to a personal residence outfitted them with every last detail of historical change. Now all that is changing. Comparing a hundred images is no longer a problem for a year's labor in an out-of-the-way museum reading room. Comparing a hundred personal accounts from working men is no longer a task to eat up a social historian's entire year.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the future holds. Any reports of historians currently putting together databases? Please post them here. In the meantime, check out this afternoon's dissertation links...

1. Practical Remarks, and Precedents of... - Google Book Search

   legal commentary on new pavement and turnpike legislation in parliament, 1802.




2. A Treatise on the Law of Ways - Humphry Woolrych, 1829




3. Steam Carriages on London Roads - Walter Hancock, London, 1838




4. A Treatise on Roads, Their History - Simeon De Witt Bloodgood - 1838

   from Albany New York - lectures on the history of recent paving, with comments on tolls and despotism




5. General Rules for Repairing Roads for surveyors on the Holyhead Roads - 1827




6. Letter to Sir Alexander Muir M'Kenzie on Scottish Roads - McAdam - 1833




7. A Practical Treatise on Making and Repairing Roads - Edmund Leahy - 1844




8. Observations on the Formation, State and Condition of Turnpike Roads - A H Chambers - 1820




9. The Practice of Making & Repairing Roads: - Thomas Hughes - 1838




10. Rudiments of the Art of Constructing Roads - S Hughes - 1850