Inscape

What is Being Occupied?

2011-10-19T10:26:00.000-07:00

The last 700 years of land use and capitalism have involved the deracination of people from their territory through the control of successive regimes of surveying, government, and money which today take the form of the environmental crisis, mortgage crisis, and landless peoples' rebellions of the global south. Without control over our own territory, there can be no possibility of a timely and appropriate response to the environmental crisis. Without cheap rent, transportation, or civic permission to be homeless in our cities, people have no right to life. Without protests in public space, new critiques of politics might never be voiced. Together these constitute the right to the city. An occupation takes place in the city. A political movement that occupies public space hardly needs a set of demands or a clear consensus to make clear its statement. In the history of capitalism, the right to public space has been challenged, and resistance is necessary to secure the right to the city.

One can think backwards to nineteenth-century struggles over the right to the city, from the Peterloo massacre of trade-unionists in Manchester suppressed by the police in 1819 to the working-class cafe society exiled from central Paris after the 1860s to the German anarchist organizations kicked out of Tompkins Square Park in New York in the 1880s. Each of these movements had to occupy space, and had to fight, frequently through violent confrontations, for the right to occupy the city, to organize people too poor to afford their own journalists or politicians, whose livelihoods were threatened by escalating rents. The right to the city -- to inhabit it, to participate in its governance, to reshape it -- is a right that has to be continually renewed. Over the last four decades we have sat upon the accomplishments of the 60s, the settlements bequeathed from lunch-counter sit-ins and free-speech protests. But those rights are now in question. Through the extension of private ownership the vry parks in which Occupy Wall Street protestors now sit are privately-held parcels opened to the public at the pleasure of a private corporation. Our right to the village green has become so tenuous.

An occupation by the people is a taking up of space by the people. It takes up the vacant concrete spaces slid through by glanceless men in peacoats and umbrellas. It takes up the concrete corridors clogged by heavy-moving SUVs. It takes up the visual space crowded by advertisements featuring half-naked women in perfume. It replaces all of that open, lifeless city with another city, a human city of faces, of voices, arguing, debating.

It is the remarkable fact about this protest that it has *not* produced a set of demands, as did the soviets or SDSers or even hippies. No consensus will fast emerge from the anarchists, teapartyers, grad students, and marines who are gathered here. They speak no common language. They agree on very few points except for their mutual duty to occupy. They are beginning a new conversation, but what they have done -- unprecedented in forty years -- is to stage an occupation, to enumerate all that has been lost when we lose our mortgages, our environment, and our right to public protest, and to demand the right to the city.

(this dispatch from the library tent at #OccupyBoston)

The Slow Burn of the 99 Percent

2011-10-13T16:47:00.000-07:00

It is the mark of a novice historian to cast about fitfully when seeking for comparisons, and for that reason, the protestors of Occupy Wall Street confound amateurs. The marchers don’t fit the model of the 60s or the antiwar marches of 2002-6. They cannot be summed up under the name hippie or under the understanding of religious action in the public sphere as it has appeared for the last half century. When Harry and the Potters played Occupy Boston, they brought an infusion of pure middle-class nerd self-righteousness to the streets, not unlike the ivy-league lawyers who were trapped on the Brooklyn.

Nor is the movement merely white and middle class. Amidst the speakers in New York rally black gospel choirs and savvy Latino youth armed with AV equipment. The diversity movements of the last thirty years have born fruit. It is a foregone conclusion, in some liberal and even bourgeois circles, that their struggle and our struggle have a deep relationship. In terms of demands, today’s movements have less to do with the largely white protest movements of the last thirty years, and more to do with the French and British riots of 2008-2011, when the unemployed poor, facing the end of government services and a string of incidents linked to the racist deployment of police violence.

Then, of course, there are the preachers. One out of every five Youtube videos features one, dressed in white shoes and a collar, railing against corruption in the building. Stephen Colbert crosses his arms in another image, widely reposted, and demands that the American public either renounce its claim to Christianity or take the demands of the poor more seriously. Images such as these, vaunting financial reform within a religious ethic, have circulated widely in the past three weeks, bringing strains of spiritual foment to bear on public life. It is likely that they reflect the mounting of a long revolution in American public life. Over the last decade, an evolving community on the Christian Left has challenged the Right’s fixation with abortion and gay marriage, drawing attention back to biblical injunctions of solidarity with the poor that many argue are, textually and historically, at the heart of the Christian religion.

If the Occupy movements are allied with any previous political movement, it is neither the antiwar hippies who occupied the streets of San Francisco in 2002 nor the Democratic Party. Far closer is the anti-foreclosure movement, which has rallied middle-class attention, labor, and ethnic protest together in a slow pooling since 2008. Anti-foreclosure is an event, a solid indictment of a financial system corrupt to its bone. It has been slowly escalating, building the support of labor in places like Chicago. It requires the reform of the legislature: both parties from the 1990s helped to deregulate the markets, removing safeguards that had protected homeowners from the ravages of the market. It cannot trust the courts: judges foreclosed upon homes without reading the documents in many cases. It finds the presidency irrelevant, a presidency concerned with the international stability of markets, but whose stimulus was in every way insufficient to promote a better infrastructure that would connect poor workers and jobs.

What can be said about a movement that holds public space for three weeks in a thousand separate cities, with up to 20,000 people in New York alone? Pundits pout while they wait for an answer to the question of what they represent, but these people, clearly, already represent themselves: nerd, black, brown, spiritual, committed to the lives of the people who suffered when the foreclosure crisis hit.

Demands for financial reform, mortgage protection, and the cleansing of lobbyists represent reactions to a wedding of bank and government that has only arisen over the last thirty years. They rise on the foundations of a spiritual movement that has only been gathering force for the last decade. If the movement looks different from other movements of the last ten, twenty, or fifty years, it is because they represent the culmination of a slow burn.

Deracination: A Short History

2011-10-11T17:40:00.001-07:00

Roots, a photo by BlueRidgeKitties on Flickr.

In Latin, a Radix is like a radish, meaning it's a root. Trees and people both have them. People, like trees, are deracinated by the coming of civil engineers, bulldozers, and rent hikes, and the deracinated people of modernity lose their connection to neighborhood, history, and nature.

This is the story of the deracination of people from their territory. Deracination is not necessarily modern; Mongol hordes and Persian armies caused the flight of peasants from their land. Slaves and serfs were owned by the land, not owners of it.
What they did have was the power to build and to name. In the modern era, individuals lost that control, living in an increasingly artificial environment where the very city around them was planned by experts removed in a high tower from the people whose lives they ordered.

In the modern era, the promise of control over one’s own territory became one of the signature promises of liberalism and the modern state. For landholders, security of property became, through the English Civil War, among the key promises by the state that guaranteed the self-determination of the individual from interference by neighbor or government. But the promises of control over territory went further than that. Nation-states, policing far-off military borders, exempted residents in the middle of the country from the risk of ever having their village burned down by an invading enemy.

Moreover, modern governments worked to improve the value of property, enriching the security of landholders and occasionally even extending membership in the class of landlords into the wider public. In India and Egypt and Africa, colonizing western powers divided land that had never been privately owned, planning immense irrigation projects and settling the peasantry with secure property rights. Infrastructure projects like the government oversight of agriculture after the Dust Bowl promised to increase the security of farmers such that another mass migration from valueless land would never be necessary again. After the Second World War, the government of the United States generalized the principle of landholding to the majority of the middle class through the government backing of mortgages designed to create an unprecedented class of landholders, secured in their property rights against economic catastrophe.

Improvement and reform enriched an elite few. They placed the majority, however, in a situation of greater and greater uncertainty. Eminent domain rulings tore down the houses of the poor to make way for infrastructure. Public housing blocks housed the poor in structures whose designs and rules were controlled by persons other than the residents. Dams that improved agriculture in certain areas exhausted the resources in others. From generation to generation, the power to control territory – to design the rivers, to take property, to order the parks and sidewalks and what could be done there, to promote one region’s economy or not – was consolidated in the hands of a class of expert managers, civil engineers, urban planners and architects.

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This is hardly the only story about the lack of control by the poor over their own destiny. In the consolidation of modern political parties in the nineteenth century, the working poor lost much of the power they once had to shape the political messages carried forward by protests on the street, even as they won the vote. Free-market policies that promised to distribute wealth impoverished Ireland. The devaluation of currency in India and the lack of political control over their own destiny kept that nation impoverished and subject to famine so long as it remained a colony. Marxism theorizes fundamental categorical differences in the composition of society based on relationships to labor such that in a system of capitalism, industrial and bourgeois interests flourish at the expense of the proletariat, excluding the poor from the privileged organs of education and media by which society is directed. Theories of race conjecture that modern Europeans favored differentiation by skin color above even categories of labor, creating a permanent underclass based in the global south responsible for labor and excluded from the privilege of directing society.

Power over territory looks to other organs than education and media. It asks what became of the public square and the public protest, about how it is that marches in the street, so powerful in eighteenth-century Europe, became in the twentieth century a permanent carnival of the dispossessed with limited power to change public opinion.

How power over territory might look different than other kinds of power became the subject of social theory beginning in the 1830s. Radicals from the Chartist movement, complaining about their lack of political power, foregrounded the significance of territory as a means of accessing political, economic, and social power, encouraging working-class persons to plot and invest in villages where ownership of cheap property would provide economic security, political self-governance, and social interaction. From the 1840s to the 1910s, radicals and philanthropists equally lobbied for the creation of allotment gardens that would supply the working poor with the means of self-sufficiency by granting them reserves of land in the midst of industrial areas. By the 1860s, the various iterations of the land reform campaign raised a plea for the division of large estates and farms, imagining a Britain refashioned into a nation of prosperous smallholders where the multitude, not the few, could weigh into questions about the design of infrastructure and cities.

Other theorists focused on the social and cultural aspects of control over territory. In Town Swamps and Social Bridges, Godwin argued that the problem of geographical isolation between the classes generated further problems of mutual ignorance. Social spaces for mutual interaction were contrived. In the 1880s, theorists of community pointed to the loss of open spaces for everyday interaction, drawing attention to the significance of arenas for informal interaction for building social and ethical discourse.

Still others imagined campaigns to restore political control over territory to the poor. In the 1930s, campaigns for the mapping of territory sought to empower the working poor to advise parliamentary committees with the same power to convince as that of expert elites.

Fasting from Information

2011-06-11T09:41:00.000-07:00

“Fast from stories,” advise the Taoists. The practice switches off old narratives. It’s advice related to a meditation practice of following the breath, remaining attentive from moment to moment, opening to new information, and staying in a state of awareness without judgment.

In an age of information, reading is pulled between two poles: one, reading intensively in the same areas that always intrigue us, the other, skimming for something new, observing without analyzing. A narrowing of focus is the natural shape of attention in an age of overwhelm. Fandom, loyalty to a political issue, and “following” one’s social network all take this form. How often does someone in my twitter network voice a point of view with which I radically disagree? Not so often. How often do I click through to a story on a topic I’ve never read about before? Not so often. Luddites, lamenting the death of the newspaper or our retreat from the forest, draw the conclusion that we have lost both awareness and variety. However modern it is, this narrowing of focus is almost necessary as a means of siphoning the ocean of information around us into a digestible trickle.

What about stepping into the ocean of sound itself, merely tasting its swirling mists without judging them?

I live beside that sea of information and spend more time alone with it than perhaps anyone else I know. For the last three years I’ve had the extremely unusual position of being paid, to read books and to write books, with very little in the way of outside obligation. Maybe 1% of professional historians are full-time professional researchers. The freedom of that position makes way for a diversity of reading unusual even among full-time writers, journalists, and professors.

When I was first granted this freedom, I wrote publicly all the time. Almost daily, fits of attitude would make their way onto the internet: observations about the modern university, the modern church, the modern family, the phenomenon of chatroulette, infrastructure policy, the recipe I most liked, the book I’d just been reading. Nothing was too big or too small but for me to have an opinion about it.

For the last nine months of that time, I haven’t blogged. I’ve confined myself to 140-character observations on Twitter.

I’ve been wondering about the poisoned wells of water below us, about our parched planet, the death of a radical movement on the left, about alternative capital markets, and about how far things can or cannot change in a generation.

I’ve been shifting from caring about policy to caring about participation. Instead of wondering about declining infrastructure, the collapse of the Rust Belt, eminent domain, and the segregation of the poor in the nation’s cities, I’ve been wondering about the few historical examples of cities and nations where poor people had control over their own territory. I’ve been reading about property law and its varieties. I’ve been dallying among radical law faculty at Cambridge in the 1870s, who felt in their bones that commons and commonly-owned property were the only antidote to the consolidation of power in the hands of an elite minority. I’ve been reading about water wars in South America and landless peasants in China and evictions in the United States. I’ve been scouring the World Bank reports on land reform movements and the literature published by the Via Campesina and other landless peasant movements in the global south.

I read as if asleep, taking notes without analyzing them, reading a dozen articles without synthesizing an argument. Awash in information, I fasted. There’s been too much to read for me to say yet what it meant. Most days, success was finding a spare anecdote for some argument-in-formation, or letting a dozen contrary opinions wash by my eyes. Friends grew cross with me for talking about my work so little.

But synthesis is hard. Like the gardener in the proverb who scatters seeds and forgets where they are till they grow into plants, the reader-without-judgment takes in narratives, washing the brain in new information each day, confident that somewhere in the back of the brain, aside from judgment or narrative, the hippocampus is sorting that information into appropriate registers.

I corresponded now privately, with the one friend who researched the history of allotment gardens, the other colleague who studied the history of property law and the environment, the mentor who writes about the nineteenth-century experience of caves and underground spaces.

The old issues evaporated for me. It was harder to get worked up about the future of the university when so many possible futures danced before my eyes. I was finding a new continent hidden under the mists of information, and I began to explore it, by myself, in secret forays. To write back too soon would be to risk misjudging it.

Occasionally, people would ask me to talk and I would write talks for them. At the University of Virginia, I argued that for thirty years, Foucault has driven political history towards the dead end of lamenting power’s presence without studying the avenues for liberation. At the University of Ohio, I outlined some of the models for liberatory scholarship, pioneered by radicals historians in the 1920s and 30s, who took working-class people on walking tours of their own communities, using buildings and cemeteries, not books, as sources, telling stories and at the same time proving that history was something individuals could do on their own, unmediated by the power of the expert (see chapter on landscape methods and walking radicals here).

Little by little, the anecdotes were stringing themselves into a big story, a tale of seven hundred years of people losing their relationship to territory, of the ways in which we come to know the land and reestablish a community capable of distributing territorial resources.

Time away from publishing is more precious than rubies. The sage needs to fast from stories; the student needs a long walk before writing the paper’s conclusion; faculty need sabbaticals, and saints and radicals, most likely, need to sojourn in the mountains for a month or a year at a time. That’s how we stop clutching at a particular narrative, how we relax and open the skin to the mists of information around us. In an age of information, that retreat is more necessary than ever.

foreclosure=enclosure. rent control=anti-gentrification. transportation+cheap broadband = restoration of the commons

2010-10-31T12:08:00.000-07:00

Over the last thirty years, credit markets, migration patterns, gentrification, and community settlement have increasingly driven a wedge between individuals and their territory. The foreclosure crisis deracinates thousands of people from their homes, while elsewhere entire subdivisions are bulldozed. Across the nation, a neoconservative revolution lobbies for tollroads and public housing, fighting down proposals for city-wide wifi. The white gentrification of the center city drives ethnic minorities to new suburbs on the city's edge. Everywhere, the growing power of class interest in a credit-driven economy has centralized the elite control of the city while deracinating the connection of working-class people to the territory around them.

Nowhere are these trends more clear in than in the Rust Belt, where the loss of industry has given rise to the nation's highest rates of foreclosure, eviction, homelessness, and unemployment.

The international evaporation of credit and the foreclosure crisis is pushing the poor out of Rust Belt cities at a higher rate than ever before. On 2009, I learned from my friend Valdis Krebs how the international evaporation of credit was spiraling into the targeted eviction of folks in poor neighborhoods, forcing out ethnic homeowners from the neighborhoods of Flint, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. The result of these policies was that the Foreclosure Crisis of 2008 took houses away from minority homeowners, dismantling neighborhoods. Few community gardens serve these populations.

On the other side of these ghettos are zones of privilege, filled with murals, farmers' markets, and community gardens. Their isolation, however, means that community is but a facade for most of them. In our last tour we saw parades that no one attended, "community" gardens that fed but one family, and towns "revitalized" by artists where it was impossible to find food.

At the same time, the crisis in the Rust Belt has prompted the formation of a new generation of radical organizing. There, emergent counter-movements have begun to assert the right of people to form a relationship with territory. In the upper midwest, courts have begun to uphold the rights of squatters. Progressives have begun a new back-to-the-land movement in cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh. Time banks, land banks, and local currencies comprise a new movement towards regional autonomy. In May of 2010, the NYT reported on the wealth of abandoned property in the Rust Belt, and how back-to-the-land punk squatters in Buffalo are changing land law to protect squatters' rights. The swarm of radical movements suggests the revaluation of the relationship between people and their territory.

Much of this activism remains difficult to interpret. How secure are the new radical developments, and how do they scale?

Issues about regional autonomy necessarily the great questions of political economy. Should cities like post-Katrina New Orleans or Flint, MI be cut off, left to drown in their own economic failures? Insufficient infrastructure compounds the problems of economic depression, the digital divide, and political participation by leaving swaths of a nation in ruins. How the radical movements of the Rust Belt navigate these problems says much about the shape of social justice to come.

The City Made of Words: Text mining the spaces of subaltern agency in Britain, 1848-1919

2010-09-10T14:30:00.000-07:00

[abstract for a talk to be delivered at the University of Virginia Scholars' Lab, Thursday Sep. 23]

Can digital methods resolve major debates in the historiography of political agency? In recent decades, historical scholarship in British politics has identified an era of expert rule at the cost of seemingly losing the thread of successful movements from below after 1815. The talk will outline the failures of the linguistic turn and the subsequent return of British social history back to the state. An emerging consensus now describes an era of modern expert rule characterized by the state's presence in every domain of everyday life, including infrastructure, public health, crime, poverty, and housing. Historians in this tradition (I have been one myself) routinely describe Britain 1848 as a nation where the subaltern features chiefly as the subject of surveillance, management, and repression. Much more rarely to these stories successfully describe subalterns after 1848 as political actors in their own right. Political historians are thus challenged by question first raised by Karl Polanyi, Michel Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas. Is the hegemonic power of the state in the modern world complete? Where can one find evidence of structural or continuous resistance?

Successfully identifying agency from below demands a redefinition of political agency and new methodologies for sorting the masses of texts opened up for mining by the digital era. The rest of the talk will therefore excavate methodologies from late nineteenth-century philosophers of language like Ernst Cassirer, mid-century geographers like Peter Gould, scholars of mobile culture like E. J. Hobsbawm, and anarchist writers like Colin Ward. These methods, I shall argue, foreground the potential of language mining for identifying spaces of emergent publics where agency from below has been expressed over the long duree.

Applied to digital texts, landscape methods can enhance the depth and breadth of research on alternative agency. A program for digital research is presented, together with a database on the heterotopias of late nineteenth-century London, designed to highlight the spatiality of coexisting political movements already identified in the secondary literature: the settlement houses, landscape of state surveillance, the land reform movement, theosophists, slumming, sexual and ethnic subcultures, bohemia, and hobohemia. Preliminary maps of places named in the database will be presented in conjunction with a discussion of how such a method might address larger historiographical concerns.

Modernity as a Land Crisis

2010-09-02T12:16:00.000-07:00

Land is unlike any other form of commodity. In R. H. Tawney's words, it was "orgies of land speculation" that resulted in the displacement of peasants and the linking of capital to real estate. Land trade, rather than capitalism itself, has been behind some of the most lasting and damaging aspects of advanced capitalism: the clearance of black neighborhoods, the creation of segregated cities in South Africa, India, and the United States where property ownership was backed up by law; and the economic isolation of the poor.

Some of the reasons land ownership has been so linked to power in the modern era is the legal restrictions that accompany real estate but not other forms of property. As Avner Offer pointed out in his history of nineteenth-century land movements, land is slower to trade than other commodities; it is more hampered with legal restrictions and covenants. Many of these -- duties of road maintenance, the law of lights, restrictions on entail -- went back to medieval and Roman times. But even if we imagined away the laws of trade in land, the ownership of land still gives rise to other powers that other capitalists don't have. Land ownership means buying into the right to engineer the experience of other individuals. Even the mere owner of a shopfront in a city has purchased the right to interfere with the perceptions, rights, and choices of his fellows, through how he organizes that space, through accoutrements like benches or air conditioning or street trees with which he amends his property, through what he displays and refuses to display -- powers that the owner of a yacht or the mere dealer in corn at the market has not purchased. Land ownership is implicitly linked to the governance of others' experience, and so removing land ownership from the feudal system to the capitalist system created after effects too broad to be summed up by a study of abstract capital markets themselves.

I draw here on the writing of Elizabethan historian R. H. Tawney and his reflections on the massive turnover of land that transpired in Europe between roughly 1500 and 1700 with the draining of northern Europe and enclosure of its forest frontier. Everywhere, land exchange resulted in the rapid escalation of prices, with the result of new political relationships with the peasantry characterized by enclosure, depopulation, riot, and suppression. In England, these patterns were intensified by an added factor: the breakup of monastic lands, which were turned over first to the crown and then to agents who sold them to the highest bidder. For these reasons, the turnover was greater, the gentry turned over more rapidly, their hold and rights to land were preserved more tenuously, and they had more to fear from an outright peasant rebellion of the kind embodied by the Levellers.

Based on his study of the English Civil War, Tawney reached the conclusion that land politics, rather than democratic ideas, were at the heart of the age of revolutions that created modern nations and the system of classes. Ownership in land, he reminded his readers, meant more than ownership in other forms of property. It presented political status -- the right to vote, the right to a title -- for the vote was linked to land ownership in England until 1867. It also gave social status. Land owners built country houses and began to participate in a world of political influence based on hospitality given to royalty and political office holders. Finally, ownership in alienable land meant unprecedented powers of social engineering rarely seen in Feudal systems. Land owners cleared villages and built new ones; they *had* to, in order to keep up with the increasingly extensive use of agriculture by their competitors. The regime of alienable property in land that emerged from the Civil War, buoyed by the theory of Thomas Hobbes, was in almost every sense -- the sense of creating a power elite, the sense of depriving the working class of economic and political access -- based on how it preserved the rights to property in land.

According to the subdiscipline of moral geography, this centrality of land ownership to modern liberalism in fact masks many of the most urgent issues of class, race, and gender participation in the modern era. We accept the built environment -- the separation of mother's house from father's work, the segregation of black and white neighborhoods -- as entirely natural. Looking backwards from the postwar twentieth century, the reform movements that receive the most press have been those dealing in abstract rights involving court and market. Yet the spatial structuration of our cities, farms, and nations conceals within it boundaries that demarcate access and inclusion. They are invisible to all except a radical tradition that has stressed the significance of land to the experience of contemporary governance.

Twenty-first century events threaten to again put the land at the center of analysis. Rapid turnovers in the foreclosure crisis, the devolution of state infrastructure, the spiraling cost of real estate, reverse white flight, and new back-to-the-land and utopian movements taking over the abandoned cities of Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, mean that land ownership issues have captured attention. In addition, new methodologies like collaborative mapping and GIS have offered the infrastructure for participatory efforts to make sense of these new forces that determine so much of contemporary inclusion in market and politics. Finally, the fabrication of the digital commons creates a plane of virtual real estate where the same issues of participation, visibility, social engineering, alienability and exclusion apply as with land. The enclosure of this virtual commons and its contestation through the Net Neutrality movement are among the most important political crises of our day. We could even point, with Eleanor Ostrom, to connections between death of the commons in traditional cultures and the increasing likelihood of exhausting natural resources linked to land -- which after all can be turned over at rapid rates.

So here is the hypothesis I draw: the problem with modernity isn't capitalism or government per se; the problem is land and the way capital and government have been tied to it. The land reform movement of the nineteenth century was the most courageous attempt to reform those dealings, and the crises of not having reformed them linger with us to this day.

Cure for Pain

2010-07-08T11:44:00.000-07:00

The burden of history is that emotional labor gets handed to people who never asked for it. As priests say of Eve's children, doomed for disobedience, they must labor all the days of their lives: to say otherwise is to deny a reality acknowledged by most people for most of history. Traditionally, western intellectuals talked about the doom of labor in terms of sin, wickedness, and morality; by the seventeenth century, they had begun to speak of doom in terms of ploughing, production, and capital. We were doomed to work all the days of our lives. Quakers, Anabaptists, and enlightenment intellectuals challenged the doom of sin; Marxists and anarchists challenged the doom to capital. Everywhere, self-described moderns shuffled off their connection with the past in the hopes of freedom.

But by the dawn of the twentieth century, canny people began to describe their curse as something more broad still: the doom of living in history. History as nightmare was James Joyce's charge. History is nightmare wherever revolutions have been attempted and failed. In the 1970s, British historian Gareth Stedman Jones described the great lull of working-class revolution that Britain suffered after the death of Chartism in the 1840s, repression from above resulting in a failure to reimagine the nation even unto his writing. In his masterpiece on the riots of the 1960s, A Grin Without a Cat (1977), filmmaker Chris Marker tallied the international swell of people's movements against their unsuccessful attempt to stop the atrocities in Vietnam. It is painful, wrenching stuff: a candid acknowledgement that the ideals of an entire generation had ended in failure.

Memory can be paralyzing. In the memories of my last relationship, it was the treatment of our common past, the recitation of failure, that resonates still into the present. An awkward interchange with one of my friends, the way I brought up a difficult topic, would be recalled multiple times for months afterwards, my lover's growing, articulate list of reasons why I was an unfit mate. Everybody has such at-fault lists, maybe, as they're settling into a relationship and trying to decide whether to stay or go; but the appropriate thing is to stay or go: and then get on with forgiveness, not bludgeon the other human.

It's that list of failures that haunts me. I'm still dealing on a daily basis with the weight of those charges, shooting down the recording of his voice in my head that calls me selfish and says that I'll never be in a relationship again. It's pretty horrible. But at the end of the day, it's just pain. The memories enter at the level of the body, like a reflex: my throat remembering to contract because it's been prone to contracting out of fear for most of my life and my brain begins to spin. Reason isn't involved, and reasoning with myself isn't the whole of the cure: there's very little that's true or persuasive about the particular criticisms involved; I don't think I'm a horrible person, and even at the time, I took most of his analysis of me in terms of complicated reservations and jealousies that were the other side of a deep, abiding affection. It was not my duty to talk him out of the abusive parts, and I quit as soon as I realized how stuck he was. But I'm still trying to train my body out of the memories. Yoga and acupuncture seem to work better than story-telling: deprogramming the body from the memory of pain.

That memory is but another form of the burden of history. There have been plenty of naysayers -- parents, advisors, boyfriends, false friends -- who didn't know when to stop attacking, leaving my body riddled with memories of stopping, clutching, holding, bracing; saddling me with the long labor of process.

One would like to be free of such labor, to use one's labor for one's own ends. But we were none of us born into that kind of freedom, and those of us from Calvinist/depression-ridden families perhaps less so; one bad relationship begets frail expectations, and the patterns reinforce themselves. I would really like to be done with them, and it seems to take a long time, training the body to live without random contractions of the throat and gut. But it isn't just about me or my level of energy or commitment or discipline, no.

Beyond individual memory, at the core of this kind of paralysis, there is history again. Among the charges brought against me in that relationship was my identity -- too white, too middle-class, too academic -- as a reason why I would never understand my partner. The charges sunk in because they mirrored other charges brought up consistently by my activist friends and subaltern studies colleagues.

There are very important, historical, political, and moral reasons to take seriously such pleas for listening. Psychologists have documented the high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder in inhabitants of ethnic neighborhoods cleared to make way for eminent domain developments. Who could argue that any victim of oppression hasn't suffered the trauma they describe -- especially when the trauma in question was inherited from history? If my student, colleague, or partner lash out against me for reasons of history, what possible remedy could mere words offer?

When someone traumatized rebuffs the willing interlocutor, it's the fault of history, not of assholishness. Postcolonial historians, in the 1990s, debated whether anyone of nonindigenous background could speak with sympathy on behalf of the subaltern; in the 2000s, the same debates are rehearsed in queer studies: can straight people write histories of gay migration? For believers, the very rationale of subaltern studies is the transformation that happens to people who tell their own story for the first time. Let more subalterns speak, they explain, and expect the world to be transformed. The sign of that transformation is not only the shift to the subaltern: it manifests not only in the self-confidence of radicals who used to hurt, but also in the transformation of the attitude and the composition of the privileged. Yet as white, straight, male, privileged academics inherit prized positions at top universities, the subaltern proponents of subaltern studies object -- as they should; social justice will only be effective when the racial and gender balance of academic departments reflects that of the population at large.

And this is the politics of identity, the politics of exclusion: the necessary relic of historical oppression. It is the deaf ear turned on the student, friend, and colleague. Many versions of this conversation foreground not social justice but identity; the necessity of people telling their own story. So much so good for them: in therapy, in small groups, story-telling heals the subject.

In society, however, exclusive story-telling is dangerous. Modern identity politics has left a legacy of exclusion: maternalist feminists rejected the NAACP; SNC leaders and Black Panthers rejected the woman's movement forming in their midst; transexuals were disinvited from the Michigan Women's Music Festival. The former victims of exclusion shut out possible interlocutors.

If you're committed to a moral life -- to transcending identity in the name of good politics -- there is no way to escape these iterative exclusions. From the census and governing mechanisms of the nineteenth-century state, subalterns learned the nuances of ethnicity: to cleave, maddeningly, to distinctions of caste and ethnicity that had mattered rarely or at least less before. From the fissioning labor movements of the 1870s, radicals learned to enforce boundaries of belonging and identity: anarchosyndicalists against Trotskyites against Soviets; first- and second- and third-wave feminists who competed for academic funding against queer studies. There is a hierarchy at work: an enormous pyramid of positioning within the left to be at the wedge breaking into the academy, breaking politics, or capturing media attention. Enter any nonprofit, volunteer, organize, or attend a radical convention, and you will find yourself on a battlefield of this kind of positioning. If you want to stay in the conversation, sooner or later you will take on an epithet, a position, and an identity.

There are deeply structured, historical reasons why most people on the left operate out of a politics of exclusion. It is history's curse.

The problem is that not everyone can claim a moral identity in this game; some are excluded for good. Straight, white, educated male radicals can identify in support of Puerto-Rican independence; they can describe what they've inhabited for a long time, but they cannot claim to speak for the movement. They cannot claim, by birth or natural experience, any of the identities that would tell them where to stand: ethnicity, gender, queerness, or class. Some apprentice themselves to another movement, and speak for anti-gentrification after spending ten years working against gentrification. Some resuscitate an ancestor -- a steel-worker or immigrant farmer grandparent. All options entail labor. They are inherently unfriendly to beginners or learners. Some radicals like it that way: a high barrier to entry means fewer superficial participants, more true believers in the ranks.

A high barrier to entry makes the left exclusive. It also means shutting out the well-meaning colleague or naive student who'd like to help but has no experience. It means shrugging at or mocking parents, siblings, and acquaintances who don't get it. This kind of behavior is legion in activist circles: I've both received and replicated it. A beginner and a person of reasonable privilege, one is likely to receive the rebuff exclusion on a frequent basis. The way things go, being an activist means lecturing most of one's peers most of the time on how they don't get it.

No wonder there are so few straight, white men in these movements. So far as I can tell, they are liable to suffer the brunt of isolation. As a woman and a scholar, I can at least from time to time vent my isolation in the form of an emotional essay, a genre stretching back to Virginia Woolf. But imagine my idealistic scientist colleagues -- no wonder their energies are bound up with Kurzweil-style transhumanism and other fantasies with nothing to do with the current perils of the environment, of race and class. No wonder my white, male colleagues in the humanities decline to speak on any subject from a moral position, if they do so, hopelessly abstract it into libertarianism or theology or post-Marxism. They are excluded from all other conversations: they cannot speak as an expert, certainly; but the path of humility is also likely to be quite lonely in a world where the politics of exclusion rule. It is very, very hard to think of oneself as a moral subject in the absence of a community.

What a strange world, where being a person of privilege and power requires one to suppress the impulse for either community or a better world.

There are alternatives to shutting out people from conversation. I had enough of exclusion early: by birth and timing, I wasn't one of the individuals who profited from it. Shortly after college I stopped calling myself a feminist in most public contexts, having watched the reflex hostility of class-based or intellectual radicals with whom I allied myself in other contexts. Why throw up a wall when you're trying to forge a movement? Quieting -- not absolute silence, but forebearant quieting -- was the price of participation. I called myself a feminist in private, and continued hanging out with labor organizers, progressive Christians, and social-networking activists. I kept my lens, my information, but I spoke less about what I knew as a subject and more about what I was learning as a participant. I quieted down to listen; I let go of my own exclusion politics; I inherited community.

Community is the alternative to exclusion. Community, that overspent word of NPR, is a cliche in 2010; it helps to remember that in 1880, community was a term of high theory. Talking about "community" in 1880 meant challenging the rights of landlords and looking back to medieval communes for the inspiration of a city in which the poor could afford to participate. Advocates of community like Annie Besant became the first proponents of rent control and public housing. Beatrice Potter Webb and other privileged women took jobs as rent collectors and union organizers, seeping themselves in the world where the other class lived. They did not insist on their own identity politics: they took up the problem of forging social bridges.

Which brings us to why so many conversations, relationships, and ideas within the contemporary left are *not* about community. The significance of "community" was spatial: it was based on a commons. They looked to the ancient town commons as an ideal for the shape of the city, a place where people of different backgrounds met each other and interacted on a regular basis. Strangers drifted in and out of the medieval market, challenging the politics of the local with news from far-off cities and religions. Community is about meeting people different than you are. When, much later, politicians and journalists began speaking about the "black community", they misapplied the term, as many leftist activists do to this day. If everyone looks just like everyone else, what you're creating is not a community.

We seek out relationships informed by community because they offer the opportunity for changing history. Zapatistas have survived through their connections with politicians, academics, and elites. The nineteenth-century rent-control movement succeeded only where it united tenants and organizers from classes of privilege. When I let my own feminist identity politics go, I joined the food activists and social-networking activists who were creating real change: not because they, as individuals, were insightful, so much as because there, around those issues, a community had formed of diverse people with enough motivation to act. It was a community so poised as to transform the social structures around it: it was what, in the mid-twentieth-century, clever people who'd heard about the spontaneous migration of atoms called a "movement." It is the union of those powers from below and above that made such movements so powerful: such powers rarely appear in the life of the repressed when they work alone. The payoff of changing history is freedom: not the freedom from priests or capitalism, those battles of our ancestors; but freedom from the doom of history: freedom from the doom of exclusion. We want our children to be free to meet, converse, mingle, learn, work and play, without undergoing the impossible labor of processing history. We want participation for queer, black, Latin, female, and migrant children who face barriers everywhere in education, academia, and the professions. We also want the experience of participation for middle-class, white, male, straight children: because that experience makes for happier, freer, less afraid, more playful individuals. It makes for a world of imagination, exchange, and learning. I want my children free from the kinds of isolation and loneliness in which many radicals have lived for most of their (our) days.

For me, the renegotiation of identity has been crucial to receiving information from quarters previously invisible to me. Any alliance of working intellectuals and thinking workers demands the renegotiation of identity on all sides. Where I have found an opening, I've found myself participating in the making of a new history, a happier alternative to the curses of exclusion that we inherit from the past. But while I let my own walls down, the people around me did not: colleagues, friends, and potential partners still tell me how it is, frequently. A choice in favor of community is a choice to listen to people who are different from oneself.

If one takes up a moral commitment to the kinds of relationships that foster social change, one is going to encounter the vanguard of exclusion politics, and one will necessarily suffer abuse. If one is going to continue listening, bridging, moving, and living, one will probably have to make a myriad series of corrections: boundaries, blockages, and disengagements, throwing up walls against abuse. Where the abuse slides out of expectation, you're in for long, unasked-for months of pushing the noise out of one's head. The walls of exclusion shoot up, and the supplicant is left in the exile of history, with no community to save her. It is immoral. Exclusion stifles conversation; it inflicts the labor of history on future conversations, relationships, and generations. It makes us fearful; it makes white, privileged people of power less rather than more willing to engage the movements that afford an opportunity for transformation. Where, after so much naysaying, will we find the masses willing to participate in a broadcast revolution of social life in the name of justice or the environment? Exclusion kills off participation, creating artificially high barriers to community and thus prohibiting movements of scale. It is at the heart of the great lack of transformative movements like those of the nineteenth-century city; movements that were grounded in community, not exclusion or identity. Exclusion destroys life; it inhibits play; it stifles courage. It drains good things wherever it finds them. Say to the activist: YOU are the source of my pain.

Listing one apprentice's or friend's or partner's shortcomings only makes one into another of the perpetuators of exclusion. If one wants to stay in community, one will have to keep tearing those walls down. Even in a good relationship or a solid movement, this kind of renegotiation is necessary. Forgiveness, the theologians say, may be offered a thousand times a day. Purged, forgiving, listening, talking, flowing with change and new information, these are the techniques of being human that loose the exclusions of history. In them lies something that tastes vaguely sweet, as if there were a cure for pain.

But balm for the wounds of history never comes from one direction alone. There are no cure-alls in a game of multiple causation. I don't look to another relationship to stop my stomach hurting; I trust a long conflation of factors -- relationships including searching out kind colleagues and kinder friends, exercise, diet, dancing, distancing oneself from the dramatic and selfish; living the commitment to one's values, and connecting with some kind of spirit.

Indeed, some of those parts are easier than others. So with that (glances out window at the city pool a block away)...

Face to Face

2010-06-24T14:04:00.001-07:00

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough. Ezra Pound

Sociologist Richard Sennett's Flesh and Stone (1996) gives a strange history of interaction. Deploring the death of human contact in public, Sennett blames modern loneliness upon Greek masculinity, the Christian church, urban planning, and indeed capitalism's fear of the poor.

Such arguments raise profound questions for the way we live: is loneliness a human condition? or have modern people, divided by suburbs and cubicles, removed themselves from strangers to a degree unprecedented in other ages? History lends some answers. In The Road to Rule (Harvard University Press, 2011), I show that strangers stopped speaking to each other on the public streets of nineteenth-century Britain as middle-class travelers began to rely on guidebooks and maps for wayfinding advice they once received face-to-face from strangers. In other articles, I've examined the shift of body language and changing repertoires for reading strangers' faces.

But writers become sensitive to habits of interaction by living in a body in the world, not by books alone. ChatRoulette is an online website that randomly assigns your video camera to another party. There are dorm rooms, people masturbating, and dance studios -- wherever people happen to be -- from all around the world. Enter and you could find yourself looking into any of the nations where the internet is cheap: Japan, Boston, or Ireland. Go and you'll find a disproportionate number of men, a series few black screens (where the user wants to see you but won't show himself); and a large number of penises in the process of being jerked off.

But click past these gatekeepers and you might find yourself looking straight at the face of a stranger. Not in the eyes; both of you are almost certainly looking into the computer screen, not its camera. But there they are, in real time, the stranger's face, looking back at you.

You find yourself gazing into the face of strangers intently, studying teeth, hair, eyes, and smiles. People are too nervous on chatroulette to say much at first: what one really wants to do is stare at the face. After a string of penises another shy face, slightly amused, comes as a welcome surprise. For a few minutes you just look at the other person's laughing eyes, flickering from camera to screen, both of you amused to find another person with clothes on. The shape of the eyes, the face leaning towards you, the motions of a laugh are mostly silent, because most of us have terrible microphones in our computers. So we look and look, and then if we take up courage, if the person isn't to sour or somber, maybe we bend towards the keyboard and type, "How are you?" Contact is all about the face.

Three days ago I found myself giggling face-to-face with a twenty-year-old in Berlin who had just gotten off the night shift. It was 2am in Boston and 8am in Berlin, and there was sunlight coming through the window of the other room. We didn't have much to say to each other, but there was a full fifteen minutes of staring at each others' faces, lively, grinning, eyes moving, the pure delight of connection.

It takes a new technology to see a face a different way, to open up the room for longings otherwise suppressed or forgotten. How little did I know I wanted so much to gaze, to be gazed upon; to be seen. For two full days I thought only about that smile.

In The Railway Journey (1987), historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch argued that nineteenth-century trains were the first place where large numbers of strangers sat facing each other in silence. The experience created, he argued, the strange phenomenon of strangers looking at each other without saying anything. Thomas de Quincey's rambles in nineteenth-century London reflected another aspect to that silence: the strange sobriety of strangers on the streets in London, careful not to crack a smile or break a stride. Each face was frozen in the aspect of concrete: two windows looking out, nothing looking in. Strangers locked eyes to their mutual embarrassment. On the Tube people stare at the floor. A book is a comfort, a retreat.

In the city a few days later, I realize how little I gaze in everyday life. Philosopher Edward Casey, in his monumental study The World at a Glance (2007), asserts that the gaze of cinema is a rarity in human history, founded mainly upon the furtive glances, the fleeting snapshots of strangers' expressions and gestures. Early cinema scholars equated gazing with bought luxury, the privilege of the man in the box-seat staring at the woman on the stage, or the privilege of moneyed people staring through department-store windows. The intimacy of the face is something most of us only have with movie stars, whose pores and creases we know in detail. The luxury of gazing and gazing at another living face -- and of being gazed back upon -- is like drinking in the magic of cinema. More: it's like *being* the magic of cinema. It's the opportunity of being enchanted with someone else's pure personhood. It is not their ideas, their voice, their touch, their beauty that are transmitted through the tiny screens and dodgy cameras: it's their sure presence, their strange daring, for being alone with a stranger, for letting their face be studied. I find myself stopping at the face that says, "I am here! How crazy is that?" My shy smile back asks: "How funny is it that we're staring?"

So this human gaze is something special, historically speaking: the chance to look face to face, rather than through a glance fleetingly, at the lines of strangers' faces. We gaze at icons, moviestars, and children. The intimacy of gazing is too much, too scary, to entertain with adults. God forbid you study the face of a stranger on the bus or in the cafe.

Even in love, most of us blush and become calm when our partner breaks the stare to turn towards our feet or hair. Even among friends, we change topics that cut too close; we relieve the burden of presence by playing games or eating or telling stories. When do we stare?

Mostly, even on chatroulette, one does not stare; either party has the option of selecting "next" and being propelled to the next screen. I glance at nervous twenty-year-olds and immediately hit "next," downright afraid of being face-to-face with expressions so raw, so scared; as if looking any longer at their faces could put me in their condition.

We see through a glass darkly, says the Bible. How long will chatroulette remain a novelty, an opportunity for seeing people anew? For how many people does it actually operate that way? For a moment now, we see face-to-face. As we fill our screens with ephemeral windows that studies tell us sap our attention span, the glance predominates. We see face-to-face but for a moment: it is enough to remind us of how beautiful other people are, even if hereafter we choose against it, deflecting our gaze in shyness.

Locals and Tourists: The Maps of Collective Imaginations

2010-06-16T18:04:00.000-07:00

About a year ago, I started asking my graduate students in digital history about a complicated problem: sorting photos, not text, for cultural data. When humanities professors go digital, typically they tackle text first. Humanities professors, schooled on books and sorted by proficiency in the math-and-numbers testing of the SAT and GRE, are (like most of our text-based culture) fluent with words, not pictures. The genera of research projects they attempt are based in text. They sort court cases for redundant terms; they try to identify the relationships between individuals in the Domesday book, or they tally the programs from the eighteenth-century theater -- all sorting games that effectively involve sophisticated flavors of keyword search. Like most of search software for the internet, humanities professors can only get you to what we know about text-based culture.

But scholars have long been aware of a universe of visual signifiers, exchanged beyond the scope of literate elites among the illiterate masses. Even in an age of mass literacy, 90% of experience is visual, and the built environment, advertising, the commodity, gesture, and ritual constantly fill the visual cortex with new messages about social reality.

Since "local" and "tourist" maps appeared on Eric Fischer's flickr site, however, the humanities have a hard prod to try something more visual.

The Local v Tourist map is the first attempt to map a collective *visual* (rather than textual) imagination. By dividing the population into two groups -- locals and tourists -- the maps manage to point at one of the foundational terms of modern sociology and anthropology. The key term was "world view." From the 1880s forward, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists and art historians fixated upon "world view" as a category for understanding how different demographics use and move through a city, a forest, a market, or government in very different ways.

"World view" is always studied through the use and experience and naming of everyday places, which makes social networks in flickr such a perfect way of studying it. Further horizons include the ability to show you something like "the Chicano city" or "the teenager city" and invite the traveler to really become a traveler into different peoples' worlds -- not just into the social imaginary of the city as presented by Disney or Fodor.

The next step, it seems to me, is using photosynth to agglomerate something about the local/tourist city -- even "averaging" houses, monuments, museums, parks, or people from local v tourist. Or, as Bethany Nowviskie prods me, averaging colors and angles used by locals and tourists. Or, if one is using film-in-time rather than pictures to make an argument: smooshing them together into a VR tour of the local v tourist city.

One of the grants I wrote last year was for a nonprofit in Chicago with thousands of landscape photographs taken by youth of color. We were imagining building something like this to sort their photographs, then building a mobile phone app to help bring in new photos with GPS and social networking metadata.

All of this represents a new way of thinking about how people deal with the spaces around them -- how to see into the world views of different cultures, the overlapping planes of culture in real space. And *that* represents the real horizon of synthetic research in historical landscape photographs, maps, and travel-guides.

If we can build a world-view-surfer for Chicago on Flickr, we can build it for French and English explorers with the Newberry library maps & guidebooks on Google Earth. The old historical chestnut was that the French went by river; the English by land, and their cities, landscapes, and language developed accordingly. What other patterns are out there?

Overlapping world views, transposed onto the same space: synthesizing and averaging images to give an overview of how different cultures use landscape -- this is the horizon of a vast and little-known frontier.

There's room for much building yonder. Neither the Googles of the world, nor the visual analysts of computer science departments, nor scholars of the visual humanities have come up with tools sufficient to differentiate World View. But the material is vast.

Announcing: Rust Belt Tour Part 2

2010-06-15T14:01:00.001-07:00

In a few weeks, I embark for Rust Belt Tour Part 2, camera in tow, looking for traces of how people's relationship with their territory is changing.

The Rust Belt has some of the highest rates of foreclosure, eviction, homelessness, and unemployment of any area of the nation. It's the perfect geographical region to study if you want to understand the social reality of the economic downturn.

A Modest Proposal

The thing that's changing right now isn't a new Russian Revolution or a new age of Utopias. It's just a subtle, historical shift in credit markets, migration patterns, and how-people-meet. Those things are worth knowing about and worth looking for.

In advance of the journey, we will look at maps of foreclosures, rates of debt, and new migration patterns. We'll be stopping off at shelters and places we could go where we'd find people in transit, i.e. truck stops, campgrounds, and the "jungles" where the homeless live.

What is the relationship between people and their territory in general? As we tour the Rust Belt, filming and interviewing, there are patterns that we can expect to encounter. Minorities are the most vulnerable to eviction, foreclosure, and migration. In the current crisis, minorities have lost structural control because of racist urban-planning policies inaugurated in midcentury America and continuing today under the guise of redevelopment (see my article, "The AntiDevelopment Crisis"

On the other side of these ghettos are zones of privilege, filled with murals, farmers' markets, and community gardens. Their isolation, however, means that community is but a facade for most of them. In our last tour we saw parades that no one attended, "community" gardens that fed but one family, and towns "revitalized" by artists where it was impossible to find food. The communities that self-isolate with capital/race/privilege are the least robust and interesting.

As we travel, we will be looking for territories where new forms of politics are being forged -- places that don't conform to the model described above. Throughout history, communities find each other in space. In nineteenth-century London and Paris and CHicago, radical politics emerged from public parks and urban cafes. We will ask, How is the relationship between people and their territory changing right now as a result of things more specific and structural than a local economic crisis? Our intuitions so far draw us to three conclusions.

First, the international evaporation of credit and the foreclosure crisis is pushing the poor out of Rust Belt cities at a higher rate than ever before. On our last trip, we learned from our friend Valdis Krebs how the international evaporation of credit was spiraling into the targeted eviction of folks in poor
neighborhoods, forcing out ethnic homeowners from the neighborhoods of Flint, Cleveland, and Philadelphia.

Second, the deindustrialization of North America is promoting a backwards-migration of radicals and artist elites to the places of abandonment. On our last trip, we saw in Braddock how deindustrialization was driving a new
back-to-the-land movement of rich elites. We learned about how deindustrialized towns save themselves by recruiting prisons. We read in the NYT, about the wealth of abandoned property in the Rust Belt, and how back-to-the-land punk squatters in Buffalo are changing land law to protect squatters' rights.

Third, the internet is promoting the creation of new communities.
c) changes in how-people-meet - historically, newspapers, maps, and guidebooks changed who-talked-to-whom, not necessarily making everyone talk, but opening up certain places where only the rich or only radicals met.

Are there internet places where elites are meeting and then changing the rust belt? are there internet places where radicals are meeting and then hooking up in real life?

We will scour sites such as http://www.kickstarter.com/, where nonprofits raise funds for new community gardens, and http://www.pledgebank.com/ for evidence of new meeting patterns. -- which has more interface with homeless shelters and soup kitchens.

Social networking among nonprofits seems to be genuinely changing the shape of engagement in America. For instance, community-based funding seems to be saving local agriculture in San Francisco.

However, web-based charity may mean a lot less in places of economic isolation like the Rust Belt. A preliminary survey of these sites suggests that the majority of users are privileged users-of-technology, meeting up for the purposes of painting murals or planting community gardens: in short, they're gentrifying the poor out of neighborhoods. The nonprofits receiving funding on Kickstarter have raised funds for community gardens and murals, but not for rehousing the homeless or creating soup kitchens.

We're interested in finding any users who aren't local garden leagues -- perhaps punk
squatters who found out about their squat via the internet, or users of http://www.couchsurfing.org/ in more diverse areas of rust belt cities.

In a few weeks, we'll be reporting back. Till then, check out the photos from Rust Belt Tour '09 and reports from our travels last year.

The Invisible Frontier: Thrivability Essay, 2010

2010-03-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

(the following essay was my contribution to Jean Russell's digital pamphlet, Thrivability, which outlines the pathways to a new economy built upon respect for humans, the value economy, and the environment. Read more about Jean's vision at her blog, Thrivable)

The invisible frontier is the location of the zones where modernity has failed to make good on its promises: famines, wars, corrupt bureaucracies; ghettos without exits. For those who rest content in the faith that capital heals everything, the invisible frontier remains invisible. When confronted with rumors of people on the other side, they characterize those people as monsters : the great unwashed, living in a devil’s playground of arson and gang wars.

The old-fashioned capitalists are wrong about what things look like across the invisible frontier. That way lies information, precious information. The information tells us about modernity’s failures, about government abuses and neglect, about disintegrating markets. A drive through the wrong side of town shows the grocery stores that are closing their doors, the encampments of homeless, the empty factories.
A drive through the Rust Belt shows quick the devastation hidden from coastal enclaves: entire neighborhoods, demolished. Standing skyscrapers, vacant. New empty lots, cleared by arson. Closing schools. Closing hospitals. Abandoned old folks’ homes. No one can afford them. This information is frequently of a kind useful to those who care about the future: it shows how bad the economy is and how much worse it could get. The invisible frontiers show what happens in the breakdown of capitalism and government: they show the societies of hobos, the existence of spontaneous guilds in trailer parks, child-care co-ops, community gardens, and utopian storefronts. The
invisible frontier is the location of experiments that rival capitalism.

In general, invisibility happens because of lack of access to capital, social or otherwise. The son-of-a-preacher public health expert hasn’t walked the back roads of Liverpool and has preconceptions about what the inhabitants need: they need morality before they need running water. The son-of-a-preacher knows who to talk to in parliament; the Liverpudlians do not. Another example: the health-insurance lobbyist
can buy access to the Senator; devoted student activists cannot. People on the other side of the digital divide -- the 12% whom the Pew tells us have not even a dial-up connection -- cannot tell Silicon-Valley engineers to design community-participation software that runs off of cell phones.

Insidiously, however, the invisibility of people is usually mutual. Even if you volunteered to design infrastructure tailored to the people on the other side of the digital divide, they might have a hard time answering the question. The uses of infrastructure are new to a people who lost their houses to highways. Poor factory-workers in nineteenth-century Liverpool choked when they went to Parliament.
They didn’t know which functionary they would speak to, or which language with which they would interact if they found him. A whole host of functionaries have arisen since 1870 with the attention of bridging these gaps: public schools, social workers, outreach centers, organizers, and activists. All of our modern institutions produce a
surfeit of paper. The institutions of freedom -- from Parliament and Congress to the school board to the IRS and the design of the internet -- are shrouded in paper, their inner workings invisible to the people who would benefit the most therefrom.

Landscape invisibility compounds class invisibility. Stockton, a foreclosure capital, is home to Hispanic truck-drivers and factory-workers who have lost their houses in great numbers. They are no different than other, better-known working-class immigrants in San Diego, Chicago, and New York. However, Stockton is off the map. First, the poor lose their landscape; next, they become invisible. Whatever capital has forgotten about dissolves like the soft paper of midcentury paperbacks, crumbling in the hand. On the digital landscape, the overworked and harried rarely contribute to community web2.0 bike-maps. They too become invisible. We keep planning, however, as if there were no frontier, and nothing invisible beyond it.

The truly sustainable, the thrivable designer, reaches hands across the invisible frontier. It reaches across the digital divide, and puts technology for rethinking government, energy, and food directly in the hands of those communities who live in food ghettos (where there are no grocery stores) and dial-up deserts (where one pays
upwards of $40/mo for a slow connection on a pc shared by 5). Thrivable design listens patiently, it enters dialogue with potential users who find the new terms difficult, whose interests and resources and foreign to those who come from a state of capital.

Thrivability recasts the designer's place: no more in the halls of power, hanging out in shiny buildings in well-kept cafes with others of money; now instead, the designer belongs in the city, on public transit, exploring the suburban ghetto. Thrivable design on the invisible frontier pays attention to all those details of life hidden in the landscape -- the public places where strangers meet, the memory of people who have migrated a long way together, the corridors people travel who don't have access to funds.

The thrivable designer sees life -- people trying to make a living, communities that need tools -- where old-fashioned capitalists see only failure. Thrivability recasts the designer's role: no more the paid lieutenant of corporation and state; now, instead, the wanderer around invisible peripheries, the witness and facilitator of emergent states.

Visualizing the Academic Mind

2010-03-11T19:16:00.000-08:00

The Social Sciences began experimenting with visualization as early as the 1910s, when Franz Boas applied Kwakiutl place-names to an ordinary map to help him better explain the Kwakiutl world view. In the 1940s, scholars of folklore began abstracting these geographical diagrams into "synoptic diagrams" that showed concepts in relationship to each other. Since that time, scholars around a range of disciplines have used mental maps and synoptic diagrams for their powers at synthesizing a range of information from diverse fields.

James A. Notopoulos, “The Symbolism of the Sun and Light in the Republic of Plato. II,” Classical Philology 39, no. 4 (October 1944): 223-240.

Briefly, visualizations do two things to rational argument that text is very bad at doing.

Synoptic diagrams are excellent at getting people on the same page. For this reason, anthropologists in the 1960s used them to synthesize everything known about cultural binaries, making sure that divergent scholars came to a consensus about the shape of world view. For this reason, too, "visual journalists" were hired in Silicon Valley from the 1970s forward to draw synoptic diagrams of a discussion, live. When everything everyone has said in a meeting appears on the wall, visually organized by the proximity of arguments, the meeting tends towards agreement. With a visual record, it's more difficult to suddenly disagree, reposition oneself from the outside or challenge the record. Visual diagrams lend permanence to thoughts and help to establish universal, structural arrangements, organizing all intellectual manifestations.

Visual diagrams are also particularly useful for ability to pan out. In a text document, it's often hard to get an overview without relying on an arbitrary abstraction like a table of contents. When reading a map, however, the scholar bends over to see more clearly the detail around a particular city, or steps back to see the nation as a whole. Just so, a visual diagram of an argument allows the reader to very quickly slip between the finite details and the big picture -- making sure that the argument fits exactly where it's supposed to.

For both of these reasons, I've found, as a scholar who produces text, that visual diagramming aids both my ability to recall large numbers of facts -- and to organize them into a larger picture without repeating myself.

There's much to be said here, but I'll confine myself to mentioning two of my favorite tools and their uses.

1) PersonalBrain

Key uses:
- Notetaking at conferences/lectures when facts may be needed for later recall
- Organizing facts related to an overview of a broader field
- Brainstorming in a relatively new subject area
- Keeping track of large numbers of dates, characters, and places when these items are new

PersonalBrain is a sovereign organizer of images, notes, and web links -- it allows you to drag and drop URL's, jpg's, and text from your daily reading program into a map. A few keystrokes allow you to type "thoughts," quickly linking "up" to "parent thoughts" -- overarching categories (History of Chicago < History of Cities) -- and "down" to "child thoughts" (History of Chicago > Ship and Sanitary Canal).

PersonalBrain is amazing at making million-thought outlines at conferences. Using it to take notes allows you to, over time, create an extended map of your entire knowledge of things-people-have-told-you-about-the-periphery-of-your-field.

Say I'm listening to presentations at the Anglo-American Conference, and one of them includes a colleague lecturing on balloon housing in the history of Chicago. When I begin taking notes on "Balloon Housing," I link it to the "History of Chicago." PersonalBrain remembers that I have other notes on the History of Chicago, and suddenly, my two sets of ideas are connected. Everything the colleague now tells me about housing and construction is now linked, however distantly, to the larger thoughts, The History of Chicago and the History of Cities. Should I ever need to locate those thoughts again, there they are, linked up with their related subjects.

Over time, these expanding larger categories ("history", "modernity", and "landscape" are key ones in my case) come to be enriched with detailed information garnered from sitting in conferences, job talks, and other lectures.

Five years from now, when I'm suddenly called upon to teach an introduction to Western Civilization, there will be my lecture notes: matching my colleague, his references to Chicago, all the notes I took, and any other notes I happen to take on Chicago after now. Say I'm planning that lecture, and want to recall how Chicago fits into everything else I know about modernity. PersonalBrain allows me to pan back from the single-thought view. It creates a map -- weighting thoughts related to each other so that they float near each other. On a big screen, entire branches of knowledge become clear.

This flexibility and permanence become rapidly useful when you're juggling large numbers of concepts whose relationship to each other is still unclear to you.

A perfect example: rewriting a syllabus. I recently sat down to reconsider the syllabus for a graduate course in Digital History, which I teach at the University of Chicago in Winter 2010-11. The course I teach has three parts -- one, a history of information revolutions since Gutenberg (with readings by Bob Darnton, Adrian Johns, and Ray Kurzweil). Two, an overview of contemporary issues like privacy and copyright (readings by Larry Lessig and Dan Cohen). Three, an introduction to new methods like GIS, network analysis, and collaborative writing.

That's a lot of information to teach. The class only goes clearly if one divides up the syllabus nicely into classes where each meeting offers a small dose of each subject. How to make sure I'm covering my bases? Brainstorming with PersonalBrain helped: I outlined issues and grouped texts together before creating time-oriented thoughts like "Week 1" and dividing them. Take it for a whirl:

Digital History Syllabus
(Hint: the "+" in the menu expands to a more elaborate view; the spider-icon allows you to switch from normal view to expanded view where you start to see the big picture.)

Personal Brain's one weakness for my purposes is that it's not designed to allow you to write in paragraphs. Your "idea" is only allowed to be about 40 or so characters long.

The program is therefore not ideal for writing essays. Thus, the thousand notes on railways i took at the Huntington Library last year: not so great. They're a beautiful outline. They're wonderful to lecture from. I can rearrange them, elaborate them in the "notes" view, and then export them as a text outline. It's very difficult, however, to work sentence-by-sentence through my notes, to make sure that every thought goes in an explanatory order, and that conclusions follow after facts.

Since that visit to the Huntington, I've figured out that a better piece of
software for outlining notes that go into essays is MindManager, a mind-mapping program designed to fit seamlessly into Word.

2) MindManager

Key uses:
- taking notes on a historiography
- taking notes for an essay while moving towards the ultimate structure of the essay

Mindmanager allows you to take notes on a project and move them around in a 3d map
until they make sense. Because the essay view is synoptic, the writer's eye can constantly move back up the tree hierarchy -- to make sure that this thought is in the right place -- and down the tree hierarchy -- to make sure that every statement is thoroughly supported with adequate evidence.

The essay is written as a branching tree. Each sentence and paragraph can be dragged-and-dropped into place; entire sections can be rearranged, with their entire structure intact, into the linear flow of the essay. In this way, the essay's structure is constantly being reorganized for clearer flow.

The writer has the ability to easily zoom in and out of a particular view. As one zooms out, viewing the entire essay as a map, blank spaces of insufficient support become visually clear. That ability alone decreases the chances of convincing oneself that one has adequately supported a point only to remember, when printing the essay out, that insufficient evidence has been cited.

Such tools increase the writer's chances of catching redundancies early, and decrease the likelihood of writing and rewriting the same essay over and over again. A few weeks' work suggests that Mindmanager doubles the writing speed of an average essay, at least.

Once the thoughts are organized in what seems to be their proper shape, sufficiently elaborated, the writer exports to a text document. The visual, hierarchical mindmap instantly becomes a linear essay.

However: MindManager doesn't allow you to make the million-point 3d
map of your own brain. It's marvelous for moving from a visual brainstorming diagram of main points down to support; it's less good at creating permanent ideas in a branching tree of knowledge, giving large ideas permanence, and making connections where none previously existed. For brilliant note-taking at conferences where people are throwing you information you might need to find again in 5 years -- much better to
use Personal Brain.

For my own purposes, I've chosen to adopt both tools for different uses. I use PersonalBrain for taking notes in other people's lectures -- for organizing my knowledge of things of general interest -- and mindmanager for taking notes specific to your own project -- for turning note cards into essays.

Credit where credit is due: Thanks to Jerry Michalski and Cathrine Dam for plugging me in!

The Anti-Development Crisis

2009-12-15T15:47:00.001-08:00

The depression didn't start on Wall Street; it started in Flint, Michigan several decades ago. Thirty years ago, city elders in the Rust Belt announced their plan to rescue economic elites from the sinking ship of car manufacture. Ominously dubbed "Shrinking Cities," the plan evicted tax-delinquent working-class people from their homes and resold the remaining houses on double-wide lots..., (my article continues at the Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jo-guldi/the-anti-development-cris_b_392743.html)

Ghost towns of the nineteenth century

2009-12-10T14:37:00.001-08:00

What are we to think about industrial decay? Should cities like post-Katrina New Orleans or Flint, be cut off, left to drown in their own economic failures?

It is not a new question.

In the 1890s, the Gold Rush of '49 was old news; new types of mining opened industrial sites elsewhere and the boomtowns of California, Nevada, and Utah turned into ghost towns overnight. They were the instant subject of articles and guidebooks for automobile tourists. In 1967, someone published an atlas of them.

Ghost towns represented the spatial end of history, and they were not the first candidates for talking about that subject. Crumbling buildings in slumside London and New York suggested the limits of development; entire regions slid into poverty with the shift of economic currents. Scotland's promising industrial revolution crashed after the 1850s; the American South was haunted by racial strife and soil exhaustion after the civil war. The limits of development were obvious; the traveler had only to look at the ghetto and the national periphery to raise difficult questions.

For political economists of a sanguine temperament, crumbling peripheries simply evidenced the existence of racial hierarchy and the undeserving poor. Places that slid into starvation, such as Ireland, would be corrected by the market. Zones of underdevelopment were zones of opportunity, looked at correctly; if the undeserving Irish refused to labor, foreign investment would eventually develop their island.

By the long depression of the 1870s, however, few writers could feel so bold about the places where depression hit. The economic disintegration of Scotland and the American South, the collapse of California boomtowns, and the constantly decaying stock of city slums all suggested . The burning of Paris under the commune reminded all that other futures were possible.

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It is possible to map the places where such questions come up. In the nineteenth century, the zones where ghost towns seemed significant were a peculiar reflection of liberalism's failures.

Collapse made travelers curious about the linked fates of home and empire. Archaeological sites in India and Persia made British administrators quiver at how easily their own empire might collapse. Roman ruins in England reminded Conrad and Masefield that all empires were fragile. The naturalist W. H. Hudson felt relieved when Roman walls were hidden by ivy. Such a curtain, he thought, should cover over all such failures of history lest men be discouraged. In Afoot in England (1909), a volume on birdwatching, Hudson quoted a Spanish poet whose name had lapsed to the same effect: “What of Rome; its world-conquering power, and majesty and glory – what has it come to?”

Where progress itself was questioned, the next step was to ask whether ghost regions represented the future. Popular fantasy novels explored how free individuals would rise from the sites of decay. Abandoned cities set the scene for both H. Rider Haggard's She (1887) and later Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan (1912). Hudson's 1887 novel, A Crystal Age, predicted a that the twenty-first century would turn its back on both industrialization and cities, reinventing a rural paganism where the names of both Queen Victoria and Moses were equally forgotten.

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What I found I really wanted to do, reading through these travel stories about decay, was to map the first places that came up when I asked Google Books or other archives for nineteenth-century texts with the words "crumbling cities" or "decaying cities" or "ghost cities" or "ghost towns."

Where were they first noted, these cases of urban decay -- in Scotland? in California? on the fringes of empire?

I needed a ten-minute map of a few -- say the first hundred -- just to trigger my mind. What are the patterns of disruption? Where was the periphery decaying? I turned to twitter for advice. Thanks to the amazing Bethany Nowviskie, digital guru at UVA, and Schuyler Erle of Brooklyn, for lending a hand. Thanks to Geomaker for the first working map.

Nineteenth-century hits for "crumbling cities":

Today, urban explorers, kids who break into abandoned buildings in the Rust Belt, see it before other people do.

That geography is significant for a very important reason. Travelers who left zone of prosperity began to write about both history and the future in ways that challenged the dogmas of liberal progress. In losing their faith, they gained the ability to see around the curve of time. The map of decaying places, in other words, is invaluable to those trying to understand either history or their fate.

Deindustrialization may be the future, after all; it was in Britain's future, and it may well be in America's. A geography of decay becomes the map of fantasies about alternatives to liberalism.

My project, The Memory Machine, recently screened at the annual meeting of the History of Science Society, was filmed at the Detroit Book Depository.

The Awakening of Psychogeography: Child Psychology, 1923-1977, and the perception of landscape

2009-10-14T09:12:00.000-07:00

From 1923, when Melanie Klein published her psychological studies of children playing in sandboxes, to 1977, when the first studies of place cells were published, the primary field of new research in the mental processing of the landscape was child psychology. Piaget and Donald Winnicott claimed claimed to study the “infant’s point of view.” Piaget observed children drawing objects and discerned the lack of a sense of a Cartesian grid in their mental worlds; things that were emotionally near were reached for as if physically near. The psychoanalyst Edith Cobb, embarking on a long-term study of childhood experience, identified a formative period between five and twelve, when most of a child’s energy was directed not towards parents or friendships but rather towards place. At this age, she wrote, “the natural world is experienced in some highly evocative way, producing in the child a sense of some profound continuity with natural processes and presenting overt evidence of a biological basis of intuition.”

Play for the infant, Winnicott argued, happened in a space with neither “inner psychic reality” nor “external reality.” He describes a dialectic between merging with mother and separation that is reduplicated with every nonliving object around the child, in particular blankets, teddy-bears, or other cherished objects that the child can alternately caress and attack, treating one moment as the human extension of her own body and the next as an insensate object, its button eyes to be torn out. The sense of self and otherness is therefore gradually formed in the “potential space between the individual and the environment.” The environment becomes thus infested with creative play that invests all objects in the immediate landscape with valuation, extrapolation, and association.

Cobb showed children Rorschach tests and watched them play in sand boxes. She observed with fascination how the children seemed to express emotional attachment in play with objects more vividly than with people or animals.

“I became acutely aware that what a child wanted to do most of all,” she wrote, “was to make a world in which to find a place to discover a self.”

Winnicott defined two different kinds of childhood learning about the environment: the first, “favourable” outcome happens an abundance of individual symbols and fascinations projected onto the environment: “the potential space becomes filled with the products of the baby's own creative imagination.” The landscape where childhood play is allowed becomes “sacred to the individual” as the place where she “experiences creative living.” This is the world of play, characterized by a sense of wonder, free enjoyment, and easy association that Winnicott lauds as giving children a sense of the fullness of their own potential and the many riches of experience. It takes the form of turning any landscape into a magical wonderland, invested with the potential of encountering fairies or taking adventure.

The second outcome, Winnicott argued, would happen in cases of “failure of environmental reliability,” when a baby absorbs adults’ perspectives on the environment. This form of learning teaches the child about zones of danger and safety, but discourages play, and so, Winnicott concludes, is less consistent with the individual development of an internal life, of the ability to critique authority, or of risk-taking behavior outside. Individual imagination in safe childhood exploration of landscape was thus set up against collective order of the environment and the manufacture of a disciplined, uncritical subject.

Most adults, Winnicott argues, have experience of both playspace and discipline. Mature adults can return to access their mental worlds of play, the space of “unintegration,” which he defines as a “day-dream-like” state where fantasy, dream, and real world meet, inner projections applied and then separated from real-world objects, the limits of self and other readjusted. Only by relating to the landscape, he thought, did children have the opportunity of distinguishing themselves as independent entities, of parsing “the nature and interrelationship of inner and outer objects and worlds.”

(Photo thanks: cc 2006 Ian)

The Future of Social Science in the Era of the Internet

2009-10-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

Social science today has an opportunity to create an online infrastructure for social valuation that becomes participatory to a degree far exceeding the contemporary rule. While nineteenth-century social scientists worked for government elites, an online infrastructure designed to illuminate world view would place the tools of cultural observation within reach of many minds. Opening up representation of landscape has the opportunity to directly channel participation into urban planning, tax policy, housing policy, social services, and other aspects of the representation and administration of the physical landscape. It is hoped that application, articles, and videos will pioneer a new role for social science in the era of social networking technology, and foreground the cause of democratizing social science’s power.

So long as government interests dominated the social sciences, the work of the social scientist aimed at influencing the work of the national government. Historian, sociologist and geographer worked to describe cases of state success and failure, expectant that the state would build according to their plans. The end of that political relationship opens up a radical opportunity. Social scientists in the age of the internet have the opportunity to work directly on behalf of communities without the interface of government.

In the age of the internet, radical participatory information exchanges, market and political exchanges replace much of the work of the state. In such a setting, many of the social science’s traditional roles become irrelevant. Social scientists no longer advise a state in charge of designing public spaces where members of identity groups can safely meet. Informal, market-driven social servers such as LinkedIn.com, Facebook.com, and Myspace.com become significant forums for social exchange. Social scientists such as danah boyd have documented the divides of race and class in these sites. But who do they advise? There are no urban planners overseeing Facebook.

Few social scientists have explored the radical opportunities available at the level of design. Launched from independent geeks, corporate start-ups, and computer science departments, new applications spring up constantly, tweaking the infrastructure of social exchange. One application allows Flickr.com photos to appear on Facebook’s wall. Another shows the user a rotating cloud of all the pictures semantically related to a given search term. Fundamentally, these applications are about making connections; their success actually depends upon broadening the internet’s infrastructure to become as participatory as possible.

One of the greatest challenges to participatory exchange on the internet is the limit of transcultural boundaries. Users’ gender, class, race, and identity are obscured online, surfacing as an invisible law of self-association. Reduplicating the isolation of society at large, affluent whites on the internet share information with affluent whites, while the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves populate.

Here the history of the academic disciplines provides insight. Social scientists employed by the state once combated ethnic segregation in the city by prescribing programs such as public housing designed to enhance identity assimilation. Their work tended to generalize racial differences into differences of violence, gender organization, and attitudes towards work.

Armed with new forms social expertise – planners, architects, and geographers – charged with managing the boundaries between cultural worlds, based upon the assumption that the only way world views could be reconciled at large was through the management of the state. Nowhere was this trend clearer than among the experts who embarked upon a discipline new to the twentieth century, the study of cities. Urban scholarship flourished around what was becoming known as the “urban crisis,” the post-civil-rights-era phenomenon of black inner-cities ringed by ethnically divided white suburbs. Intellects as diverse as economist Edward Glaeser, geographer David Harvey and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. examined the historical health of urban administration with an eye to the future of racial integration in America. Geographers asked whether overcrowding in public housing contributed to interracial violence. Child psychologists asked whether access to green spaces influenced the development of creative powers. Social scientists intended to describe the ideal city, and they expected the state to build it.

Their efforts, frequently belittling or primitivizing minority ethnicities, urged their students to concentrate upon designing a single, ideal, national landscape: a design for cities, frequently modernist, that would help immigrants of many backgrounds to assimilate to the same culture. By ignoring difference, they hoped to efface it. Their trajectory was marked by failure, and by the year 2000, Chicago and St. Louis were tearing down the housing projects erected under that regime.

Faith in expert management of cultural infrastructure by sociologists and psychologists gave rise to an unprecedented level of authority being given modern urban planning. The public housing projects erected under their charge took American and British neighborhoods out of the hands of the local ethnic minorities who had built them. Far from the master travelers envisioned by early students of world view, twentieth-century planning aimed to assimilate ethnic minorities by effacing cultural difference.

By contrast, in advising and enabling the oversight of design for online infrastructure, academics in the social sciences can facilitate collaborative knowledge making by communities about themselves.

Social Engineering, Race, and Geography in the 1970s

2009-10-08T17:42:00.000-07:00

When the geographer Peter Gould sat down to write his autobiography in 1990, he looked over a career of mapping the perceptual spaces of Swedes, Tanzanians and college students. Over that life, he had repeatedly claimed that his major contribution to knowledge had been primarily in the service of the state. Gould was the man who figured out how to draw a picture of the version of the nation in a given individual’s head: ask the person to name all the cities they can in the United States; map those.

The results remind us that human beings live in worlds of constructed of personal experience, not in atlases. New Yorkers can name all the boroughs and a smattering of places on the East Coast; Chicagoans can name factories in the Midwest with no resonance at all in San Francisco. The studies he produced were magically suggestive of the distance between worlds: children of fishermen can name and draw every cove round an island; not so those who live on the mainland. Even the citizens of relatively homogenous civilizations, he suggested, could be separated by experience into separate universes of perception, interest, and prejudice.

For most of his career, Gould, like the geographers of his generation, claimed that these findings should interest state bureaucrats. Writing about his first “mental maps” in 1968, he claimed that his audience was bureaucrats “in government service” concerned with “income differentials” and the potential for relocating “migratory movements” in line with industry. Brian Berry of the University of Chicago was even more explicit, announcing to the Annual Conference of the Institute of British Geographers in 1970 that in the new world of “meritocratic élites,” geographers found themselves servants to the “needs of public policy.” He imagined a world where geographers would project the cities of the future that were “most likely to emerge in the future with and without public intervention” and so help functionaries decide and find the tools to shape the most preferable community possible.

This was hardcore social engineering: the idea was that geographers, like psychologists and other social scientists, would aid the twentieth-century state in helping poor people and people of minority races to assimilate, or failing that, in Berry’s words, to “monitor” contemporary developments and so apprise authorities of outbreaks of danger before they happened. Geographers varied in which elites they thought they were advising. David Harvey’s early work specifically targeted the reform of federal mortgage administration. Yi-Fu Tuan emphasized not policy but rather urban planning, and hoped that his literary analyses of landscape would help designers to achieve “a habitat in concert with the full potential of our being.”

Geographers varied as to which areas they thought most merited intervention. Gould claimed that his personal contribution was establishing that isolated islanders had trouble learning about jobs on the mainland; Ley and Cybriwsky used graffiti to discern the most troubled areas of black-Puerto Rican conflict in Philadelphia. Harold Rose defined the city center from St. Louis to Atlanta as a “high risk homicide environment.” Brian Barry was most worried about the poor blacks and white elderly isolated in the impoverished hinterland. Geography was to be the psychological surveillance arm of the state, tracing the zones of isolation and despair emerging around America, in order to more intelligently apply some combination of architecture, welfare, and policing.

A significant group of geographers directed their findings towards the state's management of race. The Chicago School of sociology had mapped racial segregation of Chicago’s neighborhoods since the 1930s, but by blending of psychology and their mapping skills, a new generation of geographers began to rival them. Edward T. Hall’s study of public and private space, The Hidden Dimension (1966), blended studies of rats and slums to argue that overcrowded cities produced escalating acts of violence and decreasing fertility among females.

The studies exploded in the 1960s, offering explanations to confused white Democrats who demanded to know why the passage of the 1965 Equal Rights Act had only resulted in further riots in Watts and Detroit. Applying terms like “overcrowding,” “territoriality,” and “isolation,” geographers charged into the causes and consequences of racial segregation in cities.

The geographers located answers in American zones of isolation and hopelessness. Bill Bunge organized his fellow professors into the Detroit Geographical Expedition, leading frequent trips to document the slums of Detroit and later Toronto. Their findings were equally provocative. In 1968, the Society published a map entitled “Where Commuters Run Over Black Children on the Pointes-Downtown Track.” Life and death, they argued, were not merely the commodities available to any hard-working American, but hung upon the thread of a special kind of privilege, the privilege of safe territory.

That privilege became all the more identifiable in the wake of a series of geographical investigations of racial covenants, which forbid people of color from owning property, and redlining, the practice setting racial qualifications for home loans within certain neighborhoods. Geographers documented the problem in 1960 and 1972, and in David Harvey explained that the high price of mortgages for blacks in Baltimore justified all Marx had said about the direct relationship between high rents and social exclusion.

Describing the deep structuration of the urban crisis became the geographer’s favorite tool. Addressing the Association of American Geographers in 1978, its president, Harold Rose, coined the term “geography of despair” to interpret rising figures for homicide in black neighborhoods. Geographical investigation and race questions and climaxed in Zev Chafet‘s much-acclaimed Devil’s Night (1990), a book that defined the recent spate of black-on-black arson as reaction to white flight in a scene of hopelessness. Black hopelessness, among the social geographers, as the greatest social crisis of the moment, justified their concern. With so much evidence, it was all the more easy for implacable black hopelessness to become a convention of American belief.

The surveying of racial crisis began with advising the state necessarily distanced the geographer from the place he described. Whatever the revolutions within geographers’ hearts, most of them reported, like Gould, to the state, more frequently advising urban planners, architects, and task forces than grassroots networks. They wrote about sexuality and violence in the slum.

Rather than creating sympathy with the victims of race and class, their reports read like porn to the white audiences who consumed them. In The Hidden Dimension, Edward Hall drew parallels between overcrowded rats and contemporary black neighborhoods, indicting both as “behavioral sinks.” Documenting the spread of graffiti from ghetto backstreets to public highways in 1972, David Ley and Roman Cybriwsky explained a “behavioral primitive” akin to animals marking out territory.

Even when taking a conciliatory attitude, privileged observers defined their subjects as the passive victims of environmental forces. Rose wrote of his study of homicide, “Youth who find difficulty establishing themselves in American society are less prone to abide by the norms of the larger society,” the direct result of which was untamed aggression among black and hispanic males, lashing out against strangers. Friedmann and Miller concluded, with equal finality, that the poor whites in deindustrialized rustbelt towns were “short both on civic leadership and hope. They can neither grasp the scope of the events that have overtaken them nor are they capable of responding creatively to the new situations.” Racialized or not, the environmental forces described in the reports were both final and damning.

By 1990, however, Peter Gould had glimpsed another use for his mental maps. He had been watching over thirty years how his classes of eighty to a hundred people responded to seeing him explain the vast differences of experience between growing up in a black ghetto and a white suburb. They stopped in their tracks, he wrote, to realize that “their location in geographic space seemed to determine to a high degree the information they had.” As the undergraduates learned to understand their aesthetic tastes and political attitudes as a reflection of where they grew up, he wrote, they began to ask where they were located “in ‘ethnic space,’ ‘religious space,’ and ‘gender space.’”

The question, at base, as he formulated it, was actually a question most provocative when aimed at his privileged, white undergraduates: “How free really were they when they were trapped by their locations in these other spaces?”

Bulldozing your Neighbors: Development Plans in the Rust Belt

2009-10-06T15:03:00.000-07:00

Across the Midwest, the stimulus package is encouraging very strange things: cities are using it to demolish capital instead of to build it.

The signs are everywhere if you know where to look. In the Polish Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, I’m pitching my tent in a vacant lot. Until a few months ago, an abandoned house stood in the space where I’ll be sleeping tonight. A journalist was squatting in this house, free of rent, much like artists who took over empty factories and abandoned houses in the 1990s. The landlord didn’t bother to evict her: times were hard and few tenants were available. The house was falling down, and the journalist was doing basic repairs and making sure that no one damaged the property. The agreement suited everyone. Valuable housing stock was maintained; meanwhile, a woman was able to keep a roof over her head.

Last year, however, the city seized the squat, which was $6,000 overdue in back taxes. Rather than leaving it standing, the city spent about $5,000 in federal funds to bulldoze the house. The vacant lot is not likely to be rebuilt anytime soon.

Bulldozing is an odd strategy for an economic downturn, but it’s the major urban strategy being pursued in the rust belt. The “shrinking cities” scheme started in Flint, Michigan in the 1980s. Instead of allowing vacant houses to stand, city officials would use federal, state, and local funds to bulldoze houses. The vacant lots would be turned over to favored development corporations or – more likely – left fallow. In the wake of the current foreclosure crisis, the strategy of “shrinking cities” is being adopted as a way of dealing with vacant lots in Cleveland and Pittsburgh; bulldozing is now the unofficial urban policy of the Obama administration.

Read the rest at the Commonweal Institute, where I'm a fellow.

In praise of surre(gion)alism

2009-08-04T07:58:00.000-07:00

Max Cafard's Surre(gion)alist Manifest first appeared in Exquisite Corpse in 1990 and was afterwards republished with a preface by New Orleans poet Andrei Codrescu. Arguing for the eminence of the local as a point of view, the manifesto urged readers to consider their own perspective, political and culture, as the outcome of their existence at a certain place and time. It argued that only in radical utopian moments such as May 1968 do individuals become able to envision life beyond the bounds of their own history.

I had the great joy of getting to meet Max and hang out back in May while passing through New Orleans. We met for coffee in the afternoon and talked about landscapes till late at night. He told me about his ancestors, how they'd come to New Orleans trying to save the family farm back in France. I got to hear about Max's travels through anarchist experiments around Europe in the 60s. I got to hear about New Orleans' travelers who tack between racial neighborhoods, till the invisible boundaries break down and new worlds become visible. I got to hear about living in New Orleans in the breakdown around Katrina, when Max's son, intimate with the ghettos and slums of many races, ended up naked in prison for days, then housed in solitary for months, unbeknownst to his relatives.

Max's major opus, the Surre(gion)alist Manifesto, excavates radical European and Chinese philosophy for a new political philosophy appropriate to twenty-first century America. It looks back to the radical individual Taoism of Lao Tse, the utopian experiments of nineteenth-century Europe, the anarchist/individualist critique of Dada, and the radical Situationist Internationale of 1960s Paris, searching for a utopian logic that respects the radical difference of place and individual will. The intellectual roots here are serious: the analysis of psychogeography pioneered by Bachelard, Dubord, and De Certeau, combined with the Henri Lefebvre's critique of capitalism. Cafard reduces, engineering a new dialectic of liberation, a landscapey recipe, the navigation between the "utopian nowhere of meaning and the topian density of earth."

In the Manifesto, attention to local landscape offers a movement towards political and economic liberation. Cafard urges, Strive to reject the people who would manage you from another place far away, whether they are capitalists or teachers. Try not to be like them: try to live instead in the landscape of your journey, taking lessons from the cities and seasons where you find yourself.

This injunction to inhabit the local first, as a beginning of a radical politics, is explained more fully in another fine essay, "Deep Play in the City." Here Cafard applies radical psychogeography as an instruction set for looking at urban landscapes. Landscapeyness becomes the beginning of radical political freedom.

Back over on Landsploitation, the experimental film channel for all things landscapey, Max has let me put up the video version of the Manifesto, presented by Cafard's student Andrew Goodrich. If you'd prefer the text version, you can find it here.

I'd like to take this opportunity to remind readers that I curate two videocasts about everyday landscape. Landsploitation presents experimental videos and sound. Dilettantes and film geeks both welcome. The Landscape Studies Podcast presents work by my colleagues, typically papers that have been read already at conferences, excerpts of talks, or summaries of scholarly articles. Itunes listeners, subscribe to Landsploitation and Landscape Studies. Both are accepting submissions.

Digital History Syllabus: Historiography and Methods

2009-06-28T06:36:00.000-07:00

Digital History tells the deep story of the information revolutions the world is now experiencing. It looks back to earlier revolutions in information and technology, searching for analogous transformations in our notions of property, sociability, collaboration, and rule. By looking at these previous information revolutions -- including the print, urban, transport, and mass media revolutions -- historians come much better equipped to engage relevant, contemporary questions of copyright, property ownership, and the rule of experts. Such questions engage the historian in contemporary debates about the future of ongoing information revolutions for politics, society, and the self.

This search forces the historian to reprioritize new kinds of teaching, researching and publishing that may have little to do with traditional books, lectures, seminars, and conferences. As the world archive becomes digitized, the scholars who make the most persuasive and radical arguments become those who have mastered new techniques for mining information from the world-catalogue of maps, images, and automatically-translated texts of all eras. As reading shifts towards browsing, as writing becomes more collaborative, the very skills we teach undergraduates are shifting to emphasize the pithy, analytic, and interdisciplinary over the twelve-page essay within a particular discipline. As the university publishing houses collapse and university lectures become downloadable on the web, academic experts will find homes in institutions whose nature we can scarcely anticipate now.

The only way to prepare ourselves for those eventualities is to experiment broadly with the tools of participative education, writing, and publication now, testing them for the best advantages and most threatening shortcomings. What we’re attempting is actually a reflexive application of historical knowledge to self-understanding within the discipline of history. One hope of such an agenda is that the engaged historians of the present will become the architects of a new system for the future.

Goals:

• Experimenting as a class with web2.0 technology with an eye to understanding its role in collaborative research, publishing, and teaching
• Testing a set of new research tools each week by asking students to apply them to their current area of interest, dissertation list, and qualifying exams material, so that they may immediately begin executing more sophisticated ways of sorting their material and more public ways of making that knowledge available to others. To become comfortable assessing and reviewing new technologies’ potential for academic use.
• Charting the historiography of information revolutions capable of helping the historian effectively comment on contemporary experience, social change, and policy
• Establishing the grounds for comparing this scholarly historiography to contemporary uses of history and theories of technology
• Beginning a conversation about the future of the academy and the professional academic in a world where the university competes with the internet as a source of expertise.
• Leaving a relic of these discussions available to the public sphere in the form of information trails in web2.0 environments

Texts
(Not at bookstore. Please order through your favorite online retailer.)
Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Olivier Zunz, Why the American Century?
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message
David Henkin, The Postal Age
David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous
Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone
Neil Headrick, When Information Came of Age
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book

Required Software
All of the required software is free to download and use. The two recommended pieces of software that charge – Personal Brain and Devonthink – may be highly useful in the long term for dissertation students sorting massive quantities of data. Both have a free first-month trial, and personal brain allows you to use some of the basic features without upgrading from the free version.
Please create an account and friend the class in the following programs:
• Delicious
• Twitter
• Flickr
• Zotero
Please download and install:
• EverNote
Familiarize yourself with:
• Google Book Search
• Google Scholar
Recommended early installations – may take several weeks to master:
o Google Earth
o Firefox + Sharaholic extension (send stuff to facebook, dig, delicious) + Zotero extension (citation manager for books, articles, newspapers, websites) + Cooliris extension (better for photo browsing) + UChicago plugin (search Worldcat, lens, library catalog) + Ubiquity extension (translate on the fly)
o Personal Brain (~$100/hit) (optional)
o Devonthink/Agent (~$50 with student discount. Get the Pro Office edition so that it can recognize words from scanned archival documents) (optional)

Projects
WEEKLY ASSIGNMENTS. Each week, each student will select one technology from the “methodology” list, download/create an account, and begin integrating the technology with their workload. The student will perform experiments in using said technology to enhance their scholarship, and will report on their experience to the rest of the class.
It is hoped that the set of methodologies each student picks will remain in casual use for the duration of the semester, through various experiments, and so form a trial of the use of web 2.0 in a teaching situation. For instance, the syllabus begins with a list of everyday technologies like Facebook and Twitter, which are highly useful for signaling to the course’s professor, as well as the rest of the digital coffeehouse, that one is maintaining a critical interest in how digital technologies might enhance one’s engagement with other courses and matters of research interest.
PARTICIPATION. Conversational engagement is the most traditional way of assessing a student’s participation. This course will have a secondary record of backchanneled communication as well By the end of class, the student’s twitter, delicious, and flickr accounts should form a transcript of evolving experiments, interests, and ideas.
FIRST PROJECT (fifth week of class). The equivalent of a five page paper on the historiography of information, preferably making use of some cutting-edge methodology as a source of its overview, presented in the form of a series of flickr slides, blog entries, or an omeka project.
SECOND PROJECT (last week of class). A synthetic project aggregating material from at least 3 of the methodological categories. The project may extend the historiographical project or present research material from another research paper/dissertation chapter, made available to the public in the form of a series of flickr slides, blog entries, omeka project, podcast, videocast, annotated map, or concept map. To be presented, during class, the last week of class.

Schedule of Readings
Course readings are in two sections: I. Historiography and II. Methodology. The methodology readings are due on Tuesdays; the historiographical readings on Thursdays.
The reading list will go, like Merlin, backwards in time so that we should begin by facing contemporary prejudices about the workings of media, and end with the most distant mirror armed with new methodologies for drawing our own conclusions.

WEEK ONE

Tuesday: Class introductions and overview.
Install required software.
Friend everyone in the class on Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, and Zotero.

Thursday: Rethinking Pedagogy in the Age of P2P communication:
First Methodology Reports due in class. Software for Sharing and Annotating the web (CHOOSE ONE to report on):
• GoogleDocs
• Diigo
• Skim
• Slideshare
• PBwiki
• Scriblink
• ScienceCommons
• Gurteen.com
• Anything else from http://delicious.com/network/joguldi/sharing+tools
READING: (these are about 1 page each)
• Howard Rheingold, "Participative Pedagogy: For a Literacy of Literacies" http://freesouls.cc/essays/03-howard-rheingold-participative-pedagogy-for-a-literacy-of-literacies.html
• Charles Murray, "Are Too Many People Going to College?"
• http://www.american.com/archive/2008/september-october-magazine/are-too-many-people-going-to-college
• Stephen Mihm, "Everyone's a Historian Now," Boston Globe (May 25, 2008)
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/25/everyones_a_historian_now/?page=full
• Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History Be Open Sourced? The Future of the Past”
http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/d/42
• Gideon Burton, "Dear Students: Don't Let College Unplug Your Future", Academic Evolution (January 11, 2008)
http://www.alex-reid.net/higher_education/
• Alex Reid, various blog entries tagged "Higher Education" in Digital Digs: http://www.alex-reid.net/higher_education/
• Wikipedia Schools and Universities Project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_and_universities_project
• Intro, section on mobiles, HORIZON Report 2008: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/CSD5612.pdf
• "Teaching as Lying," Chronicle of Higher Education (2008) http://www.alternativeculture.org/content/view/114/63/

WEEK TWO
Tuesday: Historiography of Information
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near (excerpts, handed out in class)
Michael Angelo Garvey, The Silent Revolution (1852) (online - skim)

Thursday: Bibliographic Methodologies
Choose one and generate a bibliography with metadata. If you are working on a dissertation or other major project, use some books from your dissertation. Otherwise, use the readings for this course.
o Zotero
o Papers
o Librarything
o Lens
o Connotea
o Edtags
o Webcitation
o Zotz
o Citeline
o Scholar
READING:
• "Are Online Articles Changing Scientists' Reading Habits?"
http://www.endofcyberspace.com/2008/08/are-online-data.html
• Thomas Mann, "The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloguing, and Scholarship in Research Libraries"
http://guild2910.org/Pelopponesian%20War%20June%2013%202007.pdf
• Daniel H. Pink, "Folksonomy," New York Times (December 11, 2005)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas1-21.html?_r=1&ex%1291957200&enP937f27a0973e6e&eiP90&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
• "Harvard Forum on Social Tagging"
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/harvard_forum_on_social_taggin.html
• Google Scholar Bibliography (via Dean Giustini): http://hlwiki.slais.ubc.ca/index.php/Google_scholar_bibliography

WEEK THREE

Tuesday: Historiography of the Internet
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication

Thursday: Methodologies of Publishing
Choose one:
• Blog: Wordpress, Blogger
• Podcast: Podomatic
• Videocast: Blip.tv, Archive.org, Vimeo
• Flickr

READING:
• Alf Rehn, "Academic Publishing: A Rant," Text Sushi, 2007
http://www.alfrehn.com/blog/2007/11/24/on-academic-productivity-%E2%80%94-a-rant/
• Various articles on the future of scholarly publishing from Nines
http://nines.org/about/readings.html
• "Harvard Opens Up Publishing"
http://www.oculture.com/2008/02/harvard_opens_scholarship_freeing_up_knowledge_and_budgets.html
• Robert Darnton, "The Case for Open Access," Harvard Crimson, 2008.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=521835
• George Siemens, "Scholarship in an Age of Participation," 2007.
http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/journal.htm
• Lev Grossman, "Books Unbound," Time (2009)
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1873122,00.html

WEEK FOUR

Tuesday: Historiographies of c20 Media Explosions
FILM: CRAIG BALDWIN, SPECTRES OF THE SPECTRUM (I’ll see about arranging a viewing)
Intro, Mark Kurslansky, 1968 (on Chalk)
Excerpt, Alex Wright, Glut (on Chalk)

Thursday: Mass Digitization
Choose one in each category:
• Text Databases:

EEBO (c17), ECCO (c18), Old Bailey (c19 English Courts), NINES (c19 literature) GoogleBooks (includes some German, Spanish), Gallica, ArtFL

• Image Databases:

Flickr Commons, LoC (American), National Library of Australia, David Rumsey Map Collection, Perseus (Classical), Europeana

For the bigger picture, start here: http://delicious.com/bibliparis4

READING:
• Jim Naughton, "Google Pays Small Change to Open Every Book in the World"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/02/google-books-scanning-libraries
• "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" (2008)
http://guerillaopenaccess.com/

WEEK FIVE

Tuesday: Historiography – Universities, Think Tanks, and Public Relations Experts
VIRTUAL EXHIBIT: http://www.prmuseum.com/
Mark Crispin Miller, “Introduction,” and Ch 1, in Edward Bernays, Propaganda (online)
Olivier Zunz, Why the American Century?

Thursday: Methodologies for Sorting
Choose one:
• PhiloLogic
• Juxta
• Collex
• TAPoR
• TagCrowd
• uClassify
• Topicalizer
• UsingEnglish.com
• SemanticHacker
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPSS
• *Devonthink
• *Many Eyes
• Google Timeline

READING:
• David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellanious
• Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/
• Chris Forster, "How to Measure Text" (2008)
http://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/index.php/grad-fellows/how-to-measure-text/
• The Institute for the Future, "The Future of Libraries as Places"
http://digitalhistorysyllabus.pbwiki.com/The-Future-of-Libraries-as-Places

WEEK SIX

Tuesday: Historiographies of Victorian Connections
Dionysius Lardner, The Steam Engine (online - skim)
David Henkin, The Postal Age
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message

Thursday: Methodologies of Visual/Spatial Analysis

Image mining/sharing:
• Flickr + flickr tag browser: http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/related_tag_browser/app/
• http://maker.geocommons.com
• http://www.tagzania.com/
• http://www.placeopedia.com/
• http://www.wayfaring.com/
• Omeka
• Wikimapia
Readings:
• "Biblical Statistics"
http://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/index.php/digital-humanities/biblical-statistics/
• "Iterative Cosmologies"
http://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/index.php/grad-fellows/iterative-cosmologies/
• "The Next Big Thing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science Computing: Cultural Analytics," HPCWire (July 29, 2008)
http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/release.php?id=1447
• "Geo-Everything", HORIZON Report 2008: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/CSD5612.pdf

WEEK SEVEN

Tuesday: Historiographies of Urbanism
Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone
M. H. Ebner, “Urban History: Retrospect and Prospect,” Journal of American History (1981)

Thursday: Methodologies of Mind-mapping and Concept-mapping
Choose one:
• Personal Brain (there is a free edition which allows you to take notes but not to zoom or make attachments)
• Bubbl.us, MindMeister, XMind (collaborative!) (Free registration)
• http://cmap.ihmc.us/ (look especially at "synchronous collaboration" and "knowledge soups")
• Ivanhoe (literary) (free registration)

WEEK EIGHT

Tuesday: Historiography of the Age of Experts
Headrick, When Information Came of Age
FILM: The League of Nobel Peers, Steal This Film (available online at stealthisfilm.com)

Thursday: Rethinking Publishing
Investigate one of the following:
• Patricia Fumerton's Ballad Project: http://emc.english.ucsb.edu/ballad_project/
• Itunes U
• Digital Installation Art, e. g. http://emergenceproject.org/
• http://www.seriousgamesinstitute.co.uk/
• http://kids.generationcures.org/play
Reading:
• Clive Thompson, "Why a Famous Counterfactual Historian Loves Making History With Games", Wired (May 21, 2007)
• David Parry, Assignments from Digital Storytelling
• Bill Turkel's class's interactive, real-object models of Hervey's circulatory system and the sky: http://digitalhistory.wikispot.org/
• Peter Gallison's CV
• http://www.bigthink.com/

WEEK NINE

Tuesday: Historiography of the Print Revolution
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book
Intro, Elizabeth Eisenstein, the Print Revolution (on Chalk)

Thursday: No Class. Work on your final projects.

WEEK TEN

Presentation of final projects

The Counterculture That Wasn’t: Fred Turner and the Manufacture of a State Religion for Silicon Valley

2009-04-13T12:45:00.000-07:00

Fred Turner’s 2006 book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, is an important book. For those interested in the information revolutions that led to the present, Turner presents three crucial turning points crucial to the making of contemporary Silicon Valley. The first two are straightforward: a moment of institutionalization in the 1980s, and a moment of corruption in the 1990s around the ideas of deregulation. The third is more difficult.

Some time between 1985 and the present, the internet witnessed the manufacture of a state religion for Silicon Valley. That religion is dominated by a predominantly masculine, educated, jet-set elite, deracinated from their roots; they are unified in an understanding of the telos of history. They have defined and hire for the identifying marks of an initiate in their religion. They have invented, in contradiction to their stated values, a world that rewards men for gift-like exchanges of information but exploits women for the economically unrewarded exchanges of nurture and counseling because of which their world thrives. This is the story of the manufacture of a state religion for Silicon Valley. This story is available to readers of From Counterculture to Cyberculture, but it is more difficult to identify, because it is not the tale that Turner set out to tell.

---

My students of information revolutions are studying Fred Turner this week in my course at the University of Chicago. I value Turner because he does a good job of setting out the dates since 1985. He tells us about who the economic players were, who created innovations in bureaucratic management, how the politics of Silicon Valley shifted in the 1990s, and what some of the consequences were. All of these events are crucial to understanding the way the internet and the companies that rule it are reshaping the culture of corporations and government’s role with respect to development and information management.

The first of these watersheds was the moment of institutionalization that made Silicon Valley. Turner begins his discussion of these events with the 1985 founding of the WELL, the first online community as the date for the emergence of an ideology based upon dialogue as a social leveler and economic catalyst. The narrative then links the institutionalization of this ideology to the migration of the information industry from MIT to Silicon Valley by the 1980s. Turner’s explanation is that California’s culture of openness lured talent and then capital across the country. The explanation, while insufficient, is provocative. Turner shows too how dialectical ideology became implanted in the very fiber of California-based consulting strategy. He traces the establishment of GBN and the reinstitutionalization of IFTF, both of which wedded the insights of experiment-guided dialogue towards the format of organizational psychology. Northern California institutionalized dialogue as an alternative corporate structure to that of the traditional postwar bureaucracy.

Second, as to the moment of corruption. The 1993 founding of Wired Magazine sets the date for the unholy marriage of dialectical ideology (with its hippie roots) and new-right anti-regulation political policy. The deregulation of media giants like Turner is countenanced by a libertarian-left California alliance that hopes to have already vaccinated the electronic future with an anti-hierarchical open-source movement that will benefit from deregulation. Turner hints at more than he makes explicit, but the implication is clear: the new internet giants like Microsoft and Google were allowed their far-ranging monopolies over communications because the hippie left and libertarian right formed a consensus against regulation. We are now living in that moment of massive deregulation, and it is too early yet to judge the consequences.
These turning points are, I think, correct, and represent useful contributions to the history of twenty-first century society.

---

Yet the book’s ambitions aim much higher. Turner wants to show, as his title indicates, that the values of the hippie era were transported unblemished into the backbone of the internet. He offers us a set of heroes that he credits with the transformation, LSD-dropping radicals such as Stewart Brand and John Perry Barlow, whose thirty-year trajectories bridged the worlds of Haight-Ashbury and Sand Hill Road. The hero-drive account is seductive, but it becomes problematic when it comes to identifying the political ideas of counterculture and cyberculture, their origins, their influence, and their affects.

. To accredit the 60s with the values of contemporary Silicon Valley, Turner strains to make every connection prove the radical credentials of the internet’s birth. It turns out, according to Turner, that everyone alive between 1954 and 1982 participated in a set of values defined as the counterculture. A similar symptom is defining the openness of the cyberculture inventor in terms, not of their beliefs and actions, but of their milieu. Brand’s adolescent travels around America, for example, are given as evidence of his exposure to the entire diverse milieu of radicality, including abstract impressionism in contemporary New York, SDS, the Free Speech Movement, although no connections have been shown to the actors he names. By this definition, any liberal youth of the baby boom who listened to Bob Dylan while Jackson Pollack was painting next door was necessarily aware that his drug-taking was an opportunity to radicalize perception. This is poor history: to show milieu is not to demonstrate the transmission of ideas. The historian who shows that Napoleon was young during the riots of the French Revolution has shown less than the one who demonstrates the strategies of rule that shaped his formation as a mind. Brand’s strategies for bringing together clever young men around tools have more to do perhaps with the laboratory revolution that hit American university science in the 1920s than with the counterculture. The reader would like to know what strategies Brand and his fellow-entrepreneurs learned from the past. To say that they learned "openness" is to beg the question.

. The celebration of “60s values” by way of history has been around for a while, and it comes with an agenda. Since the moment of the 60s itself, baby-boomer historiography has tended to celebrate all revolutions – Vietnam War Protests, Free Speech, Back-to-the-Landers, and Civil Rights – as a seamless continuum of justice, peace, and love. The agenda is visible in what’s left out. Those who emphasize unity tend not to think very hard about why the 60s failed. They tend not to detect the rift that happened when feminists walked out on SDS; they tend not to inspect how Yippie irony alienated public consensus in favor of the left; they don’t think very hard about the forms of political consensus that had a chance to succeed and why they failed. Baby-boomer historiography, California style, congratulates California for having invented the new age, seeing LSD as the fulfillment of radical politics. Other historians would look to LSD as its betrayal. Baby-boomer historiography, Berkeley style, attributes highest laurels to Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement. Other historians fault the college-educated counterculture for alienating the poor white families of Vietnam veterans, and so directly abetting the rise of the right. Turner does not show a precise set of countercultural values that definitively influenced cyberculture in its early stages. Instead, he too blurs the events of the 60s, telling us about what happened on the other side of Manhattan while Stewart Brand was young. The blurring is meant to suggest rather than identify the transmission of radical values. Good enough for some, perhaps. But…

. If one cares deeply about mid-century utopianism, one would like to know which revolutions Silicon Valley intended to participate in, and which version of the history of radical ideas it absorbed: a Marxist critique of the origins of capitalist inequality? A Situationist critique of radical culture? A mystical vision of an era of peace lead in by an occult elect, such as the Rosicrucians of Southern California were promoting? We don’t get these nuances out of Turner. We get instead a trite amalgamation of all-things-1960s, a baby-boomer’s nostalgia for multiple movements of peace, love, experimentation, and openness: these, and nothing more specific, will define the roots of cyberculture.

. Another alternative would be telling a longer story about the making of a Californian politics and its role on the internet. The story has to start long before he places it and involve a far broader set of interests than the heroic, peace-loving, Zen-meditating hippies he wants to credit. Take two of the terms key to the founding of the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Federation. Turner convincingly shows that two of the essential terms to the EFF’s self-understanding were the “frontier” and the hive.” Both terms seemingly appear out of nowhere, illustrations of “new communalist” logic spontaneously evolving out of Brand’s fertile skull. Turner thus misses two other points of origin for the terms that are deeply significant in their ideological freight. The role of the frontier in American history was described by Frederick Jackson Turner; the “hive” that would populate the frontier was described by Leary as the next phase in the spontaneous evolution of an Irish-Jewish intellectual elite who would wrest the controls of society from its traditional Anglo-Dutch leaders. These terms appear at the EFF courtesy of SB, thus clouding the possibility that they circulated more widely in a larger group of actors who had a shared conception of what it meant to be Californian and hence a Californian Programmer in the 1970s and 1980s.

. It is worth considering different versions of Cyberculture’s social origins. Long in advance of Silicon Valley, California’s faith in technology was shaped by the ideology of manifest destiny, the westward migration of late-nineteenth-century theosophists, deviant transvestite culture around the turn of the century, women preachers like Annie Semple McPhereson, early twentieth-century migrations, war work, and Pentacostalism. Historians George Pendle and Megan Shaw Prelinger have already given us critical stories about how the California religion found its way into the culture of Boeing and NASA. By 1968, these forces had already set firmly in place the millennial hopes for a technology-based social revolution, long in advance of hippie culture. The hippie contributions to Cyberculture were neither the first to proclaim openness, the first to embrace millennial destiny, nor the first to proclaim the transcendence of gender, class, and hierarchy.

Telling the history in vague terms means getting away with vague definitions of “counterculture values.” Turner’s argument concludes that “experimentation” and “openness” were invented by the counterculture and adopted by cyberculture, and it relies on fuzzy definitions of both terms.

. “Experimentation” and “openness” turn out to be marvelously flexible categories. Turner relies throughout the book on small gestures to stand in for full-out intellectual and political revolution in the history of ideas. He instead gestures towards LSD and Timothy Leary, a season studying radical theologian Tielhard de Chardin. Turner extrapolates a brief exposure into a lifetime of study. The book is not a history of ideas, however, and it remains content to define “openness” in terms of novelty – any type of performance new in the 1960s is defined as open; openness need not be defined in terms of inclusion, social justice, or class or gender identities. Openness in cyberculture is not a form of politics. Ill-defined ideas about novelty are offered as illustrations of the heroes’ sense of adventure.

. A blurry definition of "openness" absolves Turner from pressing a gender or class critique too far. Pressing would reveal the fissures between stated values and social practice. Take the “gift economy” Turner finds at work in the early WELL; the result, he concludes, of countercultural immersion in ideas about tribal belonging and “openness.” Turner gives evidence that the kind of knowledge that would be traditionally coded as feminine – listening, counseling, and giving romantic advice – was freely given, largely by women, free of charge, in vast quantities, without compensation in a form that could benefit one’s career. By contrast, knowledge coded masculine – information about stocks, future technology, and code – was freely exchanged, largely it seems by men, and led directly to the spiraling financial success of reviewer/consultant/journalists such as Howard Rheingold. In other words, the WELL community structurally reduplicated the division between freely-given, non-compensated female labor and freely-exchanged but actively-compensated male labor that formed the most reprehensible characteristic of American postwar suburban housewifery. Turner gives the evidence, but doesn’t perform the analysis. He cites the later career burnout by Ellen Ullman, one of the women who participated in the WELL, without indicating the extent to which gender difference seems to have structured the split between male success post-WELL and female burnout.
The ideas are manhandled this way in the service of his larger mission, a heroic portrait of Stewart Brand, John Perry Barlow, and Esther Dyson as the architects of a more just world. It manhandles ideas in ways deeply flattering to Silicon Valley.

. The result of all this muddling is history in the vein of hero-worship. Turner concentrates the bulk of his research on the biographies of a few saintly counter-cultural digerati -- Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and John Perry Barlow -- as metonymy for the whole. They become impossible geniuses, launching initiative after initiative; idea after idea, if only because Turner starkly refuses to do the research on where these ideas came from or how widely held they were. This is not history; it is biography written in the key of modern lives of saints, like those nineteenth-century idolizing tributes to Napoleon as the advocate of all liberties that tried to tie all the best idylls of the French Revolution and all the rights of man to the general’s experiences in adolescence.

. Such histories tend to miss what is so interesting about the period (a larger movement among a particular set of actors who didn’t exist before, and who are much larger than the individual). History by way of biography tends also to miss what is so interesting about the individual (a leader, wrote John Steinbeck, is the one who happens to be at the head of a crowd when there is a movement happening).

. In fact, staged against the long genesis of California culture, the characters described by Turner look downright backwards. Turner’s evidence points everywhere to the early internet as a gentlemen’s club for bearded hackers, many of whom thought women should stay at home. Once enthusiasm is peeled away, what Turner describes is the coming of an international jet-set elite, removed from the concerns of social justice that typified the 1960s. He writes of two of his heroes, characters he advertises as riding Air Force Two between nations, feted at Davos and the World Economic Forum: “Barlow and Dyson had become packets of information, shuttling from boardroom to conference to media outlet. Their sense of place had become dislocated and their sense of home, like the notion of home on the Net, distributed.” It doesn’t take much interpolation to conclude that Turner is describing the evolution and deracination of a new elite. The new version of the Elks Lodge and Harvard Club, in other words, was the WELL, where one could go expecting rational conversation and sympathy with others of similar background, status, and economic interest. Turner explains that Cyberculture changed everything, but the evidence he gives portrays a nineteenth-century politics of equality for the already privileged, transported unblemished to twenty-first-century California.

Turner indeed proves that contemporary Silicon Valley believes in the lineage he’d like to give – the best of hippie culture, the back-to-the-earth, peace-and-love, radicalism determined to succeed. He conclusively shows that as early as the 1980s, hacker culture in California thought of itself that way: the direct heirs to the movement.

---

I began by talking about the book’s contributions to a history of information revolutions: the migration of information technology to Silicon Valley, the solidification of dialogue-based corporate practices in Silicon-Valley businesses, and the alliance between the northern California left and the libertarian right around the deregulation of communications. I’d like to conclude by suggesting that the book’s greatest contribution is to highlight one more watershed in twentieth-century information revolutions. But this is a watershed that Fred Turner did not intend to describe: the recent revolution that consisted in manufacturing a state religion for California.

There was a moment when Silicon-Valley intellectuals began to brand themselves with the mantel of the counterculture. Barlow and Brand’s memories, Esther Dyson’s identity as a child of NASA and California, Joi Ito’s adoption by Timothy Leary – all of these factor in, of course. But there was a moment when those secret links were made explicit.

A more complete history of Silicon Valley values would have included a section Turner leaves out: a chapter on a canonization of the hippie founders of Silicon Valley, a moment that deserves its place in American History alongside the Founding of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the 1990s debate over the religion of the Founding Fathers as a moment when artificial history served to implant a new consciousness and manufacture a new political identity of enormous significance for future politics. Like them, the newest articulation of the state religion of California holds the conviction that California invented liberty, and that its forms of spirituality, technology, and politics are inherently purer, less corrupt and less hierarchical than those experienced elsewhere in America.

The canonization of Silicon Valley started perhaps with the smiley-face-adorned cover of Wired magazine in July 1997, which proclaimed “25 years of freedom, prosperity, and a better environment.” Not a big claim: the stress was on the Pax Americana, not the 25-year memory of the failed counterculture reincarnate. They played it down. Subsequent Wired articles became more daring. Canonizaton progressed with the ritual identification of Silicon Valley corporate elites with Burning Man in the 2000s. When, in 2001, Google named, as a the significant credential for hiring VP Eric Schmidt, his participation at the Burn, they canonized that relationship further, adding corporate weight to civic ritual. The manufacture of religion culminated with the publication of Fred Turner’s hagiography of hippie digerati, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, in 2006.

That history, I have tried to suggest, is more myth than fact. Even as a descriptor of present-day Silicon Valley, it falls flat. Take the Gift Economy as institutionalized for Silicon Valley by Burning Man, perhaps the most fleshed-out version of the world Turner describes. In practice, the $300 door pass plus week's supply of food and water plus transport translate into a $1000-a-year fee for participation. The Gift Economy is itself an elite club, a white-male-aristocracy. While it preaches listening, in practice it has but infrequently made concerted political efforts to reach into the ethnic ghettos, trades, and classrooms that radical bridge-building would benefit the most. Burning Man, as the yearly festival of Gift Economy, seems to celebrate a revolution already accomplished. Silicon Valley and the Hippie Old Guard come together as if they had always been one, behaving as if their message of love and justice were already realized.

Artificial histories help to plant identities. But they also work by smoothing over difference. Missing from the Wired history, the civic rituals of Burning Man, or the telling of Counterculture, is the role of dissent, that ingredient that seemed so crucial to the revolutions of 1968. Someone needs to prod these people into taking their own ideals seriously. If they actually care about a gift economy that will conquer the inequalities of gender, class, and race, they need to design an electronic economy that will reflect those values. They need a serious investigation of how, when, and why the gender equality in computer science departments in the 1980s devolved into the male bias we see today. They need to send OLPC’s to Chicago’s southside schools. They need, in terms of ideology, a critical investigation of gifting that takes seriously the possibility of giving to those from whom one can expect nothing.

---

I mean, God bless’em, I hope the hippie message stays strong, and I’m saving my dollars for a Burning Man ticket this summer like everyone else. All I’m saying is that Fred Turner isn’t, as it turns out, Elijah. Neither was Stewart Brand, marvelous travels though he had.

I just hope that Silicon Valley has some prophets to call out the failures as well as the successes. I’d like to read a history of those prophets some day.

The Age of Digital Citation

2009-04-08T14:24:00.000-07:00

Peer-to-peer technologies are working to unlock one of the most secretly-guarded rituals of academic citizenship, one that in former times was the most expensive to procure and the most costly to transfer: that is to say, knowledge of the canon itself.

The canon has to be mastered in a process of slow reading and even slower surfing of footnotes that occupies the first three to five years of graduate study leading up to qualifying exams and a dissertation prospectus. Even finding out what the canon is remains part of the work, eased in certain places by official departmental reading lists and historiographical classes, but finally a matter of reading and mastering the minutia of the scholarly apparatus.

Finding the canon in history, for instance, means careful reading of acknowledgements sections and footnotes correlated with cv’s, finding out who worked with whom, which texts appear with frequency, and which are dismissed. Finding the canon in comparative literature is frequently a matter of reading notes from Lacanian seminars in 1960s Paris, deducing from reported conversations the subtext that actually mattered to scholars.

All of these processes depend upon having the time to follow professors, to track them down in office hours, to pay attention to which conversations they listened to, to abstract one’s own canon from the masses. It was never enough to self-train; it was hardly enough merely to read, and visiting bookshops was a way to error rather than fruition. The canon has, until now, been secret, and it has been a matter of personal socialization to even find out what the important names were. And all of this suddenly promises to fold. Google Scholar counts citations and delivers the one true text on the transport revolution cited by scholar after scholar, or the new groundbreaking text that rocketed to a favorite within the last ten years.

The citation databases create new canons, established by numbers. Numbers have power. Sooner or later, it’s nearly inevitable now, that those numbers will begin to influence hiring decisions. Woe betide the uncited book or ignored article: relevance to disciplinary discourse can be counted and numbered. Scholarship has entered the age of the citation database.

Such highways create residual suburbs on the periphery of common activity. Journals to exclusive or small or specialist to go online, such as Cabinet, which depends on orders of back editions for part of its revenue, upload none of their articles by humanities rockstars, be they ever so bright as Wolfgang Schivelbusch or Marina Warner. Blog entries from para-academic scholars such as Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG, or podcasts by David Harvey, despite their circulation, will show up in Google stats but never Scholar; it will who up on Zotero if users put it there, but part of its cache is being known to only a small group of thinkers. One finds these scholarly suburbs by knowing the right people, by following the right idea. Knowing about Cabinet means dedication to a discourse.

There are two levels of citation, two ways of knowing then: the official, the common highway, the established canon of knowledge, now finally unlocked for all. The eighteen-year-old high-school drop-out in Cleveland can learn about the industrial revolution on his own, navigating straight to the top texts if he chooses. Alongside that canon, another and more mysterious one is forming: the secret canon of para-academic, interdisciplinary know-how. The former uses Scholar and Zotero, the tools of the trade. The latter leaves traces on Delicious and Twitter, the tools of public intellectuals. Scholars following the breath of the new will want to have exposure to both.

Interdisciplinary Canons, New Fields

We can look around the curve of time to further consequences of this unlocking of canons. The proximate arenas of affect are in interdisciplinarity and the establishment of new fields.

The age of digital citation also makes possible a new age of rampant interdisciplinarity: searching for the origins of urban prisons in the nineteenth-century launches the historian into the abundant writing from literature scholars on the same subject. One no longer has to visit the art history department to develop a second field in art history; the list of innovative new texts is in easy grasp. While traditional scholars ignore other fields for the sake of expediency, the easy grasp of interdisciplinary knowledge makes ignoring it merely irresponsible.

Open canons also imply the more rapid establishment of new fields: though scholars had been writing serious studies of the city since Henri Pirenne, it took an operator like Arthur Schlesinger to establish urban history as a field. A Harvard professor could produce a generation of graduate students, a flood of scholarship, a conference, and finally a journal. For most of the twentieth century, such were the criteria necessary to generate a legitimate subfield where most departments hire and teach today.

Navigating the Information Glut

Such interdisciplinary plenitude foreshadows an age of information glut. Even as I write, I too cringe, already worn out from a morning preparing a nineteenth-century cities lecture, lured outside my historical canon by the ready availability of literature scholars’ studies of early detective fiction.

The temptation to meander is a serious one. I could waste hours there, thinking about the difficulty of finding information for the urban police, and the way those searches find their way into the middle-class fascination with Sherlock Holmes; a historical problematic of information glut not unlike my own. The task looks impossible, though, and for the moment I’ve simply avoided the other canon. I’ll concentrate on historians’ accounts of police, and leave their literary imaginal for another day. Here’s the gist of the problem: much like those urban subjects, today’s researchers have the problem of knowing which categories of information are relevant.

A second temptation is to decline responsibility altogether. Clumsy navigation of information results in a glut of citations that don’t actually reflect their user’s experience. That happens in the last efficient way now whenever a scholar cites relevant articles in a footnote without reading them, guessing from title or first page alone their content. Scholars show their finesse at navigating digital canons by citing only the works essential to their argument. A smaller list of citations frequently demonstrates real mastery.

Reducing the canon effectively is always a matter of outsourcing responsibility. Traditionally, the scholar relies upon the advisor for setting the bounds of discovery, the questions of debate, even the nature of inquiry. Derrida gives us the image of Socrates prodding Plato with his stylus to get him going; Socrates comes up with the questions and Plato does all the work. In traditional graduate departments, the student is somewhat relieved of this relationship by the possibility of multiple members of a committee. Barbara Johnson, Derrida’s feminist pupil, gives another image: Moliere’s Agnes in The School for Wives, who gains her freedom by having two teachers and choosing her own path between them.

The age of digital citation raises the possibility of hacking through the canon with other prosthetics than the human teacher. Each of them has their own limits and rewards.

Crowdsourced citation, in its most blunt form, creates simple accounts of which texts are most read. In the world of tagging, however, readers assign labels to a text or passage. Tagclouds rank the labels used by a particular group of users by frequency. A set of crowdsourced labels produces a folksonomy, or the set of terms of greatest interest to that particular set of users. Individual folk publics can emerge, each of them generating their own set of terms. Each advisor and her graduate students can communicate, it seems, in a common language of labels applied to the texts the commonly read. One could sort the entire western canon for texts labeled “governmentality” by students of Patrick Joyce. The crowdsourcing is hypothetically open: our drop-out in Cleveland can theoretically acquaint himself with the canon interpreted by Patrick Joyce and followers by searching Zotero for “governmentality.” He can theoretically contribute his own readings from Mayhew.

The generation of new terms in a folksonomy is organic, as well. For another scholar to highlight another term to the tagcloud, they need only to begin abundantly tagging themselves. A body of sympathetic users who adopt a new term can grow and find each other. In the age of digital citation, subfields have the chance to emerge in a new way. They emerge with less certainty and coherence, to be sure, than those directed by graduate advisors, but they emerge nonetheless. Landscape Studies, so long on the periphery of a dozen canons, perhaps only has a chance in the age of digital citation.
To whom lies innovation in such a setting? To the advisor, to be sure, who launches a generation of students tagging the world through a new taxonomy; but also to the innovator, who dives into the established canon, passionately splicing the world according to a new set of values: leaving behind a trail of texts for a Marxist reading of the eighteenth century or a landscapey reading of the nineteenth.

And here the problem of originality reemerges. For these alternative taxonomies to be persuasive, they much seem relevant to other taxonomists. They must not seem redundant, the mirror of so many Patrick Joyces or T. S. Ashtons who have looked at the literature beforehand.

Another means of sorting through the noise of the digital canon is to outsource the reading to artificial intelligence. A program such as Devonthink, taught by a user to group together the readings and excerpts for a single undergraduate survey, can learn that texts that mention Britain, Adam Smith, and the 1750s belong together. It can even browse JSTOR for new passages of immediate relevance to the topic, excerpt them, and highlight some of the most important words that seem to appear for frequency. The scholar still has to read: but the machine performs the work of the research assistant, diving into the archives and coming out with particular passages neatly marked.

Working with such an apparatus creates the problem of an echo chamber. If you liked this, you will also like something like it. How does the scholar find an alternative telling? Where lies innovation? The answer to this question is probably the same as it has always been in academia: one does something innovative by mastering the canon and looking outside of it. In the age of digital citation, the canon is easier to find than ever, which means that the economy of time can spare more room for reading beyond the canon in search of fresher ideas. The healthy scholar will employ digital prosthetics towards mastering established canons, leaving more energy to spare for creative praxis.

It is an age for the flourishing of scholars who have the time to read deeply and the energy to think outside of the canon. This is what’s scary about it: to keep up in the age of digital citation, scholars will have to master a series of intellectual prostheses – tagging circles, artificial reading bots, quick skimming – that will help them navigate through the masses of texts. The age of digital citation will punish scholars who merely reduplicate the canons of their mentors. This is what’s exciting about it: you no longer have to go to a university to find out what books are on the canon.

The age of digital citation is almost guaranteed to produce a phalanx of interdisciplinary thinkers, skilled synthesists, capable of putting together the big picture from a variety of micro-fields and offering new perspectives on the whole. It will be to the credit of the rest of us if we can accept them.

Hunting for Controversy in the Archives: Wikipedia, Truthiness, and Historical Research on Dialectics in the Modern West

2009-03-25T14:32:00.000-07:00

I’ve been staying up all night shaking the virtual archive tree into dropping fruit. Humanities researchers have an increasing number of possible trees: collections of biographies, collections of images, machines for sorting texts, and machines for identifying parts of speech. Alas, any of these trees are only useful when we can ask good questions of them. Different researchers have different questions. The historian’s major problem -- discerning watersheds in social practice -- appears to defy such inquiries. But I might have found a place to start. When you’re looking for controversy over truth in the archives, the best place to start is where one group of thinkers tells another to shut up.

Here’s the question: can I ask an online archive to point me to the most controversial topics about politics between 1789 and 1832? That would be great, right? I’m not there yet; I can’t train my sophisticated search tools on the eighteenth/nineteenth-century collections yet. But I do have Wikipedia. How do I ask Wikipedia about the places where its volunteer-writers stand in line to punch each other?

Searching for Truthiness in Wikipedia

I started on a hunch, and that hunch involved one of my favorite twentieth-century words for starting a fight. The word “pseudoscience” was one of the twentieth century’s most powerful tools for turning a pleasant argument into an all-out jam-throwing mud-in-your-eye punch fest. Establish something as a “pseudoscience” and you dismiss the evidence offered out of hand. The processes to which pseudoscience refers are very modern: expert communities, institutional truth, public discourse, and the body of scientific thinking. Twentieth-century philosophers of science like Karl Popper of course fashioned us the tool, discerning communities of disciplinary inquiry, methods, and paradigm shifts as the symptom of science an its distance from its opposite, pseudoscience, where evidence could be marshaled into the simulacrum of established knowledge without the actuality of the same authority. To call something “pseudoscience” is therefore to challenge whether a conversation is relevant to the other people hanging out in the same era. Your sixteenth-century worldview, my friend says, It’s so pseudoscientific. Yes.

I suppose I’m attracted to things labeled pseudoscience in part because they represent communities whose thinking is out-of-time or out-of-place, and twenty-first-century interlocutors frequently have problems determining which and why. Take acupuncture. The elemental metaphors relating bodily organs to the seasons appear to be whacked out-of-time from the perspective of twentieth-century western science. But acupuncture’s reliance on communities of practice, responding to the experience of the patient, frequently surpasses western medicine in its skills of communicating with the patient, treating the physical ailment, the psychological, the psychosomatic, and the patient-doctor relationship as parts of an entire whole. If anything, acupuncture isn’t out-of-time, it’s out-of-place, the creature of a tradition external to the west and frequently misunderstood by western practitioners. That doesn’t stop western pracitioners from labeling acupuncture a “pseudoscience,” or cultural anthropologists from accusing the category “pseudoscience” of incorporating western bias. Pseudoscience is a great term for pointing to fissures.

Armed with nice, personalized search-engine, all of Wikipedia, and a few sort-and-visualize master tools, I set upon the canon of twentieth-century knowledge about science, determined to suss out Truthiness and subject it to the steely lens of machine-based AI.

Here’s what I did. I asked DevonAgent (a personalizable search agent for automatically pulling big sets of text from the web without cut and paste, ~$25 education rate) to find me all the Wikipedia articles that reference pseudoscience, either in the class heading, the article itself, or the backboard discussion. Those articles range from articles explaining Popper’s definition of pseudoscience to clearly discredited theories (phrenology, flat-earth theory) to controversial subjects from the borderlands of western institutional knowledge (e.g. acupuncture).

The resulting database of articles is a collection of knowledge fissures: places where one group of researchers has attempted to tell another to shush.

So I asked the machines who was involved in the fights. ManyEyes, a free collection of visualization tools from IBM, will let anyone look for recurring grammatical relationships between certain words in a given piece of text. When ManyEyes looked at the Wikipedia Pseudoscience database, it quickly recognized certain names coming up regularly. It knew that they were names only from the grammatical construction of a personal relationship, i.e., the word was followed by an apostrophe-s, e.g. Freud‘s book, Sheldrake’s claim, Popper’s hypothesis. So I asked ManyEyes for a list of the players who appear in the fights over pseudoscience. Here they are, to the best of the machine’s knowledge.

Next, I asked the machines to tell me about where such fights occurred. Sort of interesting. Irvine, California: home of pseudoscience! (or is it its refutation?)

Finally, I asked the machines to tell me about what the claims of pseudoscience were. The pseudoscience database was too fuzzy to produce good results, but a narrower database, a list of articles referencing “pseudoscience”, “modern”, and “history” successfully produced a tight list of articles about controversial scientific battles in their historic context. Once I had that database, I could ask for a list of phrases that began “claims that…”. Even more powerful was looking at those individual claims, for instance, statements about geology, taken from the set of sentences beginning with “the earth…” The resulting set is a fairly good list of discredited early-modern to modern- theories about the nature of the globe: the theory that the earth is flat, the myth of the hollow earth, and so on:

One can even usefully extrapolate the data from the pseudoscience data to a set of basic centers of consensus that comprise what c21 wikipedia users believe to be true of science in general:

* * *

Now the real gambit I'm after isn’t Wikipedia; it’s the revolutions of knowledge in the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries.

I’m imagining searching for dialectics in discourse – fissures like the ones indicated by the word “pseudoscience.” I’m imagining being able to look into points when alternative intellectual discourse erupts.

The eighteenth- or nineteenth-century term wouldn’t be pseudoscience, of course. It might be “retrograde” for science; for politics it might be accusations of “interest.”

I spend a lot of my time reading endless pamphlet and newspaper wars, trying to figure out who the sides are in the railway debates and what they care about. While I don't think that I'll ever be freed from reading, algorithms like these promise to give me some of the keywords that can offer me a short cut direct to some of the major controversies in question. The paragraphs on railroads that accuses others of “interest” reference which place-names, for instance? I've had limited luck searching the nineteenth century for "Birmingham interest", although I read paragraphs about railway interests relating to Cornwall from time to time. I'd love a short-cut that takes me to, say, the unknown bulk of references to the "railway interest" in Darlington. Or again: What personal names come up most frequently? Or would the phrase "the claim that" turn up a list of counter contentions and contentious claims, once I fed in the top ten treatises from both side of the railway arguments? When enlightenment figures accuse each other of being “retrograde”, which claims are most violently under contention?

The result will hardly be a Skinnerian automatic history-generating machine, but it nevertheless offers an important tool. Finding the names and places associated with a controversy as common as the railroads, which I study, is time-consuming, the work of reading hundreds of treatises and following up every place and name in infinite keyword searches. A machine that can predict who the controversialists were and where the places they argued about were located would save the historical researcher untold time.

What I'm imagining is essentially a finding aid for zeroing in on *some* of the contentious claims, names, and interests from any given discourse. It will not eliminate the need to read in context, but it can offer some short-cuts straight to the heart of the controversy.

We’re only a few months away from having these tools and being able to apply them to pointing out controversies for a select set of texts. When we have them, we’ll be able to look at a set of all the texts that reference the phrase “political economy” published between 1820 and 1830, say, and then ask for the major personal names and place names.

What I need next: a series of plug-ins to make the DevonAgent search machine talk to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century databases (EEBO, ECCO, Making of the Modern World, Google Books, Hansard’s Debates, Parliamentary Papers, Nineteenth Century Newspapers, and so on). We’re guessing that it’ll cost about $200/each to hire a programmer to design each plug-in.

So: we’re passing the hat to historians with research budgets to collect the necessary funds. Interested? Get in touch. Know a DevonAgent programmer? We’re hiring. Rewriting the history of modern institutions of knowledge? Stick around; it’s about to get interesting.

(Cred where cred is due: Thx, Simon DeDeo, for helping me think through pseudoscince, and thx to my brilliant colleague Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, for helping me think through "retrograde" political economy and the tortured legacy of Quentin Skinner!!)

A Psychogeography of San Francisco

2009-02-10T12:04:00.000-08:00

San Francisco stretches in a curve under a sky the color of salmon: the bright western dawn that Caspar David Freidrich so loved. The sky interpolates a you: you had to be here to see it, writes Joseph Koerner. On a heroic January morning, it’s hard to look out over that pink, clear sky and not inhale with a whiff of emotions rising.

Some of that information is mine alone. I’m staying in a friend’s apartment, partaking of a view of the Mission District Grid from the south, a thousand three-story workers’ apartments reflecting white roofs. This is the view I used to jog every morning in grad school. I used to jog past the houses of small-time rock stars and local documentarians, past the overgrown garden where old hippies gave away avocados, past the friary where Franciscans fed soup to the homeless, the bar where I’d fallen asleep with the arm of a novelist around me, the alleyway where my best friend had read my tarot cards. The city was a map of emotions; walking it from the level of a sidewalk, I could run into the ghost of a painful argument at any time. But above, with the dog-park and the other joggers, I’d feel those labyrinths of experience falling away into another view. I’d look out at a city of people I’d argued with, fought against, cried with, feeling it all slip below me, a system distinct from me, separable, whose many stories remained accessible but also distant.

That hill is my spiritual cleansing. This bright January morning, it still has the power to put me back from immediacy, and fear trickles down away from me to the valley below. Any hilltop view in San Francisco gives me this feeling of levity, freedom, and abstraction. Some of that cleansing power of the city is mine, the after effect of a ritual I practiced every day for years, now ingrained in memory. The map of encounters and romances, of personal narratives woven into particular alleyways are mine; the view, the attitude, the adjustment, are each a creation of personal experience are also. Both are rituals of a personal narrative, both relics of the way I lived when I lived in this city. Standing on the hilltop, I might even mistake what I see in the city for my own experience, but in truth, most of it is not.

The rose-colored sky is itself inherited; we borrowed it from the nineteenth-century golden dawn painters who saw sunrises over Swiss forests. I see the city through the eyes of nineteenth-century investors and artists, I see Jack London’s Oakland, I see the broad-shouldered laborers depicted in WPA murals from the 1930s. Struck by the whiff of freedom beneath the California stars last night, I cough language borrowed by Woody Guthrie from the throat of Muir, who parsed Thoreau and Rousseau into American dialect.

The grid that stretches before us is administered by a dozen different invisible agencies which enforce the socio-economic pattern of the rich on the hillsides and the poor in the valley. That grid was the product of mapping by state and capital: by investors, affiliated with the railroads, who laid down the shape of a city to be; three different grids, torqued at different angles, by three different companies who began to plan from the east and west and south of the pinensula at different times. The maps were adopted by state authorities, who used them to see where to send trolley-car lines and water pipes, and by banks, who used them to guess where whites lived (and where to make loans) and where lived others (where to deny them).

The horizon is mountains dotted with houses, then sky: the border where this landscape ends. I’ve just come, this time, from the other side of those hills, and I’m aware in every conversation I have in San Francisco about the limits of the world view here. If Midwestern chemtarails are real, and the people of San Francisco where the activists are don’t know about it, they’ll never write about it to change it. Katrina struck the rest of the country more deeply. Gaza rings more loud. There are privileges associated with that world-view: every conversation I have here will flow easily into recycling, spirituality, and altnerative healing, where I’d have to scrimmage to claw at such ideas or people in the Midwest. The anti-Israel protest swings by, two hundred men and women of all ages and ethnicities, some with banners from the Episcopalian church and some of them Jews against Zionism, and one feels an uplift of possibility, of small social movements forming, demanding peace, wondrous to be in San Francisco now, ground zero for social utopianism. But there are limits. That parade, like the anti-war rallies against Bush in the 2000s, will never be covered outside of local news. Almost all the social movements launched here die before they cross those hills. Like the land of Oz, we’re surrounded by an impassable waste on every side, crossed only by natural disaster and magic slippers.

Landscape is the single most important tool mankind has for keeping information away. The developer who practices unwise investment strategies to the risk of investors has only to hide those properties over the horizon. Diamond miners with unscrupulous attitudes towards unions had only to practice their trade in Africa. Conducted in plain sight, within the sphere of everyday interactions, conspiracy and murder would never pass; there in another world, they become everyday affairs. Landscape, a system of boundaries and limits to vision, conspires with corruption.

This world is greater than me, my personal world being shaped by the map of a city created by distant administrators a century ago; even my sense of light, my preference for a certain kind of café with its French tables ranging the sidewalk and doors the length of the bar thrown open, the reflection of other cafes, cultivated by French bohemians now dead, documented, popularized, digested, recreated, so that I and other would-be artists could congregate there. I live in a city where three-fourths what I see is a relic of someone else’s glasses, someone else’s blueprints, someone else’s election.

To decode this world, I need not only politics but also aesthetics and philosophy; it is not merely the laws that govern loans and taxes that shape this world, but also preferences for beauty, imitated and disseminated. By landscape I mean that system of boundaries, conjoined, overlapping, self-perpetuating, invisible, and unavoidable, which subsist in space and structure my experience. The boundaries interpolate and imbricate each other; they’re mistaken for each other, like when I think that I have personally struggled to become more free because I live in San Francisco where the natives chant the history of civil rights all the time. The boundaries are some very old and political, like the angled route of Mission Street, once the Camino Royale, which runs past the site of the old mission of Saint Francisco di Asis all the way south to Mexico City; and some of them are as recent as the fluctuating line of gang warfare on 22nd street, or the invisible boundary around Chaim’s house, which makes me think in lines from Bob Dylan and Rimbaud whenever I cross 14th towards Natoma. Landscape is all the boundaries, personal and political, inscribed on the horizontal world by the accretion of time.

Reinventing the Academic Journal: First, Take Down Your Website

2009-02-07T11:14:00.000-08:00

The web is thirsty for efficient, effective ways of retrieving useful information about the state of the field. This pressure creates an enormous market for those instruments that help individuals locate authoritative discourses and situated scholarship, and this, of course, is one of the traditional roles of the academic journal.

Academic Journals are in the course of rethinking their management, methods, and publication standards. This year saw major panels at the AHA (American Historical Association) and MLA (Modern Language association), largely through the leadership of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

If they face this transition with courage and ingenuity, journals have the opportunity to plant themselves firmly as pillars of professional utility, scholarly collaboration, and authoritative knowledge as a public utility. Much of it may require thinking in terms of shifting communities and the life of information, and shifting sharply away from current journals' dependence on issue-by-issue websites and pdf-servers like jstor. If you're a journal editor, the first step in a shift away may indeed be so radical as taking down your website, sharing information in new ways even more deeply integrated with the flow of information on web 2.0.

I list here four major headings for the consideration of those trying to adapt academic publication to a web 2.0 world.

1) Journals must pursue interoperability with the other online tools that are shaping the techne of scholarly practice.

Web 2.0 requires public visibility and interoperability with other web tools, in order that a searching aid should be found, adopted, and rendered relevant to the new research paradigms being adopted by scholars and members of the public alike. The more journals fit themselves into this paradigm, the better they'll thrive in the new order, finding readers both academic and para-academic as allies. They will function usefully as finding-aids for the most relevant, expert material in their disciplines.

In going web 2.0, journals have the ability to mesh their publications with tools that will allow readers to better integrate journal essays with the rest of their research. A scholar using zotero and jstor can download the article pdf and the citation, ready for use in footnote. Web 2.0 journals will go further into this zone: a scholar using zotero, jstor, google scholar, and delicious can instantaneously find other scholars' opinions of a particular article, the names of the disciplines and sub-disciplines they think it applies to best, and other articles of similar note to that particular scholar.

1.a) With these tools, every published article becomes easily interfaced with the tools new scholars are using to sort their data.

For example:, if you look at http://delicious.com/bibliparis4/revues you will find some sources of reviews recommended by the French librarian who holds that account. When I'm signed into delicious as joguldi, I have the option to save any of these citations from the list into my own account. Each visitor can refashion their own micro-reading-list from their colleagues' reading-lists, cutting and pasting collective knowledge into an individual canon suited to their own project.

1.b) The promise of resilience: continued relevance to changing research patterns.

The web 2.0 journal will encourage this kind of interface, working within technologies for co-tagging, sharing lists, and making-one's-own-list. In so doing, the web 2.0 journal will become intimately interfaced with scholars' processes of research, reading, and writing, remaining an indispensable part of scholarship in the next era of research. They will avoid the possible irrelevance to reading processes, subdisciplinary conversations on mailing lists/delicious/twitter, and other forms of scholarly information-sharing that are coming to predominate in the life of the digital scholar.

1.c) The need for permanence.

Web 2.0 journals must insure that some copy of whatever material they publish is backed up for posterity. They may rely upon a public, collaborative site such as archive.org for those purposes.

1.d) Real interoperability.

It is strongly desirable to use a public, widely-adopted instrument such as delicious or librarything, already equipped with full tagging, user interoperability, and visibility before the public, rather than one of the new, unstable, invite-only micro-communities for information sharing like academiacommons or scribd.

2) Journals have opportunity to reframe their role in the academy as curators of the noise of the web.

Dream Scenario: The Web 2.0 Journal as a web bastion of curatorial authority.

The web suffers from a crisis of authority which is being met on the individual, rather than the collective and disciplinary level. For questions of disciplinary fields, for example, wikipedia is likely to be irrelevant and useless. Far more useful, from my point of view, have been peer-to-peer exchanges on delicious.com, librarything, and twitter, where colleagues in proximate fields have openly shared their course reading material, current research, and private canons.

In these sharing sites, individuals tag interesting citations with a series of terms most relevantly useful to their own practice. Users are less concerned with the interoperability of those selected terms than with the project of generating as many accurate, natural-language keywords as possible (see "folksonomy" entry in Wikipedia). The collected mass of these tags becomes an ultimate subject catalog to all the possible subject headings that might apply to any given website. Particular individual users become peculiar sources of authority for a given subject heading (for example, http://delicious.com/bibliparis4/, an expert archivist at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, is an authority on the best online archives, especially in the Francophone world.

Journals have the opportunity to weave themselves as crucial threads in the fabric of online conversations if they begin tagging, becoming collective repositories of the best, collectively-ratified articles and citations available for download on the web.

In a world where the primary tools for finding new scholarship are tagged, social databases like delicious and librarything, the most efficient form of journal interface with the world might be a for journals to scrap their websites and become collective, tagging entities.

2.a) The advantage of having an official canon of online material ratified by editors.

In the world of the traditional print journal, scholars vied to get a Journal of Modern History citation on their vita because it stands for something. What if there was a http://delicious.com/victorianstudies and http://delicious.com/journalofmodernhistory?

Such a stream of official citations could come to stand in for the private account of a collective recognized for setting a standard in the field, providing much the same function as the old print citation in terms of scholarly participation and professional standing. Being collected in those entries could still stand for the product of collective vetting among recognized scholars, standing out in the same way that my more famous colleague Danah Boyd's collection, http://delicious.com/zephoria, is better-read than my own (http://delicious.com/joguldi).

2.b) The editorial voice.

It might seem that if the Journal of Modern History disbanded its website in favor of a delicious stream, much would be lost: for instance, the editor's voice. Not necessarily. Perhaps invited keynote editorials might deserve a special tag, setting them apart from other tags; perhaps certain articles in the JMH tagging stream would also be tagged "featured article" or "special edition."

Consider: the editor-in-chief of The Journal of British Studies for 2009-2011 has a blog, which she has maintained since 2007 and keeps writing through 2020. For the years 2009-2011, the blog entries which she writes that pertain to the field of British Studies and are ratified by the rest of the Board become tagged "editor-in-chief" on http://delicious.com/journalofbritishstudies. The researcher who searches "2009" and "editor-in-chief" under that stream will find that subset of her articles, or they can search "editor-in-chief" for the full download of editorials for JBS.

2.c) The freedoms of web 2.0 journal operation.

Web 2.0 journals that take their primary responsibility as curatorial have no need for official publication from the university press system. They are not dependent on the income model of the university press, and they have no reason to collect subscriptions: their purpose is disciplinary service and public access. There is no reason for the articles published in this format to be made private, or to require elaborate fee-charging mechanisms.

3) Electronic journals will have the opportunity to expand their curatorial mandate include different forms of publication.

3a) Past the essay model.

The traditional journal collects and publishes only three sorts of essays: the editorial, the peer-reviewed essay of new research in 15-50 pages, and the book review. There is nothing platonic about these forms: they evolved from the culture of eighteenth-century coffee-house journals, reviewing the books in circulation, and the canonization of eighteenth-century essayists like Addison and Steele in the English curriculum of higher education at the end of the nineteenth century. They are considered the template for developing a reasoned, supported argument, and so the metric for measuring the ability to research, argue, and write.

3b) Broader forms of inclusion.

The traditional canon of essays, editorials, and book reviews has excluded much of other forms of scholarship, the circulation of whose best models are of value to the scholarly community, including: syllabi, subject division lists for qualifying exams, lectures, paragraph-sized notes/queries, lists of relevant new electronic tools, reviews of electronic tools, reports on best methods in the archives, lectures, and blog-sized opinions about exciting new directions for the field. An electronic journal has no reason to exclude a twenty-minute audio segment, a selection of maps shared on Slideshare.net, or a video segment of a conference paper shared on Youtube. Properly curated, any of these categories would be of immense disciplinary interest, worthy of collection in a journal stream.

3c) Against exclusive publication.

It is contrary to utility, in the world of web 2.0, to maintain exclusive publication rights on an article. Exclusivity of publication places a text in only one domain. Yet non-exclusive text gets reproduced and recopied, circulated around the internet, and rapidly floats onward to mimetic influence in other cultures, excerpted and referenced. For every web 2.0 author, non-exclusivity and easy republication is ideal. For every would-be-idea-of-influence in the age of web 2.0, easy reduplication is crucial.

Exclusivity has been the format followed by most online journals, which seek to mimic in form the traditional journal: one essay, neatly formatted, looking as professional as possible. Exclusive re-publication suggests the old model of authority, and is superficially reassuring to editors without actually promoting the real functions of the journal: disseminating ideas and establishing the authority of the journal-as-canon and disciplinary metric.

Significantly more desirable would be setting a different precedent: for all disseminated forms of the text to advertise the article's accreditation as having been curated by inclusion in the journal-as-stream. (the text might end with, for instance, "please recirculate with this citation: by-Professor-Bonnie-Wheeler, SMU, 2009; officially tagged in 'Arthuriana,' [link] May 2010") Advertising the link between article and journal in many reproduced/cross-referenced copies would function both to the benefit of the article and the prestige of the journal.

Again, if the dissemination model is followed, the journal homepage need not include reprints of the articles themselves: merely links to the original blogspace or university-housed-pdf or slideshow where the material was originally posted, with all of its links, illustrations, video, and wallpaper as the author originally presented it. The journal's role is reduced to curation, not to presentaiton. Not having a use for a graphic designer, typesetter, or illustrations layout person, the journal's workflow will be considerably reduced.

4) Broadening the criteria for participation.

Another major question opened by the age of the electronic journal is the issue of expertise. Like the essay, the journal peer-review process is the relic of another age: an age of abundant, unbegrudging emeriti with plentiful leisure to foster the development of younger peers who had, on average, three years of training by way of a PhD. The limited number of peer-reviewers and editors responsible for the operation of the journal at any given time, is the relic of the system limited by the expense of the US Post Office, the limited social networks of the people who invented the system, and the era of fewer PhD's on the world scene. In a new era, many of the burdens of editing and curation can be more broadly distributed to both the aid of the editors and the thriving of the discipline itself.

4a) Benefiting from a wider array of input.

In the age of web 2.0, journals have the opportunity to reconsider the distribution of time and responsibility. Is peer review a top-down mentoring process for scaling up the academic ladder, or will it be reconceived as an open playing-field (a sort of open seminar for peer review rather than a two-vetted-readers-read-you)? With the aid of wikis, it becomes possible for a single text to be usefully edited by hundreds of individuals, vetting their understanding of significance, authentic fact, and argument flow. For young scholars, accreted small suggestions of other citations, references, examples, and counterexamples, from a wider array of supporters, could conceivably enhance an article on multiple levels.

4b) The opportunity to expand disciplinary boundaries.

In web 2.0 collaboration, the thinking of interdisciplinary members of the broader academy might be usefully invited. The pressure of other ideas could hypothetically encourage the discipline to take account of the findings of related sub-disciplines (invited participation from scholars in postcolonial studies for Victorian Studies issues on empire), the concerns of related fields (are economists convinced by new findings in economic history?), and the legibility of argument to the public (does this ground-breaking, relevant article on tyranny and empire actually parse to the average reader of the NYT?)

4c) The reconsideration of timelines.

In the age of web 2.0, it is also possible for a writer to continuously revise an argument over an extended period of time, even indefinitely. For the sake of scholars' multiple projects, an indefinitely revised work is probably not ideal, but extended revisions, over the course of a year, become possible and useful for the author and the discipline. An article could be published as "officially under review" in a sub-category of the journal stream, subjected to gradual wiki conversation for a year, and remain available to a reading public for the entirety of that time.

The product that would emerge at the end of a year of wiki-ratification would be very different than that at the beginning. If the author failed, in the course of wiki revision, to produce a stronger article than at the beginning, the article could be removed from the journal stream at the end of the year.

4d) Indefinite projects.

An exception to the rule against indefinite revisions might be the case of a collectively-authored, introductory textbook (editions #33-150 of Arnstein's Introduction to British History could easily be collectively rewritten over the course of 20 years by a team of collaborators). Similarly, the journal might include a wiki article on "the state of the discipline" that was collectively revised by the journal's readership, year after year, to consider the best collective knowledge of subjects of inquiry.

(I've had the honor of being in conversation with Bonnie Wheeler of CELJ, and I want to express my gratitude here for being invited into the conversation. Editors of academic journals have been the heroes of professional support processes like peer review for a long time, and they have a brave future ahead of them, whatever course they take.)

5-minute digital history experiment: Places Left Behind by Rail

2008-11-20T07:29:00.001-08:00

View Larger Map

There I was, dutifully taking notes on Samuel Shaen's Review of Railways and Railway Legislation (1846), and linking up his review of railway statistics to the larger themes in my abstract mind-map of themes important to the history of British railways.

That mind-map, which I've blogged about below, allows me to organize my citations, quotations, and thematic notes under an overlapping series of larger, abstract thoughts, which are helping me make provocative connections early in the research process. One big thought in my mind-map is "The Problem of the Geographical Periphery," which has to do with sectional politics resulting from where the railways go and don't. It's related to other interesting thoughts like "The Power of the Railways to Transform Geography" and "Places Left Behind by Rail." Shaen gives a nice list of the English county towns that still aren't directly hooked up to London in 1846. As you can see, there are a bunch of them.

Since I'm trying to think through where the rails go and don't on the level of geography, it occurred to me that it would be really stellar to have a map.

Here we go, in five-minute experiment form.

I'd never done it before, but I'd heard right. Producing your own map of points (or lines, or points and lines linked to photos and text) is ridiculously easy now. Five minutes, probably less. Here they are, the nine towns in question. I know it's not a miracle, and it doesn't tell you everything you'd want to know about the geographical periphery by a long stretch, but isn't it nice to see them? See how they're all on the west, not the east?

A lot of them are near agricultural districts. Rail immediately served manufacturing, mining, and shipping points. Agricultural centers were left behind, and British agriculture almost immediately started the long slow path into decline.

It gets better. If you zoom in on the map (as I did when I was placing the little pointers), you start to notice that a good number of these towns still retain their eighteenth-century shape: a very small net of streets hugging the main highways. Getting left behind by the rail in 1846 permanently retarded their progress, as rail sped up the differential between industry and places left behind.

View Larger Map

oOo

The plethora of tools like this really come together when a researcher is trying to assemble a series of connections and ideas to present to other scholars.

All of my tools here serve traditional purposes. The mind-map I'm showing you serves a very traditional purpose: the outlining of paragraphs that will comprise the backbone of the chapter on railway and political economy in the 1830s and 40s in the book manuscript I'm preparing. The map above serves, for the moment, as a visual aid to my own imagination; if I can add a bit more data to make sense of why the periphery looks the way it does, that map might become a visual aid to the book itself.

I believe that it's the small tools like these that enhance our skills at visualizing arguments, that make possible small 5-min experiments, where the shape of how digital technology is transforming academic research is mostly clearly visible.

That opens up the room for experiment and risk-taking behavior. Despite my interest in geography, I'm not adept at map-making, and I've shied away from mapping my roads and trains for a long time. The 5-min experiment lowers the threshold for new ways of thinking. It makes it possible for political/social historians like myself to mess around outside of my comfort zone.

If we give grad students and undergrads the room to try this sort of thing, it's this sort of messy sorting of ideas and launching of experiments that could come to characterize humanities pedagogy: start with a small mapping experiment, see if you can identify the patterns at stake, keep mapping and moving until the project takes on its own form.

A characterization of humanities pedagogy based on risk-taking, insight, and pattern-finding is very exciting. It pushes past the monotony of the college essay and re-emphasizes the skills of perception upon which the humanities have traditionally been based. It creates richer minds and broader sets of experience.

I won't press my claims too far, but let me rest with this conclusion: I'm excited about my five-minute experiments and the direction in which they tend.

Manifesto: Against the Death of the Public Intellectual

2008-11-13T07:51:00.000-08:00

The SSCI (Social Science Citation Index) appeared in 1973 and provided the basis for rankings of publications by citation counts – the number of citations that linked to a particular publication. America’s Best Colleges Rankings on US News and World Report began to be published in 1983, and it too compiled statistics on publications, broken by department and university. As quantitative citation became the measure of success, minority professional publications that did the citing were prioritized over mainstream, public journals. The academic’s relevance was defined in terms of his footnoting colleagues, not in terms of an unknown public of New Yorker readers. Through an insistence on the metrics of the superscript, “publish or perish” effectively eliminated appeal to the public as an item of academic concern.

The proliferation of abstruse publications was hastened by one last new trend, electronic publication. Expensive institutional subscriptions funded by university libraries still float the expensive print journals, with little if any profit going to staff and publisher. They were labors of constant cost-cutting. Online publication drove down the cost of publishing, encouraging new journals to spread like the wildfires of Los Angeles. In 1994 the four-year-old Postmodern Culture went electronic, the first peer-reviewed publication to do so. In 1996, First Monday, the child of radical information scientist Edward Valauskas, was launched as an exclusively internet publication. More than half the existent journals on disability arose after 1996, and almost all of these were exclusively published as online journals.

Ironically, electronic publication was initially expected to reinstate the public venue for academics, rather than to abstract journals further from the public realm. The pioneers of electronic journals like First Monday saw electronic publication as an opportunity to liberate discourse from academic constraints, and so reach a broader public. This trend remained particularly true for publications on the study of technology, where an ideologues looked to the internet as a new commons. Yet freedom and publicity were not the trend. Electronic publication soon became another cash cow for the great university presses, which sold packages around the electronic subscription to traditional disciplinary landmarks like Past and Present.

Charging for the electronic version of the publishers’ great mainstays established a precedent for charging for the new ranks of exclusively electronic journals as well, grounding visions of an internet commons. Electronic journals became the private demesne of university publishers who reap between $4 and $200 an article that costs them nothing to buy or to publish. Taylor & Francis, a British publisher, charges between $131 and $2973 for the electronic subscription to a year of quarterlies and monthlies (an individual print subscription is a bargain in comparison, at rates between $42 and $911). Imagine the parent of the disabled child reading across a range of years and journals. The journals and their publishers are not intended highwaymen, of course; they prohibit access knowing that the articles are written by academics, for academics; that university libraries subsidize the fees of their only readers, and that the public cares not a fig for what academic journals have to say in the first place.

Read the rest of my essay, The Surprising Death of the Public Intellectual and a Manifesto for its Restoration, in the latest issue of Absent Magazine.

Twittering from the Chicago Digital Humanities Conference

2008-11-03T12:29:00.000-08:00

The Digital Humanities and Computer Science conference is just wrapping up: two days of fairly deep geekery around the programming of text-mining bots, followed by one mind-blowing day of investigations into the use of visualization to discern new forms of cultural change.

From the very small text-search to the very large collaborative overview, these are forces that could revolutionize the practice of history.

My twitter stream from the last three days skims over plenty, but gives a quick overview of some high points, including some of the tools that could be immediately plugged in to any old cultural studies problem on your mind! Offered here for your geeking out pleasure, a quick three days of tweets:

visualized word tree for "i am married" in personals ads: http://tinyurl.com/2brdao about 2 hours ago from twitterrific

"you are like a..." word tree from Jane eyre: http://tinyurl.com/6ekhax about 2 hours ago from twitterrific

mark wattenberg visualizes Richardson's novel Pamela (1740): http://tinyurl.com/676835 about 2 hours ago from twitterrific

hearing about mark wattenberg's big visualizations of culture: for instance, color in the english language http://tinyurl.com/67zrnz about 2 hours ago from twitterrific

live blog of panel that includes paul conway's stuff on distorted photos: http://tinyurl.com/5ee8j7 about 2 hours ago from twitterrific

listening to really disturbing run down of the way that historical photographs are regularly altered for the web -- so much mangled history about 3 hours ago from twitterrific

listening to Scott Branting describe the GIS mapping of an iron-age city in Turkey, speculating about patterns in city form about 4 hours ago from twitterrific

live coverage of #dhcs2008: http://tinyurl.com/6lfr4k 7:46 AM yesterday from twitterrific

#dhcs pasenek sculley presenting "a study of parody" - lit crit meets machine learning! 7:25 AM yesterday from twitterrific

#dhcs possibilities for new kinds of text mining here, but everything I'm hearing about today looks like 5 yrs from big collaborative use 1:18 PM Nov 1st from twitterrific

thick possibilities for new kinds of text mining here, but everything I'm hearing about today looks like 5 yrs from big collaborative use 1:17 PM Nov 1st from twitterrific

meandre promises synthesized, advanced text search... 12:26 PM Nov 1st from twitterrific

presentation about how SEASR aggregates analysis from a dozen different scholarly search tools: http://seasr.org/ 12:16 PM Nov 1st from twitterrific

machine-extrapolated philologic relationships for the whole of the eighteenth century corpus online!!! 11:07 AM Nov 1st from twitterrific

at the Digital Humanities conference at Chicago, geeking out over Philologic: http://philologic.northwestern.edu 11:06 AM Nov 1st from twitterrific

Psychogeography of the Border: A Short History

2008-11-02T12:43:00.000-08:00

In 1700, it was possible to travel across the borders of states without knowing that one had crossed from one region into the next. In 2000, a traveler stopped and searched by customs could hardly avoid the knowledge of nations. Yet the same traveler in Chicago or New York might daily drive past neighborhoods of which he had no knowledge, passing through the invisible boundaries of spaces he had no ability to read.

The dawn of the modern era saw a boom in technologies of navigation, the result of concerted travel from the Grand Tour to continental exploration to travel for the fiscal-military state. Broadly construed, those tools included not merely the cartographic rules for longitude and latitude, but the whole category of the social tools the traveler uses to tell where he is: drawing, hand signs, and printed guidebooks offered techniques for navigating around cultural boundaries, social difference, and government presence.

Equally significant to the tools themselves, however, was the radical hopes for transparency that spatial tools engendered. The cosmopolitan subject was imagined as a traveler, a freemason, for example, whose social connections enabled him to drift from port to port, exchanging information and trading freely no matter where he landed.

The dream of transparent geography began to break down almost as soon as it was launched. The same technologies of navigation created new, invisible frontiers. Watching the masses of tourists and soldiers travel, blinded by disregard for the interior boundaries they crossed, critical travelers described the geographies they themselves saw: islands of routine, colonies of clerks, savannas of mass culture, lakes of ethnic enclaves, each fixed in space, separated from other subgroups by an invisible boundary, across which members of those territories could not see, into which outsiders rarely peeped. The results are well known to urban historians: gentlemen slumming London's ghettos for sex in the 1820s; Dana's Ten Years Before the Mast; and middle-class reformers entering the slums full of ideas. As soon as modern subjects encountered the invisible frontier, they tried to tame it.

What they discovered was an unknown geography in a state of constant flux that defied the now conventional means of navigation. Those places so marked by their invisible boundaries were in fact generated by many of the same modern processes that had shaped so much navigation: new frontiers in circulation, migration, building, representation, affiliation, and the institutionalization of knowledge.

(sketch of a short article in progress)

(thanks, bill rankin, for the atlases!!)

Mapping the History of Death

2008-10-22T14:47:00.000-07:00

This wikipedia map records the shifting geography of places where population and death have caused the overflooding of traditional cemeteries.

Nineteenth-century cities like London and Paris faced the problem of overcrowding by corpses. In response, they resorted to the building of mass cemeteries and crematoria on the edges of town.

Which answer a government takes, when faced by large numbers of the dead, tells you a great deal about the government. If you're a state and there are too many dead bodies, building crematoria is one answer; outlawing death is another. Different kinds of politics lie behind each: crematoria require architects, surveyors, and a certain kind of flexible theology; outlawing death requires a strong, centralized ruler, but no bureaucracy is needed at all.

A very clever map would animate rises of population (in one color, say a bubbling orange) followed by problems with cemetery overflow (in oozing purple), followed by marks delineating several possible outcomes: blue dots marking the appointment of state-appointed cemeteries; gray dots marking crematoria, and red dots marking sites where death is illegal.

Bad Taste as a Measure of Political Corruption

2008-10-21T23:33:00.000-07:00

In Britain's nineteenth-century debates over bureaucratic expansion, expert authority, and wasteful expenditure, architectural design offered a new rubric for evidence of how far the public trust had been abused: the measure of “taste.”

In 1808, Mr. Windham paired his objection to wasteful expenditure on a new Exchequer building with condemnation of the “bad taste which prevailed in the pretended improvements.” Mr. Fuller, cautioning that any expenditure should not be a waste, critiqued the recent rebuilding of the House of Lords, joking that “its pilasters appeared nothing better than a set of elongations.”

The measure here was not personal taste, of course; rather, it represented Hume-inspired, objective taste in beauty; “taste” as a scientific measure of the degree to which architects and committees had conspired towards a fit, public end, immediately recognizable by the uneducated masses as well as the designing elite.

A critic of parliamentary building projects explained:

The effect which a fine specimen of art, more especially in architecture, creates on the mind, is not alone confined to the critic or the man of taste; it does not result from knowledge or reflection, it arises not from an acquaintance with the rule and compass; but it is the result which beauty and excellence, shewn in harmony of proprotions, grandeur of dimensions, and due arrangement of ornament, will never fail to produce.

The spectator, when he feels thus, pauses not to inquire whether the canons of Vitruvius, or any more modern teacher of the art, have been strictly observed; nor does his admiration decrease one tittle when he is informed by some critic at hand that every law of architecture has been violated in the structure.

Now that the government started building architecture for the people, tasteful buildings would be the immediately accessible signs for the people of what sort of a government they had. Good buildings would tell the people that they had a good government. Poor buildings would evidence a corrupted state that employed wortheless architects on the basis of nepotism and privilege.

“Bad taste” was, moreover, flexible as a marker: Not only did it signify the abuse of public taste by malicious experts; it could also signify the zone where economy and bureaucratic interference had gone too far and interfered with expert wisdom. The 1828 committee that inquired into so much waste in public spending found that the “inconvenient line” and poor taste in which the Council Office was produced were the result of cost-cutting around Soane’s original designs. Here, cost-cutters were to blame rather than designers. When the committee asked about a stray balustrade placed upon the roof of a “dwarfish front,” Soane replied that it was the fault of financially-fiscal, tampering officialdom, medaling with his designs: “he had nothing to do either with the putting it on or taking it off.”

Where “taste” appeared in the public landscape, it demonstrated that the bureaucracy had recruited a real architect, negotiated certain limits, and given room to the architect’s imagination. “Bad taste” as a measure of abusive management promised a rule for showing that the balance of power between the expert and the bureaucracy was out of whack.

The Floods of Heaven

2008-10-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

For twenty years now, the consequences of this course have been hard to see: hard, because whenever the signs of damage appear, the free market was quick to label a “culture of dependence.” A term that originated in the 1970s to attack American blacks’ use of welfare, the term “culture of dependence” has been extended to a broadening sphere of parties that have any relationship with government or law. New Orleanians’ ruined houses were the result of a “culture of dependence” on federal infrastructure funds. Policing the illegal trading of faulty mortgages and bandit short-selling represents a “culture of dependence” on the state. Community organizers, Sarah Palin suggests, instill a “culture of dependence” upon organizations of teachers and workers. Any individual or group with a relationship to government or law – any form of society, that is – stands at risk of imbibing a “culture of dependence.”

A series of shocks are shaking Americans into reconsidering those stories. Disaster, like the sun, falls on the good and the bad alike; provisions against disaster, like a law-abiding financial sector, are a necessity for a functionally operating society.

The more we look at history, the deeper the case of interdependence appears.

Read my full story here:
http://www.counterpunch.com/guldi10172008.html

Obsolescence and the Scholar's Tools

2008-10-15T08:35:00.000-07:00

When I moved house from San Francisco to Chicago this summer, I sold the filing cabinet, threw away some books of old slides, and recycled piles of old notes. I kept the ones that I thought were most useful. They were heavy: expensive to ship. I thought about the burden of old tools. I thought of one of my committee-members who proudly proclaimed last spring that he'd sold his book collection. What?! -- we all exclaimed. His notes were in spiral-bound copies, he explained. He didn't need the books themselves at all.

Much as we depend upon the permanence of objects for our own archival research, those objects have a consumption-value besides their use-value, and the two are easily confused.

Books are a luxury, a prop; perhaps a fetish. Which makes me wonder: are the notecards a fetish as well? The unread spirals -- a fetish? I don't know: but I do have a hunch that what matters most of all is the tool that helps us immediately, in present time, to tell a better story. If my dancing spiraling notes help me see the skeleton of an article being formed: if they help me weave tomorrow's talk and lecture, then they do their job better than all the lasting piles of notes I could possibly leave behind.

Digital scholarship and fancy new software both promote dangerously ephemeral records. Andrew Keating and Jim Sparrow, both digital historians whom I admire, have separately asked me the same thing. I'm writing my current article with the Personal Brain: will those notes still be accessible thirty years from now? When I'm preparing my lectures as a tenured professor, shouldn't I want to have notes that will have lasted?

Maybe. But here's a contention: most scholarly tools are ultimately ephemeral. I have notecards from my quals and xeroxes used to prepare my dissertation. No scholar I know flips through his old notecards in the evenings for fun. Many fine lecturers I've known enjoy the challenge of rewriting their last year's lectures again from scratch: rethinking the old problems, revisiting the old friends, readjusting the ideas to respond to contemporary concerns, new scholarship, or even ongoing politics.

In history as in film-making, the product is what counts. People read the book: the book remains. They hear the lecture, not the work behind it. The conversations, notes, and plans flitter away, trash on the breeze. This much seems clear to me: It is far less important what happens to the software I use than whether I'm able, in a shorter and more efficient way, to produce the next article and the next book.

And yet we still pay the movers to ship our books.

oOo

All of this brings us back, of course, to the war between the written and the spoken word. The historical account upon which Jacques Derrida deracinated philosophy was the story, new in the 1960s, about what had happened to our ancestors at the dawn of written language. Archaeologists were unveiling how ephemeral speech had waned in importance as it was, for official and symbolic purposes, replaced by written law.

Digital history, it seems to me, is performing a similar intervention on written words: wearing slowly away at the fetish value of written learning. The digital is promoting in place of the permanent/written an ephemeral kind of scholarship that asks to be outdated by new thoughts and new archival ruptures. If the traces, the ephemeral, the consumerist/fetishized stuff of notecards and heavy books vanish, and in their place remains a network of threaded-together ideas, consolidating every so often into a fine, deep essay? Then, I imagine, digital history is doing us all a great favor.

Not least of all by untethering the mobile scholar from her dozen thirty-five-pound boxes of notecards, that awful shackle of the past.

This is a paper being written.

2008-10-14T08:21:00.000-07:00

(click to zoom)

I've been admiring Jerry Michalski's brain for a while now. By note-taking in a free-form, web-linked network, brain-users claim that they find themselves retaining more facts while making stronger and more imaginative connections.

Here's what it ends up looking like, in practice, for the essay-writer. one ends up organizing the notecards as one takes them down: continuously grouping ideas into an expanding cloud of relationships and themes. At a far earlier stage than in standard-essay writing, I can see the structure of the new chapter here already emerging: two poles, one about centralized governance and one about its opposite. Below them, a cloud of subpoints: the history of precedents for centralized government in Britain; the history of precedents in transport government per se; the particular actors at work behind the rail; their arguments pro and con centralization on a variety of particular points.

Essentially I'm cutting out several phases in standard note-taking format: the phase of consolidating notecards. As I read and take notes, the points and themes form. No need to trace and retrace through an abstracted outline of points from each author; no need to write and reshuffle notecards. I can see the backbone of the essay right now, and I'm only beginning.

Portrait of the Blogger

2008-10-13T11:58:00.000-07:00

Lovely weekend of exploring neighborhoods, sitting in the park, and browsing in Chicago's wonderful Myopic Books. Thanks to my new friend, photographer August Bach, for this portrait, which I love! (If you like August's work, he posts a photo-a-day by email to subscribers. Check it out!)

Storm the Widener! Open the Gates! Free the Prisoners!

2008-10-11T08:29:00.000-07:00

University Presidents saying to the Publishers: Free our Libraries! A happy hope, surely, of broadening access to the stacks to the curious masses, yearning to break in and read. Inscape urges on the tide. Storm the Widener! Open the gates! Free the Prisoners!

Yet we must needs cast a wary eye towards the academic publishers and the account books of the university. Will the open publication movement survive? Servers cost money, digitization funded by Google is likely to come with strings -- and yet, what better use for library endowments?

Folksonomy vs. Navigation in Chains

2008-10-10T06:54:00.000-07:00

Two tendencies are at war over digital publishing: the trend towards free navigation and navigation in chains.

Navigation in chains is a disturbing trend, encouraged accidentally by some of the hardest-working and smartest academics on the web. As RWMG points out in a comment below, Exhibitors and Mass Digitization projects expand different kinds of public access. I've been arguing that mass-digitization projects are the broadest hope for expanding public access to the treasures formerly locked away for the few. Exhibitors indeed play a valuable role by encouraging the expansion of mass digitization back in time, so that nineteenth-century books from the dawn of cheap printing are joined online by medieval manuscripts, Renaissance incunabulae, and tablets from ancient Persia.

What I'm worried about is the role of independent navigation and collaborative interpretation in both projects.

Traditionally, online exhibitors have tended to pre-package navigation through their online collections. One can "take the Itinerary" through ancient Rome -- more fun than most primetime shows, sure, but generally not where I'd head first myself. The big problem is that most of the categories first noticed and made available -- the names of major monuments, emperors, and styles of architecture -- are the most over-written subjects in the field.

Where's the fun in that?

Navigate your way through the collection based on known categories, and you won't see anything new. What about the natural curiosity that guides even an amateur through the stacks? What about the undergraduate or grad student who comes to the online exhibit with their own concern -- what Renaissance Rome can tell us about ribbon development, public places, or eminent domain? Such freely arising, spontaneous, and individual questions are the questions that drive individuals to do their own inquiry in the first place, rather than operating as passive consumers of books.

The braver alternative, which few of the exhibitors are using for reasons of authority and control, is to open up to the public the tagging of each manuscript. When you open up each manuscript you get, possibly thousands of overlapping keywords -- in digital searching, that's not a problem; it in fact means that more subtle descriptors like mood, use, or background details might be noticed and tagged by people who care about them, leaving the room for a later researcher to make headway in categories no one's noticed before.

No lesser institution than the Library of Congress has experimented with open tagging. This spring, they opened up 3000 images to open-tagging on flickr. Famously, within the first 24 hours, the public had added 11,000 tags. For visual images, those expanding, publicly-generated tags signify a new kind of searching and category formation hitherto unavailable to visual image researchers, who had to rely on their own eyes, their own skills of analysis, and the clumsy and slow manuscript delivery of image libraries, where images were tagged only with preexisting categories. With open tagging, image searching hypothetically means one could actually look through occurrence of the tag "poverty" in the nineteenth century and learn something. Or look through the tags relating to "women" auto-generated by users and start wondering about the papers that haven't yet been written:

Insofar as critical inquiry -- the engagement with texts, the arguing back against books -- represents one of the fundamental reasons for the humanities, a tendency towards navigation in chains is antithetical to what academics should be doing on the web. Encouraged by an uncritical reverence for the scholar's authority, navigation in chains is structuring a disturbing number of the collections now online.

Defensible indexing: A dangerous kind of search

2008-10-09T08:31:00.000-07:00

Traditional searching mingles scholarly and unscholarly texts indiscriminately. Google Book Search, for instance, will give you nineteenth-century textbooks on political economy alongside radical screeds in the morning paper.

Some scholars are disturbed by this chaotic glut of information online. They want new tools to help them find the other scholars with awards and titles behind their name, who have published and been lauded; nor are conferences and university presses and google scholar and the thousand other tools for finding colleagues enough for them: they want to have their own Panopticon of a search, disciplining the little search hits into neat rows.

Scholars worried about their authority have a recourse: a peer-reviewed search. Colleagues vet academic websites, describe the ones that are sufficiently rigorous and authority-driven, and provide the scholarly community with an authority-driven, defensible index of peer reviewed sites.

Here, to answer their prayers, is Nines, a defensible, authoritative, peer-reviewed index of online exhibits pertaining to the nineteenth century:

Now I love this idea, honest, and I'm probably going to use Nines a lot.

But I'm also disturbed by it.

A prying question: what if I *wanted* to search an index that included Sally Anne's genealogical website that houses manuscripts from her grandfather's family of tin miners in Cornwall? Sally Anne's family documents aren't going to show up on Nines. Nor is the amateur collection of online costumes by naval enthusiasts. Nor will the crowd-sourced documents uploaded and tagged by Flickr users.

Some of us (social historians?) tend to think that the mingling of authoritative and unauthoritative sources is a good thing. It returns the historian to the naive viewpoint of the reader outside an institution, the reader without a history in hand, who looks at the newsstand wondering which of the trends will prevail. It breaks down the logic of the canon, making possible new kinds of texts and sources that challenge our received narratives. Social history has always depended upon outsider archives, and the policing of archives has always been a danger to our more radical practices.

oOo

The bigger issue here is whether we still need peer review. Nines itself represents an intelligent attempt to extrapolate the peer review process from traditional publication to the internet. But peer review may itself be redundant. Google Scholar, for instance, already makes clear who-cites-whom. We've crowdsourced authority. If fifty scholars read my blog and cite it, you know I might be onto something. Why the expensive meeting of a board? Why the time-consuming meetings to review?

Moreover, there are the dangers above associated with delimiting noise with authority as a standard. Journals' practice of vetting their own particular standards around a particular interest is helpful for winnowing noise, of course. So is the practice of individual connoisseurs on delicious and other self-indexing programs. But indexing by authority is the opposite of creative inquiry. Indexing by authority means putting every scholar and member of the public in line to kowtow to the standardized canon of institution. It's a stifling situation. Indeed, our colleagues in the natural sciences are already finding out that "peer review stifles scientific inquiry." Peer review, as an index, isn't healthy for individual scholarship, and it doesn't serve the purpose of critical inquiry.

Woe betide any institution that sets up a defensible index that becomes the standard gateway for the nineteenth century, to the exclusion of the amateur and peripheral.

Surely it were better to pool as many tags as possible, make knowledge as abundant as possible, and develop one vast Collex project that indexes everything? Surely it were better, individual scholars, to place your photos on Flickr under Creative Commons, where they can be collaboratively noted, tagged, and commented on by the whole of the scholarly and curious world? Surely we'd all be better off ignoring peer review altogether.

On the scholarly web, intelligent readers should be wary of the defensible spaces that confine their reading rather than broadening it. Streamlining our reading habits along narrow lines encourages scholars to retreat within the defensible walls of their community rather than engaging, describing, and critiquing practices on the outside.

Kvelling over the University of Chicago

2008-10-07T08:48:00.000-07:00

To be sure, all unrestrained shows of hyperbole are destined to be corrected by reality and winter, so I figure I'd better get it all out of my system now. Here, uncensored, my kvell.

First, there's Chicago as a wellspring of imagination, ideas, and intellectual activity, particularly for the digital humanities. Given free rein to explore, I'm hunting out the most interdisciplinary and experimental faculty at the university and interviewing them. Scott Branting, archaeologist at the Oriental Institute, is using GIS and medical modeling to develop pedestrian traffic maps of ancient Iron-Age cities. With nothing but corpses, a street grid, and the topography of a city, he can extrapolate a pretty remarkable prediction of where traffic flows (he tried it out on Cambridge, UK first. it predicts where the good coffee shops are.). Elisabeth Long, a librarian, has been experimenting with scans of medieval manuscripts so close that one can nearly conduct paint and orthography analysis virtually. Next on my list is John Padgett, a political scientist, who plugged in 60,000 renaissance Florentines and conducted network analysis on them. Conversations start with the particular and expand to the digital future of the humanities, the nature of the landscape in history, the possibilities for the teaching profession in dialogue with the public.

Second, there's Chicago as a radical opportunity to experience America. At a time when red state and blue have polarized the nation, finding liberals who can talk to middle America is rare. In the coastal universities, it is very rare indeed. Earnest Chicago, politically split between a free-market tradition of economic analysis and a deeply interventionist mode of sociological analysis, finds libertarians and hippies in conversation, strange intersections, and actual exchange. Last night at the Regenstein Library, a sign on the stairwell: "Got prayer? room 207." I stopped by to find a single librarian praying over a list of several dozen distressed undergraduates, name by name, spending a good five minutes on each concern over MCAT's and roommates and calling, lifting them up for guidance and company and love in whatever way. I stayed there and listened, genuinely moved by the practice. University towns often miss this kind of emergent American tradition; in Berkeley, the evangelicals kept to themselves, a little reclusive, perhaps suspicious of faculty accustomed to prognosticate their annihilation before modernity. Chicago has philosophers, economists, and historians willing to talk about American faith, its meaning, and their experiences, exploring both the conservative and progressive forms of religious practice.

In Eden the fruit falls from the tree without labor. In Chicago, one works hard, but the ideas are so abundant as to spring forth from the ground uncoaxed, spontaneous, and delightful. Bring it on, winter.

The Exhibitor vs. the Card Catalog Junkie: Scholars, Academics, and the Public

2008-10-06T17:22:00.000-07:00

In these first few months as Chicago's Digital Historian, I've given myself the task of having a lotta coffee. I'm having coffee with the GIS peeps, the archivists, the tech-savvy archaeologists... everyone, in short, who can tell me where the future lies.

Here's an assertion. When they go online, scholars go in one of two directions. Most of them, thinking they've been invited to curate a library installation of delightful rare books, create a gorgeous online exhibit. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go here and feast your hungry eyes: http://speculum.lib.uchicago.edu/

Many fewer of them, but some very smart folks, imagine themselves to be hanging out around an enormous virtual card catalog, craning over their colleagues' shoulders. "Oh, I LOVE that book!" "And have you read his other works?" "That reminds me of this editorial I read the other day..." If you don't know what you're talking about, read this version of the chatter that sits on my desktop all day: http://delicious.com/tag/academia

The card catalog junkies, not the exhibitors, are the way of the future, of course. They're the ones who take full advantage of the internet's full social capabilities: hanging out with scholars beyond their department. Sharing notecards. Sharing references. Experimenting in new exchanges, rapid-fire ways of seeing patterns and sorting data. They include grad students enrolled in digital history courses, twittering professors, helpful librarians, and dissertation-writers who make their notecards public to anyone who wants to read them. Mostly they operate for their own, finite, friendly, social purposes. Sometimes because online organizing helps their own creative process.

But the exhibitors operate out of some impulses with great staying power. The exhibitors operate out of fear and respect for their discipline. Terrified of promoting second-rate material, they only share their students' work if it's already edited. They also operate out of love of beauty, a respect for manuscripts, and a desire to connect the consumption-driven contemporary public to the noble minds of the past. That, and they're funded. Massively funded. NEH grants and Macarthur money sits behind a lot of their projects; that, rather than direction from the librarians or the universities, has meant the flourishing of so many digital exhibits.

On the surface, the exhibitors seem to care more about the public. They made these gorgeous installations for the benefit of an admiring public, right? It's *their* neat websites that smooth out the rough edges, present a ready-to-go taxonomy of searchable terms ("nineteenth century" "slavery" "abolition" "Abraham Lincoln"). Many even begin with ideas about encouraging their students to share, learn, and promote new scholarship online. They book computer-laden classrooms and learning sessions where their grad students work on collaboratively translating Greek.

Ironically, however, the exhibitors are actively dodging some of the most public opportunities for reaching the public. Presenting the public with a didactic, one-way model of the professor-as-podium, they present material risks being either so arcane that no one wants to read it but their colleagues, or so general that no one wants to read it but high-school students cramming for exams. Engaging, relevant, or dialogue-oriented it is not.

The card-catalog junkies end up engaging a much more public form of history. This morning, for instance, sharing my morning paper with some fellow-twitter-users, I was pointed to an editorial by an Americanist at William and Mary by an activist, and then shot it back to my friends, where a couple of consultants picked it up. There we were, the western world, talking about whether the current financial crisis is more like 1873 or 1929.

A public historian couldn't be more pleased.

Power against the city: The infrastructure state in democratic nations

2008-08-26T07:46:00.000-07:00

The way the story is typically told, eminent domain isn’t a problem for democratic nations like Britain and America; British and American towns are centers of a new, cosmopolitan, and intellectual commons. They invented the coffeehouse and the modern leafy suburbs, and their urban atmosphere was characterized by a contested but evolving civility, certainly not by the power of the state.

Some political ghosts are at work in this narrative. Wrapped up with the leftism of Cold War America, urban historians tend to associate the rise of modern urban planning with despotism, singling out the work of sixteenth-century popes like Sixtus V and nineteenth-century empires like Baron Haussman in Paris or Vienna and the Ringstrasse. Such a history tends to distinguish a despotic political system as the major threat to organic society.

We historians tend to exonerate British and American cities of similar activities. Isolated examples of control and demolition like the Bridewell reformatory, Regents Street, and the flaneur’s male gaze are therefore written off as partial examples of Enlightenment tendencies of control, outpaced in Britain by an expanding spirit of democracy; they are considered social problems, which in Britain never received political grounding, as distinguished from the systematic, despotic symptoms of control that characterized the contemporary cities of the continent. This account leaves Britain and America to stand as the major sanctuaries of freedom, democracy, and livable cities: coffeehouse paradises characterized more by the exchange of words than by visual symbols or spatial realities, more by bottom-up activities of writers and novelists than by the top-down efforts of planners and the state

Working at reforming such a narrative -- the article I'm currently working on -- means deploying some thinking of a kind that's nonintuitive, not just for British historians, but for historians of modernity in general.

My contention is that Britain invented, between 1790 and 1830, a new alliance between centralized state power, expert rule, and technology, endowed with the power to reconfigure human and natural environments on an unprecedented scale.

That political reality – the infrastructure state – had a social manifestation in the form of the modern age of landscape, an era where human environments were perpetually marked by their unprecedented scale, the lack of local political access to the mechanisms of design, and the visual symbols of state authority.

These elements came together for the first time in the edifice of the General Post Office, where Britain’s highways connected for the purpose of insuring the security and rapidity of the mails. The building was the result of the demolition of local neighborhoods, the usurpation of authority over design from the neighborhood, city, and event Post Office itself to the Treasury, and the creation of a nationally-revered visual statement about the nation’s identity, spread through lithographs and editorials across the four kingdoms. It inaugurated an era when the decisions of parliamentary experts rather than local builders came to characterize the substance of the everyday built environment, when the landscape itself became the direct conduit of state purposes and national identity.

Photo credit: Tracy Collins, documenting eminent domain at work in New York.

See also: Photos by Metroblossom, a very talented sociology graduate student at the University of Chicago.

The Dissected Map

2008-08-22T07:42:00.000-07:00

Cheap printed maps also made possible a new identification with the nation. Britain’s physical shape of its borders became an icon for the first time, the subject of moral and political education in the classroom.

Educational theorists like Maria Edgworth recommended the maps as a tool for teaching children to use hand and eye in conjunction. The first jigsaw puzzles, dissected maps consisted of an ordinary road-map, cut up into squares, left for the child to recompose on the basis of the whorls, coastlines, and words that fit together.

Such tools disappeared among generations who grew up with the shape of nations familiar as an icon; the cognitive challenge was smaller when the nation’s image was more commonplace. Only for children of a generation unfamiliar with the shape of the country, the dissected map was itself a challenge to put back together, the mind struggling to remember the indentures of coasts and the unfamiliar outline of the island viewed from above.

The maps reflected a burgeoning faith in the necessity of a nation's natural boundaries. William Paley explained, in 1828, the origin of the “natural boundaries” of Great Britain, arguing that any inner divisions of kingdoms within the island would have made the whole vulnerable “against the dangers that surround them;” arguing that a unified Britain was necessary, as any internal division into separate kingdoms would result in the conquest of the whole. William Priestley argued in his Lectures on History that each nation’s “natural situation” was of “great consequence either for defending ourselves, or of attacking others.” In exercises that patterned Paley’s sense of Britain’s perfect boundaries, Butler expected his students to name the southern and northern counties of England Scotland and their relationship to each of the island’s natural boundaries. Hannah More, similarly, had explicitly moral aims in mind when she applauded the turn towards geography in primary education. She exhorted that it would be “proper” always “to read history with a map, in order to keep up in the mind the indissoluble connexion between history and geography; and that a glance of the country may recall the exploits of the hero, or the virtues of the patriot who has immortalized it.”

More images? "I Collect Puzzles" has assembled a rather remarkable collection of nineteenth-century puzzle maps of the United States: http://www.icollectpuzzles.com/Maps/countries.htm

The Parallax View

2008-08-20T20:42:00.000-07:00

If today was not an endless highway
If tonight was not a crooked trail
If tomorrow wasn’t such a long time
Then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all

Tomorrow’s such a long time is Dylan at his very best: romantic, downcast, too tough to let you tell him that he’s wrong for feeling things, a little suspicious of the conditions under which he’s prone to let himself feel attachment. Dylan in that mood makes me want to hit the road, pull down the highway, and get out a map only after I’m three hours out of the city, cell phone off, dead to the world for weeks.

Dylan sings well about distance: distance was sort of his thing. The Jewish boy from Duluth, masquerading as a Santa Fe cowboy, playing a half-Mexican or half-Irish or Welsh poet in New York was reenacting one of Europe’s deepest myths, the one about the lovesick tramp or traveler. Like Walter Benjamin, Dylan had special access to that myth, by race and by personal experience, one of those chosen to travel. Travel fixed the bounds of his experience: it cemented the quirk of suspicion like a kniving splinter deeep in every love-song. Dylan didn’t sing about places, not places abandoned, left behind, returned to, remembered, cultivated, adored; unlike virtually every other folk-singer of the generation, each of whom left a litany of songs to particular places. I’m thinking about Neil Diamond’s honey-dripping hymns to Rocky Mountain High, or Simon and Garfunkel singing to Frank Lloyd Wright. Those are love-songs to places, real places; they’re spangled with their generation’s hopes of hoisting real utopias on earth, and they’re fashioned by the vatic singing of artists who think they’ve found something.

Dylan never allowed himself that feeling. Think about Kingsport Town or the Mediterranean earthquake that swallowed up an entire port of ambassadors, casinos, soldiers, and troublesome women. Dylan only sang to imaginary places and places he’d never been: or rather, he only sang about one place, an abstract place, the port-town where sailors hung out for a few heartsick and doomed weeks before leaving again. That town was surely Valparaiso and Singapore and Marseilles and Buenos Aires and Bangkok rolled into one: all the dirty haunts of gamblers and lovesick self-made ruins, where men who might otherwise be artists drank themselves into graves. Their lives offered a mirror to Dylan’s own, a worst-case scenario of what might happen to a love-sick artist if followed those strange cravings for the company of strangers, not into song but into travel instead. The broken, gun-slinging, hard-drinking traveler, he sensed, was an artist doing everything other than art.

I always liked Black Diamond Bay the best of these, the Mediterranean version of the same cautionary tale about a traveler getting into trouble, but this time – and perhaps it’s unique for Dylan – the traveler is a girl: “Out on the white veranda … Her passport shows a face from another time and place / She looks nothing like that / All of the fragments of her recent past are scattered on the wild wind.” The woman here is an exhausted and unimpressed woman in men’s clothes, capable of getting herself into a lot of trouble. She’s the girl from the Fitzgerald novel, the one half the men at the hotel are trying to make love to, but who’s been abandoned by the only men who can actually help her, because they themselves are suicidal. As in all the other songs, the character is unmistakably Dylan himself: stuck between the lovers of so many albums who said they loved him but knew they might be wrong. Dylan could still imagine a girl traveler in the same tragic and lonely place, and when he did, his inability to imagine her unlonely was so profound as to blow wide open his existential indifference to his own condition. The traveler’s vulnerability becomes the grounds for articulating the most sentimental carpe diem the twentieth century could deal with: because all travelers are united by the kinship of barely making it, their shared tales of loneliness might be worth singing about after all.

Maps and Nationalism

2008-08-19T12:18:00.000-07:00

We like to think that modernity means the spread of information. Newspapers, maps, travel: all these things supposedly bind peoples into a single national whole. We like to think these things are true; but sometimes such stories are too easy.

In 1775, Boswell had just heard that parts of the East Indies were better mapped than the Scottish Highlands of Britain itself, and he found the fact outrageous. Johnson merely observed, “That a country must be mapped, it must be traveled over.”

Boswell, a Scot, thought he better knew what his English friend was thinking. Don’t you meant to say, he jibed, that "it is not worth mapping?”

In 1784, the modern view of the nation, with its boundaries firmly delineated, the shape of the country itself an icon, was transmuted from the heavy volumes of private libraries consulted by the gentry, into a medium more common, widespread, and accessible. These maps, one assumes, should have brought to an end anxieties like Boswell’s (in 1775) over the position of any particular people, assimilating them all into a single icon of national unity. Sixty years before the arrival of a national press, the visible shape of the nation, in tangible and portable form, offered Britons a ticket for exploration and a tool for identity.

Yet the cheap printed map was also the child of twisted corridors of state dissemination. Republishing the results of military conquest and survey, the cheap printed map indirectly translated the state’s activities for a consuming public. That translation was idiomatic at best.

For reasons that hinged upon the history of military mapping and the government’s lead role in distributing geographic data upon which commercial maps depended, the nation depicted in these maps was informed by peculiar distortions. The survey of Scotland performed in the 1750s that became the basis for early nineteenth-century maps was trigonometrically out-of-date; as new surveys of Scotland were delayed by a military more concerned with troubles in Ireland, the outdated data was rejected by cartographers.

Publishers instead routinely depicted Scotland as a white corner on the map, lopped off by the edge of parchment that fell just above Edinburgh. The standard nineteenth-century map of Britain that hung in classrooms excluded most of Scotland from the nation pragmatically defined. Such facts raise the question of what nation, exactly, modern Britons thought they belonged to.

C. Smith, Smith’s Map of England & Wales (London: Printed for C. Smith, 1830). (view full image at the National Library of Australia)

The traditional story of how modern Britons came to understand themselves as members of a nation tells a far more straightforward account of what national implied. Since T. B. Macaulay’s History of England of 1848, official accounts of British identity have tended to emphasize the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as periods of successful assimilation, in which the fissures of earlier religious and political divides were healed by the salve of commerce, communications, and military exercise. While some scholars interrogate the limits of assimilation, even then, the received narrative tends to take for granted the inclusive work of enlightenment processes like communications and mapping. In fact, mapping itself was a creature of government, like the government-directed military and postal communications that spawned the early surveys upon which commercial cartographers depended. As a result, public maps took on contingencies of intension and empire that worked to structurally exclude Scotland from full integration in the consciousness of ordinary Britons. London publishers complained and Edinburgh cartographers tried to remedy the situation, but neither succeeded. It was the confusion of government practice, rather than English prejudice or Scottish self-assertion, that erased Scotland from the national map.

The map could only direct the traveler as well as allowed by the militarized history of cartographic practice. The common travelers’ aim, unlike the state, was not to police, but rather to plan a route through known and unknown regions, determining the likelihood of trade and the relationship between territories for secure travel and territories of adventure. As students, geologists, and railroads adapted standard maps to their own purposes, the fissures of the nation enshrined in maps were carried over to other practice. The tangible shape of the nation had become a tool of national distortion.

The Nation's Fragile Skeleton

2008-08-16T21:35:00.000-07:00

Early this summer most of America saw images of houses washing down the swollen Mississippi, logjammed against a bridge. In the following weeks we heard about the humans, libraries and even pets left homeless, but outside Iowa, few people heard about the problem of those houses, or indeed about that bridge itself. Iowans alone were left to contemplate their opportunities: When insurance failed, would FEMA provide? Would charity? Such questions only rise in importance the moment a reader in San Francisco or New Orleans or Miami pauses to consider who would repair their own city after disaster. For those who pay attention, the problem is wider still. Relics of the early 20th century, America's ancient dams and highways are crumbling with a shocking rapidity. The nation's skeleton is as fragile as the candy-cane bones sucked down to threads on Cinco de Mayo. Who replaces highways and bridges once they're gone?

Most Americans alive today grew up in an era when state infrastructure was on the rise. Some can remember still the monumental Mississippi flood of 1927, which propelled the nation into an unprecedented glut of levee-building. In 1944, the Pick-Sloan Plan gave the Army Corps of Engineers control over 316 reservoirs, dams, navigation projects and flood control zones across the nation. Seventy-year-olds still remember glowing documentaries boasting the efforts' star initiatives: the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification. In the 1950s and '60s, state engineers spread pylons and arches and overpasses across the nation. They connected and canalized; they filled the landscape with the rumbling sound of commerce on highways, rivers, ports and streets.

That phase of building was associated with a 200-year trend in politics, in which infrastructure became the favorite experiment of expanding nations. The infrastructure state, however, is no more a reality; it has been dramatically eroded by the postwar politics of suspicion.

Read the rest of my article on Alternet.

How to Read Walks

2007-09-28T23:05:00.000-07:00

“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

2007-09-12T09:49:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-01T17:41:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-05T22:43:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-23T12:04:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-03T21:41:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-19T21:16:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-27T10:03:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-26T12:44:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-22T19:43:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-21T09:07:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-20T19:57:00.001-07:00

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

2007-03-17T13:01:00.000-07:00

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.