Inky T O D - Ink Pen Paper And Handwriting Musings #2 - What Do You Like About Your Handwriting?
2. What is it about your handwriting that you like or dislike, and what is it about your handwriting that are actually going to change?
Now before Lapis asks why this topic is here (and not in another forum) - the answer is because for me the answer has something to do with ink. If it doesn't for you, that's okay.
Mine is terrible Cross your T's!? Pssht!
Pro: it's pretty identifiable as mine!
Edited by evyxmsj, 06 April 2018 - 20:58.
Same quote, four different pens and inks. I think it gives a pretty good representation of my handwriting. Especially when I slow down a little.
Three of the four are KWZI inks: El Dorado, Pine Green and Brown #4 plus Noodler's Apache Sunset.
Edited by Runnin_Ute, 07 April 2018 - 03:20.
Sorry for the extra-wide margins of white space on the pictures. There's probably a way to adjust the scanner for half-sheets of paper, but I don't know it.
I have the perfect reply that I will make layer today because it is after midnight and I really should be sleeping.
I don't particularly like my handwriting, but at least it's a bit legible; at school I had spectacular but illegible handwriting, and I held pens in such a way it was painful, so I had to start anew. Fountain pens have helped with greater girth and no dragging across the page, and to think clearly as I write, at a slower pace than I think, which used to drive me mad as a kid. Sometimes I have problems with specific letters, like r, but at least my u, v and x now look distinct!
I might try to improve my capital letters, the E looks iffy. Being mesmerized by Tsuyu Kusa, Verdigris and finally Kon Peki also helps .
OMG, I love that quote, where did you find it?
I hate the new trend of marketers to use handwritten fonts. When I used Calligraphr, it would allow me to use up to 8 different variants of the same letter.
I forgot I scanned my reply to this thread.
It's very interesting to read how everybody adapts their handwriting to fit the occasion. Amber's replies are so colorful, and knarflj's handwriting is so neat.
Also Aysun, your script is top notch, I tip my metaphorical hat to that.
Though I don't agree with Stoker's words. If a person shows a variety of handwriting styles, I think it's good to welcome them. They're like different facets of the same personality. Sometimes we're coherent, sometimes we're contradictory, it's the wonder of the human mind.
Being always uniform and same to yesterday's self implies an inability to adapt and change, which can be beneficial to our lives.
In response to RBN's post about childish and forgeable penmanship.
BTW, sorry that the LCR on TR paper with this huge wet nib didn't dry after 45 minutes.


text:
Writing History in the Digital Age
a born-digital, open-review volume edited by Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki
Part 1: Re-Visioning Historical Writing → More Than an Argument about the Past? (Dorn) Fall 2011
Minimise Header
More Than an Argument about the Past? (Dorn) Fall 2011
Is (Digital) History More Than an Argument about the Past? (Fall 2011 version)
by Sherman Dorn
See 2013 final edition from the University of Michigan Press
writinghistory
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 6 The well-dug trench of long-form historical argument embedded in the university-press monograph fits poorly with the range of constructions that are well-used digital history projects. Embedded in successful digital history projects is always (the possibility of) a rich historical argument, but historical argumentation is not always the intended central purpose or the way users find the most value. Existing (successful) individual digital history projects suggest a common template that we can use in understanding and evaluating digital historical works beyond the long-form argument.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Are professional historians and other scholars in related areas worrying about more than we are learning from the digital projects we admire? The online world appears to be infecting humanities scholars in the U.S. with status anxiety.1 Many new scholars worry about what "counts" as scholarship in an online universe, fearing that their senior colleagues will not respect anything other than monographs published by university presses. More experienced scholars find themselves worrying about the nature of peer review online, or maybe the future of the codex and university press publishing as an infrastructure for scholarship.2 There are some important practical issues to address with online scholarship, but the status anxiety is misplaced or at least poorly focused, for two reasons. One is that we, our students, and others interested in the humanities need to see the threats to scholarship more accurately. Fundamentally, threats to humanities scholarship have their roots far from the influence of technological change on the mechanics of scholarship and the routines we use to certify quality within our fields. Long before the internet and Amazon.com came declining state support for public universities, vocational rhetoric surrounding the politics of higher education, the growing use of contingent academic labor, and increased pressures for scholarship at institutions that had focused on teaching only a few short years before.3
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 But a second reason to avoid reasoning about scholarship from a status-anxiety framework is that it distracts us from an opportunity to understand our field in a richer way. The need for this is both pragmatic and philosophical. In one pragmatic sense, scholars whose work goes beyond the long-form argument need a way to help peers and administrators understand their work. Ernest Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered is a general way of communicating but not sufficiently specific for each discipline.4 Public historians have often struggled to communicate the meaning of their scholarship in research-oriented institutions, and the development of disciplinary support for their work and appropriate tenure and promotion standards has been relatively recent.5
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 In a second pragmatic sense, we need a better way to teach historical scholarship for undergraduates, not only for the ordinary reasons why college and university history departments should be concerned about an undergraduate education (which we often focus on history majors) but also because for the next generation of elementary and middle-school teachers in the States, the majority of the future teaching pool comprises the undergraduates that colleges and universities in the U.S. have for one or two classes as part of their general education requirements. Often, the second-to-last history class elementary-school teachers take is in high school, leaving just one or two classes in college for them to understand history as a discipline. College history classes have little room for error in educating future teachers about what history is and can be.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 2 But the opportunity to use digital history projects to explore the nature of historical scholarship stretches beyond the practical issues of tenure, promotion, and exposing future teachers to our disciplinary conventions and understandings. In addition to these worthy aims, we can use the best of digital history work to reimagine the discipline. In attempting to battle the perception of history as a set of dates and names, or "just one damned thing after another," as Toynbee and Somervell put it, historians have perhaps gone overboard in arguing that history is "an argument about the past," as a poster available to schoolteachers puts it.6 The irony of the poster is that it is produced by the National History Education Clearinghouse, whose work fits squarely within Boyer's "scholarship of teaching" rather than the monograph's scholarship of discovery or integration/synthesis. A further irony is that the National History Education Clearinghouse site is hosted by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, whose well-used work often is far from arguments, instead often managing either the development of tools or the type of project (such as the Clearinghouse) that otherwise supports scholarship and teaching.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Figure 1. Poster detail from National History Education Clearinghouse. Source: "Free Historical Thinking Poster!" (blog entry), August 17, 2010, available at http://teachinghistory.org/nhec-blog/24174 . The emphasis in the poster is on using primary sources, understanding multiple perspectives, and putting issues in historical context. What is missing is the type of work that often dominates digital history projects, including the one that created this poster.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 2 The development of digital history has not marginalized these diverse types of projects, and that diversity of digital projects has developed for several reasons: funders have had a range of interests, a few senior historians such as Roy Rosenzweig and Edward Ayers have used funding to develop diverse projects, and the development of digitization technology far in advance of electronic book publication and sales created a first-mover advantage. This first-mover advantage for CD-ROM and then web projects leveraged interest in digitizing a range of sources at a time when it was neither realistic nor professional advantageous to try to publish long-form arguments online. Into that gap stepped funders, institutions, and individual academics and teams of scholars who had different priorities. At the same time, two developments at a national level in the U.S. created educational audiences as well as funding streams for a range of projects. First, education reform politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s created a push for state-level standards in traditional K-12 academic subjects, including history.7 While the effort to create national history standards faltered because of political pressures by Lynne Cheney and others, states pushed.8 In addition, the late Sen. Robert Byrd (WV) and former President George W. Bush championed a dedicated funding stream in the Teaching American History grants, leading to a range of districts and partners needing curriculum material and trying to spread a more sophisticated understanding of history among K-12 teachers.9
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 This heterodox development is an opportunity to think about historical scholarship beyond the long-form argument, in ways for historians more specific than Boyer's rough classification.10 This is consistent with historians' more general craft orientation to disciplinary quality, what retired New York University historian Paul Mattingly once told me was his strong sense that historians were most comfortable with "mid-level generalizations" about specific times and places.11 So let us go about making some mid-level generalizations based on the diversity of digital history projects.
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Digital History as Diverse Types of Scholarship
Digital history projects that have provided public resources on history span a broad range of quality and scope. This section provides brief descriptions of several such projects that were created by professional historians, public historians, and other scholars.12 The point of this section is not to identify either the most polished or the most famous digital history projects but rather to list and briefly describe a range of both polish and scope. This section begins with two projects originally distributed on CD-ROMs, though digital history projects for a decade have generally focused on publicly-accessible online distribution.13
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 Who Built America? was an extension of a two-volume social-history textbook of the same name, with two CD-ROMs constructed and published in the 1990s.14 The CD-ROMs provided a digital expansion of the common textbook sidebar presentation of primary sources, including audio and video clips of speeches as well as photographs and text or facsimile primary documents. Creating such a compilation is a labor-intensive process in part because of extensive licensure issues involved in using media.15
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 1 The Valley of the Shadows was also an extension of a book project, in this case Edward L. Ayers' comparison of lives in two counties (Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia) before, during, and after the Civil War.16 The project had an early online life that Michael O'Malley and Roy Rosenzweig described in 1997 as a guided exploration of primary sources: "It allows students to construct their own narratives of life in both towns in the years before the war, but it seems to encourage narratives that follow the framework of Ayers's planned book."17 In the years since, it has had various versions, including the transformation of the materials to a website that now serves as an official "archive" of the project.18
¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 Figure 2. Screen capture of main navigation page, The Valley of the Shadow archival website, August 2011. URL: http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/choosepart.html. This page uses a library-room metaphor for types of sources and the periodization, with each period represented by a virtual "floor" with its own "rooms" for types of sources such as letters, maps, newspapers, and census records. Other pages in the archival site provide other structures for entering the materials.
¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 The American Memory project (http://memory.loc.gov) is an explicit display of archival collections that highlights a large number of the notable and little-known primary sources, photographs, and other artifacts in the Library of Congress collections. Begun in the early 1990s with a pilot project and CD-ROMs, American Memory has continued as a sprawling online display of historical artifacts.19 Individual items in the collection are displayed with archival metadata and can often be reached either as part of an organized presentation or through search tools.
¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 1 The Papers of George Washington (http://gwpapers.virginia.edu) is a 43-year-old editing project that has produced more than 50 volumes of edited material (out of an anticipated 90). One digital version of the papers has public access (http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/GEWN). A more scholarly online version of the papers is available by individual or personal subscription as well as by purchase of individual printed volumes from the University of Virginia Press.20 The general-access version contains a number of entrees to the primary sources, including chronological back-forward buttons that are akin to page turns.
¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 Figure 3. Screen capture of public ("guest") access to Papers of George Washington, with journal entry from October 17, 1781; URL: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=GEWN-chron-1780-1781-10-17-1. Left-right arrows contain hyperlinks to the previous and next journal entries. There is breadcrumb navigation to various levels of chronological organization as well as links to other methods of accessing individual sources. There is no standard bibliographic citation available on the page itself, though a user of the public access point could create one.
¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 Hypercities (http://hypercities.com or http://hypercities.ats.ucla.edu/) is a geographic display platform for layered maps built on Google Maps and the ability to geocode pictures and maps. While other platforms built on Google Maps focus on current events (e.g., Ushahidi, originally created to map Kenyan election violence in early 2008), Hypercities focuses on the collection and curation of historical map information. It is the result of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation grant to Todd Presner of UCLA and Philip Ethington at the University of Southern California and has been used for a number of classes at various institutions as well as for scholarly research (such as Ethington's work on the history of Los Angeles).
¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 Figure 4. Screen capture of Hypercities map of Mexico City with 1519 Tenochtitlan map overlay. Users can adjust the transparency of individual overlays as well as zoom and pan to compare historical maps with a contemporary satellite view on Google Maps. Other features of Hypercities allow the geotagging and tying of photographs or other artifacts to the location of the referenced feature.
¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 Europe, Interrupted (http://www.inventingeurope.eu/invent/exhibits/show/europeinterrupted) is an online exhibit of the Inventing Europe project sponsored by the European Science Foundation and the Foundation for the History of Technology. It presents a structured path through collection items using the "exhibit" metaphor for presentation. It is an example of the type of exhibit produced using the open-source Omeka museum collection presentation software that public historians can customize for specific exhibits.21
¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Figure 5. Screen capture of main navigation page for Europe, Interrupted. The navigation page uses a rail-map metaphor to allow different paths through the online connection. Each "junction" presents a curated object (or a media representation of one) with explanatory text. Each "line" has a label with an implied argument under the umbrella of imperfect technological development.
¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 History Matters (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/) is a website originally created in the late 1990s by the same organizations that created Who Built America? (the American Social History Project at the City University of New York and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University). The website supports survey courses in U.S. history at the high school and undergraduate levels (and is subtitled "The U.S. Survey Course on the Web"), with a range of materials from selected primary sources and historical links to sample syllabi, exemplary student work, and other resources for teachers.
¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 Digital History (http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu) is another collaborative teaching resource collection project headed by University of Houston historian Steven Mintz in the mid-2000s (and sponsored by a group including the University of Houston, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History). It has types of collections similar to those of History Matters, including both primary sources and lesson and other direct guidance for teachers.
¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 Figure 6. Screen capture of Digital History timeline tool, which combines a slider for a time window at the bottom with geographical markers of events that can be clicked on to reveal specific events. The copyright date of 2003 in the lower right corner of the image is older than the most recent copyright date elsewhere on the site (2007) and suggests the vulnerability of projects such as this to erosion from obsolescence (in contrast with an explicitly "archived" completed project such as The Valley of the Shadow).
¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 Digital History as PAELA: Tools for Presentation of Artifacts and Events, Learning, and Argumentation
The small collection of digital history described above includes several award-winning projects, and perhaps the most important starting point for learning from the projects is to acknowledge that digital history projects can win broad recognition of quality from peers who see them as professional, admirable, and enormously useful. And yet, of the collection listed here only Europe, Interrupted (and none of the award-winning projects) focuses on the type of argument that historians value in university-press monographs. Professional digital history projects can focus on the organization and presentation of primary sources from a specific range of time and place (The Valley of the Shadows), can be an online conversion of an archival collection (The Papers of George Washington), can be a teaching "portal" organized around instruction (such as History Matters), and can present a tool "modded" from open APIs such as Google Maps provides (Hypercities) as well as they can make an historical argument.22
¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 3 Academic historians in the post-WW2 era have recognized some types of non-argument activities and functions as important if marginalized in higher education. Public history is valued in theory, if only a few history departments have faculty who engage in public history projects (and fewer who have earned tenure on that basis). Archivists are essential to the work of historians, but they are usually trained in library or information science schools.23 If this pattern extends to digital history, one should expect that only a few departments will devote significant resources to the formal training of digital history technicians, those who have programming skills and some disciplinary history background, and that departments will struggle to evaluate digital history projects except where professional awards clearly convey peer approval.
¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 But there need not be significant difficulty in understanding the contributions of digital history projects. As demonstrated in just the few projects described in this chapter, academic historians have little problem recognizing the value of outstanding digital history work. The question is how to articulate the contributions of digital history in a way that is conceptual rather than ad hoc. We may use the existing outstanding digital history scholarship to bootstrap those concepts, and the rest of this section catalogues an initial classification.
¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 Using tools to present artifacts. There is already a range of recognized professional presentations of historical artifacts, generally primary sources but also multimedia files. The Library of Congress American Memory project is the most extensive in North America, but both the Papers of George Washington and The Valley of the Shadows organize primary sources for an audience. The scope is different in each case: the Library of Congress (or a research library's special collections department) cares for and presents material from multiple collections in its custody), while an edited version of an individual's papers or a thematic collection is much more narrow in purpose as well as scope. The critical traits of an archival resource for historians include custodianship and proper sourcing, and the critical traits of an online presentation of historical artifacts remains identical: care of the digital resource and clear provenance. One can see similar parallels with edited collections of primary sources (a Papers of… project), though in the case of the Papers of George Washington it is clear that while the editing quality is the same for the (identical) hard copy and online main text, the public digital version is missing critical traits of scholarly annotation that historians expect of scholarly edited collections of quality.24
¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 1 Using tools to present events. A second general use of tools for digital history is the presentation of "events" or, more generally, specifics of history bounded by time and place. A number of tools exist for creating online timelines such as the SIMILE timeline tool that has been incorporated into Google Docs, or the EasyTimeline markup format in Mediawiki software. However, one does not need an online tool to create a timeline. On the other hand, complex time and space data require specialized tools for presentation. The construction of historical maps has been an art form for centuries, generally beyond the recognized skill set of academic historians.25 Hypercities has attracted considerable attention in a few years of its development, because it allows the presentation of data in a form that is attractive, thought-provoking, and conceptually simple, with successive layers representing change over time. One does not need to be an artist to use Hypercities, though the required digitization and geocoding tasks require time and attention to detail. One could also argue that statistical presentation is an equally important activity in presenting "events" if one considers a datum bounded by time and place, with presentation of statistical data a skill often neglected in history departments. Gapminder is currently the most generally-known infrastructure for presenting historical data series online in an attractive and conceptually-simple manner.
¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 1 Using tools for learning. The three class-focused digital history projects listed above come with different organizations: an "expanded textbook" and the "teaching portal" with a broad range of resources. The construction of any website around learning is more than the appending of "lesson plans" to an existing website; it is the deliberate composition of a range of resources that includes primary sources and support for activities teachers might design or facilitate for students.
¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 Using tools for argumentation. Tools for constructing arguments have begun to catch up with the digital history projects that do not focus on argumentation. Blogs have been a tool for short-form argumentation that has made self-publishing of short commentary accessible to individual scholars for more than a decade, but long-form arguments or multimedia arguments have generally required specialized website construction until recently. Some blog tools such as WordPress plug-in digress.it now allow the publication of book-length projects with open commentary as the projects evolve (including the project which prompted this essay). Omeka is a tool for online public history exhibits discussed earlier. Some more adventuresome university presses such as the University of Michigan Press have also explored different definitions of the long-form argument as extending beyond the hard-copy book.
¶ 30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 4 Where Historians' Boundaries Must Stretch: Infrastructure as Scholarship, Use and Collaboration as Criteria of Value
As I have suggested earlier, historians will probably recognize the value of digital history in presentations of artifacts and sets of events and event representations when they contain the recognizable elements of quality work in offline parallels: care in custodianship and curation, tracking of provenance, match of organization with purpose, and accessibility of presentation. Such digital history projects may be viewed as inferior to long-form arguments unless they are adjuncts to long-form argumentation that academic historians already recognize.26 But recognizing such projects as valuable scholarship does not require rethinking the fundamentals of historical work since it matches up well to the traits of existing "infrastructure" for historians. I hope my fellow historians are more ecumenical in recognizing this work than I expect them to be; anyone who wishes to take the "easier" path compared with the monograph, by creating a digital history project, is welcome to try!
¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 1 What requires more deliberate effort is the evaluation of scholarly work in creating tools for presentation. Here, an important consideration in viewing digital tool-building as scholarship is the public visibility and use of the work. This is a pragmatic issue in terms of long-term impact as well as immediate value. Tools by themselves have little value as archived; because software quickly becomes outdated, a tool that is not used within a year or two will have no one providing feedback, no volunteers for further development, and no chance of support from potential funders. Yet to gain users, generally most tools require a team that gains users and builds a community as well as creating a software package.
¶ 32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 6 This requirement of effective team-building makes collaboration an essential part of tool-building, and this may be the most difficult evaluation criteria for historians to assimilate, more than use (which has a parallel to citations). Historical scholarship generally operates as solo projects or as the product of very small teams of scholars. In contrast with those small teams, a much larger community is required by the development, persistent use, and maintenance of software packages such as Omeka or Zotero. A history department at a research university may give tenure to an assistant professor who writes a single-authored book on an obscure topic published by a university press, where fewer than 200 copies are sold to libraries and placed on shelves without any evidence of who read the book other than the acquisition editor, a small number of reviewers, and the peers and external reviewers of the assistant professor. In the case of a university-press publication, the prospective valuation of the manuscript and post-publication review by a small number of senior scholars is sufficient. What about the assistant professor who worked as a graduate student on a software package and continues to do so as a new faculty member, where the software package is used extensively by museums and historical sites but where the tradeoff for the new faculty member is a few articles published before tenure rather than a book? I suspect many history departments would gladly value a scholar who headed such a project, but for someone who was a longtime contributor but not the lead, the value placed on such work would be far below the long-form argument, even if it were the software development contribution that had the greater contribution to the field.
¶ 33 Leave a comment on paragraph 33 0 About the author: Sherman Dorn is a professor of education at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. In addition to various articles and books written about education history and policy, he has consistently written in his blog focused on education for more than a decade and is the former editor of the open-access, online Education Policy Analysis Archives.
This essay focuses on both the professional dynamics in the U.S. and websites in English, but the argument is more general: we should see the diversity of successful digital projects as a way to talk about historical scholarship. ↩
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence (NYU Press, 2011). ↩
For a small sample of the recent literature on such changes, see Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace (Princeton University Press, 2004); David L. Kirp, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line (Harvard University Press, 2004); Martha C. Nussbaum, Not For Profit (Princeton University Press, 2010). ↩
Ernest L. Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, 1st ed. (Jossey-Bass, 1997). ↩
Kristin Ahlberg et al., Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian (Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship, June 2010). ↩
Arnold Joseph Toynbee and D.C. Somervell, A Study of History (Dell, 1965), 295; National History Education Clearinghouse, "History Is an Argument about the Past" (poster), 2010, which can be requested at http://teachinghistory.org/poster-request. ↩
Maris Vinovskis, From a Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind (Teachers College Press, 2008). ↩
Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn, History on Trial (Vintage, 2000). ↩
Alex Stein, "The Teaching American History Program: An Introduction and Overview," The History Teacher 36, no. 2 (2003): 178–185. ↩
This essay does not address the influences of postmodernism or some of the political influences on scholarship that Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob; Hoffer; or Wiener have explored. My focus on the disciplinary construction should not be read as a claim that these other concerns are irrelevant; Joyce Oldham Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret C. Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (Norton, 1994); Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect (PublicAffairs, 2007); Jon Wiener, Historians in Trouble (New Press, 2005). ↩
Mattingly's statement is itself a mid-level generalization consistent with Michéle Lamont's argument about historians' disciplinary temperament in How Professors Think (Harvard University Press, 2010). ↩
There are also well-known digital history projects by amateurs, such as Phil Gyford's presentation of Samuel Pepys's diary as a blog; URL: http://www.pepysdiary.com. ↩
The Papers of George Washington digital edition is available by subscription from the University of Virginia Press through the press's Rotunda service, though a less scholarly version is available to the general public. The distinctions between public and subscription availability, as well as issues of ethics and business models, is beyond the scope of this essay. ↩
Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Brier, and Joshua Brown, Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914 (Learning Technologies Interactive/Voyager, 1995); American Social History Productions, Who Built America? From the Great War of 1914 to the Dawn of the Atomic Age in 1946 (Worth Publishers, 2000). ↩
Daniel Jared Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), Chap. 7. ↩
Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies (W. W. Norton, 2003). ↩
Michael O'Malley and Roy Rosenzweig, "Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web," Journal of American History 84, no. 1 (1997): 145. ↩
The implied meaning of "archive" for the site is a static entity that will not be revised, rather than a living, curated collection of materials. ↩
Library of Congress, "Mission and History," n.d., http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/about/index.html. ↩
The project has received considerable support over the decades from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. ↩
Omeka was produced by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and can be downloaded from http://www.omeka.org. ↩
An online exhibit is a relatively straightforward translation of long-form historical arguments to a hyperlinked environment. ↩
The Society of American Archivists lists seven archival degree programs located in history departments. ↩
A separate issue is the organization of such artifacts, and I recognize that one could argue that an exhibit using Omeka is also presentation of artifacts. I classify Omeka as a tool for argumentation based on the structured nature of Omeka. ↩
The classic is Charles Joseph Minard's display of Napoleon's march into and out of Moscow; see Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd ed. (Graphics Pr, 2001), 40-41. ↩
The illustrations in Bernard Bailyn's Voyagers to the West (Knopf, 1986) may have contributed to the multiple awards it won, though they were peripheral to the argument. ↩
16 Comments on the whole Page
Sherman Dorn September 30, 2011 at 3:36 pm
I have this poster on the wall of my office. I love it, and yet I wince at the irony that this was produced for teaching purposes… so does teaching have to have an argument in order to be history?
I love the room/floor/source metaphor. Did it appear in the CD-ROM version?
Unfortunately, you cannot directly use the URL listed in the caption–you need to enter through the portal and then navigate to this journal page about the surrender negotiations with Cornwallis.
This is one of the online exhibit pages that works beautifully on an iPad–Omeka does not require Flash, unlike a number of other packages that digital historians have used over the years.
The "active on-the-ground" version of this layered approach to display exist with several apps (or "programs" for those of us older than 30) for mobile devices, that can display historical photographs taken from the vantage point of where one is standing.
Sherman Dorn October 2, 2011 at 2:52 pm
I forgot to acknowledge that there was an earlier online version from the early 1990s, with far fewer sources available (though still a wealth).
Cheryl Greenberg October 14, 2011 at 4:07 pm
I thought this essay was quite provocative. But it did leave me uncomfortable. You suggest that the claim that we have gone overboard with the claim that "history is an argument about the past." But I think it IS. That is what distinguishes historians from antiquarians — we both collect information but historians analyze it, place it in its context and explore why it happened as it did. I agree we should appreciate the challenges of creating digital sites, etc. but I am worried about giving this sense of history as analytical argument up.
Sherman Dorn October 19, 2011 at 2:11 am
Cheryl, I'm somewhat uncomfortable with this issue as well, which is why I wrote about it. Some years ago, a friend with a background in statistics asked me why historians never argue about methods. We do, occasionally, especially if there is an allegation of fabrication a la Bellesiles. But is it a sign of our craft orientation that we hide the "craftiness" of what we do behind the curtain of "this is all argumentation"?
Brian Sarnacki October 26, 2011 at 10:32 pm
History as a discipline has traditionally undervalued teaching, scholarly editing, archival work, and building tools and resources. Sherman Dorn discusses this longstanding problem with the valuation of historical work, particularly in regards to digital history. The public nature of digital history projects has raised the profile of these undervalued historical practices. I agree with Sherman Dorn that history as a discipline needs to value scholarship other than historical argument about the past, but I still believe the practice of history is intimately involved with argument. While not all types of valuable historical scholarship need argument, the practice of writing, presenting, and teaching history require argument. The fact that the practice of history needs argument does not mean scholars should not restrict scholarship to long-form arguments, however. Digital history projects help bring attention to these less appreciated forms of scholarship and hopefully history as a discipline will benefit from this discussion.
I do think on a general level teaching historical information involves argument. Teachers present an argument when they lecture on, for example, the causes of the American revolution or the worldwide impact of the Great Depression. They are arguing these particular events or social conditions caused the revolution or the Great Depression led to other specific events. Teachers may even present more than one argument to students. The way in which teachers present information, specifically constructing a narrative, creates an argument. The alternative seems to be simply listing names and dates, which is, at the very least, not good teaching.
However, I agree that teaching history (not simply historical information) does not always involve presenting an argument. Teachers must give students a set of skills for the students to do history. In teaching these skills, like writing and reading comprehension, teachers are not arguing, but they are still teaching history. In taking this broader view, teaching, like historical scholarship, is not simply historical argument, but rather argument and historical "infrastructure."
Rebecca S. Wingo October 27, 2011 at 4:12 pm
History on a professional level is about formulating an argument from a set of sources or materials and presenting the argument in a clear, concise, organized manner that buttresses a final conclusion. Using that definition (or something similar), I think we can distinguish between digital projects and digital history projects, as there is a difference: the argument. For example, when we talk about tool creation and use, the tool itself is a digital project while the use of the tool to shape an argument by either the creator or a user within the field of history is a digital history project. This distinction needs to be made.
So let us rehash the digital projects presented here that do not fall within the author's range of an argument: Who Built America?, The Valley of the Shadows, the Papers of George Washington, etc. I think Dorn's argument has some validity here – not all of these make arguments. Some mirror arguments made in monographs while others merely provide an online archive. By today's standard of digital history projects, many of these might not fall within the same grouping and appear more like digital projects. Is the only reason to count Inventing Europe because of its customizable interface and manipulability? What we need to understand when assessing these (at times award-winning) projects is that we are a long way from the Who Built America? and the Papers of George Washington. These projects were the forerunners of digital history, and at the time they were created, they were indeed revolutionary (no pun intended for the Papers of George Washington).
Unfortunately, that leaves us with a problem – do we discount previous digital history projects that would have been defined as such previously as mere digital projects because technology has changed? That hardly seems fair. To place this within a context that many non-digital scholars will understand, do we discard monographs once they get too dated, or do we build upon the work that previous scholars have written to formulate our own ideas? Certainly we do the latter. As historians, we love to contextualize our histories (as evidenced by the numerous historiographies I have to write for graduate school). If we were to discard previous work, how would we understand our work or the work of others? Admittedly, I created this problem by trying to distinguish between digital projects and digital history projects. I still hold that this distinction needs to be made for new scholarship. We have reached a point where our goals and objectives are clear when we start out. In other words, if we want to create an archive, then we have all the tools at our disposal to do so. If we want to create an historical argument about some materials, we have the tools to do that as well. We are no longer breaking ground at the same speed the authors of the listed digital projects had to. So to selfishly answer my own question, no – we should not wholly discount the work of previous historians and their digital history projects just because they are somewhat outdated. Instead, we should look forward and realize that we are charting the course for the future of digital history and we must maintain our focus and present arguments digitally.
To answer the title question, digital history is an argument about the past and needs to be maintained as such. Online archives that merely present or collect information while engaging in the materials are useful to the development of these historical arguments, but are not inherently digital history projects. To briefly clarify, I am not arguing against the generation of online archives. They bring needed primary sources to the home or library and that is an important service. I am merely suggesting that Dorn's article could absorb some of these thoughts when looking at past projects. As far as digital history projects go, their central purpose should always be the argument as that is the value of history.
Digital projects, on the other hand, are enormously beneficial, especially to the history scholar. Great value lies in the development of new tools like SIMILIE and Gapminder because they can aid the formulation of one's argument. Dorn's breakdown of the tools to present artifacts, to present events, for learning, and for argumentation is a viable way to categorize the different types of tools. He states, "Tools for constructing arguments have begun to catch up with the digital history projects that do not focus on argumentation." (paragraph 27) As already discussed, I think Dorn is absolutely correct. The tools used to facilitate argument creation or formulate arguments are much more advanced than those of the first digital history endeavors. However, Dorn's definition of what these tools are (blogs, Omeka, etc) is too narrow as there are a multitude of tools being created that can revolutionize the way we approach our documents. Google's N-Gram (despite the problem with its origins in the computer sciences with no input from the humanist scholars who would potentially use it), key words or phrases in context, and many other newer tools that I am just not cool enough to know about yet are more revolutionary to historical methods than blogging. Reworking this paragraph so that it encompasses some of these other argument-based tools would strengthen Dorn's argument.
To close with some notes on collaboration, I will say that Dorn is spot on. History has traditionally been a solo-act. Digital history should not be. Is it too far to say that digital history cannot be a solo act? The way I see it, digital history hovers in a strange gray area. The computer scientists tell us that if we are doing history, we are doing computer science and programming wrong; the book-hugging historians tell us that if we are doing digital history, then we are doing history wrong. How do we solve this problem? Collaboration. In this way, and only this way, are we able to produce the best digital work possible. Let's face it – historians are mostly trained in the same manner of thinking; computer scientists or other well-trained humanists can expose us to new ways of conceptualizing our arguments that will forever change how we view our materials.
I have created another gap in my response that needs to be addressed: I am excluding the idea of a joint project that simultaneously creates an archive of information, documentation, photographs, or artifacts (read: digital project) and a project incorporating analysis and interpretation of the archive (read: digital history project). In many cases, the archive needs to be created first in order to properly integrate it into the digital history project. Indeed, it could be that digital projects begin to sprout digital history projects. Perhaps collaboration between computer programmers, archivists, museums, and scholars would be the best solution to generation of digital projects and digital history projects.
As far as value of digital scholarship goes, I am not daunted by the tenure situation. There is no going back for history. Frankly, the field cannot continue to exist in the way it has for the past 150 years. Venues such as this one, and thought-provoking articles like Dorn's, will pave the way for digital humanists across all disciplines.
Jonathan Jarrett November 3, 2011 at 7:45 pm
I think the papers discussing Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View earlier on in this may-be-volume help with this. That too is an argument, of course, even though it disclaims it. Similarly, whatever any teacher may pitch to a class is an argument, even if he or she speaks as Authority. It may be a completely well-founded and convincing argument! But I don't see how encouraging the pupils to follow it through and make sure would hurt even then.
Kathryn Tomasek November 12, 2011 at 3:55 pm
First, I want to express my appreciation of the way this essay sets out some articulate points about opportunities to "think about historical scholarship beyond the long-form argument." This resonates deeply with ideas that I have encountered within the Digital Humanities community. Digital innovations have the potential to transform the ways we define scholarship in history as has been the case in other disciplines.
In my comment on the final paragraph, I have already said a bit about the effects of dichotomies that Dorn introduces in the final section. Here, I want to respond to Wingo's comment above.
It's perhaps to be expected that I dislike the idea of establishing a dichotomy between digital projects and digital history projects as Wingo suggests. Since I count the editorial staff of the Papers of George Washington and the XML experts at Rotunda among my colleagues, I object to the notion that PGW is somehow over or passé. Such commentary reproduces longstanding and unfortunate underestimation of the value of scholarly editing. I much prefer the generosity of the notion expressed by the organizers of the 2011 Digital Humanities conference, the idea that the field is a "big tent" that includes many different types of projects.
I do not dispute the notion that collection digitization differs from argumentation about the past, but I do think it's useful for us to think about the potential of such digitization for making the asking of new questions possible. For example, my conversations with the editors at PGW began because both their projects and ours have begun to digitize financial records, an abundant and underutilized resource that can be found in many archives worldwide. I imagine a future historical profession in which markup and metadata standards for the digitization of collections that include such documents will make possible new kinds of understandings of the economic exchanges that characterized daily life through data harvesting. Digitizing this kind of primary source is more labor intensive than creating Google Books, and it produces data that differs from either the IPUMs demographic data or the ICPSR political and social data. That does not mean it does not have value or that the work of creating standards for metadata and markup should not "count" as scholarship.
Clearly, Wingo has hit a nerve, and I apologize if this comment offends.
I would be saddened indeed to think of our discipline as one so firmly attached to defining history as argument about the past as to fail to imagine possible uses of digital efforts that move beyond argument for future historians.
William G. Thomas November 22, 2011 at 5:00 pm
After such cogent and thoughtful criticisms and suggestions, I hesitate to wade into this further. I was thrilled and pleased to see that Sherman Dorn has taken on the question of "long form" digital scholarship and decided to labor in its "well-dug trench."
What gave me pause was the idea that we have gone "overboard" in arguing that history is an argument about the past. I think that it could be argued we have persistently undervalued argument in digital history scholarship and as a result have opened up a troubling gap between digital history and mainstream historical scholarship. I would suggest that we ways to close this gap and develop new forms of digital historical argumentation–both embedded and narrative longer form.
One correction: the project is The Valley of the Shadow not The Valley of the Shadows–this is a common mistake but needs to be corrected throughout.
Digital history clearly opens up room for argument to take different forms beyond the scholarly monograph and it is helpful to point out the diverse types of large projects that have come forward. Whether Mintz's Digital History textbook is an argument in the same way that The Valley of the Shadow is is not clear to me. Dorn has pulled together a range of digital history works, and each in its own way has advanced aspects of the field. They share an emphasis on building infrastructure for scholarship–assembling tools, data, documents, and other materials in service of teaching, scholarly inquiry, and interpretative narrative. These are not all documentary scholarly editing projects, like The Papers of George Washington. And the Papers has, of course, changed form as it moves into Rotunda with other Founding collections. PGW extends a long tradition in historical scholarship, maintaining the highest standards of research, validation, and editing integrity. American Memory is a digital library project and digitization project with little if any scholarly editing.
I would classify The Valley of the Shadow and Hypercities perhaps as more argument-driven than the others. The Valley's intentional archive was specifically arranged to create a social history of the Civil War, which was underdeveloped in the historiography when the project began. It's argument is in some ways embedded in its architecture and structure, which is explicitly comparative and built around what Ayers has called "deep contingency." The project also produced a series of different scholarly products or outputs, most of them "long form"–Ayers' Bancroft prize-winning book In the Presence of Mine Enemies, a co-authored scholarly argument and "article" (hundreds of pages) on The Differences Slavery Made, a primary source reader published by W. W. Norton, a CD-ROM also published by W. W. Norton, methods papers, conference presentations, and essays.
The institutional settings of these projects differ as well, as does their audience and intended purpose. The Valley project contains thousands of documents but it was never a scholarly editing project in the way that The Papers of George Washington is. In any case, the larger point is that all of these are scholarship and this scholarship has taken digital form.
Infrastructure is scholarly activity to be sure, and in many cases it may be scholarship. But the problem of argument remains. And so does the gap that seems to have opened up in the practice of digital history. The tools for argumentation Dorn has outlined here (blogs, Omeka) provide some good places to start, but I think we need to have a broader discussion about the changing nature of narrative and argument in long-form digital history scholarship.
Sherman Dorn November 24, 2011 at 1:25 pm
Since I am not sure if I will have much time later this weekend (before the close of comments), I want to thank everyone who has commented on my essay, and especially William Thomas for encouraging his students to dive in. When I submitted this essay, I was not certain if it would get a rise out of anyone or just get a "ho-hum, so what?" reaction. Instead, I have a wonderful set of comments challenging me to think about the potential value of long-form arguments on multiple levels as well as missed opportunities for digital history to engage in argumentation. My deepest appreciation and gratitude to everyone who has responded.
co-editors Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty January 13, 2012 at 5:52 pm
In our invitation to revise & resubmit your essay, we wrote:
This essay's focus on argument is commendable and much needed. However, we are left wondering how you see narrative (as opposed to argument, or in conjunction with argument) given the thrust of this essay. For instance, do you believe that historians overvalue narrative as well? As our 2012 Table of Contents shows, we plan to pair this essay with the one written by Stefan Tanaka, who discusses narrative, so it would be ideal for it to briefly address this. See also other comments on your essay in the Fall 2011 web-book, in particular the suggestions by Will Thomas.
Please do your best to incorporate these recommendations into your revised essay. According to the word count at the bottom of the WordPress editing window, your current essay is 4,599 words. In order to meet our obligations to the Press, your final resubmission must not exceed 5,000 words.
This paragraph was written as an explicit abstract. Does it work as an introductory paragraph as well?
William Caraher October 18, 2011 at 3:17 pm
The mixed metaphor (as an archaeologist I can't really imagine an embedded trench) is a bit rough at the start.
William: guilty as charged.
I agree that a large number of digital history projects can serve as to illuminate the possibilities of historical scholarship outside of long-form argument. However, historical argument, though perhaps not long-form, has a place in many digital history projects. I think the suggestion that historians should look to the certain projects listed later as templates for moving beyond argument as the focus of scholarship leads to the confusion Shelia Brennan voices in a comment on paragraph five. Perhaps, the introduction could use a clearer explanation that this essay acknowledges, but does not focus on, historical argument in digital history. The title reflects this notion, implying (correctly) that history is argument about the past, but also that there is more to history as a discipline.
Timothy Burke November 23, 2011 at 2:06 pm
I think in a way part of the problem is potentially with audience–some audiences will know what is meant by "long-form historical argument" right away, but the more that I think about it, the more complicated it is even from my perspective. The monograph seems like a more specific, concrete genre–this essay suggests that 'rich' historical argument isn't necessarily equivalent with the monograph but it wasn't always equivalent with it in the past, either–part of the question is, when did that take hold in its strongest form?
Bethany Nowviskie November 27, 2011 at 9:17 am
I was glad to see this comment indicating the first paragraph was a late addition, because I would encourage you to drop it entirely! The trench metaphor, the parentheticals, the issue Timothy Burke highlights below about embedding too many early assumptions in the phrase "long-form argument…" I find the second paragraph a clearer and more engaging start.
1 Comment on paragraph 4
Whoops: I think that should be "comprising," not "comprises."
Sheila Brennan October 19, 2011 at 12:26 am
This paragraph confuses me. How have historians gone overboard with saying that history is an argument, or a construction, or an interpretation, about the past? There are still many forces in the schools, on television, on the web that reinforce that history is a set of dates and names–which is what I believe this poster is trying to address.
Also, I know this is your work and your argument, but I can't resist mentioning that there are plenty of projects at CHNM that put forth historical arguments (Gulag, Bracero, Historical Thinking Matters, History of 1989).
Charlotte D Rochez November 23, 2011 at 10:31 am
I agree with Sheila Brennan's comment here that "there are still many forces… on the web that reinforce that history is a set of dates and names"; although we might be able to "use the best of digital history work to reimagine the discipline" as you suggest, new technologies could also be used to teach of history in a more traditional sense.
I also think that reconceptualisations of the discipline, though influenced by technological developments, may be related to wider socio-political developments, beginning perhaps in the 1960s before digital tools were so widely available.
Does the first-mover argument here make sense? This is one of the passages that seems obvious to me, but that I know could be too obtuse for readers.
Not a problem for me. I do think that this essay privileges one kind of successful project while leaving out the kind of success that Sklar and Dublin claim for their WASM. My own concerns about their project are stated (if not entirely clearly) in the comments on their essay. I wonder whether WASM is omitted from this essay by choice or as a result of oversight.
1 Comment on paragraph 11
"Shadow" should be singular throughout.
Charlotte D Rochez October 31, 2011 at 3:03 pm
Aren't individual and personal subscription the same thing? Or should it be "institutional or personal subscription"?
I agree with these claims for the importance of, and the challenges of doing, these kinds of digital projects. But it is less clear to me how these projects differ from print versions of document collections, except in their scope. That is, with the exception perhaps of the mapping tools, digital history projects seem to me to be a bit like document collections on steroids. I would never quarrel with the benefit of wide distribution, and plentiful space, neither of which a book can enjoy. I use many of these sources myself for teaching and even for research. But I don't quite see how it is structurally different (except in having to learn the software) from those earlier document volumes, or why they ought to be valued (as contributions) any differently than those are.
Cheryl: you're right about the parallel for the digital projects I label as "artifact presentation," which are online collections in one form or another. Do you think the same is true for the Europe, Interrupted exhibit?
I find it useful to compare these digital projects to their print counterparts. Long before computers helped digital history gain ground, historians undertook many similar, though not the exact same, scholastic endeavors. History must address the inequality of credit scholars receive for these type of projects, whether they be in print or digital format. History, and the academy more generally, rarely give non-argumentative scholarship equal value to long-form scholarship.
Charlotte D Rochez November 23, 2011 at 9:57 am
Relating this paragraph to your earlier comments regarding the digital age moving us beyond notions of history as sets of dates and names, I wonder if it is possible that this type of history remains but in a new form, whereby we consider peoples rather than individuals and time periods rather than events, with digital history organising brackets of time and statistics…
I think you could expand on this. Might not such learning websites also redefine the learning audience and broaden access to those outside of the classroom setting?
This may have utility in over-coming issues of physical access to learning. For example: where the learner is learning part-time and has other family or work commitments; where the learner is ill or has certain disabilities; where a specialist course is to be offered to many people in different locations; where the learner would prefer not to be in a classroom environment; where the learner lives in a geographically isolated or inclement area
Here it may also be worth mentioning that digital formats may allow engagement at any time and for engagement to continue for longer or to occur at the pace of the learner.
Lovely invitation in the final sentence. I'd be delighted to see us as a discipline undertake to develop guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship comparable to those of the MLA: <http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital>.
I'd also say that meditations on the meaning of "finished" in digital humanities quarterly are useful for discussion of the "ease" of digital projects.
I think this piece might be a good opportunity to ask if there are any reasons why historians might legitimately regard the long-form argument in a monograph as a genuinely more labile and flexible instrument in constructing their own work and authority. So many of the contributions in the project frame that preference as the product of customary or habitual usage or as an artifact of institutional culture. But right here in these three paragraphs, you identify some significant issues, and looking at the various projects you review, those issues are pretty sharply visible. Maybe I'd be more inclined to cite and use a monograph because in some ways they are more flexible, adaptable and resilient than *any* of the digital projects reviewed here, before we even get to preferences for non-argument vs. argument functions.
Kathryn: I read the MLA's guideline as a formalistic "thou shalt think about granting credit and do it appropriately" norm rather than the guts of expectations. The pieces about having qualified reviewers and reviewing the material in the form in which it appears are important. I am not certain that addresses the argumentation preference.
Timothy: We're trained in grad school to focus on argumentation, to listen for an author's goals and theses. I remember my advisor's comment in one class that a first-year grad student's typical response to a reading is harsh criticism, without seeing what the contribution was or could have been. The flip side of that skill is looking to exploit our colleagues' arguments. I sometimes wonder (or worry) that as a result we're argumentative bricoleurs. There's nothing wrong with that, but the "usability" of long-form argumentation may be the consequence of discourse habits. The fair question is whether we could write differently.
Apart from the professional-credit and tenure issues, I think we could be. This essay is my first stab at doing so.
So many places where we as historians can benefit from interactions with digital humanities folks. Matt Kirschenbaum's current work on the necessity of knowing how to operate heritage machines in order to be an archivist of the digital age, for example. Stephen Ramsay's notion that digital humanists build things. Willard McCarty's resisting dh as "mere" methodology and seeking dh as poesis.
I do think there is an important difference between the monograph and the software product and that is in how it moves the field forward. Teaching is important, and we are not just teaching future historians. Educating a wide audience is crucial outside our classrooms as well. However the other component to our job is to move our knowledge or understanding of a topic forward. That's the difference between professors and high school teachers. Both teach, both know an incredible amount. But professors are (ordinarily) also expected to add something to the "current wisdom" in our field. (I am not saying high school teachers can't do this, of course, I'm only talking about job expectations.) Certainly we want to reach broader audiences, and we want to support those who do. But I don't think we want to lose sight of the importance of the analysis that the "singe-authored book on an obscure topic" can provide.
I wonder whether the comparison between the monograph producer and the digital tool producer here is a bit overwrought. As someone whose work sits astride the fields of archaeology and history, I have come to recognize that different models for publishing thrive outside of history and are already sufficiently robust in conceptualization and practice to contribute to history as a discipline. For example, each year my archaeological project moves toward a general goal based on broad reaching research questions (grounded in an understanding and appreciation of historiography). At the same time, it produces "easy" to publish data that speaks to many smaller research questions and technical goals. More frequently we publish articles that consider method, procedures, and even technological issues surrounding archaeological field work. These studies typically engage a more technical discourse central to producing comparable, reliable, and robust archaeological samples. These occasional annual publications filled out my CV while the longer term and more conceptual publications gestated.
The same approach could be grafted onto digital history where smaller articles on, say, technical aspects of tool development or "small picture" conceptual challenges can find "easy" homes in myriad technically oriented peer-reviewed journals. Typically a tool emerges based on carefully considered needs within the field, conversations with endusers, technical triumphs, and the like.
Moreover, the production of a tool begs and introduces a whole series of important, critical questions grounded in a sophisticated discourse. For example, consider recent(-ish) work by folks like Bruno Latour on technology and actor-network theory. To think that somehow technical proficiency occludes the need to engage this kind of theoretical and methodological scholarship is surely a false dichotomy. What it does mean, of course, is that scholars invested in using technology to move the field forward have to find ways to mediate between the practitioners in "the field" and their own contributions. Fortunately, there is a theoretical, methodological, and even technical literature that is already in place to foster these intradisciplinary conversations.
Thank you, Cheryl and William, for your thoughtful comments here. To some extent, I think William's explanation of the technical-methods discussion in archaeology both provides a model for and the limits of parallel outlets for historians who spend considerable time on software tool development. There are a few technically-oriented journals that might function as outlets, such as Historical Methods (currently published by Taylor & Francis), and others might develop, either as refereed journals or as gray literature.
I'll leave it to those involved in development projects to talk about what sort of technical papers might come out of software development. It seems at least at first glance as if the suggestion is "well, turn your methods into an argument about methods," which is a neat envelope trick if it can be managed… but it feels like it could easily be perceived as navel-gazing into belly buttons that are fairly ordinary. The point about software development is the what it does, and all the software tricks are hidden from the user because that's what a good user interface does.
Cheryl, maybe my point should be put a little more forcefully: 1) Do you think historians should have software tools at their disposal to think about historical evidence in new ways? 2) If we do not concretely value such work through tenure, promotion, etc., which historians will be involved in their development?
I think it probably behoves us to acknowledge that most or even all of the prospective contributors to this volume are writing methods papers that came out of larger research projects that were aimed at other outcomes.
More anecdotally, I'm sure we can all think of scholars who did grunt work on digital projects that didn't wind up being an effective CV line, but if you need a case, I blogged about one here. The text between the lines may need filling in but you can see the shape of it.
Posing a dichotomy between the monograph and the software package/tool leaves out multiple points of opportunity for creating new ways to affect the ways we think about the past. I'm interested in ways in which creating an online archive like Valley of the Shadow (no s, the allusion is to the 23d Psalm) created the possibility for Christian Spielvogel at Hope College to create ValleySim, a game that used the data created in the transcription and markup of the documents Ayers and his numerous collaborators, credited and non-credited, curated for Valley of the Shadow. <http://valleydev.cs.hope.edu/template/home.php>
You might be interested in some of the resources listed on this page, having to do with the development of project charters and the negotiation of shared credit for collaborative work: http://praxis.scholarslab.org/topics/toward-a-project-charter/
Introduction (2012 revision)
General comments on the book
How to comment — with video tutorial
Editorial and intellectual property policy
Assigning your students to read this book?
Part 1: Re-Visioning Historical Writing
More Than an Argument about the Past? (Dorn)
Pasts in a Digital Age (Tanaka)
Part 2: The Wisdom of Crowds(ourcing)
"I nevertheless am a historian" (Madsen-Brooks)
Historian's Craft, Memory & Wikipedia (Wolff)
The Wikiblitz (Graham)
Wikipedia and Women's History (Saxton)
Part 3: Practice What You Teach (and Teach What You Practice)
Teaching the Introductory Course (Harbison & Waltzer)
Learning How to Write (Lawrence)
Teaching Wikipedia without Apologies (Seligman)
Part 4: Writing with the Needles from Your Data Haystack
Reflections on 10,000 Notecards (Erickson)
Creating Meaning in a Sea of Information (Sklar & Dublin)
Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing (Gibbs & Owens)
Part 5: See What I Mean? Visual, Spatial, and Game-based History
Visualizations and Historical Arguments (Theibault)
Putting Harlem on the Map (Robertson)
Pox and the City (Zucconi, Watrall, Ueno, & Rosner)
Part 6: Public History on the Web: If You Build It, Will They Come?
Writing Chicana/o History (Rosales Castañeda)
Citizen Scholars (Sikarskie)
HeritageCrowd Project (Graham, Massie, & Feuerherm)
Part 7: Collaborative Writing
Accountability Partnership (Mehlman Petrzela & Manekin)
Informal Writing, Blogging & the Academy (Cummings & Jarrett)
Conclusions: What We Learned
How it works: our open-source web-book
How this book evolved
conference proposal submission (February 2010)
first round of essays & comments (Fall 2010)
proposal to University of Michigan Press (Nov 2010)
response from Press reviewer 1 (March 2011)
revised proposal to the Press (April 2011)
assessment by Press of revised proposal (May 2011)
call for essays/ideas (late May 2011)
essay idea discussion (May-August 2011)
progress report to Press (mid-June 2011)
our contract with the Press (July 2011)
essay submission and policies (July-August 2011)
editorial & intellectual property policy (Fall 2011)
instructions to expert reviewers (Sept 2011)
instructions for authors (September 2011)
how to comment — with video (Fall 2011)
open peer review essays (Fall 2011)
instructions for resubmitting essays (December 2011)
contributor's agreement for the press (December 2011)
summary of revisions to the manuscript (September 2012)
our words to the wise (March 2013)
copyediting with collaborators in a digital age (May 2013)
Announcements about this book
Follow us on Twitter or RSS feed
co-editors Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty
See in context
Bethany Nowviskie
Charlotte D Rochez
Ed Kaplan
While you're correct that a Zotero source record only has a single field for notes, you can have any number of associated text (i.e. note) records related that that source.
Kristen Nawrotzki
Our apologies for this frustration. We had temporarily suspended new registrations for technical reasons but have since reactivated it, so that both new registration and commenting without registration should now be possible.
Trevor Getz
This is the lesson that I'm learning right now. It's so true, and so difficult. All of the authors on our project are also discovering that you have to hit hundreds of people you know, and thousands of others, to get just a few willing to visit and contribute to the site. Thinking about strategies in this area requires great creativity, and many of us historian types are unused to thinking creatively about human contact in the here-and-now. But you have to do it to get a the kind of interaction that delivers on the promise of the technology.
Anne Hickley
Unfortunately, it says above that you need to enter your details in full for each comment or register once … but when you click 'register' it says 'registration is not allowed'. Mildly frustrating! :-)
Hmm … you're asking 'the public' to comment on the essays in this journal, but then the first two or three paragraphs talk exclusively about 'we historians' etc. which might well put of 'the public' from commenting, I would have thought.
I can't see how the digital revolution could not transform how historians write about the past – but it probably depends how far back you go. The past is yesterday – for yesterday's history there must be a vast mine of information on the net, from the completely trivial (I hurt my knee, ouch – I've written a blog post about it) to major world news.
However, pre-web history will obviously not be affected in the same way. I've no doubt the way it's written about will still be affected though and I look forward to reading more and finding out how.
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States license. You may freely share it under these terms with a source citation.
[Insert author/commenter and essay/page title], in Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, eds. Writing History in the Digital Age. Forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. Trinity College (CT) web-book edition, Spring 2012, http://WritingHistory.trincoll.edu.
Source: https://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/revisioning/more-than-an-argument-about-the-past-dorn/

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Congratulations to our new partners
We are pleased to announce the promotion of three of our highly-valued associates who have become partners of the firm.
Leanne Philp, within our Dispute Resolution department, Tony Brownlie, Head of Estate Administration, and Salvatore Amico, Head of Town & Country Planning, have all been with Attwaters for varying lengths of time, but have each shown their dedication towards our progression, delivering outstanding levels of service for clients and supporting our work within the community.
Leanne Philp specialises in contentious probate, breach of contract claims and building disputes, as well as civil and commercial litigation. She has been a qualified Chartered Legal Executive since 2006, when she joined the Attwaters team.
Tony Brownlie joined us in 2012 and is a specialist in Private Client Law, particularly in the areas of estate administration and probate work, but also tax and trusts, wills, lasting powers of attorney and estate planning. He is a member of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners (STEP).
Salvatore Amico's town and country planning expertise have been noted several times by the Legal 500 directory in recent years. He provides advice on all aspects of the Town and Country Planning Act and represents developers, individuals and local authorities.
Managing Partner, Andrew Flannagan, said: "Attwaters is a firm that encourages career progression and to be able to welcome Leanne, Tony and Salvatore to the partnership is something we are very proud of. They each bring their own expertise and ideas to the table and we are looking forward to the future, as we continue to grow. Congratulations to all!"
We are recognised by:
Resolution (Solicitors Family Law Association)
Law Society Family Panel and Advanced Family Panel
Society for Trust and Estate Practitioners (STEP)
Law Society Clinical Negligence Panel
Law Society Lexcel Accreditation
Association of Personal Injury Lawyers
Action Against Medical Negligence Panel
Law Society Conveyancing Quality Scheme Accreditation


Shield/Safety/Clean Slate scrolls. We need more choices to save and/or recover slots when scrolling our gear. I am am very grateful for both we receive per month in the reward shop, but realistically Maplestory 2 Mesos not enough when we have 100s of slots to scroll.
Right now, bots appear to conduct a monopoly on clean slates in game and sell them for 30m maplestory2 mesos a piece. I would love to see that the limitation in the reward store upped to 5 or so a month, or possess clean slates drop a great deal more frequently (perhaps from zak, hilla, etc) to get them down to 5-10m a bit.
Untradable equipment - mainly Android hubs, but also sweetwater equipment, etc.. As someone who makes most of my cash from kisses and sweetwater, I'd rather be broke and find something else to market as a way to trade these around my maplestory2 account. As of now, these can be the very last thing that I ever scroll/cube... assuming I ever get around to them! Even being able to sharing tag these items would be better than nothing.
I understand GMS is limited to what it can do, but Spell Traces have to be updated to reflect what regular scrolls can do. I do not mind weapons being stuck in 9, so they can earn money off Primes with Marvel, but Android hearts ought to also be in a position to have 9 assault! This wouldn't hurt the Prime marketplace, as min/maxers would still want them. As somebody who's likely considered middle class/mid game... These are the largest glaring defects to me.


One summer day last month, I happened upon an old rocking chair at a garage sale down the street from my house. I fell in love with it's character and found myself actually carrying it home! I couldn't help but imagine rocking my future grandson and maybe later find him cuddled up in it reading books. I bought it for $5.00!
I was so pleased with my find...that was until I asked my dad during his stay last week (He's an awesome woodworker btw), if he would set me up to sand the chair down. His look was one I saw many times during my childhood when I'd stump him with, what he calls my "crazy ideas". It's a look that said: Valerie are you kiddding me....this thing needs to go in the dumpster! (ha!ha!) After probably ten minutes of serious contemplation the challenge was on! He set forth to rebuild the darn thing!!!
As he took pieces apart, I set forth sanding....and sanding....and sanding! I think he used an entire bottle of wood glue!
I love the colonial red color I found! My mom laughed, literally out loud, at the fact my new cushion cost more than the chair.(I did too!) But I LOVE IT!!! I can't wait for it to be moved into the house (Today I had a few paint touch-ups to complete after school) But can't ya see a quilt finding it's home draped on it's back and a toddler all cozy looking at picture books in it? And maybe even a quilted cushion cover in the future!?? Aughhh the creative thinking never ends does it.
It was a fun weekend! Thanks dad.
What a great find and it is now perfect. Your dad is a treasure.
How beautiful! Old furniture is so much nicer than new things.
I love a good rescue story, beautiful!
I bought a rocking chair when I was pregnant with my first child and I've hardly used it, but I plan to keep it until I am an old lady, so it should get plenty of use in the future. I can't remember whether it cost $200 or $400, needless to say, you got a bargain. And time spent working on a project with you family is time well spent. In the future, the rocking chair will bring back memories not just of your grandchildren, but of your father as well.
The memories have already begun, for as I post, my college age daughter is rocking our dog in the chair teasing me that I bought a grandma rocker! Haaaahaaa!!!
What a lovely chair! Hope you enjoy rocking many happy times.
Gorgeous val, I saw one in a thrift store recently and almost bought it but my apartment is almost bursting at the seams at present, so I had to leave it there, not sure I will have the same ability to resist next time though!
Love your story and the rocking chair, awesome!


Tracy Lazonby. Final Journey is Tracy's creation, and she is the person that you will deal with throughout, from the first phone call through to the time after the funeral, when she can suggest local support groups if needed.
When you meet Tracy, it's as if you've known her for ages – she's warm and friendly and has a natural way of putting people at ease. Her philosophy is simple – treat people the way you wish to be treated yourself – and you instantly feel that she gets it, she understands, and is there to help guide you through the myriad of decisions that need to be made when someone has died.
And she wants clients to feel in control – this is something that is really important to Tracy, and everything about Final Journey is geared to ensuring that clients feel that they are in charge of what happens, that they choose what works for them.
It's a simple yet profound approach, the polar opposite of some more traditional funeral directors, whose way of working is to try and take care of everything for you. Tracy encourages you to think about what you need and she can help suggest ways to do this.
'Carrying the coffin: You can carry the coffin or we can do it for you or we can all do it together'.
Simple, but so powerful. Putting you and your feelings about the person who has died right at the heart of everything. This is Tracy's approach, and this is what makes her so good. She gets what matters, that each funeral needs to be created and conducted according to the culture, customs and language of the family involved, and she sees her role as helping you to achieve this.
One of the reasons that Tracy has such insight into the complex needs of people who have been bereaved is that her life has been very much shaped by the deaths of people close to her. She created Final Journey after the death of her mother, six years ago, but, as she says 'I have lived in the shadow of death my whole life'.
Tracy's father died suddenly, when she was just fourteen, and this huge loss and trauma was compounded by her mother's illness, which had been diagnosed some years earlier, and which had caused her to become a young carer. When her dad died, Tracy had to try and deal with her own grief while also trying to protect and care for both her mother and her younger sister. She had to almost become the father figure in the family, and this responsibility was one that she carried for years, influencing many of the choices that she made in her career and work life.
She had all kinds of experiences, flying as cabin crew, working for Estée Lauder, working for a Health and Safety company at the time of the foot and mouth outbreak, serving as a Special Constable for the local police force – all combining to make her a rounded, capable person, who is really good with people. Looking back, everything she has done over the years helped her acquire the skills needed to make a really good funeral director – the customer service skills, the attention to detail, the logical, organizational skills, the awareness of the importance of Health and Safety – and the ability to connect with people from all walks of life.
Without realising it at the time, throughout her life, Tracy had been learning everything she needed to know to make Final Journey work. And it was when her mother finally died (a death that was welcomed because her quality of life was so poor at the end), the idea for Final Journey became reality.
So with these thoughts in mind, when she created Final Journey, Tracy used all her own experience to shape the type of business that she would have wanted to find herself. A funeral director that focused on what she needed, not 'how it's always done round here'. A personal service from someone who listens and makes suggestions without any pressure. A thoughtful, kind approach with attention paid to little details that perhaps wouldn't have been thought of. A human, gentle and professional company that gives extraordinarily good value for money.
With the support of her husband Mike, Tracy set about converting part of their home into the Final Journey premises. Completely separate from the hubbub of family life in the rest of the house, and with its own entrance, there is a dedicated office area for families and a private space where you can spend time with the person who has died. Beautifully and stylishly decorated, with comfortable chairs and fairy lights in lanterns, the entire space is quiet and peaceful, with an immediate feeling of calm.
Cleverly, and unobtrusively, what appear to be cupboard doors on one side of the room actually open into a spacious fridge, where several people can be kept cool until the day of their funeral. Trestles and stretchers and all the various bits and pieces that are needed by undertakers behind the scenes are kept in a further room out of sight, and coffins are ordered individually as clients choose them, meaning that storage requirements are minimal. Tracy has a small desk but comes to sit at the coffee table with clients when they visit, although the vast majority of people prefer Tracy to come to them to talk about the funeral arrangements.
When Tracy collects someone from where they have died, she always calls her client to let them know that they're home with her. Many people mention this in the numerous testimonials left on the Funeral Advisor website– it obviously means a lot to receive that phone call. And she cares for everyone in the same gentle way. She washes and dresses them herself, and one of her friends is a hair stylist who often comes in to make sure that the person who has died has their hair done properly, and Tracy has an impressive collection of make-up which she applies with skill when needed (that training with Estée Lauder didn't go to waste).
As for the types of funerals that Tracy offers – well, she can do whatever kind of funeral you want. If you want shiny black cars you can have them, no problem at all. There will be an additional hire cost, but that's all laid out on her website and in her price list, so you know what this will be when you choose. Different styles of coffins are shown (with their prices) on the website so you can pick the type you prefer.
Costs are transparent, and easy to find – an inclusive price for either burial or cremation at Carlisle Cemetery or Crematorium is shown, with what's not included clearly listed in each case. If you want the funeral to take place elsewhere, then Tracy will obtain the costs for you and calculate the price for her services.
If you don't want to use Final Journey's gold Mercedes Vito (included in the figure quoted) then you'll just need to add on the cost of whichever alternative transport you prefer, along with the coffin of your choice. It's all very straightforward and simple, and puts you very much in control of how much you want to spend; by adding items to the online 'Wish List' you can have an instant calculation of the costs involved, with no obligation (or even conversation if you don't want one at this stage).
On the website, there are two really helpful downloads – 'My Funeral Wishes' is a useful checklist to help ensure your wishes for your funeral are recorded, with a note to remind you to keep it in a safe place once completed and also, most importantly, to tell someone close to you where it is. 'When Someone Dies' is a comprehensive four page document giving lots of information about what needs to be done after a death has occurred, and phone numbers for local register offices.
As mentioned above, there are also a lot of helpful suggestions and ideas about the funeral itself, all intended to put you in control of what happens and how it's done – and available for anyone to take inspiration from, even if they aren't choosing Final Journey as their funeral director.
Recognising that everyone is different, and needs different types of support – Tracy is really good at listening and understanding what clients need from her, and then tailoring her support to a level that is right for you.
This has the result of putting every client in charge of the funeral they are arranging. If this sounds daunting, it's not. Tracy is there to support each of her clients, holding hands if need be to ensure that each one feels they are being helped by a friend who knows the pitfalls to avoid. She stays in contact throughout your dealing with her, and knows every detail of every funeral arrangement inside out.
It was Tracy who brought direct cremation to the area by actively promoting it as a choice for some. She's very clear about the difference between direct cremation and other types of funeral, giving details on her website, along with the reassurance that 'we always make sure everyone knows the date and time the cremation will take place so that they can just be still and take a moment to send their thoughts and prayers if they wish'.
Little touches that make all the difference. For example, Tracy has loads of different sizes of candles (battery powered ones) which get placed around each coffin at the funeral ceremony, to give a sense of the person who has died being surrounded by light and love.
All of the details matter – Tracy knows how important it is to get everything right. She has a selection of scarves and floral corsages to match different colour themes at funeral ceremonies, a simple, subtle touch that might not be noticed by everyone, but connects her with the mourners in a thoughtful way.
Tracy's is just normal. She's lovely and friendly and stylish and confident, but overwhelmingly she's just normal, like one of your friends. She talks normally, not in euphemisms or strange funereal phrases, and she behaves normally. She dresses normally too, no uniform or intimidating barriers of formal dress, just smart, normal clothes.
She's practical and capable and sensible and straightforward, and she has created a funeral company that reflects her ethos and personality perfectly, the kind of funeral company that didn't exist in Carlisle when she needed it. Many of the traditional funeral directors in town thought that she wouldn't last when she launched Final Journey. Now, most have begrudgingly eaten their words, and she has earned the respect of her peers, even those who work in very different ways.
Your first callwill be answered Tracy.
Home visits – yes definitely, Tracy mostly visits people at home to talk about arrangements as she's found that most clients prefer this.
Embalming? Not usually. Tracy doesn't offer it but can arrange it if necessary.
Ethnic specialism? Happy to serve clients from all cultures and ethnicities.
Home arranged funerals – Happy to assist as much or as little as needed where clientsare looking after the funeral themselves.
Local celebrants – Tracy has an excellent and varied selection of celebrants and will always try and match the right officiant with each client.
Vehicles– Gold Mercedes Vito. Any other type of hearse can be hired for you, as can limousines if you want them.
Website– Lovely website, fresh, attractive and informative, with a price calculator and downloadable documents that you can print out and complete.
Client support – Personal support from Tracy throughout your contact with her.
Money matters – All Final Journey prices are online, clearly explained and broken down. Excellent value for money particularly given the personal service you will receive.
Parking–on street parking outside Tracy's house. (Access to the Final Journey entrance is down the drive rather than along the path).
Final Journey has become exactly what Tracy set out to create, a flexible, transparent and personal service that will provide exactly what you need from a funeral. Tracy has used her skills, knowledge and all of the experience she's gained throughout her life to create exactly the kind of funeral director company that she would have loved to find to support her when her beloved mother died.
If you need to find a funeral director in the Carlisle area, and if you are looking for someone who will really listen, and who will really be able to understand what you need to help you create exactly the kind of funeral you want, then we can't think of anyone better than Tracy Lazonby at Final Journey.