Update from 11/17 Presentation

Thanks for all of the helpful input from last week’s presentation.  Much of the information will allow me to find more appropriate pictures and objects for the proposed site.

After the suggestion from Professor Cohen, I looked at the Google site to find out how to integrate a customized Google search for the site.  It appears to be idiot proof, but I will put that theory to a test when I try to do a customized search among the links that I will highlight in my web site.

The site will continue to be text heavy which I think is unavoidable.  I will try to find an appropriate logo when the site is actually done.  I will continue to keep the colors muted, because I believe that lively colors are inappropriate for the topic.  I will use colors to distinguish page headings and coordinate with navigation buttons on each page.

Using the customized Google search is creating somewhat of a tension about the purpose of the site.  I continue to believe that the innovation of the site is the attempt to find persons who can add intimate knowledge of free persons of color in antebellum Virginia.  I want to keep this focus as the purpose of the site.  Having the site also become an searchable archive of other links does not necessarily detract from this purpose, but it adds a new dimension to the site that may change the abstract somewhat.

Curtis

Web Pages

free-persons-of-color-in-antebellum-virginia4

Moretti vs. Manovich

All the authors this week had something to say, but as has been commonplace for me in this class none of the readings spoke to me.  The excitement of a new history discourse based on broad searches of multitudes of data has not touched my soul.  I will use some current examples to try to explain my lack of enthusiasm.

As the election night passed, I thought the CHNM probably will soon offer a new web site that allows people to register their feelings about the election of Barack Obama.  I don’t think that would be a bad project.  It surely would give us some insights about the movement of college educated voters into the Democratic column.  Hopefully, it could give us some feelings of African Americans about the personal meaning of this election to them.  If the site encouraged participation in Spanish, Latino voters might also give us some ideas about their switch to voting Democratic.  But, I wonder if input from thousands of Americans would give us any insight into the discourse that I think will soon be associated with this election.  During my lifetime, African Americans have been seen as victims–first of slavery and then of racism.  With the election of an African American president, I don’t believe that white America will any longer tolerate the victim narrative.  If my hunch is correct, the narrative will play out in many different arenas that will require a skilled historian to show the changing discourse.  My point is that masses of data may not always answer the right question.  How do you feel about the election of Barack Obama will get thousands of responses.  How did the election change your perception of African Americans will not receive as many responses and such a query would not necessarily get an honest response.

I was also thinking about the 9-11 CHNM input.  I believe one of the big narratives that evolved from 9-11 is a discussion of what it means to be American.  I am sure that with a creative query, the responses to the CHNM request for input about 9-11 would give us some useful information.  I also feel that the Virginia Tech shooting responses might also give us some insights.  After all, both incidents were instigated by oriental terrorists.  But, do we have similar sites to give us insights when we have had occidental terrorists such as in the Oklahoma City bombings, the Columbine shootings, or the Amish shootings?  Would the reaction from Americans about the perpetrator be the same if he was a Westerner versus an Asian?  Do our feelings about the Americaness of the perpetrator affect the way we mourn?  For me, the point is that a lot of data does not necessarily mean that we will get answers to important questions.

I see other problems with the use of massive amounts of data.  Summaries of the data are only as good as the selection of the baseline data to analyze.  In other words, someone will have to make a judgement about the importance of various possible data sources.  If the data base is huge, the historian will be forced to rely on statistical sampling to review the data.  Such sampling may or may not allow for a good analysis of outliers.  Finally, the definitions of the variables are a key for getting good information.  How many historians are skilled in defining all the possible ways people communicate in order to get good information about changing racial attitudes or definitions of what it means to be an American or an outsider.

I do not object if Moretti wants to graph all novels written in England.  More power to him, but I am skeptical that his findings are worthy of the work required because ultimately the data may not yield answers to the most important trends in English literature.

This Week in Clio-Wired

This week’s readings were of interest particularly Leary and Norvig.  They certainly challenged me to think about using better search methods to find relevant material.  The Learned Society article was less inspiring to me.  I found it interesting that in the week that Google settled its lawsuit over digitizing its books, the learned article was mired in academic thoughts.  The Google settlement proves that if it is profitable, it will happen, and you do not have to trample on author rights in order to make it happen.  We just have to stop thinking about the internet as free. 

I was also struck about the learned article’s emphasis on NEH grants.  Instead of worrying about how to beg for grant money, universities need to think more in terms of what a constituency wants.  That is what Google did in digitizing its books.  Consider the possibilities if historians tapped into people’s desires to think about their own history.  For instance, Ancestry.com charges a steep price for people to do genealogy searches.  It seems to me that if academics think in terms of relating people’s personal histories with larger themes, the sites would be successful.  I believe it would be powerful if you could find out not only who greatgrandmother was but also what the issues were that shaped her life.  On the scholarly side, UVa has developed a site to aggregate census data.  What a great tool to get supporting data for your research.  My guess is that money would come to digitize the War Department records if a coherent argument can be made that a significant audience would use the data after it was published.

As I recall, we were asked to explain how we preserve our own history.  I have never owned a camera and have left my wife to take all the cute kid pictures as they grew up.  They are printed out and put into albums to gather dust on the shelf.  We store nothing on the computer.  The same is true with our household records.  We store nothing on the computer that is not backed up by paper.  I use a program to do my tax returns, but we keep a folder by year of tax information.  I get electronic bank statements, but I meticulously balance my checkbook each month so that I have a paper record of transactions.  We shred paper documents on a regular basis so we do not keep too much paper.

I have addressed my personal history in three different ways.  I write eulogies for family members that have died or are close to death.  Therefore, my family will have my thoughts on my relationships with my parents and brother.  I have also prepared an album of family trees and pictures of ancestors for my children.  I have included any stories that I can document about any of these people.  Finally, I intend to write a short narrative of my life for my children so that they can understand the themes that I think are important about my life.

Although I came from a family of letter writers, I have preserved none of this correspondence.  When I cleaned out my parents house, I threw away the few things my mother had kept.  I believe this is personal correspondence, and I would not keep this without permission.  In our modern household, we diligently delete e-mails so that my wife and I generally have less that 20 easily accessible e-mails.  We print out business e-mails that we need to keep.

I am a firm believer that each person is in charge of how he/she wants to be remembered.  Mostly, that responsibility comes from the way we live every day.  But, our most inner feelings should be revealed only as we see fit.  Few people want their picture taken in their swin suits.  Similarly, I do not want people accessing my unfiltered thoughts from blog posts or e-mails.  Obviously, we live in a world of compromised privacy, but I avoid the electronic world as much as possible in today’s world.