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.

Copyright and Preservation

I intend to use county courthouse records for my web site.  The purpose of the web site is to put those records about free persons of color in antebellum Virginia into some context about how the laws of Virginia affected family life of free non-whites.  Therefore, I do not expect to have copyright issues since I will be using government records.

Since this is not a records collection or research site, I do not expect the site to contain a lot of records.  The idea of the site is induce reflection not collection.  Therefore, I fully expect to type the records and use meta-data for search by name, county/city, type of record, etc.  I would certainly consider using XML if I found tags that would be helpful.

This is not a site that I would expect to be preserved.  All the records will continue to be in county courthouses and the Library of Virginia.

Preserving Digital History

This week’s readings were like my high school Latin–I remember nothing about it because it is just not something I am really interested in pursuing.  The Rosensweig article did not leave me with any real sense of guilt about not wanting to think about how archivists do their work whether on paper or digital.  The book chapters did a good job of explaining the concepts, but the NINCH Guide would have been just as readable if it had been in Latin.

I have spent some time thinking about archives while I was working with the government.  We considered digital archiving of records.  The technology at the time was too unreliable, and no one in their right mind wanted to be responsible for going through the mass of paper created by a government agency.  Therefore, we continued with our old methods of sending some paper to be archived, and the remainder was destroyed.  The prevailing feeling was that once something was gone, no one would miss it.

I certainly feel the same way about most of the “information” on the internet.  Some is worth preserving, but most of it will not be missed.  The question remains is who will be the “decider” about what is important?  Lots of people made those decisions in our agency, and I believe lots of people will be involved in the non-public sector.  Will it be saved with data tags and in XML format?  Who knows?  I believe it will be impossible to find an international standard.  As an example, at work I was involved as the banking agencies attempted to have banks submit their quarterly financial information in an XBRL format.  XBRL is a business reporting format derived from XML.  Deriving the tags for a finite number of items was a huge task.  Once it was finished, the American banking agencies and banks were on board, in a way.  Our project did not include international accountants nor did it include the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC).  Multi-national banks have to report information to foreign banking authorities so international cooperation would have been preferable if this project was to work as proposed.  The SEC just announced that it is going to require its reports in an XBRL format.  I can only imagine how their tags will screw up the work done by the banking agencies.

My philosophy is to preserve what you have in a manner that makes sense for your interest group.  Some young geek will figure out how to make it interactive in the future.  Meanwhile, don’t destroy the paper that you may need in the future until digital archiving advances past its infancy.

For my book reports this week, I chose Ivanhoe and Romeo and Juliet.  I was far more impressed with Google Books than I was with Open Library.  The Google copies were easier to read, highlighted the terms I used in my search and offered line markers every ten lines.  Reading required scrolling down which was unlike reading a book.  The Google copies showed markings in the book from previous readers which I found unnecessary but not distracting.

Open Library allowed two pages to be viewed at once as if you were reading a book.  It showed all the flaws in the book so some pages were missing some of the type.  Primarily, for me their copies were much harder to read.  Open Library had a “Help” function which I clicked on and could not get turned off.

I cannot imagine trying to read an entire book from either source, but that may just be a function of older eyes.  I also dislike using a mouse to scroll through a document while I am reading.  The movement on the screen eventually gives me motion sickness, and I have to stop for a while.

My week’s experience with Digital preservation again reminded me of Latin.  Veni, Vidi, but I just could not get that Vici thing.  I guess I will have to leave those worlds to be conquered by others.

Copyright

• I was watching Fox and Friends at my gym the other morning after the debate.  For the few moments I was watching, they conducted a rather one-sided discussion about how liberals and the mainstream media had done a disservice to Joe the Plumber.  The friends were alleging that liberals were investigating Joe and invading his privacy.  The clear message was that only people such as Fox and Friends cared about the interests of Joe.  Having been in the class, I immediately thought, “there is democracy in the new media.”  Fox News is free to say what they want and people may watch if they want.
• Unrelated to Fox and Friends, I have been following the financial meltdown, and I have thought back to my last years at the FDIC when the free market advocates took over the agency.  The free marketers believed that our supervision program was detrimental to banks so they slashed the time that bank examiners could spend at a bank.  Inside the FDIC we cynically called the new program drive-by examinations.  Banks were freed to react to the market without worrying about over-zealous federal oversight.  We also watched as the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan encouraged the movement of lending from banks to mortgage affiliates.  These affiliates were not under the direct supervision of bank supervisory agencies like the FDIC and were not funded directly with bank funds.  Therefore, with little or no supervision from the Federal Reserve, these affiliates were able to loosen lending standards, sell their packaged loans through Freddie or Fannie, and  in turn be financed by “sophisticated” funding mechanisms created on the free market of Wall Street.  What a great idea!  Who needs bank examiners?  By now, I hope we all understand there can be excesses in the free market.
• This week we had the opportunity to read about the evils of copyright laws and how democratization of ideas and free markets to disseminate those ideas will create a wonderful new world.  Please refer to my first two bullet points for my opinion of how well the wonderful new democratic, market driven world has worked in the realm of news media and financial markets.  Of course, the world of knowledge creation will be entirely different according to our authors.  We know that Rupert Murdoch would never engage in a hostile takeover of Wikipedia and spin his ideas into this new knowledge base.  We know that free markets will never try to take advantage of society’s lack of sophisticated knowledge of history to create misunderstanding about our heritage.
• Copyright laws are not the entire answer to keep us safe from those who would rewrite history for their selfish purposes.  If that were true, Southern elites could have never created the myth of the “lost cause.”  But, it is important that we never forget the importance of well-researched scholarship in writing our own history.  Columbia University’s experiment with the Teacher’s College Record seems to be a creative solution to balancing scholarly recognition with wider distribution.
• As long as the discussion of copyright focuses on the tensions of creator and publisher, the important questions of how to keep the integrity of history research in a new media world will not be answered.  There is already too much information being distributed to the world.  What history scholars need to consider is how to distinguish real scholarship from a Wiki page.
• As long as the discussion is about fair use of other persons’ creativity or ideas, the more important discussion about how to recognize new research or creativity will be delayed.  The creator of Cabbage Patch dolls did not need Disney’s permission to find a new childhood phenomenon twenty years ago.  Let Disney keep Mickey Mouse. Creativity and intellectual development come from new ideas, not from transforming other person’s ideas.
• Laurence Lessig wrote about his concerns over concentration of creativity in a few corporate hands.  Concentration issues should be addressed by anti-trust laws and Federal Communication Commission standards.  Both areas have been weakened by free marketers who had unlimited access to Washington over the past few years.
• The internet has challenged us to think about how and by whom information is distributed.  It allows for a much wider range of thought, but we have become addicted to the idea that anything we find on the internet should be free.  For the most part, we get what we pay for because the vast majority of information on the internet is not worth reading.  Scholars need to find gateways that allow a wide distribution of information at a modest cost.  If it is worth reading, it is worth a few dollars to have access to it.

Lengthy Blog Post

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	Free Persons of Color in Antebellum Virginia	Picture
Background   Virginia Laws   Demographic Data   Stories   Links   Contact Us	In 1860, Free Persons of Color were ___  percent of the total population of nthe state, but they were neither allowed privileges of full citizenship nor accepted as full members of society.  Their stories tell us much about the racial struggles that later Virginia would face after the Emancipation Proclamation.   In particular, free persons of color faced significant challenges to maintain their family life.  They faced economic discrimination, hurdles which made keeping their families intact difficult, and state law that required any former slave to leave the state if freed after 1806.  This site tells some of their stories. Please contact us if you would like to add to this archive documenting the struggles of free blacks in antebellum Virginia.

 

The proposed web site, “Free Persons of Color in Antebellum Virginia,” will serve as an informational site about family life of freed non-whites in Virginia in the period before the Civil War.  The site will provide some general background about understandings of race in Virginia in that period, laws that impacted those who were called free persons of color, demographic information, and stories of how family life of free persons of color was affected by discriminatory legal, economic and social structures of the time.  Descendents will be asked to share their understandings of family life as passed down through their ancestors stories.

Since the majority of blacks in Virginia in the period before the Civil War were enslaved, far less energy has been spent on understanding the lives of former slaves who were living in the state in the antebellum period.  Although freed from slave labor, these people faced no hope of full citizenship while enduring economic and legal discrimination.  These factors impacted the family life of free persons of color.  This impact has not been fully considered in the study of antebellum Virginia.

The focus of the project will be to tell some of the stories of family life among free persons of color in Virginia.  Because literacy rates among former slaves were low, written family records are not plentiful.  Historians find many of their sources in the archives of the county courts or petitions to the General Assembly.  Letters or other manuscripts dealing with family life are rare.  The site will provide a place where descendents or others may share their understandings of family life among freed slaves in Virginia prior to the Civil War.

The targeted audience is intended to be the descendents of free persons of color as well as other parties interested in Virginia history.  It will be challenging to find descendents because both blacks and whites of mixed ancestry may be reluctant to admit their background.  Therefore, the site will allow the names of ancestors only to be used to protect the privacy of their descendents.

This site will be developed on a simple technology platform.  Therefore, Dreamweaver and Photoshop will provide the basic design features.  A Virginia map will be used to present percentages of free persons of color in each county or city in the state, but I have no idea what technology is needed to present this information.

E-mail will be used to invite user contributions.  Because the site is asking for stories that are nearly 200 years old, it is unlikely there will be a volume of responses that will require anything more sophisticated.

Curtis Vaughn

Another Week in the New Media

Curtis Vaughn

This week’s readings and the podcast explored three topics that I think are worthy of consideration–Intellectual ownership of materials, the web and uses of secondary sources, and marketing.  All three raise interesting questions about the effectiveness of the new media.

Bell’s article about the new media and scholarship is interesting particularly since his article proves how difficult it is to read and retain material from a computer screen.  I cannot imagine trying to read a whole book sitting in front of a computer.  I am not sure that Bell has found the exact answer for why it is so difficult, but I am convinced that a fuzzy handheld device will not make the experience any better.  It seems to me that the new media is far more important in providing better access to primary sources.  Easier access to primary sources is an important step in the democratization of history.  Such sites as the 9-11 archive show the power of preserving primary sources.  Secondary sources seem to be more problematic on the web.  First and foremost, is the source of any importance?  If my ego would allow it, I could place the first paper I wrote at GMU on the internet.  It may or may not bring an audience, but since it was the beginning of a long learning process, I am certain it is of no historical importance.  At present, I don’t see a filter that effectively keeps poor work off the net.  Secondly, the internet brings into question the ownership of the secondary sources.  Many sites are created without the reader having any idea who has created the site or information in the site.  When material under copyright is placed on the net access is controlled which is contrary to the idea of democratization of history.  Material that is not under copyright laws seems to take on a life of its own just because it is on the net.  Third, because of the power of search tools, the message of the secondary source can easily be distorted by picking and choosing passages rather than looking at the author’s intended message.

This brings me to a segment of the podcast in which the panelists were discussing documents produced by the NIH having limited access.  The panelists seemed to oppose any limitations on access to these documents since NIH is publicly funded.  That seems like a bit of a slippery slope argument.  Couldn’t it be argued that any professor at a state university is in some way publicly funded?  Whose intellectual property is a document that has been created by an individual who has received funding from a public source?

Whether funded from a public or private source, I believe the most important thing about intellectual property is its value derived from research by knowledgeable people that has been scrutinized by equally knowledgeable peers. Therefore, it has something important to say about an area of study.  Whether we have new media or not, I believe that a standard of scrutiny by knowledgeable peers is crucial to the integrity of research.

This brings me to marketing web sites and my objection to web sites.  If I understand the process correctly, by next May we will produce a site that can or will be viewed by the public.  So far, I have not heard anyone ask, is what you are planning to do important to the study of history?  I am sensitive to that question because before I wrote one of my first research papers the professor here at GMU drilled into the class that it was not enough just to tell a story–we also were required to explain why the story was important.  Why is that standard dropped when it comes to web site development?  If the same standard was enforced in developing web sites, why would marketing be needed?

In spite of the democratization of information created by the web, I do not use the internet as an important source of information for anything other than sports.  The library electronic database is an exception.  If there were other safe areas I could go where the sites had undergone some scrutiny of knowledgeable peers who had asked such simple questions as why is the information contained in this site important to the study of history, I might be more enthusiastic about this forced march through the new media.

Wiki and the Web

The readings this week brought on further anxiety for me about creating a web site.  It seems that every week I grow more concerned about where my interests and the “new media” meet.  Certainly, it is unlikely to come this week as I am required to use my lack of artistic skills and visual imagination to begin the process of creating a web page. 

My research interests seem to be outside of where the internet wants to go.  In doing research for a paper during my Masters program, I developed an interest in free persons of color in Virginia during the antebellum era.  What intrigued me about the topic is the extent to which Virginia government went to discourage these people from having a family, and the resistance by free blacks to this government intervention into their private lives.  I hope to create a site that can explain the issues involved with free blacks and family life in  antebellum Virginia with the idea that feedback may give me some leads into other stories of free black family life in that era.

So far I have not found any sites that appear to have the same purpose.  But, I am not really surprised given our classroom discussion last Monday.  I was interested that most of the sites we reviewed concern events of the recent past.  I believe that is because our understanding of a good site requires visuals such as photographs which is primarily a phenomenon of the twentieth century and beyond.  The two sites that we reviewed from the nineteenth century were fascinating in their contrast.  The class was clearly bored with the UNC site and struggled with anything positive to say about it.  It reminded everyone of a library, and libraries are usually perceived as exciting places.  In contrast, you could see the excitement on the collective faces of the class as the Ox Hill battlefield site was put on the screen.  Professor Cohen’s busy fingers could not wait to make the little rectangles move over Fair Oaks Mall and vicinity.  People could not wait to talk about the site.  All I could think about was what a piece of crap this whole site is, and I am not talking about the characteristics of a good web site.  For me this site brought about a visceral reaction from my childhood when I was force-fed the Civil War from the Southern perspective.  As we learned about the battles of 1862, little rectangles represented the brave Confederate soldiers who were always positioned to show Southern superiority over the damn Yankees.  Of course, our side was defending the Constitutional principle of states’ rights while the Yankees were trying to destroy our genteel lifestyle.  What was missing then, as well as now with the web site with little rectangular armies moving over Fair Oaks Mall, was any sense of the brutality or any context about why this brutality was occurring.  This takes me back to the boring UNC site.  Much of life of common people in the nineteenth century has to be recreated through the painstaking tasks of searching for clues where often there is not much information.  It takes many visits to the library or courthouse.  It is hardly ever a mouse click away.

This rant brings me to Wikipedia.  As Roy Rosenzweig describes, Wikipedia is an electronic encyclopedia.  What Rosenzweig did not say (at least as I skimmed the article–it is hard to truly read on a computer screen) is that this encyclopedia is skewed towards the twentieth century.  American history is divided in nine periods according to Wikipedia.  Four of those periods are before 1918; five periods occur after 1918.  Undaunted, I read about Millard Fillmore, our last Whig president.  Good ole Millard was president during the compromise of 1850.  His biography included listing the major provisions of the compromise two of which were the admission of California as a state and the Fugitive Slave Act.  As presented, it was as boring as eighth grade history.  There was no context presented and Wikepedia did not offer any explanation of how people may have been affected by the compromise and Fillmore’s support of it.  But as stated by Rosenzweig, it appeared to me to be factually correct.

It seems to me that whether we get our crap right (by this I mean good web design principles) is not nearly as important as how we make history come alive for people who are looking at the site.  Yes, that requires more innovation than the library approach at the UNC site, but it should never be simplified into moving rectangles over Fair Oaks Mall.

As a last chuckle about last week’s class, our model for a good web site was Steve Barnes’ Soviet Gulag site.  I am no expert about Soviet history, but weren’t Gulags used to punish people who did not go along with the twentieth century brave new world of Communism.  Now we are in class talking about the twenty-first century brave new world of the new media.  I still have a vision of the screen shaking as Professor Cohen emphatically says, “Gulag, Gulag, Gulag.”  Repetition is a principle of good web design.  Was there a message there for anyone who is not fully on board?