Revised Draft for Class 11/24

project-draft-nov-19

I’m trying to find the line between having a consistent look and being a little TOO consistent — look forward to hearing more from all on Monday.

Thanks, Tracy

Draft of Website, Second Try

Still fighting with wordpress, but here’s the current draft of my pages.

-Tracy

project-draft-nov-161

Draft of Presentation Slides, Second Try

project-slides-rev2

First draft of the presentation I would give if we had more time.

-Tracy

Thoughts on the (Last) Readings

It took me a few pages to figure out just why I was reading Moretti.  Okay, so this must be the part where he switches from literature to history.  Okay, maybe this is the part.  Nope.  But then I realized that it was the presentation of the data (very Tufte) and how presenting the data in different ways can make you see it differently.  I thought the bar-graph-style presentation on the novel was fascinating.  I was less persuaded by the maps — probably just because that’s not the way I visualize things.  But I thought the trees were great too — because that’s *just* the way I visualize things.  Seeing someone with a lot more imagination do what I work hard to do in my head or on paper, depending on the application, was almost inspiring.  I’m not sure that I have the creativity of a Moretti (or a Tufte) but I’ll happily steal, er, borrow from their methods where I can use their styles to draw analogies to the work I’m doing.

I was less interested in Burke’s article — while he appreciated some of the innovation inherent in Moretti, he seemed (like our friend from Google last week) a little more interested in data for data’s sake.  That’s not what Moretti is after, it seems to me.  He’s not crunching numbers to see if the numbers tell us anything interesting, however abstract.  Moretti is visually presenting data that might otherwise be presented in numbers.  It’s the presentation, not the numbers, that I found fascinating.  Does it matter if we know how many things are in a really big archive?  If you can’t read a million things in a lifetime, does it matter if the archive contains two or three million?  Isn’t it more important to “bin” the ones you care about, so that you can get started on the half million or so that you’re actually interested in?  (Okay, maybe just a couple of thousand.)  But maybe Burke is right and the numbers (and the presentation of them) would tell us things we don’t know.  Maybe there are thousands of works in a particular, as-yet-unresearched period, suggesting there’s more “there” there than we thought.

I do think Burke is right that it’s not clear that Moretti’s presentations would explain “rupture, breach, or novelty.”  If the graph is dis-continuous (reaching way back to analytic geometry and calculus there), the graph may not explain why — but it would show you the big gap between where your function was at (t-1) and where it is now (at t).  That would tell you something — maybe something you didn’t know — even if it didn’t explain why the disruption occurred.  So I think Burke’s right about Moretti in that regard, but that doesn’t mean that Moretti’s not helpful (not that Burke is saying that he isn’t) — it just means we’ll need a different toolkit to go at those jumps in the graph and understand and then explain them.  Give Moretti a break — he doesn’t solve *every* problem, he just takes a few steps toward solving a few of them.  Can’t really ask for more.  If not completely satisfied, come up with a better (or complementary) solution.

This probably comes down to different styles of learning.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all the classes I’ve taken, it’s that different people absorb and “get” information differently.  If you “speak” numbers, then Google and Burke are for you.  If you “speak” pictures, stick with Moretti and me

I’m not sure about Thomas and Ayers.  Is their project more appropriate for the web than for a journal because of the flexibility?  The ability to update rapidly (not sure that’s a big issue)?  Or just because it’s cool?  It didn’t seem like they were doing a lot that they couldn’t do in a more static article and, not surprisingly, I found the on-line version harder to reader.  I’m so 20th century.  And it bothered me that it looked like you could only print sections.  When most of the site is text and pictures, how hard would it be to let people print the text?  I understand that they’re experimenting and I’m all in favor of that — I’m just not sure that this is the ideal candidate.  I expected the map to link to more graphics — nope, just more text.  Is this doing more than a table could do in the appropriate paper form?  Not clear.  On balance, however, I applaud the attempt — definitely an interesting example from which others (with perhaps more appropriate projects) could take ideas.

With the respect of the work of our good Dr. Cohen, I thought the analogy from the short story was particularly helpful, and again, I discover that all the readings from last week and this, when taken together, provide a coherent structure.  The analogy to the short story made me rethink some of my inherent dislike for “data for data’s sake” — what I reject in Burke this week and our Google friend from last week.  Computer scientists do approach things differently and that’s a good thing — the tools they bring us likely make us more efficient researchers.  All we have to do is two things:  keep a close eye on the computer scientists, to make sure they don’t run amuk in the data at the expense of the inquiry, and realize that nothing is a panacea to solve everything — not even computers.  I’m pretty sure that all the computer searches in the world aren’t a perfect substitute for flipping open a book to the index or the bibliography. Maybe it’s the same reason that it’s so hard to browse for books on Amazon — when you don’t know just what you’re looking for, Amazon can be very frustrating.  I just want to see what’s “new” from my favorite authors.  I can do that in three second by scanning the table inside the door of Borders but it’ll take much long on Amazon to run all those searches (even if I can remember all the authors I want to look for).  So much for the impulse buys (wait, maybe that’s a good thing, at least for my financial stability) and welcome to the occasional realization (just had on yesterday) that one of my favorite music groups has had a new CD out (could have been out for months for all I’d know).  (I have the same issues with iTunes — very useful when you know what you want, much harder to find things you didn’t know you wanted.  The “things you might also like” software must be worth a fortune, because I know a lot of people who buy things that way, but that won’t find you the completely unrelated thing that you’d like if you knew it existed.)  Okay, back to the main point.  Computers do some things very, very well.  We shouldn’t confuse that, however, with them doing *everything* well.  They don’t.  They don’t understand misspellings or bad syntax or vague requests (though the Google spelling alternatives have helped me on a number of occasions).  They do quickly and efficiently bring up data that has been properly entered and stored –  that’s very helpful but it’s not the ultimate answer.

I did really like the idea of a syllabus finder — I didn’t go check it out, but I will.  I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few months (for the first time in my graduate career) looking for syllabi.  I’m putting together reading lists for directed reading classes, I’m doing a choose-your-own-adventure historiography for a class, and of course, I’ve got this major project that I’m trying to unpack.  It’s amazing how helpful syllabi can be to suggesting a group of works to start with (and then follow those bibliographies) or to helping you be sure that you’re on the right track (in topic, in authors, in books, in what’s “scholarly” in what disciplines and what’s not — love it that everyone’s reading comic books (okay, graphic novels) in history and memory classes — thanks to Art Spiegelman.)  I thought the H-Bot was cool, but I’m not sure that’s a huge step above “Ask Jeeves” or plain old Google.  Just a question of syntax to me — getting the search terms right when you frame your query.  And of course I was shocked, shocked to find Dr. C advocating for cool ways to access digital media and more of them — and free ones available to everyone.  I have my issues with open source (I work with too many economists not to think that money can set priorities in useful ways as well as bad ways) but I do think that Dr. C is right about making tools widely available.  If nothing else, that makes the world a whole big group of “beta testers” if you have the resources to either watch how your tools are being used or take feedback from those users interested enough (or frustrated enough) to send it in.  Would I pay for Google if they suddenly made it fee-for-use?  Well, really, I’d hope that the government would fork out for it and I’d do my searching at work (off hours, of course) — but I’d probably seriously consider it if the price was right.  So tool-providers would always have the option of being like dealers — they could get you addicted and then up the prices.  But if there are enough geeks out there (I use the term with  affection, as those used to be my people), someone will build a better mousetrap and steal, er, borrow and adapt good ideas for more users.  Maybe open source is like free speech — more of it just can’t be a bad thing (with the occasional problematic exception).

Looking forward to our last discussion of assigned readings . . .

-Tracy

To Preserve or Not to Preserve

I’m old school when it comes to school work — I keep hard copies of everything. Syllabi, papers, book reports, projects.  I’ve had to fight with administrators too many times over what I did or didn’t do for a class in order to try to get additional credit.  (I also keep all my printed sources for a while — until I’m sure I won’t be challenged — and I keep the ones that were hard to find (or expensive to photocopy) for longer than that.  I also keep a few sets of sources in areas that are particularly interesting me, because the same set of sources can often support more than one paper or project.)  I also collect up the hard copies of final papers with the professor’s comments whenever possible — I have had a fair amount of success with getting copies of my final paper back if I was willing to put a LOT of stamps on a big envelope.

So my school work — I’m set there.  The rest of life is a little bit harder.  I print and keep e-mails or web sites that are of particular interest, but I don’t do as much to keep e-mails as I should.  I’m already seeing that family conversations take place in e-mails and not in letters — though, frankly, I never kept too many letters and probably wouldn’t be inclined too.  My family has just never been that interesting.  We do have some old letters from when grandpa was “overseas” in World War I — that sort of thing I think we’d all know enough to keep now.

One that that has been interesting is the culture of collecting.  When I was a kid, complete collections were valuable — if you had the baseball cards from Topps for a particular year, that was really something.  If you had all the Batman comics from the beginning, you were impressive (and presumptively rich).  But once people started figuring that out — drat you, Boomers, and your mad need to collect — the companies started responding.  Topps started selling complete sets of cards that anyone could buy.  Took all the work out of it (but also took out some of the fun of finding one of those last few cards you needed — on the other hand, it reduced the problem of having three dozen Alan Trammel cards from the 1983 Tigers (the year BEFORE they won the World Series)).  And don’t start on Beanie Babies, which were collected frantically by people — or maybe that’s just me, since Beanie Babies were after my time.  I DID want a complete set of Star Wars Action Figures, to fill my Darth Vadar collectors’ case (and how I wish I still had THAT).  Anyway, it seems clear that people got more savvy about collecting things that made sense to collect — we still have grandpa’s mess kit and the bag that his gas mask came in (though, sadly, not the gas mask itself).

But one debate the family has had recently is pictures.  My mother (not on the cutting edge of technology) not only has her own digital camera (okay, Dad claims it’s his, but you can’t tell by looking) and has started taking classes at the local community college (and now the Apple store) about using the camera, downloading the pictures and manipulating them with software.  (Next stop:  pictures of me as a child with Richard Nixon or something equally odd — no, not really — my mother would NEVER want me anywhere near Nixon.)  So she and I had the digital picture discussion — should you print them? why? they just take up space.  And besides, they’re on the computer so they’ll always be there.  And I went through the whole argument — technologies change and the only way to be completely sure is to have a hard copy — it may not last forever but it may last a lot longer than a digital file.  Family photos are important to her — she has boxes and boxes — so she decided that printing at least some of them made sense.

I’ve been a scrapbooker — no, not that kind, just a person who puts things in a box or a book to hold them — since I started college.  So I’m in the habit of printing out pictures, articles, anything that catches my attention and putting it in a scrapbook.  Not sure what I’ll do with them ever — my college will likely accept the ones from my time there as part of their collection — but they’ve been handy on a number of occasions to find out when we saw a certain play or what our address was at a certain time.  So I probably have more collected history of my life in paper than some people.  I occasionally have this vision of someone going through my things in seventy or eighty years and throwing it all out, but who knows.  Maybe it’ll entertain some enterprising young historian who needs materials on life in the late 20th century — if only she can get the materials digitized so they can be “useful” . . .

-Tracy

There are always unintended consequences

It’s one of Murphy’s laws (and one of Murphy’s laws of war) — if you do something to achieve a particular result, you’ll get other results, some of which won’t be good.  The Clarence Darrow character says it in “Inherit the Wind” (about Darwinism, but let’s not go there): Gentlemen, progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, “Alright, you can have a telephone, but you lose privacy and the charm of distance.” “Madam, you may vote, but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind the powder-puff or your petticoat.” “Mr., you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.”

Googling the Victorians makes that concept relevant to the modern age.  Who hasn’t tried researching something in expensive databases, given up, thrown the search into Google in desperation and gotten a right answer?  And/or a whole LOT of wrong ones?  Not to mention that two people doing supposedly the same search can reach different results — have you ever asked someone else to do a search for something you couldn’t find and it came right up for them (so frustrating!).  But if Google is amazing, practical(thank you Google spell check and “did you mean”), and often useful, it seems clear that we risk becoming overdependent.  Well, if those expense databases don’t do any better than Google for strange things, why should I use them, or pay for them, for other things?  But that narrows our world to “what Google knows” — and that has to be a bad thing.  One source for ANY work is a bad thing, no how many sources are subsumed into that one source.  The world narrows and our ideas narrow.   I particularly liked the warning that the “time is near upon us when whatever is not online will simple cease to exist as far as anyone but specialists is concerned, a condition I have come to think of as the offline penumbra.” (13)  I think that’s a really great view of things — both the warning and the idea that “offline” becomes an amorphous thing that’s hard to define and harder to care about it (unless you’re the one being screened out or need information out there that’s only on paper).

I’m not sure what I was supposed to get out of the Peter Norvig lecture other than baffled.  I had a lot of math in college — even probability — but that was a long time ago.  Not sure that he couldn’t have done a little better job explaining what he was demonstrating, but in any event, what I DID take away from the lecture is just because you have a zillion pieces of data doesn’t necessarily mean that you have an idea of what they mean.  I have no doubt that what Google is doing is revolutionary and critically important — but I’d rather here someone CRITIQUE Google’s method than master what Google does.  Are we sure that “how Google works” is the best way?  I’m trusting Google — and the open market, heaven bless it — to do right by all of its information and therefore by me.  If there’s an error in the code or the process or whatever we call it, how long will it take to uncover, especially if it’s the more obscure areas that some of us live in?  I think I heard him explain how they translate — a method done with much ambiguity by people and professionals with lots of experience — do I want to rely on computers to do something that requires discretion?  Computers are good tools, but they don’t live in the gray.  Can you imagine if a algorithm mis-translated an important word in Hebrew or Arabic or something else where subtleties matter a great deal and the differences in wording are really important, even for just a little while?

I thought the ACLS report was pretty thorough, but I did think it was amusing that “copyright” issues were given the same level of importance as the “conservative culture of scholarship.” (20-21)  In some ways, the academic culture will change with time as the next generation — more comfortable with technology and digital research — becomes ascendant in “the academy.”  Copyright, however, is marching consistently the other way — as we discussed, the period where materials will be unavailable for relatively-recent materials produced is growing longer and longer over time.  So while the “young guns” will be more ready to integrate technology and history, the “old hands” in Congress will still be working to keep them from “everything.”  Maybe it works the same in both cases — will there be “young guns” in Congress (eventually) who know enough about both sides of the debate to strike a better balance?  Or is the turnover in the academy just a lot faster — it’ll take multiple “generations” of historians suffering before the next “generation” of congressmen find a better way to protect Mickey Mouse without depriving us of F. Scott Fitzgerald.   (Maybe if we just get the congressmen to read the report . . . nah.)

I also liked the idea in the ACLS report that one of the primary goals of the cyber-infrastructure would be to facilitate collaboration.  I think that’s one of the great advantages of the web — it brings people who could never afford to come visit each other together and problems can be broken down by lots of people working on them simultaneously — in fact, around the clock.  We’ve seen examples of that in class and more in the newspapers.  I also like the idea of experimentation — let people try things and like any concepts in a free market, the things that work will fall out and replace the things that don’t.

Overall, though, I found these readings a little less coherent than last week but all of them were interesting, even if Norvig was, er, a little dry.  =)