The Leisurely Historian…

I’m exhausted. Even though it happened only five miles from my house, on the campus of my own school, THATcamp 2009 left me too exhausted to do any sort of extended postmortem. It was an amazing (un)conference, I learned a lot, made a lot of connections, and was really reminded why I was interested in doing Digital History projects in the first place.

It was amazing and awesome. If you want a more in-depth treatment of the topic, check out Larry Cebula’s or Jim Groom’s blog posts on the topic. Or if you have a bit more time, just start reading the THATcamp wiki or the 2,600+ tweets hashtagged #thatcamp. (This last link is thanks to Julie Meloni.)

In non-THATcamp-related news, I’ve been doing a bit of research for a man that a friend put me in touch with, looking through at least four or five linear feet of records at the National Archives in College Park. I found something the other day that, while it isn’t relevant to the research project I was working on, was too cool not to scan and share.

It’s a map made by a member of the 82nd Airborne’s 505th Parachute Infantry Unit, tracing their movement from sometime around (this is an informed guess) August or September of 1944 (after their participation in the invasion of Normandy, but before Operation Market Garden) until some time in 1945, when they were in Germany:

It’s rather predictable that this is something I’d be interested in, as it combines several of my scholarly/personal interests– mapping, cartooning, the use of illustration as a narrative technique, etc.

Going through the historical documents and general orders of the 82nd’s 505th, I came across many maps. They were all fascinating, but most of them were fascinating because you were touching history. You were holding a map that was used to plan D-Day at Normandy, for example. That’s an amazing little piece of history to hold in your hands. But the maps themselves, while well-executed, were rather spartan, utilitarian. I came across one that, for purely aesthetic reasons, included a couple planes in the air, flying up the coast of Sicily. I think it was by the same fellow.

But this is the only map I came across like this, that provided not plans but a history, that physically plotted out memory. This map traces out a period of time, the events the soldiers remembers, sights they saw. The women in France and Belgium. The food provided at a somewhat more permanent camp in France. Two separate spates of bad weather in Holland. On to the German lines, and starting to see them falling back, losing ground.

So many important pieces of paperwork and records get lost in the shuffle from wartime to military records to being placed with the Archives. A lot of things you assume you’d be able to find are quite simply not there. But I can see why this map, even being as out of place as it was with its surrounding documents, made it through the multiple shuffles. It’s a remarkable artifact. It took love and attention and time to create, things that were in short supply in wartime. And the resulting work actually helps to serve to tell the story of these soldiers, and to fill in some gaps. Very few of this Unit’s records between Market Garden and 1946 have actually survived the shuffle. What does survive from the War in general in the NARA records tends to reflect more about Army protocol than the emotions and lived lives of the men on the ground. This map can help fill in some of the lacunae in the record.

Plus, it’s just wicked cool. So I thought I’d share.

Jenny Reeder, a member of my cohort here at GMU, was studying for her quals last semester, and she showed me her 3×5 cards.

I’d never really used them before, personally, for anything other than public speaking classes in high school. They don’t really gibe with my rather organic, piecemeal approach to studying or to note taking. It always struck me as an extra activity that would distract me from the actual work at hand. But that’s just me– YMMV, different strokes for different folks, something about drummers, etc.

Now, just because I don’t use them doesn’t mean I’m not fascinated to see them. And Jenny’s were amazing. She had multiple sets in different orders– one stack by author, another in chronological order, and another that was organized alphabetically by theme.

It’s that last stack that really got to me– it was a fascinating way to look at History, where causality, chronology, biography, and historiography all fall by the wayside. Where Reconstruction is nearer to Reformation than it is to the Civil War. Flipping though those cards, I realized, was historical gymnastics. You had to shift modes, books, eras, and patterns with each flip of a card. Explain the House of Burgesses. Okay. Flip the card. Explain HUAC! The sudden shifts and turns didn’t just make practicing for quals more challenging, they made it more engaging and fun.

If you have an iPod, you’ve had those moments where you suspect that the “shuffle” feature isn’t as random as it’s supposed to be– why else would it play three songs in a row from the 1980s that all feature former Beatles? But, as this NPR report and this episode of WGBH’s Open Source make pretty clear, it’s not that the iPod isn’t random– it’s that our minds are quite bad at perceiving randomness. We naturally and instinctively look for order, for patterns, and our mind gloms onto them instantly, even if what we’re really looking at is completely random…

Even in the face of chaos, our brains look for order, looking for connections, perceiving causality. And that process is a lot of what we as historians do– we look to the chaos of the past, and try to make order of it. Sometimes we do it by imposing our own frameworks onto the events of the past, but we at least like to think that what we are actually doing is illuminating connections that may have been obscured, perceiving the organic order where it may look like chaos or disorder.

So how do we harness this propensity to see order, and make it work for us?

It seems to me that randomness has traditionally been a bit of an anathema to historians. The sheer vastness of history itself requires the imposition of order, and that’s the historian’s task. “Doing history” is making order out of disorder. Why would we embrace the chaos?

But digital tools allow us to work with things differently. This started to be apparent with the New Social History, with historians working with punch-card computers to crunch number sets so vast that they had been useless before. Computers are great for making large data sets manageable.

They’re also quite good as pseudorandom number generators, which in turn means that they are quite good at creating fairly random juxtapositions. We can see this with the iPod’s shuffle feature, or even the link on Wikipedia that takes you to a random page. We now find ourselves in a age of shuffle, where wild juxtaposition is the norm.

Even simple little applications like the Random Activity Generator can be powerful tools for promoting creative thinking. Incorporating the principle of randomness into tools for digital humanists would, I think, help promote better scholarship. Shuffling– creating random juxtapositions– forces the mind to make connections between otherwise unconnected items. And finding new connections between historical events– isn’t that at the heart of a historian’s work?

Something from the attic, if you will– a post from four months ago that never got finished and sat around in draft limbo. I’m going to spend the next week or so emptying out that attic and getting the half-finished stuff out there and published, even if it’s not perfect.

I was talking to a friend of mine, a Melville scholar, about Bartleby the Scrivener a while back, and the first thing he told me was, “You have to remember– it’s not about about Bartleby.”

I thought back to the Wordle visualization of Moby Dick I posted a while back, went to Project Gutenberg, and decided to check out what Wordle thought of this theory.

Apparently, Wordle would disagree:

Now, I understand what my friend was arguing– that it’s actually about the narrator, the lawyer, and his reaction to Bartleby. But I disagree. Or at least, I think it’s a bit reductionist. At its heart, the story is about Bartleby, even if it’s about him as an enigma. He’s at the center of the text, and from the above, it shows that this is at the very least the case numerically.

You have to wonder about whether this is just another case of the phenomenon that Dan Cohen discussed a while back about the limits of the possibilities of text mining– basically, that if you don’t ask the right questions about a text, you end up finding out that the Bible is a book about Jesus and that War & Peace is a book about Russia.

Is Wordle too simple a tool to help us really rethink or explore a text? Does it really only offer the simplistic answers? Was I using it as a crutch for my overly-simplistic reading of the story when I saw it as endorsing my feeling that a story that uses the name Bartleby that many times has to be at least somewhat about Bartleby?

So I went to another shorter work by Melville– Benito Cereno.

Again, proper names dominate– the large incidence of “Benito,” “Delano,” and “Babo,” not to mention the titles of “Captain” and “Don,” should come as no surprise to anyone who’s read the novella. Likewise, in this tale of a slave insurrection, the commonness of terms like “Negro,” “Negroes,” “Blacks,” “servant,” and “master” is not surprising.

However, where I noticed the frequency of use of terms that indicated the race of the rebelling slaves, the frequency of terms indicating the “Spanish” origin of the San Dominick’s crew surprised me– if combined, “Spanierd” and “Spanish” would be approximately the size of “Negro.” This actually ended up shifting my reading of the story.

The entire story works on the tension created by Captain Delano’s inability to parse what was going on on the San Dominick. He is constantly shifting views, sensing something sinister and then convincing himself that nothing outside the ordinary was occurring. That the inscrutability of the events is in part due to his perceiving the African slaves as deeply other is obvious– he is constantly shifting around in the deep illogic of racism, seeing the slaves as alternatively threatening and deeply dependent.

But there’s something else going on here, too. The New England-born Delano is likewise confused by the ethnic otherness of the San Dominick’s “Spanish” crew. These men are almost as othered to him as the slaves are– a deep divide that creates an inscrutable situation. If the crew had been from New England, Delano would have surely sensed that an insurrection was occurring. But with the strange cultural difference of a crew from the southern hemisphere, he could not be sure. These people had different ways of interacting with blacks than they had in New England, the racial hierarchies– might they not be a little less distinct down there?

One senses that the drama of the situation partially comes from Delano’s ethnic ambivalence– his own sense that the crew of this ship might not be completely “white” themselves. Spanish-ness is just as much a part of the tensions of the book as blackness and whiteness.

This isn’t the most sophisticated reading in the world of the novella, and it may seem patently obvious to someone else. But to me, it came as a revelation. In this case, a simple tool like Wordle was just enough to make me reframe my reading, look sideways at a text that I might not have given quite as much thought to.

The most simple data mining tools can provide some very simple data, but sometimes even that is enough to make you reconsider a text that had previously seemed uncomplicated. Even when they provide painfully obvious answers, there might be other interesting nuggets in those results– you just have to look and sift around a bit.

This pretty much reflects exactly how I feel about the current economic situation.