The Leisurely Historian…

I just finished my MA last year at Umass Boston. My first year, I had a normal Teaching Assistantship.  It was fine.  But the next year, I had to hunt down an alternate source of funding.  I ended up getting an Assistantship through the library, working at the Reference desk.  It was, I hate to admit it, a FAR more educational experience than keeping attendance and marking papers.  I was, despite my lack of an MLS, basically working as a part-time reference librarian… although there was almost always a real reference librarian available on-call if I got in over my head.  Nevertheless, I got very acquainted with databases and systems I never would have otherwise– I now can find chemical abstracts over the Internet.  Why I would ever want to again, I can’t tell you, but I can do it.  I also know how to deal with business databases, and other systems I’ll never use again. 

But I liked it.  Actually, I even toyed with the idea of getting an MLS.  But there was something about the culture of libraries that I never got comfortable with.  One librarian, in the midst of a long conversation one slow Friday afternoon, helped me put my finger on it, very precisely.

I forget how we got on the topic, but we started talking about the role of libraries– what all should be kept, and what should be thrown out as detritus.  Coming from an American Studies department that valued Cultural Studies and Social History,  I was adamant that too much was being lost to the selections of archivists and librarians.  Too many voices are lost to the authority of the archives.  Who can judge what is going to be important 15, 20, or 100 years from now?  As I saw it then, the goal of libraries and archives, ideally at least, should be one of collection– collecting for both depth and breadth.  Collecting indiscriminately.  I was tired of finding so many topics I was interested in working on were things that no one had cared enough to keep and preserve.  It was then the goal of librarians, and especially reference librarians, to make these huge quantities of information navigable for patrons.

In contrast to my collection/preservation model, the librarian I was speaking to offered a completely different model– one that is taken from communications theorists of a generation ago, and which they borrowed by means of metaphor from electrical engineering.  He talked to me about signal-to-noise ratio.  He told me that the goal of a librarian was to be a custodian of information, constantly overhauling the collection in order to increase the amount of signal (usable information) and to try to eliminate noise (detritus, misinformation, things that lack scholarly value.)

I was aghast, and wondered how anyone would ever presume to know so much that they could understand exactly what would be of value to future scholarship, and what wouldn’t.  Any Historian who’s spent weeks trying to find information about someone who seemingly only exists in a single fascinating document will understand where I was coming from.  Today’s trash can be tomorrow’s treasure.

However, after reading this article, I’m starting to wonder if I wasn’t being a bit naive– or at least thinking in impossibly idealized terms.  Frankly, I’m starting to wonder if there’s not just too much information, and if that "custodian" model isn’t as outdated as I thought.  Looking at the sheer volume of information being produced in a single year, it seems an impossible task to keep it all. (Even when you discard the somewhat-misleading on data that is non-recorded, such as telephone conversations, in the report, the number is staggering.)

I mean sure, we can spider and scrape systems, we can come up with clever ideas to get people to provide tags for free, but ultimately, the methods we have of automating such things are always going to provide as many blind spots as moments of insight… or at least I’m afraid that’s the case.

I think H-Bot, for example, is a brilliant idea, but it sort of points toward the stupidity of computer intelligence… Here’s a little trick: ask H-Bot "When was Teddy Roosevelt president?"  And then ask it "When was Theodore Roosevelt president?"  You’ll find that Teddy was president in 1908, and Theodore was president in 1903.  Both answers are correct, in a fashion, but don’t give the whole story.  It’s all because of the very method of data-collection that H-Bot uses.* 

Don’t get me wrong, I know the thing’s just beta testing, and it’s not complete, and honestly, I still think it’s a cool project, and I’ve been playing with the thing since I found it last year.  But any mechanized data-collection, data-pooling, or data-mining software will always have these sorts of problems– they’re simple little machines, and cannot comprehend complexity.  Maybe, at least for the time being, we should keep on encouraging the librarians to throw some stuff out.

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*– What this result does point to that’s very interesting is the different use of language at different points in that President’s career.  More web sites describe him as Theodore when focusing on the events of 1903 than any other year, whereas 1908 is the big year for Teddy.  It would be interesting to look at other variations on different presidential nicknames, and see what kinds of correlations you could find– do people describe them by their nicknames during good times, showing familiarity and comfort, or during bad times, showing derision and lack of respect?  It could be a fun thing to look in to…. (Although checking into that a bit, I discovered that H-Bot can’t find James Carter or William Jefferson Clinton, so the question might not be as easy to answer yet…)

I’m really a "follow the research" kind of guy, so it’s hard for me to present a proto-thesis or "research questions" at the moment… I’m still digging.  Nevertheless, I’d like to talk about what I’ve discovered so far in my most recent little research obsession…

While I was in the LoC print and photo reading room looking for something else, I came across something fascinating: a collection of stereographic cards from the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exhibition.  Digging further, I found there were several lots of photos from the exhibition as well, including a whole collection of printer’s proofs of commemorative postcards to be sold at the event. 

Quickly I became fascinated with the event, as it seemed to be a site of confluence for many "big issues" of its time.  There was an incredibly complex and conflicted view of race being exhibited, for example.  There was the issue of the Civil War– 1907 is still firmly within the period where the discourse of reunification and reconciliation after that conflict was still being actively worked at and played out.  Teddy Roosevelt spoke there, and his very existence always brings up various questions of gender, empire, war, and peace… (The last two are best illustrated by the fact that 1907 was 9 years after the Spanish American War, and two years after Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize.)  And there was this overarching militarism and nationalism– so different from the World’s Fair quality of the World’s Columbian Exhibition 14 years earlier.  Where the Columbian Exhibition had a "Midway," the Jamestown Exhibition had a "War Path."

Then I came across a wonderful pamphlet housed in the Rare Books room– International Justice vs. the Splendors of War: In Protest Against the Diversion of the Jamestown Exposition to the Service of Militarism.  This was a 12-page pamphlet, published five months before the Exhibition’s opening, was written by a splinter group of the Exhibition’s Advisory Committee, protesting the increasing militarization of the event by the Committee.  Among the undersigned were an amazing collection of Progressive Era progressives– Jane Addams, Carroll D Wright, president of Clark College and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Edward Everett Hale, and Cardinal Gibbons.

The group was mortified that the budget of the Exhibition had gone from the initially-allocated $200,000 to $1,500,000, largely due to spending on military spectacles.  (This extra money was procured from congress only after piggybacking it onto a House Sundry Civil Bill, as the Speaker of the House and several key Representatives were highly opposed to the increased spending.)  They further proposed reallocating some of the money dedicated to military spectacle to the building of a "Hall of International Justice," which would celebrate the values of the upcoming Second International Peace Conference at the Hague.

A shorter version of the pamphlet appeared in the January 10th issue of the progressive journal The Independent, along with an article celebrating TR’s winning the Nobel Prize and hoping he would continue to promote International Justice at the Hague, and an article by Charlotte Perkins Gilman advocating paying housewives.

I want to write a paper looking at the Jamestown Exhibition, using it as a window into its era. I’m still sifting through all the sources available to me– I’ve located over 40 primary sources at the LoC, including photos, maps, brochures, and all matter of related materials– but I’m very interested in using this pamphlet, as well as the other, celebratory materials dealing with the battle reenactments, military parades, ship christenings, etc. to look at this event as a celebration of the nascent spirit of US Imperialism at the time– sort of an Americanized Empire Day.  I’m curious to find accounts of the Exhibition in newspapers of the time, to see if it was understood in that way at the time.  I’d also like to dig up the congressional record for 1905-1906, and see what can be understood about the jockeying for increasing funds.  I’d also love to find the actual speech that TR delivered at the Exhibition, on "Georgia Day," and see what kind of world he’s creating with that address.

I’m actually yoinking this from somewhere else, somewhat edited… I just thought it was pertinant and interesting research, and if y’all have the time, think about participating…

A couple of months back I saw a call for participants for the following research:
"The Impact of User Perceptions of Information Quality on World-wide Web Information Retrieval Strategies".

Responses have been pretty good, but at the moment my data is very heavily waited towards academics and researchers (as in university ’staff’).  Some interesting patterns seem to be emerging between the two user-groups and I require more graduate students to validate this data.  If you have not already registered to be part of the user-groups (even if you are academic staff) please consider reading the documentation and registering.

The links to the Call for Participants documentation (PDF’s) are below:
» Current academics, lecturers, university researchers etc,
» Current postgraduate students.(U.S. grad students)

Summary: In a nut-shell, the research involves understanding how academics and researchers go about searching for "quality" information on the World-wide Web.  The PDF documents briefly describe the project and what being part of the user-group entails (basically answering 4 online surveys which take a total of around 20 minutes to complete ~ not all have to be done at once),

To register your interest in being part of either user-group, please go to http://www.informationqualityonline.com/form01_registration.html and fill in the registration form. 

Be nice– it’s the first time I’ve done anything like this.

I decided to work with images I found online that had something to do with US Labor History. You’ll see lots of Wobblies (just ’cause I’m fascinated by them), Emma Goldman, some of the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster, miners, a photo of members of the Knights of Labor, Trotsky reading a US Communist Party paper, broadsides, Eugene V Debs, WPA workers, depression-era farm families, a sharecropper’s house, the office of the Appeal to Reason… and a lot of other stuff… All put to Billy Bragg singing “L’Internationale.”

Hope you enjoy.