The Leisurely Historian…

Reading the chapter in Digital History on building an audience was pretty interesting. It was a lot of stuff I’ve thought of before– I’m a pretty shameless self-promoter when it comes down to it, especially in the semi-anonymity of the Internet– and some other stuff I hadn’t. As someone who’s been slow to subscribe to H-Net, for example, I really wouldn’t have thought of that.

The key, though, seems to be pretty self-evident. Pimp your site out to everyone and anyone who might be interested. Encourage "word of mouth," as "word of mouth" in blogs is a VERY powerful thing, and boosts your Google juice, etc. Keep track of visitors and where they’re coming from– I’ve mentioned this here before, but I’m fairly obsessive about checking my click-throughs on my TypePad blogs, here. I use a couple other journaling and community sites, and when I’ve referred to stuff over here in those sites, I consistently see my click-throughs skyrocket in the following couple days. It’s kinda amazing to me– I don’t assume a lot of my non-academic friends are interested in what I have to say about something like china cabinets in the early republic, but my "lay" friends seem to click through just as much– if not more– than my on-line academic colleagues. (Although the union portion on the Venn Diagram of those two is pretty big– a sadly large number of my friends are academics.)

One strategy I noticed NOT noticing in the chapter– though I will admit I read it somewhat quickly, and may have missed it– is something that’s a little old-fashioned by web standards, but even more important than it was adopted as a practice– the "Links" page.

Most web pages have ‘em. Your readers/viewers/audience/players/whatever who are most interested in your topic are going to be the most likely to use them. They provide instant connection to other sites. And there’s a netiquette standard quid pro quo, tit-for-tat quality of mutual addition. These pages are going to boost your Google juice, by making your page more frequently linked from and to. They’re going to bring over audiences– and the most intensely interested audiences– from other pages. And it’s a free, easy way to increase traffic.

I guess that thinking like this is pretty natural to me– as I’ve said in class, I’m pro- academic showmanship, I think of this whole deal more as a profession than as a higher calling (though there is that element, too), and, as I said above, I’m not afraid to be seen as a shameless self-promoter. As the beginning of the chapter indicates, the audience for history isn’t the biggest one– I mean honestly, a lot of days, I’d rather be reading comic books or going to see a concert myself. If we are ashamed as historians to make an honest plea for attention, to really argue for the interesting and compelling nature of our work, aren’t we sort of to blame if nobody looks at our research? And if you publish a monograph and nobody ever picks it up, what good are you really doing anyone?

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Oh, and if anyone has any doubt as to the efficacy of Internet self-promotion, consider the case of the brilliant Terri Senft, an academic who works on Media Studies at the University of East London. She wrote her dissertation at NYU on LiveJournal and "Cam Girls," and put together a LiveJournal account herself, actually becoming her subject. When she announced recently that she had gotten a book deal on her dissertation, she had dozens of posts from LiveJournal "friends" saying that they planned on buying the book. So using the Internet to market yourself as an academic can work in your favor beyond just the simple matter of getting web traffic for your CLIO project.

(And everyone should check out Ms. Senft at any rate, ’cause she really is brilliant, and offers a lot of sage advise about academic practices, how to improve your writing, and lots of other good stuff.)

Okay, we’ve been hearing about Web 2.0 for a bit, now, and we all use sites and apps that fall under that rubric.  We’re there– or rather, we’re getting there.  A lot of websites are still quite Web 1.0 and still serve their purpose.

When I was reading through some of the readings this week, I was actually quite blown away at the resistance of some of these curators and historians to the idea of folksonomies and the import of memory.  Historical memory is, if anything, almost more important than historical fact, when you think about it– if an historical event becomes a totem or a fetish for particular national meanings, that’s its true significance.  It may not be "true," objectively, but it is true to those who believe it, etc. etc.  (I think this is sufficiently covered ground.)  And yet here are these professional public historians, worrying that the masses will misinterpret, or gloss over, the real truth…

Is there any real historical significance to the flag that inspired the national anthem?  Not really.  It’s only important ’cause people choose to interpret it as such.  Now, if you showed me the gun that shot Hitler or Lincoln*, you might have a real historical artifact– an object that actually was used by an historical actor to create change.  The flag that inspired a song?  That’s something I’m pretty comfortable letting the people decide on the import of, ’cause  without the people, let’s face it, that particular flag ain’t that important.

Seeing people in these traditional "gatekeeper" positions being reluctant to open up their institutions gave me a bad taste in my mouth.  I wanted to look to the new public history, empowered by web 2.o technologies, and see the future of public history– to see postmodern public history, where there are no grand narratives, and where contesting claims to truth can be flattened to a single plain, can coexist, can be presented so others can determine validity and use– or even seek to integrate them.

Then I looked at the examples we were given, and frankly, the reports of the museum-keeper’s demise at the hands of social networking technologies have been greatly exaggerated.  These sites were– I’ll be generous– pretty unimpressive.

Steve, the art museum social tagging experiment, is–despite its rather eccentric name, just plain boring.  There’s no real interactivity to it.  It just is a set of photos, and the "opportunity" for you to tag them.  Not being given any information on the pieces, I was frustrated– I recognized a decent number of the paintings, but couldn’t put my finger on them.  I ended up clicking away from the site quickly, feeling a bit stupid.  Plus, there was no indication of other tags people had come up with, or anything.  It felt a bit un-thought-out.

And then there was Every Object Tells a Story.  Frankly, no, it doesn’t.  And neither can most people, if the folks who submitted "stories" to this website are any indication.  There was too little explanation on many pieces, many pieces without pictures– I understand that you can’t actually HAVE a picture of Boo Radley’s house, but maybe that’s ’cause it’s not an OBJECT.  Why would you submit it to this site, especially if you had so little to say about it?  Then there were the people who suffered from the belief that they could write– the site is dripping with the worst kind of purple prose– writing so bad, I often couldn’t read it long enough to figure out what the object was, or why someone put it up.  And don’t get me started on the group response to the guy who posted his facial piercings, eliciting mostly aesthetic critiques, and a lot of misspelled four-letter words.  (Which leads me to a whole other rant about people who post things on line and can’t even spell the F-word correctly…)

Frankly, if these are the best examples one can provide for the creeping of social networking technology into public history, the fact that there’s even debate and discussion on the topic seems a bit pre-emptive.

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*Not that I’m equating the two men, just that they’re two men who made big historical decisions and got shot.

Someone sent me this link a couple weeks ago.

To be completely honest, I didn’t even realize it was a joke until the second entry.

The first one seemed completely commonsensical– of course you need a technique to cite graffiti. What if you’re working on a paper about, say, the use of Situationist graffiti in Paris in 1968. Or even a paper on contemporary graffiti– these things often get political or personal, they’re interesting and colorful, you could probably apply some of the same theories of anonymity and role-playing that people like Lisa Nakamura apply to the Internet. There’s some good papers there.

Only when I got to the method for properly citing a magic 8-ball or alien mind transmissions did I realize it was a joke. To be honest, I still like the idea of a citation format for graffiti or tattoos. I think they’re both things that one could find insight in. Maybe it’s just me, though.

But that experience got me to wonder about citations, and the role they play in our lives as students and academics. How much do we allow the people at the University of Chicago Press dictate what is or is not a valid object of academic work?

This is one of the challenges faced by anyone who does scholarly work on the Internet. The Chicago Manual of Style just has one catch-all category of "electronic source." When I was in college, I remember how excited the reference librarian got when he showed me the library’s first book that dealt with online citations.

Without an agreed-upon method of citing a source, the source itself is cast in a sort of shadow. If there’s no consensus about how to cite it, you open yourself up to battles between readers or editors about how to structure your citations that could leave your work in limbo while they thrust and perry. Some people are willing to take that chance, and they’re slowly starting to develop a consensus about certain questions of online citation, and opening up new questions… Should a blog post and an online newspaper really be cited the same way?

But there’s something deeper than all that going on here– how much do standards of citation unconsciously affect our decisions about what is or is not a valid object of scholarly research? It’s a difficult question to answer. It seems reasonable to assume, however, that standardized citation techniques do lend a certain amount of authority to certain types of texts. Might their absence do the opposite?

I was trolling around the Internet, and I couldn’t find much of anything on the history of standardized citation. Having done research that involved reading history books and literary criticism from the 1920s and earlier, I knew that the cult of MLA, APA, and Chicago (not to mention that radical Turabian splinter group) wasn’t always the monolith in academe it is today. In fact, back then, there seems to have been NO discipline-wide standardized citation technique.

Not that I’m saying that was a better situation– reading those sources can be a nightmare. It’s citation anarchy. If I had a dime for every time I encountered someone saying, "As Smith wrote in his diary," without clarifying who Smith was, whether his diary had ever been published, and if it hadn’t, where it could be accessed… well, I wouldn’t be a rich man, but I’d probably be a might happier. I would never advocate going back to those days, even if there are certain drawbacks to standardized citation as we know it today.

One thing I found that was interesting to me, however, was that (according to those all-knowing sages at wikipedia) the first edition of the Chicago Manual of Style was published in 1906. This shocked me, because from my own personal observation, citation standardization didn’t really take off until the mid-century.

But then, I saw this: at the time, the title was  Manual of Style: Being a compilation of the typographical rules in
force at the University of Chicago Press, to which are appended
specimens of type in use. Rather than being a conscriptive standard set for all academics within a a certain set of disciplines, it was actually a guide to how to format things for the U of Chicago Press.

APA style first appeared as six pages of guidelines in The Psychological Bulletin in 1929, and the first edition of the manual was printed  in 1953. Similarly, somewhat later, the MLA first distributed a style sheet in 1951, and didn’t publish a manual until 1977. Obviously, the fifties were a time when the issue of standardization of style took on a new importance. I’d love to hear someone explain why. Also, it’s interesting that in all three cases, it really is the style itself that differs. The sorts of texts considered are fairly uniform. Is this perhaps a relic of fifties conservatism and fear of sticking out?

This is all rambling, and doesn’t really go anywhere. But I’d love to find more information and theories about how and why standardized citation came about when it did, and about when they were making the first decisions about what made the style-manual cut and what didn’t.

It’s all rather interesting to me.

If anyone reads this and has any books or articles to suggest, PLEASE comment.

I’m a little old-fashioned now and then– it’s a result of my being a somewhat cynical pragmatist.  This week’s reading on the Gutenberg<e> project is one of those things that brings that out in me.

This goes sort of along the same lines as when I said in class that whether or not a project is "History" really depended on whether or not it got you tenure, or a teaching gig, or the approval of your department head, or whatever.  I’m pragmatical and careerist when it comes to where to invest my time… well, except for that giant leap in logic that told me that getting a PhD in History was a good idea in the first place.  ;P

And, yeah– that’s the exact problem you have with this project– is it gonna count as a book?  If you’ve just graduated, and you’re looking for a place to work, and get on the tenure track, do you want to risk it?  Personally, I don’t think I would.  I could definitely see some programs not looking at this as an actual monograph publication.  Which could mean, in some places, that you’re going to have to write and get accepted for publication ANOTHER monograph in those difficult first four years or so of teaching, or else risk not passing your tenure review.  Which means relocation at best, and professional death at the worst. 

Maybe this route appeals to some, the risk-takers out there, or the people who wouldn’t want to work somewhere that insisted on a physical book publication– but I’m neither.  Frankly, I’ll work anywhere.  (Thus my job working as a security guard in housing projects after college…)  And I’m pretty risk-adverse.  Not conservative, mind you, but seldom the first to stick his neck out.

And the fact that their subscription rate is so low–despite its being one of the cheapest e-subscriptions out there a university might consider– highlights this riskiness.  What if the project loses some of its philanthropic funding and can’t keep the sight afloat?  You’ll have already sold off your book to the publishing house, and there won’t be an extant, physical copy out there for anyone to look at.  There’s always the possibility that Columbia might try to publish a couple of these books if that happened, but I wouldn’t count on it, nor do I think I’d gamble on my monograph being one of the ones (or the one) that was good enough to warrant that treatment.

(Not to mention that from what I’ve heard, most academic houses these days are shooting for 200 pages plus footnotes– with fewer and fewer footnotes– while Gutenberg<e> books average 350 to 400 pages.  I’d personally use the electronic format to have more complete footnotes– one of the appealing things about the format– but that just means more even greater revisions if it were transfered to print, and less likelihood that such a transfer would happen.)

All that said, it seems like an interesting and exciting project.  I don’t want to be seen, 20 years from now when/if this is seen as the beginning of a revolution in scholarly history publication, as the guy who thought it was a bad idea.  I’m not being reactionary here, in fact I’m rooting for the project.  I think it’s a neat idea, the site looks well-done, the books sound interesting… it’s got a lot going for it.

I’m just not ready to bet my meager life savings on that long-shot horse quite yet.

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And just because I can’t repress the urge to make a pop-culture reference at every turn, was I the only one who, when he heard the name of the project, thought of THIS GUY?  It sounds like an adjective used by an amateur film critic:

"What did you think of his acting?"

"Oh, it was alright, a little vanilla… A little to Guttenberg<y> for my taste…."