[Image]Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is cutting an on-site World War I workshop intended for high school history classes, and took some heat in the Globe and Mail for the decision (the article, “First World War workshops soon to be history” [Feb. 25, 2010] is behind a pay wall).

The workshops offered Ottawa-area students the opportunity to handle World War I era letters from soldiers and learn about the soldiers’ experiences from LAC archivists who had expert knowledge of the material.

The article paints Canada’s national archives as near-sighted for replacing face-time between students and expert archivists with online PDFs and lesson plans for teachers.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and Canadians should be applauding the decision. In the face of a huge Canadian deficit this year, it is important for cultural institutions to justify their spending and look for more efficient ways to offer Canadians their services. LAC has achieved this by placing the learning resources online, making them available to far more students, and reassigning the staff who offered the workshops to other tasks.

Critics argue that it’s not the same for students to read online PDFs as it is to hold the actual letters written by soldiers, and that the expertise of the archivists adds to the learning experience. I certainly cannot argue that these cuts are not a loss for Ottawa-area students and teachers. But, claims made in the article that teachers - who are not WWI experts - cannot teach the content or that students will be unable to make the connection between the short-hand, “GSW” and “gunshot wound” are overly apocalyptic.

I argue that historians, digital and otherwise, need to be aware and acknowledge the significant epistemological and pedagogical differences between the handling of manuscript letters and the reading of their digital likenesses on a computer screen.

There are a number of trade-offs in this situation that commenters (go there) have not discusses — first among these is the recognition that handling archival documents offers a lesson in material culture that a digitized document cannot, one that is surely part of a historical education. If we think of these letters as only useful for the information written upon them, then digitization is an improvement. However, a well-informed archivist would be able to talk about, for example, envelopes, postage, the quality and source of the paper, the ink (leading to a discussion of military procurement), and how archivists have developed ways to preserve these materials, all of which are important to an understanding of the historical world and World War I and which are pretty specific to the archivists and the visit — if we value an understanding of material culture.

Now, after considering this loss to the lesson, or the added cost to giving this kind of interpretation in a digital form, it might still make economic and pedagogical sense to digitize. But we should acknowledge that these would end up being two very different lessons.

The issue boils down to this — there are limits to the capabilities of digitization. There are features of documents that a scan cannot capture or represent. And the process of digitization introduces an additional process of editing, of what is included in the scanning project and what is excluded, which is an additional layer of contemporary interpretation laid upon the archival sorting that the institution has already done. These limitations, the reduction of WWI letters to images on a screen, transform the experience of an archival visit–a special occasion–to another daily classroom activity in which the computer has already become an instrument to inflict pain and confusion (see Edward Tufte).

How can I say this? I am a digital historian and a technological enthusiast, but I am a historian first. By that I mean that I have a wide array of questions about the past and I have come to recognize that certain sources and methods offer up particular kinds of information. I found the traditional (to me) methods of textual analysis in many programs and people to be limiting and, in fact, undermined my ability as a historian to answer my questions and to adequately represent these answers to an audience. This is why I sought out people and experiences that brought technology to bear upon my historical interests — the limitations I found in traditional methods. However, I also recognize that while digitization can offer many advantages, it often comes at the expense of material culture and the kinds of answers (and even questions) that it offers up. In some ways, thinking that the words written upon the document are the most important (or only) information it can offer up is in fact the most traditional form of historical and archival thinking. There’s more to it than that and historians, whether in times of economic scarcity and looming cuts, or economic plenty and new opportunities, must recognize that.

Ruby Button

If you’re reading this, you’re probably quite excited at the prospect of research at what is likely the greatest archival repository in the country, and one of the best in the world, but somewhat bewildered about what the experience will be like. Here is a basic guide.

Archives II, or The Deuce, as I call it, has most of the post-WWII documents and record collections. It is in College Park, on land adjacent to the University of Maryland. It is big and sprawling in many ways and has always been a rewarding but difficult research experience.

GETTING THERE

The easiest way to get to The Deuce would seem to be to drive if you have your own car, but parking spaces can be in short supply. NARA recommends you use public transportation, but if you’ve got to drive, come into the entrance off of Adelphi Road (not Metzerott). A fairly easy way for those staying in DC is to take a NARA shuttle bus from Archives I, which departs on the hour from the east side of the building and puts you at the visitors entrance to The Deuce. No ID is required to get on the shuttle and it takes 35-45 minutes to get out to The Deuce, depending on traffic. Finally, there’s the Metro. You can take the C8 Metrobus from the College Park Metro train station. Beware, buses only take cash and the Metro SmarTrip card (a plastic electronic pass card recharged by your bank account), not the basic fare card (paper with a magnetic strip) that the train stations use (along with the SmarTrip).

RESEARCH MATERIALS

It’s probably best to travel light. It’s difficult to bring any paper into the archives and you have to have every page inspected by staff. Really all I ever see being brought in are laptops, cameras, and scanners. Your best bet in my mind is to have all your notes on Record Groups in a digital form (like a Word file) or to have them condensed simply onto a limited number of pages. There are plenty of public machines with web access available in the research rooms.

You can scan or take photos with permission, which is usually easily granted by staff in the textual research room (unless the words “confidential” or “classified” appear on your box or folder, which means a much more thorough review). The textual research room (paper documents) is a pretty good place for this because it is a large room with a window wall, so there is a lot of diffuse light to illuminate your documents. Sometime there is a bit of direct light that can throw off your exposures if you are using a camera. Many people use small tripods, I generally shoot handheld with a fairly high ISO (200-400). I recommend you familiarize yourself with some of the controls on your camera beyone just the “AUTO” mode, like how to use your aperture priority, shutter priority, or fully manual modes. Don’t worry, they’re pretty easy. Each research station has a lamp and two three-prong outlets, and there are four spots at each table, so there will be plenty of light and power for your gadgets.

There are photocopiers in the Textual Research room and both scanners and photo copy stands in the Still Image Research room. There is a wide range of fees, but the main ones are $.50 per self-service paper photocopy page, or $8.00 per self service high quality scan of photographs.
FINDING WHAT YOU NEED

This is going to be one of the tougher parts. First, make sure you have done some searches in ARC and you have that information either in a Word file on your laptop or on very innocuous paper so you can get it into the research room. And make sure what you want is at Archives II, not Archives I. However, this is only a small first step. Once you get into the big Textual Research Room, there is a room where finding aids are, along with a couple archivists on duty. The problem is, most of the finding aids seem to suck. And they are out of date. And they are paper so it is very hard to change them and impossible to access them remotely. So you will find the finding aid for your Record Group, flip through it, and sort of find what you want. Maybe. You will probably have to ask the archivists a time or two to figure out what you want. If you are unlucky, the archivist(s) will say, that’s really not my area of expertise and you had better come back (this afternoon/tomorrow/the next day) when (somebody else) is on duty. If you are lucky, you will find what you are looking for in the main finding aid. However, these can be up to 50 or so years old, so the collections may have been reorganized or had parts removed. So then you go to the Hierarchical Finding Aid, a neater, slimmer, but less detailed set of finding aids in the same room. These are pretty recent and include the specific location information you need to fill out a call slip, and have info that corresponds to the electronic database the archivists have access to. If you are using a single RG a lot, you will eventually just go to the Hierarchical Finding Aid first because you don’t need an explanation of the entry.

Once you fill out a call slip, you have an archivist check it and it goes into the pile for the daily calls. THIS IS KEY. Documents are not retrieved on a continuous basis as in most other, smaller archives. only about 4 or 5 times a day does staff go pull something — 10am, 11am, 1:30pm, 2:30pm, and sometimes 3:30pm. It typically takes up to an hour for your documents to arrive at the circulation counter of the Textual Research Room, so you should be aware that you could be on the premises for 2 hours (potentially even more) before you get to see a single document. You can call up to 2 carts worth of stuff, which could consist of about 24-30 regular archival boxes, but could also consist of only a handful of large or irregular-sized boxes, so it really pays to think ahead about your workflow. I always make it a point to have more stuff called up than I think I can look at in a day because I don’t want to get caught finishing looking at my documents at 2:45pm and not being able to call up or see anything else before 11am the next day. This can mean that your trip to The Deuce will be very stressful and annoying and I don’t see how anyone could possibly come for less than a week and get anything done because there are so many time gaps.

However, there could be some bright sides to your trip (irrespective of any terrific finds you make) and there are more logistics questions I will go into shortly…

Recently I went to a Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibit on Timothy O’Sullivan, a photographer with several geological surveys of the west in the 1860s and 1870s. I was pretty excited about this because I have read about O’Sullivan’s work in Alan Trachtenberg’s Reading American Photographs (badly reproduced in the paperback) and the Oxford History of Art book on American Photography. His medium was mostly silver albumen prints, which discolor somewhat, but they really are quite visually striking with very deep and rich tones. There were dozens of these prints in the galleries. As a bonus, there were quite a few stereoptic images, and the Smithsonian had blessedly put up two stereoptic viewers (kind of like a big, wooden, 3-D viewmaster from back in the day), and some of these images were done quite well, with foreground elements just about jumping out of the photo. O’Sullivan worked with the wet collodion process on glass plates, which necessitated a traveling darkroom during the surveys, one of which you see here. A glass plate was evenly covered with chemicals, soaked in a tub of other chemicals to make it all light sensitive, encased and put in the camera until the exposure, then developed. (more here) The photographer also worked for a short period for Matthew Brady of Civil War and NY/Washington studio fame. He died at 42 of tuberculosis.

In the exhibit I think everything was a print. No negatives. I love the detail, the precision of collodion glass plate exposures and prints, and seeing some more of those negatives would have been great.

I’m happy to announce I have accepted a position as a visiting assistant professor at Temple University. I’ll be moving to Philadelphia in the middle of the summer and teaching in the history department and the public history program. I’m looking forward to drawing on the rich historical resources of the city and a really impressive set of media resources at the university.

The building depicted is Sullivan Hall, formerly the library at Temple, completed in February 1936. It was a PWA project, one of only three nationwide at private universities.

I thought it worth re-visiting this find from a while back at the request of Angus Johnston.

In my dissertation, “Building the Ivory Tower: Campus Planning, University Development, and the Politics of Urban Space,” I research the development of American universities over the course of the 20th century, using the built environment as a lens for examining urban politics, student life, and academic culture in the process of urbanization. In short, I argue that universities are integral to urbanization, in contrast to previous scholarship that characterizes them as inherently suburban or anti-urban.

In the process of researching one of my cases, the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, I came across an interesting student sit-in during January of 1962. Students in a chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) realized that the university had bought up a large number of private apartment buildings in Hyde Park and hired a real estate management company to steer and segregate tenants as part of a larger neighborhood management process to insulate the university from the expanding Black Belt (Arnold Hirsch touches on this in a chapter of Making the Second Ghetto). After some paired applicant testing to establish discrimination, CORE arranged a sit-in (pdf) at the UofC administration building and the real estate management company offices that lasted for two weeks. I was surprised to find out how lines of support and opposition were drawn. It turns out one of the leaders of CORE was Bernie Sanders, an undergrad from New York who had transferred to Chicago for his degree (he mentions this in his political autobiography, Outsider in the House). Students were split on the issue. The faculty was largely opposed to the students’ action, preferring discussion and research on the topic of segregation and housing. And there were some other surprising discoveries I won’t go into here.

One of the items I found in the archive was this image of the sit-in, including Bernie Sanders (standing). Since I am a big supporter of the Senator, and am in DC on a research fellowship, I got two prints of the image and went down to his office on Capitol Hill. I left them with his staff with an explanatory note and a request for a signature on one (the other for him to keep in his papers if he wanted). Today I went and picked this up — his staff reported he was pleased with my gift.

Thanks for the signature, Senator Sanders. I defend my dissertation May 4th at the University of Michigan.

Way back in the day my top priority used to be distance running and all things athletics. True story: when it was time to go to grad school, I applied to masters programs at Oregon and WMU. At WMU I would do public history and at Oregon, if I got in, I would do track and field history (I had in mind a research project on the development of amateur running clubs like the Florida Track Club, the Greater Boston Track Club, and the group around the University of Oregon). Long story short, Oregon admitted me but didn’t give me any money (my undergrad record was pretty middling and my research interests were not really in line with those of the broader historical profession, I don’t think), so I went to WMU.

However, I was a real go-getter, and even while I was an undergrad I started on a research project that I hoped would culminate in an undergrad thesis. It didn’t work out, but I did conduct several oral histories with prominent members of the Florida Track Club, including Jack Bacheler, Juris Luzins, Jerry Slavin, and a couple others. I thought I had lost the transcripts of those interviews I had done, but recently found them in the depths of the internet archive.

Check out the first, an interview with Jack Bacheler from January of 2000.

UPDATE: You can track individual states by clicking on their name or their bubble. You can change what’s on the axes and whatnot, if you want — if you have a huge spreadsheet behind a chart like this, you could have dozens of factors to change and visualize, which is really what Gapminder does. I think the value of this is not really analytical, but it deals with the opacity of tables in a really effective way. Like me, you might not be able to look at anything more than a 10×10 table and visualize the changes over time. Now, you don’t have to. I think, like with mapping, seeing quantitative data like this allows you to make some qualitative judgments about it. This table took me a couple hours to find all the data for and clean up and tweak, but just looking at the resulting chart for a half hour is, for me, more useful and memorable than just poring over a table for an hour and trying to conclude or recall something concrete about it.