Research Bits

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Dale Winling

One of the real joys of being a historian is the beginning of a project. The whole narrative, all of the discoveries stretch out before you, and it is one of pure potential. These past few busy weeks, I’ve had about an hour a week for the life of the mind, but really felt this exhiliration.

I have been poking around in the Virginia Tech Special Collections recently doing some scout work for my classes, especially a class I am focusing on Blacksburg in the 1930s. Recently I came across an extensive collection pertaining to a Roanoke architectural firm, Smithey & Boynton, and today I was looking at some from a Richmond firm, Carneal and Johnston — both of whom designed buildings in Blacksburg and on the VPI (VT) campus. In trying to learn a bit more about the firms I found some other collections as well as some digital materials.

No MA theses, though. The MA thesis is a product that seems to be in decline as programs focus either on seminar papers that could turn into articles or on pushing the dissertation and not worrying about the MA thesis along the way. Not quite the bite size of a seminar paper/article, and not quite big or original enough to create new scholarly frameworks, the MA thesis seems to be the red-headed stepchild of academic products.

It is a work of scholarship I have an increasing appreciation for. In that the intellectual ambitions are typically fairly modest, the scope of theses often really are manageable in size. In addition, since students are not trying to make their career based on it, they don’t often push the boundaries of theory or creativity. Instead, they are often solid exercises in demonstrating mastery over a broad topic and specific ability with a manageable set of sources. Just the kind of thing I’d like to see students do for a firm like Smithey & Boynton or Carneal & Johnston.

I’m in the early stages of a career and won’t have the opportunity to do much with these materials, much as I might like to get to know all about architecture in Virginia. But I got excited thinking about the possibilities of Virginia Tech students doing MA theses on firms like these — it really would be a great set of projects that could be valuable resources for scholars, researchers, and the public in years to come. Just reading the finding aids is not enough background on the firms, the principals, or their buildings. Digital catalogues don’t offer the appropriate context or analysis. Only an actual narrative piece of scholarship can both give the background information and make an argument about the trajectory of the firm over time. And an MA thesis would be just about right for one of these firms or another. So students: think about it.

Carneal & Johnston resources: Digital Library of Virginia (photos)

Carneal & Johnston papers

Smithey & Boynton papers

More Smithey & Boynton papers

Posted in Architecture, Higher Education, History | Leave a comment

Historic Photography

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Dale Winling

A photo project I’ve recently seen passed around Facebook is the Detroit re-photography project by David Jordano. A Chicago-based photographer, in 1973 Jordano was a Detroiter and conducted a photo survey of his city. He recently revisited those sites and worked to reshoot the photos. Some instances seem like a twist on the standard “ruin porn” of decaying Motor City landmarks — this one of the interior of the Michigan Central station, for example.

However, Jordano’s efforts get somewhat more poignant when his 1973 images illustrate just what has been lost in the interim.

In Jordano’s depiction, the great hall really was a waiting room, with black and white Detroiters caught in moments of calm and repose between trains. His image is testament to the loss of an era of grand architecture, where private commerce could sustain a public good and enrich the lives of all the citizens residents and travelers.

But Jordano’s photos also illustrate the loss of modest structures, ones that made no list of architectural achievements or corporate headquarters. This photo from 1973 nearly makes me weep to think of the careful tending and modest but forceful design intended in the building. The top image could come straight out of an exhibit in Kelo v. New London or mid-century urban renewal pamphlets.

And now we’ve got a semi parking lot or distribution center. Woo chain link.

Also, I must note that, despite the talk of the affordability and quality of digital cameras, Jordano’s rig (likely an expensive large format view camera) from 1973 vastly outstrips his new camera. A better lens, better resolution, and more masterful lighting make the black and white images simply better on nearly every count. They seem like fine art pieces, far more so than the well composed but lifeless digital equivalents.

Together, this pairing of images from 1973 — nearly the apex of postwar prosperity — with contemporary versions tells a story, a narrative of loss and unfulfilling rebirth in a new neoliberal framework, where old-line retailers and their buildings are replaced by the hostile headquarters of computer software companies, and ramshackle but dignified homes are bulldozed for Pepsi bottling plants. Here we really see the cost of deindustrialization and the limited gains for places like Detroit, not simply imagining what must have been there before the parking lots. Being confronted with this reality is, in fact, much worse than our imaginations could conjure.

Posted in Art, Cities, Film, History, Photography | Leave a comment

Advice for Grad Students

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Dale Winling

Advice abounds on the internet for how to choose an advisor, how to shape your topic, how to get into a writing rhythm. My advice to you: buy a good set of pots and pans. Spend more than you think is reasonable. Probably double what you think is reasonable. Probably copper. No teflon. If you can only afford one, get a good medium saucepan or medium saute pan with fairly high walls because you will be able to get multiple functions out of that one (sauteeing onions in the saucepan or making some soup in the saute pan, for example). One of the best gifts my wife and I ever got was a set of copper cookware that are still our most important pots and pans 7 years on, clean up super easy, and haven’t suffered a bit.

It is important to get this quality piece or pieces because it will make cooking easier for you, make it more fun for you, make cleaning up easier, and allow you to eat more healthily while you are in grad school. You will often stay late at the office or library and feel like grabbing some junk food on the way home. Or once you get home, you won’t want to go to the trouble of a meal and cleanup, so you’ll think about snacking on junk or ordering pizza. Don’t do it. Put some olive oil in your pan and throw in some fresh ingredients — you’ll be eating better and feeling better soon.

Posted in Higher Education | Leave a comment

The Problem with Copyright

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Dale Winling

Specifically, copyright on academic books.

I’ll keep this non-specific. This upcoming semester I am teaching an undergrad course in which I wanted to use an out-of-print book. You might not realize, but it is difficult as hell to do this, despite all the advances of the digital age, because of copyright. Even under fair use for education purposes, you can only copy up to 25% of a book. There aren’t that many copies of the book around (the VT library only has one), and so I contacted the publisher, a university press, in order to see about how to be able to use it. The Espresso book machine seems like a terrific idea that would be a simple solution to this problem (on demand printing with paperback quality). I was excited to hear about it at the University of Michigan, but never got to see it in action. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many of them in the United States, and even the rights person at the university press had never heard of it. I think the functionally nearest one (that I would ever come in contact with) is in DC (though the state of Michigan has at least 3!). So it wasn’t a realistic option because of the logistics (do I front the cost, how do I get them to Blacksburg, etc.)

It boiled down to the simplest option being the granting of rights to photocopy the entirety of the book, either by a copy shop, or by a student assistant, for a fee. I discussed this over the phone and asked the rights person to send me the granting document. She said she didn’t know what the fee was/would be; I didn’t expect it to be too high. I was doing the author a favor by using his long out-of-print book and the press had zero productions costs (just the phone call and the typing and emailing of the document), so it was free money.

Turns out they want a fee of THIRTY DOLLARS A COPY for the rights to copy the book. This is more than a new paperback would cost and is about what a new hardcover would go for retail — and again, there are no production costs involved for the university press. Students would have to bear the cost of photocopying/binding. I protested to the UP rights person and received no response. It is doubtful whether I will use this volume and I am going to do my best to avoid ever buying anything from this UP again, and everyone winds up a loser: the author, whose book will not be read; students, who will miss out on this information and argument; and publisher, who will not get the money for the rights set at a more reasonable level. Also me, because my course may not be quite as good (or might be as good, but will require more hassle to make up for the missing book).

Maybe it’s time to look more seriously at web publishing or limited granting of rights.

Posted in Books, Higher Education, History | Leave a comment

The Sins of Kalamazoo

Posted on December 10, 2011 by Dale Winling

From the long-ago poem about Kalamazoo by Carl Sandburg:

Best of all
I have loved your kiddies playing run-sheep-run
And cutting their initials on the ball ground fence.
They knew every time I fooled them who was fooled and how.

Best of all
I have loved the red gold smoke of your sunsets;
I have loved a moon with a ring around it
Floating over your public square;
I have loved the white dawn frost of early winter silver
And purple over your railroad tracks and lumber yards.

Posted in Kalamazoo | Leave a comment

What Has Been Lost

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Dale Winling

I read Jonathan Rees’ blog pretty regularly, as I think he is a fairly astute critic of the way that educational technology is often deployed and its labor implications in the academy. Here he really nails the issue of knowledge loss with the introduction of new technology.

Don’t you think it’s funny that in all this talk about progress, nobody in the edtech world wants to think about what is getting lost? Maybe we can we keep a “seed” bank somewhere so that we can revive perfectly good education ideas after they go extinct, the same way that those hover-chair people in WALL-E learned how to walk again.

It’s quite normal that some knowledge, skill, or information is replaced by technology. This happens all the time. Nobody but an amateur film enthusiast knows what’s in D-76 film developer or even how to develop a roll of black and white film. Heck, now that there is an iPhone app with the Massive Development Chart, I don’t really need to remember what the dilution or times for developer/fixer/wash/hypo-clear are for Ilford HP5+. It’s in the database, so I touch the screen and it tells me.

However, though this is a normal process, I do find it somewhat surprising that there is not much of a reckoning of this in higher education, which seems to me it should take very seriously the issues of the creation, endurance and preservation of bodies of knowledge. This is a pressing matter to me as I am slated to teach an undergrad course in historical methods this semester and I taught two “how to be a historian” intermediate seminars last year. For example, though there are tools like Zotero and EndNote that will dump in your citations in the right format into your paper, you have to recognize what the right format is — and you have to write/type them out yourself several times to solidify that body of knowledge — many more times than you might think. Another skill would be knowing the basics of the Library of Congress classification system — if students don’t have to navigate it because they get all their readings from the web, they really won’t know how to use a library (the book part) when they need to.

Posted in Higher Education, History, Teaching | Leave a comment

Getting Back

Posted on December 3, 2011 by Dale Winling

There’s just a few weeks left in our European trip. We have traveled to many great sites and stayed in some wonderful places. But since we’re heading back to the States, I’m thinking about what I have missed most and what I will most enjoy getting back to: (1) my cameras and film developing; and (2) GIS mapping. If there’s a third, it is the sit-and-work cafes Stateside.* I don’t prefer them outright to Italian caffe bars, but I do wish we could have a good mix of both in the U.S.

*It goes without saying that I miss my family and my cat.

Posted in Coffee, Europe, Film, Self-referential, Travel | Leave a comment

Cincinnati Riverfront Daguerreotype

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Dale Winling

Cincinnati 1848

The Smithsonian twitter feed brought the Cincinnati riverfront daguerreotypes to my attention the other day. Above is part of one of the 8 images taken from the Kentucky side of the Ohio River in 1848.

I was surprised and annoyed to learn how good the resolution of daguerreotypes are. I say this because I have heard numerous presentations, read many articles and books, and visited several museum exhibits on photography, none of which ever made reference to the exceedingly high resolution of daguerreotypes. This fundamental chemical information must have escaped scads of scholars and curators (as it had me) who did not understand the basic chemical and mechanical processes of daguerreotypy. This is simply not acceptable for historians.

Posted in History, Photography | Leave a comment

What Middletown Read

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Dale Winling

While I was working on my dissertation research I received support from the Center for Middletown Studies at Ball State to do research on Muncie and the origins of BSU. Jim Connolly, the director, told me about a project they were working on digitizing the recently-found transaction logs of the Muncie Public Library. Earlier this year, they launched What Middletown Read and it was recently featured in Slate. The additional research the CMS has done to study the demographics of patrons and checkout patterns is particularly interesting. I’m looking forward to seeing how this data is incorporated into broader historical research on Muncie and social and intellectual life at the turn of the 20th century.

Frank Felsenstein has tracked quite a few individual Muncie stories (he discovered that Louis Bloom’s brother, Landis Bloom, who read oodles of nautical tales, went on to join the Navy) but he still feels that it would be dangerous to make strong claims about the relationship between library records and lived experience. Not least because books were often borrowed for friends and family, and because even blue-collar kids would very likely have had access, via loans, drugstores, and serialized fiction in newspapers, to plenty of other reading material.

This is a meaningful caveat, but the process of going to the library, checking out a book, and risking fines seems pretty intentional to me and can reflect some of the intellectual trends that individuals were concerned with, in contrast to the more ephemeral newspapers and comic books and so forth.

Connolly’s co-authored book will be out in 2013.

Posted in Ball State University, Digital History, History, Muncie | Leave a comment

Three and Out

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Dale Winling

Word is starting to come out that Rich Rodriguez will be named the next coach at Arizona. I couldn’t be happier for the guy. I hope (and believe he can) make Arizona a dominant football school.

I bought John U. Bacon’s Three and Out on October 25th when it came out and it made me about as depressed as I was last winter. Rodriguez came into Michigan with strikes against him, dealt with a petty former regime, a hostile press, and an inept group of clowns in the Athletic Department. Certainly he made some mistakes, like bringing in Greg Robinson, but in the end I think it was the culture around Michigan and a few key individuals within it who bear the brunt of the blame. In the end, I think it was better for Rodriguez to go, because there was something fundamentally wrong with Michigan that would not let him succeed. The guy deserves to lead a football team that offers him their full backing. I don’t know that the rifts are really healed, but Hoke (of whom I was highly skeptical upon his hiring) has papered over them pretty well.

Posted in Sports, University of Michigan | Leave a comment