Several months ago Professor Laqueur wrote a book review of Fritz Stern’s Five Germanys I Have Known in the London Review of Books. I hadn’t read the book and I have only the most cursory knowledge of intellectual debates among twentieth century German scholars. I enjoyed the review primarily because I love the way that Laqueur writes. Although the review was somewhat critical, it seemed balanced to me.

The September 20, 2007 issues of the London Review of Books includes a letter from the scholar Tony Judt who attacks Laqueur’s review as well as him personally. Judt takes issue with the observations Laqueur made about the importance of fame and recognition to Stern and his contemporaries. He writes:

This ad hominem assault would be distasteful from any quarter. But it is pretty ripe coming from an academic whose own website (http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Laqueur/) lists every bauble he has received, every important lecture he has ever given, and even takes the trouble to inform visitors that Thomas Laqueur was once a ‘Guest of the Rektor, Wissenschafts Kolleg zu Berlin’. In matters of aspiration, apparently, the professor knows whereof he writes.

As the guy who manages the Berkeley History Department’s website I know for a fact that there are quite a few things wrong with Judt’s use of this example to criticize Professor Laqueur. For one thing, Judt’s framing of that address (http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Laqueur/) as Laqueur’s “own” is a little misleading. It is not, after all, something like thomaslaqueur.com. Instead it is something more analagous to a directory listing. Professor Laqueur does not update that web page himself, nor do any of the faculty in the department update their own directly. If they have more information to add they tell tell me or another staff person. Many of them simply email me a copy of their CV whenever they make changes to it and I format the updated version for posting on the web. All of the faculty pages are simply pages on the History Department’s site, not their own entities.

Moreover, the content of Laqueur’s web page is fairly extensive because of an administrative request that faculty pages be up-to-date and as extensive as possible. One of the many criteria that the National Research Council uses to evaluate graduate programs is information found on department websites, including faculty profiles. As part of the NRC evaluation process the university encouraged departments to make pages as thorough as possible. I can attest to the fact that not every faculty member in the History Department sent me a complete CV to post, but the vast majority of the department who did (like Laqueur) were acting in the interest of and at the request of their university.

Apart from that there is the issue of prospective graduate students and how they get information about the department’s faculty. I know from talking with my peers in their first few years of graduate school that most of them before they came to Berkeley looked at the web pages of faculty whose work interested them. Tony Judt probably would argue there is no need for a prospective student to know every honor that a professor received, but it seems to me that there is a benefit to posting a complete or nearly-complete CV.

The larger point is that a web site or web page is not about self-aggrandizement. Certainly not when it follows a standard department format and sits on a university server. But, even in a general sense, web pages have become so commonplace that they are often the first place we turn for information about someone. Even Tony Judt in fashioning his critique must have done a Google search for “Thomas Laqueur” (if, instead, he went to the Department’s main page and found Laqueur through navigating our site that would prove the point about the institutional nature of Laqueur’s web page).

There’s a really interesting article in The New York Times about the proliferation of tools on the web that allow individuals to create and add information to maps. Google Maps and Google Earth are probably the most prominent examples of the tools available, but there are others as well. The article focuses on how people all around the world are contributing and collaborating on maps.

The article does not mention that much the other really amazing aspect of this technology: the ability to visualize historical change through map overlays. “Google Earth in 4D” is the shorthand for one version of this, which was developed by the David Rumsey Historical Maps Collection. The David Rumsey Collection took some of their historic maps and provided them as overlays in Google Earth, so it’s possible to overlay a city map of London from 1843 on the Google Earth representation of present-day London.

Apart from the new wealth of information being created by amateur cartographers using these web tools to map the present-day world, I think there is obviously huge potential for use by historians as a supplement to their research as well as to enhance their teaching.

‘What is happening is the creation of this extremely detailed map of the world that is being created by all the people in the world,’ said John Hanke , director of Google Maps and Google Earth. ‘The end result is that there will be a much richer description of the earth.’

This fast-growing GeoWeb, as industry insiders call it, is in part a byproduct of the Internet search wars among Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others. In the race to popularize their map services - and dominate the potentially lucrative market for local advertising on maps - these companies have created the tools that are empowering people with minimal technical skills to do what only professional mapmakers were able to do before.

‘It is a revolution,’ said Matthew Edney, director of the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. ‘Now with all sorts of really very accessible, very straightforward tools, anybody can make maps. They can select data, they can add data, they can communicate it with others. It truly has moved the power of map production into a completely new arena.’

The complete article from The New York Times: “With Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking”

On The Chronicle of Higher Education website I read the article by Professor Rob Jenkins (Chronicle Careers: 7/11/2007: Pimp My Course) about his decision to “pimp” his course by incorporating more technology. Professor Jenkins was motivated to do this because:

The truth is, as far as today’s students are concerned, I’m not a ‘young’ professor anymore and haven’t been for at least a decade. Nor am I particularly hip or cool. Most days I don’t even wear jeans in the classroom, 12 years of administrative duties having decimated my graduate-school wardrobe.

Worst of all, I’m hardly ‘cutting edge.’ To be honest, I’m doing pretty much the same things in class I was doing 20 years ago. For Pete’s sake, I still illustrate some of my favorite points by using anecdotes from MASH, that favorite sitcom of my generation that few of my current students have ever heard of, much less watched.

Clearly it’s time for a major teaching makeover, in the spirit of TLC’s Trading Spaces or better yet MTV’s Pimp My Ride, in which cast members take old cars and update them with new paint jobs, ground effects, stereo systems, and so forth. In the end, the cars may be only marginally more functional, but they sure look a lot cooler.

Resolving to ‘pimp my course,’ then, I went straight to the experts, colleagues who really are cutting edge. Under their tutelage, the first thing I learned is that I definitely need to use the computer a lot more during class. And I don’t mean just to check my e-mail while the students are writing essays.

My immediate reaction upon reading those paragraphs was to feel like a professor who correctly references the television programs “Trading Spaces” and “Pimp My Ride” was really much more “cutting edge” than he claimed. Nevertheless, reading about Professor Jenkins’ experience made me think about the entire concept of pimping a course.

I’m still slightly on the outside looking into the whole process considering that I’m still a graduate student who’s never had complete responsibility for a course. I have, however, been a pimp for an undergraduate course taught by a professor of mine, of which I will be the head Graduate Student Instructor in the fall. Several semesters ago I presented the idea of podcasting the introductory European history course to Professor Laqueur. I’ve also helped him move from slide carrousels (which he used when I took the course from him as an undergraduate in the spring of 2000) to digitized images and slides using Microsoft PowerPoint first and now Apple’s Keynote software.

In preparing for the fall semester, I thought it would be neat to have a short video (”YouTube-esque”) to introduce the course to prospective students and I found a very talented undergraduate to put it together for the class. The video is available on the History Department website homepage: http://history.berkeley.edu.

On one level, none of this is really necessary. Professor Laqueur is an immensely talented lecturer who engages his students even in a large lecture class regardless of the technology he incorporates. The course fulfills a number of requirements, for the undergraduate history major and for the College of Letters and Sciences, so enrollments are usually near capacity.

On the other hand, I find it increasingly hard to imagine this course *without* all the technology incorporated. The use of digital images in Keynote for the lectures was about more than beautification. Professor Laqueur started several years ago using images that were essentially the same as the ones he had used in physical slides (mostly because one of my jobs as an undergraduate was to scan the physical slides). Each semester that goes by he’s added and/or replaced some images resulting in almost all of the images shown in class being visually stunning. The technology makes it very simple for him to zoom in on particular aspects of an image that he wants the students to notice. Of course, art historians did this sort of thing with multiple carrousels and a tremendous amount of preparation before, but computers make it so much easier.

The podcasts, too, seem to enhance his teaching as well as students’ comprehension. Students sitting in class are more likely to sit back and pay attention to the lecture, rather than feeling as though they have to take down every fact and detail for a possible exam, when they know that there is an audio recording at their fingertips when they need it to review material. Most students in past semesters’ of podcasting have listened to lectures in addition to, not in place of, attending them. Of course, this is not always true, and some students undoubtedly feel like the podcasts make it easy for them to miss lectures without consequences. In a class like this one, though, there is no way to escape the weekly discussion section led by a GSI which is the place where attendance and participation are recorded as a part of the final grade.

Ultimately, my point is that all of the “pimping” I’ve been a part of for this course has, I think, served to enhance the teaching and the overall experience for the students. It seems to me that this is what technology is supposed to do, that is, be a useful tool to enhance rather than replace strong teaching and interesting lecture content.

Hopefully Professor Jenkins will have an equally positive experience with course pimping. My experience is that the fact that he is thinking about these things and actively trying to figure out which will work best and/or be useful and helpful for his students already puts him in a category ahead of many of his colleagues. Not to mention the fact that he’s familiar with MTV and TLC programs!

The BBC reports that Britain’s National Archives is in the midst of grappling with the problem of preserving obsolete digital file formats.

The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a “ticking time bomb”, the chief executive of the UK National Archives has warned.

Natalie Ceeney said society faced the possibility of “losing years of critical knowledge” because modern PCs could not always open old file formats.

Anyone who has tried to open archived digital files knows the sort of problem that the National Archives faces, although theirs is of course on a much more immense scale than individuals or even businesses. Paper, it turns out, is much more reliable.

Ms Ceeney said: “If you put paper on shelves, it’s pretty certain it is going to be there in a hundred years.

“If you stored something on a floppy disc just three or four years ago, you’d have a hard time finding a modern computer capable of opening it.”

“Digital information is in fact inherently far more ephemeral than paper,” warned Ms Ceeney.

This is a very real problem and it is something that will be of tremendous concern to future generations of historians and scholars who want to study our time. However, I expect that part of the ephemeral nature of certain digital technology will be solved (although it may end up being very expensive and/or labor intensive).

My faith is in technology itself to provide the tools necessary to fix this dilemma. I think the clearest example of a possible route to “fixing” the problem of digital permanence is emulation software. Because computer speeds continue to increase pretty much in line with Moore’s Law it is possible for a present-day (or future) system to allocate a portion of it memory, hard drive, processor, etc. to create an older machine virtually. VMWare is the company that first comes to mind with this sort of software.

The point is for some place like the National Archives (or even an individual or a business) that the answer may not be to keep converting documents to “universal” file formats but instead to ensure that tools exist to ensure that the data can be accessed in a roughly similar context to how it was originally created. If you have a file created using an obsolete program that was written for Windows 95, fire up a VMWare emulator and run a virtual Windows 95 system on a computer, install the appropriate program, access the file, etc.

Of course, this is much more difficult when the added variable of obsolete physical formats is thrown into the mix. If the data that the Windows 95 programs needs is on a 3 1/2″ floppy diskette and the computer running the emulator doesn’t have a drive that will read these disks, there’s still a problem.

Yet, the same principle behind software emulation could apply to solve these sorts of hardware problems. It can’t be too difficult of an engineering problem to build a disk drive to read an antiquated disk (after all, people built them 10-15 years or more ago!). It is probably more a question of money and resources than anything else. I suspect that in the next few decades libraries, companies, and even individuals may end up creating a market for new “old” computer hardware.

The complete article from BBC News: “Warning of data ticking time bomb”

Amazon.com is following Google’s example and embarking on a project to digitize books in university libraries. I think there are a few features of their attempt which, if they follow through, could make their efforts more useful to historians and scholars.

The Chronicle of Higher Education explains:

But, unlike Google and Microsoft, Amazon will not limit people to reading the books online. Thanks to print-on-demand technology, readers will be able to buy hard copies of out-of-print books and have them shipped to their homes.

And Amazon will sell only books that are in the public domain or that libraries own the copyrights to, avoiding legal issues that have worried many librarians — and that have prompted publishers to sue Google for copyright infringement.

Amazon is clearly not taking the “conquer the world” approach that Google has and is not attempting to scan and catalogue every book in existence. This seems like a safe way to go, and it is, perhaps, an indication of the difference in corporate cultures between the two companies.

What really impresses me is the idea that they will make it very easy to purchse copies of rare or out of print books using on-demand printing technology. This is going to be absolutely amazing for scholars who locate a book in some other library and do not want to go through the Interlibrary Loan process and/or need their own copy for extensive research. Hopefully Google will find some way to follow suit.

The complete story from The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Amazon Will Digitize Universities’ Books and Sell Print-on-Demand Copies”

I downloaded and installed the JumpBox version of MediaWiki today, and I was totally impressed with how easy it was to set up and use. JumpBox packages certain open source server software packages, like MediaWiki and WordPress, along with all of the dependencies that are required to run them. With virtualization software like Parallels or VMWare, setting up the software is as simple as double-clicking the JumpBox package.

The end result is that software that would have required a web server to operate can be simply installed on a desktop or laptop computer without needing to download and install a bunch of random components and potentially screw up your primary operating system.

I have a MediaWiki-powered wiki running on a web server of mine, but I am only using it to track my own academic research notes. Wiki markup, along with the ability to automatically save multiple versions of documents, is what appeals to me, not the ability to have many collaborators access and edit the documents. I see myself using a JumpBox MediaWiki implementation as a mirror of the server-installed wiki. If I’m someplace without an internet connection I can still work on my wiki as if I was online.

I’m downloading the JumpBox versions of Trac and Joomla! right now and I plan to give them a try next. Trac is open source software for bug tracking and trouble tickets that is used mostly by software developers. My plan for it is much less ambitious. I’d like to see if I can adapt its project management capabilities to academic research that I’m doing. Instead of following “bugs,” “fixes,” and “releases” I want to see if Trac helps the process of planning research and writing.

Joomla is a widely used content management program that runs on a variety of web servers and allows users to have different levels of access, add / remove content, etc. I’m interested in playing around with this software to see what its capabilities are to potentially recommend it to people I know.

JumpBox gives me the ability to sample all of these server programs without a lot of hassle.
The idea of using virtualization and packaging server based programs for use on personal computers is a really neat concept and so far my experience is that JumpBox has implemented it really well.

A Canadian company announced that they will donate 100,000 copies of the computer game Civilization 3 along with a special game module designed to simulate Canadian history. According to GameSpot.com:

Developed by Toronto, Ontario-based media firm Bitcasters, HistoriCanada simulates scenarios from Canada’s past, allowing gamers to take control of one of its European or aboriginal cultures to relive history, or change it in the process. In addition to the core gameplay (which builds off of Civilization’s social, economic, and military simulations), HistoriCanada also includes artwork, text, and short video clips on a wealth of topics as a result of cooperation with The Canadian Encyclopedia and Historica Minutes.

A Bitcasters representative told GameSpot that sponsor and distribution details are still being finalized, but 20,000 copies will be sent directly to high schools by Canada’s National History Society, where teachers will be able to use it in extra-credit assignments and otherwise experiment with the game in the classroom. The remaining 80,000 copies of the game will distributed directly to 12- to 18-year-old students through mail or retail outlets, likely by an as yet undetermined sponsor.

I loved the Civilization series of games when I was a teenager, mostly but not exclusively because of my interest in history. Although the strategy aspect of the game made playing on a computer-generated “random” world exiting, playing the real historical scenarios always appealed to me more. I really envy the students who will get to play the game as part of their history curriculum.

My only reservation, of course, is the issue of how accurately the game scenarios have been constructed. For instance, in the regular game’s “technology tree” a player can advance in knowledge of technologies that end up completely anachronistic to their civilization’s history (Incan stealth bombers and Russian AEGIS cruisers, to give a couple examples, always amused me). Not to mention the “wonders of the world” that a player could build given the requisite technological advances. I would always laugh when I read something across the screen like “Shakespeare’s Theater has been built in Paris,” “The Hanging Gardens have been built in Boston,” etc.

I hope that the developers of the Canadian history mod have been sensitive to spacial and cultural considerations in addition to temporal ones. If the “civilizations” are limited to Canadian cultural groups, then hopefully they’ve been sensible enough to only make certain technologies or wonders available to certain players. Counterfactual history is useful to an extent, but there are some counterfacutals that are so completely “wrong” that they would serve only to teach the students a really screwed up version of history.

For instance, if the game gave players the impression that native societies were on more or less equal footing with settler and immigrant civilizations, the result would be that a clever student game-player might end up “winning” as a native civilization. Of course, history in Canada, the United States, Australia, and other settler colonies is full of examples of smart, clever indigenous people going against the dominant trend of their peoples’ mistreatment, disenfranchisement, etc. at the hands of European immigrants. But it would be a disservice to students to teach them that history could have gone radically differently if only the natives had made a few different choices. All of this is speculation on my part, because I haven’t played the game mod for Canada.

The complete story from GameSpot: “2K donates Canada-specific Civ III mod to students”

All Things Considered on NPR has a piece about how initially reluctant publishers are beginning to change their minds about Google’s Book Search feature. I was particularly interested in the statistic that Google has digitized over a million volumes in a couple of years. It is possible to imagine them being able to achieve the goal of digitizing all the world’s books in another five to ten years. Technically speaking, they obviously can do it. Whether or not there will be legal or business orientated roadblocks and objections seem like the potential stumbling blocks.

The other really interesting fact was the representative from Oxford University press who remarked that in the past one and a half to two and a half years “321,000 times” people clicked their books to link to the press’ website and purchase them. The key point, he said, “We spent nothing to do that. That’s why we’re a big fan of this program.”

The complete story on NPR’s website: “Publishers Warm to Google’s Book Search”

Political scientist Pete Moore downloaded a bunch of Coalition Provisional Authority documents about the early period of the US occupation of Iraq. His son inadvertently turned on the “view / track changes” option in the “view” menu in Microsoft Word, and there ended up being a treasure trove of information contained in the markup.

My son made his discovery while impatiently waiting to play a computer game on my laptop. As part of a research project, I had downloaded 45 documents from a section of the CPA Web site known as Consolidated Weekly Reports. All but three of the documents were Microsoft Word. I had one of the Word documents up on my screen when my son starting toying with the computer mouse. Somehow, inadvertently, he managed to pull down the “View” menu at the top of the screen and select the “Mark up” option. If you are in a Word document where “Track changes” has been turned on, hitting “Mark up” will reveal all the deletions and insertions ever made in the document, complete with times, dates and (sometimes) the initials of the editors. When my son did it, all the deleted passages in a document with the innocuous name “Administrator’s Weekly Economic Report” suddenly appeared in blue and purple. It was the electronic equivalent of seeing every draft of an author’s paper manuscript and all the penciled changes made by the editors.

Moore was especially concerned with the substance of the data contained in this electronic marginalia. It gave him unprecedented insight into the thinking of bureaucrats working for the CPA. During the rest of the article he describes the ostensibly deleted theories that the CPA had for why violence was going up or down in Iraq. Even in the midst of these revelations, which show the extent to which the CPA used ethnic stereotypes and reductionist arguements to “understand” Iraq, Moore takes note of the theories that are missing:

Nowhere in any of these theories, including the “boring” one, does the author address the dissolution of the Iraqi Army as a major contributor to the violence. Nowhere, in fact, does the author seem to know which “bums” or “losers” are attacking the Americans or why. Indeed, the most remarkable passage in the entire deletion is a simple statement by an Iraqi businessman, whom the writer quotes in passing while explaining why American-induced economic prosperity will end the fighting. “It is nothing personal,” the Iraqi says. “I like you and believe you could be bringing us a better future, but I still sympathize with those who attack the coalition because it is not right for Iraq to be occupied by foreign military forces.” In the world of the CPA circa 2004, first one American glosses over this Iraqi’s prophetic words, and then another tries — unsuccessfully, as it turns out — to delete them.

Moore’s work is politically-charged because of its contemporary resonance. However, it makes me think about what sorts of tools and techniques the historians of the future will employ in the course of their research. Additionally it shows how even in electronic records that are tightly controlled a candid and unvarnished reality can be discovered or surmised. In a sense this should be incredibly reassuring to historians in the twenty-first century who fret that the rise of email and electronic documents will render the past inaccessible for scrutiny.

The complete article from Salon: “The secret Iraq documents my 8-year-old found”

Robert Townsend lists on the American Historical Association Blog several problems with Google Books and its program of scanning books to make them accessible on the internet. His critique is mostly focused on the accuracy of Google’s scanning, or rather the inaccuracy of its OCR, which he believes has led to a variety of problems.

The problem of quality control only exacerbates my most basic worry about the larger rush to digitize every scrap of information—that we are adding to the pile much faster than the technology can advance to extract the information in a useful or meaningful way. When I have asked people who know a lot more about the technology than me about this problem, they tend to wave their hand and mumble about “brilliant scientists” and “technological progress.” Forgive me if I remain unconvinced. Even for someone fairly proficient in Boolean search terms I find a lot of the results from Google Books (and Google more generally) just page after page of useless and irrelevant information. I find it increasingly hard to believe that Google can add tens of thousands of additional books each month to the information pile—many containing basic mistakes in content and metadata—and the information results will actually grow better over time.

The problem with Townsend’s quick dismissal of the opinions of “people who know a lot more about technology than [him]” is that there is stunningly brilliant work being done in field of search technology not to mention OCR software.

I remember a consumer flatbed scanner ten years ago that would take 5 minutes or so to scan a flat page of text, and the OCR recognition was pitiful. By contast, I am now able to use my digital camera and tripod to photograph documents for my own research at about 5 to 10 pages a minute (depending on page size, condition, binding, etc.) and my personal OCR software is upwards of 90% successful at recognizing type (I still wouldn’t dare try anything handwritten). For my own research, the OCR capability is something I’m experimenting with, not relying upon. Digitizing the documents I’m finding in archives is immensely useful, however, because I can enlarge the images on a large monitor and zoom in to read them much more effectively than I could with a magnifying glass. Five or ten years from now, when OCR is even more advanced, there’s nothing stopping me from running it on my TIFF images.

My own experience with research thus far is beside the point of Google Books. I offered the experience as some form of vindication for the technology underlying Google’s book scanning process. If a lowly graduate student like myself can do what I described fairly easily and inexpensively, what tools must Google have at its disposal?

Townsend in his piece continues to be a nay-sayer, and concludes that the Google’s immense financial resources are reason to be mistrustful of the motives behind its efforts.

So I have to ask, what’s the rush? In Google’s case the answer seems clear enough. Like any large corporation with a lot of excess cash the company seems bent on scooping up as much market share as possible, driving competition off the board and increasing the number of people seeing (and clicking on) its highly lucrative ads. But I am not sure why the rest of us should share the company’s sense of haste. Surely the libraries providing the content, and anyone else who cares about a rich digital environment, needs to worry about the potential costs of creating a “universal library” that is filled with mistakes and an impenetrable smog of information. Shouldn’t we ponder the costs to history if the real libraries take error-filled digital versions of particular books and bury the originals in a dark archive (or the dumpster)? And what is the cost to historical thinking if the only substantive information one can glean out of Google is precisely the kind of narrow facts and dates that make history classes such a bore? The future will be here soon enough. Shouldn’t we make sure we will be happy when we get there?

Of course, the problem with the argument that the Google “library” is “error-filled” is that it is constantly being updated and revised. The “errors” that do exist, as the result of faulty OCR or scanning, are going to be fixed as part of the Google’s process. The fear that actual libraries will relegate their scanned books to a “dark archive” or “dumpster” seems unfounded at this point. It is hard to imagine any historian or scholar tolerating that sort of destruction no matter how accurate and complete the digital archive becomes. Rather, the digital should complement, supplement, and augment the original physical archive.

A fellow Berkeley student, Jo Guldi, has used Google Books much more than I have for her research and dissertation work. On her blog she writes about how many new places Google Books search results have taken her by introducing her to a wealth of obscure 19th century texts. Google Books and Google search results were one of many starting points for her work, and opened up new avenues of inquiry for her.

I expect that Google Books, combined with many of their other search technologies, will help scholars in a wide variety of ways. Instead of criticizing their efforts, graduate students as well as established scholars should be lending the expertise we have with the content to Google and other organizations that have the technical and financial resources to help us with our research and writing.

Townsend’s critique on the AHA Blog: American Historical Association Blog: Google Books: What’s Not to Like?