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!

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how I didn’t think there was much truth to the claim of social stratification between Facebook and MySpace users. Or, more specifically, I argued that to the extent there were differences in the demographics of the users of each site it was a product of structural differences in the rules and management of the sites.

Today a report from the network ratings company Comscore confirms what I was saying. It turns out that since Facebook opened up its membership to the general public instead of restricting it to college students in school “networks,” the demographics of the site have changed.

“Given its roots as a college networking site, Facebook has historically shown very strong skews toward the 18-24 year old age segment,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix.  “However, since the decision to open registration to everyone, the site has seen visitors from all age groups flood the site.  As the overall visitation to Facebook continues to grow, the demographic composition of the site will likely more closely resemble that of the total Internet audience.”

The statistics showed:

Once a social networking haven for college students, Facebook’s decision to open registration has helped attract new visitors from outside the 18-24 year old age segment. In fact, the 38-percent increase among 18-24 year olds was the lowest rate of growth of the age segments represented in the study. The most dramatic growth occurred among 25-34 year olds (up 181 percent), while 12-17 year olds grew 149 percent and those age 35 and older grew 98 percent.

I hope that Danah Boyd, the author of the piece I responded to several weeks ago, takes this sort of quantifiable information into account and retracts her claim that there is a widening gulf between the two sites that represents a sort of social networking “digital divide.” Her cry of wolf about a “digital divide” that seems to not really exist takes away attention from more meaningful problems of equal access to technology.

The complete comScore report: “Facebook Sees Flood of New Traffic from Teenagers and Adults”

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”

My new iPhone is amazing. I love it. Sure, it is not perfect and I’ve already thought of things I wish it did, but it’s basically light years ahead of any other cell phone. The visual interface is stunning, and the difference between the screen looks and other “smart phones” is comparable to the difference between the first color cell phones and their monochrome predecessors.

My wait in line to get it was not that bad, about an hour before it officially went on sale, and then another once the store opened.

It will be interesting to see how it is perceived in the weeks to come, whether every blogger and tech pundit will consider that it lived up to its hype. I’m not even going to try and speculate about any of that. All I will say is that my own experience with it has been incredible so far, and I don’t regret the ~2 hours of my life spent waiting to get it!

Blogger and Berkeley iSchool PhD candidate Danah Boyd presents a seemingly catchy and provocative claim in an online essay, “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.” Facebook and MySpace are reflecting and creating a “digital divide” because:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.”

By contrast, Boyd argues:

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

As soon as I read those stereotypes, I wondered if Boyd had managed to channel New York Times columnist David Brooks, whose “bizzare misinterpretations” of American society have become legendary fodder for liberal bloggers (see Tom Tomorrow’s hilarious “Mr. McBobo,” http://thismodernworld.com/2973). As Philadelphia Magazine pointed out about Brooks, “There’s just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false.”

I’ve not studied the subscriber data from either Facebook or MySpace to know whether there in fact more “‘good’ kids” on the former any more than there are more “art fags” on the latter service. The language of her generalizations is inherently reductionist, but I’m surprised by how little she tries even to define the meanings of her own categories, much less give some actual numbers to back up the categories she ascribes to each service.

The larger conceptual problem that I see with the entire essay is the fact that Facebook and MySpace have completely different purposes. Although Facebook has grown in scale and in scope since its inception, its purpose was to replicate some of the pre-existing networks in the physical world — first colleges and universities, then geographies and employers, and only relatively recently in its history could people join without a “network.” To the extent that Facebook network groups are homogeneous, and to the extent that Facebook itself is middle class or upper middle class based this simply is indicative of the socio-economic stratifications already existing in American society. Is anyone really surprised to learn that a website primarily populated by college students is generally middle class or upper middle class in character?

By contrast, the MySpace network was originally used by musicians and artists looking to network themselves and their work to as large an audience as possible, as diverse a crowd as possible. Many people become “friends” with strangers they’ve never met and will never meet because they liked each others’ pictures or the same song. Users have hundreds of “friends” from seemingly everywhere. The point is that this is a completely different sort of community, organized differently, and, big surprise, the generalizations about its members are different.

Boyd does not seem to understand that the reason there was a “pedophile scare” in the media surrounding MySpace and not Facebook was because it’s much more difficult for a pedophile to target and befriend children on Facebook than it is on MySpace. A comparison would be the way that the online classified marketplace Craigslist operates as opposed to the newly introduced classified ad section of Facebook. Craigslist, offering users the sense of anonymity, is home to a variety of ads for “escorts,” maintains an “erotic services” section, has a personals section which reads like pornography. I’ve never seen an ad for a prostitute on Facebook. Maybe it will happen, maybe it has happened, but I am guessing that having one’s picture and profile a click away from an ad will keep everything rated PG-13, PG, or G. There’s no “erotic services” section in the Facebook ads. That different people will be using these sites for different purposes seems completely obvious.

There’s another huge conceptual flaw with the entire argument and that is the fact that most individuals belong to multiple social networking websites. Facebook users frequently join MySpace and vice versa. Boyd tries to suggest that while MySpace is accessible to Facebook members and is generally known, the reverse is not true. Preppy kids can go slumming on MySpace, but not the other way around. That’s just ridiculous, especially when she gives only anecdotal evidence to suggest how many users of each service are aware of the other. Boyd would do well to consider the quantitative evidence published recently by Parks Associates, which concludes:

MySpace users are chronically unfaithful…. Nearly 40% percent of MySpace users keep profiles on other social networking sites such as Friendster and Facebook. Loyalty among the smaller social networking sites is even lower, with more than 50% of all users actively maintaining multiple profiles.

These trends highlight a peculiar aspect of the market for social networking services. Nearly half of all social networkers regularly use more than one site; one in six use three or more. The result is an increasingly interlinked environment tied together by links, widgets, and the users themselves. “MySpace is a growing ecosystem and one that ironically now extends beyond MySpace itself,” said John Barrett, the lead author of the report, Web 2.0 & the New Net.

The survey, “Web 2.0 & the New Net”, is based on exactly the sort of data that boyd’s report is lacking. Its findings completely refute any idea of a “digital divide” between social networking websites. If anything, such websites promote mobility and connections between individuals who might not interact as easily in the real world.

It is discouraging to me that boyd’s essay is being so widely circulated on the internet. Even The Chronicle of Higher Education “Wired Campus” blog has picked it up and runs with it, “Social Networking and a New Digital Divide?”

By the time they get to college, many students already have pledged allegiance to one of the two social-networking giants — Facebook and MySpace. (Plenty of young men and women have profiles on both sites, but even most of those students check one site more than the other.)

Despite that parenthetical, the article makes no mention of the Parks Associates study or gives any quantifiable evidence. They cherry picked Boyd’s conclusion, concluding by asking college administrators if they’ve “noticed a social-networking class divide?” At least that piece ends with a question, rather than Boyd’s fairly trite, “MySpace and Facebook are new representations of the class divide in American youth. Le sigh.”

The real “le sigh” in my view should come from reading Boyd’s second paragraph about her methodology:

The practice of ‘ethnography’ is hard to describe in a bounded form, but ethnography is basically about living and breathing a particular culture, its practices, and its individuals. There are some countables. For example, I have analyzed over 10,000 MySpace profiles, clocked over 2000 hours surfing and observing what happens on MySpace, and formally interviewed 90 teens in 7 states with a variety of different backgrounds and demographics. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. I ride buses to observe teens; I hang out at fast food joints and malls. I talk to parents, teachers, marketers, politicians, pastors, and technology creators. I read, I observe, I document.

This strikes me as the sort of research methodology that gives ethnography (potentially even “social science” more generally) a bad name. Which 10,000 MySpace profiles did she pick out of millions? How many Facebook profiles did she look at? How many Facebook profiles could she look at considering many of them are visible only to friends or network members? How was the sample group of 90 teens chosen? At least that’s “only the tip of the iceberg.”

Thankfully, the Valleywag blog picked up on the major methodological problems with Boyd’s work with “The Shaky Sociology of Social Networks.” It’s sort of embarrassing that this blog manages to ask critical questions that escape The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Valleywag even goes so far as to show a graph in a follow up piece, “THE CHART: Measuring the Social Network Divide,” which shows the difference in average income levels of MySpace, Facebook and general web users. This difference is not surprising, of course, because Facebook began as a social networking site for students at elite universities, spread to all colleges and universities, and now to companies and regions.

Again, this doesn’t seem that shocking to me, given the different purposes of the various social networking sites. So, while Valleywag is right to point out the flawed methodology, they still accept the Boyd’s paper’s completely flawed conclusion. “Le sigh” indeed.

Like, it seems, everyone else interested in technology, society, and business, The New York Times devotes a good deal of attention to Google. Its latest assessment about the search company and its prospects focuses on potential challengers to Google and how they might capture a piece of the market.

The entire article is focused on evaluating the whether Google can accurately be characterized as a business defined by its algorithm, its technical, mechanistic solution; and whether this emphasis opens the door to competitors who are able to adapt more of the “human” element. One search company is paying its employees and users to create results pages which seem to be more fruitful than Google’s.

A hand-built Mahalo search-results page has one conspicuous advantage over Google’s: grouping into subthemes, which make a page of links much easier to scan and to find items of particular interest. For example, Mahalo’s page about Paris Hilton, the site’s top search subject last week, arranges the recommended links into clusters including news, photos, gossip, satire and humor. The use of subject categories also eliminates the need to provide, as Google does, two-line text excerpts from the listed sites to provide clues about the site’s contents.

On the other hand, the article acknowledges that it is not entirely fair to characterize Google only in terms of its algorithm. The company is experimenting with more human results driven pages, and considers itself more of a hybrid of the two extremes.

One thing that is not explicitly considered in the article is the ways that the “machines” are becoming smarter and closer to human thought processes. Frankly, I think that the idea of paying people to edit search result pages and group items based on categories that are intuitive to humans seems amazingly time consuming. I think that the truly innovative research will come in the area of making the machines organize the search results better, more like humans would do.

Still, considering how far Google has come in the past ten years, it boggles the mind to think what the landscape for internet search, information organization and retrieval will look like in another decade.

The complete article from The New York Times: “The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip”

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”

Amazing to think about the numbers of people around the world who not only have internet access but also have high speed broadband connections. The United States still has the highest number of broadband connections, but the trends indicate that China will surpass it later this year. South Korea remains in the lead in terms of the percentage of its population with high speed connections. Even Great Britain (not in the top ten list) has 55% of its population online.

The Guardian reports the latest statistics:

Almost 300 million people worldwide are now accessing the internet using fast broadband connections, fuelling the growth of social networking services such as MySpace and generating thousands of hours of video through websites such as YouTube.

There are more than 1.1 billion of the world’s estimated 6.6 billion people online and almost a third of them are now accessing the internet on high-speed lines. According to the internet consultancy Point Topic, 298 million people had broadband at the end of March and that is already estimated to have shot over 300 million. The statistics, however, paint a picture of a divided digital world.

Amazing to think back to what these numbers were 10 years ago and to ponder what they will be in another decade.

The complete story from The Guardian: “China catches up on US for fast internet as Africa gets left behind”