12 |
13 |
14 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/colophon.pdc:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Colophon
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | %
4 |
5 | Tools I Use
6 | -----------
7 |
8 | - MacBook Pro running Lion
9 | - [iTerm2](http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home)
10 | - [Vim][] for text editing
11 | - [Pandoc][] for document conversion
12 | - [Notational Velocity][] for light-duty notetaking and task management
13 | - [Editorial](http://omz-software.com/editorial/) and [Drafts](http://agiletortoise.com/drafts) for iOS notetaking
14 | - [Mutt][] for my email
15 |
16 | How This Site is Built
17 | ----------------------
18 |
19 | The posts and pages on this site begin as plain-text files written in
20 | Pandoc's extended version of [Markdown][]. I then use the bash shell
21 | script below to turn those files into flat HTML documents that are
22 | uploaded to my server.
23 |
24 | The shell script is a much more basic version of full-featured static site
25 | generators like [Hakyll][], [Jekyll][], and [Hyde][], and even more like
26 | [rawk][]. I looked at some of these programs but wanted to see if I could
27 | build something lighter for myself that used Unix tools I was already
28 | familiar with. Pandoc is robust enough, for my purposes, to do most of the
29 | heavy lifting with a simple pandoc HTML template, which I've posted for
30 | reference [here][]. For now, at least, this script also manages to conform to
31 | [the Hakyll philosophy][]; not only does configuration take less than 100
32 | lines of code, but the whole shell script is under 100 lines. I took some
33 | inspiration for it from [this page][] and a few others.
34 |
35 | The key part of the script is the long `echo` command that comes after
36 | using pandoc to convert each post to html. This line creates a record
37 | for each post containing information fields (separated by %) that are
38 | then manipulated later in the script by `awk` to generate an RSS feed
39 | and lists of posts for the main page and each category page.
40 |
41 | To style the site, I use a customized, minimized version of [Bootstrap][] for the
42 | responsive layout, and [Glyphicons][] for the social media icons. The color scheme is Solarized by [Ethan Schoonover][].
43 |
44 | I've set up the script to update the code below everytime I upload
45 | changes to this site. I have also included comments in the html source
46 | for individual pages so that interested geeks can see which parts of the
47 | site are added using pandoc's options and which are part of the Markdown
48 | files that form the main content. I'm still a shell scripting newbie, so
49 | if you see problems with the code or have suggestions about improving
50 | it, I'd be grateful if you'd let me know at .
51 | The script and all of the files that make up the website can also be
52 | found in a [github repository][], though it may not always be as current
53 | as this site.
54 |
55 | [an 1844 letter]: http://archive.org/details/lettertomydearfr00webb10
56 | [Vim]: http://www.vim.org
57 | [Pandoc]: http://www.johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
58 | [Notational Velocity]: http://notational.net
59 | [Mutt]: http://www.mutt.org
60 | [Markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown
61 | [Hakyll]: http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/
62 | [Jekyll]: http://jekyllrb.com
63 | [Hyde]: http://ringce.com/hyde
64 | [rawk]: http://rawk.brokenlcd.net
65 | [here]: http://github.com/wcaleb/pandoc-templates/blob/master/website.html
66 | [the Hakyll philosophy]: http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/philosophy.html
67 | [this page]: http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/publish-a-web-site-with-bash-scripts.html
68 | [github repository]: https://github.com/wcaleb/website
69 | [Bootstrap]: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/index.html
70 | [Glyphicons]: http://glyphicons.com
71 | [Simon Pascal Klein]: http://klepas.org
72 | [Ethan Schoonover]: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized
73 |
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/cv.pdc:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | /Users/wcm1/Dropbox/notes/cv.txt
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/cvhead.pdc:
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1 | % Curriculum Vitae
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | %
4 |
5 | Also available in [PDF form](./mcdanielcv.pdf).
6 |
7 | # Positions
8 |
9 | Rice University, Associate Professor (2015-present)
10 | Rice University, Assistant Professor (2008-2015)
11 | University of Denver, Assistant Professor (2006-2008)
12 |
13 | # Education
14 |
15 | Ph.D, History, Johns Hopkins University (2006)
16 | Dissertation: *Our Country is the World: Radical American Abolitionists Abroad*.
17 |
18 | M. A., Philosophy, Texas A&M University (2001)
19 | B.A., History, Texas A&M University (2000). *Summa Cum Laude.*
20 |
21 | # Publications
22 |
23 | ## Books
24 |
25 | _Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America_ (forthcoming in 2019 from Oxford University Press)
26 |
27 | _The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform_ (Louisiana State University Press, 2013). [Introduction online](http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/book-introduction.html).
28 |
29 | - [Merle Curti Award for Best Book in American Intellectual History](http://www.oah.org/programs/awards/merle-curti-award/)
30 | - Co-winner, [James H. Broussard First Book Prize](http://www.shear.org/book-and-article-prize/)
31 |
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/hacks.pdc:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Hacks
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | %
4 |
5 | As a certified geek, I prefer workflows that are paperless and use plain
6 | text files whenever possible. These posts mostly chronicle my attempts
7 | to realize these preferences within an academic work environment. These
8 | are "hacks" in the sense used by sites like
9 | [Profhacker](http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/) and
10 | [Lifehacker](http://lifehacker.com/) but largely reflect my
11 | idiosyncratic approach to productivity, which, to paraphrase [Ben
12 | Schmidt](http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/), involves using tools
13 | from the 1980s to do research on the nineteenth century while living in
14 | the twenty-first century. No warranty as to their actual productivity is
15 | either expressed or implied.
16 |
17 | Posts
18 | -----
19 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/hacks/applescript-and-notational-velocity.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Applescript and Notational Velocity
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % October 1, 2011
4 |
5 |
6 | This post was originally published on my old blog as [Applescript and
7 | Notational Velocity][].
8 |
9 |
10 | In an earlier post, I explained [how I use plain text files and
11 | Notational Velocity as a task-management alternative][] to the GTD
12 | program [Things][]. Towards the end of that post, I also hinted that I
13 | have been able to automate parts of my system by using some Applescript
14 | and Automator tricks. Most of these tricks depend on using an apparently
15 | little-known feature of Notational Velocity, which is the ability to
16 | perform the “search” command on your notes using Applescript.
17 |
18 | As [Notational Velocity][] users know, what makes the program unique is
19 | the fact that most of its functions begin in the “search” bar. If you
20 | want to create a note, you go to the search bar, begin typing the title
21 | of your new note, and click enter to create it. If you want to open an
22 | existing note, you also go to the search bar and begin entering the text
23 | that you want to find.
24 |
25 | With the release of [Version 2.0β4][] at the beginning of 2011, however,
26 | it became possible to “search” for text strings in NV using Applescript.
27 | (If you are new to Applescript, check out [the Ultimate Beginner’s
28 | Guide][].) This makes it relatively simple to write an Applescript that
29 | will create a new note in Notational Velocity, like this:
30 |
31 | tell application "Notational Velocity"
32 | activate
33 | search "Name of the new note"
34 | tell application "System Events"
35 | keystroke return
36 | key code 53
37 | set visible of process "Notational Velocity" to false
38 | end tell
39 | end tell
40 |
41 | The first part of this Applescript tells Notational Velocity to search
42 | for whatever text is between the quotation marks after `search` (in this
43 | case, `Name of the new note`). The second part of the script uses System
44 | Events to simulate the process of hitting return, which you would
45 | ordinarily do in Notational Velocity to create your new note after
46 | entering its title in the search bar. It also adds `key code 53` (which
47 | has the same effect as entering the Escape key) so that the query is
48 | cleared from the search bar after the new note is created. Finally,
49 | since the first part of the script activated Notational Velocity,
50 | thereby bringing it to the foreground, the script concludes by hiding
51 | the NV window from view so you can go back to whatever you were doing.
52 |
53 | With some slight modifications, you can also use a script like this to
54 | enter some text into the body of the new note you create, but more on
55 | that in a moment. First, if you are familiar with NV and are following
56 | along so far, you’ll probably realize that this script has some
57 | important limitations. Namely, if the text string that you’re searching
58 | for is already in a note in your NV database, you’ll run into some
59 | problems because instead of creating a new note, NV will find the note
60 | with that text.
61 |
62 | Nonetheless, this script has been useful in helping me to automate parts
63 | of my previously-described GTD system. Here’s an example: in a previous
64 | post, I explained [how and why I use my iPad to grade student papers][].
65 | I also use my iPad to annotate other documents that need feedback from
66 | me. So when I receive a paper to grade or a document to annotate, there
67 | are two things I need to do: (a) get the file to my iPad for annotation;
68 | (b) add a “to do” (or a `qq`, using [the syntax I explained before][how
69 | I use plain text files and Notational Velocity as a task-management
70 | alternative]) to Notational Velocity so I’ll remember that I need to
71 | read the file. To accomplish both of these tasks at once, I use an
72 | Automator workflow that incorporates a beefed-up version of the simple
73 | script above.
74 |
75 | Before showing you the workflow, however, I should also explain why I
76 | now prefer to use [GoodReader][], rather than [iAnnotate][], for most of
77 | the annotation that I do on my iPad.
78 |
79 | ### GoodReader versus iAnnotate
80 |
81 | When I wrote my earlier post on grading with my iPad, I was using
82 | [iAnnotate][], and sometimes I still do. But I’ve switched to
83 | [GoodReader][] for annotating most PDFs, in large part because the
84 | process of syncing files to my iPad is easier and more intuitive. Since
85 | I wrote my earlier post, GoodReader has also added a full slate of
86 | annotation tools that compares nicely with iAnnotate and even adds some
87 | features that work better, in my view.
88 |
89 | I learned about GoodReader’s killer syncing capabilities from [this
90 | episode of Mac Power Users][], which also discusses lots of other
91 | features peculiar to GoodReader. The most important payoff is this:
92 | GoodReader allows me to [keep particular folders in my Dropbox
93 | automatically synchronized][] between my iPad and my desktop. For
94 | example, I have a folder in my [Dropbox][] called “annotate.” I have set
95 | up GoodReader so that this folder is synchronized on my iPad. So
96 | whenever I add a file on my laptop to the “annotate” folder, I can get
97 | this file on my iPad just by tapping the “Sync” button in GoodReader.
98 | Then, when I annotate the file on my iPad, I just tap “Sync” again, and
99 | the marked-up file will appear in my Dropbox and on my laptop. Nifty,
100 | no?
101 |
102 | ### An example workflow
103 |
104 | Now that I’m using GoodReader, Step A of the workflow I described above
105 | (getting the file to my iPad) basically means moving the file into my
106 | “annotate” folder so that it can be synchronized to GoodReader later.
107 | The next step in my workflow is then to add a `qq` note in Notational
108 | Velocity that tells me to read the file. To do both, I use Automator.
109 | (If you’re new to Automator, here’s [an introduction][].)
110 |
111 | To see what my Automator workflow looks like, click on the image below
112 | to enlarge.
113 |
114 | [![image][]][]
115 |
116 | The first step in this workflow moves the file in question to my
117 | annotate folder, so that it’s ready to be accessed on my iPad via
118 | Dropbox synchronization. The workflow then passes the name of the file I
119 | need to annotate to an Applescript, which creates a note in Notational
120 | Velocity that says `qq Read examplefile.pdf`. (This Applescript is
121 | longer than the one I showed you above, because I don’t want the title
122 | of my to-do to include the whole pathname of the file. In this example,
123 | I also then have the Applescript put the pathname in the body of the new
124 | note, before simulating the Escape key and hiding Notational Velocity
125 | from view.)
126 |
127 | Sometimes the file I need to annotate comes to me as a Microsoft Word
128 | document, in which case I also need to turn the file into a PDF. So I
129 | have a separate Automator workflow with an extra step at the beginning
130 | that turns Word documents into PDF files. Click the image below to see
131 | what I mean.
132 |
133 | [![image][1]][]
134 |
135 | To make a (potentially even longer) story short, I have saved these
136 | Automator workflows as plug-ins for Finder. (I am still using Mac OS
137 | 10.5.8, and Automator underwent some significant changes in Snow
138 | Leopard, including the elimination of “plug-ins” in favor of [something
139 | similar called Services][]) So when I have a file in my Finder that I
140 | want to annotate in GoodReader, I basically right-click on the file,
141 | navigate to my “To Annotate” workflow, click on it, and voila: the file
142 | is moved to my annotate folder, and a new task is created reminding me
143 | to read the file. I’ll see that task next time I do my GTD review.
144 |
145 | That’s just one example of the kinds of automation I can add into my
146 | plain-text GTD system, and it’s certainly the one I use the most. But
147 | since [you can schedule Applescripts to run on particular dates in
148 | iCal][], it’s also easy to imagine how you could use a simple Notational
149 | Velocity Applescript and iCal to simulate the process of automatically
150 | creating scheduled or repeating tasks in [Things][]. But that is a post
151 | for another day.
152 |
153 | **UPDATE:** I’ve since figured out how to do this particular workflow
154 | much more efficiently using a shell script and the command line. Still,
155 | the Applescript functionality of NV might be useful for other workflows.
156 |
157 | [Applescript and Notational Velocity]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=175
158 | "Permanent Link: Applescript and Notational Velocity"
159 | [how I use plain text files and Notational Velocity as a
160 | task-management alternative]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=153
161 | [Things]: http://culturedcode.com/things/
162 | [Notational Velocity]: http://notational.net/
163 | [Version 2.0β4]: http://notational.net/releasenotes/release2/
164 | [the Ultimate Beginner’s Guide]: http://mac.appstorm.net/how-to/applescript/the-ultimate-beginners-guide-to-applescript/
165 | [how and why I use my iPad to grade student papers]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=113
166 | [GoodReader]: http://www.goodiware.com/goodreader.html
167 | [iAnnotate]: http://www.ajidev.com/iannotate/
168 | [this episode of Mac Power Users]: http://macpowerusers.com/2011/04/mpu-048-goodreader/
169 | [keep particular folders in my Dropbox automatically synchronized]: http://www.goodiware.com/gr-man-tr-servers.html#sync
170 | [Dropbox]: http://db.tt/SXfRhdY
171 | [an introduction]: http://mac.appstorm.net/how-to/applescript/automator-the-ultimate-automation-assistant/
172 | [image]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/files/2011/10/ToAnnotate-300x291.jpg
173 | "ToAnnotate"
174 | [![image][]]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/files/2011/10/ToAnnotate.jpg
175 | [1]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/files/2011/10/ToAnnotateWord-300x191.jpg
176 | "ToAnnotateWord"
177 | [![image][1]]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/files/2011/10/ToAnnotateWord.jpg
178 | [something similar called Services]: http://gigaom.com/apple/quick-tip-automator-and-services-in-snow-leopard/
179 | [you can schedule Applescripts to run on particular dates in iCal]: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/04/14/mac-101-schedule-your-scripts/
180 |
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/hacks/digitally-archive-articles.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % In Which I Digitally Archive Some Articles
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % September 20, 2010
4 |
5 |
6 | This post was originally published on my blog as [Post the Fourth, In
7 | Which I Digitally Archive Some Articles][].
8 |
9 |
10 | Several months ago, I learned about Rice University’s [Digital
11 | Scholarship Archive][], an institutional repository where faculty
12 | members can store and share published and unpublished work online. Many
13 | universities now have such repositories, including the [University of
14 | Michigan][], [Johns Hopkins][], and others. But as Shane Landrum
15 | ([@cliotropic][]) recently suggested, I’m not sure history faculty are
16 | widely aware of these repositories. I know that without a tip from the
17 | great Lisa Spiro ([@lisaspiro][]), I might not have learned of Rice’s
18 | DSA at all. But I’m glad I did, and here’s why and how I’ve posted some
19 | of my published work to the repository.
20 |
21 | For me the advantages of putting my work online in this way are clear.
22 | One benefit is curatorial. By putting my work here I can be sure that
23 | professional librarians will regularly back up my files, as well as
24 | convert documents to newer file formats when old ones become
25 | obsolescent. Without any maintenance from me, I will know that my online
26 | scholarly works will have permanent URLs, ensuring that anyone wishing
27 | to use them can rely on a working link.
28 |
29 | But the greatest benefit here is that I can provide more open access to
30 | many of my publications, which otherwise would hide in subscription-only
31 | databases like [JSTOR][] and [Project Muse][]. I can also provide copies
32 | of unpublished work like conference papers. Indeed, once deposited on
33 | the repository, such papers no longer become “unpublished” work. And
34 | this means that the work and research put into conference papers can be
35 | shared widely. I can solicit feedback and critiques of the works long
36 | after a conference has closed while simultaneously ensuring that my
37 | authorship is documented and in the public record.
38 |
39 | That’s why I’ve decided to make use of the DSA. And here’s how I did it.
40 |
41 | The process of putting my conference papers online was [straightforward
42 | enough once I received an account on the repository][]. (To read these
43 | instructions, Rice faculty will need to log in.) I didn’t need to ask
44 | anyone’s permission to publish those. But in order to find out which
45 | published journal articles I have the right to put online, I had to do a
46 | very modest amount of additional investigation.
47 |
48 | First, I browsed over to [SHERPA/RoMEO][]. This is basically an online
49 | database of publishers’ policies concerning reproduction and copyright;
50 | it’s as easy as typing in a journal’s name to find out where its
51 | publisher stands on the digital archiving of articles. You can use
52 | [SHERPA’s “color coded” key][] to get a quick sense of what rights a
53 | particular publisher gives to an author, but it’s best to closely read
54 | the restrictions each journal places on archiving or, better yet, to
55 | click through any link that is provided to the press’s own policy page.
56 | Some publishers allow the archiving of an author’s pre-print or
57 | post-print version of an article (i.e., a Microsoft Word or PDF version
58 | of the submitted manuscript), while others allow the archiving of an
59 | actual PDF file of the published article, with the copy-editing and
60 | formatting done by the press. And various journals attach restrictions
61 | to these permissions.
62 |
63 | For example, by searching for the *Journal of the Early Republic* on
64 | RoMEO, I learned that I could put the Publisher’s Version/PDF of an
65 | article in Rice’s DSA, so long as I waited until 12 months after the
66 | article appeared and so long as I honored the Press’s request to credit
67 | them for the original publication. By clicking through the link provided
68 | to the University of Pennsylvania Press’s [own page on its archive
69 | policies][], I also found a set copyright notice that I was required to
70 | attach to the archived work. ([Click here][] to see an image of what
71 | this actually looked like on RoMEO.)
72 |
73 | I also learned that another article I published in *American Quarterly*
74 | could probably be put up, but that I should contact the publisher to
75 | check. I sent an email and heard back the next day that I could post it,
76 | along with a credit. I think it’s also a good idea (and a courtesy) to
77 | confirm RoMEO’s results by emailing even those publishers who don’t
78 | require an email, so I also wrote the JER to make sure I was reading the
79 | policy correctly. I easily found the relevant email addresses on both
80 | journals’ homepages, and it was also reassuring that [the JER’s
81 | homepage][] contained a link to the same Press policies on
82 | “Self-Archiving and Digital Repositories” linked to by RoMEO.
83 |
84 | In short, faculty interested in using Rice’s repository should not
85 | regard difficulty of use as a barrier; the couple of questions I had
86 | were quickly answered by librarians and/or RoMEO and my publishers. One
87 | additional thing I learned is that to make these links available to
88 | people off campus, the “https” in the URL needs to be changed to “http.”
89 | But now, with just a little bit of work, I have two of my published
90 | articles, my dissertation (which I have the copyright to), and most of
91 | my conference papers available on the DSA. Click on the link below to
92 | see the list:
93 |
94 | Published, Peer-Reviewed Articles:
95 |
96 | “Repealing Unions: American Abolitionists, Irish Repeal, and the Origins
97 | of Garrisonian Disunionism,” *Journal of the Early Republic* 28, no. 2
98 | (2008), 243-269 ([download][])
99 |
100 | “The Fourth and the First: Abolitionist Holidays, Respectability, and
101 | Radical Interracial Reform,” *American Quarterly* 57, no. 1 (2005),
102 | 129-151 ([download][1])
103 |
104 | My Dissertation:
105 |
106 | “Our Country is the World: Radical American Abolitionists Abroad,” Ph.D
107 | diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2006 ([download][2])
108 |
109 | Conference Papers:
110 |
111 | “What Counts as Radical Abolitionism? A Reconsideration of Recent
112 | Scholarship,” [OAH][] Annual Meeting, Seattle, March 26-28, 2009
113 | ([download][3])
114 |
115 | “Repealing Unions: American Abolitionists, Irish Repealers, and the
116 | Coming of the Civil War, 1842-1847,” [AHA][] Annual Meeting,
117 | Philadelphia, January 5-8, 2006 ([download][4])
118 |
119 | “Our Country is the World: American Abolitionists, Louis Kossuth and
120 | Philanthropic Revolutions,” [OAH][] Annual Meeting, Boston, March 25-28,
121 | 2004 ([download][5])
122 |
123 | “Haiti’s Usable Past: Violence, Anglophilia, and Antebellum American
124 | Abolitionists,” [OIEAHC][] Ninth Annual Conference, New Orleans, June
125 | 6-8, 2003 ([download][6])
126 |
127 | [Post the Fourth, In Which I Digitally Archive Some Articles]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=75
128 | "Permanent Link: Post the Fourth, In Which I Digitally Archive Some Articles"
129 | [Digital Scholarship Archive]: http://scholarship.rice.edu/
130 | [University of Michigan]: http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/55467/browse?type=dateissued&submit_browse=By+Date
131 | [Johns Hopkins]: https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/
132 | [@cliotropic]: http://twitter.com/cliotropic/status/21352071993
133 | [@lisaspiro]: http://twitter.com/lisaspiro
134 | [JSTOR]: http://www.jstor.org
135 | [Project Muse]: http://muse.jhu.edu
136 | [straightforward enough once I received an account on the repository]:
137 | https://owlspace-ccm.rice.edu/access/wiki/site/91656f53-9adf-45c4-000e-b5072d163d17/faq.html#howto
138 | [SHERPA/RoMEO]: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/
139 | [SHERPA’s “color coded” key]: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeoinfo.html#colours
140 | [own page on its archive policies]: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/about/archivepolicy.html
141 | [Click here]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/files/2010/09/sherparomeo.jpg
142 | [the JER’s homepage]: http://jer.pennpress.org/strands/jer/home.htm
143 | [download]: http://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/27612
144 | [1]: http://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/27613
145 | [2]: http://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/27492
146 | [OAH]: http://www.oah.org
147 | [3]: http://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/27611
148 | [AHA]: http://www.historians.org
149 | [4]: http://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/27608
150 | [5]: http://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/27609
151 | [OIEAHC]: http://oieahc.wm.edu/
152 | [6]: http://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/27610
153 |
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/hacks/get-citations-with-isbndb-and-ottobib.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Get Book Citations at the Command Line using OttoBib and ISBNdb
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % March 16, 2013
4 |
5 | Recently I've been finishing footnotes for an article, a process that
6 | invariably requires looking up or checking lots of bibliographic
7 | information.
8 |
9 | Usually, when I'm late in the drafting process, my manuscripts contain
10 | lots of short-form citations with just the author's last name, book
11 | title, and page numbers. That means I have to fill in the full title and
12 | subtitle, full author name, publisher and city, and year of publication.
13 | To double-check this information, I usually either *(a)* get the book
14 | down from a shelf in my office and flip to the copyright page or *(b)*
15 | search on my library catalog or Amazon for the full book record. The
16 | result is usually a desk stacked with leaning towers of books, or a
17 | broswer filled with hanging tabs.
18 |
19 | The conventional way to solve this problem digitally is to use
20 | bibliographic management software like [Zotero][]. But sometimes you
21 | just want to quickly cite something that's not already in your library
22 | of citations.
23 |
24 | Yesterday I started wondering if there is a better way to do quick
25 | bibliographic checking during the drafting process. Some searching
26 | online turned up [OttoBib][], which can take a book ISBN and return a
27 | (usually) well-formatted bibliographic citation in either Chicago, APA,
28 | or MLA style. Of course, it's not that much easier to find an ISBN
29 | number than it is to find a full record. But [ISBNdb.com][] allows you
30 | to search for books by title and author and get ISBN numbers in return.
31 |
32 | After a little more head-scratching, I realized that I could probably
33 | use a Python script to connect the functionality of OttoBib and ISBNdb
34 | together. [This script is the result.][] I call it `blookup`, and it
35 | basically allows me to get formatted book citations from the command
36 | line with nothing but an author and some title words.[^1]
37 |
38 | For example, if I enter:
39 |
40 | blookup.py "david blight race and reunion"
41 |
42 | The output I get is:
43 |
44 | Blight, David W. *Race and reunion : the Civil War in American memory*. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.
45 |
46 | If I so desire, I can pipe that output to my Mac clipboard using
47 | `pbcopy` and paste it directly into my manuscript. But I can also just
48 | use it to check my memory about the publication date or the subtitle.
49 | Since I use [DTerm][] to quickly call up a commandline window, it's
50 | pretty easy to do this with a hotkey without ever leaving my chair or my
51 | manuscript.
52 |
53 | So far the script has done a pretty good job with any book I've thrown
54 | at it. But if anyone else tries it out, some caveats are in order. The
55 | first are the same caveats offered by Jonathan Otto, the author of
56 | OttoBib.com: "I strive for accuracy of the citations but you should
57 | treat this tool as a starting point in your works cited, because you
58 | still need to look it over." The second is that the script fetches the
59 | ISBN of the top result returned by ISBNdb for the search string, so it
60 | helps to include as much of the author and title as you can.
61 |
62 | Finally, [the script][This script is the result.] doesn't work right out
63 | of the box. It requires several Python modules, which I've explained in
64 | the comments. And to use ISBNdb.com, you have to create a free account
65 | and generate an API key, which then has to be hand-coded into the
66 | script.
67 |
68 | Happy citing!
69 |
70 | [^1]: I've been slowly learning some Python, and have blogged a little
71 | bit about the experience [elsewhere][].
72 |
73 | [Zotero]: http://www.zotero.org
74 | [OttoBib]: http://www.ottobib.com
75 | [ISBNdb.com]: http://isbndb.com
76 | [This script is the result.]: https://gist.github.com/wcaleb/5178632
77 | [DTerm]: http://decimus.net/dterm
78 | [elsewhere]: http://digitalhistory.blogs.rice.edu/category/python/
79 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/hacks/h-net-2.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % H-Net 2.0?
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % July 17, 2011
4 |
5 |
6 | This post was originally published on my old blog as [H-Net 2.0?][].
7 |
8 |
9 | Several years ago now, [Mills Kelly wrote a provocative post][]
10 | suggesting that the future of [H-Net][] was bleak. After noting that the
11 | traffic on many of H-Net’s edited, subject-specific e-mail lists was
12 | declining, Kelly argued that e-mail lists had outlived their usefulness
13 | for scholars online. “If H-Net is going to survive into a second
14 | decade,” he said, “I would urge its leadership to give up on email and
15 | move on. Digital communities in the Web 2.0 world just aren’t created in
16 | email any more.”
17 |
18 | As someone who participates in Web 2.0 “communities” like Twitter and
19 | the blogosphere, I see Kelly’s point, which may be even more appropriate
20 | now than it was in 2007. But even then, I wasn’t convinced that Web 2.0
21 | posed an all-or-nothing, “[change or die][]” choice for academics
22 | online: either e-mail, or something else. Today, as a book-review editor
23 | for [H-SHEAR][] and a subscriber to several other H-Net lists, I still
24 | believe e-mail lists and newer digital communities can coexist and
25 | thrive together.
26 |
27 | Earlier this month, for example, Adam Costanzo at UC-Davis [posted to
28 | the H-SHEAR list][] proposing a Twitter hashtag for the annual meeting
29 | of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
30 | ([SHEAR][]), which took place this last weekend in Philadelphia.
31 | Costanzo also offered some useful links to sites that talked about how
32 | to have a productive back-channel at a conference. Around the same time,
33 | two presenters at the SHEAR conference, [Mark Cheathem][] and [Daniel
34 | Kilbride][], sent messages to the list with links to their papers.
35 | Finally, a slew of attendees at the meeting “live-tweeted” the sessions
36 | they attended for those who of us who couldn’t make it, [using the
37 | hashtag Costanzo had proposed][]. Among those posting updates for the
38 | conference were Rachel Herrmann ([@raherrmann][]), Jennie Goloboy
39 | ([@JennieGoloboy][]), William Tatum ([@wptiii][]), Kathryn Tomasek
40 | ([@KathrynTomasek][]), Costanzo ([@adam\_costanzo][]), and Cheathem
41 | ([@markcheathem][]), who also posted notes about sessions on [his
42 | blog][].
43 |
44 | As far as I know, this is the first time that a sizable number of
45 | SHEAR-ites were tweeting from an annual meeting. But it is worth noting
46 | that this digital community sprung up around and (at least partly) with
47 | the help of H-SHEAR without having to “move on” from it. H-SHEAR and the
48 | live Twitter stream from Philadelphia were neither mutually exclusive
49 | nor co-dependent; the survival of one did not require that the other
50 | live or die.
51 |
52 | At the same time, it’s also worth noting that in this particular case,
53 | the Twitter stream lacked some advantages that H-Net still possesses.
54 | For instance, even though I am on Twitter ([@wcaleb][]), I had not known
55 | to look for Costanzo until he posted to H-SHEAR, which suggests how
56 | H-Net can still serve as one of numerous tools for discovering other
57 | digital communities. More importantly, as vibrant as last weekend’s
58 | discussion on Twitter was, a hashtag search for \#SHEAR2011 will
59 | probably, at some indefinite point in the future, cease to work. Whereas
60 | I can still go back to discussion logs from years ago on H-Net, it is
61 | not immediately clear how to do that on Twitter. (This is [likely to be
62 | a problem for the foreseeable future][] now that Twitter, which is not a
63 | non-profit like H-Net, is becoming more mysterious, proprietary and
64 | closed.) Finally, the excellent live-tweeting that was done from the
65 | conference was likely missed by the large number of active subscribers
66 | to the H-Net list.
67 |
68 | Another recent episode on the H-SHEAR list illustrates similar points.
69 | Back in April, Daniel Feller of the University of Tennessee posted a
70 | message to the list about [Internet citations and research standards][]
71 | that prompted a good deal of discussion among subscribers. Very quickly,
72 | however, the discussion also jumped off the list into other online
73 | communities. Blog posts by [John Fee][] and [Mark Cheathem][1] noticed
74 | the debate, and a post on the blog of [the Historical Society][] sparked
75 | a rich conversation of its own in the comments. Feller’s post was also
76 | tweeted on the same day it was sent to the list, which led to a stream
77 | of posts related to the debate on Twitter, a few of which (in no
78 | particular order) I saved:
79 |
80 | - [http://twitter.com/\#!/cliotropic/status/63226728495054848][]
81 | - [http://twitter.com/\#!/cliotropic/status/63046105671282689][]
82 | - [http://twitter.com/\#!/jnthnwwlsn/status/63023593952509952][]
83 | - [http://twitter.com/KevinLevin/status/63251444886806528][]
84 | - [http://twitter.com/cliotropic/status/63250983853105153][]
85 | - [http://twitter.com/jmadelman/status/63249219737223168][]
86 | - [http://twitter.com/jmadelman/status/63277736793354241][]
87 | - [http://twitter.com/jhrees/status/67618584771309568][]
88 | - [http://twitter.com/wcaleb/status/63276620798115840][]
89 |
90 | Here again, a discussion started on H-SHEAR easily spilled over into
91 | other digital communities and enriched the conversation by drawing in
92 | new commenters who did not participate in the discussion on the list.
93 |
94 | Of course, a defender of Kelly’s original position could also find
95 | support in these cases. After all, the discussion surrounding the Feller
96 | post did dwindle quickly on the email list while it continued on blogs
97 | and Twitter. Doesn’t this just show that traffic on the traditional
98 | lists is dying and that H-Net is expendable?
99 |
100 | My answer would be no, partly because (as already mentioned)
101 | reconstructing and saving a debate on a Web 2.0 platform like Twitter is
102 | still much more difficult than on a threaded email list. If I had not
103 | saved links to the above tweets as they were appearing, it would be
104 | virtually impossible for me to find them again now.
105 |
106 | More importantly, however, I question whether declining traffic is
107 | really a symptom of morbidity anymore. After all, one of the hallmarks
108 | of Web 2.0 is the realization that users seek out content when they want
109 | it and have a variety of ways of getting it. I, for one, already keep up
110 | with most H-Net lists using my RSS reader, as I suspect some others do.
111 | I know the H-Net lists are there when I need them, and I can keep them
112 | in the background of my information stream during times when I don’t. So
113 | sparse posts don’t necessarily call into question the worth of the
114 | medium, anymore than a blog post that gets only one or two comments
115 | means that blogs are dead. (This is not even to mention the larger point
116 | that H-Net does more than simply maintain group email lists; it also has
117 | a well-established platform for [open-access, scholarly book reviews][]
118 | that are published online and pushed to list editors.)
119 |
120 | Moreover, the rise of new digital communities doesn’t mean the older
121 | digital communities, often composed of different people, should simply
122 | be cut loose. H-SHEAR has a healthy number of subscribers, only a small
123 | percentage of whom currently tweet or blog (as far as I know; a survey
124 | would be interesting). That means that posting to the list reaches a
125 | number of scholars in the field who could not be reached otherwise. Yet
126 | from my point of view, neither these scholars nor the ones who are
127 | active on Web 2.0 sites need feel threatened or inconvenienced by the
128 | existence of the other communities.
129 |
130 | I do think that H-Net can do things to help facilitate exchanges among
131 | these varied communities, like making easier permalinks for posts or
132 | incorporating “share” buttons within the archived discussion log pages
133 | online. Even better would be the incorporation of a DISQUS-style
134 | trackback system into the logs, so that viewers could see when a post or
135 | book review has been tweeted or mentioned on a blog. All of these
136 | changes could be made without diehard email subscribers even noticing
137 | them, while they would significantly aid those who wish to link to and
138 | continue list discussions elsewhere. At the same time, however, I think
139 | it’s important to note that the two episodes I’ve mentioned here
140 | occurred even without such features, which aren’t strictly necessary in
141 | order for H-Net to be plugged into the evolving online ecosystems like
142 | Twitter.
143 |
144 | In fact, my own advice to H-Net leaders, looking back on what has
145 | happened since Kelly’s original post in 2007, would be to make small
146 | changes but not to change too much. H-Net has certain strengths that
147 | argue strongly for its continued vitality well into the future. But it
148 | would be a mistake, I think, to decide that H-Net needs to do all the
149 | things that Twitter and blogs do in order to stay relevant, and a still
150 | greater mistake to try to replicate such services with another
151 | hermetically sealed set of tools. H-Net doesn’t need to be Google-Plus
152 | to the Facebook of blogs and Twitter; with some slight tweaking, it can
153 | continue to coexist and play a role in a Web that includes those
154 | services. Indeed, it already does.
155 |
156 | [H-Net 2.0?]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=171
157 | "Permanent Link: H-Net 2.0?"
158 | [Mills Kelly wrote a provocative post]: http://edwired.org/2007/09/10/the-end-of-h-net/
159 | [H-Net]: http://www.h-net.org/
160 | [change or die]: http://chronicle.com/article/Change-or-Die-Scholarly/46962/
161 | [H-SHEAR]: http://www.h-net.org/shear
162 | [posted to the H-SHEAR list]: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=1107&week=b&msg=WIdGkCV%2bYgJeRlYXsR0OEQ&user=&pw=
163 | [SHEAR]: http://www.shear.org
164 | [Mark Cheathem]: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=1107&week=b&msg=bSwZGcrRTZFjkInzLfWmRg&user=&pw=
165 | [Daniel Kilbride]: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=1107&week=b&msg=sdM0WOmck9hSb1jtYM1sgw&user=&pw=
166 | [using the hashtag Costanzo had proposed]: http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23shear2011
167 | [@raherrmann]: http://twitter.com/Raherrmann
168 | [@JennieGoloboy]: http://twitter.com/JennieGoloboy
169 | [@wptiii]: http://twitter.com/wptiii
170 | [@KathrynTomasek]: http://twitter.com/KathrynTomasek
171 | [@adam\_costanzo]: http://twitter.com/adam_costanzo
172 | [@markcheathem]: http://twitter.com/markcheathem
173 | [his blog]: http://mcheathem.wordpress.com/
174 | [@wcaleb]: http://twitter.com/wcaleb
175 | [likely to be a problem for the foreseeable future]: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/the-end-of-twapperkeeper-and-what-to-do-about-it/31582
176 | [Internet citations and research standards]: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=1104&week=d&msg=1rvV6eW8LvgcW4mtpU%2b%2bsQ&user=&pw=
177 | [John Fee]: http://www.philipvickersfithian.com/2011/04/historians-and-online-sources.html
178 | [1]: http://mcheathem.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/should-historians-utilize-online-sources/
179 | [the Historical Society]: http://histsociety.blogspot.com/2011/05/standards-of-citation-and-internet.html
180 | [http://twitter.com/\#!/cliotropic/status/63226728495054848]: http://twitter.com/#!/cliotropic/status/63226728495054848
181 | [http://twitter.com/\#!/cliotropic/status/63046105671282689]: http://twitter.com/#!/cliotropic/status/63046105671282689
182 | [http://twitter.com/\#!/jnthnwwlsn/status/63023593952509952]: http://twitter.com/#!/jnthnwwlsn/status/63023593952509952
183 | [http://twitter.com/KevinLevin/status/63251444886806528]: http://twitter.com/KevinLevin/status/63251444886806528
184 | [http://twitter.com/cliotropic/status/63250983853105153]: http://twitter.com/cliotropic/status/63250983853105153
185 | [http://twitter.com/jmadelman/status/63249219737223168]: http://twitter.com/jmadelman/status/63249219737223168
186 | [http://twitter.com/jmadelman/status/63277736793354241]: http://twitter.com/jmadelman/status/63277736793354241
187 | [http://twitter.com/jhrees/status/67618584771309568]: http://twitter.com/jhrees/status/67618584771309568
188 | [http://twitter.com/wcaleb/status/63276620798115840]: http://twitter.com/wcaleb/status/63276620798115840
189 | [open-access, scholarly book reviews]: http://www.h-net.org/reviews
190 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/hacks/more-plain-text-gtd.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % More Plain-Text GTD
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % May 15, 2012
4 |
5 | About a year ago I adopted a [plain-text system for getting things
6 | done][], using Notational Velocity, Simplenote, and the "q" key as a
7 | substitute for bigger GTD programs like Things or OmniFocus. I'm still
8 | happily using the same system today and have developed a few additional
9 | "hacks" to make it work for me.
10 |
11 | The only major addition I've made to the basic system is that I now
12 | often assign tasks priority simply by putting `qqq` in the title of my
13 | note attached to that task, instead of the usual `qq`. This is really
14 | just a further borrowing from Merlin Mann's "q" trick, which I explained
15 | in my [original post][]. But at that time, I was still adding hashtags
16 | like `@tw` or `@td` to tasks that I wanted to accomplish this week or
17 | today. Now I just use three q's so when I want a more focused list of
18 | high-priority items, I just search for `qqq` in NV instead of `qq`, which
19 | pulls up all of my tasks.
20 |
21 | The other thing that has changed in the last year is that I have become
22 | even more of a plain-text nerd than I already was. I still find
23 | [Notational Velocity][] to be the easiest way to enter new tasks and
24 | find old ones, but I also now use Vim, Mutt, and other command-line Unix
25 | programs as a regular part of my workflow. And I've learned much more
26 | about baked-in Unix goodies like `grep`, `sort`, and `awk`. All of this
27 | has allowed me to extend my plain-text GTD system while learning some
28 | bash scripting along the way.
29 |
30 | In fact, keeping all of my tasks in plain text files has advantages now
31 | that I didn't anticipate at the time because I can so easily manipulate
32 | my system to add features. For example, let's say I wanted to print off
33 | a list of all my tasks for this week. I could simply switch to the
34 | directory where I keep all of my task files and run
35 |
36 | ls | grep qqq | lpr
37 |
38 | to print a to-do list from my default printer. That same basic
39 | `ls | grep` pipe enables me to call up tasks at any time from the
40 | Terminal, too, and do various things. I can also leverage the power of
41 | piping in Unix to make new tasks. If I have a text file that requires
42 | some action on my part, or some text in `stdin` that I want put in a
43 | task note, I can do something like this:
44 |
45 | cat foo.txt > notes/"qq Take care of the foo".txt
46 |
47 | In my earlier post, I mentioned that it was easy to get text into
48 | Notational Velocity using a Mac OS X service that takes selected text in
49 | any application and pastes it into a new note. That's possible and
50 | probably even faster from the command line, too; if I've copied
51 | something to my system clipboard, I can invoke [DTerm][] and type
52 | `pbpaste > notes/"qq Read over this text".txt`. In short, as I've gained
53 | more facility with the command line, I've discovered even more ways to
54 | quickly create and work with my `qq` files.
55 |
56 | Shell scripting extends the system even further. For example, in my
57 | first post I noted that one of the things I had not figured out yet was
58 | how to schedule tasks or alert myself automatically when a due date was
59 | nearing. Now it's possible to imagine how a `cron` job could do that for
60 | me, though I haven't tried it. What I have done is written a simple
61 | script that searches through my `qq` files, finds tasks that are due in
62 | the next two weeks, and then prints a reminder to my terminal every time
63 | I start a new shell session that looks like this:
64 |
65 | -1 days Change smoke alarm batteries due(05-13-12)
66 | 7 days Change A/C Filter every three months @home due(05-22-12)
67 |
68 | Here's the [gist of that script][], but less important than the
69 | specifics is the basic principle: keeping tasks in plain text files,
70 | rather than in a proprietary database, makes it possible to easily
71 | manipulate them--for free--in whatever way makes sense to you.
72 | [Todo.txt][] is perhaps the most elaborate example of this, but the
73 | basic idea applies to my system, too. Nor is shell scripting the only
74 | possible way of doing things like printing a "due soon" reminder. In
75 | another post that I wrote before really getting into bash, I explained
76 | [how to use Applescript to make a new task][], and others may be able to
77 | write more elegant Python, Ruby, or Awk scripts to accomplish similar
78 | things. That sort of flexibility--and the fact that I only have to see
79 | those features that *I* need--is what I still like about my GTD system
80 | today.
81 |
82 | [plain-text system for getting things done]: ./plain-text-gtd.html
83 | [original post]: ./plain-text-gtd.html
84 | [Notational Velocity]: http://notational.net
85 | [DTerm]: http://decimus.net/DTerm
86 | [gist of that script]: http://gist.github.com/2702834
87 | [Todo.txt]: todotxt.com
88 | [how to use Applescript to make a new task]: ./applescript-and-notational-velocity.html
89 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/hacks/pandoc-on-ios.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Using Pandoc on iOS (Sorta)
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % May 3, 2013
4 |
5 | As I've explained before, I now do almost all of my writing---[including
6 | my academic writing][]---in plain-text, Markdown files. I then use the
7 | incomparable document-conversion tool, [Pandoc][], to turn these files
8 | into HTML, Microsoft Word documents, PDFs, or EPUBs. Even [this
9 | website][] is produced with Pandoc.
10 |
11 | One virtue of this preference for plain-text files is that it enables me
12 | to write on my iOS devices. Plain text is mobile. But Pandoc is not, or
13 | so I have long assumed. Because Pandoc is a command-line utility, my
14 | ability to convert Markdown into Pandoc's other file formats has so far
15 | been tethered to my laptop.[^1]
16 |
17 | Enter [Docverter][], an open-source tool that makes it possible to use
18 | Pandoc without having it installed on your machine. To use it, you post
19 | `multipart/form-data` requests to a URL and get Pandoc output as a
20 | response, using the [Docverter API][] to select which Pandoc options you
21 | want to use. So, for example, you can send Markdown text to Docverter
22 | and get back formatted PDF output, which you can then write to a PDF
23 | file---all without having a computer with Pandoc installed.
24 |
25 | But can you use Docverter without having a desktop or laptop computer at
26 | all? At first glance, no: the documentation suggests using another
27 | command-line Unix utility, `curl`, to make requests to Docverter. But
28 | you can't use `curl` from an iPhone or an iPad, or at least not easily.
29 | If you want to use Pandoc from an iOS device, you need a different way
30 | to access Docverter.
31 |
32 | Pythonista + Docverter = iPandoc (Sorta)
33 | ----------------------------------------
34 |
35 | The solution is [Pythonista][], an inexpensive iOS app that allows you
36 | to write and execute Python scripts, including ones that interact with
37 | web services like---you guessed it---Docverter. Last weekend I spent a
38 | day writing a script that uses `httplib`, one of the standard Python
39 | libraries included with Pythonista, to post requests to Docverter from
40 | my iPad and get back Pandoc output.
41 |
42 | You can [grab the script][], with explanatory comments, as a Gist.
43 |
44 | Briefly put, the script works like this. I open a text editing app like
45 | Nebulous Notes and put some Markdown text on my iOS clipboard. I open
46 | Pythonista and run my iMDtoPDF script. A few moments later, a PDF output
47 | file appears in my [Dropbox][].[^2]
48 |
49 | This method will help me quite a bit in the following sort of situation:
50 | I am away from my laptop, but I need to email a long, footnote-heavy
51 | document to someone. Or a student requests a recommendation letter that
52 | is due before I can get to my computer, and I need to create a PDF
53 | version with letterhead from the plain text version of the letter that I
54 | keep under version control. Now I can run this script, go to my iOS
55 | Dropbox app, and email the PDF file from there, all without leaving the
56 | iPad.
57 |
58 | In other words, I can use Pandoc on the iPad ... sorta. I haven't yet
59 | figured out how to utilize all of Docverter's options in my script. And
60 | unlike Pandoc, Docverter does not use LaTeX to produce PDFs. Instead, it
61 | converts Markdown to HTML and then uses a service called [Flying
62 | Saucer][] to print that HTML to a PDF. Nonetheless, this method still
63 | allows you to control some of the styling of the PDF by using a CSS
64 | stylesheet and embedded fonts. For example, [here's the PDF output][] of
65 | this post using the CSS declarations included in my script.[^3]
66 |
67 | Extending the Script
68 | --------------------
69 |
70 | In [the Gist version][grab the script] of this script, I've deliberately
71 | kept things simple. But the version I'm using has several extended
72 | features.
73 |
74 | For example, the public version automatically gives the output PDF file
75 | a generic, time-stamped name. But you can use Pythonista's console
76 | module to prompt yourself for a specific title.
77 |
78 | ~~~~ {.python}
79 | ## Name output file with user input
80 | import console
81 | title = console.input_alert('Output filename', 'Enter title below')
82 | outfile = title + '.pdf'
83 | ~~~~
84 |
85 | By adding these two lines to the end, I can also have the script
86 | automatically open the output file in [GoodReader][], where I can then
87 | preview, annotate or email it:
88 |
89 | ~~~~ {.python}
90 | ## Get temporary URL for file in Dropbox
91 | share_url = dropbox_client.media(outfile)
92 | url = share_url.get('url', 'not found')
93 |
94 | ## Prefix the URL with 'g' to open in Goodreader
95 | import webbrowser
96 | webbrowser.open('g' + url)
97 | ~~~~
98 |
99 | Python makes numerous other features possible: my modified version, for
100 | example, prints a timestamp in the footer of the PDF's first page. And
101 | Docverter itself can be used to extend the script: with a slight tweak
102 | of the script's `fields` variable, for instance, you can output Docx
103 | files or EPUB files instead. Finally, by stringing together Pythonista
104 | with other apps like Drafts, it's possible to automate this script
105 | without having to manually launch Pythonista every time a conversion
106 | takes place.[^4]
107 |
108 | These solutions, to be sure, do not bring Pandoc in all its glory to the
109 | iOS platform. But they do *sorta* make Pandoc mobile. And I think that's
110 | sorta cool.
111 |
112 | [^1]: I should note that many iOS text editors now feature the ability
113 | to create Markdown previews or convert Markdown into HTML. But they
114 | lack some of the features of Pandoc that I most rely on, like
115 | footnotes and PDF output.
116 |
117 | [^2]: The ability to upload the file to Dropbox requires taking two
118 | other steps in addition to this script. First, you have to create a
119 | free Dropbox development app. Then, you have to create [this
120 | separate script][] in Pythonista; it includes a function for
121 | interacting with the Dropbox API that is called by my script. For
122 | more information, see [Using the Dropbox module][] in the Pythonista
123 | forums.
124 |
125 | [^3]: Flying Saucer's method of producing PDFs does have disadvantages
126 | over Pandoc's native use of LaTeX; for example, you'll notice in the
127 | PDF version of this post that quotation marks within code blocks are
128 | converted into HTML character codes, which wouldn't happen if I had
129 | made the PDF using Pandoc on my laptop. For most of the mobile use
130 | cases that I can imagine, however, Flying Saucer should fine.
131 |
132 | [^4]: For tips on automation and a ton of other Pythonista ideas, see
133 | Frederico Vitti's [monster post][] on Macstories.
134 |
135 | [including my academic writing]: http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/my-academic-book-in-plain-text.html
136 | [Pandoc]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
137 | [this website]: ./colophon.html#how-this-site-is-built
138 | [Docverter]: http://www.docverter.com
139 | [Docverter API]: http://www.docverter.com/api.html
140 | [Pythonista]: http://omz-software.com/pythonista/
141 | [grab the script]: https://gist.github.com/5478382
142 | [Dropbox]: www.dropbox.com
143 | [Flying Saucer]: http://code.google.com/p/flying-saucer/
144 | [here's the PDF output]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xreurp728bgn6f5/pandoc-on-ios.pdf
145 | [GoodReader]: http://www.goodiware.com/goodreader.html
146 | [this separate script]: https://gist.github.com/4034526
147 | [Using the Dropbox module]: http://omz-software.com/pythonista/forums/discussion/10/using-the-dropbox-module/p1
148 | [monster post]: http://www.macstories.net/stories/automating-ios-how-pythonista-changed-my-workflow/
149 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/hacks/planned-tsundoku.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Planned Tsundoku
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % August 1, 2014
4 |
5 | [Tsundoku][]---the practice of "letting books pile up unread on shelves
6 | or floors or nightstands"---is an occupational hazard for academics like
7 | myself. I try to manage the problem by at least letting newly purchased
8 | books pile up in *one* place until I can find time to enter them into
9 | [LibraryThing][] and place them on my shelf. But that creates a
10 | different hazard: the periodic hassle of shifting all my shelved books
11 | around to make room for the newcomers.
12 |
13 | That wouldn't be a hassle, of course, if I just added new books to the
14 | last shelf on my bookcase. But I try to keep my working library
15 | organized alphabetically by author's last name, to increase the odds of
16 | my finding a particular book later. When adding new books to this
17 | scheme, I invariably discover that I haven't left enough room for a
18 | particular section of the alphabet to expand. And that usually means
19 | moving quite a few old books around before I can even place the new
20 | ones.
21 |
22 | Today, as I contemplated a large stack of newly acquired books during my
23 | midsummer office clean-up, I started to wonder if there was a better
24 | way. Could I strategically leave more shelf room in places where
25 | particular letters of the alphabet tended to have disproportionate
26 | numbers of books?
27 |
28 | It's a question that I'm sure professional librarians have pondered and
29 | answered better than I can. After all, it is a law of library science
30 | that [the library is a growing organism][]. The method I settled on was
31 | only pseudo-scientific, however.
32 |
33 | First I tried Googling for answers to the question of which first
34 | letters of surnames are most common in the general population. A page on
35 | [alphabetical filing][] offered some rough percentages. But a [Gist by
36 | Andrew Pendleton][] proved even more helpful. Pendleton used Python to
37 | ingest a CSV spreadsheet of the most common surnames in the 2000 U.S.
38 | Census and return a breakdown of the percentage of last names that begin
39 | with each letter. His results:
40 |
41 | {
42 | "A": 0.03559596939643605,
43 | "C": 0.07694824074741784,
44 | "B": 0.08791477424094518,
45 | "E": 0.018669123556424614,
46 | "D": 0.04579860597727158,
47 | "G": 0.05439868577642196,
48 | "F": 0.034505834128967044,
49 | "I": 0.003955862892091837,
50 | "H": 0.07268753217954918,
51 | "K": 0.03294327720020791,
52 | "J": 0.03025983302791189,
53 | "M": 0.09608053808826617,
54 | "L": 0.04848650695769241,
55 | "O": 0.014720280137130485,
56 | "N": 0.018547007013788936,
57 | "Q": 0.002206565702878153,
58 | "P": 0.049319930077139015,
59 | "S": 0.09580978699464698,
60 | "R": 0.05763521983707609,
61 | "U": 0.002210911090800405,
62 | "T": 0.035309842314786705,
63 | "W": 0.05861438058222256,
64 | "V": 0.015875707643636012,
65 | "Y": 0.006166216881876424,
66 | "X": 0.00024144758019273616,
67 | "Z": 0.005097919974221793
68 | }
69 |
70 | Those results alone are helpful in planning for future tsundoku, as they
71 | can help predict which letters' shelves are likely to swell. But I also
72 | wondered if I could form a similar picture of my personal library,
73 | which is likely to have peculiar patterns of over-representation for
74 | names.
75 |
76 | To check, I first had to [export my LibraryThing data as a CSV file][].
77 | I then [modified Pendleton's script][] so that it would work on my CSV
78 | and so that it would sort and prettify the output. The results for my
79 | library, as of this writing, looked like this:
80 |
81 | B - 9.55% K - 3.66%
82 | M - 8.77% A - 2.75%
83 | S - 8.38% J - 2.62%
84 | H - 7.33% E - 2.23%
85 | D - 7.20% O - 1.96%
86 | W - 6.15% N - 1.57%
87 | F - 6.02% V - 0.92%
88 | G - 5.37% I - 0.65%
89 | R - 5.24% Q - 0.65%
90 | C - 4.97% Z - 0.52%
91 | P - 4.97% U - 0.26%
92 | L - 4.19% Y - 0.13%
93 | T - 3.93%
94 |
95 | Data science, this is not. For one thing, Pendleton's script was
96 | built for a list of unique names, whereas my spreadsheet contains
97 | multiple rows with the same name (though further scripting could correct
98 | that). Still, I got from this little exercise what I wanted: a rough
99 | approximation of which shelves in my library need the most room for
100 | growing.
101 |
102 | For the most part, my percentages matched what Pendleton found for the
103 | general population: bookshelves authored by authors whose names begin
104 | with B, M, S, and H are probably going to groan. But I also identified
105 | some unusual spikes in my collection---like F and W---that led me to
106 | leave more room for added books in those areas. Hopefully, the next time
107 | I'm trying to mitigate the effects of tsundoku, I will save time that I
108 | would have spent shifting books around---time I can spend on other forms
109 | of [structured procrastination][] like analyzing my LibraryThing data with
110 | Python.
111 |
112 | [Tsundoku]: http://web.archive.org/web/20140801180245/http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/tsundoku-should-enter-the-english-language.html
113 | [LibraryThing]: https://www.librarything.com/profile/wcm
114 | [the library is a growing organism]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_laws_of_library_science
115 | [alphabetical filing]: http://web.archive.org/web/20130801020145/http://anythingfiling.com/tag/alphabetical-filing/
116 | [Gist by Andrew Pendleton]: https://gist.github.com/apendleton/2638865
117 | [export my LibraryThing data as a CSV file]: http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Export
118 | [modified Pendleton's script]: https://gist.github.com/wcaleb/2e6da75a4c91f8b46dd4
119 | [structured procrastination]: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com
120 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/hacks/search-engines-from-command-line.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Search Engines from the Command Line on a Mac
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % September 7, 2012
4 |
5 | Lincoln Mullen wrote a post yesterday about [How to Hack URLs for Faster
6 | Searches in Your Browser][]. His tips showed how to add different search
7 | engines to Google Chrome, but it got me thinking about how I could do
8 | something similar from the command line. A few bash functions later, I
9 | now have an easy way to search Google Scholar, Flickr, IMDb, and even
10 | proprietary databases in my university library---all in the browser of
11 | my choice. For example, say I want to search Google Scholar. At the
12 | command line, I can now just type this:
13 |
14 | $ scholar "benedict anderson imagined communities"
15 |
16 | And I get [this][]. Or if I want to search the Handbook of Texas Online,
17 | I type this:
18 |
19 | $ hotx "monroe edwards"
20 |
21 | And I get [these results][]. I can even use Google Translate to get
22 | Spanish translations of English words. I type:
23 |
24 | $ spanish "it's hot outside"
25 |
26 | And I get a [quick translation][].
27 |
28 | My method is basically to create a series of bash functions that use the
29 | built-in Mac OS X [open command][]. I've put these functions in a
30 | [GitHub repository][]. To use them yourself, just copy the
31 | `se-aliases.sh` file to your computer, and then add this line to your
32 | `.bashrc` file (or create one if you don't have one):
33 |
34 | $ source path/to/se-aliases.sh
35 |
36 | Once you're done, you can use any of the functions at the command line.
37 | I also find it convenient to do this using [DTerm][]. I can invoke DTerm
38 | with a global hotkey (mine is Shift-Command-Return), and then type in my
39 | command, like so:
40 |
41 | ![Searching IMDb with DTerm][]
42 |
43 | Hitting enter on the command in that image immediately sent me to [this
44 | page][] about a good documentary I recently saw about "Being Elmo,"
45 | which seems like it's almost as fun as being geeky. Happy searching!
46 |
47 | * * * * *
48 |
49 | P.S. I did a little googling after my initial post and found [someone
50 | else][] doing exactly the same thing, with some slight variations in the
51 | way input is handled. Check it out!
52 |
53 | [How to Hack URLs for Faster Searches in Your Browser]: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-to-hack-urls-for-faster-searches-in-your-browser/42304
54 | [this]: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=benedict+anderson+imagined+communities
55 | [these results]: http://www.tshaonline.org/search/node/monroe%20edwards
56 | [quick translation]: http://translate.google.com/#en/es/it%27s+hot+outside
57 | [open command]: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/open.1.html
58 | [GitHub repository]: http://github.com/wcaleb/se-aliases
59 | [DTerm]: http://decimus.net/DTerm
60 | [Searching IMDb with DTerm]: ./dterm-screen.jpg
61 | [this page]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1787660/
62 | [someone else]: http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2009/google-search-from-linux-and-unix-command-line/
63 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/hacks/two-simple-timers.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Two Simple Timers
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % May 1, 2012
4 |
5 | Like [Natalie Houston][] and the Profhacker gang, I sometimes use a
6 | timer to keep me on task when I need to be productive, especially when
7 | the tasks at hand are ones that I'd rather put off. But instead of
8 | investing in a full-blown timer program, I've hacked together two simple
9 | timers for my Mac that I can fire up whenever I need them. Both are
10 | rough around the edges, but they work for me.
11 |
12 | A Simple Terminal Timer
13 | -----------------------
14 |
15 | I can't remember where on the Web I first read about this, but the
16 | simplest way I've found to set a timer is to open the Terminal, and
17 | enter the command:
18 |
19 | sleep 600;say "break"
20 |
21 | This will cause the computer to count to 600 seconds, and then say
22 | "break" using the [system's voice][]. Then I set another timer for the
23 | break that will prompt me to get back to work.
24 |
25 | sleep 120;say "back to work"
26 |
27 | I can easily recall these timers at the command line by using the up
28 | arrow key to go back to previous commands. So I can easily run each of
29 | these timers back-to-back for as long as I want.
30 |
31 | Usually, I find myself using the simple terminal timer when I want to
32 | work in short bursts using a system like Merlin Mann's [(10+2)\*5][]
33 | procastination hack. But when I want to work in longer stretches, I use
34 | iTunes and Applescript.
35 |
36 | A Simple iTunes Timer
37 | ---------------------
38 |
39 | I like to listen to jazz while I work, so about a year ago I pieced
40 | together an Applescript program that causes my music to fade out when
41 | it's time for a break, and then fade back in when the break is over. To
42 | make it work, you can copy and paste the following code into AppleScript
43 | Editor, save the script as an Application, and then launch the
44 | application just like any other Mac program. (I call mine "Write Tunes,"
45 | because I use it often to time my writing sessions.)
46 |
47 | property tick : 2
48 | property thismany : 1
49 |
50 | display dialog "Playlist?" default answer "Straight Ahead Jazz"
51 | set writelist to text returned of result
52 |
53 | display dialog "How many work sessions do you want?" default answer "2"
54 | set sessions to text returned of result as number
55 |
56 | display dialog "How many minutes each?" default answer "25"
57 | set worktime to ((text returned of result as number) * 60)
58 |
59 | display dialog "How many minutes for a break?" default answer "5"
60 | set breaktime to ((text returned of result as number) * 60)
61 |
62 | tell application "iTunes"
63 | set sound volume to 50
64 | tell playlist writelist
65 | set shuffle to false
66 | set shuffle to true
67 | end tell
68 | repeat sessions times
69 | set snd to sound volume
70 | set sound volume to 0
71 | if player state is paused then
72 | play
73 | else
74 | play playlist writelist
75 | end if
76 | repeat
77 | if (get sound volume) is greater than or equal to (snd - tick) then
78 | set sound volume to snd
79 | exit repeat
80 | end if
81 | set sound volume to (sound volume + tick)
82 | delay thismany
83 | end repeat
84 | set resume_volume to sound volume
85 | delay worktime
86 | repeat
87 | set snd to sound volume
88 | if snd is less than or equal to tick then
89 | set sound volume to 0
90 | exit repeat
91 | end if
92 | set sound volume to (snd - tick)
93 | delay thismany
94 | end repeat
95 | pause
96 | set sound volume to resume_volume
97 | delay breaktime
98 | end repeat
99 | end tell
100 |
101 | quit
102 |
103 | on quit
104 | continue quit
105 | end quit
106 |
107 | What I like about this timer is the way that it slowly "fades in" and
108 | "fades out" of work time, alerting me when a break is coming so I can
109 | wrap up a sentence and then alerting me when the break is ending, so I
110 | can stop surfing or snacking and get back into a writing frame of mind.
111 |
112 | The settings can be adjusted by changing the default playlist name
113 | (currently "Straight Ahead Jazz") and break and work times, but these
114 | defaults can also be left as they are; the dialog box will allow users
115 | to overwrite the default with their own choices. The speed with which
116 | the volume fades in and out can also be adjusted by changing the "tick"
117 | and "thismany" properties in the first two lines.
118 |
119 | I patched this together largely with help from [Doug's Applescripts for
120 | iTunes][], so there are definitely seams showing. For example, I've
121 | never really figured out a way to quit the app once it's running other
122 | than to "Force Quit" it. The program will also fail if any iTunes
123 | dialogs pop up (for example, if I have my home wireless speakers
124 | selected in iTunes and then try to run this program at work, where those
125 | speakers are unavailable, then the program will fail). I should probably
126 | try to fix these issues someday, but right now the program does the
127 | trick, which is to get me working on what I should be working on.
128 |
129 | [Natalie Houston]: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/an-everyday-essential-the-timer/22675
130 | [system's voice]: http://www.macworld.com/article/1164787/how_to_change_the_mac_s_system_voice.html
131 | [(10+2)\*5]: http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/11/procrastination-hack-1025
132 | [Doug's Applescripts for iTunes]: http://dougscripts.com/itunes/
133 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/index.pdc:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 |
Greetings!
2 |
3 |
My name is W. Caleb McDaniel. I'm an associate professor of history at Rice University and a scholar of the nineteenth-century United States. I am also the faculty magister at Duncan College, the newest of Rice's eleven residential colleges.
I have just finished a book (forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2019) about Henrietta Wood, who won a nineteenth-century case of restitution for slavery. The book was supported by a 2016-2017 Public Scholar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
29 |
30 |
Book
31 |
32 |
My first book, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform, was published by LSU Press in May 2013. It was awarded the 2014 Merle Curti Award for best book in American intellectual history, and a James H. Broussard First Book Prize from SHEAR.
You can also listen to an interview about the book on the New Books in American Studies podcast. Links to additional reviews and coverage are available on my Pinboard page.
37 |
38 |
Recently posted
39 |
40 |
41 |
42 |
43 |
44 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/pansite.sh:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | #!/bin/sh
2 |
3 | LOCDIR=$HOME/Dropbox/website # Run script from this directory
4 | PUBDIR=$HOME/publish
5 | FOOTER=$LOCDIR/_footer.html
6 | NAVBAR=$LOCDIR/_navigation.html
7 | PANOPTS="--smart --standalone -f markdown --template=website.html\
8 | --css=./bootstrap.css --css=./main.css --include-before-body=$NAVBAR"
9 |
10 | # $PANOPTS above assume that the website template is in
11 | # $HOME/.pandoc/templates/ and that the CSS file is in $PUBDIR.
12 | # Next block assumes posts to be published are ...
13 | # 1. In folders by category in $LOCDIR.
14 | # 2. In markdown files with *.txt extension.
15 | # 3. Contain a standard pandoc title block in first three lines.
16 |
17 | > $LOCDIR/.allposts
18 | echo "Processing posts ..."
19 | find `ls -l $LOCDIR | awk '/^d/ {print $NF}'` -type d -maxdepth 1 | \
20 | while read -r folder
21 | do
22 | CATEGORY=$(basename "$folder")
23 | for file in `ls "$folder"/*.txt`
24 | do
25 | POST=$(basename "$file" .txt)
26 | if head -n 1 "$file" | grep -Eq "^%"; then
27 | TITLE=$(sed -n '1 s/% //p' "$file")
28 | POSTDATE=$(sed -n '3 s/% //p' "$file" | sed 's/[ ]$//')
29 | # Next two lines use BSD date command. For GNU date, use commented line
30 | # Thanks to @fravashi http://github.com/wcaleb/website/issues/1
31 | SORTDATE=$(date -jf '%B %e, %Y' "$POSTDATE" +%y%m%d)
32 | # SORTDATE=$(date -d "$POSTDATE" +%y%m%d)
33 | RSSDATE=$(date -jf '%B %e, %Y' "$POSTDATE" '+%a, %d %b %Y 00:00:00 %Z')
34 | # RSSDATE=$(date -d "$POSTDATE" '+%a, %d %b %Y 00:00:00 %Z')
35 | if [ $file -nt $PUBDIR/$POST.html ]; then
36 | echo "| $POST"
37 | pandoc $PANOPTS\
38 | --variable=category:"$CATEGORY"\
39 | --include-after-body="$FOOTER"\
40 | --output=$PUBDIR/"$POST".html\
41 | "$file"
42 | fi
43 | CLIP=$(grep -m 1 -Eo '
.+
' $PUBDIR/"$POST".html)
44 | echo ""$SORTDATE"%"$TITLE"%"$POST".html%"$POSTDATE"%"$RSSDATE"%"$CLIP""\
45 | >> $LOCDIR/"$CATEGORY".txt
46 | fi
47 | done
48 | cat $LOCDIR/"$CATEGORY".txt >> $LOCDIR/.allposts
49 | sort -nr $LOCDIR/"$CATEGORY".txt |\
50 | awk 'BEGIN{FS="%"};{print "* [" $2 "](" $3 ") | " $4 }'\
51 | > $LOCDIR/.postlist
52 | pandoc $PANOPTS\
53 | -A "$FOOTER"\
54 | --output=$PUBDIR/"$CATEGORY".html\
55 | $LOCDIR/"$CATEGORY".pdc .postlist
56 | rm $LOCDIR/"$CATEGORY".txt
57 | done
58 |
59 | echo "Processing index ..."
60 | sort -nr $LOCDIR/.allposts | sed -n '1,5 p'|\
61 | awk 'BEGIN{FS="%"};{print "* [" $2 "](" $3 ") | " $4 }'\
62 | > $LOCDIR/recentposts.pdc
63 | pandoc $PANOPTS\
64 | -A "$FOOTER"\
65 | -o $PUBDIR/index.html\
66 | $LOCDIR/index.pdc $LOCDIR/recentposts.pdc
67 |
68 | if [ $LOCDIR/cv.pdc -nt $PUBDIR/cv.html ] || [ $LOCDIR/cvhead.pdc -nt $PUBDIR/cv.html ]; then
69 | echo "Processing CV ..."
70 | pandoc $PANOPTS\
71 | --variable=date:"$(date '+%B %e, %Y')"\
72 | -A "$FOOTER"\
73 | -o $PUBDIR/cv.html\
74 | $LOCDIR/cvhead.pdc $LOCDIR/cv.pdc
75 | sed -E 's/^[^#\[\\]/\\\ind &/g' $LOCDIR/cv.pdc |\
76 | pandoc -s -S -f markdown --latex-engine=xelatex\
77 | --template=cv.tex\
78 | -o $PUBDIR/mcdanielcv.pdf
79 | fi
80 |
81 | echo "Processing colophon ..."
82 | cat $LOCDIR/$0 |\
83 | awk '
84 | BEGIN { print "Code used to generate site on"; system("date");
85 | print "\n`````bash" }
86 | { print }
87 | END { print "\n`````" }' > $LOCDIR/.script
88 | pandoc $PANOPTS\
89 | -A "$FOOTER"\
90 | -o $PUBDIR/colophon.html\
91 | $LOCDIR/colophon.pdc $LOCDIR/.script
92 | rm $LOCDIR/.script
93 |
94 | echo "Processing RSS feed ..."
95 | cp $LOCDIR/_feed.xml $PUBDIR/feed.xml
96 | sort -nr $LOCDIR/.allposts | sed -n '1,5 p'|\
97 | awk 'BEGIN{FS="%"}
98 | {print "\t"}
99 | {print "\t\t" $2 ""}
100 | {print "\t\thttp://wcm1.web.rice.edu/" $3 ""}
101 | {print "\t\thttp://wcm1.web.rice.edu/" $3 ""}
102 | {print "\t\t" $5 ""}
103 | {print "\t\t" $6 "[...]\n\t"}
104 | END{print "\n"}'\
105 | >> $PUBDIR/feed.xml
106 |
107 | exit 0
108 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/recentposts.pdc:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | * [The Dangers of a Fake Tubman Quote](fake-tubman-quote.html) | March 22, 2016
2 | * [Beyond Failure: Rethinking Confederate State Policies on the Western Frontier](beyond-failure.html) | August 21, 2015
3 | * [Looking Back on the Backwards Survey](looking-back-on-backwards-survey.html) | August 17, 2015
4 | * [Rubric for Historical Thinking Skills](historical-thinking-rubric.html) | May 15, 2015
5 | * [Lewis Perry's Civil Disobedience](civil-disobedience-review.html) | April 28, 2015
6 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/research.pdc:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Research
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | %
4 |
5 | My [publications][] so far have centered on the history of American abolitionism and transatlantic reform. I am currently working on two research projects: first, a book-length microhistory of Henrietta Wood, a free woman who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the antebellum period, but sued her kidnapper in federal court after emancipation, and second, an article-length study on how state policy in Confederate Texas during the Civil War impacted the origins of Jim Crow and convict leasing there. My notes for both projects are available in [an open-access wiki][]. The posts on this page generally cover my research talks, information about smaller writing projects, and my thoughts on new projects as they develop.
6 |
7 | [publications]: ./cv.html#publications
8 | [an open-access wiki]: http://wiki.wcaleb.rice.edu
9 |
10 | ## Posts
11 |
12 |
13 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/research/abolitionists-on-pbs.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % The Abolitionists on PBS
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % January 15, 2013
4 |
5 | Last Tuesday, PBS premiered the first episode of [*The
6 | Abolitionists*][], a three-part documentary showcasing the lives of five
7 | prominent antislavery Americans. I was honored to appear briefly in the
8 | film and hope the show sparks increased popular interest in the history
9 | of abolitionism.
10 |
11 | Like any documentary---or any work of history, for that matter---the
12 | film is [open to criticism][]. Even in a three-hour film, it would be
13 | difficult to place abolitionists fully in their historical context,
14 | especially since the filmmakers spotlight only five figures out of many
15 | they could have chosen.
16 |
17 | Indeed, the film itself frequently points beyond its own quintet to the
18 | larger cast of characters that participated in the actual drama of the
19 | abolitionist movement. In one scene in Episode One, for example, William
20 | Lloyd Garrison addresses an African American man standing in the offices
21 | of *The Liberator* whom he calls "William"---a likely reference to
22 | William Cooper Nell. Nell was a man who could easily inspire a
23 | three-hour biopic of his own, one that would further showcase the role
24 | of black abolitionists in the movement, the close connection between the
25 | fight against slavery and the fight against racial discrimination, and
26 | the conflicts and schisms that troubled even the closest
27 | abolitionists.[^1]
28 |
29 | Still, I think Nell---one of the country's first African American
30 | historians---would be glad to see a film like this exist, and even
31 | gladder to see the range of critical discourse about it on the Internet.
32 | In a recent book that I highly recommend, historian Margot Minardi notes
33 | that Nell and other abolitionists always "perceived history as a story
34 | that was still being written," in contrast to antebellum Americans who
35 | preferred to build monuments to the past and "privileged the idea of
36 | history as a received narrative." As a result they would probably
37 | welcome the conversation surrounding the film as much as the film
38 | itself, and would be disappointed if the movie were viewed as a static
39 | monument.[^2]
40 |
41 | In fact, the abolitionists would probably view a film like this as an
42 | opportunity to reflect *on* the present, not just to reflect the past.
43 | Wendell Phillips, another important abolitionist not featured in the
44 | film, believed that "the honors we grant mark how high we stand," but he
45 | cautioned against using history only for self-congratulation. "The men
46 | we honor, and the maxims we lay down in measuring our favorites, show
47 | the level and morals of the time," he once said, but then as now, those
48 | very maxims may well reveal how much more there is to be done. Any time
49 | a state or nation "offers a pedestal for the statue of a citizen," or a
50 | PBS documentary for that matter, Phillips would say that "such a step
51 | deserves thought. On this let us dare to think."[^3]
52 |
53 | I hope---and am optimistic---that viewers of this film will "dare to
54 | think," and I believe the film invites such daring. By asking viewers to
55 | participate in [making a map][] or to talk about the film on social
56 | media, and by dramatizing the everyday lives of the characters, the film
57 | encourages the audience to interact with history instead of receiving it
58 | passively. If you've come to this page interested in learning more about
59 | the abolitionists, then read on. Investigate, question, dare to think,
60 | and you'll be doing part of what I think the abolitionists themselves
61 | would demand of you if they were still here.
62 |
63 | Further Reading
64 | ---------------
65 |
66 | The American Experience website has a good list of [related books and
67 | websites][] on the abolitionists, including a link to an extensive
68 | [bibliography hosted at IUPUI][]. There are also some additional [links
69 | to resources][] on one of my course websites.
70 |
71 | I also have a fair number of [bookmarks I have collected][] on
72 | abolitionism over the years, and my LibraryThing collection lists about
73 | [120 books on the subject][].
74 |
75 | Because my own research has centered on abolitionism since 2001, I also
76 | have several publications on the movement available online. These
77 | include:
78 |
79 | - The [introduction to my forthcoming book][] on Garrisonian
80 | abolitionists.
81 | - An [essay][] on Frederick Douglass's autobiographies and his
82 | disagreements with William Lloyd Garrison, a topic discussed in
83 | Episode Two of the documentary.
84 | - An article about [John Brown's relationships with black
85 | abolitionists][].
86 | - An article on interracial abolitionism and [how the abolitionists
87 | celebrated holidays][] like the Fourth of July.
88 | - An article on [why Garrisonian abolitionists began to call for
89 | disunion][], which views this demand as more political and pragmatic
90 | than is often assumed.
91 |
92 | For those interested in my other publications, whose notes can point you
93 | to other scholarship on the subject, feel free to check out [my CV][].
94 |
95 | I also hope to be available on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/wcaleb) when the
96 | second and third episodes of *The Abolitionists* air, in case anyone wants to
97 | chat about the film or antislavery history. Happy watching and reading!
98 |
99 | [^1]: For an excellent recent book about black activists like Nell and
100 | their struggle to win both abolition and citizenship rights, I
101 | recommend Stephen Kantrowitz's *More Than Freedom: Fighting for
102 | Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829--1889* (New York:
103 | Penguin, 2012). Many of Nell's writings can also be found at the
104 | excellent [Black Abolitionist Archive][]. His most famous work,
105 | *Colored Patriots of the American Revolution*, is also [online][].
106 |
107 | [^2]: Margot Minardi, *Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the
108 | Politics of Memory in Massachusetts* (New York: Oxford University
109 | Press, 2010), 94.
110 |
111 | [^3]: Quotes are taken from Phillips's speech "Idols," which you can
112 | read at [Google Books][]. Speaking of the present, several
113 | historians of abolitionism have recently joined forces in a group
114 | called [Historians of Against Slavery][], whose aim is to provide
115 | well-informed historical context for ongoing struggles against
116 | forced labor and contemporary forms of enslavement.
117 |
118 | [*The Abolitionists*]: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/abolitionists/
119 | [open to criticism]: http://earlyamericanists.com/2013/01/10/the-abolitionists-in-primetime-two-responses/
120 | [making a map]: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/interactive-map/abolitionists-map/
121 | [related books and websites]: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/further-reading/abolitionists-further-reading/
122 | [bibliography hosted at IUPUI]: http://americanabolitionist.liberalarts.iupui.edu
123 | [links to resources]: http://abolition.blogs.rice.edu/resources/
124 | [bookmarks I have collected]: http://pinboard.in/u:wcaleb/t:abolitionism
125 | [120 books on the subject]: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/wcm&tag=abolitionism
126 | [introduction to my forthcoming book]: /book-introduction.html
127 | [essay]: /lives-of-frederick-douglass.html
128 | [John Brown's relationships with black abolitionists]: http://hdl.handle.net/1911/64545
129 | [how the abolitionists celebrated holidays]: http://hdl.handle.net/1911/27613
130 | [why Garrisonian abolitionists began to call for disunion]: http://hdl.handle.net/1911/27612
131 | [my CV]: /cv.html
132 | [@wcaleb]: http://twitter.com/wcaleb
133 | [Black Abolitionist Archive]: http://research.udmercy.edu/find/special_collections/digital/baa/index.php?collectionCode=baa&field=DC_creator&term=%22Nell%2C+William+C.+%28William+Cooper%29%2C+1816-1874.%22
134 | [online]: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/nell/menu.html
135 | [Google Books]: http://books.google.com/books?id=mrAyAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA251&ots=u-ANvGMmYl&pg=PA242
136 | [Historians of Against Slavery]: http://historiansagainstslavery.org
137 |
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/research/case-of-john-l-brown.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % The Case of John L. Brown
2 | % Caleb McDaniel
3 | % March 9, 2011
4 |
5 |
6 | This page was originally posted on my old blog as [The Case of John L.
7 | Brown][].
8 |
9 |
10 | Last Friday, I was very fortunate to be a presenter at the annual
11 | conference of the [Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World program][]
12 | at the College of Charleston. This year’s topic, [“Civil War–Global
13 | Conflict,”][] attracted a great slate of fascinating papers.
14 |
15 | Best of all, the conference organizers asked for presenters to
16 | pre-circulate drafts of any length, so the sessions were devoted mostly
17 | to discussion. [I’m posting the paper that I circulated for the
18 | conference][] in Rice’s digital repository ([here’s how and why][]), and
19 | I would welcome any feedback about the paper if you have a chance to
20 | read it. Click below for a full abstract.
21 |
22 | My paper is about the infamous Southern trial in which John Brown was
23 | sentenced to death by hanging for aiding slave flight. But I’m not
24 | talking about [*that* John Brown][]. I’m talking about the much less
25 | famous John L. Brown.
26 |
27 | John L. Brown was tried and sentenced to hang in South Carolina, not in
28 | Virginia. And his alleged crime (and I say alleged because I am not sure
29 | whether I believe Brown was guilty) was helping an enslaved woman named
30 | Hetty to escape in the fall of 1843. Brown appealed his initial
31 | conviction, but to no avail. (You can [read all about the appeals trial
32 | right here][], in the *Reports of Cases at Law, Argued and Determined in
33 | the Court of Appeals of South Carolina* [1844]). On the basis of a state
34 | law that made it a capital offense to entice slaves to run away, John L.
35 | Brown was sentenced to die on April 26, 1844.
36 |
37 | Before that could happen, however, Brown’s sentence attracted widespread
38 | attention in the Northern press, especially from abolitionists. Soon,
39 | the news about John L. Brown crossed the Atlantic too. Many British
40 | newspaper editors picked up the story, and American and British
41 | abolitionists corresponded about it. Outraged British abolitionists used
42 | the case to rally large public meetings in Birmingham, Edinburgh, and
43 | Glasgow calling for Brown’s pardon. The sentence was even denounced on
44 | the floor of Parliament. As a result of these protests, James Henry
45 | Hammond, then governor of South Carolina, soon found himself inundated
46 | with letters and petitions about Brown. One petition drawn up by a group
47 | of British churches boasted 1,300 signatures.
48 |
49 | In my paper I do two things. First, I try to explain the significance of
50 | this case of transatlantic abolitionist protest and the reasons why
51 | Brown’s trial became a center of controversy. And second, I use the
52 | Brown trial as a case study for raising some larger questions about
53 | information networks. I use the case to reconsider the ways historians
54 | conceptualize the mechanisms and results of transatlantic abolitionism
55 | in general.
56 |
57 | First, I try to reconstruct the reasons why Brown’s case in particular
58 | became a flashpoint. British and American abolitionists reported news of
59 | Southern outrages all the time, but not all of these outrages provoked
60 | full-blown protests and retorts the way Brown’s trial did. The paper
61 | suggests that the timing of the Brown trial was the primary reason why
62 | the case was important both to abolitionists and to South Carolinians.
63 | By paying close attention to the timing of the trial and its fallout, I
64 | believe a case can also be made for its under-appreciated significance.
65 | One of the interesting things about Brown’s trial is that prominent
66 | Southerners, including Governor Hammond himself and the sentencing judge
67 | John Bolton O’Neall, spoke back directly to British abolitionists in
68 | defense of the state’s actions. Indeed, the Brown trial was the
69 | immediate trigger that [prompted Hammond to write what became a
70 | “proslavery classic,”][]in the words of his biographer Drew Gilpin
71 | Faust. For the previous decade, most Southern political leaders had
72 | argued that the best way to deal with abolitionists was to silence and
73 | ignore them. So the reaction of Hammond and O’Neall to the protests over
74 | Brown’s trial represented something of a departure.
75 |
76 | My second objective in the paper is to raise some larger questions about
77 | how transatlantic abolitionism and, by extension, nineteenth-century
78 | transnational activism worked. Not surprisingly, abolitionists often
79 | depicted their transatlantic protest campaigns as part of a linear,
80 | fairly straightforward causal chain: Southerners committed some
81 | atrocity; Northern abolitionists publicized it and brought it to the
82 | attention of overseas allies; those overseas allies held meetings,
83 | drafted petitions, and generally applied pressure on American
84 | Southerners; finally, that pressure would force Southerners to relent.
85 | Abolitionists saw the John L. Brown case as a paradigmatic example of
86 | this process in action, especially since Hammond commuted Brown’s
87 | sentence from death to public whipping and ultimately pardoned him
88 | altogether.
89 |
90 | For a variety of reasons, the abolitionists’ own descriptions of their
91 | transnational pressure politics have been appealing to scholars as well,
92 | including scholars of contemporary transnational activism like Kathryn
93 | Sikkink, Margaret Keck, and Sidney Tarrow. In their book, *[Activists
94 | Beyond Borders][]*, Keck and Sikkink even cite abolitionists as
95 | historical precursors for contemporary human rights activists who
96 | “promote change” by “reporting facts” to the international community.
97 | But as I show with a careful reconstruction of the John L. Brown case,
98 | there are several difficulties with this description of abolitionist
99 | activism as a straightforward process of applying pressure by reporting
100 | facts. First, newspaper reports about the trial were discrepant,
101 | sometimes conflicting, often incomplete, and occasionally based on
102 | erroneous information or misread by the intended audiences. Moreover,
103 | the time lag between events in South Carolina and reportage about them
104 | overseas meant that British abolitionists were often acting on
105 | information that was already out of date by the time it reached them.
106 | Indeed, while abolitionists proclaimed victory for their tactics when
107 | Hammond pardoned Brown, it is likely that Hammond commuted Brown’s
108 | sentence before reports of British protest ever reached him. Because of
109 | these realities, many “non-facts” soon began circulating in
110 | transatlantic print and abolitionist networks about the Brown case,
111 | ranging from erroneous reports about whether Brown was a free man or a
112 | slave to conjectures about the complexion of Hetty.
113 |
114 | Instead of fitting our stories of transatlantic abolitionism into a
115 | model of “promoting change” by “reporting facts” and thereby applying
116 | pressure on target actors, it is important to recapture the highly
117 | uneven and often bewildering flow of information back and forth across
118 | the Atlantic. Depicting transatlantic abolitionism in this way at least
119 | helps us make more sense, I think, of what happened in the Brown case.
120 | First, the appearance of errors in abolitionist reportage is part of
121 | what provoked Hammond and O’Neall to reply; it was not so much the
122 | pressure applied on them by the reportage of facts that moved them to
123 | speak out in their defense, thereby escalating the debate over slavery.
124 | Instead, they seized the opportunity afforded them by the misinformation
125 | introduced into the coverage of the case by time and circumstance. They
126 | also made use of the fact that reports about the trial were so hard to
127 | verify to introduce rumors about Brown’s true motives that hampered
128 | abolitionists’ ability to rally public opinion about the case.
129 |
130 | In the final sections of the paper, I turn to recent scholarship
131 | highlighting the role of “rumor” in the grassroots politics of slaves
132 | and argue that this scholarship can provide methodological resources to
133 | historians of transatlantic activism as well. Many recent historians
134 | have drawn attention to the importance of slaves’ “grapevine telegraph,”
135 | or the information networks that they used to learn about opportunities
136 | for escape and resistance. ([Steven Hahn][] and [Susan Eva O’Donovan][]
137 | have recently provided brief introductions to this literature in the
138 | *New York Times*.) Much of this literature is focused on showing what
139 | was telegraph-like about the grapevine. Conversely, but in a
140 | complementary way, my paper on transatlantic abolitionism and John L.
141 | Brown attempts to show what was grapevine-like about telegraphs.
142 |
143 | Again, [you can download the full paper I presented at CLAW here][I’m
144 | posting the paper that I circulated for the conference]. I’m planning to
145 | do additional research, revise this rough draft, and prepare this
146 | article for print publication in one form or another. So I welcome
147 | critical feedback about the piece, either here or by email. If you would
148 | like to use the paper or cite it, please let me know.
149 |
150 | [The Case of John L. Brown]: http://www.samplereality.com/2012/05/02/notes-towards-a-deformed-humanities/
151 | [Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World program]: http://spinner.cofc.edu/atlanticworld/?referrer=webcluster&
152 | [“Civil War–Global Conflict,”]: http://spinner.cofc.edu/atlanticworld/civilwar/index.html
153 | [I’m posting the paper that I circulated for the conference]: http://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/37261
154 | [here’s how and why]: index.html%3Fp=75.html
155 | [*that* John Brown]: http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/jbrown/master.html
156 | [read all about the appeals trial right here]: http://books.google.com/books?id=Z6sKAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA129#v=onepage&q=&f=false
157 | [prompted Hammond to write what became a “proslavery classic,”]: http://books.google.com/books?id=29YtAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR4#v=onepage&q=&f=false
158 | [Activists Beyond Borders]: http://www.amazon.com/Activists-Beyond-Borders-Advocacy-International/dp/0801484561
159 | [Steven Hahn]: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/what-lincoln-meant-to-the-slaves/
160 | [Susan Eva O’Donovan]: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/william-webbs-world/
161 |
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/research/civil-disobedience-review.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Lewis Perry's Civil Disobedience
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % April 28, 2015
4 |
5 |
This post is the author's pre-print version of my review of Lewis Perry, Civil Disobedience: An American Tradition, published by Yale University Press in 2013. The final version was published in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14, no. 2 (April 2015), 272-273, and can be found online at Cambridge Journals.
6 |
7 | Over the last sixty years, numerous reformers have laid claim to what
8 | the antiwar activist Philip Berrigan called, in 1968, "a rich tradition
9 | of civil disobedience" in American history (25). Often, such activists
10 | have even claimed that civil disobedience is a civil right inherent to
11 | the American democratic tradition itself. "Such claims were not stated
12 | so clearly before the 1960s," notes Lewis Perry in his wide-ranging,
13 | fascinating narrative of the evolution of civil disobedience (25). But
14 | the notion that civil disobedience was a shared heritage of all
15 | Americans "remained strong" in the anti-nuclear and anti-abortion
16 | protests of the 1970s and 1980s, and continues to surface today (304).
17 |
18 | Indeed, American activists of many different kinds often share a basic
19 | set of assumptions about civil disobedience---that it was born with the
20 | Boston Tea Party, theorized by Thoreau, pioneered by abolitionists, and
21 | decisively legitimated by the sit-ins and non-violence protests of the
22 | Civil Rights movement. Perry agrees that a "distinctive American
23 | tradition" of civil disobedience does exist (1). But his nuanced and
24 | deeply researched account challenges many of the assumptions behind this
25 | commonly repeated lineage.
26 |
27 | For example, Perry finds precedents for modern civil disobedience before
28 | the Boston Tea Party, whose disguised, destructive revolutionaries
29 | looked and behaved quite differently from activists who sat at lunch
30 | counters in their Sunday best and then politely went to jail. Neither
31 | Thoreau nor his contemporaries used the term "civil disobedience," even
32 | though that title was posthumously affixed to his 1849 essay on
33 | "Resistance to Civil Government" in an 1866 collection (95). More
34 | importantly, Perry explains, notions of an unbroken radical tradition
35 | ignore the many critics of and disagreements about civil disobedience in
36 | American society, as well as the historical discontinuities that helped
37 | create what we recognize as civil disobedience today.
38 |
39 | For Perry, the most significant of these discontinuities was the
40 | transition from an early era---in which protesters framed acts of civil
41 | disobedience either as a form of *obedience* to higher moral laws, or as
42 | one of many tactics legitimated by a general right of revolution to
43 | overthrow tyrants---to a "new era of disobedience" in which protesters
44 | used it as a practical tool "to advance the rights and aspirations of
45 | groups of citizens" whose civil rights were not being recognized
46 | (155-6). That transition began, slowly, in the antebellum period, with
47 | the primarily moral protests of Christian missionaries against Indian
48 | Removal. Black and white abolitionists, though still often appealing
49 | both to moral duty and the right of revolution, accelerated the shift by
50 | creating new "ways of protesting against law, even violating law, without
51 | forsaking the quest for citizenship" by African Americans (93). But the
52 | transition Perry traces was not fully complete until the 1930s, when
53 | American popularizers of Gandhi's ideas like Richard Bartlett Gregg and
54 | Kirshnalal Shridharani redescribed civil disobedience as a form of
55 | "moral jiu-jitsu," in Gregg's famous metaphor (189).
56 |
57 | For Gregg and Shridharani, as well as Civil Rights activists who later
58 | adopted their ideas in what Perry calls "America's Gandhian moment,"
59 | civil disobedience was a tool designed to result in the "conversion or
60 | persuasion of an antagonist" (181, 200). Nonviolence became not (or not
61 | only) a form of obedience to a moral code, but "a source of power"
62 | (200). According to Perry, "one striking feature" of Gregg's work was
63 | "its lack of emphasis on obedience to an absolute higher law,"
64 | especially when compared with accounts of civil disobedience in the
65 | early "nineteenth-century American tradition, which includes Thoreau"
66 | (200).
67 |
68 | To explain this shift, Perry pays special attention to the period
69 | between 1866 and 1920, an era usually elided from popular (and even some
70 | scholarly) genealogies of civil disobedience. Indeed, the Progressive
71 | Era was, in two senses, "a crucial period in the making of American
72 | traditions of civil disobedience" (127). First, "New Departure"
73 | suffragists, as well as Wobblies, temperance reformers, and "free
74 | speech" activists who protested the Comstock Law, pioneered protest
75 | rituals that placed civil disobedience in a "new secular vein" (167).
76 | Civil disobedience became, in their hands, a "means for organized
77 | citizens to ... achieve change, while ignoring appeals for moderation,
78 | but without quite engaging in revolution" (156). The pragmatists'
79 | emphasis on the practical effects of ideas also informed the work of
80 | later writers like Gregg, whose idea of "moral jiu-jitsu" drew not only
81 | from Gandhi, but also from his experience as a Progressive labor
82 | organizer, his study of psychology, and the martial metaphors of William
83 | James and Walter Lippmann in their famous essays on the moral and
84 | political equivalents of war.
85 |
86 | Activists in the Progressive Era also accelerated the "Americanization
87 | of civil disobedience" by self-consciously claiming to be heirs of the
88 | nation's democratic traditions and by exhibiting a general reverence for
89 | American institutions and laws; they usually accepted the legal
90 | penalties for their disobedience (143). With inventive new legal
91 | strategies designed to create test cases in the courts, Progressive Era
92 | reformers helped join the threads of a distinctively American civil
93 | disobedience---active, but peaceful, confrontation with authorities,
94 | combined with a willingness to suffer whatever legal penalties resulted
95 | from such noncooperation. Yet in doing so, they also bequeathed to later
96 | generations an American tradition of differentiating between legitimate
97 | and illegitimate forms of civil disobedience. That process of
98 | differentiation became even more pronounced after the Civil Rights
99 | revolution of the 1960s, according to Perry. Wider public discussions of
100 | civil disobedience bespoke a general consensus that it was a "source of
101 | strength in America's democratic system" (274). But acceptance of civil
102 | disobedience dependend on an expectation that it stay within certain
103 | limits. "Legitimized and to some degree circumscribed---that was the new
104 | state of civil disobedience" (285).
105 |
106 | That is also largely the state of civil disobedience today, Perry
107 | argues. But in his closing chapters, he notes some recent, troubling
108 | departures from the rituals of civil disobedience that Progressive
109 | activists and their heirs worked so hard to establish, both on the part
110 | of activists willing to violate the law anonymously instead of publicly
111 | suffering an unjust penalty, and on the part of law enforcement officers
112 | too intent on the maintenance of order to care much for the almost
113 | choreographed drama of peaceful protest and public arrest that proved so
114 | powerful in the past. Perry's attention to the present-day legacies of
115 | civil disobedience underscore the greatest virtues of this
116 | masterwork---its humane, moral concern, combined with an appreciation of
117 | the surprises, problems, and paradoxes that recur in the history of
118 | "civil disobedience." The term itself is somewhat oxymoronic, Perry
119 | notes, in its odd coupling of civility and resistance. But Perry's
120 | sensitive, engrossing account brilliantly uncovers the historical
121 | conditions that led to that coupling in the United States. It will be
122 | the defining work on its subject for many years to come.
123 |
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/research/fake-tubman-quote.txt:
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1 | % The Dangers of a Fake Tubman Quote
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % March 22, 2016
4 |
5 | In 2008, at the height of the presidential primary contest between Barack Obama
6 | and Hillary Clinton, the feminist writer Robin Morgan wrote an [opinion column]
7 | criticizing women who failed to support Clinton. To support her case, she
8 | turned to an unlikely source: the abolitionist icon Harriet Tubman. Morgan
9 | wrote:
10 |
11 | > Let a statement by the magnificent Harriet Tubman stand as reply.
12 | > When asked how she managed to save hundreds of enslaved
13 | > African-Americans via the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, she
14 | > replied bitterly: '**I could have saved thousands - if only I'd been
15 | > able to convince them they were slaves.**' [Emphasis added.]
16 |
17 | The trouble with the quote was that Tubman never said it, as historians
18 | rushed to point out. Tubman expert [Milton Sernett called it a
19 | twentieth-century fabrication], and Tubman biographer [Kate Clifford
20 | Larson listed it as a fake quote][larson] on her page of "Myths and Facts" about
21 | Tubman.
22 |
23 | Despite these corrections by scholars, however, the quote continues to
24 | haunt the Internet. It shows up in a prominent sidebar when you [search
25 | for the abolitionist's name] on Google, which only knows to report what
26 | is most popular on webpages. It appears regularly on [Twitter]. It has
27 | been circulated recently by prominent figures like [Senator Cory Booker]
28 | and *New York Times* columnist [Charles M. Blow].
29 |
30 | In recent years, however, I've noticed that supporters of the modern
31 | anti-trafficking movement are major sources of the fake quote's popularity
32 | online, particularly activists who are concerned about sex trafficking. As of
33 | March 22, 2016, the [Love146 website] listed it prominently on its page about
34 | reporting trafficking. (**Update:** Love146 removed the quote shortly after the
35 | publication of this post.) The [Araminta Freedom Initiative], which focuses on
36 | child sex trafficking and takes its name from Tubman, also features the fake
37 | quote on its site. So does [The Justice Project] on a sidebar to its page about
38 | forced prostitution. [Another group] provides the fake quote with the
39 | additional hashtag "\#educationiskey." Other examples are [plentiful].
40 |
41 | In one sense, these findings are not surprising. The Internet is a fake
42 | quote emporium; just ask [Thomas Jefferson]. Moreover, Harriet Tubman's
43 | story has from the beginning been a malleable icon who has been made to
44 | say what various groups wanted her to say.
45 |
46 | As [Jean Humez] shows in her book, *Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life
47 | Stories*, this began with the very first abolitionists, who were responsible
48 | both for recording the illiterate Tubman's own narratives and for crafting the
49 | first biographies. Those biographies are invaluable points of access into
50 | Tubman's life and thought. But, Tubman scholars now agree, they also contained
51 | a variety of embellishments that served abolitionists' purposes. Over time
52 | [some of those embellishments][larson] (like the idea that Tubman took 19 trips
53 | back to the South and freed 300 people) became settled facts in collective
54 | memory, enshrined in children's books and other scholarly texts as Tubman's
55 | actual story receded from view.
56 |
57 | In other words, a fake quote attributed to Tubman is nothing new. It's
58 | more of the same where the public discourse around Tubman is concerned.
59 |
60 | Yet as a historian of slavery and abolition, I have always found this
61 | *particular* fake quote to be particularly insidious. The idea it
62 | expresses even seems perilously close to proslavery ideology as it
63 | existed in the early American republic. In his book, [*In the Name of
64 | the Father*], Francois Furstenberg shows that many paternalist masters
65 | in the founding generation rationalized their slaveholding with the idea
66 | of "tacit consent." Having just overthrown a government to which they
67 | did not consent, American patriots told themselves that if enslaved
68 | people did not rise up and resist, they must consent tacitly to their
69 | enslavement.
70 |
71 | Modern historians know the truth: enslaved people resisted their
72 | condition in countless ways, large and small. If they were not able to
73 | attain freedom, it was not because they didn't want it or because (as
74 | the fake Tubman quote would have it) they "did not know they were
75 | slaves." It was because powerful forces were arrayed against them. The
76 | idea of "tacit consent" distracted attention from that fact.
77 |
78 | I worry that the fake Tubman quote could have the same "red herring"
79 | effect in conversations about modern trafficking. It encourages
80 | activists who quote and read it to believe that the only thing standing
81 | between modern slaves and freedom is knowledge, self-awareness,
82 | education, and a willingness to actively dissent. But the corollary
83 | comes uncomfortably close to the paternalistic idea that those who
84 | somehow "choose" not to be freed or don't "know" they are slaves must
85 | tacitly consent to their own exploitation.
86 |
87 | It is pleasant to think that the only obstacle abolitionists face is
88 | "false consciousness" on the part of trafficked persons. Unfortunately,
89 | that idea may encourage true believers in the quote to underrate the
90 | power and complexity of the forces arrayed against them today.
91 |
92 | For over 150 years, Tubman's own, actual words have faced an uphill
93 | battle to be heard over the noise of other people's words about her.
94 | This is partly because of archival gaps and silences that make it
95 | difficult to [listen to the enslaved] in the past. But historians of
96 | American abolitionism know that even well-intentioned abolitionists
97 | sometimes played a role in silencing the voices of those they were
98 | trying to rescue.
99 |
100 | To be sure, abolitionists made heroic, valuable efforts to surface the
101 | stories of enslaved Americans and place them before the public. As [I've
102 | argued before], historians would know far less than we do about enslaved
103 | people's experience were it not for the antislavery movement. But
104 | formerly enslaved abolitionists like Frederick Douglass sometimes [felt
105 | pressure to say only the things that white abolitionists wanted
106 | audiences to hear]. The fake quote that some have put in the mouth of
107 | Harriet Tubman risks taking that ventriloquism a step further, while at
108 | the same time casting an immediate doubt on whatever someone considered
109 | a slave might actually say.
110 |
111 | After all, assuming from the beginning that someone doesn't even know
112 | she is a slave does not prepare us to hear what that person really
113 | knows.
114 |
115 | All of this would be an academic point if abolitionism and slavery
116 | really were things of the distant past. But if, as modern abolitionists
117 | declare, enslaved people remain in our world, then it is imperative for
118 | us to listen---actually listen---to their own stories and testimonies,
119 | even or *especially* when the people presumed to be unfree are saying
120 | something different than we expect. Sometimes, as HAS Board Member
121 | [Laura Murphy] has shown, *listening* will call our attention to horrors
122 | that desperately need solutions, just as the first stories Harriet
123 | Tubman told called abolitionists to arms. At other times, *listening*
124 | will challenge our assumptions and redirect our efforts in new
125 | directions or even force us to reconsider our approach.
126 |
127 | Either way, historians against slavery should be the first to urge
128 | fellow activists to listen to what the marginalized and unfree say that
129 | they know, instead of rushing to assume things about what they *don't*
130 | know. And, for the same reason, historians should also be vigilant in
131 | correcting misrepresentations of past abolitionists in the present. We
132 | need to ensure that we listen to what abolitionists like Harriet Tubman
133 | *actually* said and call out fake quotes that say more about us than
134 | them.
135 |
136 | [opinion column]: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/feb/14/goodbyetoallthat2
137 | [Milton Sernett called it a twentieth-century fabrication]: http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/news.aspx?id=262
138 | [larson]: http://www.harriettubmanbiography.com/harriet-tubman-myths-and-facts.html
139 | [search for the abolitionist's name]: https://www.google.com/?q=harriet%20tubman#safe=active&q=harriet+tubman
140 | [Twitter]: https://twitter.com/search?q=%22i%20freed%20a%20thousand%20slaves%22&src=typd
141 | [Senator Cory Booker]: https://twitter.com/CoryBooker/status/702114367517556736
142 | [Charles M. Blow]: https://twitter.com/CharlesMBlow/status/698281689013825536
143 | [Love146 website]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160322130910/https://love146.org/action/report/
144 | [Araminta Freedom Initiative]: http://web.archive.org/web/20160322131107/http://aramintafreedom.org/our-name/
145 | [The Justice Project]: http://web.archive.org/web/20160322131206/http://www.thejusticeproject.net/forced-prostitution/
146 | [Another group]: http://web.archive.org/web/20160322131256/http://newliferefugeministries.org/national-human-trafficking-awareness-month-part-2/
147 | [plentiful]: https://www.google.com/search?q=tubman+%22i+freed+a+thousand%22+trafficking
148 | [Thomas Jefferson]: https://www.inverse.com/article/9805-your-favorite-thomas-jefferson-quotes-are-probably-bogus
149 | [Jean Humez]: http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/2269.htm
150 | [*In the Name of the Father*]: http://www.amazon.com/In-Name-Father-Washingtons-Slavery/dp/0143111930
151 | [listen to the enslaved]: https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/sophie-white/listening-to-enslaved
152 | [I've argued before]: http://www.historiansagainstslavery.org/main/2013/10/historians-against-slavery-whats-in-a-name/
153 | [felt pressure to say only the things that white abolitionists wanted
154 | audiences to hear]: http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/lives-of-frederick-douglass.html
155 | [Laura Murphy]: http://www.historiansagainstslavery.org/main/our-volunteers/laura-t-murphy/
156 |
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/research/slave-sales-on-twitter.txt:
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1 | % Slave Sales on Twitter
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % November 15, 2014
4 |
5 | In [his 1975 critique][] of *Time on the Cross*, historian Herbert
6 | Gutman noted that,
7 |
8 | > *about two million slaves (men, women, and children) were sold in
9 | > local, interstate, and interregional markets between 1820 and 1860,
10 | > and that of this number perhaps as many as 260,000 were married men
11 | > and women and another 186,000 were children under the age of
12 | > thirteen.* If we assume that slave sales did not occur on Sundays and
13 | > holidays and that such selling went on for ten hours on working days,
14 | > a slave was sold on average every 3.6 minutes between 1820 and 1860.
15 |
16 | Every 3.6 minutes. I first encountered that figure not in Gutman's book,
17 | but in Steven Deyle's *Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in
18 | American Life*, which argued in a [lengthy appendix][] that 2 million
19 | remains a good estimate of the number of slave sales in the antebellum
20 | American South. But Deyle added, chillingly, that "it is quite possible
21 | that the average frequency of sale was even greater."^[Stephen Deyle,
22 | *Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life* (New York:
23 | Oxford University Press, 2006), 172, 292.]
24 |
25 | A few weeks ago, in my [class on the Civil War era][], I was trying to
26 | think of a way to communicate these enormities to my students. I was
27 | preparing a lecture about some of the ways that enslaved people in the
28 | antebellum South used their laboring power and their family units to
29 | find points of leverage in their ongoing conflicts with slaveholders.
30 | Drawing on scholarship by Steven Hahn, Stephanie Camp, Dylan
31 | Penningroth, and others, I wanted to help students understand what some
32 | white Northerners found so surprising when they encountered slavery up
33 | close before and during the Civil War. Some enslaved people seemed to
34 | have property that they considered theirs---houses with keyed doors;
35 | garden patches and livestock they controlled; money they earned by
36 | selling goods and services. These customary privileges, though spread
37 | unevenly across the South and never recognized by the law, represented
38 | hard-won but not insignificant victories in the never-ending war between
39 | the enslaved and their enslavers.
40 |
41 | Yet I also wanted students to realize how fragile these privileges
42 | were---a fragility born of the ever-present danger of being sold. I
43 | decided that while lecturing, I would open a small terminal window on
44 | the screen at the front of the class and run a shell script that looked
45 | something like this:
46 |
47 | #!/bin/bash
48 |
49 | COUNT=20
50 | while [[ $COUNT -gt 0 ]]; do
51 | echo "A slave was just sold."
52 | sleep 180
53 | let COUNT=COUNT-1
54 | done
55 |
56 | Every three minutes, that code printed `A slave was just sold` to the
57 | screen---a subtle reminder of the Damoclean sword that hung over every
58 | cornpatch, Sunday wage, or home that an enslaved man or woman had won.
59 |
60 | Reflecting on that experiment after the class, I started to wonder about
61 | a similar experiment using social media. In a previous [collaboration
62 | with my digital history students][], I had built a "Twitter bot" called
63 | [TexasRunawayAds][], which automatically tweets an excerpt from a
64 | runaway slave advertisement about twice a day. By slightly modifying
65 | [the script for that bot][], could I create a new Twitter bot to emulate
66 | the shell script above?
67 |
68 | The result of those musings is [Every3Minutes][], which tweets a
69 | reminder of an antebellum slave sale once every three minutes.
70 |
71 | ## Why Twitter?
72 |
73 | My decision to create this bot deserves some explanation, especially
74 | since one worry I have about the experiment is the risk of trivializing
75 | the history that it recalls. I also wondered if fellow historians would
76 | raise an eyebrow about such a use of Twitter. Scholars may rightly be
77 | skeptical about whether a serious scholarly argument can be made in 140
78 | characters or less, especially since it took both Gutman and Deyle many
79 | more words---and much more work---to come up with the estimate of a
80 | slave sale taking place every 3.6 minutes.^[It's also worth noting that
81 | the Twitter bot runs every three minutes, which is slightly more
82 | frequently than Gutman's estimate. But his estimate was itself a
83 | conservative one, and as Deyle notes, "it really does not matter ... if
84 | a southern slave was sold once every two minutes or once every five. The
85 | point is clear. This was certainly a common form of commerce. As part of
86 | one of the largest forced migrations in world history, more than a half
87 | million African-American men, women, and children were transported from
88 | the Upper South to the Lower South through the interregional slave
89 | trade. More than twice that number were bought and sold between
90 | neighbors and within state lines. Evidence of this trade could be found
91 | everywhere ..." (172-173).]
92 |
93 | Those concerns are fair. The Twitter bot is not making a new historical
94 | argument so much as it is publicizing an old historical argument in a
95 | new forum. My thinking here is similar to that of [Roy Rosenzweig in his
96 | 2006 article on historians and Wikipedia][]. Rosenzweig's appeal to
97 | historians to take Wikipedia seriously had implications for new media
98 | beyond that platform, because it was premised on much broader
99 | rationales. "One reason professional historians need to pay attention to
100 | Wikipedia is because our students do," he wrote, and the same can now be
101 | said for Twitter. And "if historians believe that what is available free
102 | on the Web is low quality," Rosenzweig added, "then we have a
103 | responsibility to make better information sources available online."
104 |
105 | There are challenges that come with any attempt to meet that
106 | responsibility. Not least is the fact that, as Rosenzweig explained,
107 | historians may find themselves subject to conventions of citation and
108 | conversation quite different from those in the academy. That's true for
109 | Twitter, as well. But whether historians like it or not, conversation
110 | about history, and specifically the history of slavery, is [already
111 | happening][] on social media. Several times in recent months, [Ta-Nehisi
112 | Coates][] and [Jeet Heer][], who both write and tweet for large online
113 | audiences, have asked questions about the history of slavery aimed
114 | directly at academic historians. Not to mention the [wide-ranging
115 | conversations][] that took place on Twitter after *The Economist*
116 | published an inflammatory review of Edward Baptist's new book.
117 |
118 | To participate helpfully in such conversations requires not only that
119 | historians be on Twitter, though that is an important first step, but
120 | also that we answer in ways sensitive to the particular kind of
121 | discourse that occurs there. Critics of *The Economist*, for example,
122 | used a clever hashtag to critique its review and to amplify individual
123 | critiques. When Twitter skeptics worry that 140 characters may not be
124 | enough to make a complex point, they misunderstand the ways that
125 | hashtags or [numbered essays][] can track a conversation unfolding over
126 | multiple 140-character tweets. Similarly, while it is not easy for a
127 | tweeter to footnote a historian like Gutman or Deyle, it could be
128 | easy---and arguably more effective, for a tweeter to `@` mention a feed
129 | like [Every3Minutes][] and thus direct readers *to* Gutman in a way that
130 | is internal to, rather than outside of, the social media environment.
131 |
132 | In short, although this Twitter bot differs from the usual sorts of
133 | [history found on Twitter][], my main rationales for making it were
134 | similar to those of other tweeting historians. My largest ambition is to
135 | help combat, in a new medium, the same myths about slavery that
136 | concerned Gutman in 1975 and that still persist today.
137 |
138 | ## The Messages in the Medium
139 |
140 | The process of making the bot has also suggested new rationales and
141 | implications, however. For conveying Gutman's message in *this* way puts
142 | questions to the audience that may be unique to the medium. First,
143 | Twitter is by its nature *social* media; its currencies are "followers"
144 | and "favorites." But this bot shifts attention from those metrics to the
145 | *raw number of tweets* it emits, a number that will increase rapidly and
146 | serve, I hope, as an arresting reminder of slavery's magnitude.
147 |
148 | Of course, the bot does not shift attention entirely away from the
149 | follow-or-favorite economy of social media. Indeed, I suspect it will
150 | make those who encounter the feed acutely conscious of dilemmas that an
151 | original reader of Gutman might not have faced: Should I follow a feed
152 | about slave sales? Am I annoyed that these reminders come so often? What
153 | would it mean not to follow or, once having followed, to unfollow or
154 | mute the tweets? Do those deliberate or implicit acts of silencing
155 | resemble, in microcosm, our nation's larger inability to come to terms
156 | with slavery's history despite evidence of its continued relevance all
157 | around us?
158 |
159 | Even if those questions never occur to anyone but me, writing [the code
160 | for the Twitter bot][] also raised different questions that I expect to
161 | wrestle with for some time.
162 |
163 | For example, I learned at the very beginning that Twitter's API
164 | prevented me from realizing my original intention, which was to tweet
165 | the same line of text every three minutes. Duplicate tweets are not
166 | allowed by Twitter's code. So the medium itself forced me to generate,
167 | randomly, a wider range of strings. I decided to do this partly by
168 | varying the order of the phrases in each tweet and the delimiters
169 | between them. But then I began to vary combinations of words using
170 | Python lists like these:
171 |
172 | people = ['a slave', 'a person', 'an enslaved person', 'someone', 'a black person', 'an African American']
173 | roles = ['child', 'parent', 'grandparent', 'grandchild', 'friend']
174 | verbs = ['sold', 'bought', 'purchased', 'traded']
175 | people = people + [p + r for p in [p + '\'s ' for p in people] for r in roles]
176 |
177 | Such variables forced me to attend to "an enslaved person" as someone
178 | bearing multiple relationships to other persons. The code also soon
179 | involved me, unwittingly, in a troubling objectification of the human
180 | individuals whose stories I was attempting to conjure. (Python is, after
181 | all, an [object-oriented][] language.)
182 |
183 | These were the sorts of discomforting reflections I hoped my digital
184 | history students might have while working on an assignment involving
185 | [JSON and runaway slave ads][]. But though I designed that very
186 | assignment, the ways in which I found myself "encoding" people still
187 | crept up on me in the writing of my code. For me, the project has
188 | already become more than a way to change history on Twitter. It is also
189 | a way to think through how putting history in code shapes or changes
190 | history.^[These are the sorts of questions being raised by scholars in
191 | the [Postcolonial Digital Humanities][] and [Critical Code Studies][],
192 | two fields that I now realize I need to know much more about.] What's
193 | more, it has prompted me to think harder about what Twitter bots are or
194 | could be for, particularly in the realm of digital history. As [Mark
195 | Sample][] is reported to have said in a [recent talk][], "coding
196 | Twitterbots provides a way, through making, coding, and tinkering, of
197 | exploring what could be (but isn’t) and what shouldn’t be (but is)." Yet
198 | what does that mean for a Twitterbot-coding historian?
199 |
200 | People should not have been chattel (but were). They can be tweeted
201 | (but, until recently, weren't). Yet should they be comprehended by
202 | lists?
203 |
204 | [his 1975 critique]: http://books.google.com/books?id=TUtFgWOISxMC&lpg=PA124&ots=JkLLPw4h9o&pg=PA124#v=onepage&q&f=false
205 | [lengthy appendix]: http://books.google.com/books?id=-dbFUlQvcRYC&lpg=PP11&ots=rrAzJ-6IUU&pg=PA292#v=onepage&q=minutes&f=false
206 | [class on the Civil War era]: http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/hist246f14.pdf
207 | [collaboration with my digital history students]: http://ricedh.github.io/05-twitterbot.html
208 | [TexasRunawayAds]: https://twitter.com/TxRunawayAds
209 | [the script for that bot]: https://github.com/ricedh/adbot
210 | [Every3Minutes]: https://twitter.com/Every3Minutes
211 | [Roy Rosenzweig in his 2006 article on historians and Wikipedia]: http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=42
212 | [already happening]: https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/status/507648800295383040
213 | [Ta-Nehisi Coates]: https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/507648324116434945
214 | [Jeet Heer]: https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/531679565014646784
215 | [wide-ranging conversations]: http://www.thewire.com/culture/2014/09/the-economist-is-sorry-about-its-not-all-slave-masters-book-review/379685/
216 | [numbered essays]: https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/529749811906764804
217 | [history found on Twitter]: http://www.martingrandjean.ch/rewriting-history-140-characters/
218 | [the code for the Twitter bot]: https://github.com/wcaleb/everythreeminutes
219 | [object-oriented]: http://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/python_classes_objects.htm
220 | [JSON and runaway slave ads]: http://digitalhistory.blogs.rice.edu/2014/01/17/homework-1-the-anatomy-of-an-ad/
221 | [Postcolonial Digital Humanities]: http://dhpoco.org
222 | [Critical Code Studies]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_code_studies
223 | [Mark Sample]: http://www.samplereality.com
224 | [recent talk]: http://tdh.brynmawr.edu/2014/11/11/bots-and-monsters/
225 |
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/research/test.txt:
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1 | This is what a draft post would look like.
2 |
3 | No % in the first line.
4 |
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/research/transnational-history-civil-war-era.txt:
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1 | % Transnational History and the Civil War Era
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % October 27, 2010
4 |
5 |
6 | This post was originally published on my old blog as [Transnational
7 | History and the Civil War Era][].
8 |
9 |
10 | On Monday, October 18, I was very honored to participate in a roundtable
11 | at the University of Houston on "New Directions in the Study of the
12 | Civil War Era," sponsored by the Center for Public History and the
13 | Department of History at UH and organized by Eric Walther. The other
14 | members of the panel were John Barr (a newly minted UH history Ph.D who
15 | has written a great dissertation about anti-Lincoln sentiment in
16 | American history), Vernon Burton, Gerald Horne, James Oakes, and Frank
17 | Wetta.
18 |
19 | Each presenter only had about 5-7 minutes to make some comments before
20 | the floor was opened for questions and discussion. And that discussion
21 | generated a lot of interesting points that I'm still thinking about and
22 | processing a week and a half later. But for now, I thought I would
23 | belatedly share my very brief prepared comments.
24 |
25 | * * * * *
26 |
27 | This afternoon I want to share some reflections, necessarily brief and
28 | over-general, on how the history of the Civil War Era is being enriched
29 | by new attempts to place the history of the United States within larger
30 | transnational and even global histories.
31 |
32 | The idea of internationalizing the history of the Civil War is not, in
33 | itself, new. Historians have been interested in the diplomatic history
34 | of the war from the beginning (think of Henry Adams chronicling his post
35 | in London during the war). And historians of slavery and emancipation
36 | have also long adopted international comparative methods. Building on
37 | such precedents, however, the most recent crop of "transnational,"
38 | "transatlantic" or "global" histories of the Civil War era has focused
39 | not just on the comparison of different societies and nations, but on
40 | the connectedness of the United States to the larger world in the
41 | mid-nineteenth century. It's exciting work to read and think about. By
42 | broadening our perspective on the American Civil War era, historians are
43 | revealing the mid-nineteenth century as an era of unprecedented mobility
44 | by migrants; an era of constant circulation of goods, ideas, and capital
45 | across permeable national borders; and an era in which the consolidation
46 | of modern nation-states occurred not just despite, but partly because
47 | of, transnational processes like industrialization.
48 |
49 | One way of summing up these points is to say that the "Atlantic World"
50 | did not abruptly end in 1800; my own primary research on transatlantic
51 | abolitionism in the Civil War era provides constant reminders that
52 | postcolonial Americans still lived and moved in an "Atlantic World" in
53 | which the "mother country" remained the dominant power.
54 |
55 | Another way of summing up what recent historians have tried to show is
56 | to look forwards instead of backwards, and to see the Civil War era not
57 | just as a moment of continuity with an older "Atlantic World" of early
58 | modern empires, but as a moment of continuity with emerging forms of
59 | imperial and economic integration on a global scale–you can consider the
60 | Civil War era, as world historians like C. A. Bayly and Jurgen
61 | Osterhammel have, as a harbinger of "globalization."
62 |
63 | I want to be brief, which means I'm being highly selective, but I think
64 | a few examples can show some of the payoffs that can come from taking
65 | these transnational and global perspectives on the Civil War era.
66 |
67 | First, transnational histories of the era offer new insights into the
68 | causes and consequences of the Civil War. I'm thinking here of [Edward
69 | Rugemer's award-winning book][] (subtitled "the Caribbean roots of the
70 | American Civil War") on the impact of British West Indian emancipation
71 | on the slavery debates in the United States. I'm thinking of [Brian
72 | Schoen's fascinating new book][] on how the world cotton market shaped
73 | secessionists' thinking about their chances outside the Union, and of
74 | [Rachel Hope Cleves's book][] on how rhetoric about the French
75 | Revolution in some sense contributed to the escalation and violence of
76 | antebellum rhetoric in the United States. And there's [Matthew Clavin's
77 | book][], published this year, about how the memory of the Haitian
78 | Revolution influenced decisions in the United States both before and
79 | during the war.
80 |
81 | All four books suggest that causal explanations of the War have to go
82 | beyond the standard recital of domestic events that heralded the
83 | "impending crisis." And there are also new works, though they seem to be
84 | fewer at present, suggesting that a full accounting of the war's
85 | consequences will also take us far beyond the borders of the nation. I'm
86 | thinking here especially of [Sven Beckert's exciting work][] on the
87 | impact of the war on the global cotton market and the attendant
88 | development of new forms of colonialism in India and elsewhere.
89 |
90 | Second, transnational histories of the Civil War era also offer us new
91 | contexts for interpreting the era and its actors. Suggestive works by
92 | historians like [Thomas Bender][] and the prolific coauthors [Michael
93 | Geyer][] and [Charles Bright][] indicate that the American Civil War is
94 | best understood, in global terms, as a moment in a long, halting history
95 | of global nation-building, even though from a narrower perspective it
96 | looks like an exceptional moment of nation-unraveling. Likewise, work by
97 | Schoen, Beckert, and others further demonstrates that Southern
98 | slaveholders were not premodern agrarians defending a civilization going
99 | with the wind; they were savvy, modern, even empire-building capitalists
100 | who often defended, for self-interested reasons, liberal "free trade,"
101 | and they were attuned to the currents of a new, industrializing global
102 | economy in which specialized regional economies enjoyed some comparative
103 | advantages.
104 |
105 | And of course there are many other examples of the ways that
106 | transnational histories of the Civil War era revise or help confirm
107 | older interpretations. But I'll close with one last point that has
108 | increasingly shaped my own book manuscript.
109 |
110 | I think it is important to remember that by the time of the American
111 | Civil War the fate of "democracy," both in national and global terms,
112 | was still decidedly unsettled. No nation with meaningful representative
113 | institutions had a larger electorate than the United States by
114 | mid-century. And even the American electorate was limited in all sorts
115 | of undemocratic ways (as Robert Wiebe puts it, "before the 1860s,
116 | slavery was no more an anomaly in the land of democracy than democracy
117 | was an anomaly in the land of slavery").[^1] But by 1855 economic
118 | barriers to voting that were still pervasive in other representative
119 | governments (which were themselves still rare, even after the abortive
120 | 1848 democratic revolutions in Europe) had mostly disappeared in the
121 | United States, at least for white men.
122 |
123 | That unusual feature of course contributed to Americans' national pride
124 | in "popular sovereignty," which played a large role in the escalation of
125 | sectional crisis in the 1850s. But it also marked the American republic
126 | for many outside observers, from Alexis de Tocqueville on, as a
127 | laboratory for studying the effects of majority rule. If, as [Seymour
128 | Drescher][] has put it, British West Indian emancipation came to be
129 | regarded in the 1840s and 1850s as a "mighty experiment" in the idea of
130 | free labor, American democracy after 1820 also was often regarded,
131 | inside and outside the nation, as a "mighty experiment," an experiment
132 | that very well might fail (for better or worse depending on whom you
133 | asked at the time).
134 |
135 | For a broad and diverse group of contemporary thinkers, the Civil War
136 | therefore initially registered as a failure, of sorts, for the
137 | democratic principle writ large; it seemed to prove that when push came
138 | to shove in a country with comparatively open representative
139 | institutions, when a powerful minority disliked the outcome of a
140 | majoritarian election, Constitutional disintegration and violence
141 | ensued. And thanks to extensive communication and print culture networks
142 | that spanned the Atlantic, key actors in the American Civil War were
143 | aware that they were being watched and discussed, and many of them also
144 | viewed the secession crisis as a referendum on democracy whose
145 | implications would affect the future of democracy elsewhere.
146 |
147 | Certainly this was on the mind of Abraham Lincoln, and [Chandra
148 | Manning][] suggests it was on the minds of his soldiers, too. In his
149 | first [speech to Congress][] after the secession crisis, on July 4,
150 | 1861, Lincoln noted with understatement that "our popular government has
151 | often been called an experiment." At stake was the ability of the Union
152 | to prove to the world that a republican form of government could be
153 | maintained. The same idea, of course, surfaced in many of Lincoln's
154 | other famous speeches, including the Gettysburg Address, all of which
155 | suggests that Lincoln sincerely worried about whether "government of the
156 | people, by the people, and for the people" (a phrase used in different
157 | versions by many democratic reformers in the mid-century Atlantic World)
158 | would "perish from the earth."
159 |
160 | A more transnational perspective on the American Civil War era also
161 | reveals for us, in retrospect, that such a possibility (of popular
162 | government either perishing or making a significant retreat) was not
163 | unimaginable in the aftermath of post-1848 counterrevolutions in Europe,
164 | continued aristocratic resistance to parliamentary reform in England,
165 | and the hostility to republicanism that still prevailed in most of the
166 | world at that moment. Looking at the Civil War from the perspective of
167 | the whole "earth," as Lincoln suggested we should, thus may allow us to
168 | see with fresh eyes the significance of Lincoln's victory and the
169 | subsequent constitutional prohibitions on using race or previous
170 | condition of servitude as determinants of voting rights. Those events,
171 | as [Leslie Butler][] has shown in her new book on postwar transatlantic
172 | liberalism, made the Civil War seem to many contemporaries like a
173 | watershed moment in the history of democracy worldwide, even while
174 | others viewed the carnage as a mark against popular government. The
175 | identification of the Union cause with the success of the democratic
176 | experiment also came with costs and ironic consequences, of course. And
177 | viewed in the long term of the long nineteenth century, it was the
178 | enfranchisement of black male voters in the American South during
179 | Reconstruction, and not their later disfranchisement at the turn of the
180 | twentieth century, that represented the exception to the general rule.
181 | Nonetheless, perhaps we should consider what we would see if we
182 | rediscovered the American Civil War Era as many of its contemporaries
183 | knew it: an era in which, globally and at the level of nation-states,
184 | majority rule was still the minority opinion. It's not an entirely new
185 | direction for Civil War historians, but one still worth pursuing.
186 |
187 | [^1]: For the Robert Wiebe quote, see Thomas Bender, ed., *[Rethinking
188 | American History in a Global Age][]* (Berkeley: University of California
189 | Press, 2002), p. 247.
190 |
191 | [Transnational History and the Civil War Era]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=98
192 | "Permanent Link: Transnational History and the Civil War Era"
193 | [Edward Rugemer's award-winning book]: http://www.amazon.com/Problem-Emancipation-Caribbean-Antislavery-Abolition/dp/0807135593/
194 | [Brian Schoen's fascinating new book]: http://www.amazon.com/Fragile-Fabric-Union-Federal-Politics/dp/0801893038/
195 | [Rachel Hope Cleves's book]: http://www.amazon.com/Reign-Terror-America-Anti-Jacobinism-Antislavery/dp/0521884357/
196 | [Matthew Clavin's book]: http://www.amazon.com/Toussaint-Louverture-American-Civil-War/dp/081224205X/
197 | [Sven Beckert's exciting work]: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/109.5/beckert.html
198 | [Thomas Bender]: http://www.amazon.com/Nation-Among-Nations-Americas-History/dp/0809095270
199 | [Michael Geyer]: http://history.uchicago.edu/faculty/geyer.shtml
200 | [Charles Bright]: http://www.rc.lsa.umich.edu/directory/name/charlie-bright/
201 | [Seymour Drescher]: http://www.amazon.com/Mighty-Experiment-Slavery-British-Emancipation/dp/0195176294/
202 | [Chandra Manning]: http://www.amazon.com/What-This-Cruel-War-Over/dp/0307277321/
203 | [speech to Congress]: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1861lincoln-special.html
204 | [Leslie Butler]: http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Americans-Victorian-Intellectuals-Transatlantic/dp/0807857920/
205 | [Rethinking American History in a Global Age]: http://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-American-History-Global-Age/dp/0520230582/
206 |
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/teaching.pdc:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Teaching
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | %
4 |
5 | Courses
6 | -------
7 |
8 | - HIST 118: The United States, 1848 to the Present ([2010](pdf/hist118.pdf) | [2013](http://hist118.wcaleb.rice.edu) | [2015](http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/pdf/hist118sp15.pdf))
9 | - HIST/FSEM 159: Legendary Americans (2009 | [2011](http://hist159.blogs.rice.edu) | [2013](pdf/fwis173fall13.pdf) | [2016](pdf/fwis173sp16.pdf))
10 | - HIST 246: The American Civil War Era, 1848-1876 (2011: [Spring](http://hist246.blogs.rice.edu), [Fall](http://civilwar.blogs.rice.edu) | [2013](./hist246fall13.pdf) | [2014](./hist246fall14.pdf) | [2018](pdf/hist246sp18.pdf))
11 | - HIST 318: Digital History Methods ([2014](http://digitalhistory.blogs.rice.edu/syllabus/))
12 | - HIST 396: The Rise of Transnational Activism ([2008](http://hist396.wordpress.com/about/))
13 | - HIST 423: American Radicals and Reformers ([2008](http://hist423.wordpress.com/about/) | [2010](http://hist423.blogs.rice.edu) | [2012](http://abolition.blogs.rice.edu/) | [2014](http://utopias.blogs.rice.edu))
14 | - HIST 577: Pedagogy Seminar ([2014](./hist577fall14.pdf))
15 | - HIST 587: Methods in U.S. Cultural History ([2009](pdf/hist587.pdf) | [2012](pdf/hist587syllabus.pdf) | [2014](pdf/hist587sp14.pdf) | [2016](pdf/hist587sp16.pdf) | 2017)
16 | - HIST 588: Graduate Readings in 19th Century U.S. History ([2009](pdf/hist588.pdf) | [2011](pdf/hist588spring11.pdf) | [2013](hist588spring13.pdf) | [2015](pdf/hist588sp15.pdf) | **[2018](pdf/hist588fall18.pdf)** )
17 | - HURC 402/603: Digital History Masterclass ([2012](http://digitalhistory.blogs.rice.edu/schedule/))
18 | - [Guidelines for Graduate Field Exam](mcdanielfield.pdf)
19 |
20 | Posts
21 | -----
22 |
23 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/teaching/announcing-dick-dowling-archive.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Announcing the Dick Dowling Digital Archive
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % April 5, 2012
4 |
5 |
6 | This post was originally published on my old blog as [Announcing the
7 | Dick Dowling Digital Archive][].
8 |
9 |
10 | It gives me great pleasure to announce the unveiling of the Dick Dowling
11 | Digital Archive and the related exhibit, [Dick Dowling and Sabine Pass
12 | in History and Memory][]. The collection and the exhibit, both proudly
13 | powered by [Omeka][], were produced by myself and undergraduate students
14 | in Civil War history at Rice University in collaboration with [the
15 | Woodson Research Center][] at Fondren Library, the [Houston Area Digital
16 | Archives][], and the [Humanities Research Center][].
17 |
18 | Dick Dowling was an Irish American Houstonian most famous for his role
19 | in a Civil War battle fought at Sabine Pass on September 8, 1863.
20 | Beginning in [the Spring 2011 semester][], Rice students in HIST 246,
21 | “The American Civil War Era,” began locating, scanning, describing, and
22 | writing about historical documents related to Dowling which were then
23 | uploaded into an Omeka collection. Students also produced four
24 | interpretive digital projects that also now reside in the collection.
25 | The Movie Group produced an introductory video ([group blog][] and
26 | [video][]). The Map Group produced several maps with ArcGIS showing the
27 | past locations of Dowling’s statue in the city ([group blog][1],
28 | [map][], and [map guide][]). The Timeline Group used [SIMILE][] to
29 | produce a dynamic timeline of events ([group blog][2] and [timeline][]).
30 | And the Podcast Group created several audio tours meant to be heard at
31 | various Dowling-related sites in Houston ([group blog][3] and [audio
32 | tours][]).
33 |
34 | Other students in the spring and [fall semester][] of 2011 worked to
35 | draft, organize, and lay out the exhibit pages for [The Afterlives of
36 | Dick Dowling][], the first major section of the Omeka exhibit featuring
37 | items in the Dick Dowling Digital Archive. Students in the fall semester
38 | also helped me to think through the other major section, [Slavery and
39 | the Battle of Sabine Pass][], which I composed in bits and pieces over
40 | the last several months.
41 |
42 | In a future blog post I hope to say more about how this project
43 | developed. For now, I’m happy to announce its existence and invite you
44 | to take a look around. Please feel free to leave comments, questions, or
45 | corrections here or at dowling-archive AT rice.edu.
46 |
47 | [Announcing the Dick Dowling Digital Archive]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=210
48 | "Permanent Link: Announcing the Dick Dowling Digital Archive"
49 | [Dick Dowling and Sabine Pass in History and Memory]: http://exhibits.library.rice.edu/exhibits/show/dick-dowling
50 | [Omeka]: http://www.omeka.org
51 | [the Woodson Research Center]: http://library.rice.edu/collections/WRC
52 | [Houston Area Digital Archives]: http://digital.houstonlibrary.org/cdm/
53 | [Humanities Research Center]: http://hrc.rice.edu
54 | [the Spring 2011 semester]: http://hist246.blogs.rice.edu
55 | [group blog]: http://dowlingmovie.blogs.rice.edu
56 | [video]: http://exhibits.library.rice.edu/items/show/766
57 | [1]: http://dowlingmap.blogs.rice.edu
58 | [map]: http://exhibits.library.rice.edu/items/show/763
59 | [map guide]: http://exhibits.library.rice.edu/items/show/764
60 | [SIMILE]: http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/
61 | [2]: http://dowlingdates.blogs.rice.edu
62 | [timeline]: http://exhibits.library.rice.edu/exhibits/show/dick-dowling/timeline
63 | [3]: http://dowlingcast.blogs.rice.edu
64 | [audio tours]: http://exhibits.library.rice.edu/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=50&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=contains&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Audio+Tour&range=&collection=4&type=&tags=&submit_search=Search
65 | [fall semester]: http://civilwar.blogs.rice.edu
66 | [The Afterlives of Dick Dowling]: http://exhibits.library.rice.edu/exhibits/show/dick-dowling/afterlives-of-dick-dowling
67 | [Slavery and the Battle of Sabine Pass]: http://exhibits.library.rice.edu/exhibits/show/dick-dowling/slavery-and-sabine-pass
68 |
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/teaching/communicating-with-professors.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Communicating with Professors
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % September 4, 2012
4 |
5 | The best parts of my college experience were the relationships I built
6 | with individual professors. In my very first semester, for example, I
7 | took an introductory logic course with [Colin Allen][], now at Indiana
8 | University. I loved the logic, but even more important for my
9 | development as a student were the conversations I had with Allen outside
10 | of class, on topics ranging from science to computer programming to the
11 | philosophy of religion.
12 |
13 | I still remember vividly the night, only a few weeks into my college career,
14 | when Allen suggested we grab a sandwich at Subway to continue a conversation
15 | that had spilled outside into the hall after class. I had something else to do
16 | that night and had to decline, but that openness to communication meant
17 | everything to me. It gave me the confidence to correspond with him by email on
18 | matters mundane and serious. And most of all, it meant that I approached future
19 | relationships with faculty unafraid to start conversations and express my
20 | views.
21 |
22 | I hope every undergraduate can have similar experiences, but my
23 | experience on the other side of the desk, as it were, suggests that they
24 | are rarer than they need to be. Sometimes this is because students don't
25 | approach faculty in the first place, limiting their engagement to
26 | whatever they get as part of the general class population. Other times
27 | it is because some easy mistakes lead to miscommunications or awkward
28 | first impressions that create static on the line between student and
29 | professor.
30 |
31 | This semester I prepared a brief presentation for undergraduates on "How
32 | to Communicate with Professors," hoping to head off common problems and
33 | demystify the process. My hope is that by getting brass tacks out of the
34 | way, the sort of conversations that meant so much to me as an
35 | undergraduate will be more comfortable for the students I know.
36 |
37 | You can view the [slideshow][] for the presentation and get the [source
38 | code][] if you wish, or you can also look at my [Storify][] page
39 | containing advice gathered from Twitter on this topic. Thanks to all
40 | those who offered their advice and turned out for the presentation.
41 |
42 | ### More Resources
43 |
44 | - [The Email Charter][]
45 | - [18 Etiquette Tips for Emailing your Professor][]
46 | - [A Primer on Electronic Communication][] by Eszter Hargittai
47 | - [How to E-Mail your Professor][] by Michael Leddy
48 | - [A Note about Professors][] by Heather Cox Richardson
49 |
50 | [Colin Allen]: http://www.indiana.edu/~hpscdept/people/allen.shtml
51 | [slideshow]: ./talkingtoprofs.html
52 | [source code]: http://github.com/wcaleb/handouts/blob/master/talkingtoprofs.txt
53 | [Storify]: http://storify.com/wcaleb/communicating-with-professors
54 | [The Email Charter]: http://emailcharter.org
55 | [18 Etiquette Tips for Emailing your Professor]: http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/professors-guide/2010/09/30/18-etiquette-tips-for-e-mailing-your-professor
56 | [A Primer on Electronic Communication]: http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2006/11/28/hargittai
57 | [How to E-Mail your Professor]: http://mleddy.blogspot.com/2005/01/how-to-e-mail-professor.html
58 | [A Note about Professors]: http://histsociety.blogspot.com/2009/11/richardsons-rules-of-order-part-xi-note.html
59 |
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/teaching/google-docs-and-group-work.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Google Docs and Group Work
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % October 13, 2011
4 |
5 |
6 | This post was originally published on my old blog as [Google Docs and
7 | Group Work][].
8 |
9 |
10 | Mark Sample recently had a [great post about reading aloud in the
11 | classroom][], in the course of which he also briefly revealed how he
12 | uses Google Docs as a sort of digital whiteboard for collecting
13 | responses from students. I’ve also sometimes used Google Docs in the
14 | classroom for similar purposes. The advantage of doing this, of course,
15 | is that the Google Doc created during class can later be shared with
16 | students online. And because Google Docs can be edited collaboratively
17 | by several users at once, it also makes it possible to reproduce the old
18 | pedagogical technique of having students “go to the board” to write down
19 | responses without ever requiring that they leave their seats.
20 |
21 | Here’s a quick example of a lesson that I’ve done twice now, with pretty
22 | good results. In my course on the American Civil War Era ([current][]
23 | and [past][]), I devote several of my classes to discussing the
24 | consequences of emancipation for freedpeople. One of my major goals is
25 | to help students appreciate the range of different circumstances in
26 | which freedpeople found themselves. In one class, I do this by
27 | distributing [a packet of four primary sources][], all of which are
28 | available online, and then break students into groups to discuss the
29 | four sources.
30 |
31 | So long as at least four students in the class have a laptop with them,
32 | I can also do this next step: I direct students to [this Google
33 | spreadsheet][], whose settings are usually such that anyone with the
34 | link can edit the sheet. I ask each group to answer a series of
35 | questions about the document–when and where the episode described took
36 | place, the circumstances under which laborers are working, and so on.
37 | Each group edits the document simultaneously, and I have it displayed on
38 | a screen in the classroom so that everyone can see everyone else’s edits
39 | as they happen.
40 |
41 | At the end of the exercise, we “rank” how well each case met the
42 | expectations and desires of freedpeople (which have been discussed in
43 | previous classes). And by having the spreadsheet before us, we are then
44 | able to have a discussion about which variables seem to correlate most
45 | strongly to situations that benefited freedpeople’s interests. In this
46 | case, what I want them to see is that the date (during the war, or
47 | after), the state, and the presence of the military helped determine the
48 | nature of the post-emancipation labor contracts that developed.
49 |
50 | That’s one way I use Google Docs in the classroom. Please share other
51 | tips if you have them!
52 |
53 | [Google Docs and Group Work]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=185
54 | "Permanent Link: Google Docs and Group Work"
55 | [great post about reading aloud in the classroom]: http://www.samplereality.com/2011/09/14/on-reading-aloud-in-the-classroom/
56 | [current]: http://civilwar.blogs.rice.edu
57 | [past]: http://hist246.blogs.rice.edu
58 | [a packet of four primary sources]: http://db.tt/5HUbIwFU
59 | "Reconstruction Group Documents in my Dropbox"
60 | [this Google spreadsheet]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtSeKg8iSxZrdHp1Rk9OYTNEa1lyRHZSTm1mSGt1aHc&authkey=COqF17cH&hl=en_US#gid=0
61 |
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/teaching/grading-with-my-ipad.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Grading with my iPad
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % March 13, 2011
4 |
5 |
6 | This page was originally posted on my old blog as [Grading with my
7 | iPad][].
8 |
9 |
10 | A friend recently emailed me to ask how I feel about using my iPad to
11 | grade student papers. One of the main reasons why I bought an iPad when
12 | it came out was to help with this task; since I ride the bus and light
13 | rail to work most days, I wanted an easy way to take my grading and
14 | reading with me, without having to lug a huge stack of papers around. My
15 | friend’s email gives me a good excuse to briefly summarize the steps I
16 | take to use my iPad for grading, and to share some of my reflections on
17 | how it’s worked out so far.
18 |
19 | How I Grade with the iPad
20 | -------------------------
21 |
22 | In order to expedite the process of grading on my iPad, I first ask
23 | students to submit their papers to me as digital files. As soon as I get
24 | a student paper, I immediately open the file, [convert the file into PDF
25 | using the mechanisms built into Mac OS X][], change the filename to the
26 | student’s last name, and save the PDF file in a folder on my hard drive.
27 |
28 | There are many apps one can use to annotate PDF files on the iPad. I use
29 | [iAnnotate][]; here’s [a good overview of what it can do][]. To grade
30 | the papers I now have saved on my laptop, I have to get them into
31 | iAnnotate, which I can do in several ways. For me, the quickest way is
32 | this: once I have all the student papers turned in, I plug the iPad into
33 | my laptop, open iTunes, navigate to the Apps tab on the iPad within
34 | iTunes, and then [drag-and-drop the files from my hard-drive directly
35 | into iAnnotate][].
36 |
37 | Now that all the student papers are on my iPad and in iAnnotate, when
38 | I’m ready to grade, I open each file and read away. iAnnotate gives me
39 | lots of options for leaving comments on the papers, but I only really
40 | use a few. (1) I can easily highlight or underline text. (2) I can draw
41 | freehand–for example, I can circle a word and write “WC” in the margin
42 | for word choice, or I can write a grade at the bottom of the file. (I
43 | use [a Pogo Sketch stylus][] to make writing on the iPad easier.) And
44 | most of all, (3) I can insert a text box anywhere on the PDF, and then
45 | use the iPad’s keyboard to type in comments to the student. This is my
46 | preferred way to leave lengthy comments, for reasons I’ll discuss in a
47 | moment. iAnnotate saves all of these annotations into the file, so that
48 | when the file is later viewed on a computer using Preview for Mac or
49 | Adobe Reader, all the annotations will be embedded in the file.
50 |
51 | When I’m finished with the paper, I can get it off the iPad in a couple
52 | of ways. I can use [an option in iAnnotate which allows me to email the
53 | file as an attachment along with a summary of all of the annotations I
54 | have made][]. This is very useful because all of the text comments I
55 | have made will now be summarized in the body of the email, along with a
56 | note indicating which page the comment is on. (I have set up the iPad to
57 | use my university email account.) If I have underlined anything in the
58 | file or drawn free hand, the summary will also indicate that there is a
59 | drawing on these pages. Eventually the student gets back the PDF file,
60 | which has the embedded annotations, and the summary of all the text
61 | comments produced automatically by iAnnotate.
62 |
63 | That’s the basic workflow I use to grade on the iPad. It does introduce
64 | a few more steps to the process that the old pen-and-paper method
65 | doesn’t have. But the process isn’t too onerous and in a moment I’ll
66 | discuss some advantages of this method. Before I do that, let me explain
67 | one further step I’ve added to the workflow that does make it a bit more
68 | onerous. I usually distribute a grading rubric to students explaining
69 | how I will evaluate their position papers. ([Here’s an example.][]) I
70 | have always found it useful to mark directly on this rubric. To do this
71 | with the iPad, I have a PDF file of a blank rubric in iAnnotate. With
72 | each student, I duplicate that file within iAnnotate, and then I can use
73 | the free-hand drawing to highlight parts of the rubric and circle
74 | scores. The trouble is that now I have a second file I need to get off
75 | the iPad, and it’s not easy to quickly associate the rubric files with
76 | the paper files (for example, by attaching both to the same email). I
77 | solve this by going back into iTunes, with my iPad attached, and then
78 | downloading the rubric files to my hard drive, glancing at them using
79 | the file preview function on the Mac, and renaming them according to the
80 | students’ last names. The added burden is mainly my choice because of
81 | the way I use the rubrics, but I am currently looking for a way to
82 | simplify this part of the workflow. [**UPDATE:** See the comments for
83 | some good suggestions.]
84 |
85 | Why I Grade with the iPad
86 | -------------------------
87 |
88 | Perhaps to some readers, this process will seem like a lot of pain with
89 | little gain, and for some it might be. But I’ve found several advantages
90 | to grading papers this way.
91 |
92 | First, it definitely solves my problem of carrying huge stacks of paper
93 | back and forth from the office, which was my main reason for adopting
94 | this method. It also eliminates the small inconveniences we’ve all
95 | experienced like dropping a file folder full of papers. And maybe it
96 | saves a few trees.
97 |
98 | Second, by accepting files electronically, and then also embedding
99 | annotations in the file, I can easily save student work without having
100 | boxes of papers piling up in my office. This is useful for a couple of
101 | reasons: if a student wants to come talk about the paper later, I can
102 | easily pull it up before he arrives to see the comments I made. If a
103 | student writes a year later for a recommendation later, I can go back to
104 | her paper and have something concrete to talk about, without having to
105 | dig around in my office. The only cost to me is a few bytes on my hard
106 | drive.
107 |
108 | There are also, I’ve found, some more pedagogical advantages to grading
109 | on the iPad, some of which stem, paradoxically, from the fact that
110 | “annotating” a PDF file does not feel as natural as scribbling on a
111 | piece of paper. It’s true that typing into a text box on an iPad takes a
112 | little getting used to, especially compared to writing in the margins of
113 | a sheet of 8.5 x 11 piece of paper, the good old-fashioned way. But as a
114 | grader, I believe very strongly in the principle of “[minimal
115 | marking][]” as described by Richard Haswell, especially since the
116 | research shows that correcting every single error or commenting on every
117 | point in a student draft quickly shows diminishing returns. More marking
118 | is sometimes less when it comes to what students can absorb, as [Claire
119 | Potter][] recently observed:
120 |
121 | > Do you write lots and lots of marginal notes on the paper, spending
122 | > hours correcting everything and re-diagramming their sentences? The
123 | > truth is, although you are trying to be the opposite of the teacher I
124 | > describe above, this freaks students out. Although you have spent
125 | > maybe an hour on this, feeling like you are a really caring teacher,
126 | > the student may see them as a blur, as grammatical correction collides
127 | > with interpretive questions, typos, basic misunderstanding of the text
128 | > and long-winded attempts not to utilize the first person or appear
129 | > “biased.” If a paper is really muddled, it is a waste of your time to
130 | > do this: far better to sit down with the student, ask a couple
131 | > questions about what s/he intended, and describe how s/he might have
132 | > gone about writing such a paper.
133 |
134 | To be sure, [commenting on writing is a complex task in which general
135 | rules are dangerous][]. (And the warnings in that last linked article
136 | about the siren song of computerized grading are worth heeding here.)
137 | Nonetheless, I find that using iAnnotate focuses my attention on the
138 | question of whether this particular comment I’m about to make is the one
139 | I want the student to concentrate on. Especially at the end of a long
140 | grading session, it’s all too easy, with a piece of paper and a red pen,
141 | to scribble down comments or corrections to grammar without even
142 | thinking, in holistic terms, about what the cumulative effect of these
143 | particular markings will be on this particular student. When I’m working
144 | on the iPad, the parts of the process that feel less natural than
145 | pen-and-paper slow the gears enough to make me more conscious of what
146 | I’m saying in my annotations.
147 |
148 | Indeed, one of the advantages of grading on an iPad that I didn’t fully
149 | anticipate is how easy it is to *delete* annotations. While I’m reading
150 | through a student paper the first time, I can very easily underline,
151 | highlight, and circle anything that I think I’m going to want to comment
152 | on for the student. Then, when I go back through the paper, I can decide
153 | which comments are the important ones–which ones are part of a pattern
154 | in the paper, for example, or which ones are most related to the
155 | learning objectives for the assignment. Then I can easily delete the
156 | other annotations without leaving the detritus of an eraser all over the
157 | page. There’s a final filter when I read back through the summarized
158 | annotations that iAnnotate produces in the body of the email that I send
159 | from my iPad; that list of annotations really crystallizes, at a glance,
160 | all of the things I’ve said to a student, and it quickly becomes obvious
161 | if I’ve been plucking on one string more than I intended to.
162 |
163 | Whether grading on an iPad will work for you is something every teacher
164 | will have to decide. For me, however, this method has not only made life
165 | easier on my back, but also has proved to be a method that functions
166 | well and complements by pedagogical beliefs as a grader. If you do
167 | something similar, please share your experiences as well!
168 |
169 | [Grading with my iPad]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=113
170 | [convert the file into PDF using the mechanisms built into Mac OS X]: http://www.techiecorner.com/311/how-to-convert-doc-to-pdf-in-mac-os-x/
171 | [iAnnotate]: http://www.ajidev.com/iannotate/
172 | [a good overview of what it can do]: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/mark-up-pdfs-on-your-ipad-iannotate-pdf
173 | [drag-and-drop the files from my hard-drive directly into iAnnotate]: http://www.ajidev.com/iannotate/support/itunes.html
174 | [a Pogo Sketch stylus]: http://tenonedesign.com/sketch.php
175 | [an option in iAnnotate which allows me to email the file as an
176 | attachment along with a summary of all of the annotations I have
177 | made]: http://www.ajidev.com/iannotate/support/annotSummary.html
178 | [Here’s an example.]: files/2011/03/Position-Paper-Rubric.pdf
179 | [minimal marking]: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~digger/609/haswell.html
180 | [Claire Potter]: http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/2011/01/if-student-essay-falls-over-in-woods.html
181 | [commenting on writing is a complex task in which general rules are
182 | dangerous]: http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/articles/haswell2006.cfm
183 |
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/teaching/history-major-in-digital-age.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % The History Major in a Digital Age
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % January 4, 2015
4 |
5 |
6 | I delivered a version of these comments as part of a roundtable at the AHA 2015 meeting in New York City, which posed the question, "Whither the History Major?" My comments focused on what the history major looks like in a "digital age." In the delivered talk, I focus more on how "capstone" projects might change to reflect digital changes in the landscape of history.
7 |
8 |
9 | In a recent essay in *The American Scholar*, Anthony Grafton and James
10 | Grossman gave a [ringing defense of the value of history][] in the
11 | undergraduate curriculum, reserving special praise for what they
12 | described as the "quaint" but essential practice of engaging students in
13 | the art of archival research. As they noted, in many universities,
14 | something like a "term paper" or original thesis remains the primary
15 | capstone experience for a history major, and with good reason.
16 |
17 | I was reminded of the good reasons over the last two days while
18 | following AHA panels on Twitter from Houston, using the conference
19 | hashtag \#aha2015. Several panels here have provided preliminary reports
20 | on the [AHA's Tuning project][], which seeks to identify the key skills
21 | and concepts that we, as historians, hope our history majors will learn
22 | by the time they graduate. Many of these learning objectives---finding
23 | sources, weighing evidence, constructing argument-driven
24 | narratives---are skills that traditional "term papers" and theses are
25 | still good at teaching and assessing.
26 |
27 | Yet in between tweets about teaching and Tuning panels, my timeline also
28 | teemed with creative examples of digital history that vastly expand
29 | traditional notions of what archives, evidence, and scholarship can be.
30 | These panels, not to mention the fact that I was following them on a
31 | social media platform, bore witness (as if more were needed) to our
32 | "digital age," an age in which both the process of historical research
33 | and the communication of its results increasingly occurs online or in
34 | some other digital form.
35 |
36 | Set aside for a moment whether this "digital age" is a blessing or a
37 | curse, and consider only the evidence that it is upon us. A [Pew survey of
38 | middle-school and high-school teachers from 2012][] found that just 12
39 | percent said their students were "very likely" to consult printed books
40 | for a typical research assignment, while 94 percent said students were
41 | "very likely" to turn to Google. I see little reason to think those
42 | percentages have reversed in three years, especially since other
43 | evidence suggests [professional historians are also increasingly prone
44 | to begin their research online][] or in digital databases. Indeed, in
45 | their defense of the continued relevance of requiring "term papers in
46 | our courses, and ... independent work and BA theses of our majors,"
47 | Grafton and Grossman themselves turn for evidence to a series of
48 | departmental webpages and digital archives that showcase student
49 | work.^[Though I'm using Grafton and Grossman as a reference point here,
50 | it's worth noting that both authors have been staunch allies and
51 | advocates of creative digital history scholarship. In what follows, I'm
52 | not going to pick a bone with them here so much as extend their points
53 | in this particular essay farther than they do in this particular essay.]
54 |
55 |
57 |
58 | Those same webpages, and many others, suggest to me that the history major
59 | will not wither in a digital age. But whither will it tend? The ubiquity of
60 | digital tools and media in our and our students' lives do raise the question of
61 | whether, as we and our majors increasingly *use* digital forms of history, we
62 | will in equal measure increase our attention to teaching them how to *make*
63 | digital historical narratives and archives.
64 |
65 | Let me be clear at this point about what I do not want to say. I do not
66 | want to set up a false either/or choice, as though the history major
67 | must either continue to focus on mastering traditional tasks such as
68 | research papers *or* become more adept at navigating and using digital
69 | tools. Grossman and Grafton explained much better than I could why
70 | traditional archival research and research papers still matter and
71 | probably will long after we're gone.
72 |
73 | But I do think that accounting for the "digital age" in our design of
74 | history major goals and assessments will require more than training
75 | students in something like "how to evaluate webpages" when doing
76 | research for a paper, which I think is still too often where it is
77 | easiest to stop. That's a valuable thing to teach majors---don't get me
78 | wrong---and we could probably always do more of it. But it's a framing
79 | based on an abstraction---"webpages"---that may not actually exist in
80 | the wild. (Is Twitter a "webpage"? Is the Digital Public Library of
81 | America? Is *The New York Times*?)
82 |
83 | Focusing on teaching students how to *use* information from the Web also
84 | considers the Web narrowly as a *place where evidence for a research paper
85 | might be found*, instead of all of the other things it is: a place where people
86 | watch "Drunk History" episodes, annotate historical photographs, follow history
87 | Twitter feeds, conduct genealogical research, organize protests informed by
88 | historical analogies and precedents, argue about historical claims with friends
89 | and relatives on Facebook, discuss historical documentaries or books as they
90 | watch or read them in real time, encounter historical artifacts and exhibits
91 | curated by museums, and increasingly interact directly with historians in
92 | blogs, comment sections, Reddit threads, social media, and more. An increasing
93 | amount and variety of history happens on the Web; what possibilities does that
94 | open up for our thinking about a "major" in this field?
95 |
96 | Before turning it over to you, I'll offer a few quick answers, none of
97 | which are revolutionary or original to me, but all of which I often
98 | ponder. The first is that if we are not in some way teaching history
99 | majors how to *make* digital stuff as well as to *use* it, we are
100 | leaving them ill-equipped to share their hard-won historical skills and
101 | knowledge in the arena where many of them are most likely to encounter
102 | claims and conversations about history.^[Mills Kelly is one of the most
103 | eloquent recent defenders of [making][] as an essential part of history
104 | curricula.]
105 |
106 | It's clear to me, moreover, that *making* digital history requires
107 | knowledge of more than the technical know-how to upload traditional
108 | forms of history like a term paper or thesis to the Internet. A linear
109 | narrative in a double-spaced, ten-page, one-inch margins research is not
110 | the same as a layered narrative of the sort that I encountered following
111 | the \#aha2015 hashtag the last two days. Knowing how to craft the one
112 | (however valuable that continues to be) is not the same as knowing how
113 | to craft the other. A hyperlink is not just a footnote by another name,
114 | and knowing how to format the latter does not mean knowing how to format
115 | and effectively deploy the former. Mounting a persuasive historical
116 | argument aimed at scholars is not the same as winning an argument about
117 | history on Facebook. All of which is to say that even if the ability to
118 | "craft historical narrative" is one of the goals of a history major, as
119 | the AHA History Tuning Project suggests, we need to recognize that
120 | crafting digital narratives often requires a different set of
121 | competencies than those required by a "written or oral presentation."
122 |
123 | That's not to say, however, that there is no overlap between the
124 | competencies students attain by writing a term paper and by crafting a
125 | digital narrative in some form. On the contrary. As the [historian Eric
126 | Rauchway recently observed][], the recently concluded, wildly popular
127 | podcast Serial, in which a radio journalist reported week by week on her
128 | investigation of a murder case, actually offered "a pretty good
129 | dramatization of the historical process," and with "a compelling
130 | narrative" besides. And [Benjamin G. Wright has had success teaching
131 | students the basic concept of historiography][] by having them examine
132 | the "history" tab of a Wikipedia page. Such examples, and I could cite
133 | many others, raise the question of whether the capstone project of a
134 | history major or independent study could be something like a podcast or
135 | a Wikipedia page, instead of only something like a paper. To cite a
136 | final example out of many possible ones, Michelle Moravec uses
137 | [Pinterest][] and an assignment in which students [live-tweet as a
138 | historical figure][moravec].^[See more digitally inflected assignments on
139 | Moravec's [Pinterest board on digital assignments][].]
140 |
141 | If such digital work can help instructors assess learning outcomes while
142 | simultaneously preparing history majors to "do history" in the same
143 | arena where they probably do most of their writing already, why not? And
144 | to conclude with a more affirmative reason why *so*, I believe such
145 | capstone projects could have the added benefit of helping students to
146 | understand the historical situatedness of digital tools themselves. One
147 | reason we have relied on term papers, as Grafton and Grossman note, is
148 | that "it's the only way for a student to get past being a passive
149 | consumer and critic [of historical narratives] and to become a creator,
150 | someone who reads other historians in the light of having tried to do
151 | what they do."
152 |
153 | I'd like to stress that last phrase, because I think it could stand as a
154 | good ideal definition of a graduate with a history major, too: *someone
155 | who reads other historians in the light of having tried to do what they
156 | do.* By the same logic, if we want our students to be more than passive
157 | consumers of Wikipedia or Twitter or podcasts or "Drunk History" videos,
158 | we'll do more than teach them how to evaluate a website's reliability
159 | and format a citation to it in a footnote. We'll encourage them to
160 | become a digital creator, someone who consumes digital resources in the
161 | light of having tried to do what their makers do---and *tried* is key
162 | here, lest we fail to start teaching digital history out of a false
163 | belief that we have to show a student how to do all of it in order to do
164 | any of it.
165 |
166 | Through the process of writing a Wikipedia page, or engaging in a
167 | Twitter debate, far more than by reading about these media, considering
168 | warnings about Google, or simply incorporating websites into a paper,
169 | students will come to appreciate that these media are themselves in the
170 | stream of time and have their own specific and [sometimes sordid
171 | histories][]. And in so doing, history majors in the digital age may
172 | more fully achieve another of the learning outcomes identified by the
173 | [AHA History Tuning Project][AHA's Tuning project], which is for
174 | students to "recognize where they are in history."
175 |
176 | [ringing defense of the value of history]: https://theamericanscholar.org/habits-of-mind/
177 | [AHA's Tuning project]: http://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/current-projects/tuning/history-discipline-core
178 | [Pew survey of middle-school and high-school teachers from 2012]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/30/few-students-likely-to-use-print-books-for-research/
179 | [professional historians are also increasingly prone to begin their
180 | research online]: http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/supporting-changing-research-practices-historians
181 | "Ithaka report on changing research practices of historians"
182 | [making]: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/dh/12146032.0001.001/1:9/--teaching-history-in-the-digital-age?g=dculture;rgn=div1;view=fulltext;xc=1
183 | "Making chapter"
184 | [historian Eric Rauchway recently observed]: http://crookedtimber.org/2014/12/19/concluding-serial-or-koenig-v-ranke/
185 | "Crooked Timber post"
186 | [Benjamin G. Wright has had success teaching students the basic
187 | concept of historiography]: http://digitalhistory.blogs.rice.edu/2013/03/06/wikipedia-as-historiographical-microcosm/
188 | "Wikipedia historiography assignment"
189 | [sometimes sordid histories]: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wikipedia_editing_disputes_the_crowdsourced_encyclopedia_has_become_a_rancorous.single.html
190 | [moravec]: http://historyinthecity.blogspot.com/2013/01/experiments-in-live-tweeting-as.html "Live-tweeting as a historical figure assignment"
191 | [Pinterest]: http://historyinthecity.blogspot.com/2014/08/using-pinterest-to-teach-womens.html
192 | [Pinterest board on digital assignments]: https://www.pinterest.com/professmoravec/digitally-assignments/
193 |
194 |
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/teaching/howtodiscuss.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % How to Discuss a Book for History
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % August 19, 2013
4 |
5 | In an earlier post on [How to Read for History][], I offered advice to
6 | undergraduate students who are assigned heavy reading loads for history
7 | classes. My central point in that essay was that reading is best thought
8 | of as a kind of conversation---ideally, a conversation that will
9 | continue after a reader has finished a book.
10 |
11 | But, ideally or not, if you take history classes, you more than likely
12 | will find yourself being *required* to converse about the books you have
13 | read. If a professor assigns a book and expects you to participate in a
14 | class discussion about it, what should you do? What will you say?
15 |
16 | If you are just beginning your study of history, you may find yourself
17 | wanting to make comments like the ones listed below. These hypothetical
18 | comments are quite commonly heard in undergraduate classes, and they are
19 | fine as far as they go. But this post is designed to help you make your
20 | comments go *farther*. These show, at a minimum, that you engaged with
21 | the book beyond a memorization of what it said; you had the beginnings
22 | of a "conversation" with the author. But each of these good comments,
23 | with a little more thinking and preparation, can become *great*
24 | comments.
25 |
26 | ### "I didn't like this book. The topic just didn't interest me."
27 |
28 | If the subject of the book was boring to you, see if you can figure out
29 | why the *author* found the topic interesting. What are the differences
30 | between you and the author that might explain why he or she spent years
31 | researching this subject?
32 |
33 | Is there a section of the book in which the author makes the case for
34 | the topic's significance? If so, focus on that section and try to tease
35 | out why it didn't convince you.
36 |
37 | If the topic of the book didn't interest you, you may not be alone.
38 | Often writers take up a subject because they have found that previous
39 | historians or writers never thought to consider it. See if there is a
40 | section in the book that discusses what previous writers have said about
41 | this topic. You may find an earlier camp that shared your lack of
42 | interest in the topic; see if you agree with their reasons, and if so,
43 | think about how you would explain why the topic lacks significance.
44 |
45 | On the other hand, be aware that your dislike of the topic might not be
46 | universally shared. Consider more specifically why other writers whom
47 | the book mentions have considered this topic. Look back at the previous
48 | or later reading assignments made by your professor, and see if you can
49 | make a guess about why this topic was included in this class. Does it
50 | connect with other themes or questions that have come up? If so, name
51 | those connecting themes, and if not, point this out by saying
52 | specifically why the topic seems out of place or "not like the others"
53 | in the course.
54 |
55 | Finally, think carefully about whether your negative reaction to the
56 | book was due to the content or the author's style of presentation. If
57 | the latter, you may have had reactions like the next two.
58 |
59 | ### "The book was repetitive. S/he kept making the same point."
60 |
61 | What *was* that point? Others might have missed what you found to be
62 | everywhere, so work on summarizing, as concisely as possible, what you
63 | identified as the main, constantly repeated point. Were the repeated
64 | points major ones that deserved emphasis, or did the author frequently
65 | repeat points that you think were minor in comparison to the main
66 | points?
67 |
68 | ### "The book was way too long."
69 |
70 | What could the author have cut out without sacrificing the main point or
71 | argument of the book? This reaction offers you another way to articulate
72 | the main argument of the book by explaining specifically what you
73 | considered superfluous.
74 |
75 | ### "The author doesn't even talk about Topic X."
76 |
77 | Would the inclusion of this topic have changed the main argument of the
78 | book? Explain how. Every book must stop somewhere, but some things can
79 | safely be left to another book while others are crucial. Is the topic
80 | that you wanted addressed one of these? If so, explain why.
81 |
82 | ### "I found the content shocking. Can you believe people in the past did this?"
83 |
84 | Why was this content unfamiliar or shocking to you? Is there a gap
85 | between the way the typical person "remembers" the past and the work
86 | that historians do? Were you taught about this subject in school? If
87 | not, do you have ideas about *why* not? *Should* the subject be taught
88 | or known more generally, and if so, why?
89 |
90 | ### "They did a lot of research and clearly know their stuff. I can't think of anything to criticize!"
91 |
92 | Take a close look at the bibliography or the footnotes. What kind of
93 | research or evidence did the author most rely on? Are there particular
94 | collections of documents or particular kinds of sources (documents,
95 | maps, images, films, novels, etc.) that the author uses most frequently?
96 | Would research in different sorts of collections, produced by different
97 | historical actors, have changed the book in any way?
98 |
99 | Alternatively, see if you can find an exemplary passage where the
100 | expertise and skill of the author is on full display. Why did this
101 | passage strike you as such a clear example of the depth of the author's
102 | research? How did s/he use evidence in this passage to persuade you, the
103 | reader, of a point's validity?
104 |
105 | ### "I loved this book! What more can I say?"
106 |
107 | As with the last question, see if you can make a list of the specific
108 | things that you liked. Was it the extent or quality of the evidence? The
109 | author's writing style? How did the choices made by the author improve
110 | the book, and can you imagine a different choice that might have made it
111 | less successful? You can make this good comment great by pointing to
112 | specific passages that exemplify the book's strengths.
113 |
114 | On the other hand, be aware that your love for the book may not be
115 | universal. Are there any hints within the text itself that other authors
116 | disagree with this one? If not, seek out a review of the book online or
117 | in the library. Does the book or the review point to larger debates
118 | within the history profession, and if so, can you guess what the major
119 | counter-arguments to your support for the book would be? Prepare for the
120 | discussion by thinking about those counter-arguments so you can better
121 | defend your agreement with the author's position.
122 |
123 | Conclusion
124 | ----------
125 |
126 | In all of these cases, the best way to make a good comment great is to
127 | take each book you read seriously as a labor-intensive,
128 | long-in-the-making expression of the author's considered opinions. Those
129 | opinions therefore deserve your careful consideration, too.
130 |
131 | The author you have read probably began the process of writing this book
132 | with comments or reactions not unlike the ones listed above: he or she
133 | found something shocking or intriguing, or disagreed strongly with
134 | something else he or she read. But as the existence of this book shows,
135 | there was much more to be said about the subject than "I wonder why they
136 | did that then?" or "That view is just wrong!"
137 |
138 | Thus, even better than using the tips above is to use the book itself as
139 | your guide for how to make thoughtful comments about it. Just as the
140 | author pushed beyond an initial reaction to a topic or debate, you can
141 | deepen your reaction and thereby enrich the discussion in your history
142 | class.
143 |
144 | Further Reading
145 | ---------------
146 |
147 | For more thoughts on how to participate in or facilitate class
148 | discussions about a history book, check out these other guides:
149 |
150 | - [Hints for Class Discussion][], from History and American Studies at
151 | the University of Mary Washington
152 | - [Tips on Leading Class Discussions][], by Rachel Seidman
153 | - [Reading Well to Discuss Well][], by Harry Williams
154 | - [Facilitating a Discussion][] from the University of Oregon
155 |
156 | And if you have ideas or links of your own, you can send them to me on
157 | [Twitter][] and I'll consider them for inclusion here. Have a great
158 | discussion, and happy reading!
159 |
160 | [How to Read for History]: /howtoread.html
161 | [Hints for Class Discussion]: http://cas.umw.edu/historyamericanstudies/history-department-resources/oral-presentations/hints-for-class-discussion/
162 | [Tips on Leading Class Discussions]: http://apps.carleton.edu/curricular/history/study/leaddiscussion/
163 | [Reading Well to Discuss Well]: http://apps.carleton.edu/curricular/history/study/read/discuss/
164 | [Facilitating a Discussion]: http://tep.uoregon.edu/resources/faqs/presenting/facilitatediscussion.html
165 | [Twitter]: http://twitter.com/wcaleb
166 |
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/teaching/methods-in-us-cultural-history.txt:
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1 | % Methods in U.S. Cultural History
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % January 13, 2012
4 |
5 |
6 | This post was originally published on my old blog as [Methods in U.S.
7 | Cultural History][].
8 |
9 |
10 | Today I started teaching my semester-long graduate seminar, HIST 587:
11 | Methods in U.S. Cultural History. The [syllabus][] I will be using is
12 | very similar to the one I used in the [Fall 2009][] semester, in that
13 | the major objective will be to produce a draft of an article-length
14 | essay based on original research. But I am also going to be trying at
15 | least two new things this time around.
16 |
17 | First, I am planning to share extensive early drafts and notes from my
18 | first graduate school research paper, which ultimately became (after
19 | *much* revision) my [first published article][]. My plan is to let
20 | students in the course see the often messy and gradual process by which
21 | an article is made, a process that can unfortunately be obscured by the
22 | more finished products that graduate students are used to reading.
23 |
24 | My reason for picking my own article to pick apart in class is *not*
25 | because I think the process that produced it was exemplary. On the
26 | contrary, while dusting off my old files for this article I’ve already
27 | found embarrassing mistakes, inefficiencies, and clunky methods that I
28 | would not use again. With the availability of digitized versions of many
29 | of the sources I used then, I’m not sure my research strategy would even
30 | be exactly the same today. And I’m also planning to share the readers’
31 | reports I received recommending rejection of an earlier draft of this
32 | article, submitted to a different journal.
33 |
34 | I have to say I’m making these decision with some hesitance; in an
35 | advice essay that I respect a lot, [Phil Agre][] explicitly urges
36 | advisors to resist the temptation to talk about themselves. But my
37 | thinking is this: as even Agre acknowledges, when people offer advice
38 | about methods, how to do research, how to get something published,
39 | usually they *are* referring implicitly to their own experiences and
40 | particular choices, even when they don’t say so explicitly or realize it
41 | consciously. I’m hoping that sharing my own experience will make overt
42 | and transparent the particular stories and choices I would be drawing on
43 | anyway in teaching a methods class.
44 |
45 | That transparency will hopefully communicate that my own decisions and
46 | methods are only some of the many possible ones; to reinforce that
47 | point, I’ve invited the authors of two other articles we will be reading
48 | to Skype into our seminar and talk about their methods and work. I’m
49 | also hoping by my own willingness to talk about my methods to encourage
50 | students in the course to share what they do.
51 |
52 | The other new thing I’m going to try to do more consciously in this
53 | course is to introduce discussions of how digital tools for research and
54 | communication are (or are not) changing methods in U.S. cultural history
55 | and beyond. This is a subject that has been much debated of late: some
56 | believe that digital humanities [is][] or [should be][] changing
57 | everything about our methods; [others][] are deeply [skeptical][]. Most
58 | of what I read on the subject falls [somewhere in between][], as do I.
59 |
60 | Still, as I’ve noted before on this blog, I do think it’s safe to say
61 | that there are [many changes afoot][] in the way that new historians
62 | will [do research][], [present their findings][], and communicate with
63 | each other through conferences like [SHEAR][] and the [AHA][]. When I
64 | started the article that I’m planning to share in class in the fall of
65 | 2001, my research process consisted of sitting in front of a microfilm
66 | machine listening to music on a 15GB [Archos Jukebox][]. Since then my
67 | research still involves microfilm, of course, but new methods have also
68 | become part of my daily workflow. In this course I’m hoping to stimulate
69 | some discussion about these changes, partly with one of the week’s
70 | readings but also throughout the course.
71 |
72 | Perhaps it is misguided to introduce digital history in a methods course
73 | that is still fairly traditional (maybe even Jurassic, if you agree with
74 | [Bethany Nowviskie][is]). But I’m disinclined to see decisions about
75 | what goes in a methods course as a [zero-sum game][]. The environment in
76 | which historians do their work is certainly changing, but I think this
77 | calls less for an asteroid-like obliteration of the old than for
78 | selective adaptation and openness to new methodological mutations. Even
79 | in the brave new world current graduate students are entering, I think
80 | it’s safe to say there will still be many scholars writing journal
81 | articles. At least, I hope there will be. It’s not the best or only
82 | form, but it has its virtues, and I think it’s worth preserving
83 | alongside whatever other new species of scholarship are currently being
84 | born.
85 |
86 | [Methods in U.S. Cultural History]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=195
87 | "Permanent Link: Methods in U.S. Cultural History"
88 | [syllabus]: http://caleb.mcdaniel.web.rice.edu/pdf/hist587syllabus.pdf
89 | [Fall 2009]: http://caleb.mcdaniel.web.rice.edu/pdf/hist587.pdf
90 | [first published article]: http://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/27613
91 | [Phil Agre]: http://vlsicad.ucsd.edu/Research/Advice/network.html#section10
92 | [is]: http://nowviskie.org/2011/it-starts-on-day-one/
93 | [should be]: http://chronicle.com/article/Historians-Reflect-on-Forces/130262/
94 | [others]: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/the-digital-humanities-and-the-transcending-of-mortality/
95 | [skeptical]: http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/01/utopianism-of-digital-humanities.html
96 | [somewhere in between]: http://miriamposner.com/blog/?p=1101
97 | [many changes afoot]: http://activehistory.ca/2012/01/too-much-information-the-case-for-the-programming-historian/
98 | [do research]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=150
99 | [present their findings]: http://www.shermansmarch.org/
100 | [SHEAR]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=171
101 | [AHA]: http://emn.sharonhoward.org/2012/01/twitter-aha-2012/
102 | [Archos Jukebox]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series
103 | [zero-sum game]: https://twitter.com/#!/dancohen/status/156921729602691072
104 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/teaching/teaching-digital-history.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Resolutions for Teaching Digital History
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % January 6, 2013
4 |
5 |
6 | These are the comments I prepared for a roundtable session on [Teaching
7 | Digital History Methods for History Graduate
8 | Students](http://aha.confex.com/aha/2013/webprogram/Session8610.html) at
9 | the 2013 Annual Meeting of the AHA in New Orleans.
10 |
11 |
12 | Last semester, I received some funding from my campus's Humanities
13 | Research Center to run what the center calls a
14 | [Masterclass](http://hrc.rice.edu/masterclass/)---a year-long,
15 | one-credit special topics course in which both undergraduates and
16 | graduates can enroll. [My masterclass
17 | course](http://digitalhistory.blogs.rice.edu) is on digital history, but
18 | in my case "masterclass" is a bit of a misnomer. I am far from having
19 | "mastered" digital history, and have not yet made serious use of digital
20 | history methods in my own research. My institution has no center in
21 | digital history, and my department has no cluster of self-identifying
22 | digital historians. The "masterclass" so far has basically been a
23 | lecture series in which I have invited digital historians from
24 | *off-campus* to speak about their methods and lead practical workshops
25 | and discussions with my students.
26 |
27 | I say all this to make clear that my experience in training graduate
28 | students in digital history methods---the topic of this roundtable---is
29 | limited. Other than the so-called "masterclass," my experience amounts
30 | to having grafted some discussions of digital history projects and
31 | digital tools into my existing, otherwise conventional [methods
32 | seminar](http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/methods-in-us-cultural-history.html).
33 | On some aspects of digital history, I have students who know far more
34 | than I do.
35 |
36 | These confessions may make you wonder why I'm even on this panel. I
37 | wondered too when Sharon Leon asked me to join. I *think* I'm here,
38 | however, because my situation is probably fairly typical. Many of us
39 | find ourselves wanting to know more about digital history, or at least
40 | feeling like our students should know more about it, but we lack
41 | institutional precedent, resources, individual experience, or even all
42 | three. That's the situation I want to speak to today: how do you teach
43 | methods that you are just learning about yourself?
44 |
45 | Now, to put the question that way shows that this conversation about
46 | *digital* history education immediately raises larger questions about
47 | training graduate students in general. Let me lay my cards on the table
48 | by saying that my own teaching philosophy doesn't regard my own areas of
49 | ignorance as problems so much as opportunities. Often, my role as a
50 | graduate instructor is to model informed befuddlement about history, to
51 | be actively not-knowing in front of students and then to demonstrate how
52 | I learn and think about something new to me.
53 |
54 | Indeed, that's what I want to do in this roundtable: to think out loud
55 | about *teaching* methods that are still new to me. Instead of expertise,
56 | what I want to offer---in the spirit of the New Year---are several
57 | *resolutions* I've made about teaching digital history with some
58 | thoughts-in-progress about how it's gone so far.
59 |
60 | My first resolution: *I resolve to share with students my own reasons
61 | for interest in digital history.* My masterclass began, as many classes
62 | do, with my asking students why they were taking the class; but it also
63 | started with my telling them [why I was teaching
64 | it](http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/why-study-digital-history.html). In my
65 | case, I started to become interested in digital history when I realized
66 | that I was already a digital historian whether I wanted to be or
67 | not---that is, when I realized that I rely heavily for my work on
68 | digital databases and digital tools whose workings I needed to better
69 | understand. In your case, you may feel a professional obligation to talk
70 | about digital skills given that an increasing number of job ads mention
71 | them and an increasing number of careers require them. But whatever your
72 | reasons for being here might be, you can resolve to be open with
73 | students about them. I've found that this simple step is not a bad way
74 | to get quickly into some of the debates at the center of the digital
75 | humanities.
76 |
77 | My second resolution: *I resolve to encourage students to build an
78 | online presence.* In both of my graduate seminars, students create blogs
79 | in which they write about course readings and projects, and many
80 | students also join Twitter. This has two important effects. First, it
81 | extends our classroom by connecting students with practicing digital
82 | historians at other institutions who are more expert than I. Second, the
83 | practice of running a simple blog or website and playing around with
84 | it---changing themes, installing Wordpress plugins, tweaking CSS and
85 | HTML---can be a good preparation for learning about more complex digital
86 | history tools and encourage more reflective use of things like search
87 | engines and databases.[^1]
88 |
89 | Third, *I resolve to assign some digital history projects and articles
90 | as part of the reading for my courses.* Even if students in a particular
91 | course do not make a digital project, they can learn how to examine and
92 | evaluate articles and websites that do make extensive use of digital
93 | methods. So, for example, in my methods in social and cultural history
94 | course, placing a couple of articles that do rudimentary text mining on
95 | the syllabus exposes students to such work and again encourages
96 | reflection on the way they themselves use keyword searching or databases
97 | like Google Books.
98 |
99 | My fourth resolution: *I resolve to learn from graduate students and
100 | colleagues from outside my department.* I have to say that I've learned
101 | a ton just from reading the tutorials and blogs of graduate students in
102 | classes like [the one Fred Gibbs
103 | teaches](http://www.fredgibbs.net/clio3workspace/blog/) at George Mason.
104 | I consider blogging graduate students like [Cameron
105 | Blevins](http://www.cameronblevins.org), [Jeri
106 | Wieringa](http://jeriwieringa.com), and [Benjamin
107 | Schmidt](http://bmschmidt.wordpress.com) my digital hisory teachers. And
108 | at my own institution, many students and staff members have more
109 | expertise on GIS software or web server administration than I. Training
110 | others in these methods requires being trained, and a willingness---as
111 | [Stephen Ramsay once put
112 | it](http://stephenramsay.us/text/2010/10/08/care-of-the-soul.html)---to
113 | sometimes be "the dumbest person in the room."
114 |
115 | And finally, *I resolve to be open with students about my own research and
116 | learning process.* If students are often reluctant to try new things and fail,
117 | who can blame them if we are too? That's why, when I recently used part of
118 | a leave to learn some computer programming skills, [I blogged about the
119 | experience](http://digitalhistory.blogs.rice.edu/category/python/) for my
120 | masterclass. It's also why, in my methods course, I shared with students the
121 | history of my first article, from outline to seminar paper to publication.
122 | I not only gave them access to every rough draft of the paper that I wrote, but
123 | also showed them reader's reports (both from the first, rejected submission and
124 | the second, accepted one) and the methods I used to keep my research notes
125 | along the way. This meant, of course, talking with them about dead ends, false
126 | starts, and things I wish I had known then about organizing notes or keeping
127 | citations.
128 |
129 | My goal here was both to demystify the publishing process for them and
130 | to demonstrate that it's OK---and inevitable---to feel lost at certain
131 | points along the way. Perhaps that does not seem immediately relevant to
132 | teaching digital history, but I've found, as [Ramsay has also
133 | said](http://stephenramsay.us/2012/06/10/learning-to-program.html), that
134 | learning about computers and digital methods requires not so much
135 | special expertise or experience as it does a willingness to fail in
136 | public, an ability to endure error messages and push through frustrating
137 | problems. To the extent that I can make myself and my graduate students
138 | less paralyzed by the new and more comfortable with the struggle, I can
139 | begin to train them in digital history.
140 |
141 | [^1]: This, at least, has been my own experience: starting my own blog
142 | as a graduate student made me roughly familiar with things like HTML
143 | and Javascript; like a tumbleweed, I picked up bits and pieces of
144 | knowledge along the way that have accumulated into the skill set I
145 | now have.
146 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/teaching/teaching-with-blogs.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Teaching with Blogs
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % October 13, 2010
4 |
5 |
6 | This post was originally published on my old blog as [Teaching with
7 | Blogs][].
8 |
9 |
10 | Tomorrow at noon, I am going to be speaking about blogging and teaching
11 | at a “brown bag” [workshop at the Digital Media Center][] at Rice. This
12 | post contains a rough outline of what I plan to say, as well as links to
13 | resources that I will mention at the workshop.
14 |
15 | My comments will fall into three categories:
16 |
17 | 1. I’ll survey how I’ve actually used blogs in my past courses, to give
18 | a sense of the variety of possible formats available with a fairly
19 | low amount of technical know-how.
20 | 2. I’ll share some general lessons and tips I think I’ve learned from
21 | these experiences.
22 | 3. I’ll briefly talk about the technical side of setting up blogs and
23 | maintaining them over the course of a semester, focusing
24 | particularly on how to use the WordPress MU installation, [Blogs @
25 | Rice University.][]
26 |
27 | Here is [my slide presentation][] for the talk.
28 |
29 | ## Part I: Examples ##
30 |
31 | [PLEASE NOTE: Some of the blogs linked below can only be viewed by users
32 | on the Rice University campus network.]
33 |
34 | First, let me summarize briefly how I’ve personally used blogs in the
35 | classroom. This is not an exhaustive list, and some of these examples
36 | work better as warnings than as models, but these illustrate how many
37 | permutations are possible even within fairly narrow parameters. I’ll
38 | talk tomorrow in greater depth about what worked and what didn’t.
39 |
40 | *Early Attempts, Mixed Results*
41 |
42 | - [American Activists Abroad][] (2004), an upper-level history
43 | seminar. (Related: [instructional handout][] and [“welcome”
44 | post][].)
45 | - [Nineteenth-Century America][] (2008), a survey course with emphasis
46 | on analysis of primary sources. (NOTE: the page linked above will
47 | not render correctly in your browser–this blog was originally
48 | published on a server at another institution, so restoring the blog
49 | with its original “style” and look would take some work. But you can
50 | read the posts and comments. Also see my overly convoluted
51 | [rubric][] (PDF) for evaluating the blogging assignment in this
52 | course.)
53 | - [The Rise of Transnational Activism][] (2008), an upper-level
54 | history seminar. (See [the assignment explanation][].)
55 |
56 | *Later Attempts, Better Results*
57 |
58 | - [American Radicals and Reformers][] (2008), an upper-level history
59 | seminar. (Look for explanation of blogging [assignments][] in two
60 | places, under “Blog Post” and under “Seminar Contributions.”)
61 | - [American Radicals and Reformers][1] (2010), an upper-level history
62 | seminar. (See explanation of comments assignment [here][].)
63 | - [Legendary Americans][] (2009), a freshman seminar with the most
64 | complex blog set-up I’ve used. In addition to a main course blog
65 | where I posted reading questions and general announcements, students
66 | contributed to small group blogs (see the links under “Links”). On
67 | these group blogs, students made one weekly post responding to one
68 | of my posted reading questions and one weekly post reporting on
69 | progress with a group project they were working on. (See assignment
70 | discussion [here][2].)
71 |
72 | In these case studies, using a blog fulfilled various functions, ranging
73 | from course management to student discussion and the monitoring of
74 | semester-long projects. These blogs varied in terms of how much
75 | direction I gave in my prompts, and in how much posting students were
76 | expected to do. This list doesn’t contain examples of other possible
77 | uses of blogs in the classroom, like having each student create his/her
78 | own blog to do free writing or journal-ing, or to create stand-alone
79 | webpages.
80 |
81 | ## Part II: Reflections and Tips ##
82 |
83 | These tips may read like directives, but they are really things that I’m
84 | telling myself as I reflect on these varied experiences. The “you” in
85 | these sentences is primarily me.
86 |
87 | 1. A blog is not a silver bullet for sparking student participation.
88 | Don’t assume students will be familiar with the medium, or that they
89 | will automatically talk more in a blog setting, or that they will
90 | “check in” regularly without good reasons for doing so.
91 | 2. A blogging assignment is a type of writing assignment. The same
92 | sorts of guidelines that make a writing assignment good (i.e.,
93 | specific prompts, clear expectations, etc.) apply to blogging
94 | assignments.
95 | 3. The more you engage with the blog (posting, commenting, [flagging
96 | good posts][], mentioning posts in classroom discussion) the more
97 | students will engage with the blog. If you leave the blog alone and
98 | seldom make an appearance, students will tend to do the same.
99 | 4. The compelling reasons for using a blog depend on what learning
100 | objectives you want to advance, so be sure you have a clear
101 | objective in mind before assigning blog posts. Would another type of
102 | assignment work better or as well?
103 |
104 | For me, blogs help advance my objective of teaching students to write.
105 | The virtue of having them respond to readings online–where other
106 | students or non-class members can read what they write–is that it
107 | encourages them to think about audience, clarity, and the use of
108 | evidence. Writing only for me, the Audience of One (aka The Grader), has
109 | its advantages, too. But if I want to teach general habits of good
110 | communication that will “export” well to other settings, then blogging
111 | has particular virtues. When prompts are specific, expectations are
112 | clear, and my engagement with the blog is sufficient, online posts and
113 | comments also serve as excellent springboards for in-class discussions.
114 |
115 | ## Part III: Technical Stuff ##
116 |
117 | At the workshop I’ll talk a little bit about using WordPress MU and will
118 | even set up an example blog that will appear [here][3] once we’ve made
119 | it. A few things I want to highlight are: how to manage Users, how to
120 | create and use “Categories,” how to change Themes, and how to manage
121 | widgets.
122 |
123 | I’ll also discuss the management of “privacy” settings. In past Rice
124 | courses where I have allowed the blog to be seen by anyone on the
125 | Internet, I have asked students to sign [a Blog Consent Form][] (PDF).
126 |
127 | Finally, I’ll have some suggestions for how to manage your workflow if
128 | you use a Course Blog, including a brief introduction to RSS readers.
129 | (Here’s a post I’ve provided to students [explaining RSS][].)
130 |
131 | For some other examples of “how to” posts and technical tips that I’ve
132 | given students, [click here][].
133 |
134 | ## Other Recommended Reading ##
135 |
136 | - [Notes on Class Blogging][], by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
137 | - [Making Student Blogs Pay Off with Blog Audits][], by Mark Sample
138 | - [Teaching and Learning with New Media][], by Jeffrey McClurken
139 | - Some [useful links][] to other blog examples and resources, also by
140 | Jeff McClurken
141 | - [Blogs for Learning and Reflective Practice?][], by Jeff Nugent
142 | - [Aggregating Student Blogs][], by Chad Black
143 | - [Student Contracts for Digital Projects][], by Jeff McClurken
144 | - [A Better Discussion][], by Lisa M. Lane
145 | - [Designing [Writing] Assignments and Presenting Them to Students][],
146 | by Margaret Procter
147 | - [Technology and the Pseudo-Intimacy of the Classroom][], an
148 | interview with Jerry Graff at Academic Commons
149 |
150 | [Teaching with Blogs]: http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=90
151 | "Permanent Link: Teaching with Blogs"
152 | [workshop at the Digital Media Center]: http://library.rice.edu/events/dr.-caleb-mcdaniel-on-classroom-blogging
153 | [Blogs @ Rice University.]: http://blogs.rice.edu/
154 | [my slide presentation]: http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~wcm1/pdf/teachingblogsslides.pdf
155 | [American Activists Abroad]: http://activistsabroad.blogspot.com
156 | [instructional handout]: http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~wcm1/pdf/blogsetupex.pdf
157 | [“welcome” post]: http://activistsabroad.blogspot.com/2004/09/welcome.html
158 | [Nineteenth-Century America]: http://hist2520.blogspot.com
159 | [rubric]: http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~wcm1/pdf/blogrubricex.pdf
160 | [The Rise of Transnational Activism]: http://hist396.wordpress.com
161 | [the assignment explanation]: http://hist396.wordpress.com/assignments/
162 | [American Radicals and Reformers]: http://hist423.wordpress.com
163 | [assignments]: http://hist423.wordpress.com/assignments/
164 | [1]: http://hist423.blogs.rice.edu
165 | [here]: http://hist423.blogs.rice.edu/assignments/
166 | [Legendary Americans]: http://hist159.blogs.rice.edu
167 | [2]: http://hist159.blogs.rice.edu/assignments/
168 | [flagging good posts]: http://hist159.blogs.rice.edu/2009/09/21/weekend-roundup/
169 | [3]: http://hist246.blogs.rice.edu
170 | [a Blog Consent Form]: http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~wcm1/pdf/blogconsent.pdf
171 | [explaining RSS]: http://hist423.wordpress.com/2008/08/28/thursday-bullets/
172 | [click here]: http://hist159.blogs.rice.edu/category/blogging/
173 | [Notes on Class Blogging]: http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/notes-on-class-blogging/
174 | [Making Student Blogs Pay Off with Blog Audits]: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/making-student-blogs-pay-off-with-blog-audits/27559
175 | [Teaching and Learning with New Media]: http://mcclurken.org/presentations/catl/
176 | [useful links]: http://mcclurken.org/presentations/jmu/
177 | [Blogs for Learning and Reflective Practice?]: http://www.jeffnugent.net/blog/?p=112
178 | [Aggregating Student Blogs]: http://parezcoydigo.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/aggregating-student-blogs/
179 | [Student Contracts for Digital Projects]: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/student-contracts-for-digital-projects/23011
180 | [A Better Discussion]: http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/?p=35
181 | [Designing [Writing] Assignments and Presenting Them to Students]: http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/faculty/designing-assignments
182 | [Technology and the Pseudo-Intimacy of the Classroom]: http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/interview/graff
183 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/teaching/why-study-digital-history.txt:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | % Why Study Digital History?
2 | % W. Caleb McDaniel
3 | % August 31, 2012
4 |
5 |
6 | This academic year I am leading a Rice University [masterclass][] on
7 | [digital history][]. This essay is [cross-posted][] on our course blog,
8 | along with a comment box.
9 |
10 |
11 | In our first meeting of [Digital History at Rice][digital history], we
12 | each shared our reasons for wanting to study this subject. Here I want
13 | to elaborate a little bit on mine. My graduate program in history did
14 | not offer any training in digital history methods, but in the last ten
15 | years, I've had a series of realizations that make me want to learn more
16 | about them.
17 |
18 | ### 1. I realized I was already doing digital history, whether I wanted to or not.
19 |
20 | Since the 1990s, primary sources in my field---nineteenth-century
21 | American history---have been digitized at an incredible rate, by [Google
22 | Books][], the [Internet Archive][], [Making of America][], and many
23 | others. When I began my dissertation, I spent much of my time looking
24 | through microfilm of the antislavery newspaper the *Liberator*. By the
25 | time I finished, there were multiple digitized copies of the paper
26 | available from at least three private companies.
27 |
28 | It would be foolish not to make use of these resources, so I do---all
29 | the time. But the more I started to notice the differences among
30 | databases and search engines, the more I began to realize that by using
31 | them, I was already engaging in a collaborative enterprise with software
32 | engineers. To be sure, this is a collaboration with strangers whose
33 | names I seldom learn, but the decisions that they make about how to
34 | program search engines, how to structure databases, and what formats to
35 | make available to me now have a direct bearing on the work that I do as
36 | an historian of the nineteenth century. That made me realize that even
37 | if I never make a web scraper, scan an archive, or encode a document
38 | myself, I needed to understand something about the way these things are
39 | done if I want to use these tools effectively and intelligently. Indeed,
40 | it's now as important to know something about these things as it is to
41 | know how to read a book or write a book review.
42 |
43 | The more I began to think about this issue, the more I realized how
44 | ubiquitous these invisible collaborations were in my day-to-day work;
45 | every time I entered a query into Google, or fired up Microsoft Excel, I
46 | was, if not *programming,* at least *being* programmed and relying on
47 | the programming others had done. Paying attention to digital history
48 | slowly made me start to realize [how much I don't know about things like
49 | database design][], but reading blog posts like that one and following
50 | digital historians through social media means I now know a lot more than
51 | I once did. That means that (at the very least) I can now make more
52 | informed decisions about the tools I use.
53 |
54 | So far I've related these points to my research, but my experiences
55 | teaching were also a big part of coming to the realization that I needed
56 | to study digital history. In the very first course I taught, I used a
57 | blog, and I have been [teaching with blogs][] or online forums ever
58 | since. But that experience also confronted me with the sometimes
59 | frustrating limitations of different platforms, ranging from Blogger to
60 | Wordpress to Blackboard---all of which has forced me to pay more
61 | attention to what is going on under the hood of the digital tools I use.
62 |
63 | ### 2. I realized other people in my field were going to do digital history, whether I did or not.
64 |
65 | Even if, by some miracle of time travel, I were now able to do my work
66 | without computers at all, other historians who write about things I care
67 | about are going to be doing digital history. In one of the journals I
68 | read regularly, [articles citing digital databases now appear all the
69 | time][].
70 |
71 | That means I need to know something about digital history if I want to
72 | be able to assess my peers' work fairly and teach it to my students.
73 | This is a responsibility I owe to the general public, as well as to my
74 | students and colleagues. As [Ted Underwood][] notes, journalists and
75 | academics in a variety of fields aren't going to stop using digital
76 | tools to draw sweeping generalizations about history even if I choose
77 | not to. Historians and humanists "need to step up our game," as
78 | Underwood puts it, if we want to counteract misleading impressions drawn
79 | from casual use of tools like Google's ngram. At the same time, if I'm
80 | going to be a responsible member of the academy, I need to be able to
81 | think and speak critically about bad uses of digital history without
82 | dismissing out of hand [more careful and sophisticated work][].
83 |
84 | ### 3. I realized that digital history might have uses for me in my future work, whether or not I could foresee them in the present.
85 |
86 | Back in 2005 and 2006, while writing one of the chapters of [my
87 | dissertation][], I spent quite a bit of time tracking the movements of
88 | American abolitionist Henry Clarke Wright during his lengthy European
89 | tour. I had his journal entries and dozens of dispatches written by
90 | Wright to the *Liberator* from places like Basel, Lintz, Innsbruck,
91 | Mannheim, and other locations that were not always easy to find on a
92 | contemporary map. So to organize the trip in my mind, I located an old
93 | map of Europe on the [David Rumsey Map Collection][], printed it out,
94 | and drew on it to produce this:
95 |
96 | ![Henry Clarke Wright's European Journey][]
97 |
98 | Not long after that, while making campus job visits in 2006, I also
99 | decided that I wanted a handout that would give audience members a quick
100 | sense of where the main characters in my dissertation lived and which
101 | countries were central to my study of transatlantic abolitionism. Though
102 | it pains me to say it now, I actually used Microsoft Word to make a very
103 | simple image that looked like this:
104 |
105 | ![Selected Members of Garrisonian Networks][]
106 |
107 | I wince to look at how simple these maps are now, given what I know
108 | about the capabilities of even the least powerful GIS software and basic
109 | principles of network analysis. But at the time I didn't really know how
110 | to make these images any other way. A trip down memory lane in my
111 | bookmarks shows that I saved [this how-to post][] in my Delicious
112 | account in May 2006. In truth, however, that was not the time---while
113 | finishing my dissertation and preparing job talks---to learn how to make
114 | multimedia maps or use GIS software. Other things rightly took priority.
115 |
116 | If I had known something about these tools *before* it was urgent to use
117 | them, however, they may well have made a difference in my analysis and
118 | presentation. That realization is what makes me interested in studying
119 | digital history progressively over time, *even before* I know clearly
120 | how I might use its methods. Of course, now---as then---it would be
121 | unwise to spend *all* my time learning complicated tools before the
122 | return on the investment is clear. But waiting until the very moment
123 | when I need a tool or method to learn *anything* about it will, almost
124 | always, mean waiting too long.
125 |
126 | I'm grateful that I have had some professors along the way who taught
127 | with that principle in mind. My first exposure to HTML was actually in
128 | an honors horticulture class, in which we were required to code a basic
129 | webpage. It wasn't immediately clear how that would help me do
130 | horticulture, but I learned to be willing to learn something even
131 | *before* its utility was immediately clear.
132 |
133 | ### 4. I realized studying digital history is fun.
134 |
135 | All of the points I've made so far make a good case, in my mind, for
136 | learning about digital history even if (a) computers aren't your thing;
137 | and (b) you don't plan to do something like topic modeling anytime soon.
138 | But in my case, I can add to these reasons a very important
139 | consideration: I think computers are fun.
140 |
141 | This is, of course, the most personal and idiosyncratic realization I've
142 | mentioned so far. But there's no use avoiding the fact. I like to [hack
143 | around][] and always have, from the days when I built a really
144 | embarrassing checklist program using Visual Basic on my dad's PC to my
145 | undergraduate years, when [structured procrastination][] led me to start
146 | and design a [now defunct online undergraduate journal][]. What can I
147 | say? I'm a nerd. [These are my people.][]
148 |
149 | In academia, the value of pursuing something that you think is fun
150 | should not be underrated. As [Stephen Ramsay][] writes, there is plenty
151 | of anxiety and stress in academic life to go around. But it's possible
152 | to mitigate them, at least slightly, by finding ways to "follow your own
153 | bliss," as he puts it---not because that will necessarily lead you to
154 | the next "hot thing," but because it will be fun.
155 |
156 | [masterclass]: http://hrc.rice.edu/masterclasses/
157 | [digital history]: http://digitalhistory.blogs.rice.edu
158 | [cross-posted]: http://digitalhistory.blogs.rice.edu/2012/08/31/why-study-digital-history/
159 | [Google Books]: http://books.google.com
160 | [Internet Archive]: http://archive.org
161 | [Making of America]: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moagrp/
162 | [how much I don't know about things like database design]: http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-historians-dont-know-about.html
163 | [teaching with blogs]: http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/teaching-with-blogs.html
164 | [articles citing digital databases now appear all the time]: http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/digital-early-republic.html
165 | [Ted Underwood]: http://tedunderwood.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/how-not-to-do-things-with-words/
166 | [more careful and sophisticated work]: http://www.dancohen.org/2012/05/30/a-conversation-with-data-prospecting-victorian-words-and-ideas/
167 | [my dissertation]: http://hdl.handle.net/1911/27492
168 | [David Rumsey Map Collection]: http://www.davidrumsey.com
169 | [Henry Clarke Wright's European Journey]: http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/wrightmap.jpg
170 | [Selected Members of Garrisonian Networks]: http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/networksmap.jpg
171 | [this how-to post]: http://www.engadget.com/2005/03/08/how-to-make-your-own-annotated-multimedia-google-map/
172 | [hack around]: http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/hacks.html
173 | [structured procrastination]: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com
174 | [now defunct online undergraduate journal]: http://web.archive.org/web/20000902170648/http://www.tamu.edu/chr/agora/
175 | [These are my people.]: http://xkcd.com/149/
176 | [Stephen Ramsay]: http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2012/04/09/hot-thing.html
177 |
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10 | 
My first book, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform, was published by LSU Press in May 2013. It was awarded the 2014 Merle Curti Award for best book in American intellectual history, and a James H. Broussard First Book Prize from SHEAR.