flux capacitors

Traveling shows

2008-04-16T15:06:00.000-07:00

In one of the threads, Ed asks whether there is a relationship between the experience of visiting a museum and a website -- and how the past is "contained" or made "digestible" to the viewers or participants in either case. Where do new media and traditional museums intersect to address difficult questions about the past? Is "interactivity" simply another word for entertainment, as Stephen Mintz suggests?

The documentary Scars of Memory (in Spanish, Cicatriz de la memoria), which was made about the massacre of thousands of peasants in El Salvador in 1932 and particularly about the memories of the survivors and their children, is in my opinion one such place of intersection. The documentary was a result of a collaboration between Jeff Gould and the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen (MUPI). Dozens of survivors were interviewed over the course of 3 years; while Gould took these interviews as the material for his book of oral history on the massacre, the museum took the footage and made a documentary that loosely parallels the argument of the book. The interesting thing about this project, though, was not only the documentary itself but the way in which it was distributed. It essentially went on tour with the museum throughout El Salvador, traveling to rural areas and screened in community centers, churches, and schools. Screenings would always be followed up with discussion sessions, where people would get quite emotional or confrontational. For a population who to a large degree can't read, especially the older people, this offered them, quite literally, a "say" in the production of history.

I think that the role the museum played in this process was essential. While the film was available online and was made using digital technology, the screenings and discussions were decidedly old school: a projector, lots of plastic chairs, coffee, and conversation. I think it is very important that the post-screening conversations - which could become very heated, I've heard - happened while members of the community tried to make sense of the past together, face-to-face. To what extent could this sort of experience be recreated online in a forum? The museum's role was to moderate discussion but to also get people together to discuss their past, not just the past. The museum moderators never placed themselves as "experts": they, like everyone else, were still trying to make sense of what happened. In fact, these traveling screenings of the film were interactive but they were not about entertainment; people were jointly contributing to the production of history in their communities.

In countries like El Salvador where literacy is not universal and access to computers, let alone the Internet, is not the norm among the majority of people, this kind of hybrid and flexible approach makes sense. There is a highly technologically conscious urban core in the major cities, but elsewhere most people only have access to radio and television. Digitized sources make it much easier (and cheaper) to create audio-visual materials with historical content, but the medium through which it is accessed (or could be accessed) is not digital.

The audio-visual medium opens history up for people who cannot read or write, but who have a stake in how the past is remembered. The museum, in this case, functions as a moderator or facilitator in a dialogue.

Some thoughts on digital history

2008-04-16T14:46:00.000-07:00

I took Kirsten Sword's History and the New Media course last year and have been "listening in" on the conversation about digital history at the JAH, as a way to re-engage with many of the questions we covered in class and prepare for my comprehensive exams. Reading all the contributors' posts, however, has done more than that -- it has reminded me of how excited I was last year when we started to explore the potential of digital history, which up that point had simply not been on my radar as an academic historian, particularly as a historian of Latin America, where the digital archive has yet to become infinite, to say the least.

What is digital history anyway? Given the range of new media, it can refer to audio or video archives of interviews, databases, video games with historical content, as well as carefully framed websites about a given historical topic. The conversation at the JAH has produced a number of approaches to the definition of digital history. Dan Cohen brings up Roy Rosenzweig's article, "Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era" and concludes that, today, it turns out that one of the main challenges of digital historians is dealing with the unprecedented abundance of historical sources. Digital history is, then, the "theory and practice of bringing to bear technology to address the abundance that we now confront."

Will Thomas adds that the medium through which digital history is practiced is continually in flux: unlike a book that is finally pried from a historian's hands and sent to the press in one final form or other, digital projects invite revision, critique, conversation. Thomas argues that we should "embrace the impermanence of the medium, use it to convey the changing nature of the past and how we understand it. I consider these projects "open research platforms" for scholars to build interpretive models." Bill Turkel agrees that these are perfect platforms for students to understand that "history that isn't undergoing revision is basically dead," since revision is almost intrinsic to the medium.

The conversation in "Digital History 101" inches toward a practical definition of digital history by discussing its place within the discipline of history. While everyone seems to agree that technical know-how is not the greatest priority in digital history, some consider basic technical literacy to be necessary in order to get what you want out of a project. Cohen writes, "This is much like the advanced language training that classicists or medievalists must have to do sophisticated, thorough work in their fields." He reminds us, however, that the tools needed to practice digital history continue to become increasingly accessible. When Kirsten Sword wonders whether Digital History should be considered a field or a method, Dan Cohen seems to be leaning on the side of method -- everyone should acquire some kind of literacy in the method, which will become easier as time goes on. If we consider it a field, it might end up breaking off from the discipline. (I can't help but wonder, though: if it is not made a concentration in its own right, won't it always be considered something that people should do "on their own time"? There should be, as mentioned in the threads, some sort of incentive to carry out these projects).

While "medium" is offered as an alternative term to the question of field/method, Kirsten Sword still thinks that "field" more clearly captures what the debate in some institutions eventually boils down to: resources. In most cases, successfully carrying out a digital project will involve some kind of institutional collaboration, a pooling of resources. Will Thomas reminds us that the most successful digital projects have "been perceived as large scale work, grant funded research, requiring access to technical services and equipment. It has required at nearly every stage an intense level of collaboration among librarians, technology professionals, programmers, information designers, and historians."

From the perspective of Latin America, this is both daunting and encouraging. The digital abundance that Dan Cohen mentions in the very first thread is only starting to trickle down to historical materials relative to Latin America. The first large-scale efforts at digitizing Latin American newspapers only started in 2007. The large amounts of money needed to carry out (and maintain) a large-scale digital project such as those mentioned in the Interchange is out of reach for many Latin American institutions.

There is a productive future, however, in collaborations between U.S. and Latin American institutions. Jeffrey Gould, for example, worked with institutions in Central America and Mexico, as well as with programmers and librarians from IU, to create CAMVA (Central American and Mexican Video Archive), which will digitize hundreds of videos and film reels taken during the revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s -- the originals of which had been stored in less than ideal circumstances for many years, and which could only be accessed during a visit to these institutions. Because the project involved so many people with specialized knowledge, Gould did not necessarily need to be very skilled in the newest technology to carry out the project; instead, he worked with the directors of the other institutions to design the larger contours of the project. Much of the labor of actually digitizing the videos will be carried out in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Mexico. When the project is completed, thousands of hours of video archives will be freely available to students all over the Americas.

But where does that leave the individual researcher (or the graduate student struggling to keep up with the traditional requirements of the discipline) interested in digital history? Are large, collaborative projects the only way to enter into the digital world creatively as academic historians? As Dan Cohen notes, the tools for engaging in digital history are becoming increasingly accessible and I think that, at the very least, students should be encouraged to take advantage of the resources that already exist. In the case of Latin America, Wikipedia remains wide open. While no original research is to be published in Wikipedia, it offers a way to put issues and events in Latin American history out in the public for discussion -- in both English and Spanish. Interesting things can be done with Google maps, such as tracing historical journeys. Editing video content has become much easier and cheaper in the past few years and can reach anyone on the globe with internet access through YouTube. And of course, websites are becoming easier and easier to make. These things, however, take time - and perhaps it is better to not go at them alone. I just think it's interesting that many historians - grad students included - don't take sites like Wikipedia too seriously, even though that is where most of their undergraduate students will go for quick reference.

spaces acquiring stories and a short exercise in terror

2007-04-20T07:51:00.000-07:00

"Traditions and Cultures at IU" incorporates many of the things we have been talking about in class this semester quite gracefully. And as with all things that are graceful, it appears almost effortless. First of all, it is surprisingly easy on the eyes. This seems simple enough, but we have seen how websites that are too busy are difficult to follow and therefore interfere with viewer engagement. Good design equals better navigation and ultimately better learning.

The sections are made up 15 to 30 slides with images that are accompanied by a short paragraph. Where appropriate, the slides are also accompanied with audio clips. For example, one of the slides about Hoagy Carmichael has links to three of his songs. This is a way to incorporate primary source material that seems quite natural and organic (as opposed to having it be a separate section that seems contrived). The slides are framed by an introductory audio clip and a quiz.

What I like about the site is that, while it is easy to follow, it is not necessarily linear. The sections are grouped according to chronology but also according to themes. Having the content of the entire course available to you as soon as you log into the site gives you a certain amount of room to wander; the great thing about having a class on a space that students also roam in their daily lives is that the buildings they enter physically literally acquire a story as the semester progresses. History is not something that happened long ago in a place far away, but something that they, too, participate in.

The Wikipedia exercise was harder than I had thought. I had planned on entering my own research on the Salvadoran novelist Maria Alvarez all week, only to find that Wikipedia strongly discourages original research. The "encyclopedia" mode of writing is also surprisingly alien to me: what, no argument? The guidelines that the administrators have regarding "neutrality" struck me as particularly old fashioned. So I though I would enter some interesting things, or "facts" that I found about the Cathedral of San Salvador during my research, but once I was about to edit an existing page with a few pages of information, I suddenly had a terrifying thought. What if I try to publish my work on the cathedral in the future and someone thinks that I copied it, word for word, from Wikipedia? Paranoid, yes, but plausible enough. So finally I figured that the only appropriate sort of thing to publish on Wikipedia would be a short article about a fantastic museum of history in El Salvador that usually falls under the radar of tourists because it tends to not be affiliated with the department of Tourism precisely because they are engaging with memories that are difficult and controversial (the civil war, the massacre of 1932). I am still working on that entry, but will have it up this weekend. I just never thought it would be so difficult to get out of the "original research" frame of mind.

new modes of storytelling

2007-04-12T22:41:00.000-07:00

Of all the websites I explored this week, only Raid On Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704 seems to have answered Steve Dietz's call for moving toward a kind of procedural authorship rather than object-centered exhibits. Dietz likens procedural authorship to baseball: "Every game, hundreds of thousands of them each year, is the same--set of rules. Yet every game is different. Each game has its own personality, based on the interactions of the players." Thus it is never like reading a book but it is still highly structured. The creators of the Deerfield website add to the idea of procedural authorship another layer: the lure of the story. Their approach is like nothing I've ever seen. They dramatize the stories of the many people involved in the raid. They also provide historical and cultural context, the usual timelines, songs, maps, and, of course, artifacts.

I felt myself drawn to the story menu more than anything else, because it was what I found truly novel. Songs, maps, artifacts, etc, with pop-up explanatory captions I'd seen before. But the story menu, with its five tabs for the different perspectives (English, French, Kanienkehaka, Wendat, Wôbanaki, along with the Overview), allows you to click on a reconstructed image of a scene along the timeline. Depending on the tab you choose, certain figures are highlighted. Then you click on the figure and read their story--a dramatized story, from their point of view. It is all very well-researched an footnoted appropriately, but like the scenes illustrating the progression of events before, during, and after the raid, they are informed reconstructions. Historical fiction. But it's so much better than a book or a film, because the medium allows for the tabs to show you all these interlocking points of view, so that there is no overarching narrative dictating what is important and what is not (of course, that too can function as an illusion -- it is laid out to be explored in a particular way). And it's engaging.

However, I wonder if a person would look through this site if they weren't either very much into history, or doing an assignment. I know I would. But the website feels a little clumsy at times (the link between entertainment and learning that can be a little stiff and forced at times). However, the possibilities it opens up are enormous. The authors of Less Clicking, More Watching emphasize that people tend to like "TV-like experiences where users watched experts and artists talk about art and culture, augmented by links to additional and in-depth information." Although the creators of the Deerfield website used a video to introduce the visitor to the site, they could have made more use of it in their creative reconstructions. They also could have linked songs and objects to the storylines. Regardless of these things, however, the site offers a compelling vision of where the web can take us as a radically different medium than text or film. This site could not have been recreated as a book or film. Object-centered sites, though interesting and "neat," just don't have the ability to pull us in the way clashing versions of an event does. It's the lure of the story. The creators of Raid on Deerfield seem to have caught on to that and begun an interesting negotiation between history, fiction, and image-making that will lead to interesting places.

archives of melodies, laughter, accents & bad hair

2007-03-29T21:26:00.000-07:00

It was quite a journey from Historical Voices to YouTube. I started off listening to William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold Speech," enjoying his warm yet no-nonsense voice, and ended up watching a video of a local Salvadoran band, shot with a predictable fisheye lens. I found it more difficult than ever to stay focused on the original question this week. After a few hours to collect my thoughts, however, I became interested in what it was exactly about the material that made it so easy for me to lose my way.

I think more than anything it has to do with lack of practice. Digital collections of oral histories make interviews available across the world that might have been sitting quietly in a dusty drawer. For someone who is accustomed to working with text rather than voices, it might take some time to develop new skills to "highlight" relevant information. The Black Oral History project on the Washington State digital sound archive makes interviews accessible in a variety of ways. Each interview is accompanied by a kind of abstract that identifies the person, the date of the interview, and (importantly) an outline of the topics brought up during the interview. What I found particularly impressive about the outline is that the topics are linked to other interviews. For example, clicking on the topic "voting" will take you to the result page with all the other interviews with people who talk about that same topic. This linkage of information would have been a little clumsy in a written format, like an index. On the database it seems to be the logical thing to do. I found this to work much better in the African American Oral History collection of Washington State than in Historical Voices (the "transcript" option on the website did not work on my computer, although I was surprised to learn that I didn't need it too much).

I think it's also important to make a distinction between audio-visual material and audio-visual material on the internet. When I watch a documentary on a DVD or on television, I do not try to find out about it until afterwards, if at all. Even when I listen to the radio, or a recording, I am much more passive. I receive the information, I think about it (maybe) and later I try to find out more about where it came from and why (sometimes). But today I caught myself wandering into Wikipedia, or simply googling key terms, again and again to shed further light on what I was listening to or seeing on another screen. I know we should be all for engagement and actively shaping how you receive information, and the internet is good for that - but it also makes it a lot easier to simply forget where you started and why.

detectives with cliolators

2007-03-23T15:43:00.000-07:00

(sorry this is late)

Cohen and Rosenzweig argue that a rapidly approaching fact-checking gadget that they (ingeniously) call the cliolator will soon be to history as the calculator was to math. After our discussion in class today regarding the difference between learning history and "doing" history, I'm still not sure what to make of the idea of the cliolator. Cohen and Rosenzweig use their example primarily with dates. But even dates are not numbers the way that they are in an equation. There are an infinite number of "facts" in the world. Historical "facts" such as dates are created by the people who single them out as significant. Events become historical facts only after they have been afforded some attention, and with attention come all sorts of arguments about why they are significant.

Dates themselves are embedded in certain historiographical arguments, or in popular narratives. What does this mean for students? Will having a fact-checking device make them more or less critical about pre-sorted information? Would it be like having an open-notebook test, which forces you to only single out information that is relevant to an argument, rather than try to impress your teachers with your ability to retain information?

My other concern is the murky line between understanding historiography and "doing" history. To use an analogy from English Departments: are students in a literature class, in which they read and study texts, learn how they are constructed and also the content, or are they in the creative writing class, in which they are taught how to construct those texts themselves? Anyone who has sat down with fifty different newspaper articles regarding one event can attest to how bewildering it can be to simply figure out what happened. A website like Who Killed William Robinson opens up the excitement of history (the detective work) to students who might otherwise never quite understand how every history book is doing exactly that (drawing on evidence to make more--or less--plausible arguments) on a larger scale.

It's interesting that both having instant access to historical "facts" and being able to immerse yourself in primary documents to make sense of an event on your own have the effect of displacing historiography. While very exciting, it makes it far too easy to get lost in all the disparate information.

Putting the final project to work, slowly

2007-03-09T06:39:00.000-08:00

After talking to my advisor for a while about summer research, I've decided to use the original idea for a database that George Alter suggested last month. I'm applying for funding for it next week. My proposal draft still needs to include a more thorough discussion of the methodology (George Alter suggested a few articles that I still need to read) as well as a more detailed description of what the database would be like. But it provides a general idea of how a database like this would really help address several problems in the historiography. So here is the general proposal, which I plan to keep working on throughout the semester in order to have the database ready to go for the summer.

Rough Draft - proposal

The overwhelming attention given to the development of progressive Catholicism in El Salvador in the wake of the Vatican II and Medellín has created a powerful historical narrative involving a "break" between traditional and progressive Catholicism, with the Pastoral Week of 1970 marking the split between two eras. Underpinning this narrative is the assumption of a two-tiered model of religion: elite and popular. Before the break, the Salvadoran Catholic Church was the defender of the status quo, providing a justificatory religious framework for the elites; after the break, the Church questioned the status quo by redefining sin as primarily social and structural and embraced the opposite side of the binary--"local," decentralized, or popular religion. Although in this narrative there is a distinction between progressive and "local" or popular religion, the former is seen as growing out of the latter, while shedding along the way "magical" or deterministic explanations of poverty and suffering. Less attention has been paid to clearly defining what is meant by "religion of the elites" or "traditional" Catholicism.

During the peak of Catholic Action involvement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, members of the clergy involved in the movement were effectively horrified at members' lack of Catholic instruction or understanding of the basic catechism. Underlying the assumption of the "break" there is an assumption of a widespread influence of "traditional" Catholicism, yet we have little knowledge of how Catholicism was traditionally practiced. To what extent was Catholicism a part of people's everyday lives in the mid-twentieth century?

Examining the influence of the Catholic Church in El Salvador in the years prior to the Pastoral Week of 1970 poses two related problems. Articles books, homilies and symbols will only get us so far: these sources only provide a vision of interactions within the institution and how it was struggling to present itself to the laity. They offer little insight into how the Church was perceived by other institutional actors like the military, and even less of how it was perceived by lay Catholics and non-Catholics, making it almost impossible to determine the degree to which its actions were greeted with acceptance, hostility, or indifference. How many people read those journals or listened to those homilies? How many people could read at all? Who cared? The most readily available sources are one-sided and tracking direct responses to these is, in most cases, impossible.

If it is true that there was a marked shift in the Church during the tenure of Archbishop Chávez y Gonzalez, one angle into the problem of how this shift was perceived is to track how people came into contact with the Church at an institutional level throughout their lives and if this changed in the twentieth century. By creating a database in my History and New Media class with semester, this summer I hope to begin a data collection project employing a methodology used primarily within the historiography of eighteenth century France in the years prior to the Revolution. The approach is quite simple: tracking the percentage of marriages carried out during Advent and Lent, two periods in the Catholic liturgical year of fasting and "preparation," in order to determine the degree to which "traditional" Catholic rituals were observed. The Church officially frowns upon getting married during these periods, as marriage is a celebration of union not in keeping with the penitential attitude demanded of observant Catholics. Whether or not Catholics were observant, oblivious, or indifferent to the most important periods of penance during the liturgical year can be broadly determined by examining if and to what extent they were getting married during Advent and Lent. In eighteenth century France, there is a correlation between the increasing number of such marriages and the Church's gradual loss of hegemonic authority as the first stage of the Revolution drew nearer. What will this tell us in the case of El Salvador?

First of all, it will simply tell us the extent to which El Salvador was a strictly observant Catholic country at all. This, in turn, will give us the tools to determine the degree of hegemonic authority that the Church wielded, broadly speaking, over the laity. Most importantly, it will allow us to examine how this changed both through time and in different dioceses. I propose to start my samples in the 1880s, when civil matrimony became an alternative to marriage through the Church, and continue into 1962, the year of the Second Vatican Council, with five-year intervals. I plan to compare the dioceses of San Miguel, San Salvador and Santa Ana as well.

The variables in a marriage certificate include profession, place of residence, age, witnesses, and name of priest. Gathering this kind of data will therefore also prove fruitful on other fronts. We will be able to consider correlations between class and church membership, compare differences in urban and rural areas, as well as determine the presence of priests in certain areas (and by analyzing the name, whether they were foreign born). In sum, examining such data will prove invaluable to understanding shifts that are difficult to track on the level of discourse alone.

strolling through an essay

2007-03-01T23:40:00.000-08:00

I found it quite funny that when I tried to cut and paste several passages from Philip J. Ethington's website onto a word document for my notes, I kept getting a blank page. It took me a few seconds to realize that the font was white. It felt like he wasn't letting me pin down his words with my old fashioned note-taking.

"Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge" is an amazing project--in its broad scope and its approach to knowledge. Like the white font, it is also purposefully difficult to grasp at first. He means it to be approached as a "totality," read like a newspaper. While I admit that I was a bit annoyed with this at first, the approach grew on me. Unlike most articles I read, I thought about his website a lot afterwards. Initially, I kept thinking, "just get to the point." What is his point about literally mapping the past? I'm still not sure. Wondering what the point is... is his point, in a way.

Now, this is something that I spend most of my time doing with my own research, this searching for the point. Going off on tangents, making links between vastly different sources, wandering through a historiography and sometimes getting lost. I have come to believe that "the point" should assume these things but should be presented in final form free of them. In other words, it should be well stitched. We all know that it was formed out of disparate pieces of knowledge, but the art of it is creating something intelligible out of the mess.

But it's the mess that I always go back to, at least in my head, to wonder what other sort of thing I could have stitched with the same pieces. Ethington creates something of a controlled mess in which to wander, and in doing so challenges my urge to "clean up." It's not just a simple mess: it's quite well organized but it demands effort to engage with it. Like a good book, I know I'll go back to it, if only to try to figure it out again. And each time I'll probably learn something new.

keeping alvarez alive

2007-02-23T02:14:00.000-08:00

One of the things that struck me the most about the readings this week was the simultaneous sense of overload and loss. It's an exciting and also uncertain time, when everyone seems to be scrambling and regrouping. Rosenzweig's article left me feeling particularly bewildered. I had never really thought about the life span of a digital document. I might need the help of an archeologist in ten years to access material that I created today! I'm glad that I read that first and Turkel's last, because he takes the conversation back to why digital projects open up new and compelling horizons for history in the first place. I was also wondering why people are taking so much trouble to scan books. The books are there. One of the greatest virtues of scanning all the books in the world is that people will be able to find more books. But couldn't a really good global card catalog do that anyway? I know it seems like a silly observation, but why do the books have to be entirely searchable? Shouldn't more emphasis be put on searching effectively rather than digitizing everything? Or does digitizing everything change the way we search for the better?

For my project this semester I've been thinking of creating what I hope to be a somewhat manageable website regarding the subject of my masters thesis. I will likely use what we've learned about databases so far in my larger research for my dissertation, but I just don't have access to all that material right now and I still have to think through the questions I want to ask properly before I start thinking about how to ask them. The good thing is that the material from my previous project is finite. It is a collection of letters, diaries, manuscripts, novels, and a radioplay, written by María Alvarez, a Salvadoran feminist whose activism prompting the passing of suffrage (constitutionally, if not effectively) in El Salvador in 1939.

I have some ideas that I'm quite excited about.

1) It happens that my fiance records music in his spare time, so we have some pretty nice recording equipment in the basement. I thought it would be great to ask a few friends, native Spanish speakers, to act out the widely successful radio play that Alvarez wrote in 1959, a turning point in Latin American history. I could divide the chapters into several podcasts and make them available on the website after a brief synopsis. The radio play is fascinating because the Cuban Revolution happened right in the middle of it and you can see Alvarez trying to make sense of it, torn between anti-communism and a kind of nationalist admiration. It also shows a time in Salvadoran history, now largely forgotten because we see everything through the lens of the civil war, when Christian Democracy was quite compelling to a lot of people, and moreover, that it was closely linked to the feminist movement. It will surprise people that there was a feminist movement in 1959 at all. This is the most exciting part of my project, I think, because it will enable me to try to approximate the original form. I hate reading plays as if they were prose. The original recording was lost in a bombing of the radio station in the 1970s (it was the Catholic YSAX through which Archbishop Romero broadcast his homilies).

2) I always thought it was interesting as I was reading all her novels that she referenced so many Latin American political works. I was curious about this network and looked up some of the key figures, but I never bothered to be thorough about it. I could actually go through her writings and write down all the names and books she mentioned and then do a Google search. In the end I could reconstruct the network and have links to fellow feminists, political figures, writers, etc.

3) I just don't know what to do with her novels and other documents. As I have never undertaken a project like this before, I don't know if it would be feasible to scan them and make them searchable. Given my lack of experience, I'm not sure if I will know how to keep this website alive.

But before addressing these question, I have to address the bigger question that is looming: copyright. She was my great grandmother and my entire family entrusted these documents to me when I was writing my thesis. She published her feminist magazines herself. All the books are out of print and didn't sell much in the first place. One of them was published in Buenos Aires, one in Madrid, and one in San Salvador. The radio station still exists but lost its archives in the fire. I know I can't use the letters because a friend of mine photocopied them for me at the Women's Archives at Radcliffe College in the papers of Doris Stevens -- but what about everything else?

My question about IUScholarWorks is also in this vein: are papers copyrighted? What if a paper becomes a part of a book later on?

Finding Short Cuts in Databases

2007-02-16T07:53:00.000-08:00

The exercise this week was quite useful for me because I've been working on a research paper and I knew exactly what I needed to find. I have already done the bulk of the work and have my primary sources from my research in El Salvador over the summer. In a nutshell, my paper focuses on how the use of sacred space has changed in El Salvador from 1950 to 1980, using the Metropolitan Cathedral as a case study. It burnt down in 1951 and remained in a perpetual state of incompleteness throughout the decades in which there was political upheaval from within the ranks of the clergy. It was the place where hundreds of thousands of people gathered every year to celebrate the patron saint, the Divine Savior, which when translated is the name of the country--El Salvador. The patron saint was always invoked as a symbol of "salvadoranness" and I examine how the meanings inscribed in the image (and its "home" in the cathedral) changed throughout the years.

I've already done that part. But there was one key thing that I needed to find in order to make my argument. I knew for a fact (through talking to people and passing mention of this in my other sources) that the Cathedral had been "taken" by popular organizations, sometimes armed, sometimes peaceful, almost fifty times from 1970 to 1985. These takeovers usually went on for days; sometimes government forces bombed the Cathedral to get the people out; and the organizations' explicit aim was usually to make their voices heard when there was no other place to voice dissent. I knew this, but I needed to find sources to back me up, as well as the specific dates of the takeovers in order to compare them to the dairies and collections of homilies that I have of the archbishops.

Now, if I were in El Salvador I would probably just go to the national archive and skim through ten years' worth of newspapers. It would take a long time. The good thing about this time period is that it created a political climate in which the United States was clearly interested in the goings-on of the popular organizations. So I figured some sort of report would make it into the major newspapers. I went to ProQuest and did a search for "cathedral el salvador." Although I only got four hits (they only seemed to report on the takeovers when they involved some sort of bloodshed), it was a good place to start, since I then knew which ones had been the most significant. The filter of the U.S. press therefore made it easier to know which takeovers had loomed larger than the others. ProQuest newspapers, because it searches all the text, is extremely useful in this regard. It is incredibly user-friendly, and if you have a detailed enough search you probably won't be overwhelmed with hits. However, that was not enough. There had been 48 takeovers during the period I was interested in and I only had record of four.

Where to look next? Google was useless, and so were all the databases of scholarly articles, even the ones centered on Latin America. Finally I had an idea. The U.S. State Department archives! There are several and for my purposes FRUS just didn't work in terms of searchability. Then I found the Digital National Security Archive. It has four possible searches: documents, bibliography, chronology, and glossary. I did a search for documents with the key words "cathedral el salvador" and got a long string of results. The documents were mostly weekly reports sent from the Embassy to the State Department regarding the meaningful events of the week. The citation includes a list of the people mentioned, the subject-matter (such as violence, disappeared persons, political prisoners, takeovers, and YES, National Cathedral). You click on the document and you have a scanned image of the original report. Because the U.S. was carefully monitoring the situation, the reports just mentioned in passing what was going on in the Cathedral, who had said what, and the date. This was perfect, since I could then both refer back to the diary entries and homilies for that date, know what the U.S. Embassy was up to, and look up the newspapers for those specific dates.

In sum, I think that for my purposes, it is very difficult to construct any research based solely on online databases, because the "meat" of what I'm looking for is just not in a database. However, they really provide ways in which to direct and fine tune my research that I probably would not be able to accomplish with print sources alone. I can't imagine consulting print copies of the New York Times, etc, just to find one or two articles regarding the Cathedral, but because it's so easy, I can do it in ten minutes, and it enhances my searches elsewhere. Likewise, I would never think to look for State Department records for information on El Salvador (the 'filtering' effect would drive me crazy), but if I know exactly what I'm looking for, it provides invaluable information that it would be difficult to find so easily elsewhere.

data maps are like time machines...

2007-02-08T16:50:00.000-08:00

...Click on the date, and there you are! When I first entered Social Explorer, I watched the slideshow of race maps of New York City over and over. Then I compulsively tried different combinations of dates with a certain set of categories. After a few hours of this, my fiancé walked in the room and asked me what I was doing. I said "Watch this!" and showed him where Austrians in the U.S. were mostly living in the year 2000 (he's half Austrian). I was disappointed to see that he did not share my enthusiasm. Then I showed him the race map from New York.

"What does that tell you?" he asked. "What did race mean to people in 1910, and what did it mean to people in 2000? Did they ask people the same questions?"

We had a very long discussion about this. I argued that, yes, there are previously constructed boxes in censuses into which reality is made to fit. But there are many things we can learn not only through the prism of censuses, but also from the shape of the prism itself. In "marital status" before the year 2000, for example, there was no category for "divorced," just "married" or "never married." Before 1960, as far as I can see, there was no category for "race" at a national level. In 1960, moreover, the race category had no subcategory for "Hispanic." Then I stopped and wondered when "Hispanic" became a "race," given that Latin Americans have African, Native American, European, Asian, and Middle Eastern ancestries. It became an official race in the United States in 1970. Given the slippery nature of the category, by1980 all races had the disclaimer "non-Hispanic" next to them. It remained the same through 1990, but by the year 2000, "Hispanic" had three modifiers next to it: Black, White, Other.

I find this fascinating--these efforts to more precisely define a group of people that share a vague something in common, something that is even shared with some Europeans (the Spanish were listed as Hispanic in the "foreign born" section in the 2000 census). I find it fascinating because these are matters of self-identification, but the choices largely dictate the reality that is reflected in the numbers. A census in El Salvador at mid-century left out "Indian" as a category, for example, and suddenly it became a "reality" that all Indians had assimilated into the larger culture somehow overnight. And yet, as flawed as the collection of data may be, it tells us something important. As I watch races shift around Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn, or grow fainter or darker around a particular point as the date changes in the upper left hand corner, I know that I am watching imperfect data imperfectly reflecting a seismic shift. But the shift is there.

My fiance's questions point to a fundamental difficulty in comparing such vast amounts of information: the sources might differ in content and in kind. George Alter's articles demonstrate how one might try to control for such gaps when the information provided is pretty much bare bones. Data can never speak for itself; it is up to the researcher to take pre-conditioned data and interpret shifts while taking into account variables that were not recorded. In "Theories of Fertility Decline," I found his evaluation of the "rising cost of children" quite instructive: "Subjects in surveys and interviews overwhelmingly report that children cost more now than they did in the past... On close examination, however, they are not describing a change in the costs of children as much as a change in their own definition of appropriate childrearing.... Historically, children have become more expensive not because the prices of commodities consumed by children have risen, but rather because parents have decided to invest more in goods and services for their children" (16). How does one control for culture? Culture is one of those things that have proven almost impossible to define--yet there it is. He also points to the reasons why doing this kind of research with large amounts of such data is both necessary and a little unsettling: the negative result. When theoretical frameworks are informed by a particular vision of the past, historical analysis must be both nuanced and as thorough as possible. These theories are, in many cases, the drive behind policies.

All these questions have made me really think about my own research--and the possibility of a negative result. My starting point is now as shaky (and as vague) as ever: the Catholic Church became increasingly involved in matters of social justice throughout the twentieth century (I can come up with a more compelling way to put it, but when it comes down to it, that's what it is). It was controversial. Many people stopped being Catholic and many others embraced the conservative Opus Dei. The Church was not a monolith and there was a lot of disagreement (more than we usually think) from within. Okay. So far in my academic career, I have concentrated on interpreting sources written by the institutional clergy. Articles, books, homilies. But I have this nagging feeling that these sources will tell me just as much as what I've learned about the Jansenist controversies in 18th century France: the arguments in journals. How many people read those journals? How many people could read at all? Who cared?

How should I phrase my questions? What sources are available? One thing I might ask is, how many people came into contact with the Church at an institutional level throughout their lives and how did this change in the twentieth century? I can only track what the institutional church was saying or disagreeing about, but it is far more difficult to track people's reactions to what was being said. A priest can yell all he wants from a pulpit, but if there's only one person in the pews, what does that say? What if he yells and the Church is overflowing? Early on in my research I thought it might be a good idea to try to track people's use of sacred space as time went on, and see how it shifted with the changing ideology. The task, however, seemed too monumental. When I brought it up at my review, one of Peter Guardino's excellent questions was, "what if people were just going to different churches because of urban expansion?" How would I control for that?

Here is what I came up with.

So, by enlisting the help of several people (possibly many) for the data entry, I could enter the names of people as they go through the sacraments. Do they stay within their parish church throughout their lives? I can pretty much track where people are going to church (roughly), and whether there were massive shifts in affiliations at certain points in time that do not correspond to urban growth. This is just a rough idea of how the information might be organized. Of course, this would not substitute but complement my initial approach to the research. But that fundamental disconnect between the people doing the talking and the people hearing it might be bridged in this way.

I might also be able to do something with schools, but it is obviously still very unclear exactly what:

interpreting "two pigs, six silver spoons, and eight hoes"

2007-02-02T01:16:00.000-08:00

Working with old newspapers is difficult because it is almost impossible to suppress the instinct to browse. After all, that's how we read the newspapers with today's date on them: we wander through them. Browsing is not a bad thing, of course, and can sometimes take your research to unexpectedly fruitful places. It also helps to put you in a similar frame of mind as the publication's original readers: they probably wanted to be informed but also entertained. When you're faced with thousands of issues, however, lack of focus can make you lose sight of your original questions. When you're faced with millions, lack of focus reaches entirely new levels. How can digitized sources help to keep our research on track?

I looked up databases with digitized newspapers and found that they only exacerbated the problems that I had faced before. They seem to have really opened up the breadth of possible research. But they do not provide ways to organize that research in any meaningful way. I have about 1,500 digital photographs taken from a weekly newspaper called Orientación, published by the Archdiocese of San Salvador. My sample spans from 1951 to 1984. I don't want any more for the time being. It is very easy to get lost in what I have. How do organize the various stories that seem to develop independently of each other through the decades? Should I be looking for other things aside from the explicit stories or arguments in the articles? How do I keep track?

Some of the questions I am asking would be easy to keep track of through time with a simple Excel work sheet, or even by tagging photographs on iPhoto with several key words in order to be able to do a quick search. With a little organization, I could trace how anti-communist rhetoric evolved into social justice rhetoric, for example, or a timeline of how the metropolitan cathedral was rebuilt after it burnt down in 1951 (the reconstruction took over 50 years). These things are related to the explicit content of the articles and hardly involve a very close reading. But in looking at the way people have used their sources to reinterpret the past, I was particularly impressed by Thatcher Ulrich's work on labor in the eighteenth century, and in my own field, Muriel Nazzari's Disappearance of the Dowry: Women, Families, and Social Change in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1600-1900. Nazzari used "inventarios" spanning several centuries as her sole source; they are the same thing, pretty much, as probate inventories.

Nazzari uses the dowry as a focal point in evaluating how property-owning families (a corporate unit including both father and mother) changed their behavior toward their sons and daughters over the course of three centuries, 1600 to 1900. Her argument is straightforward: the disappearance of the dowry meant that women went from being the buyers of men to being bought. The development of individualism and market forces caused the splintering of the patriarchal clan and a subsequent shift of the family’s allocation of resources. The privatization of women’s roles was due not simply to ideological shifts, but the emergence of a vastly different economy.

All of this, Nazzari concludes after interpreting data like "two pigs, six silver spoons, eight hoes" and seeing how it changed slowly over time. She took advantage of the publication in several volumes of the inventarios in the archives of Sao Paulo until the late nineteenth century. These were not digitized, however, and she had to deal with a representative sample for each period to keep the study manageable. If she could have isolated the data and then been able to have links between different kinds of data, she could have probably had a much larger sample, but I don't think it would have significantly changed the research itself.

There are several things in my sources that I think could work in a similar way--details that only start to take shape as a larger picture when they are compared with each other through time. What I took from Nazzari for my own work is an approach to sources. Granted, a newspaper is a different kind of source. Articles are different from wills. But there are parts of the newspaper that matter-of-factly record certain yearly events, or the amount of money gathered for the rebuilding of the cathedral, or the amount of people who showed for the festivities of the patron saint. A database of some kind would really help me to isolate these and compare them to the broader stuff being discussed in the articles.

At this point, I think it's time to pick up a pencil and some paper, since there's only so much a person can do with a keyboard.

pictures, still blurry

2007-01-26T00:04:00.000-08:00

I grew up in El Salvador in the '80s. There was a civil war going on. I lived with my mother, my grandmother, and my great grandmother. We would hear bombs from time to time (ones closer than others). I took the bus to school and sometimes our bus full of third graders overtook a truck full of soldiers on the highway. Some of them were yawning (it was 6:30 in the morning); some of them sat at the very back with their legs dangling off the truck, looking bored; some waved. Because the war never affected me directly (or at least, not until much later), it always remained peripheral to the stories I told about my life until I started to read history books. I was lucky.

When I decided to become a historian, and particularly a historian of that part of the world in which I was born, it was partly out of a deep sense of unease at having such a blurry picture of the war. I wanted to fill in the blanks, and to fill them as far back as much as possible. Many books and many years later, and after talking to a lot of people about their memories, I have something of a narrative. It is disjointed and full of gaps. There are many things that we will never know. I have seen how the questions and consequently the narratives told have changed according to the priorities of the organizations giving out funding. What I always find interesting about linear narratives about something as messy as war is that no one experienced it the way it is told. Even those people in the thick of later became the major plot did not necessarily know what was going at the same time at another part of the country the way a history book does. Even in 1979, no one could have imagined that in 1980 someone could walk into a church and assassinate an Archbishop as he was consecrating the Eucharist; or that a battalion would kill every human being in a village; or that six Jesuit rectors of the Universidad Centroamericana would be assassinated one night in 1989. Does a linear narrative necessarily obscure the open-endedness of the past? Is history itself only possible because "we know what happened"? Why do I highlight moments of violence as turning points in the plot so readily and so exclusively? Is it because I have been trained in the U.S.?

The Salvadoran civil war is relatively recent history, and my research does not focus on it. But I confess that I do study the history of Catholicism in the country because of what happened in the 1980s. It is my (often unspoken) starting place. For this exercise I looked up Catholicism in El Salvador on Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica and Google, and compared it to a book a recently reread, Anna Peterson's Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador.

I often complain that when people talk about Catholicism in El Salvador, they usually mean the institutional Catholic Church in El Salvador. Wikipedia is no different. The entry focuses on the very highest levels of the clergy; the laity only appears as ahistorical percentages. It is interesting in that it appears to be trying to be neutral in regards to the political split within the clergy in the mid-1990s, and does not spend too much space on Archbishop Romero. That said, it was by far the most useful treatment of the topic, if only because of the links (like Landow suggests, it is so much easier to follow the bibliographic trail when they are embedded in the text). The entry in Encyclopedia Britannica was tiny and only mentioned, again, percentages and the fact that Protestantism has been gaining ground in the past few decades. I found it funny that although there is no entry for Archbishop Romero, he does appear under the article for Raúl Julia, who played him in the movie, Romero. In Google, the first hit was the U.S. State Department's section on El Salvador more generally. Again, percentages. All the other hits on Google were mainly for scholarly books written about El Salvador in the U.S. I decided to type in "Oscar Romero" to see what I got. A slew of U.S. based Catholic organizations and churches, with the familiar quotes and life stories -- Romero, the bishop of the poor. One web page from Creighton University actually cites the U.S. ambassador in 1980 blaming his assassination on a Cuban sniper! When I typed the same search in Spanish, however, the results were much more interesting; I found an ongoing blog based in El Salvador that deals with social justice issues from a Catholic perspective. It was very difficult to find any historical content at all; when I did it concentrated, like the wikipedia entry, on the hierarchical church.

When I compared these pages to the Anna Peterson's book, I was honestly struck by their lack of depth and their either elite-based historical narrative or their social-scientific graph-and-percentage approach. Peterson's is an oral history of how progressive Catholics (usually poor and urban) made sense of the repression during the civil war by appropriating symbols and rituals of martyrdom in their own political struggles. To be sure, they were influenced by the progressive clergy, but they mostly took theological matters into their own hands. People like those interviewed by Peterson are why Catholicism matters politically in El Salvador; the progressive church was driven by them, not just a few courageous priests. Her vision of things, however, hardly found its way into the more diffuse digital media that I encountered.

Although I found Keith Jenkin's smugness in regards to the end of History/history insufferable, I couldn't help but think that he was absolutely right when he wrote that, "both upper and lower case histories are, like all constructions, ultimately arbitrary ways of carving up what comes to constitute their field. Both... are actually just theories about the past and how it should be appropriated" (8). Catholicism in El Salvador is just not a hot topic anymore; in fact, neither is El Salvador. The 1980s saw a tremendous surge in publishing about Central America in general; now that things are relatively stable, it has decreased significantly. Taking Cronin's lead, I saw that the kind of history we have available about Catholicism during the civil war is dictated by who had a stake in it and why. Before the end of the war, the primary question asked by observers in the U.S. was regarding agrarian reform and revolution. Thus, for years, the historiography was dominated by studies of land tenure. Catholicism was important insofar as it related to "politicizing peasants" in relation to the land reform. Others who had a stake in it were members of the clergy themselves, who wrote abundantly and courageously about their murdered brothers and sisters. However, they did have a stake in presenting themselves as defenders of the poor. What I find in the digital sources is a kind of echo of these earlier books of the 1980s, but not of the later historiography of those who stuck around.

Paintings, Pots, and Pillows: A Review of "Vistas"

2007-01-18T07:30:00.000-08:00

"Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820" is structured as an online exhibit. It includes images as diverse as a coffee pot, a coin, a feathered portrait of Jesus, a Northern mission in Texas, an oil painting of the Virgin Mary, and a coca-leaf bag. Created in the late 1990s by two art historians frustrated with how difficult it was for their students to have access to a broad range of visual materials from Colonial Latin America, "Vistas" tends to have the tone of a lively lecture; it points to difficult, open-ended questions but provides no space for the visitor to engage with them. Every image is accompanied by a link labeled "discussion." The discussion simply provides more detailed context regarding the image, like the plaque with a block of text next to paintings in museums. These are, however, exceptionally well-written plaques.

The site is thus aimed primarily at students of Colonial Latin America in both the United States and Latin America. Its main purpose is not archival; its contents are not comprehensive but carefully chosen for its particular features that fit the themes of the website. However, if one would want to look investigate a given theme or time period further, "Vistas" offers an extensive searchable bibliography that both stands alone and is divided up into individual entries accompanying every image. There is also a comprehensive list of museums and exhibitions, with links, in the U.S. and Latin America.

The visitor can choose between two organizational styles on the website, as well as between English and Spanish (which opens it up to a much broader audience outside of the United States). She can choose between navigating the site thematically or chronologically. Choosing to do it thematically is simply more fun, particularly the section entitled "Patterns of the Everyday." Given the great emphasis historians tend to give to textual sources and ideas, it is quite refreshing to see how the creators prompt us to imagine how these objects--a beautifully worked silver coffee pot, a portrait of Jesus made by an indigenous man using a pre-Columbian technique of putting together a mosaic with feathers, or an embroidered shirt--shaped the perceptions people living in Guatemala or Argentina hundreds of years ago; and more importantly, how ideas can be communicated quite effectively visually (and in many cases, better than textually).

The careful choice of themes and of the objects themselves point to an underlying argument regarding the importance of everyday visual culture from a variety of social vantage points that the creators of the website hope to communicate not only to students, but also to their colleagues. Art history of Latin America in general, they explicitly argue, tends to be crowded with elite artifacts that obscure the importance of the visual culture of non-elite members of society. The creators juxtapose a portrait of an elite Peruvian in an elaborate dress to a beautifully crafted basket from California made by a woman who wrote her name into the decorative edges. The visitor is prompted to imagine what these women's worlds might have looked like. The differences in color, texture and function throw off balance any of the homogenizing presuppositions we might have brought with us regarding Spanish America in the first place. The aim is to provide the visitor with an inkling of the great diversity of Spanish America, in spite of the preponderance of the canonically sanctioned art derived from Spain in the scholarship and in the archives themselves.