ECHO Blogging Central

Rebecca sat down next to me at breakfast and asked, "How was the hike yesterday?"  
I replied, "Good. It was more of a walk. But it was beautiful." 
Her: "You're a serious hiker, right?" 
Me: "I guess so."

This simple exchange--or one like it--happens every day. We question our abilities. We confirm our expertise.

I noticed this conversation because it happened during a break at a two-day meeting where people heatedly debated the question of who is an artist. In that context, this simple exchange about hiking got me thinking.

What does it mean when someone says she is a hiker, or a scientist, or an artist? It can mean:

• I do this thing often.
• I do this thing at a high level of ability.
• I have expertise in doing this thing.
• I make my living doing this thing.
• I consider this thing to be a core part of my identity.
• I affiliate with this thing.
• I aspire to do this thing professionally, and I am affiliating to build that future for myself.

Some professionals believe strongly in the power of aspirational affiliation. Last week, I heard a curator advocate strongly for the "everyone is an artist" frame of thinking. When you tell a child or an outsider that he is an artist, you empower that person to join a community of art-making. At the same time, you expand the definition of art and make it more inclusive. 
Other professionals believe that expertise needs to be protected. Last week, I heard an immensely talented performer say he "dances but isn't a dancer" because he doesn't do it every day. A person who dedicates their life to making art has a different way of seeing and engaging with the world. It's valuable to honor and acknowledge that difference.
Each of us defines these lines differently, and I don't think there can be one answer. There are reasonable arguments for delineation based on credentials, experience, talent, intention, time on task, and personal connection. 
I know within myself, in the small example of hiking, I froze for a moment when I was asked if I was a serious hiker. I started thinking: well, yes, this is a big part of my identity, but I don't really do it that often anymore, but I like to do it at a high level of intensity, and compared to the general public I do it a lot, and I often plan vacations around it, and probably when I am in a less crazy time of life I'll do it more... 
I experienced a half-second of heart-racing existential self-questioning just to answer a very simple question. 
I also noticed a kind of social distinction shaping up around the exchange. When I said "it was more of a walk," I was also saying "this isn't up to my standards of hiking." When she asked, "You're a serious hiker, right?," she was also asking, "You distinguish yourself from others in this way, right?" The use of the word "serious," like the use of the word "professional," started to draw a clearer line between me and Rebecca--a line that made me uncomfortable. I didn't want to exclude her from past or potential shared hiking experiences. But subtly, I did.
All of this makes me think three basic things about how we name ourselves:

1. It's personal. Even if you think you have the way to define who is an artist or a scientist or an expert, each individual may still choose to affiliate (or opt out) based on his/her own standards. 
2. It's relational. The things we call ourselves and each other do impact the way we see and treat each other. 
3. It could be much richer and more expansive. A word like "artist" is a heavy hammer to impose on every nail. If the Eskimos have fifty words for snow, can't we have fifty words for artist? If we can add more nuance to the ways we name ourselves, we can move from debate to dialogue about the opportunities inherent in a diverse and complex world.

How do you interpret the question of who is an artist/scientist/expert?

Exhibit labels. Promotional text. Grant proposals. For many arts/museum professionals, writing text in 100-word chunks is a daily activity.

And unfortunately, a lot of that writing is lousy. There are great references for better art writing, but we don't always use them. We pack sentences with high-falutin vocabulary, pepper them with clauses, and wrap them up in insider language.

Recently, I discovered an online tool that can change that. It's called Hemingway. Its intent is "to make your writing bold and clear."

It does this by offering everything you wish Microsoft Word grammar check provided:

• it keeps track of word count, sentence count, paragraph count, and character count.
• it highlights sentences that are hard to read. 
• it highlights phrases that are unnecessarily complicated.
• it marks adverbs and uses of passive voice.
• it judges "readability" by calculating grade level of the text (apparently using an average of several scoring rubrics).
• it doesn't flag stylistic flourishes like intentional incomplete sentences. Like this.

I started using it for exhibit labels. When writing exhibit labels, I am constantly checking and rechecking the word count. I use online calculators to assess grade level. It's a pain and Hemingway takes that pain away.

Then I started using it for chunks of grant proposals. Word counts matter there too. In proposals, it can be easy to fall into jargon and long, convoluted sentences. Hemingway has helped me declare where I used to meander.

Hemingway has one big downside: right now, it's just an online app. You have to copy and paste text in (and out) to use it. I'm hopeful that they will release a desktop app soon.

And of course, it doesn't actually channel the voice of Ernest Hemingway. As many have observed, Ernest Hemingway scores low on Hemingway. The app encourages clear, declarative writing, which makes it a poor fit for many creative endeavors. But exhibit labels or marketing brochures? It's ideal for that.

Now I find Hemingway infiltrating my brain when writing almost anything--including this blog post. It is at an 8th grade level, with four adverbs and two hard-to-read sentences. I can live with that.

In her excellent statement of digital humanities values, Lisa Spiro identifies “collegiality and connectedness” and “diversity” as two of the core values of digital humanities. I agree with Lisa that digital humanists value both things—I certainly do—but it can be hard to *do* both things at the same time. The first value stresses the things have in common. The second stresses the ways we are different. When we focus on the first, we sometimes neglect the second.

This is something that has been driven home to me in recent months through the efforts of #dhpoco (post colonial digital humanities). Adeline and Roopika have shown us that sometimes our striving for and celebration of a collegial and connected (or as I have called it, a “nice”) digital humanities can, however unintentionally, serve to elide important differences for the sake of consensus and solidarity. #dhpoco has made us aware that a collegiality and connectedness that papers over differences can be problematic, especially for underrepresented groups such as women and minorities, especially in a discipline that is still dominated by white men. A “big tent” that hides difference is no big tent at all.

As these critiques have soaked in, they have led me to wonder whether the eliding of differences to advance a more collegial and connected digital humanities may be problematic in other ways. Here I’m thinking particularly of disciplinary differences. Certainly, the sublimation of our individual disciplines for a broader digital humanities has led to definitional problems: the difficulty the field has faced in defining “digital humanities” stems in the first place from people’s confusion about the term “humanities.” Folks seem to get what history, philosophy, and literary criticism are, but humanities is harder to pin down. Just as certainly, calling our work “digital humanities” has made it more difficult for us to make it understandable and creditable in disciplinary context: the unified interdisciplinary message may be useful with funding agencies or the Dean of Arts and Sciences, but it may be less so with one’s departmental colleagues.

But what else is lost when we iron out our disciplinary differences? Our histories, for one.

Most of us working in digital humanities know well the dominant narrative of the pre-2000s history of digital humanities. It is a narrative that begins with the work of Father Busa in the 1950s and 1960s, proceeds through the foundation of the Association for Computers in the Humanities (ACH) in the 1970s and the establishment of the Humanist listserv in the 1980s, and culminates with foundation of the Text Encoding Initiative in the 1990s. Indeed, it is in the very context of the telling of this story that the term itself was born. “Digital Humanities” first came to widespread usage with the publication of A Companion to Digital Humanities, which proposed the term as a replacement for “humanities computing” in large part to broaden the tent beyond the literary disciplines that had grown up under that earlier term. The Companion contains important essays about digital work in history, anthropology, geography, and other disciplines. But it is Father Busa who provides the Foreword, and the introductory history told by Susan Hockey is told as the history of digital textual analysis. Indeed, even Will Thomas’s chapter on digital history is presented against the backdrop of this dominant narrative, depicting history in large part as having failed in its first attempts at digital work, as a discipline that was, in digital terms, passed by in the controversies over “cliometrics” in the 1960s and 1970s.

Let me be clear: I’m not slagging Susan, Will, or the other authors and editors of A Companion to Digital Humanities. Their volume went a long way toward consolidating the community of practice in which I’m now such a grateful participant. If it aimed to broaden the tent, it succeeded, and brought me with it. Nevertheless, as an historian, the story of Father Busa, of Humanist, and even of cliometrics is not my story. It is an important story. It is a story I do not refute. It is a story that should be told. But as a digital historian who isn’t much involved in textual analysis, it isn’t a story I can much identify with. Nor is it the only story we can tell.

My story, one I expect will resonate with many of my digital history colleagues, is a story that considers today’s rich landscape of digital history as a natural outgrowth of longstanding public and cultural historical activities rather than a belated inheritance of the quantitative history experiments of the 1960s and 1970s. It is a story that begins with people like Allan Nevins of the Columbia Oral History Office and Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk-Song, especially with the man on the street interviews Lomax coordinated in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks. From these oral history and folklife collecting movements of the 1940s and 1950s we can draw a relatively straight line to the public, social, cultural, and radical history movements of the 1960s and 1970s. These later movements directly spawned organizations like the American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Grad Center, which was founded in the 1980s—not coincidentally, I might add, by Herb Gutman who was the historical profession’s foremost critic of cliometrics—and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media (my former institution), which was founded in the 1990s.

Importantly, these roots in oral history and folklife collecting are not simply institutional and personal. They are deeply methodological. Like today’s digital history, both the oral history and folklife collecting of the 1940s and 1950s and the public and radical history of the 1960s and 1970s were highly:

1. technological;
2. archival;
3. public;
4. collaborative;
5. political; and
6. networked.

Digital humanists often say that particular tools and languages are less important than mindset and method. Our tools are different, but digital historians learned their mindset and methods from the likes of Alan Lomax.

Thus, from my perspective, the digital humanities family tree has two main trunks, one literary and one historical, that developed largely independently into the 1990s and then came together in the late-1990s and early-2000s with the emergence of the World Wide Web. That said, I recognize and welcome the likely possibility that this is not the whole story. I would love to see this family tree expanded to describe three or more trunks (I’m looking at you anthropology and geography). We should continue to bring our different disciplinary histories out and then tie the various strains together.

In my view, it’s time for a reorientation, for another swing of the pendulum. Having made so much progress together in recent years, having explored so much of what we have in common, I believe the time has come to re-engage with what make us different. One potentially profitable step in this direction would be a continued exploration of our very different genealogies, both for the practical purposes of working within our departments and for the scholarly purposes of making the most of our methodological and intellectual inheritances. In the end, I believe an examination of our different disciplinary histories will advance even our interdisciplinary purposes: understanding what makes us distinctive will help us better see what in our practices may be of use to our colleagues in other disciplines and to see more clearly what they have to offer us.

[Image credits: Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Library of Congress, Radical History Review]

In December of 2012, the rock musician Beck released his latest album, Song Reader. Song Reader didn't come as a CD, or an LP, or a bunch of digital audio files. It is what it sounds like: a book of original sheet music, beautifully designed and complemented with artwork and text. There are twenty songs in Song Reader. But if you want to hear them, you have to play them yourself--or check out hundreds of interpretations shared by musicians on the Song Reader website.

There are many artistic projects that offer a template for participation, whether a printed play, an orchestral score, or a visual artwork that involves an instructional set (from community murals to Sol LeWitt). Beck's project is unusual because he deliberately resurrected a mostly-defunct participatory platform: sheet music for popular songs. In his thoughtful preface to this project, I reconnected with five lessons I've learned from participatory projects in museums and cultural sites.

1. Constrain the input, free the output.

In my experience, the best participatory experiences are as constrained and clear as possible in the invitation offered, and as open-ended as possible in the outcome generated. Sheet music is a beautiful analogy for this.

The fact that there is no original recording by Beck of the Song Reader songs, no model upon which "covers" would be based, frees the reader to imagine the songs in any number of ways. As Beck put it:
The opening up of the music, the possibility of letting people work with these songs in different ways, and of allowing them a different accessibility than what’s offered by all the many forms of music available today, is ultimately what this collection aims for. These arrangements are starting-off points; they don’t originate from any definitive recording or performance. 
2. Level the playing field for participants of diverse backgrounds.

One of the things I always focus on in participatory exhibit design is ensuring that everyone has the same tools to work with. When community contributions are presented as second-class content, that negatively affects both the quality of the contributions and the perception of the product. If there are museum objects and visitors' objects on display together, all should be afforded the same level of exhibit design, labels, etc. If there's a talkback area in an exhibition where people can make drawings, visitors should have access to the same kind of paper and colored pencils that was used to generate seed content.

These kinds of participatory projects can actually de-motivate because participants can't possibly measure up to the display model. If Beck is in a fancy studio and you're in your garage with your ukelele, why bother?

Beck talks about this in the context of learning to play music as a young artist. The music he listened to on the radio "got its power" from studio techniques. He described it this way:
When I started out on guitar, I gravitated toward folk and country blues; they seemed to work well with the limited means I had to make music of my own. The popular songs, by contrast, didn’t really translate to my Gibson flat-top acoustic. There was an unspoken division between the music you heard on the radio and the music you were able to play with your own hands. By then, recorded music was no longer just the document of a performance—it was a composite of style, hooks, and production techniques, an extension of a popular personality’s image within a current sound.Of course, Beck notes the irony that sheet music is not exactly accessible to everyone, especially at a time when many people are making music digitally in all kinds of ways that don't start with standardized notation. But when it comes to building from a template, sheet music has simple power. As Beck puts it:
I think there’s something human in sheet music, something that doesn’t depend on technology to facilitate it—it’s a way of opening music up to what someone else is able to bring to it.
3. Everything old is new again.

Sheet music is not a new technology. Beck was inspired to launch this project by the popularity of sheet music and songbooks in the early 1900s. In the 1930s, a popular hit could sell tens of millions of copies of the sheet music, which translated to tens of millions of people playing and singing the songs in their own homes.

Thinking about this, I was struck by the resonance with conversations swirling in the arts field about "little a" art: art that happens in the home, in churches, in parks. There seems to be a hunger these days to document, research, and celebrate the diverse places and ways that people make and share art outside of formal, recognized institutions.

While any family theoretically can start a home singalong or a neighborhood play-reading group, it often takes a tradition, a formal structure, or a template to prompt this kind of activity. Song Reader looks back and encourages reengaging in a tradition that fosters participation. Similarly, when a theater adopts a talking circle practice, or a museum starts a knitting group, the institution is reconnecting with traditional templates for participatory engagement.

4. Participatory processes often (and sometimes unintentionally) restructure the product.

When you are developing a participatory project with non-professionals, it usually involves changing the process from the norm. That's expected. What's less expected is that the product itself is often restructured to meet the particular needs and assets of the participants involved. For example, a history museum might traditionally develop exhibitions internally, with one curator writing the labels in third person (even if drawing from primary sources). That same curator, when developing an exhibition in partnership with community members, may take the opportunity to produce labels in multiple first-person voices of the participants. Their involvement creates an opportunity to create a slightly different product.

Similarly, Beck found himself writing songs differently when writing for the songbook instead of the studio. He noted:
I started to think about what kind of songs have a quality that allows others to inhabit them and to make them their own. What is it about a song that lets you sing it around a campfire, or play it at a wedding? Is it the simplicity of the sentiment? A memorable melody? What makes certain songs able to persist through any era, and adapt themselves? ... The songs I would write for one of my own records began to seem less appropriate than songs written in a broader style. At times, I struggled against my own writing instincts—where was the line between the simplistic and the universal, the cliché and the enduring? Classic songs can transcend and transform a cliché, magnifying a well-trodden phrase or sentiment and making it into something elemental. But often that approach descends into banality and platitudes. My appreciation for the ability of songwriters to avoid those pitfalls drove a lot of the writing here; still, I have little idea whether any of these songs managed to find that line. In the right hands, maybe they’ll be able to come a little closer to it.This gets a bit at the confounding question of how to measure "quality" in a participatory project. Is quality sheet music the same as a quality pop song? No. They are designed to do different things.

5. It's complicated.

Song Reader brings up several familiar questions about participatory arts:

• What happens when an artist creates a participatory process instead of a traditional art product?
• Who owns the products created by that process? Who owns them in a legal sense, but also who is perceived as the owner/originator/creator of the products?
• Are the products created via such a process of worse, better, or equivalent quality as traditional art products?

These questions were particularly present as I scanned the Song Reader website, which feels partly commercial, partly community-based. The content and quality of the songs shared varies widely. But that's part of the point - that the same song can be played reggae or country, by a string quartet or a girl in her bedroom. It can be the basis for a contest, a giant concert, or an evening at home. It can be the spark a personal art practice or a community gathering. It can be a big mess, or a quiet surprise.

As Beck puts it: "That instability is what ultimately drew me to this project."

Question: Is having a pernicious bias analogous to not getting vaccinated?

Philosophers have been talking more about implicit biases recently.  I was recently reading Payne's work on 'weapon bias'; here is the first couple sentences from the abstract of this paper:
"Race stereotypes can lead people to claim to see a weapon where there is none. Split-second decisions magnify the bias by limiting people’s ability to control responses." That is, if forced to make a snap judgment, people in the US today are more likely to identify a non-gun tool as a gun if they have just seen a picture of someone typically racialized as black than someone typically racialized as white.  Also, if people had been under a heavy cognitive load before classifying an object as a gun or a tool, they are more likely to make this mistake.  If subjects have plenty of time, and have not been under heavy cognitive load, then they  make far fewer mistakes, and more importantly the rate of mistakes is the same regardless of race seen.

We typically say that people should be permitted complete freedom of thought: we should only be held accountable for our actions, not our beliefs.  I think (and I could be wrong about this) the usual justification for this complete freedom is: one can always control which thoughts one acts on.  For example, I can think 'I wish so-and-so were dead' without killing them, or even putting them at increased risk of being killed.  If we did not have control over whether our thoughts issued in corresponding actions, then simply having certain kinds of beliefs would put others at increased risk for harm.  It would arguably be a kind of negligence.

Cases like weapon bias suggest that the 'usual justification' above is wrong, and that my having certain (conscious or unconscious) beliefs does put others at increased risk for harm.  The usual justification holds in good circumstances: when I have plenty of time, and am not under a heavy cognitive load, I can control which of my thoughts issue in corresponding actions.  But sometimes I find myself in less than good circumstances (at least sometimes through no fault of my own).  And in those circumstances, my pernicious biases are more likely to harm others.

A biased person in a social setting that includes people stigmatized by that bias seems analogous to me to someone who has not gotten a vaccination for a communicable disease who is not quarantined.  If I don't get vaccinated, then it is of course possible that I will never get the measles, and thus never harm anyone.  But my lack of vaccination raises the risk that others will be harmed.  Having pernicious biases seems to be the same, if the weapons

Can someone talk me out of this line of reasoning?  I think I have an obligation to get vaccinated, but an obligation to have a 'thought vaccination' (whether for conscious or unconscious thoughts) sounds like the Thought Police/ brainwashing -- a result I'm guessing most people want to avoid.

I’m extremely uneasy about startups like Uber and Airbnb whose business models are grounded in sidestepping regulations that were originally intended as consumer- and labor-protection measures. People—both the service providers and their customers—love Uber and Airbnb because they offer greater flexibility and efficiency than traditional taxi and hotel services. Some of that flexibility is afforded by new communications technologies that offer a more direct connection between the service provider and the consumer. But a lot of that flexibility stems from the fact that these services are unregulated. Uber and Airbnb get closer to consumers not only by using information technology to ditch the middleman of the dispatcher (in Uber’s case) or travel agent and hotel chain (in Airbnb’s), but also by ditching the middleman of the government.

We can imagine lots of markets that could be streamlined by using information technology to sidestep middlemen to place service providers in more direct communication with consumers. But the middlemen are often the people who comply with government regulations that are intended to protect us from fraud and abuse. Middlemen often create friction and inefficiencies in the system. But sometimes a little friction is good.

In this episode, Amanda, Stephen, Mills, and guest Joan Troyano were joined by Digital History Fellows Spencer Roberts and Anne Ladyem McDivitt. The first topic of discussion was the announcement of the American Historical Association’s $1.6 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through which four history departments will restructure their doctoral programs to promote diverse career options for history PhDs. The conversation then moved to the lawsuit between Duke University Press and the Social Science History Association regarding ownership of the Social Science History journal. Finally, on a completely different note, we discussed wearable computing and the implications for digital humanities, which raised lots of questions, excitement, and confusion amongst the participants.

To conclude the episode, Joan provided an update from the PressForward project at CHNM, including the upcoming release of their new WordPress plugin.

Related Links:

History PhD being Redesigned?

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/03/20/historians-association-and-four-doctoral-programs-start-new-effort-broaden-phd

http://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/current-projects/career-diversity-for-historians/the-many-careers-of-history-phds

http://blog.historians.org/2014/03/aha-receives-grant-expand-career-tracks-history-phds/

Duke UP and Social Science History association lawsuit over ownership of journal

http://chronicle.com.mutex.gmu.edu/article/Dispute-Over-Who-Will-Publish/145307/

http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2014/03/18/more-than-meets-the-eye/

http://publichistorycommons.org/update-on-the-journal/

Advances in Wearable Computing

Google Smart Watch
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/google-introduces-a-smart-watch/?_php=true&_type=blogs&partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

Recently published book, Pastplay: Teaching and Learning History with Technology – http://www.press.umich.edu/6025015/pastplay

Bill Turkel’s Humanities Fabrication and Physical Computing: http://williamjturkel.net/

Thingiverse: http://thingiverse.com

Report from the Center

http://pressforward.org/the-pressforward-plugin/

Running time: 52:28
Download the .mp3

Last week I had the opportunity to take part in a private meeting chaired by Jeff Selingo, the purpose of which was to provide him (and his colleagues at Georgetown and Arizona State) with feedback on a (soon to be) new executive education program designed to prepare the next generation of higher ed leaders. The meeting, that followed a very interesting panel discussion, included a mix of university presidents, deans and other senior leaders, foundation executives, search consultants, and others working in and around senior leadership in higher ed.

The facilitator for the session was a former member of George Mason‘s Board of Visitors, Kathleen deLaski, who started us off with the following question: “What keeps you up at night when you think about the future of higher education?”

As you might expect from such a large (30 or so participants) and diverse group, there were many answers to this question, but at the top of the list were concerns about access and the growing inequality that restricted access to higher education is causing. Other big concerns included finding sustainable financial models, issues around teaching and learning, a perception that the pool of potential senior leaders has gotten too shallow, and worries that the internal systems in higher ed are not up to making the changes that will be needed in the coming decade. But only a few of the participants didn’t mention access in some way, shape, or form.

Not convinced that access to higher education is a problem? As Selingo points out in his recent book, College Unbound, a young person’s odds of obtaining a bachelors degree are closely tied to his/her family income. Children coming from homes with a family income above $90,000 per year have a 1:2 chance of obtaining a BA/BS degree by age 24. If the family income is between $60,000 – $90,000, those odds drop to 1:4, and if the family income is below $35,000, the odds fall all the way down to 1:17. Not surprisingly, the odds of someone from a lower income family getting into a highly selective institution are also terrible compared to students from upper income families. (168)

That’s an access problem that should be keeping us all up at night, especially when you realize that 21 percent of children aged 5-17 in the United States are living in poverty, which is a 24% increase over 1990. In other words, the likelihood that any American high school senior is going to graduate with a bachelors degree is just going to keep falling until (a) we figure out a way to get more kids out of poverty and (b) we figure out how to provide greater access to those kids. Otherwise, frankly, we’re in serious trouble as an industry, not to mention as a country.

The solutions to getting kids out of poverty are well above my pay grade, but solutions to access are something I know a little bit about. And what I know is that it is not enough to throw money at the problem — greater funding opportunities for students help, and help a lot, but scholarships and other forms of financial aid are not the only answer. Just as important is creating the circumstances in which students who do enroll can graduate in a reasonable amount of time, i.e., four to six years.

Many colleges and universities devote an incredible amount of energy to student retention programs, and proactive administrative efforts do help. But what also helps, and this is where historians have a role to play, is faculty members who think carefully about student success and design courses and curricula that will facilitate success and learning simultaneously.

This is a complicated problem for history, because when it comes to our majors, too often we don’t see them at all until they are sophomores, because future history majors very often have taken an AP history course in high school and so have placed out of our freshman courses. And those freshman courses all too often exist just to serve the demands of a general education curriculum, not the history major.

Given this reality on so many college campuses, it seems to me that history departments can play their own small role in the larger access/retention problem by rethinking the sequence of courses from the first semester of a freshman’s college experience right through to graduation. And, we need to reach out to our campus retention specialists and ask — what is it that makes it more difficult for our students to graduate? And what can we do to help change that, especially for the students who are at most risk?

Changing the reality of student access and success in higher education is a big issue — far too big for any one discipline to fix. But as historians, we also know that grassroots efforts across a broad population often aggregate into something bigger than one has any reason to expect. In the historical literature we often call those “popular movements” or “change from below.”

It’s high time we started our own popular movement or joined someone else’s.

 

Last week's New York Times special section on museums featured a lead article by David Gelles on Wooing a New Generation of Museum Patrons. In the article, David discussed ways that several large art museums are working to attract major donors and board members in their 30s and 40s.

The article both energized and frustrated me. I was excited to see coverage of an important issue of generational shift, but I was frustrated that it appeared to perpetuate traditional, clubbish standards of donor cultivation. I was curious to learn more about what was behind the article.

Fortunately, I had an outlet for my curiosity. David and I have known each other for a decade. We first met in Washington DC through a mix of social and professional circles. David describes himself as a "museum brat." He is the son of Bonnie Pitman, an extraordinary museum leader and educator who has served as director of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Bay Area Discovery Museum, and as a board member for AAM. David introduced me to one of my museum heroes (and his godmother), Elaine Heumann Gurian. He grew up with a special love for and perspective on museums that makes his commentary particularly well-informed.

We've kept in touch over the years as our careers evolved--mine in museums, his in journalism--and I called David to learn more about the story behind the article.

NS: Why did you want to write this story?
DG: The initial idea really came from me trying to bridge my current beat – finance, Wall Street, mergers and acquisitions -- and thinking about how that can apply to the museum world. It struck me quite obviously that the people I cover on a day-to-day basis, especially the younger bankers, are some of the future major donors for museums. I cover all these guys who make 7, 8 figures a year. Inevitably, these are the people museums are going to want to attract to join the board and make major gifts.

At the same time, from my background in the museum world, I’ve gotten to know some of these boards and board members and see how they operate. By the time my mom was at the Bay Area Discovery Museum, I was in my late teens/twenties, and I started to know the board socially, including Bob Fisher, who is now very involved with SFMOMA. I’ve known Bob for 15 years now. We have some mutual understanding and trust. I knew something about this world.

NS: I struggled with your article because you note that these younger people are looking for something different from their donor experience, but many of the examples--the wining and dining--seems like same old, same old in terms of approach to engagement.

DG: Let me first note that this was very deliberately a piece about recruiting young donors who could give substantial gifts and join at the board level. Programmatic engagement is a very different story.
Wining and dining is always going to be a part of this donor cultivation. Let’s face it – people like to be social and have a drink. But I do think some of these examples are really something very different. For example, in the article I talk about SFMOMA and how they dealt with the museum being closed for renovation. They brought in Yves Behar onto their board, a designer in his 30s. He and some of the other younger board members were absolutely the key to get the museum out of the building and into the city. And it was through the younger patrons that they were able to spread SFMOMA all over the Bay Area.

NS: The article mentions that as part of that project, SFMOMA has an outpost in Los Altos. I have a kind of cynical perspective on that--that Los Altos is an extremely wealthy area and a place for donor cultivation, not for engaging people who might not otherwise experience art and art museums. I worry that some of these examples perpetuate income inequity and the perception of museums as  being for the 1%.
DG: I wrote this article coming to museums on their terms. I’m not trying to make value judgments about whether or not it’s a good thing that museums are cultivating wealthy patrons. The fact is that large institutions are heavily reliant on big donations. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is really not the story I wrote.
I do think it’s fair to ask whether museums have become too complex, too expensive – incredibly complex, incredibly expensive to run and maintain -- and that necessitates an incredible high level of giving. In an age of high income inequity, that means you have to focus on major gifts from major donors. And rising income inequality means fewer individuals have the capacity to make major gifts – not less money to go around, but fewer pocketbooks.
NS: It seems like some of the giant institutions in the article--the MoMAs of the world--will probably be just fine with their Young Collectors groups and so on. But the generational shift seems much more threatening to the vast majority of museums that are smaller, not in huge cities, not big names.
DG: Absolutely. Smaller, less marquee institutions may face problems going forward. I included the Delaware Art Museum as an example of this. 
There are a couple of key demographic trends that impact this. There is wealthy flight back into the cities – that’s left a lot of regional and more rural institutions exposed. There's also the transience issue. It's just not the case anymore that professionals are likely to stay in one place for their entire career, especially with our generation. There's an example from Minneapolis in the article about this--a donor that the Walker Art Center was cultivating who moved to New York. This isn't just happening at the highest income levels: it's generational. In the last five years, I’ve moved from Berkeley to Miami to SF to NY... and I wouldn't be surprised if I move again.
NS: Transience seems like a really interesting issue here. What are some of the ways that you saw organizations addressing this mobility of donors and prospects?
DG: When new money comes to town, institutions need to be pretty quick on their feet. The ICA in Boston probably did a pretty good job of that. They saw a confluence of an emerging biotech community with the fact that the institution was going to expand rapidly and they were able to tap into and engage those academic/biotech leaders as donors.

NS: I'm curious to hear more about your experience working with these young bankers on Wall Street. One of the things you covered a bit in the article is some of the reports out there about how younger donors want to be engaged differently--seeking more accountability, wanting their money to go to active projects as opposed to endowments or long-term operating. Is that something you see when you look at the young bankers you cover on a daily basis?

DG:I didn't do exhaustive reporting on this directly, but yes, I think so. I think of one friend of mine who is involved in several museums in New York City, a very successful young banker who very deliberately chooses smaller museums where he can see his money at work. He funds smaller exhibitions, maybe is able to build a relationship with a curator, feel like his voice is heard. He very intentionally choses that versus being one of 600 in the Met’s Young Patrons group. He likes that intimacy. That’s a kind of accountability in itself.

NS: I guess a bigger question about these bankers is the extent to which they are involved philanthropically, irrespective of focus. It's one of the big questions where I am, near Silicon Valley. There's a lot of stress about whether a culture of philanthropy exists with young wealth, or whether people would rather be spending the money on themselves or deploying it differently, like through impact investing.
DG: There is a culture of young philanthropy in NYC, perhaps in contrast with Silicon Valley. In New York, it’s deeply woven into the fabric of the social scene. The social calendar is dictated by galas. There is party season at the end of the year. And then there’s spring party season. That’s a real part of the social currency of the town – and to attend, you have to buy tickets, buy a table, get invited.
When it comes to the donor experience, other communities could probably learn a thing or two from New York. Take San Francisco: there actually is a stable population of people who built their careers in Silicon Valley. A lot of institutions could find whatever that community is and find ways to create those long-term ties. New York is not the only city with a social calendar.
NS: Sure. But another way to look at it is that these galas and this social calendar perpetuate a kind of cultural elitism that exacerbates class disparity. I think what I struggle with most is the sense I get, throughout the article, that this kind of old-guard cultural elitism is being perpetuated for younger generations.

DG: I don’t think museum parties are perpetuating class disparity.
NS: Really? The other lead article in the Museums section was about protests at the Guggenheim, branding that museum as the "1% museum." What do you think the Guggenheim 1% thing is about?

DG: I could see how some people would view events like those at the Guggenheim and other big institutions as a manifestation of class disparity. And of course it is a reflection of certain haves and have nots in society. But I don’t think the museums and the museums' social programs are what are perpetuating class disparity. It might be a reflection of that disparity, but I don’t think they are responsible. 

NS: I guess as someone who runs a small museum that isn't in New York, I struggle with this kind of coverage that seems to perpetuate the dominance of a story about what museums are that is not reflective of the broader population--of people or museums. I worry that this kind of article problematizes our conversations in smaller communities by focusing attention on examples that aren't really relevant to our experience. 
DG: I'm sorry you feel that way. That's not representative of most of the feedback I've been getting. 
I don’t think the lesson is that you have to have a huge fancy party in the atrium to cultivate new donors. That’s not the point. The point of the article is that there’s a generational shift happening here, the next generation has different philanthropic priorities, and museums are finding a variety of ways to try to build bridges.
NS: That makes sense. I appreciate what you are trying to do. And so let's end on a positive note: in the best case, what do you hope the article will do?

DG: I hope it will serve as a prompt for institutions of all sizes across the country take seriously the need to engage with a new generation of donors and visitors. Though that wasn’t the thrust of the article, it’s really part and parcel of the same thing.

But Bob Fisher alluded to it in the article with his quote about a sleepy museum of antiquities. If you are a sleepy institution, it’s going to be hard to get this generation, our generation, involved at a programmatic and a philanthropic level. I have a hard time saying that, because I love little antiquities in vitrines. But I would have a hard time making that a philanthropic priority.
That’s the tension: how can museums, which are still temples of culture, do a bunch of things at once? They need to do what they have evolved to do—maintain an ever-expanding collection, much of which isn’t on display and needs to be storied, insured, conserved, plus doing their own curating to be programmatically relevant, displaying outside exhibits, and then of course trying to do public programming that gets through the door people who might not want to stare at beautiful little objects like I do. Add to that engaging this new generation – both through programming and as donors. Museums have a lot of work to do.
My hope is that this article demonstrates some of the ways that some big institutions have done it somewhat successfully and also serve as a clarion call to the rest to take it seriously.

How do you grapple with engaging the next generation of major donors at your institution? Are you finding ways to do so that are changing as your museum and your community changes?

On 9 April 9, the international art laboratory Hotel Pro Forma organizes a seminar discussing the connections between science and artistic process in collaboration with Medical Musieon, the Center for Healthy Aging at the University of Copenhagen, and the research project Robot Culture and Aesthetics (University of Copenhagen).

The point of departure for the discussion is the Japanese visual artist and performer Ayaka Okutsu’s current art installation Meating Ghost that combines art and scientific research. Ayaka Okutsu is artist-in-residence with Hotel Pro Forma from January to April 2014. See more below.

Presenters:

• Thomas Söderqvist, Director, Medical Museion
• Lene Juel Rasmussen, Managing Director, Center for Healthy Aging
• Ayaka Okutsu, Visual Artist, Artist-in-Residence at Hotel Pro Forma
• Elizabeth Ann Jochum, Founder, Robot Culture and Aesthetics

When: 9. April 2014, from 13.00 to 14.00.
Where: Medical Museion, The Auditorium, Bredgade 62, 1260 Copenhagen

Admission is free, but registration for this event is necessary, as there are limited seats.
The presentations will be in English.

Registration:
7 April 2014 to Martin Rørtoft, *protected email*

In Meating Ghost Japanese visual artist Ayaka Okutsu investigates the manipulation of different senses as a way of making the audience aware of their perception. The work is a video installation with binaurally recorded sound, which gives 360-degree perception through hearing. It creates an uncanny sense of dimension and physicality, offering artificial impairment in hearing and seeing.

Meating Ghost will be exhibited Saturday 5 April, 5.30-9 pm at Atelier Hotel Pro Forma, Strandlodsvej 6b, 3rd floor, 2300 Copenhagen S. There is free admission.

Regular readers of this blog will know already that over the years I’ve leveled more than my fair share of criticism at the American Historical Association on a whole variety of issues, some big, some small. And, along the way, I’ve had some nice things to say as well. The latest news from AHA central, about a $1.6 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to expand on the Association’s “career diversity initiative,” is both great news, but also a good reason to step back and take stock of all that the Association has accomplished in the past two years to help historians think about career trajectories other than the standard “tenure track job at a research university” track.

First there are a couple of facts worth remembering. At the top of my list is the fact that the vast majority of PhD trained historians with full time jobs work either as faculty at non-tenure granting institutions or in various “altac“positions ranging from museum professionals to academic administrative positions to archive management to work in the corporate sector. The second fact is that the number of tenure track jobs in history is almost surely going to remain stable (or decline) in the coming decade or so for the simple reason that the share of faculty jobs that are tenure track jobs is declining. On top of this reality is the fact that all across the country we are being told (especially by legislators) that funding should shift from non-STEM to STEM disciplines.

Labor market issues for those with advanced training, especially in the humanities, are acute and not to be minimized. Institutions of higher education all across the United States, but especially public institutions, are under tremendous financial pressure and far too many have chosen to (at least partially) try solve their financial problems by shifting to the use of more and more contingent faculty labor. This shift is bad both because it is bad for the people who are forced to labor in a kind of never never land of constant uncertainty and it is bad for the institutions because it makes it increasingly difficult for them to build consistent strength in their academic departments. I know that never never land because I spent three years there, one of which included teaching one class while waiting tables full time while my wife mucked stalls at a pony farm. It can be a very difficult place to live.

I spend a fair amount of time doing various and sundry jobs for our senior administration, so I’m privy to discussions at that level about finances and I read the academic press pretty carefully. There just isn’t much evidence that colleges and universities are going to break their addiction to contingent faculty labor in the short term.

These facts I’ve just cited are why I’m so proud of the work that AHA Executive Director Jim Grossman has done to partly pivot an organization that for its entire life has been, in my view, overly focused on the needs and desires of the most prestigious history departments, to a more capacious view of who “historians” are and what their career trajectories can look like. In my 20-plus years as an AHA member, I can’t remember a time when the Association put this much effort into work that will reach well beyond the confines of those most prestigious departments (if the work done under the grant takes hold, which is no sure thing).

This grant is not going to solve the labor market issues I’ve just mentioned. Not at all. But I’m hopeful that it will help graduate students in history find their way to fulfilling careers that are not predicated on contingency.

Anyone who has spent any significant time writing large grants like this Mellon grant knows just how much work they are. Months of effort and countless hours of staff time are required to bring off a success like this one. Shifting academic cultures is like trying to turn a battleship, but $1.6 million is the kind of figure that gets almost anyone’s attention. We won’t know for five to ten years whether this particular effort has borne fruit or not, but in the meantime, my hat is off to the AHA for getting serious about an initiative that is well outside the historical comfort zone of the Association.

Next week is #MuseumWeek on Twitter. We’ll be joining hundreds of museums around Europe and the rest of the world in taking over Twitter using a new museum-related hashtag everyday. Here’s what to expect from us at MM:

• We’ll kick off the week on Monday by dropping in on pretty much every staff member of the museum and see what they’re up to. All gory details will be shared on #DayInTheLife. This is your chance to get acquainted with our staff.
• On Tuesday you get to be a #MuseumMastermind. We’ll have quizzes and puzzles for you to wrap you mind around. And who knows, there might be prizes!
• Join us Wednesday for a trip down memory lane and share your favorite #MuseumMemories. If you have photos or videos from a visit to the museum (or any museum) get sharing!
• On Thursday we’ll go #BehindTheArt and explore the history of the incredible buildings of the Medical Museion.
• Friday is #AskTheCurator day. Have questions for us? Fire away and we’ll hunt down an expert and get you an answer.
• The museum is closed Saturday, but if you have any #MuseumSelfies in your smartphones, now’s the time to share them (again).
• Finally on Sunday we want you to #GetCreative! We’ll post a picture and it’s up to you to caption it! Or you post one and someone else can caption it! It’s all good, just #GetCreative!

So start following #museumweek today already and discover what other museums have planned. You can see which museums are participating in the UK, France, Spain and Italy here. I’ve also created a list of museums participating from other countries here.

Enjoy and get tweeting!

On April 5th, I will take part in an exciting one-day seminar at Sorø Kunstmuseum. The occasion for the seminar is the third exhibition in a three-part series on materiality curated by Birgitte Kirkhoff Eriksen. The series is intellectually spurred by new materialism in philosophy, such as speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, and features artworks that respond to these thoughts from artists such as Troels Sandegård and Lea Porsager. If you read Danish, there is a review of the exhibition here and an in-depth review of the series here. Here is a description of the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue in English.

You can also see the full program for the seminar here.

The program features a lovely mess of researchers, artists, musicians and performers engaging with the topic of consciousness and the relationship between materiality and immaterial. I wrote a piece for the (beautiful) catalogue on gut bacteria and consciousness, and at the seminar I will expand that topic with some ruminations about epigenetics and the rise of a new understanding of the body as embedded in a sort of unheimlich holism.

Below is the poster from the exhibition opening which feature the same artwork as the catalogue:

In the recent issue of Curator there is an interesting and empirically well-founded paper on visitor experience of exhibitions, entitled IPOP: A Theory of Experience Preference. It lays out a typology called IPOP of what draws people to exhibitions – Ideas, People, Objects and Physical. The authors claim that

an individual’s relative attraction to the four IPOP dimensions influences 1) what that individual pays attention to, 2) what s/he does, and 3) how that person responds.

One of the interesting things the authors point out is that people often rate their experiences the highest when they have what is called a ‘flip’ experience, meaning that they are normally drawn by, say, Ideas, but are then ‘flipped’ by the strength of eg the object experience in the exhibition:

We believe that when an individual has the kind of experience that s/he is generally drawn to, that person is likely to feel a sense of satisfaction, since expectations will have been met. But when that person has an additional unexpected experience in a dimension that s/he is not generally drawn to, that experience will seem particularly meaningful and memorable.

I think this effect is something we have been more or less consciously experimenting with in past exhibitions, and might be part of the reason for the success of eg Split and Splice. It might be a useful tool for understanding visitor experiences and what makes particular exhibitions tick.

Anecdotally, I find that this sort of unexpected museum experience can be quite profound – when, say, finding encountering aesthetic qualities of scientific objects or deep ideas in seemingly mundane artifacts. And trying to give visitor something to flip out about seem like a worthy goal.

Here are a few of the hashtags I've seen applied to photographs of museum objects on Instagram lately:
#heytherebigfella
#biggysmallistheillest
#forbrightfuture
#myfavorite
#instagood
#bestday
#withmyhomies
#whatever
#learnedfromthebest
#revolutionary
#nowicandie

These tags all do a great job capturing the magic of exploring a museum. They do a great job sharing the humor and surprise of collections objects. They position museums as social starting points, experiences worth sharing, braggable moments.

They do something entirely different than what museums professionals thought tags might do for our institutions.


Almost ten years ago, museum techies started to get excited about tagging. In 2005, a group of art museums launched steve.museum, a project to explore ways that visitors and non-professionals could help assign descriptive tags to online collections. The point was to "bridge the semantic gap [between experts and visitors in describing objects] by engaging users in the time-consuming and expensive task of describing our collections; add a multi-cultural, perhaps multi-lingual perspective to our documentation; and possibly even develop strategies for engaging new types of users in looking at and thinking about art."

Steve.museum received significant funding from IMLS, and several museums started experimenting with tagging projects, both within and beyond the Steve universe. This included a bevy of research papers and workshops, as well as innovative tagging projects intended to do everything from provide contextual information about artwork to identifying actions taken by families of birds.

The best projects incorporated heavy game mechanics to turn a chore--describing objects--into a fun plaything. While these projects had some success, tagging museum collections objects never really took off as a visitor-contributed slam dunk. And it declined over time. As Shelley Bernstein at the Brooklyn Museum told me this week: "We've seen far less tagging on our site in recent years and most of the tagging is being contributed via our tag game, Tag You're It, with far less direct activity on object pages within the collection online."

Meanwhile, social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and eventually Facebook started to incorporate tagging and hashtags into their interfaces. Tags have morphed from a way to assign a useful, searchable label to an idea (the kind of tagging museums were interested in) to a way to add commentary in an oddly authoritative, winking third-person voice. Tags like #booyah or #cute or #bestdayever allow people to electively apply an external label to a personal moment. On Instagram in particular, tagging has become the way to get noticed and get connected. In the early days of blogging, people would say "links = love." Now, it's more like "tags = love."

Where does this leave museums and dreams of visitor-driven tagging of collections? The good news is that people are finally psyched about tagging stuff. On their own. Without institutional prompting. The complicating news is that the way people want to tag is to document their personal/social experience with objects, not just the object on its own.

I think this means huge potential for museums to better understand visitors' emotional and affective relationship with specific objects and experiences--what surprises, delights, confounds, and connects. In this way, I see the shift in the use of tagging as opening up new opportunities in visitor research. For example, check out this site, where you can see instances of two hashtags applied to the same photo - try entering "museum" and "love" to get a feel for it.

As for the use of tags to document objects in a common vernacular, it's possible... but only if museums can find ways to help people connect those kinds of tags to their own motivations for tagging.

What do you see as the future of tagging and museum collections?

We are (very!) happy to announce that Canadian researcher/artist Francois-Joseph Lapointe will be in residence at the Museion and the CBMR Section for Science Communication for three weeks during May and one week during October. Francois-Joseph is head of the laboratory of Molecular Ecology and Evolution at Université de Montréal and full professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. He has more than 100 scientific publications in the areas of  metagenomics, bioinformatics and population genetics. Alongside his scientific work, he also completed a PhD in dance in 2012 with a thesis entitled ‘Choreogenetics, or the art of making DNA dance’ (see examples of his work here). His recent bioart work involves sequencing his wife and his microbiome in order to generate changing metagenomic self-portraits.

While at the Museion Francois-Joseph will stage a two-part performance called ‘A 1000 handshakes’. In his own words:

“This project proposes a scientific representation of my own metagenomic portrait (‘microbiome selfie’) and its combinatorial transformation in time through different types of interactions with other people. I will modify my own microbiome by performing specific actions (i.e., shaking hands with the public), which will modify the microbial communities of my body. I will sequence my skin, gut and oral microbiomes before AND after these experiments to assess the complex combinatorial process of metagenomics. The series of portraits (original + contaminated) will be displayed alongside each other at the exhibition, during which a re-enactment of the ‘1000 handshakes’ experiment will be presented to transform my microbiome in real time.”

The project will run in two parts – an early version in late May and a full version at the Culture Night on 10th of October, where the portraits generated by the first run will be shown, alongside the performance itself. Francois-Joseph will also give a public lecture on the relationship between art and science from his unique perspective at the Art Academy on May 15th (details to follow). We will be looking for Copenhagen-based students or researcher to participate in a workshop in May and the final event at Culture Night – from both the arts and the sciences. More details to follow, but if you’re already interested you can email us (*protected email* or *protected email*).

From March 10-12, I got to participate in the iDigBio Original Sources Digitization Workshop, a gathering of natural history collections managers, archivists, and technologists. Although the focus of digitization within natural history has been on specimens or specimen labels, this workshop sought to address the challenges and opportunities involved in digitizing ledgers, field notes, and other non-specimen data. As usual for iDigBio events, the workshop was spectacular.

Carolyn Sheffield chaired a panel (video recording) on crowdsourcing which included Rob Guralnik discussing Notes From Nature, Christina Fidler talking about the Grinnell field notes on FromThePage, my talk, and a long, valuable discussion among all participants. My presentation covered the data model and uses of wiki links as I'm using them in FromThePage.

Video, slides, and transcript are below:

"From The Page" - Ben Brumfield from iDigBio on Vimeo.
I'm Ben Brumfield.  You saw a little bit about FromThePage in Christina Fidler's presentation, so I wanted to talk about the internals -- the design and the datastructures behind some of the things that make this a little bit different from NotesFromNature or the NARA Transcribr Drupal module.
This is the transcription screen.  You've seen this with Christina, so I'll probably go over this pretty quickly.  This is a full-text transcription, not individual records like you get with Notes From Nature. 
The reason for that is that FromThePage was built to be a wiki-like tool, purpose-built for creating amateur editions.  So we've got a text and we want to create an edition from the text that can then be re-used, printed, and analyzed.

I say "amateur" editions because we're not dealing with the kinds of things that textual scholars in the humanities are dealing with, where they're trying to compare different variant manuscript versions of Chaucer.  [By contrast, we] have something that's very straightforward, and we're interested in some fairly simple annotations.

It's purpose-built -- free-standing on MySQL and Ruby on Rails, so it's not integrated with MediaWiki or anything like that.
So who's using it?

[FromThePage] was built originally for a set of my great-great grandmother's diaries.

Since then it's been used for military diaries by libraries and history departments.
It's been used for literary diaries--in this case for Shelby Foote's diaries--for literary drafts, and for punk rock fanzines.  (Which is kind of awesome!)
So what does that have to do with the people in this room and the kind of material [we're working with]?

Here's an example:  This is an 1859 journal from an expedition in which someone went out and made a number of observations and collected some things to bring back with them.  There are scholars interested in mining those.

But it's not a naturalist expedition.  This is Viscountess Emily Anne Smyth Strangford, who in this case is touring the Mediterranean and visiting a lot of classical monuments.  The folks at the Duke Computational Classics Collaboratory are interested in finding all the places in which she recorded Latin and Greek inscriptions, coming up with her itenerary, and figuring out how [that data] connects to the objects her father-in-law had collected for the British Museum twenty years earlier.

So there's a lot of correspondence, I tend to think, with field notes.
The San Diego Natural History Museum started using FromThePage for field books in 2010.  They're still working on the project.

• They've identified ten thousand subjects worth classifying in their system.
• Individual pages have been edited twenty-four thousand times.  And this goes back to the wiki-like approach -- people transcribe a page, and then they revisit it. They make a number of edits to a page as they get comfortable with the handwriting.
• And then they've linked individual observations, species mentioned, and people in the field notes to those subjects forty-two thousand times.

Then there are a couple of other projects working with field notes.  [Museum of Vertebrate Zoology] obviously is in trial, and [the Museum of Comparative Zoology] and Missouri Botanical Gardens are just evaluating the software right now.  
So, what is a wiki link?

Any of us who've edited Wikipedia may be used to this.  I followed the same syntax [in FromThePage].

What we have here is a set of double square braces with the canonical name of the subject--this could be a formatted date, this could be a full name that's spelled out--and then the text that's actually used within the verbatim transcript.

So our example here -- this is when Grinnell meets Klauber.  The field note actually says "L. M. Klauber", so the person transcribing has expanded this out to "Laurence M. Klauber".  So we have the ability to handle variance in references to Klauber, but still identify them as Klauber.
Technically speaking, what's behind one of these wiki links?

There are a lot of tables in this database.

• We know that there's this page that Klauber is mentioned on.  It's S1 Page 3 in the Grinnell field notes that MVZ has online.
• We've got a subject which is Laurence M. Klauber.
• The subject is categorized as a person, which can be used for analysis and filtering, like Christina showed you.
• And then the individual link between the page and the subject, that contains the variation, is also stored.

So there are a lot of things you can do with that.

• You can show all the pages that mention Laurence M. Klauber, and read the pages in context or just get a listing of them.
• More helpfully, as you're transcribing we can mine those links to automatically suggest mark-up.  So the next time we encounter "L. M. Klauber", we can push a button and that will automatically expand the mark-up of "L. M. Klauber" to "[[Laurence M. Klauber|L. M. Klauber]]".
• You can also feed this to full-text searches.  So if you've got a lot of plain-text transcripts which contain Laurence M. Klauber, we can automatically populate the search with those variations, creating an OR query with "Klauber", "L. M. Klauber"
• And then we can mine the mark-up for correspondences [between subjects] as Christina showed.

The last thing you can do with it is export.
Here is a TEI-XML export of the Joseph Grinnell notes.  This is useful for interchange, but the most important thing this does is that it allows amateurs to create well-formatted, TEI P5-compliant XML.  And it will handle one of the things that's very hard about creating TEI in an XML editor, which is associating reference string to their entries over in the TEI header which describes who the people are outside the text.
This is a CSV export of the Grinnell field notes.  Basically this is every observation and every person who's mentioned, exported as a CSV file with links back to the pages and URLs at which those pages can be found.  This is the kind of thing that perhaps could be ingested into [museum collection management database] Arctos.
Future plans:

We're going to be doing more CMS integrations.  We're working on Omeka.  The Internet Archive is done.  There are a couple of grant applications that involve hooking FromThePage up to Fedora Commons.

We also really want to contextualize links in time and place.  We want the ability for people to define where the person writing the journal is where they're writing, and then to apply those geotags and chronotags to the references.  So you could map when species were mentioned.  You could extract a visual itenerary.

We need more formatting options.  One of our volunteers has found all kinds of crazy editorial issues for handling strike-outs and things like that.

And the last thing that we're looking for is more projects.

The March 2014 issue of Perspectives includes a very clear analysis of the most recent IPEDS data on history BAs by Allen Mikaelian. Everyone currently teaching college history or planning to do so should read this article.

Why? A quick glance at this graph should at least given one pause.

What is shows is a five year decline in history’s share of all bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States. In the data analysis business, we call this a trend. In an era of stagnant or declining funding for colleges and universities, this is a particularly bad moment for history departments to be smaller players on the enrollment stage. While the overall number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in history is actually up slightly, deans, provosts, and campus accounting types all take note of a discipline’s relative share of resources provided and consumed and so graph results like this one are a real (not imagined) problem.

As I have written previously, one reason for history’s relative decline as a share of overall degrees awarded is the inescapable fact that, at the undergraduate level, our discipline has a gender problem. The 2011-12 IPEDS data (the most recent available) show that 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in the United States were awarded to women, but only 40 percent of degrees in our field went to women. That’s a problem. And it’s not getting better. The IPEDS data show that history is also getting whiter by the year, even as higher education as a whole is becoming more diverse by the year.

What’s new to me in Mikaelian’s article is that the share of bachelor’s degrees in history awarded by our most research intensive universities (the “very high” category in the Carnegie classification) has fallen substantially over the past 25 years. In 1989, 38 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in history were awarded at these universities, almost all of which have very large history departments with substantial doctoral enrollments. But in 2012, only 31 percent of bachelor’s degrees in our field came from these departments. And, as Mikaelian points out, those same institutions experienced only an overall drop in bachelor’s degrees of three percent, so there has been a real drop in history degrees at our most research intensive departments.

I’ve spent a lot of time in university administration over the past five years and one thing I know for sure is that a measurable decline in degrees awarded is something that gets noticed, even if that decline took 25 years. There just aren’t enough resources to go around any more and so those fields that are generating more tuition revenue are blessed with more resources, while those generating less revenue see their budgets declining. That’s the inescapable reality of higher education in 2014.

What does this mean for the future of our discipline? It means that in the near term we shouldn’t be surprised to see tenure  lines at the most research intensive universities being shifted away from history. Unless those faculty who remain agree to teach more undergraduates (unlikely in most cases), those large departments will either become smaller still, or will begin relying on ever more contingent labor for their undergraduate teaching.

More worrisome than any possible decline of the biggest and most research intensive history departments is the on-going gender problem we have at the undergraduate level. If we don’t start coming up with new ways of thinking about that long standing problem, we’re all in the same boat — a boat that has sprouted more than a few leaks.

From the “Further Readings” section at the back of Paul Collin’s wonderful Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change The World: There is one very simple way to see what Beach’s railway [19th (…) Read more

You know those research studies that make you want to immediately change your practice in some way? I recently read The BERI report on bilingual labels in museums and was blown away by its findings. BERI was an NSF-funded three-year collaborative project co-led by Cecilia Garibay (Garibay Group), Steve Yalowitz (Audience Viewpoints Consulting), Nan Renner (Balboa Park Cultural Partnership, Art of Science Learning) and Carlos Plaza (Babel No More). This guest post was written by Steve Yalowitz, a Principal at Audience Viewpoints Consulting, who has a Ph.D. in Applied Social Psychology and has evaluated and researched informal learning experiences in museums and other visitor institutions for over 20 years.

Bilingualism in the U.S. is a controversial topic, and the same is true in museums. If someone asked you whether museums should or need to have text in more than one language, what would you say? You probably have an opinion, or you could probably come up with an opinion without too much effort. Maybe you are in a country that mandates multiple languages, or at an institution already committed to bi- or multi-lingual interpretation. However, based on my conversations and experiences with many museum professionals, my guess is that many of you are aware of the issue, may think it’s worth discussing, but have limited knowledge about the core issues surrounding bilingual interpretation.

I was co-author of a recently completed research study [PDF] funded by the National Science Foundation, the Bilingual Exhibit Research Initiative (BERI), which strove to better understand bilingual labels from the visitor perspective. This qualitative, exploratory study involved tracking and interviewing 32 Spanish-speaking intergenerational groups in fully bilingual exhibits at four different science centers/museums. We observed and audio recorded the groups, and conducted in-depth interviews in Spanish after they went through the exhibit, with a focus on what the bilingual experience was like for the group.

The BERI study really expanded our thinking about bilingual interpretation, even though we’d been studying the topic for years. One of the main affordances of bilingual interpretation, of course, is that it provides access to content. The BERI study shows that access to content—the most obvious benefit of bilingual labels—is just the tip of the iceberg. Bilingual interpretation expands the way visitors experience and perceive museums, shifting their emotional connection to the institutions.

Here are three affordances that may not be as top-of-mind when we think about bilingual interpretation:

1. Code-switching – We found lots of evidence of effortless switching back-and-forth between English and Spanish. We saw kids and adults switch from English to Spanish not only mid-conversation but mid-sentence, both in the exhibition and in the interviews afterwards. Museum professionals often incorrectly assume that if we provide Spanish text for Spanish speakers, they stay in “Spanish mode.” The power of bilingual text is that it’s bilingual – it provides access in two languages, and code switching lets you understand and express yourself from two different perspectives, with two sets of vocabulary. It was a huge affordance for bilingual groups, especially when some members were not able to understand English, or even if they were Spanish dominant or fully bilingual. 
2. Facilitation – We researched intergenerational groups, so it’s not surprising that many of the adults saw their role as facilitator as essential to their own and the group’s success in the exhibition. We confirmed what other label studies have previously found: that adults were more likely to read labels than kids. However, this study found that in bilingual groups adults were more likely to read in Spanish, while the kids were more likely to read in English. With Spanish labels available, adults were able to facilitate, guiding the conversations and interactions, showing their children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews where to focus and how to interact. Adults who were previously dependent on their children could now take the lead as confident facilitators. An added benefit of bilingual labels, even for those who could read in English, was that they didn’t feel slower or that they were holding up the group.
3. Emotional reaction – This study found that the presence of bilingual interpretation had a profound emotional effect on the groups. Groups said they enjoyed the visit more, felt more valued by the institution, and many said having bilingual interpretation changed how they felt about the institution. In our field, if we focus on the emotional aspect of the experience, it’s typically around the content and what we’re hoping people feel when engaging with our exhibits. While some of the reactions were around engagement with content (as would be expected), many of them were really about feeling confident and comfortable–key factors for a satisfying and worthwhile visit. 

When asking whether bilingual interpretation is worth it, we’re often looking at it through the wrong lens. It shouldn’t be about whether it’s worth it for us as an institutional investment, but whether it’s worth it from the visitor perspective. Does it improve the visitor experience in a way that adds value to the visit, providing affordances that don’t exist in monolingual experiences? The answer, from the BERI study findings, is a resounding yes.

BERI was a three-year collaborative effort I worked on with Cecilia Garibay, Nan Renner and Carlos Plaza. When we received the award, we felt a great sense of opportunity and responsibility, since this was the first NSF-funded research study about bilingual families and their experiences in fully bilingual exhibitions. You can download the research report and find out about the research model, methods, analysis and implications for the field.

 We saw this study not as the answer to the field’s questions about bilingual interpretation, but as the start of a conversation around better understanding how it works. In doing so, we found out that it is a much more complicated and rich experience than even we thought. After a recent presentation about the findings, a museum professional told us that the study’s findings helped change how they think about bilingual interpretation. My hope is that some of you out there will continue this important work, and help change how I think about bilingual interpretation.