The title of this post is purely rhetorical because no one has asked me to teach a MOOC. In fact, I have not been involved with MOOCs at all, except as an observer from afar. Instead, the title is the result of me wondering why anyone would teach a course with tens of thousands of students enrolled (maybe more), who you would never meet, and for which there is an enormous amount of start up effort (designing the course, filming the lectures, figuring out the grading algorithms, etc., etc.)?
I understand why universities want to get MOOCs out there with their most prominent professors teaching them. Having a big name professor offer a MOOC brings many, many eyeballs to your campus logo (and even better to the website) and helps burnish your image in a global market for higher education. In short, MOOCs are marketing dollars well spent, even if they aren’t yet showing any sign they are good for the bottom line, given the terms that companies like Coursera are offering colleges and universities.
But why would a professor, especially a prominent (and presumably busy) professor, bother to spend all the time and effort necessary to bring a MOOC to market and then, one assumes, have some connection to its implementation? After all, designing a new course or redesigning an old one takes a lot of time in the analog world. When you consider the time required to film lectures, work with an editor to polish up that film and add in B-roll, design online assignments and assessments, and think through how students are going to progress through the various online materials, a MOOC represents a lot of time and effort.
After puzzling on this question, I can think of two answers.
The first is what we might call educational altruism. MOOCs offer faculty members a chance to make their courses available, for free, to the widest possible audience. As scholars we are supposed to be engaged in the circulation of knowledge, and being able to circulate one’s knowledge of a particular subject to 70,000 or 100,000 students, even if only a tiny fraction of them complete the course, is a potentially wonderful thing. I’m not sure that those students learn anywhere near what they would learn in a well designed face to face class, given that MOOCs largely replicate the lecture/listen binary model that is so ubiquitous in large American universities. That model has been demonstrated in countless studies by cognitive scientists to yield only minimal learning gains, even when taught by famous, or brilliant lecturers. But if the purpose of teaching a MOOC on one’s subject is to make one’s expertise in a given subject available, for free, to as many people as possible, that’s a laudable act. I’m not sure how much of this educational altruism there is out there, but I’m willing to admit that it might really exist.
The second reason is more mercenary and involves the sale of books and/or other collateral products. In particular, I wondered whether MOOCs offered faculty members an opportunity to make some serious money on the teaching and learning products that they have created?
To test my idea that book sales might just be part of the reason why some faculty members would teach a MOOC, I randomly selected eight courses across the disciplines and from various universities on the Coursera website. I tried to do the same thing at the Udacity site, but one cannot read the course syllabi there. What I found was that on all eight syllabi, the only readings students were expected to do were from free and open source/open access materials. However, five of the eight professors recommended or suggested as optional books that they had written, ranging in price from $8 to $110. One of the professors recommends only open source works, and the other two recommend books published by others for either $44 or $142.
If we assume for a minute that some fraction of the tens of thousands of students taking part in a given MOOC go ahead and purchase the “recommended” or “optional” book written by the professor teaching the course, the potential for significant earnings via book sales is very real. For the sake of argument, let’s say that I taught a MOOC that drew 50,000 students and I recommended as optional the ebook version of my new book ($19.95). And, for the sake of this same argument, let’s say that 10% of the students purchased a copy. Under the terms of my contract with the press, I would make just under $7,000 in royalties from the sale of those books. While $7,000 is not enough for the downpayment on that beach house I’ve been wanting, it’s still $7,000 in additional income.
Different states and different institutions have widely varying rules (and even laws) governing whether faculty members can require students to purchase a book from which the faculty member receives income. But those rules were made with the standard course for credit model in mind. MOOCs disrupt that model by not offering credit and in the cases I looked at, by having all textbooks be “recommended” or “optional.” Once MOOCs move to the credit bearing/tuition charging mode, it will be interesting to see whether there is any change in this approach. I suspect there won’t be, if only because the openness of a MOOC begins to break down once it starts to get expensive for students.
4th newsletter from Medical Museion in 2013.
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Over the weekend my friend and colleague Peter Haber passed away after an extended illness. I was only fortunate enough to know Peter for the past four years, but I benefitted greatly from his friendship, his collegiality, his ideas, and his good humor.
Like my former colleague Roy Rosenzweig, Peter was a “connector” — one of those people who brought others together for the benefit of everyone. Through Peter I have met and begun to work with a number of colleagues in Switzerland and Austria, colleagues I never would have met otherwise. More importantly, though, my understanding of digital history and digital humanities is so much richer for having read Digital Past. Geschichtswissenschaft im digitalen Zeitalter (2011). What Peter brought to the study of digital history was a scientific rigor, a style of analysis, that is so often lacking in English language scholarship on our field. If I could quibble with one thing about the edition of the book that I own, it is the photograph of Peter on the back cover. In that photo, he seems dark and mysterious. Those who knew him well, know he was anything but dark or mysterious.
Perhaps the most tangible evidence of Peter the Connector is his co-authored volume (with Marin Gasteiner), Digitale Arbeitstechniken (2010). When I read these essays I came away with a much better sense of the kinds of work being done by my German-speaking colleagues in digital history — work I would likely not know if Peter and Martin had not collected it. More importantly, though, I began to think about several issues near and dear to me in new and different ways. That is what the best scholarship does for us.
But really, Peter’s greatest academic contribution, in many ways, has been Hist.net, perhaps the longest-lived digital history blog in any language. With his close friend and collaborator Jan Hodel, Peter spent more than a decade making all things digital and historical available and accessible to a wide audience. I knew of the blog before I knew Peter and Jan, and one of my happiest professional moments was the day I received an email from the two of them inviting me to speak at a conference in Basel. For my own family health reasons, I couldn’t attend that meeting and so I was very pleased (and relieved) when they kindly invited me back the following year to speak in Basel. That meeting was the starting point of our three way friendship and collaboration on Global Perspectives on Digital History, a project that kept us connected until he became too sick to continue.
One the most enjoyable days I’ve spent in the past several years was with Peter, when he was still feeling fine, touring the Fondation Beyeler, then returning to Basel for a coffee. That is the Peter I will remember. But I will also remember the Peter who, when you said something he didn’t entirely agree with, would cock and eyebrow, pause, and then ask a probing question that politely disagreed, while trying to find a way that the two of us could agree. I will miss both of those Peters very much.
I wrote the other day that taking down museum exhibitions could be as much fun as building new ones.
That was a pretty spontaneous tongue-in-cheek comment triggered by our conservator Nanna Gerdes’ enthusiastic twitter series of images (see @NaGerdes and storified here, here and here) from the process of taking down three old exhibition rooms in our museum’s Tietkens Gaard building.
But the more I think about it, I feel this spontaneous remark has some deeper truth to it. Here’s the way I reason about it:
Most curators will probably think the design and building of an exhibition is more fun than taking it down afterward. Especially if you are interested in ideas and concepts, and in constructing new unseen worlds.
Sure, it can surely be forbiddingly exhausting to design and build: conceptualising and physically constructing a new exhibition in the interfaces between history and the present, between images and material artefacts, immaterial ideas and three-dimensional physical spaces can at times be frustrating and anxiety-provoking.
But all in all it’s a pretty satisfying creative process. And I think it is this combination of hard work and immersion in creative processes that make us think of exhibition making as being ‘fun’.
And in contrast, the taking down an exhibition after closing day sounds, from an exhibition curator’s point of view, like a pretty dull and boring activity. The opposite of having fun. Like cleaning up after the party rather than planning and taking part in it.
However, I think there is another and more fun side to taking down than the immediate connotations of boredom, deconstruction and cleaning up.
Whereas the building and construction process has certain similarities with being on speed (especially in the last couple of weeks and days before the opening), the post-closing process is much more relaxed. If building up is associated with fervour, even hysteria, taking down is more characterised by tranquility, even melancholia.
Now, paradoxically, the creative and conceptual focus in the building phase draws the curator’s attention away from the artefacts themselves. When you build an exhibition you are 110% focused on how to find the right objects and images, and how to make them fit into the overarching theme of the show. You concentrate on the meaning of the artefacts — their history, their social context, their cultural significance, how they play together with other artefacts into a meaningful whole. The concept and the idea are sovereign, the artefacts its subjects.
After closing down, however, the conceptual frame is dead. The curator’s ordering mind has since long continued to other storage room hunting grounds. Now the remaining artefacts are no longer subjected to the powerful mind of the inquisitive and sovereign curator, they are no longer props in the curator’s script. And suddenly we can see them for what they are, as artefacts pure and simple.
So if you really want to see, smell, touch and contemplate artefacts, you’d better not get too involved in the constructive building up of a new exhibition, but rather wait until the last visitor has left the rooms and the catalogue has been removed from the shelves of the museum shop. When the show is over, the curator in the original sense of the word (the one who cares about artefacts) enters the scene and takes a renewed and more intense look at the artefacts.
That intense dealing with the artefacts can be pretty ‘fun’ too. My online dictionary defines ‘fun’ as “a source of enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure”, and that’s what a less hectic and conceptual dealing with artefacts can be: enjoyable, amusing, pleasurable, playful.
Actually, even if we talk about exhibition making as ‘fun’, there isn’t really much time for pleasure and play in the process. Deadlines must be met, budgets kept, many different wills must be negotiated, and conflicts avoided. That’s hectic fun. But packing the whole thing down afterwards gives us a chance to engage with the things in a more free and relaxed way: that’s playful fun.
And after all, that’s what fun is about, isn’t it?
We’ve had two specialists in colour history visting from the National Museum of Denmark.
They have worked hard grinding down selected areas of the walls and doors in the museum’s Titkens Gaard building to find out what colours the new exhibition room have had since the mid 18th century.
See also Nanna’s tweets here.
For larger images, click the photos below:
Dear Nico,
Yesterday you turned fifteen months old. As unhappy as this last month has been for your city, and for so many other places, you remain cheerful and loving.
You speak in sentences. We woke up one slow Sunday morning, and you said, “dog say woof.” I said, “oh yeah? What do cats say?” You didn’t answer, but when I asked you where our cats were, you said, “I don’t know!” And fair enough: they aren’t allowed in the bedroom at night, so who knows where they go when they’re behind the closed door! Having said these things, you proceeded to get off the bed safely, butt first.
Physics is a lot better now. Bath time is more awesome for your ability to squeeze the squirt toys. You hold your own bottle, which took an inexplicably long time. You can stand from sitting, slide down a slide, and oh, walk without holding on. No big deal, just walking. This is me not freaking out.
Cognitively? Huge leaps. Earlier this month you got stuck under chairs, which was hilarious; no more of that. You’re way more into stuffed toys. You’ve figured out that feeding yourself may be messier, but is infinitely better. You’re starting to get the concept of “gentle” with cats, babies, and most of the time even my face. You’ve figured out that calling me when you wake from a nap, instead of bursting into tears, totally works to bring me to you.
No more falling asleep at the boob: you’ve started to ask to be put to bed. Settling down after that might be tricky, but is a necessary life skill, so we’re both giving you space to learn this. Plus, falling asleep without being held means you can put yourself back to sleep when you wake, sometimes.
Sometimes. Everything is variable. The variability, and the fact that you’re talking up a storm and I understand about 10% of it, means tricky times at the Launch Pad.
Latest food exploits: you’re very thoughtful about coconut curry. Canned sardines are awesome. Blueberries are the best, except muscat grapes are even better. Cheese makes you tremble with excitement (then you make faces while eating it). Today’s toast with tapenade, tomatoes and feta was a smashing success. Cupcakes and ice cream and cat food… oh, my.
You give slobbery kisses and enjoy a little post-nap back rub. You’re getting more clingy cuddly. Spring is finally here, and you’re loving it almost as much as you love dogs.
Don’t believe anyone who tells you those big feelings you’re having will go away. They never do. But you’ll get much better at handling them! You’ll have no choice: eventually it’ll be either that, or I sell you to the next traveling space circus that comes through town.
Love,
-Mama
ps Pix!
As I wrote in an earlier post, we are now on the track of building up the new semi-permanent exhibition ‘Under the Skin’ in the museum’s Tietkens Gaard building.
In the last couple of months, our conservator Nanna Gerdes has worked hard to take down the three former exhibition rooms and packed the artefacts for remote storage.
Judged by Nanna’s enthusiastic photographing activities, taking down the old exhibitions for storage seems to be almost as fun as building up new ones.
See Nanna’s storified twitter posts of the X-ray study collection with images here; ditto from the Finsen exhibition here, and ditto from the exhibition of anatomical models here.
(And here’s the ground plan of the rooms exhibition, ca. 25 x 12 meters in all:)
We are now in the first phase of the construction of our new 3500 square feet semi-permanent exhibition here at Medical Museion — provisionally titled ‘Under the Skin’ — to be opened in the late autumn of 2014.
The exhibition will show some of best specimens from our big collection of normal and pathological anatomical specimens and other human remains, together with a number of new acquisitions from contemporary human remains, such as samples from bio- and tissue banks.
Already last year we secured the basic funding for the new exhibition from the Arbejdsmarkedets Feriefond (AFF), but until recently we’ve been waiting for the University of Copenhagen’s decision to redecorate the beautiful exhibition rooms in the mid-18th century Tietkens Gaard building.
Now the University has decided to start the redecoration and therefore we are now launching an exhibition site, where we tell about the successive phases of the construction process:
1) taking down the former study collections in the spring of 2013
3) the rebuilding and redecoration of the rooms in the next 6 months
4) the continuous development of the concept for the new exhibition and the preliminary design ideas
5) choosing and curating objects and images in the next 12 months; and finally
6) the mounting and installation in the early fall of 2014.
Our conservator Nanna Gerdes has tweeted her daily work taking down, packing and conserving the objects from the former study collections in the room (follow her here: @NaGerdes).
New thoughts and ideas for the exhibition project will be available through our blog and via Facebook.
Read more here: http://www.museion.ku.dk/under-huden-under-konstruktion/
Want to explore fat with pencil and pastry fork?
We seem to live in a world obsessed with fat. Obesity is described as a worldwide health threat, and we are bombarded by diet advice. But fat itself is a mystery. While we know that “full fat” foods can be bad for us, we also know that the body needs fat (and of course, greasy food can be the most delicious). We often find fatty substances disgusting, but moisturize our skin with lotions based on lard and oil. And the kinds of bodies seen as beautiful oscillate wildly over time and media. It’s a love-hate relationship.
Last year we opened the exhibition “Obesity – what’s the problem?” here at Medical Museion. The exhibition takes a close look at the gastric bypass operation used to treat morbid obesity, and some intriguing recent research in metabolism. It’s all very scientific and clinical. But what about fat as a substance? How do we feel about it?
On Sunday 5 May we organise an afternoon event full of sensuous exploration of our love/hate relationship with fat. With London-based fine artist Lucy Lyons as our guide, we will feel, draw and eat our way through a world of fat. Also participating will be senior curator Bente Vinge Pedersen, Medical Museion, who is responsible for the exhibition ”Obesity – What’s the problem?”. Associate Professor Romain Barres, a specialist in human fat tissue and metabolism at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR), University of Copenhagen, will help us explore what scientists know about the way that fat cells work.
The event takes place at Medical Museion, Bredgade 62, 1260 Copenhagen K on Sunday 5 May, 1-5 pm.
Tickets including entrance to the museum, coffee/tea and cake are on sale at Billetto, 75 DKK.
More info here: http://www.museion.ku.dk/the-substance-of-fat-a-multisensory-event.
Working in Bing Local Search brings together a number of interesting challenges.
Firstly, we are in a moderately sized organization, which means that our org chart has some rough similarities to our high level system architecture. This means that we have back-end teams who worry mostly about data - getting it, improving it and shipping it. These teams are not sitting in the end-users laps and our customers, to some extent, are internal.
Secondly, we are dealing with 'big data'. I don't consider local as it is traditionally implemented to be a big data problem per se, however when one starts to consider processing user behaviour and web scale data to improve the product it does turn in to a big data problem.
Agile (or eXtreme programming) brings certain key concepts. These include a limited time horizon for planning (allowing issues to be addressed in a short time frame and limiting the impact of taking a wrong turn and the 'on-site customer'.
The product of a data team in the context of a product like local search is somewhat specialized within the broader scope of 'big data'. Data is our product (we create a model of a specific part of the real world - those places where you can peform on-site transactions), and we leverage large scale data assets to make that data product better.
The agile framework uses the limited time horizon (the 'sprint' or 'iteration') to ensure that unknowns are reduced appropriately and that real work is done in a manner aligned with what the customer wants. The unknowns are often related to either the customer (who generally doesn't really know what they want), technologies (candidate solutions need to be tested for feasibility) and the team (how much work can they actually get done in a sprint). Having attended a variety of scrum / agile / eXtreme training events, I am now of the opinion that the key unknown of big data - the unknowns in the data itself - are generally not considered in the framework (quite possibly because this approach to engineering took off long before large scale data was a thing).
In a number of projects where we are being agile, we have modified the framework with a couple of new elements.
Metrics not Customers: we develop key metrics that guide our decision making process, rather than rely on a customer. Developing metrics is actually challenging. Firstly, they need to be a proxy for some customer. As our down stream customers are also challenged by the big data fog (they aren't quite sure what they will find in the data they want us to produce for them), we have to work with them to come up with proxy metrics which will guide our work without incurring the cost of doing end to end experimentation at every step. In addition, metrics are expensive - rigorously executing and delivering measurements is a skill required of second generation big data scientists.
The Data Wallow: While I'm not yet happy with this name, the basic concept is that in addition to the standard meetings and behaviours of agile engineering, we have the teams spend scheduled time together walling in the data. The purpose of this is two fold: firstly, it is vital that a data team be intimate with the data they are working with and the data products they are producing - the wallow provides shared data accountability. Secondly, you simply don't know what you will find in the data and how it will impact your design and planning decisions. The wallow provides a team experience which will directly impact sprint / iteration planning.
Related articles 5 Hidden Skills for Big Data ScientistsAs a follow up to my previous post about history’s gender problem, I now want to offer some possible solutions for our discipline. Before I do, however, a bit more context on the gender problem History has here at George Mason seems warranted. Of the undergraduate programs in our college with more than 100 declared majors, only three have enrollments where fewer than two-thirds of those declared majors are female — History (40%), Government (41%), and Economics (34%). Every other substantially enrolled major in our college is more female than the university average of 62%.
Further, our MA enrollments are similarly skewed. Overall MA enrollments in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences are 60% female, but in History, MA enrollments are only 42% female. Thus, the problem I identified in my previous post extends beyond the undergraduate years into the MA. Given what Rob Townsend has written for the American Historical Association, I suspect we are very typical of history departments nationwide.
What then can be done to deal with history’s gender problem (and not just at George Mason)?
Too often, the standard answers to this sort of gender problem in an academic discipline are to increase the number of female faculty and/or to teach more courses that will appeal to female students. To my mind, the first of these is pretty obvious and needs constant attention. Even in a department that is changing rapidly, only 40% of the tenure track faculty in History here at Mason are female, so further attention to finding a full gender balance is something we’ll need to continue to work on. But it’s the second of those proposed solutions that I think is off the mark.
First of all, such phrasing assumes that male and female students can’t or won’t be interested in the same things about history, and second, it tends to turn on simplistic notions about preferences, such as male students want military history (and women don’t) and/or female students want women’s history (and men don’t). While I think information about student preferences for course content is important, the problem is more complex than simply offering a few more of this or a few less of that type of course.
Instead, I think the problem seems to lie in the way history is taught and in the ways we conceive of and describe to students what they might do with their degrees in history. One of the most important reasons I say “seems to” here is that there is very little in the way of solid data on the role that gender plays in the choice of major in college, and what little data exist tend to be focused on the much greater gender gap in the STEM fields.
Nevertheless, it is possible to glean some useful information from some of the STEM-focused studies. For instance, in a 2009 report by Basit Zafar, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (“College Major Choice and the Gender Gap“), offers some very interesting data on the role gender plays in the choice of major. Zafar’s study was limited to students at Northwestern University and so does not pretend to be broadly predictive. However, it does offer a very rigorous analysis of data. Zafar concludes that gender differences in major choice between men and women are not based on expectations of future income, nor are they explained by differential levels of confidence in one’s academic abilities, nor (for those with US born parents) do beliefs about the status of a future job resulting from a major play an important role in the choice of major.
Instead, Zafar concludes that for those with US born parents the most important factor in the choice of major is the degree to which one expects to enjoy the coursework and the degree to which one expects to enjoy a future career tied to that major, with female students having a much greater concern for these two factors than male students (pages 25-28). For those with foreign born parents, whether male or female, perceptions of the status of the major and the status of jobs that might result from that major play a more important role for both male and female students, but especially for male students (20).
Assuming for a minute that Zafar’s data could be replicated across a much broader sample of students, then we need to think very carefully about the ways we teach about the past. Ask a group of graduating history majors how much diversity there was in the teaching methodologies they experienced in their history courses and I think it’s a safe bet that they will say, “not much.” The vast majority of history classes follow a general lecture-plus model in which professors mostly lecture with some discussion time thrown in daily or weekly. At some point this style of teaching has to become boring, no matter how good the professor is at delivering it.
We also need to think very carefully about the ways we talk about careers our students might pursue after graduation. As the digital economy rolls over us, the work our students will be doing after graduation is increasingly very different from the work they might have done five or ten years ago, but by and large our descriptions of that work remain the same, rooted in a series of generalized notions about what one might do with a liberal arts degree. It’s time for us to get much more specific about the jobs our students are getting/will get in the new economic reality they’ll be living in.
Which brings me to my final point — these two considerations do not exist in isolation from one another. Instead, they are inextricably linked. One way to increase the levels of enjoyment our students experience (or expect to experience) is to begin creating courses that break the lecture-plus model and begin to incorporate project work, service learning, and other forms of “doing history.” Rather than continuing to talk to them or with them about the past, it’s time to develop courses that get them into the field, into the archives, into employment sites, at museums or historic sites, in short, give them a chance to exercise their creative energies. One more great lecture or one more well thought out five page essay assignment just isn’t going to do that.
Examples of what I’m talking about exist all over the country, but they are the exceptional courses in history curricula. If we are going to take seriously the notion that our gender problem — which is very real — needs to be addressed, then it’s time for a national conversation about how changing our curriculum is the way to address that problem.
In the April issue of Perspectives, Rob Townsend offers what is perhaps his last analytical article for the American Historical Association’s monthly newsletter (Rob has moved on from the AHA to a new job): “Data Show a Decline in History Majors.”
From the title of this post, you might be inclined to think that I’m worried that a decline in history majors is the looming disaster for history departments around the country. If only it were that simple. You see, undergraduate history programs don’t have an enrollment problem. We have a gender problem.
According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, in 2010 just under 57% of all undergraduate students at 4-year non-profit institutions of higher education were female and the data for degrees conferred are similar. According to Rob’s article, fewer than 41% of the BA degree recipients in history departments were female in 2011. Our data here at George Mason are even worse. Female history majors represent only 40% of our total at an institution where 62% of our undergraduate students are female.
That yawning gap between overall undergraduate enrollments and history enrollments is the size of our gender problem.
The problem is bad enough on its own to require us to take action as a profession. In addition to the obvious need to do something about the relatively low popularity of history as a discipline among undergraduate women, we also need to fix this problem for pragmatic reasons. As has been reported widely over the past several years, institutions of higher education are increasingly enrollment driven. This isn’t news to private institutions who have been living and dying by their enrollment numbers for years. But it is a new experience for many public institutions, who only in the past decade or so have been learning what it’s like to live or die by the same data. In this fiscal environment, if we don’t fix our gender problem soon, history departments all across the country should expect to see tenure lines and other important resources shifting to departments with more robust enrollments — enrollments that will only be robust with large numbers of female students.
What is to be done? None of the answers are simple or obvious and there is certainly no silver bullet that could solve our gender problem in undergraduate history education. Instead, I think it is high time we embark on a sustained conversation about change in undergraduate history education — including changes that will make our discipline just as appealing as other majors are to the largest segment of the undergraduate enrollment on our campuses.
The alternative is to decide that history is doomed to be an ever smaller part of the undergraduate enterprise. I believe that if we really commit ourselves to doing something about our gender problem, we can and will find ways to change for the better. But we need to commit. And soon.
My previous post about digital historical text generated some very interesting comments, both here and on Twitter. I met with my students again last night and we had an extended discussion about those discussions, so thanks to everyone who chimed in. What follows is a summary, more or less, of our conversation last night.
We were particularly taken by Steve Ramsey’s critique of my post, especially the following paragraph:
If so, your problem clearly necessitates access to the original work. But if you are concerned merely to read it, it seems to me very hard to argue against a digital copy. And the truth is that even digital copies can rival the originals for problems that apparently involve the “thingness” of the thing. Scans of the Beowulf manuscript — which no responsible scholar should ever touch — are of such density that one can see the hills and valleys of the vellum. I’m unable to imagine what it is about scans of the War Papers that make the original “disappear from view” or resistant to prioritization as historical sources. Are you prepared to argue that Spencerian handwriting moves documents up and down the hierarchy of importance?
None of us was arguing that digitizing texts was, in and of itself, bad. We all agreed that access to the content of those texts was an unqualified good. And I’ve gone back into the original post and clarified my language about the War Department project, because the way I wrote one sentence made it sound as though I was unhappy with the scans of the documents (which are copies of the originals due to a fire that destroyed the originals — see the project page for more on this issue).
Nevertheless, we all agreed that as historians, we care about the “thingness” of the source, and we care a lot about that. Not because of some “thinly veiled nostalgia” for the thing itself, but because texts are both texts and historical artifacts and so students of the past need access to that thingness if they are to understand both aspects of the source — it’s content and its materiality.
The importance of the text itself is pretty obvious and so doesn’t need clarification. But the materiality does. We discussed, for instance, the problems posed in teaching using historical newspapers via a database like ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The ProQuest search delivers the story requested abstracted from the page that it appeared on. The full page is available as well, but unless students are taught what a newspaper is, how the arrangement of content on the page and its placement in a section is the result of a dynamic process involving editors, writers, and layout staff, they will have no sense for why the placement of that story matters sometimes as much as the content of the story itself. “Above the fold” or “below the fold” become meaningless when a database serves up only the story.
ProQuest at least returns a pdf of the original story, so students can see the type face and (often but not always) the images that went along with the story. And they can examine the headline and consider why a headline might be more sensational than the content of the story warrants — again, as a result of that dynamic process involving several actors I just described.
As for the hierarchy we assign to sources, we also agreed that sometimes we might just assign a different importance to a source based on things other than the words in the text — that all sorts of other factors, most of them material, might convince us that this or that source was of greater import. Knowing everything about the source — not just its words, but the marginalia, its placement in a collection, or where it was found — can all shed potentially important light on what the source means and meant to others at the time it was created or later.
Given all of that, we wanted some sort of best practices for digitizers, that included common standards about such things as images of the original to go with the plain text on a white screen. As Sarah Werner wrote in her comment, creating such standards will require historians, bibliographers, archivists, and technologists to get together and discuss, among other things, what they (and our students) aren’t seeing when all we get is black pixels on a white screen.
