Old is the New New

We interrupt our series of concept courses to point out once again: Kate Beaton is awesome. I wonder if I could get her to illustrate my alternate Canadian histories?

(Click through for the whole thing, and explore her other (often historical) cartoons too.)

Here’s a second concept course, though the idea is neither new nor mine, and maybe it’s not really a concept course if several people have done it. Still, I would really like to try this someday.

Every single event is the offspring not of one, but of all other events prior or contemporaneous … it is an ever-living, ever-working Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from innumerable elements. And this Chaos, boundless as the habitation and duration of man, unfathomable as the soul and destiny of man, is what the historian will depict, and scientifically gauge, we may say, by threading it with single lines of a few ells in length!
–Thomas Carlyle, “On History”

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Last fall, Bill Turkel had a great blog entry calling for “concept projects” in academic history: like concept car prototypes or catwalk fashions, these would be imaginative efforts that need not prove wholly workable or utilitarian, but that might serve to get ideas into circulation, push the boundaries of the form, or, a la Thoreau, simply “affect the quality of the day.” A similar staple of my old Boston gaming / blogging circle was the Game I’d Like To Run post: basically these were trailers or elevator pitches for mental movies, never-to-be-written novels, and genre mashups that we had no real intention of constructing, but were fun to imagine and share.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about a handful of “concept courses,” probably because the school year just ended and so right now I’m about as far from facing a real classroom as the calendar lets me get. My next couple of posts, then, will be ideas for university classes that are interesting (to me at least) to think about and with. How they’d really work in practice, how they’d get approved by an education policy committee, whether I’d be qualified to teach them, are all of less importance than the notions themselves, the fragile but lovely potential of shiny soap-bubble ideas.

Here’s the first:

In time, those unconscionable maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following generations … saw that the vast map was useless, and … delivered it up to the inclemencies of sun and winter. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are tattered ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars.
–Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”

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(Cross-posted at Cliopatria.)

I know this was linked in the last Carnivalesque, but I don’t think a solution has yet been found. The American historical profession must step up to the plate if we are to call ourselves historians: Why are there so many peeing dogs in historical prints of the American Revolution?

The Bowery Boys, a great weblog about Big Apple history, celebrates the arrival of Grand Theft Auto IV: Old People Beware with the history of New York City in video games from Donkey Kong on down.

In “The Paranoid Style is American Politics,” Reason, 24 April, Jesse Walker turns not to Richard Hofstadter but Bernard Bailyn to survey paranoia in American politics from the Jacobin pawns of the Illuminati to the current presidential contest between the lesbian assassin of Vince Foster, a secret Muslim Communist Republican, and a brainwashed puppet of the Viet Cong.

In “Well, it’s very bad history!” TV writer and producer Denis McGrath reviews HBO’s John Adams and makes a sensitive case for emotional truth over strict accuracy in historical film.

And what do you think was “the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise”? According to Clay Shirky, it was the sitcom. The equivalent technology for the previous century? Gin! (Hat tip to Sharon Howard and my non-blogging buddy Sean.)

A village in south-west England will shortly be swarming with robots competing to show off their surveillance skills. The event is the UK Ministry of Defence’s answer to the US DARPA Grand Challenge that set robotic cars against one another to encourage advances in autonomous vehicles. The MoD Grand Challenge is instead designed to boost development of teams of small robots able to scout out hidden dangers in hostile urban areas. [Read more.]

You have to get to the third paragraph to learn that the village is in fact a mock East German village built for urban warfare training during the Cold War. Insert Prisoner reference here.

There has been some great, chewy stuff over at Cliopatria recently: Miriam Burstein’s essay on the aesthetics of history, Manan Ahmed and Nathaniel Robinson’s conversation about reconciliation and historical memory, and today our newest member, Claire Potter, on the history of everyday rage. I’ve been so derelict in posting there, I wanted to return to the fold with a similarly weighty and scholarly piece of work. And so I give you:

A thriving LiveJournal community, which examines historical figures and asks of each the vital question: Were They Hot? Recent contestants include Lord Byron (surely a no-brainer?), Frida Kahlo, Robespierre (”he’s got a slightly squished face but I reckon he looks good naked”), and the Roman Emperor Philip (”I would ride this man to Damascus and back if I had to”).

Kate Beaton’s History Project and History Project Two, a series of winsome and ridiculous cartoons about history, much of it obscure and/or Canadian. I can’t pick a favorite cartoon, as they always have a cumulative effect on me, but it’s hard to argue with Sandford Fleming’s beard. I wish the CBC would scrap the hokey old Heritage Minute and give my tax dollars directly to Kate.

Sometimes blog posts seem so blatantly written for me and me alone that I feel like a chimp when I link to them. But I suppose the internet is big enough that everybody feels that way from time to time. Anyway, one of our buddy Bill Turkel’s digital history students recently wrote a software ‘bot that impersonates Benjamin Franklin. I must admit it is not the most cunning impersonation one could imagine:

Turkel: So what do you think of Rob MacDougall’s blog?
FranklinBot: Does it have anything to do with reductionism?
Turkel: Why yes it does.
FranklinBot: Yay!

Finally, here is some more of the internet-enabled infomancy I celebrated on my blog last week: Caleb Crain and Paul Collins track the origins of the essential phrase, “Mad, mad, I tell you!”

That’s really all I want for my blogging life: to make a robot Ben Franklin say “yay” and to follow Paul Collins and Caleb Crain around like a dorky third wheel. “What are we doing today, guys? Guys?”

This is the week, it seems, of people reading my posts and making them better. First, Ken Hite revealed the infomantic significance of the Ford’s Theatre index card disaster. Then, Barista’s David Hiley expanded my link to Jess Nevins’ post on Japanese automata with a fuller biography of Gakutensoku, the golden calligraphy-writing robot.* David also pointed out the secret through-line between the automata and index card stories:

Here he [ie, me] combines two wonderful and pathetic factoids in the one zany flow. Handy, dandy, it has the logical flow of the management of information which leads to proto-robots which takes us ultimately to these machines, which we all share as we prowl the world from our keyboards.

The way I see it, I didn’t combine the Ford’s Theatre and Gakutensoku stories, he did. I just put them next to each other. But I appreciate his kind words and the phrase, “wonderful and pathetic factoids.” That goes on my ever-growing list of alternate taglines for this blog.

This is what I love love love about the 21st century: Barista posted about Gakutensoku three days after Jess Nevin’s original post, two days after my own. Granted, I’m impressed by anyone who writes a post in two days. (I have on my hard drive a half-written response to Seth Shulman’s Telephone Gambit that I started writing when I saw Shulman give a talk at MIT… in 2005.) But the real infomancy is the way these not-necessarily-pathetic factoids carom around the internet. A librarian in Texas (who knows everything, by the way) writes a short piece about a 1920s Japanese robot. It bounces off a Canadian history professor, and is read by an Australian film writer. Who then researches the history of that robot, using an amazing online encyclopedia of more than 2 million user-generated articles, not one of which existed eight years ago. It’s easy to take it all for granted, my friends, but we are living in the future. Where’s my flying car, you ask? You’re driving it right now.

(At least until Big Cable / Bell Canada takes away the keys.)

*Barista says Gakutensoku “ain’t no robot–it is an automaton.” But are the two categories mutually exclusive? Mr. North, Ms McDougal, Mr. Da Vinci, can I get a ruling?

My friend Jess Nevins, the extraordinary gentleman himself, offers up a history of Japanese robots and automata and the blasted gaijin who keep making off with them:

Japan’s first modern robot was created in 1928 by Makoto Nishimura, as part of the formal celebration of Emperor Showa’s (a.k.a. Hirohito) ascension to the Chrysanthemum Throne. The robot, Gakutensoku (or “learning from natural law”), was 7′8″ tall, painted gold, could open and close its eyes, could smile, could puff out its cheeks, and at the beginning of each performance would touch its mace to its head and then begin to write.

How much do I want a 7′8″ gold Japanese robot called “learning from natural law”? RTWT, as they say, for a robot haiku by Kobayashi Issa*, an unscrupulous American magician, and intimations of occult robot conspiracy.

Speaking of occult conspiracy, Ken Hite showed once again why he is the king, picking up on the Paul Collins post I linked yesterday and spinning it into secret magical history gold:

[Collins:] In the U.S., for instance, the War Department struggled with mountains of haphazard medical files until the newly touted method of card filing was adopted in 1887. Hundreds of clerks transcribed personnel records dating back to the Revolutionary War. Housed in Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC — the scene of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination a generation earlier — the initiative succeeded a little too well. Six years into the project, the combined weight of 30 million index cards led to information overload: three floors of the theatre collapsed, crushing 22 clerks to death.

[Hite:] Can anyone say Ascension of the Bureaucrat in 1894? Blood sacrifice to begin the Information Age? Creation of the “mass man” from data (which is to say, DNA) and crumpled flesh (of 22 people — where was the 23rd, necessary to complete the full chromosomal pairing?), intermingled on the blasphemous regicidal altar of America? The possibilities are limitless.

Do not fold, spindle, or sacrifice.

Also, there’s a nice link back to me today at Dug North’s excellent Automata blog. (Dug, I owe you an email.)

Edit: Engadget has video of a spiffed up Gakutensoku in action. (Hat tip to my man Sepoy.)

*Question: Would the great 18th century haiku master really use the word “coolness”? Answer: He would if he were writing about tea-serving robots!

Several people have sent me this link, and that is because they, and it, are awesome: the trailer for a new DVD of Harry Houdini’s film career. Gizmodo declares, based on this evidence, that “Houdini was the first person ever to fight a robot on film.” I think they mean to say, “the first person to fight a robot in a fictional film”–but now I’ve said too much. Click through for hot Houdini on robot action plus a couple of stern looks and many death-defying stunts. Eat your heart out, Gene Autry!