An undergraduate experiment in digital humanities, part I

February 15, 2012 By

We’re into week five of my Women in America: The Western Experience course, which means it’s time for students to start to get serious about the final project. Since some Clutter Museum readers showed interest in how the project progresses, I thought I’d provide an update.

To review: my 40 undergraduates will be building an online exhibition about the history of Idaho women’s amateur arts and crafts.  I’m leaving the platform open, but I suspect the choice will come down to WordPress or Omeka, and I’m guessing the students will choose WordPress, though who knows? Maybe they’ll surprise me.  Because all the students in the course have iPads, I’m encouraging them to optimize the exhibit for that screen size and resolution.

Yesterday, student groups picked their topics from a list of arts and crafts categories, all of which are represented by artifacts in storage at the local museum:

  • basketry
  • wedding dresses
  • lacework
  • plein air painting
  • beadwork
  • taxidermy
  • ornaments and wreaths made from human hair
  • quilts
  • needlework

There are eight groups, but I put nine possible topics on the list so that the final group to select a category still could choose between two of them.  I can’t believe no one opted to study the Victorian human hair ornaments.  I mean, seriously–one of the artifacts available for study and interpretation is a family tree made from intricately woven hair from each represented family member.  What’s not to love?

Taxidermy was the last topic picked.  The group seemed a bit disappointed in its topic, so I shared a bit of history with them, and now they’re pretty excited about it.  Women + 19th-century U.S. + taxidermy = awesome wackiness.  And god only knows what they’re going to find in the equation of women + 20th-century Idaho + taxidermy.  I’m hoping for some steampunk.

Students will be heading to the museum to photograph artifacts on display there, and to museum storage to photograph and research additional objects.  The museum’s curatorial registrar came to talk to the class yesterday about her job, the basics of artifact conservation, guidelines for photographing objects on exhibit, and the rules for viewing the artifacts in storage and using photographs of them online.  She emphasized that, because of security concerns, the first rule of Museum Storage Club is that you do not talk about Museum Storage on social media or post photos of it or disclose its location.  Students found that secrecy fascinating, I think.

Her talk definitely heightened some students’ sense of adventure in the project.  Honestly, I’ve never seen anyone, and certainly not twentysomething undergrad, so excited to go try to photograph scraps of 100-year-old lacework in a dimly lit environment.  I’m hoping they maintain this excitement throughout the semester.  I’ll keep you posted. . .

Filed Under: Putting the "Public" in Public History, Sometimes I teach

Add the Words, Idaho

February 12, 2012 By

Everyday life in Boise is similar to that of many of the places I’ve lived or visited. There are ridiculous numbers of big box stores and chain restaurants, late-1970s suburbs featuring ranch-aspiring homes of mediocre construction and design, sprawling new suburbs, a downtown that appears to be on the upswing, too many crappy supermarkets to count, a few historic buildings, a regional university, a couple dog parks, several commercial strips that appear to be caught in the 1970s, and some nice hiking in the hills on the edge of town.

As long as one doesn’t leave town much, it’s pretty easy to forget that Boise is more considerably more isolated geographically.  In fact, it’s the most isolated city of its size in the United States; our nearest “big city” is 350 miles away–and it’s Salt Lake.  Let me put it this way for my urban readers: if I want to make a Trader Joe’s run, I need to drive 320 miles to Bend, Oregon.

Even though its geographic isolation is significant, Boise is even more dramatically isolated politically from the rest of the state.  That doesn’t mean the city is a hotbed of liberalism; I read someplace that about 30 percent of the students at Boise State are Mormon, and they tend to be politically more conservative than the average bear, and we have several active military and veteran students as well, and while I’ve found them to be more politically dynamic than the Mormon students, they are yet another reminder that I’m not in Davis anymore.  (My sense is that students here are more likely to have fought in the oil wars than to bicycle against them.)  Still, as long as I don’t pay too much attention to the news when the state legislature is in session, I can keep my blood pressure relatively stable, as politics in Boise itself are decidedly moderate.

Friday was an exception. Friday I was slapped hard by the realization that I moved to a very, very conservative state.

Idaho’s Human Rights Act protects people from employment and housing discrimination regardless of race, gender, or religion, but LGBT people in Idaho can be fired or refused housing because they’re gay or transgender. On Friday, a state senator, motivated by a group (and growing movement) called Add the Words, Idaho, proposed a bill to the State Affairs Committee to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Human Rights Act.  The Idaho Statesman relates what happened next:

In the committee’s narrow view, this proposal didn’t even merit real consideration. Friday’s hearing was a “print hearing” — when a committee decides whether to introduce a bill. A printed bill becomes a piece of the session’s public record — a document all Idahoans can read and judge for themselves.

Legislative committees sometimes print bills to advance the discussion of an important issue. On Friday, discrimination didn’t make the cut. The State Affairs Committee had neither the time nor the empathy. Committee members couldn’t dismiss this idea or its proponents quickly enough.

Image from the Add the Words homepage on February 12
Later that day, I joined a couple dozen Add The Words folks in the Senate gallery.  We sat quietly, though it’s clear our presence made the Republican senators on the State Affairs Committee nervous, and there were both Capitol security guards and State police positioned just outside the gallery door once the Senate realized who was gathering in the seats.
Idaho’s existing Human Rights Act bans employment and housing discrimination on the basis of race, religion or disability. The “Add The Words” bill would have added sexual orientation and gender identity. “There’s lots of groups who don’t have that ability as well, so the issue becomes, where does it stop? Where do those special categories end?” McGee asked.
McGee said his constituents in Canyon County don’t support the change. He acknowledged that discrimination does occur against gays and lesbians in Idaho, saying, “For me to tell you that this doesn’t exist would be naive.” But, he said, “I think what we did today is say we don’t believe that this is the right way to deal with that.” Asked the right way, he said, “Continued education,” and added, “We say no to legislation all the time.”

Add the Words supporters told me that in conversations with individual senators, they have also been told that there just isn’t time this legislative hearing for such a bill.

That’s hilarious, considering the session I sat through on Friday lasted all of 55 minutes, and most of it was dedicated to apotheosizing Abraham Lincoln.  There was time enough for not one but two Christian prayers, and for a lengthy reading of some things Lincoln said–including his opinion on banknotes.  We heard, of course, about how he freed the slaves, but also about how he turned all his enemies into his friends.  (Um. . . wasn’t he assassinated?  Seriously–I wish the Senate would post the text of the prayer and readings on its website; it was a piece of ahistorical work if ever there was one.*)  There was time enough for someone to sing “God Bless the U.S.A.”:

I’d thank my lucky stars,
to be livin here today.
’Cause the flag still stands for freedom,
and they can’t take that away.

I was choking on the irony.

There was once nice moment during the session, but I missed it because we were sitting at an angle that obscured our view of the senate president’s desk: Senator Nicole LeFavour of Boise, Idaho’s only openly gay state legislator, walked up to the dais and placed a sticky note on it.  The note was a physical reminder of the thousands of sticky notes sent from all over the state and posted in the Capitol in support of Add the Words.  LeFavour’s crossing into the well of the senate chamber was a serious breach of protocol, and it appeared to send some of the Republican senators into a confab in the senate antechamber. But what could they do? Censure the legislature’s only openly gay member on the day Republicans once again denied equal protection under the law to gays?

I’m a bigger fan than ever of LeFavour, who during the session also asked her fellow senators to recognize the Add the Words people in the gallery by applauding for us.  It was an uncomfortable moment, I think, for everyone in the chamber and gallery.

I want to emphasize that, unlike in Washington state and California this week, the issue under consideration was not gay marriage, which was forbidden in Idaho by a state constitutional amendment in 2006.  We’re talking about basic civil protections. Regardless of what Senator McGee believes, adding protections for LGBT people isn’t going to establish a slippery slope by which the state will be forced to add countless “special categories” of people to the act.  This is a group of people who face significant discrimination and even physical danger in the state–discrimination that McGee himself recognized in the Spokesman Review article–and they need and deserve legal protection from discrimination and abuse.

I’ll be writing respectful letters to the senators on the State Affairs Committee, as well as to my own (Democratic) senator–who, based on what I heard from Add the Words leaders, has been lukewarm to the bill, even though he wrote me a note last month assuring me he supports it.   As Senator McGee said, it’s clear Idahoans are in need of “continued education.”  As an Idaho resident, historian, professor, and LGBT ally, I’m happy to provide such education to our legislators.**

One more thing. . . Would you pretty please “Like” the Add the Words page on Facebook?  Every little bit of support is appreciated.

* If any historian is going to be OK with lay public interpretations of American history, it’s me.  Seriously, I’m fascinated by such attempts to construct both hegemonic and alternative narratives.  But in this case the irony was too big, the stakes too high.

**  I’ll be even happier when federal laws extend full civil rights to LGBT folks, and I can write about how these Idaho senators were as much on the wrong side of history as those who opposed civil rights for women and people of color.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Putting the "Public" in Public History, Wait. . . I moved to where?, Whining Exhortation and Angst

All manifestoed out, part II: admitting graduate students edition

February 2, 2012 By

As promised, here’s another mini-rant, or rather series-of-questions-whose-answers-would-likely-lead-me-to-mega-rant.  And with this one, I’d really like your assistance.

Because I’m one of only two faculty in my department whose specialty is officially “public history”—mind you, we all practice one form of it or another, but I have been anointed by my position description—pretty much all the applications for admission to our Master’s in Applied Historical Research program come across my desk.  Usually I just write a few notes explaining why I’m recommending we admit the candidate, admit hir provisionally, or decline to admit hir, and then that’s the last I see of the application.  I also don’t get to see my colleagues’ comments on the application, as that might unduly bias me.

Occasionally, however, an application comes back to me when individual faculty make conflicting recommendations about admission.  So, for example, I might say we should admit someone, but two or three of my fellow faculty recommend the opposite. In many departments, a majority “no” vote might be the end of the line for an application, but our graduate program director gives me (or anyone else whose vote differs, I’m assuming) the opportunity to reconsider the application, to change my vote or take a stand or something in between.

At such moments, I get to see the admissions recommendations and, more importantly, the comments of my fellow evaluators. And often I’m in complete agreement with what they’re saying about the application, but I still want to recommend the opposite of what they do.

I’m not sure why, but it took me a year and a half in the department to realize that our occasionally differing visions about who should be admitted to the program stem from our–wait for it–differing visions about the program’s capabilities and mission.

My friends, we lack collective clarity.*

See, we have two programs: a traditional M.A. in history, and the M.A.H.R.  The department’s web page describes the programs using almost exactly the same language, differentiating between the two only by saying the M.A. will prepare students for work in academic settings at all levels (by which I assume we mean high school teaching or the occasional adjunct gig) and the M.A.H.R. prepares students for careers outside academic settings. Programmatically, the degree requirements differ very little, with M.A.H.R. students taking one additional seminar in public history—but when I taught that course last spring, there were several M.A. students in it, too.  The M.A.H.R. students can substitute “skills” courses (like GIS or video editing) for the foreign language courses required of the M.A. students. The M.A.H.R. students are also allowed, and encouraged, to take more internship credits.

If you’ve been around the history graduate program block lately, maybe you’re reading this as I do: the M.A.H.R. program is about helping students take very specific steps toward getting jobs.  The M.A. program. . .maybe not so much.  I don’t work with the M.A. students much, so I’m not sure what they want out of the program, but the M.A.H.R. students often have very specific goals: to open a historical consulting firm, to go into museum exhibit development, to make a documentary film, to apprentice themselves in a historic preservation office.

My latest (implied) rant took the form, then, of a memo to the graduate program coordinator in which I asked these questions (and provided my own tentative answers):

  • Should the students applying to the M.A.H.R. program have the same preparation and/or potential as students applying to the M.A. program?
  • If not, should we differentiate the application process for the M.A. and M.A.H.R. programs?
  • If we differentiate the applications, is a 15-20 page, traditional academic essay the best way to gauge preparedness for the M.A.H.R. program? If not, what is?
  • If we do away with the academic essay requirement for M.A.H.R. students, how will they demonstrate their ability to work with primary and secondary sources?

Here’s the thing: I read a lot of mediocre writing in those applications, from both M.A. and M.A.H.R. applicants. Many of the objections from my colleagues stem from applicants’ bad writing or poor research skills. And in my own classes, I’m a pretty unforgiving taskmaster when it comes to writing.  So I’m not suggesting that we lower to the admissions bar for M.A.H.R. applicants.  Yet maybe we need to acknowledge that public historians’ work embraces a huge spectrum; some public historians might find themselves addressing K-6 students, while others work primarily with policymakers.  On the job, some will rarely write anything longer than an exhibit label.  Others will need to write eloquently in grant proposals.  Many will need to do both.

I suspect that many of the applicants who can’t write a good enough academic essay to be admitted to a traditional academic programs can still engage in critical and creative thought–it’s just that the essay isn’t the best way for them to exhibit these skills.  Someone who is a good fit for our M.A. program might not be a good fit for the M.A.H.R. program, and vice versa.  I suspect we faculty have been treating applicants as if they’re applying to the same program.

The grad program coordinator told me to bring my questions and concerns to the faculty at a department meeting.  Our faculty meetings are relatively fleet things, thank goodness, but it also means I need to find a way to encourage people to either (a) coalesce around a unified vision in, oh, 10-15 minutes or (b) reflect on what they think the difference between the two programs should be and share their individual visions with me before the next meeting.

Of course, before I do that, I’d like some information from other programs.  I’ll be scouring departmental web pages and perhaps contacting some folks, but in the meantime, here’s what I’d like from you, dear readers:

If you teach in, or pursued a degree within, a humanities or social science department that offers to graduate students an “academic” track and a “practical” or “non-academic career” track, how do you differentiate between applicants to the two programs? Do you require essays or something else? Do you require interviews? Do you expect applicants to propose specific projects? Do you ask recommenders to comment on the applicants’ career potential instead of just their academic performance? How can you tell which applicants might be a better fit for one degree track over another?

Please share your experiences in the comments.  I know many of you maintain your anonymity on the interwebz, so you can either obfuscate a few details, comment anonymously, or you can e-mail me privately at trillwing -at- gmail -dot- com.

Many thanks!

 

* . . .in an academic department. A stunning revelation, I know.

Photo by vlasta2, and used under a Creative Commons license.

Filed Under: Administrivia, Putting the "Public" in Public History, Sometimes I teach, Whining Exhortation and Angst

One junior historian’s to-do list

January 6, 2012 By

Thanks in part to the Modern Language Association and American Historical Association conferences, there’s a lot of talk in the blogosphere and on Twitter right now about what university faculty work should look like, public perceptions of faculty work, and how humanists and historians might think more broadly about how their research and careers intersect with public life.

I have more to say about these topics in a broad, waxing-philosophical sort of way, but for now I thought I’d just share a list of my current projects. Consider it one more data point in describing the workload and work life of a faculty member in history, in my case a junior, tenure-track one at a regional public university.

Please do share your own work.  I’d love to hear what’s keeping you occupied, and I suspect I’m not the only one who would appreciate the opportunity to compare and contrast workloads and projects.

Here’s what I’m doing for the next couple weeks:

  • Collaborating with a colleague on a proposal for an NEH summer institute
  • Collaborating with an interdisciplinary team on an NSF grant proposal to produce a monologue-based play about historical women in science
  • Writing a couple short articles  for an informal science wiki designed to inform applicants for NSF grants in informal science education. Topics:  “In what ways have citizen science programs advanced the public understanding of science and influenced public attitudes about scientific issues?” and “To what extent have humanities content, theory, and methods been incorporated successfully into informal science education, why, and to what end?”
  • Revising a chapter on the myth of Black Confederate soldiers for the book Writing History in a Digital Age
  • Planning for my ambitious spring course
  • Filling out IRB forms so I can later publish research about my spring course
  • Peeking at two journal articles that need extensive revision before resubmission
  • Continuing to shepherd The Boise Wiki I founded last spring, at this moment by applying for a small grant
  • Recruiting history majors to present papers at the regional Phi Alpha Theta conference (I’m the faculty adviser for our local chapter)
  • Mentoring my graduate students, two of whom are presenting their museum exhibits—one on Prohibition in Idaho and one on the Idaho boxcar of the Merci Train—this spring
  • Planning two trips to archives, funded by a research fellowship from my college
  • Preparing a proposal for the Western Museums Association conference
  • Playing matchmaker for history interns and organizations
  • Planning for my one-credit spring workshop “Rethinking Museums”

When I look at this list, it’s kind of crazy-making, especially since it comes on the heels of an exceptionally busy December. I have a mentoring committee that meets infrequently, and the folks on it do know about these activities. At our last meeting, their biggest suggestion for improvement in my progress toward tenure was “publish book reviews.” While I understand the utility of book reviews as a form of service to the profession, I didn’t know whether to roll my eyes or giggle, as I think I really have enough other stuff on my plate that might trump book reviews in my tenure case a few years hence.  (Full disclosure: I’m not sure if I’ve ever read a book review in an academic journal.) So I suppose I should add to my list:

  • Contacting journal editors re: book reviews

What’s keeping you busy at the beginning of 2012?

Awesome image by Chris Scott, and used under a Creative Commons license

Filed Under: Putting the "Public" in Public History, Sometimes I teach, Tall tales and true

Trying not to freak out: spring course edition

January 4, 2012 By

What do you get when you mix iPads, old taxidermy, hair ornaments, and a near-complete disregard for one’s own pedagogical tradition?

My spring course, History 346: Women in the American West.

It’s the first time I’ve taught the course, and I’ve decided to throw caution to the wind.

Thumbnail

40 students, upper-division History, cross-listed with Gender Studies. Books by and about women.

In

Squatters on Mexican land grants in California. Women Zoot suiters. Manzanar. Dorothea Lange. A hundred years of Chinese Americans. Native American activism. Museum artifacts, some made from human hair. Also probably some taxidermy. Plus: an iPad2 on loan to each student. Several one-page reflection papers. One giant group project.

Out

Covered wagons, bonneted pioneers, Sacajawea, Oregon Trail, Donner party.  Individually authored, end-of-course research essays.

The project I suspect makes some of my colleagues think I’m not playing with a full deck

My students are going to construct an online experience (I’m looking for a better word–exhibit doesn’t quite do it for me) about the history of Idaho women’s amateur arts and crafts. They’ll be drawing on frequently uninterpreted objects from the collection of the state historical society: needlework, ornaments made from human hair, quilting, beading, plein air painting, taxidermy, sewing (clothing), and whatever else we find in storage or on exhibit. They’ll have to research and document these artifacts, take and edit photos, correspond with experts, write essays about women’s participation in each kind of arts and craft practice, determine on what platform they’d like to build this project (I’m guessing WordPress or Omeka, but maybe they’ll surprise me), break down the work across several smaller groups of students, create a timeline to ensure the exhibit is complete, build the damn thing, and put in place quality assurance protocols.

Each student is being loaned an iPad2 for the semester by the university’s academic technologies office, under the auspices of its Mobile Learning Scholars program.  This is my second year as an m-learning scholar.

But basically, yeah, I’m giving the students shiny new devices and asking them to engage in a 40-person, high-stakes group project.

Hey look—I have research questions

1. In what ways does the student practice and presentation of western U.S. women’s history—often represented in its raw form through sometimes difficult-to-interpret everyday objects and letters rather than through political and business documents—benefit from an approach that emphasizes collaborative research and interpretation; technology that allows for a media-rich interpretive experience (including, for example, a closer, relatively three-dimensional examination of artifacts than is afforded by a museum exhibit); and an engagement with potential audience members through social media from the moment of a project’s conception?

2. How does the use of tablet computers influence the depth and breadth of student collaborations and the quality of the work resulting from these collaborations?

Inspirations

  • Frustration with how I’ve evaluated student work in the past (so much grading, and What Really Matters gets thrown into question)—and solutions brought to me in part by thinking about the fox in the video game.
  • Martha Burtis and Jim Groom of ds106 fame. This project is far less ambitious and considerably less wacky than their grand and highly successful experiments, but it has its creative roots and insistence on student responsibility and ownership of learning technologies in the experiments going on at the University of Mary Washington these last several years.
  • Also: Alan Levine‘s insistence on constantly creating, iterating, and sharing.

Anticipated challenges

  • Persuading students not to jump ship or panic when I tell them a good deal of their grade is based on the Mother Of All Group Work.
  • Convincing students, once and for all, not to form their smaller groups with the people who happen to be sitting next to them that day.  (Will they never learn, despite my repeated warnings?)
  • Showing students that there are indeed connections between the readings and the Mother Of All Group Work.
  • Getting students to be reflective about women’s history, public history, and their anxieties about creating stuff with technology—without sounding all touchy-feely.  (“Get in touch with your inner PHP learner. . . What is she afraid of? What can you do to help her?”)
  • Not overwhelming the museum’s fabulous curatorial registrar, who is also one of my grad students, and who is also trying to mount her own exhibit and graduate this spring.
  • Getting IRB approval to study my students’ collaborations and publish the results.  (In progress. . . The paperwork is a headache and a half, as it forces me to be all social-sciencey in a way with which I’m not comfortable.)

I’m at once excited about the course possibilities and dreading finding out the multiple small ways in which it will inevitably go off the rails.  Wheeeeeee!

Assuming the semester doesn’t get too busy and stressful (ha!), I’ll blog about the course here at The Clutter Museum.

What are you looking forward to (or dreading) about your projects or classes over the next several months?

Filed Under: Putting the "Public" in Public History, Sometimes I teach, Technobabble

Ice Cube salutes the Eames

December 8, 2011 By

Although I very much appreciate his comments on the character of L.A. freeways, my fave moment comes at 1:46.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Putting the "Public" in Public History

Public history Ryan Gosling

December 3, 2011 By

As a follow-up to Feminist Ryan Gosling, someone has created Public History Ryan Gosling.

Check it out.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Putting the "Public" in Public History

Comments and advice for students, please?

December 3, 2011 By

Hey, I wrote a post over on my other blog about finding a public history or museum studies graduate program that’s a good fit.  Since I know many of my readers have been to grad school, and especially grad school in the humanities and social sciences, if you have a moment, I’d appreciate it if you’d click over there and leave a comment for students who are looking to make what is traditionally a historian’s Plan B into their Plan A.

Many thanks!

 

Filed Under: Putting the "Public" in Public History, Sometimes I teach

Elsewhere. . .

November 4, 2011 By

If you’re interested in museums and/or internships, I have the first post in a looooong time up at Museum Blogging.

Irregularly scheduled programming will resume here soon. :)

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Putting the "Public" in Public History

Hard time

November 1, 2011 By

Fang volunteered to portray Troy Powell, a condemned murderer who was hanged with his co-conspirator in 1951, for the Frightened Felons event at the historic Old Idaho Penitentiary.  His performance was apparently, erm, memorable.  As he writes in a recent blog post, the most common advice he received was “Dial it back!”

Here’s his portrait from the evening, as found on the Old Pen’s Facebook page and taken by Nette Shaff:

Filed Under: Putting the "Public" in Public History, Tall tales and true
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Header image credits

origami beetle by Emre Ayaroglu, mounted butterflies by Black Country Museums, First Lady Sarah Polk's dress and the Jefferson Bible source book by the National Museum of American History, and lionfish by Martyn Steiner, all used under Creative Commons licenses.

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