The Quintessence of Ham

“The world needs ditch dig­gers too.” –Judge Smails, Cad­dyshack (1980)

At last week’s Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties Lux­em­bourg (DHLU) sym­po­sium, a com­mon refrain could be heard in nearly every pre­sen­ta­tion: “I’m only a his­to­rian.” Uttered apolo­get­i­cally at the begin­ning of a num­ber of pre­sen­ta­tions, after two days it became the object of par­ody and ulti­mately com­prised part of orga­nizer Frédéric Clavert’s excel­lent con­clud­ing remarks. But despite the snick­er­ing each time it was heard, there was lit­tle inves­ti­ga­tion of what was behind this phrase. I think it actu­ally reveals some­thing impor­tant about the state of DH, per­haps espe­cially in Europe but hardly exclu­sively so.¹

A gen­er­ous inter­pre­ta­tion would be that stat­ing one is “only a his­to­rian” apol­o­gizes for a deficit of tech­ni­cal con­tent in one’s pre­sen­ta­tion or project. By dis­avow­ing any tech­ni­cal com­pe­tence, the speaker insu­lates him­self against any tech­ni­cal crit­i­cism. Of course, the implied mod­esty of being “only a his­to­rian” — it doesn’t mat­ter whether it’s false or gen­uine — has pow­er­ful rhetor­i­cal impli­ca­tions in the world of acad­e­mia, and specif­i­cally in the realm of DH. You see, “only his­to­ri­ans” work with their minds, not with their hands. The “only a his­to­rian” can (and in fact must) con­ceive of a DH project and only then finds engi­neers to make it hap­pen. The phrase “only a his­to­rian” pre­cludes any pos­si­bil­ity of char­ac­ter­iz­ing the result­ing work as truly “col­lab­o­ra­tive,” despite pro forma claims to the contrary.

Dig­i­tal human­i­ties in this form doesn’t have a very bright future. Strictly from the per­spec­tive of cost, it’s highly unlikely that out­side a few large cen­ters very many “only his­to­ri­ans” are going to be able pro­cure (and remu­ner­ate) the ser­vices of tech­ni­cal engi­neers. Pro-tip: devel­op­ers cost a lot, and good ones are hard to find at any price!

His­to­ri­ans are per­haps under­stand­ably blink­ered, since even as a his­tor­i­cal ques­tion the nature of pro­fes­sions has gone largely unex­plored. Although of peren­nial inter­est in soci­ol­ogy, the pro­fes­sions and pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion receive scant atten­tion from his­to­ri­ans. One notable excep­tion is med­ical his­tory, and Tom Bro­man has neatly sug­gested that pro­fes­sions are merely occu­pa­tions that claim to join the­ory and prac­tice.² This def­i­n­i­tion is of course uniquely rel­e­vant in the arena of DH, which grap­ples daily with the bal­ance of think­ing and doing. And behind all the recent fra­cas about the neces­sity of cod­ing (and its gen­der impli­ca­tions) what do we find but a debate over the rela­tion­ship between the­ory and practice?

So how impor­tant to DH are prac­tices in the end? If we’re going to lis­ten to soci­ol­o­gists, the answer is “quite a lot.” One analy­sis that has long struck me as par­tic­u­larly com­pelling (and which largely informs my work on French cooks and now colo­nial doc­tors) is Andrew Abbott’s account of how occu­pa­tions come to exert con­trol over their practices:

There are two rather dif­fer­ent ways of accom­plish­ing this con­trol. One empha­sizes tech­nique per se, and occu­pa­tions using it are com­monly called crafts. To con­trol such an occu­pa­tion, a group directly con­trols its tech­nique. The other form of con­trol involves abstract knowl­edge. Here, prac­ti­cal skill grows out of an abstract sys­tem of knowl­edge, and con­trol of the occu­pa­tion lies in con­trol of the abstrac­tions that gen­er­ate the prac­ti­cal tech­niques. The tech­niques them­selves may in fact be del­e­gated to other work­ers.³

Pro­fes­sions (like his­tory) clearly fall into the lat­ter group, but unless the prac­tices of DH are embed­ded within his­tory itself, his­to­ri­ans will never really own them. While Abbott sug­gests that tech­niques can be del­e­gated, they still need to orig­i­nate within the orig­i­nal group. As “only his­to­ri­ans,” it’s dif­fi­cult to imag­ine how we are meant to acquire any sort of mas­tery or author­i­ta­tive com­pe­tence with­out a basic under­stand­ing of the prac­ti­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties and con­straints of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy. By claim­ing to be only a his­to­rian, we’re del­e­gat­ing tech­niques we haven’t yet developed.

Improb­a­bly enough, Dan Cohen and Roy Rosen­zweig are par­tially to blame: their oft-quoted admo­ni­tion for “his­to­ri­ans to think of them­selves more like archi­tects than plumbers” may be inad­ver­tently encour­ag­ing a gen­er­a­tion of his­to­ri­ans to eschew tech­ni­cal skills in favor of skip­ping right to the high-level archi­tec­ture.⁴ Hardly any­one ever cites Cohen’s fol­lowup com­men­tary in the JAH, where he added, “But those who would like to do advanced work in dig­i­tal his­tory will ulti­mately have to acquire sig­nif­i­cant tech­ni­cal skills, not only to exe­cute com­plex dig­i­tal projects suc­cess­fully (or to guide those doing the design and pro­gram­ming in a tech­ni­cally lit­er­ate way), but also to have a more far-reaching vision of what is pos­si­ble for his­to­ri­ans in this new medium.“⁵

There’s no easy road here, and I think ulti­mately we need to rely on the ancient ethos of fab­ri­cando fit faber, or lit­er­ally “mak­ing makes the maker.“⁶ Not every his­to­rian can or should become an expert pro­gram­mer, but it’s time to put to rest the notion that being a his­to­rian cat­e­gor­i­cally excludes these skills.

1. DH=digital his­tory in this piece, though the con­cerns obvi­ously have broader applic­a­bil­ity in the dig­i­tal human­i­ties. [↩]
2. Thomas Bro­man, “Rethink­ing Pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion: The­ory, Prac­tice, and Pro­fes­sional Ide­ol­ogy in Eighteenth-Century Ger­man Med­i­cine,” The Jour­nal of Mod­ern His­tory 67, no. 4 (1995), 836. [↩]
3. Andrew Delano Abbott, The Sys­tem of Pro­fes­sions: An Essay on the Divi­sion of Expert Labor (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1988), 8. [↩]
4. Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosen­zweig, Dig­i­tal His­tory: A Guide to Gath­er­ing, Pre­serv­ing, and Pre­sent­ing the Past on the Web (Philadel­phia: Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia Press, 2005), http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/starting/2.php [↩]
5. “Inter­change: The Promise of Dig­i­tal His­tory,” The Jour­nal of Amer­i­can His­tory 95, no. 2 (Sep­tem­ber 1, 2008): 452–491. [↩]
6. Wik­iquote offers “prac­tice makes per­fect” as an Eng­lish equiv­a­lent, but this trans­la­tion really misses the point. In French it’s “c’est en forgeant que l’on devient forg­eron,” — “You become a black­smith by forg­ing” — which does cap­ture the spirit of the orig­i­nal mean­ing. [↩]

I’m pleased to announce a new part­ner­ship between Press­For­ward and OpenEdi­tion. Press­For­ward is the Roy Rosen­zweig Cen­ter for His­tory and New Media’s project to study and pro­duce alter­na­tive means schol­arly com­mu­ni­ca­tion. OpenEdi­tion, led by the Cen­tre for Open Elec­tronic Pub­lish­ing in Mar­seille, shares many of the same goals but on a much larger scale: it seeks to develop a sus­tain­able dig­i­tal plat­form for pub­lish­ing schol­arly con­tent and will be sup­ported over eight years by a 7 mil­lion euro grant funded by the French Higher Edu­ca­tion and Research Min­istry. Our role at RRCHNM will be to develop and sup­port PressForward’s mul­ti­lin­gual inte­gra­tion into OpenEditions’s over­all plat­form.
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N.B. For best results, try to get Destiny’s Child’s “Sur­vivor” going in your head before proceeding.

Two recent blog posts by Larry Cebula and Hol­ger Syme high­light the deep divide that sep­a­rates the pes­simists from the opti­mists in acad­e­mia. Cebula explains why he steers his stu­dents away from pur­su­ing a career as a pro­fes­sor, essen­tially argu­ing that the odds are sim­ply too stacked against them even under the best of con­di­tions. Syme, in con­trast, sug­gests that Cebula’s dream-crushing advice is short-sighted and ulti­mately dan­ger­ous to the long-term via­bil­ity of the pro­fes­sion. While Cebula’s rea­son­ing will be famil­iar to many — he’s work­ing the same rich vein as has William Pan­na­packer under his nom de doom Thomas H. Ben­ton in the Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion — I sus­pect he’s also still greatly out­num­bered among the greater pop­u­la­tion of aca­d­e­mics, thanks in no small part to sur­vivor­ship bias and an unwill­ing­ness to grap­ple with the unfor­giv­ing cal­cu­lus of oppor­tu­nity cost.
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Among the more eye-popping num­bers asso­ci­ated with LinkedIn’s recent ini­tial pub­lic offer­ing is the 100,000,000 mem­bers it claims. What do those hun­dred mil­lion peo­ple do with their LinkedIn accounts? If they’re like me, they qui­etly ignore the end­less spam but never quite moti­vate to unsub­scribe. Or maybe they occa­sion­ally click through a link returned by a Google search, only to dis­cover the limp résumé of some sad sack look­ing to escape the Enter­prise rent-a-car counter, not the super cool and attrac­tive “Sean Takats” that they went to high school with and are stalk­ing.
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Brian Crox­all recently lit up the com­ment feed at the Chron­i­cle with his ProfHacker com­par­i­son of “Zotero vs. End­note,” where the debate cen­tered mostly around issues of cita­tion fidelity. As Fred Gibbs notes, how­ever, “while cita­tion for­mat­ting is one major rea­son to use bib­li­o­graphic soft­ware, it isn’t nec­es­sar­ily the only or even pri­mary rea­son, espe­cially in the human­i­ties.” Zotero’s cita­tion func­tion­al­ity was always imag­ined merely as bait: by pro­vid­ing this labor-saving func­tion­al­ity, Zotero would encour­age each user to move her research into what amounted to a fully search­able and share­able rela­tional data­base that could be sub­jected to text min­ing and other analy­sis. Here researchers could begin to do truly remark­able and new things with their evi­dence.
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About ten thou­sand years ago, we were intro­duced to the phrase “time shift­ing” by a decade-long law­suit over the right to use VCRs to tape TV shows for later view­ing. Today’s DVR has of course made this process far eas­ier and prob­a­bly more wide­spread, but the idea remains the same: rather than watch some­thing right now, with no snack breaks, we instead put it off until some later time. Other than the occa­sion­ally self-serving gripe about hav­ing “a lot of TiVo to catch up on,” time shift­ing is a set­tled and dead issue, a non-story. Or it would be, if it were not for the trou­bling case of his­tor­i­cal research.
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As a his­to­rian I like to think that I’m com­fort­able with the idea of fields dying. Maybe they’re reborn and live to fight another day (like diplo­matic his­tory, or so we all keep hear­ing), and maybe they never really die at all (like quan­ti­ta­tive his­tory, safely entrenched at Paris 1-Sorbonne).

But what about the old work­horse geo­graphic fields like, say, French his­tory?¹ Unless you are Natalie Davis, being a French his­to­rian over the last five decades or more prob­a­bly meant that you, well, went to France to do your research. And why did you go? You told your depart­ment chair and your grant fun­ders and your col­leagues that you had to get to the archives and the libraries, of course. But let’s be hon­est here: French his­to­ri­ans don’t go to France to get to the doc­u­ments. Instead we wed our­selves to doc­u­ments that just so hap­pen to be found only in France, “forc­ing” us to go there, usu­ally when the weather there is super great, or at least super crappy at home. That’s why we became French his­to­ri­ans in the first place. There are a few excep­tions to this rule: the hand­ful of self-loathing sad sacks we all know who hate wine and cheese and cig­a­rettes, but this is no time to be cruel. » Read the rest of this entry «

1. I’m focus­ing on France, of course, because it’s what I know. That said, I don’t see any com­pelling rea­son why the argu­ment that fol­lows couldn’t apply to any num­ber of national or transna­tional areas of inquiry. [↩]

This past week’s THAT­Camp Firenze was a huge suc­cess, offer­ing plenty of oppor­tu­ni­ties to learn about new projects and the var­i­ous national and inter­na­tional fla­vors of dig­i­tal human­i­ties that are flour­ish­ing in Europe. But seri­ously, on a blog with this title, how can I ignore the most spec­tac­u­lar part of the trip?

Zotero’s server infra­struc­ture has evolved in count­less ways since the project’s 2006 launch, but most of those changes are super bor­ing and not worth remem­ber­ing. Over the past two months, how­ever, we moved the bulk of Zotero’s back end to Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, a step that I believe is uniquely note­wor­thy in the con­text of dig­i­tal human­i­ties projects and their long-term sus­tain­abil­ity. In this post I describe the recent changes to Zotero’s archi­tec­ture. In the next post I’ll dis­cuss why these changes are impor­tant for the dig­i­tal human­i­ties. This story is long, but it has a moral, and also a van. » Read the rest of this entry «

Because I live under a rock (Viet­nam), I only recently dis­cov­ered the Google Charts API. When I saw that it sup­ported maps, I thought it might be fun to plot the sales data for Zotero File Stor­age pro­vided by the non­profit cor­po­ra­tion I started along with a bunch of other aca­d­e­mics. Bear in mind that these maps only reflect the billing addresses asso­ci­ated with pur­chasers of Zotero stor­age. Zotero’s gen­eral user base is even more glob­ally dis­trib­uted and sev­eral orders of mag­ni­tude larger than the sub­set depicted here. Nonethe­less the results are stun­ning, I think, and some­thing that pleas­antly reminds me of the last throes of a game of Risk. We have work to do in Africa and the Mid­dle East. Click the thumb­nails below for full-size, detailed images.