Week 2

This week class is held in the library, where a reference librarian will introduce students to the use of RefWorks. In the second part of class, we will talk more about possible collaborative final projects and then discuss the following assigned readings:

Andrew Abbott, Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), chapter 4.

            Abbott advises in this book that it does not need to be read in a linear fashion, so I have assigned selections from Digital Paper in both this class and my undergraduate history research methods class this semester. Part of my goal is to buy myself the time to read it for my own purposes, for my intuition tells me that this is a really important book about how to do research—as crucial as Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird is for writing. I am an admirer of other work by Abbott, who appears to me to be the smartest contemporary scholar in the world. This chapter is not precisely about digital history, but it points to issues that graduate students in general should be thinking about as they approach seminar papers and their theses. From what I have read so far, I have to agree with this blog post, which calls for pretty much everyone to read it.

• Discussion strategy: start with generally what he is telling us, and then move to what implications it might have for digital history.
• What advice does Abbott give about library research? What are his major points about organizing a research project?
• How would you implement the suggestions practically, using digital tools (acknowledging Abbott’s own preference for paper)?
• What is the difference between scanning and browsing?

T. Mills Kelly, Teaching History in the Digital Age, Preface through chapter 2.

Preface

• What do you think of his point that if students are engaged with what they are doing, they are probably learning better—even if it’s technology and not history that focuses them?

Introduction

• Why did Kelly’s student feel free to mash-up a primary source? In what sense was it “better” than the original? Why would historians object to this practice?
• Where do you stand on the “authenticity” vs. “originality” dichotomy he sets up?
• Do you agree that lecture is the worst possible way to teach anything?
• What does he mean by “remix culture”?

Chapter 1: Thinking

• What distinction does Kelly draw between considering how best to teach history and how students learn history best?
• What skills, facts, and ideas about history should we be trying to inculcate in students?
• What is Kelly’s attitude toward students? Is this an attitude many history professors share?
• What does he mean by “do history” and “make history”?

Chapter 2: Finding

• Kelly opens with discussion of the difficulty of teaching Eastern European history to American students because of the language barrier—he was mostly limited to teaching primary sources that originally in English or were translated into English. Does translation include barriers that student readers should be aware of? Are those barriers in any way comparable to those we should consider when consuming primary sources made available online?
• Do students actually wander freely around the internet, finding all sorts of historical sources without professorial encouragement?
• What is “disintermediation,” which Kelly defines as “the removal of hierarchical controls over information in the digital realm”?
• Kelly suggests that it is a mistake to expect 21^st century students to rely only on sources vetted by historians. Is it possible to reconcile this stance with Abbott’s clearly stated belief that not only should we rely on peer reviewed sources, but we should also depend on a hierarchy of prestige among university presses and academic journals? Are there other important differences in how Kelly and Abbott think about (student) research paths that we should be aware of?
• What is the problem with the Adolf Hitler Historical Museum? (Is it still out there? I tried Kelly’s searches and did not get similar results.)
• What “digital literacy” information skills should we be inculcating in students?
• Why does Kelly provide the date of his Google searches? Should we be worried about the fact that Google searches are actually individualized by computer?

Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006),Introduction.

• Note the publication date
• What are the reasons they are optimistic about the utility of the web for history? Are there any new reasons for (or against) that have emerged since they published?
• Qualities [capacity, accessibility, flexibility, diversity, manipulability, interactivity, and hypertextuality (non-linearity)] and dangers of networks (quality, durability, readability, passivity, and inaccessibility)
• How is authority established on the web? How do you know what to trust, what to be skeptical of, and how to use it?
• How do you know what order in which to read hypertext historical materials?
• Should we look for argument in digital historical scholarship? Should we try to embed argument in digital historical scholarship?
• What do you think of the practice of academic publishers of charging (relatively high) prices for access to their digital databases of journals? Do you feel the same way about book publishers?
• What does “open source” mean?