Two wonderful photosets for Friday.

1. Yet again via Boing Boing, this article from Wired about the 1939 World’s Fair is quite wonderful and amply illustrated. I think I’ll use the picture above for my syllabus when I teach the history of capitalism next Spring.

2. Based on a tip from the Scout Report (which you should definitely subscribe to), I’ve been avoiding grading this morning by perusing “The Epic of Industry” section of the “Pageant of America” collection at the New York Public Library. They are quite wonderful, but alas not readily available for use in classes. The New York Public Library, however, is an excellent institution so perhaps I might buy the rights to a few for classroom or publication use somewhere down the road.

Best New York blog ever or why I miss the East Coast.

Via Boing Boing (of course), I just discovered what has to be the best blog about New York City history in existence. It’s called Scouting New York, by Nick Carr whose profession is to find shooting locations for Hollywood movies in the New York area. It’s history, it’s architecture and man does he post great photographs.

The post that Boing Boing linked to, about Coney Island (see above), is a stunner. I also liked this one and this one, and it looks like I have plenty of back posts to keep reading all summer, so onto the blogroll it goes!

Wait until they have a job.

I really wanted to be outraged by this story, but then I thought, “What happens when they have to punch a time clock?” In most jobs that I know of, attendance is assumed.

Doubling down on the no reading thing.

It’s always a good thing when something you write contributes to eloquent writing by others, and Dr. Crazy at Reassigned Time has certainly done that in part due to what I wrote about reading papers at conferences earlier today. Given Dr. Crazy’s choices, I pick:

“b.) “I know! Isn’t it outrageous! I am ashamed of the conventions of my discipline and I think it’s all a bunch of old-fashioned hogwash!”“

Nevertheless, I’ll see what I can add here in response.

Reading Dr. Crazy and the supportive commentators in the comments there, it seems like the core of the pro-reading argument is this:

Every single word in that 15-20 minutes that comes out of my mouth counts to my audience because my primary agenda is not to communicate information but rather to demonstrate how my mind got to my particular interpretation and to convince the audience that how my mind works can assist their own engagement with a literary text.

Maybe it’s a disciplinary thing, but when I go to a conference I actually pick panels where I can get new information. It’s impossible to learn the history of absolutely everything, so I look forward to learning about new things that I don’t know about already. [Oddly enough, that's why I read history outside my field as well.] Once the presenters slice of individual research has been presented, I look for connections to the whole overarching story of US History (I think those English Professors call that a meta-narrative) so I know how best to file that bit of information away for future use. I’ve seen plenty of great panels during which historians mimicked Dr. Crazy’s ideal of showing me how they think, but what I remember is their arguments in general, not the precise wording used to express them.

While I wish we academics were somehow more attentive than other people, the truth is that we are just as human as anyone else. Stick us in a room with a boring speaker at the podium and we will all reach for our iPhones and Blackberries, just like our students do. Personally, I pack mine away at conferences so that I won’t be tempted, but admit it: You’ve seen others do this in the last few years. Why am I going here? I’m going here because the rules of public speaking are not somehow suspended because the room is full of professors and grad students. We are all under an obligation to engage our audiences and reading your conference paper is like starting out with one hand tied behind your back.

There’s one other part of what Dr. Crazy wrote that’s worth a response here:

I’ll admit, I get kind of bored with claims that the way my field does things is wrong or out-of-touch, claims that are most typically made by people outside of my field who have no clue about what “research” or the presentation of it means in my field. And I also get bored with people in my or other humanities fields who think that they are in some way superior if they choose to present in another format that doesn’t involve reading aloud.

I’m guessing that includes me. I certainly don’t claim to be superior to people who read their scripts, because I only just started weaning myself away from the printed page and don’t do it that well yet. Indeed, I keep a few notes to keep myself on track, just like I do in lecture. I wish I spoke better this way than I do, but at least I’m trying and I know that my trying is already paying off.

I just started giving book talks (for this book, if anyone’s interested) to regular, plain-old people around Southern Colorado who are just interested in history. Talking through my research in a engaging way (at least I hope it’s an engaging way) for other academics has helped me explain my research to non-academics, and I think communicating with as many people as possible about history is a good thing. Don’t you?

If everyone else just wants to talk amongst themselves, then please be my guest. Just don’t expect anyone outside of Academia to ever listen attentively.

Please stop reading your conference papers.

Over the weekend, I provoked a friendly disagreement with the illustrious and extremely entertaining Historiann over whether it was OK to read your conference papers like a script at profession forums. Yes, I know everyone does it – in history – but I’ve seen more than enough economists and business professors go off the cuff (as is the norm in those disciplines) that I think that we should do it too. After all, would you ever be satisfied teaching that way?

Feel free to chime in here or there for your chosen side, but as I think my comments there weren’t quite enough to get my whole point across I thought I’d add a little more here on this subject. First off, I am working on the assumption that someone talking to you is more entertaining than someone reading at you. Indeed, if there is a non-academic in the room, I strongly suspect they will be automatically put off by your reading whether your paper is any good or not. Unless you record books on tape, your reading isn’t going to add much to the presentation and a few ad-libbed asides aren’t enough to make you look engaged and spontaneous. Talking off a script is alienating by definition. That’s why actors memorize their lines.

Consider this comparison: UD had a very good post yesterday which included a reference to “Death by PowerPoint,” a favorite topic of hers as we regular readers know. Explain to me the difference between reading from slides and reading from pieces of paper and I’ll take it under consideration. What I do know is that at least in a death by PowerPoint situation, the students presumably have pretty pictures to ponder. What are you giving your colleagues to look at it if you read your conference paper other than the front part of your head?

We have seen the enemy and we are not him.

From a review of yet another book that explains why Academia is going to hell in a handbasket:

Some people believe that university presidents and governing boards are primarily responsible for the growing numbers of NTT [Non-Tenure Track] faculty members at American universities. According to this view, university policy makers have chosen to hire more NTT instructors as a cost-cutting measure.

[John G.] Cross and {Edie] Goldenberg challenge this common perception. They point out that university presidents spend most of their time raising money and managing crises and usually do not concern themselves with the details of hiring NTT teachers. Indeed, Cross and Goldenberg observed, “[U]niversity administrators appear to be unaware of the employment patterns that are developing in their own institutions” (pp. 96-97). Likewise, governing boards typically focus on matters that are external to the university and probably don’t even know how many NTT instructors are employed at their institutions.

In fact, Cross and Goldenberg argue, senior university administrators have little control over day-to-day academic decisions. Instead, tenured and tenure-track faculty often determine academic policy at the department or college level, especially at the nation’s elite universities; and the decisions they make can have the effect of increasing the number of NTT instructors that need to be hired.

For example, a department chair may allow senior faculty to teach low-enrollment graduate-level courses in their research specialties while assigning large-enrollment undergraduate courses to NTT teachers.  Departments may give reduced teaching loads to professors with funded research projects or give faculty reduced teaching loads for assuming department-level managerial responsibilities. All these decisions put pressure on universities to hire more NTT faculty members to teach classes that were once taught by the regular faculty.

I don’t buy it.

I’ve heard our President acknowledge a number of times that our problem is that everyone at our school works too hard as it is, which means we don’t have enough faculty as a whole. This is particularly true for committee work, which is essential to running the place effectively, but from which most my colleagues will flee from like the plague not because they’re lazy but because they’re over-committed already.

I think we need to focus on growing the higher-ed pie (which would include converting as many NTT positions to tenure track positions as possible) rather than spread blame around about who’s not carrying their weight bailing out a sinking ship.

The best ten minutes of radio that I’ve heard in a long while.

There were two excellent stories back-to-back on Morning Edition this morning on two subjects close to my heart.

The first one was about a teacher training program in Boston that has some really nice discussion about the nature of teaching in general. Best line: “Teaching is not just about preparation, it’s about thinking on your feet.”

The second one was about the discovery of documents relating to the 1881 shootout at the OK Corral.

A lovesong to Zotero.

In a world in which the Supreme Court doesn’t understand texting, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that there are historians out there who don’t understand notes programs. Nevertheless, I was still shocked when I asked two historians whose work I respect tremendously at different times in the last few weeks what notes program they use and got blank stares in return.

I wrote my dissertation (and by extension my first book) using note cards and Xerox copies. This was way I learned to do research as a high school debater and it worked fine getting me through grad school. While I sometimes had trouble finding quotations I remembered, since all my sources were in a finite set of boxes or the books that were clogging my carrel I always found what I needed eventually.

That’s why I was so intrigued with the idea of note-taking programs. In 2000, I got one called Papyrus, loaded it on my laptop and started typing research cards on the history of ice and refrigeration into it. Ten years later I have 2000 cards and my new laptop can’t even run the old operating system that Papyrus requires. [No laptop recycling yet for me!]

This summer, I’m finally going to start writing that manuscript in earnest, but in the course of writing three articles from that research I can’t tell you how much time I’ve saved by the ability to do keyword searches on those cards to find information that I knew was there somewhere even faster.

But now there’s Zotero, an add on that goes with the Firefox browser. I started adding new ice and refrigeration cards in Zotero only a few months ago as practice for my next project, but I’m already stunned by what I can do using this program. Here, take a look yourself [I think this video's out of date now, but it still serves my purposes.]:

The folks at Zotero make a big deal about its web friendliness, and they should. You can download attachments from databases or the web or even take a screen shot. Nevertheless, you can still manually download information and group it with the bibliography cards describing the source from which it came (solving a problem I remember from my index card days). It’s also preset to allow entry of archival information.

What won my heart to Zotero though is the searchability of texts inside the notes or attachments. Using Papyrus, I was basically stuck finding things with keywords or a few other fields. Zotero works like Google in the sense that I can find everything by the word.

Yes, your research is going to be in the cloud, but you can download it onto your computer for safekeeping. Yes, it takes time to learn the ins and outs of the program (and I’ll be the first to admit that I still don’t have it all down). Nevertheless, considering the length of any book project, you’ll figure it out over time.

In fact, next semester, I’m going to start training my students to use Zotero. Here at my underfunded state university with a tiny library databases and Google Books are our most important resources, and I doubt anything could be better for managing that kind of information. No more writing down URLs. No more stacks of copies from newspaper databases. They can even start a new library for every research paper.

In short, if you aren’t using Zotero, your research is taking too long. And did I mention that Zotero is free?

Economists vs Historians: It’s not the numbers, it’s the morality.

Thank you again to the fine folks at the Historical Society for continuing to send me their journal, Historically Speaking, for no apparent reason. I was excited to read their economic history forum when I first saw a preview of it on their blog and was not disappointed. [I can't blame them for asking mostly economists to participate as most people in that sub-field are indeed economists.]

Deirdre McCloskey of Illinois – Chicago, summarizing Robert Whaples’ lead essay in the forum, writes:

“It’s very true, as he also says, that our numerical habits have repelled the history-historians, especially since they have in turn drifted further into non-quantitative studies of race, class, and gender (it is amusing that the young economic historian Whaples quotes gets the holy trinity slightly wrong, substituting ‘ethnicity,’ a very old historical interest, for ‘class,’ a reasonable new one; it is less amusing that historians believe they can adequately study race, class, and gender without ever using numbers, beyond pages 1,2,3).”

What’s amusing to me is that economists and economic historians think that numbers of any kind are somehow value neutral. Whaples’ piece is particularly damning in that regard:

” Most economists have also concluded that market competition leads to desirable outcomes, while many historians are deeply suspicious of market outcomes. For example, 71% of economists I surveyed agreed that ‘a Wal-Mart store typically generates more benefits to society than costs.’ When I asked historians the same question, only 13% agreed.”

I can’t say I’m surprised by that outcome. If all you care about numbers, all you’ll see on one side are allegedly low prices. What historians see on the other: environmental damage, sprawl, anti-unionism (something which your average economist would probably see as an asset) can’t be quantified, and if it can’t be quantified it might as well be invisible to the economics profession and to me that’s the height of immorality.

My brother is an economist. He thinks I’m a socialist. So I found this line from Whaples particularly amusing:

” It is impossible to prove whether or not people are rational. But when an economist who assumes that they are meets a historian who doesn’t, they often find it hard to communicate with each other and end up talking past each other.”

That’s precisely why he and I seldom talk shop. When we do, and I’m sick of listening to him talk like he’s more objective than I am, I just say “Assume a can opener…”.

I can’t win the argument this way, but it does make me feel better.

As if Stephen Ambrose’s reputation wasn’t already as low as it could go.

From The New Yorker (via Silbey):

Nonfiction writers who succumb to the temptations of phantom scholarship are a burgeoning breed these days, although most stop short of fabricating interviews with Presidents. But Stephen Ambrose, who, at the time of his death, in 2002, was America’s most famous and popular historian, appears to have done just that.

Plagiarism wasn’t enough, apparently he faked interviews with Dwight D. Eisenhower and used them for the rest of his life whenever he felt like making a point for which he had no evidence. I’m so proud we we went to the same grad program!

Here’s my Stephen Ambrose story: While I was in grad school at Wisconsin, he came back to his alma mater for a semester to teach World War II. I never talked to him, but I knew one of his teaching assistants. Apparently, he gave an entire lecture on trenchfoot and refused to acknowledge any Soviet contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Perhaps that’s why the History Department at Madison didn’t need to know that he was a plagiarist to never invite him back.