Have you heard the saying “What would Jesus do?” Who hasn’t? In the 1990s the phrase became a fad among evangelical Christians, who printed the abbreviation WWJD? on bracelets, t-shirts, and posters, spawning in turn a host of mocking pop culture imitations. WWJD can provide a useful lens for looking at evangelical consumer culture of the late twentieth century. But the phrase can also serve as a parable about contemporary copyright law.
Today the Washington Post ran an article about college professors who ban laptops from their classroom. The article sparked a conversation among the digital humanities crowd on Twitter, some sympathizing with the ban, but most protesting. The debate reminded me of playing Trivial Pursuit this weekend.
Last weekend I attended a conference at Yale University titled The Past’s Digital Presence: Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities. I’m only just starting to explore how I’ll relate my own scholarship to digital methods and products, so the conference was a help in getting acquainted with the issues within the field of digital humanities. It was also good to meet a number of grad students and scholars working in digital humanities. In this blog post, I want to reflect on a few of the talks that I found most engaging.
For a long time I’ve looked for a website that could catalog my book collection. I wanted something where I could easily import the books, but with the power to edit the metadata if I chose. The emphasis of the site had to be cataloging, but social features would be nice too. And the site had to work with any book, not just the latest vampire thriller. I tried GoodReads, Shelfari, and the my library section of Google Books, and they were all useless. I finally found the application that I liked: LibraryThing.
LibraryThing is very powerful at cataloging—so powerful that some libraries use it as their catalog. I’ve added something like 350 of my books so far. I enter the ISBN or title of the book, LibraryThing searches a library catalog of my choice (usually the Library of Congress), and imports the book into my catalog. From there, I can edit the metadata and change the cover. Maybe the single greatest feature of LibraryThing is it’s concept of a work, as opposed to specific editions. For example, I can link to a work page, which includes all the editions of that book.
LibraryThing’s cataloging tools would be powerful enough, but they have some interesting social tools too. For example, the top-three books that I share with other people are The Riverside Shakespeare, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.
LibraryThing gets both Web 2.0 and Library 2.0.
For each of my classes, I have a Zotero collection. For each of the assigned readings, I import an item and take notes on it. In class discussions, I then have access to my notes.
The problem is that by midway through the semester, I have dozens of items in my collection, and so it takes a lot of awkward fumbling around to find the few assignments for that day in class.
Too many Zotero items
My solution is to give each item a tag with the date it will be discussed in class. For example, items that will be discussed today I tag “2010-02-01.” After I filter the collection by that tag, I have list of just the items I need to refer to.
Just the readings for today
A simple solution, but it helps me.
This semester I’ll be taking three classes:
I’ll also be writing a research paper and participating in a group that will read Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self.
In a few days, I will hand in a revised version of my semester research paper. So now I can safely admit that this is my first semester doing serious archival research. Not my first semester doing serious research, but my first semester in the archives.
Where I went. I spent most of my time in the Massachusetts Historical Society. This Historical Society is housed in a beautiful old building on Boylston Street in Boston, an easy bus ride from my apartment. The first time that I was there, I walked into what appeared to be an exhibit room. It turned out to be the office of the librarian, but he was kind enough to give me a tour of library and to show me John Quincy Adams’s diary, which was sitting on his desk for a photo shoot.
I’m planning to read a few biographies, perhaps ten or twelve, to get a feel for the biographer’s craft. I’m not looking for the top ten biographies ever, by whatever criteria one could make that judgment. Rather I’m looking for books that demonstrate different ways to do biography. These are the books I’m considering: Continue reading …
Here is a line from a biographical sketch of the minister Samuel Worcester (1770–1821), written by his son:
He very seriously impaired his health, in the first year of his academic studies. His constitution never fully recovered from the shock which it then received, by the crowding of more than two years of hard study into one. Not a year passed, after my remembrance of him began, when he was not more or less severely afflicted by sickness or infirmity. And it was always, with rare exceptions, work, work, WORK, let his health be as it might. (William B. Sprague, ed., Annals of the American Pulpit, 2:406)
I have letters to William Ellery Channing from his grandfather, William Channing, asking the young Channing not to study too hard nor to preach more than twice a week. Continue reading …
As I mentioned in an earlier post, this summer Robert Townsend of the American Historical Association reported that religious history is now the largest single thematic subfield in the AHA membership. In the blog post on AHA Today, Townsend includes a chart that visualizes changes in the subfields of historians. Using the same data (PDF), which the AHA generously provided, I’ve created another chart to visualize the same change in a slightly different way.
Data provided by the American Historical Association. Used by permission.
This chart shows that the study of religious has gone from being a significant but only middle-of-the-pack subfield in 1992, to being in the top three subfields in 1999, to being the top subfield in 2009. Religious history is by no means dominant, considering the extraordinary diversity of the AHA membership, and especially in comparison to the dominance of social and even women’s history in 1992. From 2008 to 2009, the percentage of religious historians has slipped slightly, even at the same time that it overtook the percentage of cultural historians. (All of the top ten subfields declined as a percentage in 2009.) My tentative conclusion is that religious history is a growing subfield whose growth relative to the profession as a whole is magnified by long-term shifts towards increased diversity in the specialties of AHA members.
I should provide a few caveats about what this chart does not say. First, this chart reports AHA members identifying with a given subfield as a proportion of the total identifications, not as a proportion of the total membership of the AHA. AHA members are asked to identify with up to three subfields. So, from this data one cannot say that 7.7% of historians in 2009 identified as historians of religion. (That number does seem to be correct, however, calculated a different way.) Second, this chart does not give an indication of the numerous other subfields that AHA members identify with. I have chosen the top thirteen subfields in 2009, because they are the only fields garnering more than 3% of the responses. But in 2009, other subfields garnered 38.3% of the responses, compared to 18.3% in 1992. Third, it is important to recognize the fine distinctions between subfields. Over time, if I understand correctly, the AHA has added more subfields, so the increasing reported diversity of subfields may be driven as much by changes in the method of surveying as it is by actual changes in the membership. The fine distinctions in subfields also makes it difficult to rank them. For example, for 2009 this chart ranks women’s history third (6.4%) and gender history sixth (4.9%). But if those subfields were considered combined, say as women/gender history, then the total percentage (11.3%) would easily top all other subfields. Of course there is both overlap and distinction between those fields.
