Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

July 1, 2015

Crime, Prisons and Punishment

Filed under: History — Patrick Durusau @ 4:20 pm

Crime, Prisons and Punishment

From the webpage:

Just how murky is your past? Are there law breakers or law makers in your family tree? Whether your family history contains vice or virtue, with our Crime and Punishment month we’ll be giving you the opportunity to find out, with blogs, articles and videos to help you research your criminal ancestry.

Launched to coincide with our release of almost 2 million crime and punishment records – made available online for the first time only on Findmypast – our Crime and Punishment month explores the seedy underbelly of our family histories.

In addition to our helpful blogs and videos, we’ll have stories of the criminals amongst our record collections, fun games and quizzes and case studies of the amazing criminal ancestry discoveries made by our users. Find out more over on our blog!

I don’t usually post about strictly commercial sites but this one has “family reunion” written all over it. Appears to be focused on the UK, Australia, etc.

If you have any ancestors in the records covered, it could be a real conversation starter at your next family event. 😉

June 25, 2015

1.5 Million Slavery Era Documents Will Be Digitized…

Filed under: Crowd Sourcing,History — Patrick Durusau @ 7:40 pm

1.5 Million Slavery Era Documents Will Be Digitized, Helping African Americans to Learn About Their Lost Ancestors

From the post:

The Freedmen’s Bureau Project — a new initiative spearheaded by the Smithsonian, the National Archives, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — will make available online 1.5 million historical documents, finally allowing ancestors [sic. descendants] of former African-American slaves to learn more about their family roots. Near the end of the US Civil War, The Freedmen’s Bureau was created to help newly-freed slaves find their footing in postbellum America. The Bureau “opened schools to educate the illiterate, managed hospitals, rationed food and clothing for the destitute, and even solemnized marriages.” And, along the way, the Bureau gathered handwritten records on roughly 4 million African Americans. Now, those documents are being digitized with the help of volunteers, and, by the end of 2016, they will be made available in a searchable database at discoverfreedmen.org. According to Hollis Gentry, a Smithsonian genealogist, this archive “will give African Americans the ability to explore some of the earliest records detailing people who were formerly enslaved,” finally giving us a sense “of their voice, their dreams.”

You can learn more about the project by watching the video below, and you can volunteer your own services here.

A crowd sourced project that has a great deal of promise with regard to records on 4 million African Americans, who were previously held as slaves.

Making the documents “searchable” will be of immense value. However, imagine capturing the myriad relationships documented in these records so that subsequent searchers can more quickly find relationships you have already documented.

Finding former slaves with a common owner or other commonalities, could be the clues others need to untangle a past we only see dimly.

Topic maps are a nice fit for this work.

June 17, 2015

Black Freedom Struggle Collection [That Is Struggling To Be Free]

Filed under: Education,Government,History — Patrick Durusau @ 7:52 pm

Law Library Introduces Black Freedom Struggle Collection.

From the webpage:


The Law Library, Davis Library and the Sonja Haynes Stone Center have just purchased rich digital collections of NAACP, federal government and other organization documents. The collections illuminate the African American struggle to attain equal rights after Reconstruction. Collections span the 1870s to the 1980s. The collections are:

  • Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Federal Government Records
  • Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers

They supplement current UNC collections of NAACP documents and complement another new collection documenting earlier struggles, Slavery & the Law, and the existing Southern Life and African American History, 1715-1915, Plantation Records. Slavery and the Law features petitions on race, slavery, and free blacks that were submitted to state legislatures and county courthouses between 1775 and 1867.

The collections are in ProQuest’s History Vault Collection. For more information, contact a law librarian at 919-962-1194.

ProQuest sales brochure for Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Federal Government Records and Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers.

I rather doubt that the UNC Law Library has purchased these collections but rather has secured access to members of its faculty and student body to these materials. Hence the access via the ProQuest History Vault Collection.

Like any good massa, ProQuest is going to make a return on its investment, even if that excludes black Americans, indeed, all Americans, from learning the history of race in American from primary sources. Or at least those members of the population who don’t have institutional access to the Proquest History Vault Collection.

What makes this particularly galling in this case is that the materials represent a history of struggling for freedom, a story that should be widely told. A story that is being suppressed as it were in the name of our current IP model in the United States.

If we are confined to the artifices of commercial exploitation currently in place, why doesn’t Congress, which has wasted $billions on aircraft that exhibit spontaneous combustion (long rumored about people but confirmed in the F-35), site license this resource for everyone in the United States?

That would eliminate the paperwork for every institution that wants to access this material, eliminate the paperwork for all those contracts for ProQuest, make the original sources of our racial history available to every person located in the United States, so where is the downside?

While we work on changing the pernicious and exploitative IP regime of the present day, let’s change the rules on site licensing and let the greed of ProQuest lead it into doing the right thing. I care nothing for their motives, so long as universal access is the result.

June 15, 2015

Map of the Tracks of Yu, 1136

Filed under: History,Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 12:47 pm

Tracks-of-Yu-1136

I first saw this on Instagram at: https://instagram.com/p/363b2lOpn7/ with the following comment:

Map of the Tracks of Yu, 1136, is the first known map to use a cartographic grid.

The David Rumsey Map Collection, Cartography Associates, offers this more complete image from the Harvard Fine Arts Library:

Yujitu1136

And the following blurb:

Yujitu (Map of the Tracks of Yu), 1136. This map’s title derives from the Yugong, a treatise describing the sage-king Yu’s mythical channeling of China’s rivers. It is a rare surviving example of cartography used in the 12th century for public education, mixing classical references with later administrative history. Carved on a large stone tablet so that students or visitors could make rubbings, the map strikingly depicts a riverine network on a regular grid of squares intended to represent 100 li to a side. Read a more detailed description of this map by Alexander Akin, Ph.D. View the map in Google Earth. The image is courtesy Harvard Fine Arts Library.

To temp you into further reading, Alexander Akin’s description opens with these lines:

The Yijitu (Map of the Tracks of Yu) is the earliest extant map based on the Yugong (introduced below). Engraved in stone in 1136, the map measures about one meter to a side. It was carved into the face of an upright monument on the grounds of a school in Xi’an so that visitors could make detailed rubbings using paper and ink. These rubbings could be taken away for later reference. The stone plaque thus functioned as something like an immovable printing block, remaining in Xi’an while copies of its map found their way further afield. Harvard University holds one such rubbing made from the original stone, and has generously granted permission for the use of this unusually clear image, which shows more detail than any previously published version….

Alexander struggles, as only a modern would, over the “accuracy” of the map. A map that at times accords with the findings of modern map makers and at times accords with its Confucian heritage.

With maps in general and topic maps in particular, a question of “accuracy” cannot be answered with being supplied with the measurement to be applied in answering that question.

June 4, 2015

Cultural Heritage Markup (Pre-Balisage)

Filed under: Archives,Cultural Anthropology,History — Patrick Durusau @ 7:39 am

Cultural Heritage Markup Balisage, Monday, August 10, 2015.

Do you remember visiting your great-aunt’s house? Where everything looked like museum pieces and the smell was worse than your room every got? And all the adults has strained smiles and said how happy they were to be there?

Well, cultural heritage markup isn’t like that. All the real cultural heritage stuff we have maiden aunts and Norwegian bachelor uncles to take care of that stuff. This pre-Balisage workshop is working with markup and is a lot more fun!

Hugh Cayless, Duke University introduces the workshop:

Cultural heritage materials are remarkable for their complexity and heterogenity. This often means that when you’ve solved one problem, you’ve solved one problem. Arrayed against this difficulty, we have a nice big pile of tools and technologies with an alphabet soup of names like XML, TEI, RDF, OAIS, SIP, DIP, XIP, AIP, and BIBFRAME, coupled with a variety of programming languages or storage and publishing systems. All of our papers today address in some way the question of how you deal with messy, complex, human data using the available toolsets and how those toolsets have to be adapted to cope with our data. How do you avoid having your solution dictated by the tools available? How do you know when you’re doing it right? Our speakers are all trying, in various ways, to reconfigure their tools or push past those tools’ limitations, and they are going to tell us how they’re doing it.

A large number of your emails, tweets, webpages, etc. are destined to be “cultural heritage” (phone calls too if the NSA has anything to say about it) so you better get on the cultural heritage markup train today!

May 27, 2015

Speaking Truth To Power (sort of)

Filed under: Government,History,News,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 12:56 pm

16 maps that Americans don’t like to talk about by Max Fisher.

Max lists the following maps:

  1. The US was built on the theft of Native American’s lands
  2. The Trail of Tears, one of the darkest moments in US history — and we rarely talk about it
  3. America’s indigenous population today is sparse and largely lives in areas we forced them into
  4. America didn’t just tolerate slavery for a century — we expanded it
  5. This 1939 map of redlining in Chicago is just a hint at the systematic discrimination against African Americans
  6. School segregation is still a terrible problem
  7. Kids born poor have almost no chance at achieving the American Dream
  8. American has the second-highest child poverty rate in the developed world
  9. The US ranks alongside Nigeria on income inequality
  10. The US tried to replace Spain as an imperialist power
  11. The US outright stole Hawaii as part of its Pacific colonialism
  12. The firebombing that devastated Japan — including lots of non-military targets
  13. Agent Orange: the chemical we used to destroy a generation in Vietnam and harm our own troops
  14. The US backed awful dictators and insurgencies of the Cold War
  15. The thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths in the Iraq War
  16. Syria’s refugee crisis; the humanitarian catastrophe we could still help address but won’t

As far as Max’s maps:

Truthful? Yes.

Informative? Yes.

Not widely known? In some cases.

Will result in different outcomes? No so far.

The repetition of these narratives is part and parcel of Chompsky’s Propaganda System that we were discussing yesterday.

People make entire careers at keeping old injustices alive. Taking up historical causes is safe because the past is beyond our ability to change. You don’t want to be the March of Dimes when they discover a cure for polio.

Is bringing up old injustices speaking truth to power? After some amount of discussion, those in power will stop pretending to pay attention, a majority of citizens will lose interest (until next time) and present injustices, will continue without effort or change.

Ask yourself, whose interest does distraction from current injustices serve?

Power can tolerate a lot of truth, so long as it is beyond being changed by anyone. The crowd can vent its righteous anger, speeches can be made, marches held, and other for cleaning up after crowds, the system grinds on.

PS: On Syrian refugees, Saudi Arabia is a lot closer than the United States and the oil states of the Middle East have the resources to more than adequately care for Syrian refugees. US involvement will only continue its tradition of weak/corrupt governments in the Middle East.

May 19, 2015

Civil War Navies Bookworm

Filed under: History,Humanities,Indexing,Ngram Viewer,Searching,Text Analytics — Patrick Durusau @ 6:39 pm

Civil War Navies Bookworm by Abby Mullen.

From the post:

If you read my last post, you know that this semester I engaged in building a Bookworm using a government document collection. My professor challenged me to try my system for parsing the documents on a different, larger collection of government documents. The collection I chose to work with is the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies. My Barbary Bookworm took me all semester to build; this Civil War navies Bookworm took me less than a day. I learned things from making the first one!

This collection is significantly larger than the Barbary Wars collection—26 volumes, as opposed to 6. It encompasses roughly the same time span, but 13 times as many words. Though it is still technically feasible to read through all 26 volumes, this collection is perhaps a better candidate for distant reading than my first corpus.

The document collection is broken into geographical sections, the Atlantic Squadron, the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, and so on. Using the Bookworm allows us to look at the words in these documents sequentially by date instead of having to go back and forth between different volumes to get a sense of what was going on in the whole navy at any given time.
…

Before you ask:

The earlier post: Text Analysis on the Documents of the Barbary Wars

More details on Bookworm.

As with all ngram viewers, exercise caution in assuming a text string has uniform semantics across historical, ethnic, or cultural fault lines.

May 9, 2015

A History of the Revolutionary Working Class

Filed under: Government,History,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 10:18 am

A History of the Revolutionary Working Class

From the webpage:

Since capitalism arose in the world, workers have been banding together; at first locally in small groups, but increasingly workers realized that the greater the strength of workers’ organisation, the better able workers are to challenge capitalism. This section provides in-depth history of these efforts of organising workers regardless of race, ethnicity, gender – or border, the effort to organise and create collaboration and co-operation between workers the world over in order to win the world for those who make it run.
…

A great source for balancing the standard narratives about socialism/communism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Their lack of success reminds me of (paraphrase):

…if you’re unwilling to talk about violence, you aren’t ready to talk about revolution….

I don’t remember if the source was a newspaper (LA Free Press for example), a book, etc. Does that ring a bell for you?

I first saw this link in a Facebook post by Steve Pepper.

March 12, 2015

Detecting Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Legal Documents:…

Filed under: History,Law - Sources,Text Analytics,Text Mining,Texts — Patrick Durusau @ 6:32 pm

Detecting Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Legal Documents: Methods and Preliminary Results by Lincoln Mullen.

From the post:

How can you track changes in the law of nearly every state in the United States over the course of half a century? How can you figure out which states borrowed laws from one another, and how can you visualize the connections among the legal system as a whole?

Kellen Funk, a historian of American law, is writing a dissertation on how codes of civil procedure spread across the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. He and I have been collaborating on the digital part of this project, which involves identifying and visualizing the borrowings between these codes. The problem of text reuse is a common one in digital history/humanities projects. In this post I want to describe our methods and lay out some of our preliminary results. To get a fuller picture of this project, you should read the four posts that Kellen has written about his project:
…

Quite a remarkable project with many aspects that will be relevant to other projects.

Lincoln doesn’t use the term but this would be called textual criticism, if it were being applied to the New Testament. Of course here, Lincoln and Kellen have the original source document and the date of its adoption. New Testament scholars have copies of copies in no particular order and no undisputed evidence of the original text.

Did I mention that all the source code for this project is on Github?

February 26, 2015

Making A Mouse Seem Like A Dragon

Filed under: Government,History,Politics,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 6:44 pm

Ishaan Tharoor writes of a new edition of ‘Mein Kampf in What George Orwell said about Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ saying in part:

But, in my view, the most poignant section of Orwell’s article dwells less on the underpinnings of Nazism and more on Hitler’s dictatorial style. Orwell gazes at the portrait of Hitler published in the edition he’s reviewing:

It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to.

The line:

If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.

is particularly appropriate in a time of defense budgets at all time highs, restrictions on travel, social media, “homeland” a/k/a “fatherland” security, torture as an instrument of democratic governments, etc.

Where is this dragon that threatens us so? Multiple smallish bands of people with no country, not national industrial base, no navy, no airforce, no armored divisions, no ICBMs, no nuclear weapons, no CBW, who are most skilled with knives and lite arms.

How many terrorists? In How Many Terrorists Are There: Not As Many As You Might Think Becky Ackers does the math based on the helpful report from the U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Terrorism.

Before I give you Becky’s total, which errs on the generous side of rounding up, know that the Department of Homeland security already has them outnumbered.

Try 184,000.

Yep, just 184,000. Even big, bad “Al-Qa’ida (AQ)” and its three affiliates (“Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula”; “Al-Qa’ida in Iraq”; and “Al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb”) boast only 4000 bad guys combined. (The main Al-Qa’ida’s “strength” is “impossible to estimate,” but the Reports admits that its “core has been seriously degraded” following “the death or arrest of dozens of mid- and senior-level AQ operatives.” “Dozens,” not “hundreds.” Hmmm.)

And remember, 184,000 is a ridiculously inflated figure – both because of our generous accounting and also because governments often expand a word’s meaning well beyond the dictionary’s. You may recall the Feds’ contending with straight faces in 2004 that if “a little old lady in Switzerland gave money to a charity for an Afghan orphanage, and the money was passed to al Qaeda,” she met the definition of “enemy combatant.” Five years later, a federal Fusion Center decreed that “if you’re an anti-abortion activist, or if you display political paraphernalia supporting a third-party candidate or [Ron Paul], if you possess subversive literature, you very well might be a member of a domestic paramilitary group.” No telling how many confused Swiss grandmothers and readers of Techdirt’s subversive articles cluster among those 184,000.

That number grows even more absurd when we compare it with the aforementioned Homeland Security’s 240,000 Warriors on Terror. Meanwhile, something like 780,000 cops stalk us nationwide, whose duties also encompass tilting at terrorism’s windmill. And that’s to say nothing of the scores of other bureaucracies at the national, state, and local levels hunting these same 184,000 guerrillas as well as an additional 1,368,137 troops from the armed forces [click on “Rank/Grade – current month”].

Even if you round the absurd number of terrorists up to 200,000 and round our total down to 2,000,000, at present the United States along has the terrorists outnumbered 10 to 1. Now add in Europe, China, India, etc. and you get the idea that terrorists really are the mice of the world.

Personally I’m glad they are re-printing ‘Mein Kampf.’

Good opportunity to be reminded that leaders who are making dragons out of the mice of terrorism aren’t planning on sacrificing themselves, they are going to sacrifice us, each and every one.

February 12, 2015

BHO – British History Online

Filed under: History,Humanities — Patrick Durusau @ 7:15 pm

BHO – British History Online

The “news” from 8 December 2014 (that I missed) reports:

British History Online (BHO) is pleased to launch version 5.0 of its website. Work on the website redevelopment began in January 2014 and involved a total rebuild of the BHO database and a complete redesign of the site. We hope our readers will find the new site easier to use than ever before. New features include:

  • A new search interface that allows you to narrow your search results by place, period, source type or subject.
  • A new catalogue interface that allows you to see our entire catalogue at a glance, or to browse by place, period, source type or subject.
  • Three subject guides on local history, parliamentary history and urban history. We are hoping to add more subject guides throughout the year. If you would like to contribute, contact us.
  • Guidelines on using BHO, which include searching and browsing help, copyright and citation information, and a list of external resources that we hope will be useful to readers.
  • A new about page that includes information about our team, past and present, as well as a history of where we have come from and where we want to go next.
  • A new subscription interface (at last!) which includes three new levels of subscription in addition to the usual premium content subscription: gold subscription, which includes access to page scans and five- and ten-year long-term BHO subscriptions.
  • Increased functionality to the maps interface, which are now fully zoomable and can even go full screen. We have also replaced the old map scans with high-quality versions.
  • We also updated the site with a fresh, new look! We aimed for easy-to-read text, clear navigation, clean design and bright new images.

​Version 5.0 has been a labour of love for the entire BHO team, but we have to give special thanks to Martin Steer, our tireless website manager who rebuilt the site from the ground up.

For over a decade, you have turned to BHO for reliable and accessible sources for the history of Britain and Ireland. We started off with 29 publications in 2003 and here is where we are now:

  • 1.2 million page views per month
  • 365,000 sessions per month
  • 1,241 publications
  • 108,227 text files
  • 184,355 images
  • 10,380 maps​

​We are very grateful to our users who make this kind of development possible. Your support allows BHO to always be growing and improving. 2014 has been a busy year for BHO and 2015 promises to be just as busy. Version 5.0 was a complete rebuild of BHO. We stripped the site down and began rebuilding from scratch. The goal of the new site is to make it as easy as possible for you to find materials relevant to your research. The new site was designed to be able to grow and expand easily, while always preserving the most important features of BHO. Read about our plans for 2015 and beyond.

We’d love to hear your feedback on our new site! If you want to stay up-to-date on what we are doing at BHO, follow us on Twitter.

Subscriptions are required for approximately 20% of the content, which enables the BHO to offer the other 80% for free.

A resource such as the BHO is a joyful reminder that not all projects sanctioned by government and its co-conspirators are venal and ill-intended.

For example, can you imagine a secondary school research paper on the Great Fire of 1666 that includes observations based on Leake’s Survey of the City After the Great Fire of 1666 Engraved By W. Hollar, 1667? With additional references from BHO materials?

I would have struck a Faustian bargain in high school had such materials been available!

That is just one treasure among many.

Teachers of English, history, humanities, etc., take note!

I first saw this in a tweet by Institute of Historical Research, U. of London.

February 5, 2015

Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain and its Making

Filed under: Cartography,History,Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 2:31 pm

Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain and its Making

From the home page:

The Gough Map is internationally-renowned as one of the earliest maps to show Britain in a geographically-recognizable form. Yet to date, questions remain of how the map was made, who made it, when and why.

This website presents an interactive, searchable edition of the Gough Map, together with contextual material, a blog, and information about the project and the Language of Maps colloquium.

Another snippet from the about page:

The Linguistic Geographies project involved a group of researchers from across three UK HEIs, each bringing distinctive skills and expertise to bear. Each has an interest in maps and mapping, though from differing disciplinary perspectives, from geography, cartography and history. Our aim was to learn more about the Gough Map, specifically, but more generally to contribute to ongoing intellectual debates about how maps can be read and interpreted; about how maps are created and disseminated across time and space; and about technologies of collating and representing geographical information in visual, cartographic form. An audio interview with two of the project team members – Keith Lilley and Elizabeth Solopova – is available via the Beyond Text web-site, at http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/video.php (also on YouTube).

The project’s focus on a map, as opposed to a conventional written text, thus opens up theoretical and conceptual issues about the relationships between ‘image’ and ‘text’ – for maps comprise both – and about maps as objects and artifacts with a complex and complicated ‘language’ of production and consumption. To explore these issues the project team organized an international colloquium on The Language of Maps, held over the weekend of June 23-25 2011 at the Bodleian Library Oxford. Further details and a short report on the colloquium are available here.

Be sure to visit the Beyond Text web-site. The interface under publications isn’t impressive but the publications for any given project are.

January 26, 2015

Why Internet Memory Is Important – Auschwitz

Filed under: Government,History — Patrick Durusau @ 8:16 pm

After posting a note about Jill Lepore’s essay The Cobweb: Can the Internet be archived?, I found a great example of why memory and sources (like a footnote) are important.

Today, 26 January 2015, is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The Telegraph gave this lead into its reprinting of the obituary of Rudolf Vrba:

Rudolf Vrba escaped from Auschwitz in 1944 and was one of the first people to give first-hand evidence of the gas chambers, mass murder and plans to exterminate a million Jews. Nearly 70 years on from the liberation of the concentration camp, the Telegraph looks back on his legacy

So horrific was the testimony from Rudolf Vrba, that the members of the Jewish Council in Hungary couldn’t quite believe what they were hearing.

Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, who escaped with him in April 1944, drew up a detailed plan of Auschwtiz and its gas chambers, providing compelling evidence of what had previously been considered embellishment. It has since emerged that reports from inside Auschwitz, compiled by the Polish Underground State and the Polish Government in Exile and written by Jan Karski and Witold Pilecki among others, had in fact reached some Western allies before 1944, but action had not been taken.

Vrba and Wetzler’s detailed, first-hand report about how Nazis were systematically killing Jews was compiled into the Wetzler-Vrba report and sent shockwaves around the world when it was circulated and picked up by international media in 1944.

It still took some weeks before the report was accepted and credited after it was written – something that Vrba said had contributed to the deaths of an estimated 50,000 Hungarian Jews. Just weeks before their escape, German forces had invaded Hungary, and Jews there were already being shipped to Auschwitz. It wasn’t until the report made the headlines in international media that Hungary stopped the deportation in July of 1944.

Ahead of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Monday 26th January, here is the Telegraph’s obituary of Vrba, who died in 2006, and is credited for opening the world’s eyes to the horrors of Auschwitz:
…

The obituary is very moving but if you need to read The Auschwitz Protocol / The Vrba-Wetzler Report to get a true sense of the horror that was Auschwitz.

The report is all the more chilling because of the lack of hype and matter of fact tone of the report. Quite different from the news we experience every day.

Remembering an event such as Auschwitz is important, not to relive old wrongs but to attempt to avoid repeating those same wrongs again. Remembering Auschwitz did not prevent any of the bloodiness of the second half of the 20th century. Which if anything, exceeded the bloodiness of the first half, when famine, drought, disease and human neglect or malice are taken into account.

But Auschwitz will live on in the memories of survivors and their children. Equally important, it will live on as a well documented event. Dislodging it from the historical record will take more than time.

Can the same be said about many of the events and reports of events that now live only in digital media? We have done badly enough with revisionist history on actual events (see who defeated Germany). How much worse will we do when “history” can simply disappear? (As much already has from government archives no doubt.)

Preserving discovery and analysis of the content of archives presumes there are archives to be mined for subjects and relationships between them. Talk to your local librarian about how to best support long term archiving in your organization, locality and national government. The history we loose could well be your own.

I first saw the basis for this post in Vintage Infodesign [105].

January 24, 2015

History Depends On Who You Ask, And When

Filed under: History,Persuasion,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 11:52 am

You have probably seen the following graphic but it bears repeating:

sondage-nation-contribue-defaite-nazis

The image is from: Who contributed most to the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945?

From the post:

A survey conducted in May 1945 on the whole French territory now released (confirming a survey in September 1944 with Parisians) showed that interviewees appear well aware of the power relations and the role of allies in the war, despite the censorship and the difficulty to access reliable information under enemy’s occupation.

A clear majority (57%) believed that the USSR is the nation that has contributed most to the defeat of Germany while the United States and England will gather respectively 20% and 12%.

But what is truly astonishing is that this vision of public opinion was reversed very dramatically with time, as shown by two surveys conducted in 1994 and 2004. In 2004, 58% of the population were convinced that USA played the biggest role in the Second World War and only 20% were aware of the leading role of USSR in defeating the Nazi.

This is a very clear example of how the propaganda adjusted the whole nation’s perception of history, the evaluation of the fundamental contribution to the allied victory in the World War II.

Whether this change in attitude was the result of “propaganda” or some less directed social process I cannot say.

What I do find instructive is that over sixty (60) years, less than one lifetime, public perception of the “truth” can change that much.

How much greater the odds that the “truth” of events one hundred years ago are different from the ones we hold now.

To say nothing of the “truth” of events several thousand years ago, which we have reported only a handful of times, reports that have been edited to suite particular agendas.

Or we have some physical relics that occur at one location, sans any contemporaneous documentation, which we would not understand in its ancient context but in ours.

That should not dissuade us from writing histories, but it should make us cautious about taking action based on historical “truths.”

I most recently saw this in a tweet by Anna Pawlicka.

January 5, 2015

Mapping Boston’s Religions:…

Filed under: History,Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 8:13 pm

Mapping Boston’s Religions: Next Steps in Mapping U.S. Religious History by Lincoln Mullen.

From the first slide:

This conference paper and visualizations are to be delivered January 5, 2015, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Church History. It is part of a panel on “Mapping Religious Space: Four American Cities from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century.”

The slides aren’t numbered but I think from slide 4:

My general argument is that there are large sources of data on American religion after the colonial period and before Word War II which historians have not used to make maps. Scholars have not passed over these sources because they are unaware of them, but because they could not meaningfully represent them in print maps. The problem is one of resolution. Print atlases could convey relatively few data points. Furthermore, because atlases can contain only so many maps, they have often been forced to set their chronological or geographic scope very large. By using these more detailed sources we are able to make maps which better approximate the sophisticated thinking about religious categories that we expect from our prose. These richer maps can tell us not just more, but more humanistic, things about religious history. To take advantage of these more comprehensive sources we need digital maps. To be sure, digital history has had more than its share of hubris, more than we have time to repent of today. But digital maps do offer the possibility for working at different scales, for displaying change over time, for integrating maps with our sources, and for crafting narratives with maps. While none of these advantages entirely solves with the problem of mapping humanistically, they do permit us to at least start to address these theoretical concerns.

Lowering the barriers and constraints on map making, such as the limitations and cost of print maps, is empowering new map makers, like Lincoln Mullen, to craft maps no one has attempted before. Where those maps will take us remains to be seen.

I first saw this in a tweet by Lincoln Mullen.

January 2, 2015

The Machines in the Valley Digital History Project

Filed under: Digital Research,History,Humanities,Social Sciences — Patrick Durusau @ 4:42 pm

The Machines in the Valley Digital History Project by Jason Heppler.

From the post:

I am excited to finally release the digital component of my dissertation, Machines in the Valley.

My dissertation, Machines in the Valley, examines the environmental, economic, and cultural conflicts over suburbanization and industrialization in California’s Santa Clara Valley–today known as Silicon Valley–between 1945 and 1990. The high technology sector emerged as a key component of economic and urban development in the postwar era, particularly in western states seeking to diversify their economic activities. Industrialization produced thousands of new jobs, but development proved problematic when faced with competing views about land use. The natural allure that accompanied the thousands coming West gave rise to a modern environmental movement calling for strict limitations on urban growth, the preservation of open spaces, and the reduction of pollution. Silicon Valley stood at the center of these conflicts as residents and activists criticized the environmental impact of suburbs and industry in the valley. Debates over the Santa Clara Valley’s landscape tells the story not only of Silicon Valley’s development, but Americans’ changing understanding of nature and the environmental costs of urban and industrial development.

A great example of a digital project in the humanities!

How does Jason’s dissertation differ from a collection of resources on the same topic?

A collection of resources requires each of us to duplicate Jason’s work to extract the same information. Jason has curated the data, that is he has separated out the useful from the not so useful, eliminated duplicate sources that don’t contribute to the story, and provided his own analysis as a value-add to the existing data that he has organized. That means we don’t have to duplicate Jason’s work, for which we are all thankful.

How does Jason’s dissertation differ from a topic map on the same topic?

Take one of the coming soon topics for comparison:

“The Stanford Land Machine has Gone Berserk!” Stanford University and the Stanford Industrial Park (Coming Soon)

Stanford University is the largest landholder on the San Francisco Peninsula, controlling nearly 9,000 acres. In the 1950s, Stanford started acting as a real estate developer, first with the establishment of the Stanford Industrial Park in 1953 and later through several additional land development programs. These programs, however, ran into conflict with surrounding neighborhoods whose ideas for the land did not include industrialization.

Universities are never short on staff and alumni that they would prefer being staff and/or alumni from some other university. Jason will be writing about one or more such individuals under this topic. In the process of curation, he will select known details about such individuals as are appropriate for his discussion. It isn’t possible to include every known detail about any person, location, event, artifact, etc. No one would have time to read the argument being made in the dissertation.

In addition to the curation/editing process, there will be facts that Jason doesn’t uncover and/or that are unknown to anyone at present. If the governor of California can conceal an illegitimate child for ten years, it won’t be surprising to find other details about the people Jason discusses in his dissertation.

When such new information comes out, how do we put that together with the information already collected in Jason’s dissertation?

Unless you are expecting a second edition of Jason’s dissertation, the quick answer is we’re not. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

The current publishing paradigm is designed for republication, not incremental updating of publications. If new facts do appear and more likely enough time has passes that Jason’s dissertation is no longer “new,” some new PhD candidate will add new data, dig out the same data as Jason, and fashion a new dissertation.

If instead of imprisoning his data in prose, if Jason had his prose presentation for the dissertation and topics (as in topic maps) for the individuals, deeds, events, etc., then as more information is discovered, it could be fitted into his existing topic map of that data. Unlike the prose, a topic map doesn’t require re-publication in order to add new information.

In twenty or thirty years when Jason is advising some graduate student who wants to extend his dissertation, Jason can give them the topic map that has up to date data (or to be updated), making the next round of scholarship on this issue cumulative and not episodic.

December 25, 2014

Christmas Day: 1833

Filed under: History,Science,Skepticism — Patrick Durusau @ 2:31 pm

Charles Darwin’s voyage on Beagle unfolds online in works by ship’s artist by Maev Kennedy.

darwin-slinging-the-monkey

Slinging the monkey, Port Desire sketch by Conrad Martens on Christmas Day 1833 from Sketchbook III Photograph: Cambridge University Library

From the post:

On Christmas Day 1833, Charles Darwin and the crew of HMS Beagle were larking about at Port Desire in Patagonia, under the keen gaze of the ship’s artist, Conrad Martens.

The crew were mostly young men – Darwin himself, a recent graduate from Cambridge University, was only 22 – and had been given shore leave. Martens recorded them playing a naval game called Slinging the Monkey, which looks much more fun for the observers than the main participant. It involved a man being tied by his feet from a frame, swung about and jeered by his shipmates, until he manages to hit one of them with a stick, whereupon they change places.

…

Alison Pearn, of the Darwin Correspondence Project – which is seeking to assemble every surviving letter from and to the naturalist into a digital archive – said the drawings vividly brought to life one of the most famous voyages in the world. “It’s wonderful that everyone has the chance now to flick through these sketch books, in their virtual representation at the Cambridge digital library, and to follow the journey as Martens and Darwin actually saw it unfold.”

…

It would be a further 26 years before Darwin published his theory of evolution, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, based partly on wildlife observations he made on board the Beagle. The voyage, and many of the people he met and the places he saw can be traced in scores of tiny lightning sketches made in pencil and watercolour by Martens – although unfortunately he joined the ship too late to record the weeping and hungover sailors in their chains – which have been placed online by Cambridge University library.

Anyone playing “slinging the monkey” at your house today?

If captured today, there would be megabytes if not gigabytes of cellphone video. But cellphone video would lack the perspective of the artist that captured a much broader scene than simply the game itself.

Video would give us greater detail about the game but at the loss of the larger context. What does that say about how to interpret body camera video? Does video capture “…what really happened?”

I first saw this in a tweet by the IHR, U. of London.

December 24, 2014

historydata: Data Sets for Historians

Filed under: History,R — Patrick Durusau @ 7:42 pm

historydata: Data Sets for Historians

From the webpage:

These sample data sets are intended for historians learning R. They include population, institutional, religious, military, and prosopographical data suitable for mapping, quantitative analysis, and network analysis.

If you forgot the historian on your shopping list, you have been saved from embarrassment. Assuming they are learning R.

At least it will indicate you think they are capable of learning R.

If you want a technology or methodology to catch on, starter data sets are one way to increase the comfort level of new users. Which can have the effect of turning them into consistent users.

December 23, 2014

U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates (1774-1875)

Filed under: Government,History,Law,Law - Sources,Legal Informatics — Patrick Durusau @ 4:35 pm

U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates (1774-1875) by Barbara Davis and Robert Brammer (law library specialists at the Library of Congress).

A video introduction to the website A Century of Lawmaking For a New Nation.

I know you are probably wondering why I would post on this resource considering that I just posted on finding popular topics for topic maps! 😉

Popularity, beyond social media popularity, is in the eye of the beholder. This sort of material would appeal to anyone who debates the “intent” of the original framers of the constitution, the American Enterprise Institute for example.

Justice Justice Scalia would be another likely consumer of a topic map based on these materials. He advocates what Wikipedia calls “…textualism in statutory interpretation and originalism in constitutional interpretation.”

Put anyone seeking to persuade Justice Scalia of their cause, is another likely consumer for such a topic map. Or prospective law clerks for that matter. Tying this material to Scalia’s opinions and other writings would increase the value of such a map.

The topic mapping theory part would be fun but imaging Scalia solving the problem of other minds and discerning their intent over two hundred (200) years later would require more imagination than I can muster on most days.

December 4, 2014

Hebrew Astrolabe:…

Filed under: Astroinformatics,History,Language — Patrick Durusau @ 9:16 pm

Hebrew Astrolabe: A History of the World in 100 Objects, Status Symbols (1200 – 1400 AD) by Neil MacGregor.

From the webpage:

Neil MacGregor’s world history as told through objects at the British Museum. This week he is exploring high status objects from across the world around 700 years ago. Today he has chosen an astronomical instrument that could perform multiple tasks in the medieval age, from working out the time to preparing horoscopes. It is called an astrolabe and originates from Spain at a time when Christianity, Islam and Judaism coexisted and collaborated with relative ease – indeed this instrument carries symbols recognisable to all three religions. Neil considers who it was made for and how it was used. The astrolabe’s curator, Silke Ackermann, describes the device and its markings, while the historian Sir John Elliott discusses the political and religious climate of 14th century Spain. Was it as tolerant as it seems?

The astrolabe that is the focus of this podcast is quite remarkable. The Hebrew, Arabic and Spanish words on this astrolabe are all written in Hebrew characters.

Would you say that is multilingual?

BTW, this series from the British Museum will not be available indefinitely so start listening to these podcasts soon!

December 2, 2014

Likenesses Within the Reach of All

Filed under: History,Museums — Patrick Durusau @ 7:59 pm

Likenesses Within the Reach of All

From the webpage:

The Southern Cartes de Visite Collection is a recently digitized group of 3,356 photographs from circa 1850 to 1900. The map below depicts the locations of the collection’s photographers, studios, and galleries between about 1850 and 1900. Users can browse the map and select locations to see information and examples of the cartes-de-visite taken there. Users can also filter the collection by photographer and zoom in to cities like Baltimore, Louisville, or New Orleans to see the individual studio addresses. By clicking on the locations, users can access an Acumen link to see the photographs and manipulate them as if they were in the archive.

Great resource for Southern history buffs who want to map between period resources that are online.

Then, like now, some people were more photogenic than others. 😉

I first saw this in a tweet by Stewart Varner.

November 25, 2014

Treasury Island: the film

Filed under: Archives,Government,Government Data,History,Indexing,Library,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 5:52 pm

Treasury Island: the film by Lauren Willmott, Boyce Keay, and Beth Morrison.

From the post:

We are always looking to make the records we hold as accessible as possible, particularly those which you cannot search for by keyword in our catalogue, Discovery. And we are experimenting with new ways to do it.

The Treasury series, T1, is a great example of a series which holds a rich source of information but is complicated to search. T1 covers a wealth of subjects (from epidemics to horses) but people may overlook it as most of it is only described in Discovery as a range of numbers, meaning it can be difficult to search if you don’t know how to look. There are different processes for different periods dating back to 1557 so we chose to focus on records after 1852. Accessing these records requires various finding aids and multiple stages to access the papers. It’s a tricky process to explain in words so we thought we’d try demonstrating it.

We wanted to show people how to access these hidden treasures, by providing a visual aid that would work in conjunction with our written research guide. Armed with a tablet and a script, we got to work creating a video.

Our remit was:

  • to produce a video guide no more than four minutes long
  • to improve accessibility to these records through a simple, step-by–step process
  • to highlight what the finding aids and documents actually look like

These records can be useful to a whole range of researchers, from local historians to military historians to social historians, given that virtually every area of government action involved the Treasury at some stage. We hope this new video, which we intend to be watched in conjunction with the written research guide, will also be of use to any researchers who are new to the Treasury records.

Adding video guides to our written research guides are a new venture for us and so we are very keen to hear your feedback. Did you find it useful? Do you like the film format? Do you have any suggestions or improvements? Let us know by leaving a comment below!

This is a great illustration that data management isn’t something new. The Treasury Board has kept records since 1557 and has accumulated a rather extensive set of materials.

The written research guide looks interesting but since I am very unlikely to ever research Treasury Board records, I am unlikely to need it.

However, the authors have anticipated that someone might be interested in process of record keeping itself and so provided this additional reference:

Thomas L Heath, The Treasury (The Whitehall Series, 1927, GP Putnam’s Sons Ltd, London and New York)

That would be an interesting find!

I first saw this in a tweet by Andrew Janes.

October 21, 2014

The Harvard Classics: Download All 51 Volumes as Free eBooks

Filed under: Data,History — Patrick Durusau @ 7:06 pm

The Harvard Classics: Download All 51 Volumes as Free eBooks by Josh Jones.

From the post:

Every revolutionary age produces its own kind of nostalgia. Faced with the enormous social and economic upheavals at the nineteenth century’s end, learned Victorians like Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold looked to High Church models and played the bishops of Western culture, with a monkish devotion to preserving and transmitting old texts and traditions and turning back to simpler ways of life. It was in 1909, the nadir of this milieu, before the advent of modernism and world war, that The Harvard Classics took shape. Compiled by Harvard’s president Charles W. Eliot and called at first Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf, the compendium of literature, philosophy, and the sciences, writes Adam Kirsch in Harvard Magazine, served as a “monument from a more humane and confident time” (or so its upper classes believed), and a “time capsule…. In 50 volumes.”

What does the massive collection preserve? For one thing, writes Kirsch, it’s “a record of what President Eliot’s America, and his Harvard, thought best in their own heritage.” Eliot’s intentions for his work differed somewhat from those of his English peers. Rather than simply curating for posterity “the best that has been thought and said” (in the words of Matthew Arnold), Eliot meant his anthology as a “portable university”—a pragmatic set of tools, to be sure, and also, of course, a product. He suggested that the full set of texts might be divided into a set of six courses on such conservative themes as “The History of Civilization” and “Religion and Philosophy,” and yet, writes Kirsch, “in a more profound sense, the lesson taught by the Harvard Classics is ‘Progress.’” “Eliot’s [1910] introduction expresses complete faith in the ‘intermittent and irregular progress from barbarism to civilization.’”
…

Great reading in addition to being a snapshot of a time in history.

Good data set for testing text analysis tools.

For example, Josh mentions “progress” as a point of view in the Harvard Classics, as if that view does not persist today. I would be hard pressed to explain American foreign policy and its posturing about how states should behave aside from “complete faith” in progress.

What text collection would you compare the Harvard Classics to today to arrive at a judgement on their respective views of progress?

I first saw this in a tweet by Open Culture.

October 20, 2014

20th Century Death

Filed under: Graphics,History,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 3:42 pm

20th century death

I first saw this visualization reported by Randy Krum at 20th Century Death, who then pointed to Information is Beautiful, a blog by David McCandless, where the image originates under: 20th Century Death.

David has posted a high-resolution PDF version, the underlying data and requests your assistance in honing the data.

What is missing from this visualization?

Give up?

Terrorism!

I don’t think extending the chart into the 21st century would make any difference. The smallest death total I saw was in the 1.5 million range. Hard to attribute that kind of death total to terrorism.

The reason I mention the absence of terrorism is that a comparison of these causes of death, at least the preventable ones, to spending on their prevention could be instructive.

You could insert a pin head dot terrorism and point to it with an arrow. Then compare the spending on terrorisms versus infectious diseases.

Between 1993 and 2010, Al-Qaeda was responsible for 4,004 deaths.

As of October 12, 2014, the current confirmed Ebola death toll is 4493.

The CDC is predicting (curently) some 550K Ebola cases by January 2015. With a seventy (70%) mortality rate, well, you do the numbers.

What graphic would you use to persuade decision makers on spending funds in the future?

October 13, 2014

Mirrors for Princes and Sultans:…

Filed under: History,Politics,Text Analytics — Patrick Durusau @ 3:07 pm

Mirrors for Princes and Sultans: Advice on the Art of Governance in the Medieval Christian and Islamic Worlds by Lisa Blaydes, Justin Grimmery, and Alison McQueen.

Abstract:

Among the most signi cant forms of political writing to emerge from the medieval period are texts off ering advice to kings and other high-ranking ocials. Books of counsel varied considerably in their content and form; scholars agree, however, that such texts reflected the political exigencies of their day. As a result, writings in the “mirrors for princes” tradition o er valuable insights into the evolution of medieval modes of governance. While European mirrors (and Machiavelli’s Prince in particular) have been extensively studied, there has been less scholarly examination of a parallel political advice literature emanating from the Islamic world. We compare Muslim and Christian advisory writings from the medieval period using automated text analysis, identify sixty conceptually distinct topics that our method automatically categorizes into three areas of concern common to both Muslim and Christian polities, and examine how they evolve over time. We o er some tentative explanations for these trends.

If you don’t know the phrase, “mirrors for princes,”:

texts that seek to off er wisdom or guidance to monarchs and other high-ranking advisors.

Since nearly all bloggers and everyone with a byline in traditional media considers themselves qualified to offer advice to “…monarchs and other high-ranking advisors,” one wonders how the techniques presented would fare with modern texts?

Certainly a different style of textual analysis than is seen outside the humanities and so instructive for that purpose.

I do wonder about the comparison of texts in translation into English. Obviously easier but runs the risk of comparing translators to translators and not so much the thoughts of the original authors.

I first saw this in a tweet by Christopher Phipps.

September 21, 2014

Medical Heritage Library (MHL)

Filed under: Biomedical,History,Library,Medical Informatics — Patrick Durusau @ 10:48 am

Medical Heritage Library (MHL)

From the post:

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) and DPLA are pleased to announce that MHL content can now be discovered through DPLA.

The MHL, a specialized research collection stored in the Internet Archive, currently includes nearly 60,000 digital rare books, serials, audio and video recordings, and ephemera in the history of medicine, public health, biomedical sciences, and popular medicine from the medical special collections of 22 academic, special, and public libraries. MHL materials have been selected through a rigorous process of curation by subject specialist librarians and archivists and through consultation with an advisory committee of scholars in the history of medicine, public health, gender studies, digital humanities, and related fields. Items, selected for their educational and research value, extend from 1235 (Liber Aristotil[is] de nat[u]r[a] a[nima]li[u]m ag[res]tium [et] marino[rum]), to 2014 (The Grog Issue 40 2014) with the bulk of the materials dating from the 19th century.

“The rich history of medicine content curated by the MHL is available for the first time alongside collections like those from the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Smithsonian, and offers users a single access point to hundreds of thousands of scientific and history of science resources,” said DPLA Assistant Director for Content Amy Rudersdorf.

The collection is particularly deep in American and Western European medical publications in English, although more than a dozen languages are represented. Subjects include anatomy, dental medicine, surgery, public health, infectious diseases, forensics and legal medicine, gynecology, psychology, anatomy, therapeutics, obstetrics, neuroscience, alternative medicine, spirituality and demonology, diet and dress reform, tobacco, and homeopathy. The breadth of the collection is illustrated by these popular items: the United States Naval Bureau of Medical History’s audio oral history with Doctor Walter Burwell (1994) who served in the Pacific theatre during World War II and witnessed the first Japanese kamikaze attacks; History and medical description of the two-headed girl : sold by her agents for her special benefit, at 25 cents (1869), the first edition of Gray’s Anatomy (1858) (the single most-downloaded MHL text at more than 2,000 downloads annually), and a video collection of Hanna – Barbera Production Flintstones (1960) commercials for Winston cigarettes.

“As is clear from today’s headlines, science, health, and medicine have an impact on the daily lives of Americans,” said Scott H. Podolsky, chair of the MHL’s Scholarly Advisory Committee. “Vaccination, epidemics, antibiotics, and access to health care are only a few of the ongoing issues the history of which are well documented in the MHL. Partnering with the DPLA offers us unparalleled opportunities to reach new and underserved audiences, including scholars and students who don’t have access to special collections in their home institutions and the broader interested public.“

Quick links:

Digital Public Library of America

Internet Archive

Medical Heritage Library website

I remember the Flintstone commercials for Winston cigarettes. Not all that effective a campaign, I smoked Marboros (reds in a box) for almost forty-five (45) years. 😉

As old vices die out, new ones, like texting and driving take their place. On behalf of current and former smokers, I am confident that smoking was not a factor in 1,600,000 accidents per year and 11 teen deaths every day.

September 12, 2014

Connected Histories: British History Sources, 1500-1900

Filed under: History,Search Engines,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 4:24 pm

Connected Histories: British History Sources, 1500-1900

From the webpage:

Connected Histories brings together a range of digital resources related to early modern and nineteenth century Britain with a single federated search that allows sophisticated searching of names, places and dates, as well as the ability to save, connect and share resources within a personal workspace. We have produced this short video guide to introduce you to the key features.

Twenty-two remarkable resources can be searched by place, person, or keyword. Some of the sources require subscriptions but the vast majority do not. A summary of the resources would fail to do them justice so here is a list of the currently searchable resources:

As you probably assume, there is no binding point for any person, object, date or thing across all twenty-two resources with its associations to other persons, objects, dates or things.

As you explore Connected Histories, keep track of where you found information on a person, object, date or thing. Depending on the granularity of pointing, you might want to create a topic map to capture that information.

September 9, 2014

The American Yawp [Free History Textbook]

Filed under: History,Texts — Patrick Durusau @ 5:49 pm

The American Yawp [Free History Textbook], Editors: Joseph Locke, University of Houston-Victoria and Ben Wright, Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College.

From the about page:

In an increasingly digital world in which pedagogical trends are de-emphasizing rote learning and professors are increasingly turning toward active-learning exercises, scholars are fleeing traditional textbooks. Yet for those that still yearn for the safe tether of a synthetic text, as either narrative backbone or occasional reference material, The American Yawp offers a free and online, collaboratively built, open American history textbook designed for college-level history courses. Unchecked by profit motives or business models, and free from for-profit educational organizations, The American Yawp is by scholars, for scholars. All contributors—experienced college-level instructors—volunteer their expertise to help democratize the American past for twenty-first century classrooms.

…

The American Yawp constructs a coherent and accessible narrative from all the best of recent historical scholarship. Without losing sight of politics and power, it incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. Whitman’s America, like ours, cut across the narrow boundaries that strangle many narratives. Balancing academic rigor with popular readability, The American Yawp offers a multi-layered, democratic alternative to the American past.

In “beta” now but worth your time to read, comment and possibly contribute. I skimmed to a couple of events that I remember quite clearly and I can’t say the text (yet) captures the tone of the time.

For example, the Chicago Police Riot in 1968 gets a bare two paragraphs in Chapter 27, The Sixties. In the same chapter, 1967, the long hot summer when the cities burned, was over in a sentence.

I am sure the author(s) of that chapter were trying to keep the text to some reasonable length and avoid the death by details I encountered in my college American history textbook so many years ago.

Still, given the wealth of materials online, written, audio, video, expanding the text and creating exploding sub-themes (topic maps anyone?) on particular subjects would vastly enhance this project.

PS: If you want a small flavor of what could be incorporated via hyperlinks, see: http://abbiehoffman.org/ and the documents, such as FBI documents, at that site.

August 22, 2014

Manhattan District History

Filed under: History — Patrick Durusau @ 3:42 pm

Manhattan District History

From the post:

General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Engineer District, in late 1944 commissioned a multi-volume history of the Manhattan Project called the Manhattan District History. Prepared by multiple authors under the general editorship of Gavin Hadden, a longtime civil employee of the Army Corps of Engineers, the classified history was “intended to describe, in simple terms, easily understood by the average reader, just what the Manhattan District did, and how, when, and where.” The volumes record the Manhattan Project’s activities and achievements in research, design, construction, operation, and administration, assembling a vast amount of information in a systematic, readily available form. The Manhattan District History contains extensive annotations, statistical tables, charts, engineering drawings, maps, photographs, and detailed indices. Only a handful of copies of the history were prepared. The Department of Energy’s Office of History and Heritage Resources is custodian of one of these copies.

The history is arranged in thirty-six volumes grouped in eight books. Some of the volumes were further divided into stand-alone chapters. Several of the volumes and stand-alone chapters were never security classified. Many of the volumes and chapters were declassified at various times and were available to the public on microfilm. Parts of approximately a third of the volumes remain classified.

The Office of Classification and the Office of History and Heritage Resources, in collaboration with the Department’s Office of Science and Technical Information, have made the full-text of the entire thirty-six volume Manhattan District History available on this OpenNet website. Unclassified and declassified volumes have been scanned and posted. Classified volumes were declassified in full or with redactions, i.e., still classified terms, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs were removed and the remaining unclassified parts made available to the public. All volumes have been posted.

In case you are interested in the Manhattan project generally or want to follow its participants into the late 20th century, this is the resource for you!

Just occurred to me that the 1940 Census Records are now online. What other records would you want to map together from this time period?

I first saw this in a tweet by Michael Nielsen.

August 1, 2014

Interactive Map: First World War: A Global View

Filed under: History,Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 2:47 pm

Interactive Map: First World War: A Global View by UkNatArchives.

From the pop-up when you visit the map:

A global view

Explore the global impact of the First World War through our interactive map, which highlights key events and figures in countries from Aden to Zanzibar. Drawn directly from our records at The National Archives, the map aims to go beyond the trenches of the Western Front and shows how the war affected different parts of the world.

The First World War: A global view is part of our First World War 100 programme. It currently focuses on the contributions of the countries and territories that made up the British Empire during wartime. We will continue to develop the map over the next four years, to show more countries and territories across Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, Africa and Asia.

About this map

To get started, select a country or territory by clicking on a marker Map maker icon on the map, or select a name from the list on the left. Navigate through the tabs to read about battles, life on the Home Front and much more. Each country or territory is illustrated with images, maps and other documents from our collections. Click on the references to find key documents in Discovery, our catalogue, or images in our image library.

To reflect changing borders and names since 1914, we have provided two map views. Switch between the global map as it was during wartime, and as it is today, by using the buttons at the top of the map.

My assumptions about certain phrases do jump up to bite me every now and again. This was one of those cases.

I think I know what is meant by “First World War,” and “A Global View.” And even the language about “changing borders and names since 1914,” makes sense given the rise of so many new nations in the last century.

Hence, my puzzlement when I looked at the Country/Territory list only to see:

Aden Jamaica
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan Leeward Islands
Ascension Island Malaya
Australia Maldives
Barbados Malta
Bermuda Mauritius
Britian New Zealand
British East Africa Newfoundland
British Gold Coast Nigeria
British Honduras Northern Rhodesia
British New Guinea and German New Guinea Nyasaland
British North Borneo and Sarawak Pacific Islands
Burma Seychelles
Canada Sierra Leone
Ceylon Straits Settlements
Cocos (Keeling) Islands Southern Rhodesia
Cyprus St Helena
Egypt The Gambia
Falkland Islands Trinidad and Tobago
Gibraltar Uganda
Hong Kong and Wei-Hai-Wei Windward Islands
India Zanzibar

In my history lessons, I had learned there were many other countries that were involved in World War I, especially from a “global” view. 😉

My purpose is not to disagree with the definition of World War I or “global perspective” used by the UK National Archive. It is their map and they are free to use whatever definitions seem appropriate to their purpose.

My point is that even common phrases, such as World War I and “global perspective” can be understood in radically different ways by different readers of the same text.

For an American class, I would re-title this resources as England and its territories during World War I. To which a UK teacher could rightly reply, “That’s what we said.”

More examples of unexpected semantic dissonance welcome!

PS: You should be following The National Archives (UK). Truly a remarkable effort.

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