Going Beyond the Textual in History

Photo by Andrew Mason

Because of my interest in both history and games, I'm always on the look-out for good writing or new takes on how to bring elements of the gaming world into the framework of historical inquiry.  Increasingly, I'm finding my best sources of this kind of reading from my Twitter stream, as was the case when Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) pointed me towards an article in the recent edition of the Canadian Game Studies Association journal, 'Loading…', titled 'Beyond the 'Historical' Simulation: Using Theories of History to Inform Scholarly Game Design'.  Tackling what they call 'gamic action', the authors of the paper look to use elements of 'procedural rhetoric' (a concept introduced by Ian Bogost in his work 'Persuasive Games') combined with 'valid and scholarly means' of constructing the past (modeled on the monograph or print article) to produce 'reasonably justified truths' compatible with current methodologies in use by many historians.    

I mention the article not because I found it to be a progressive example of innovative historical thinking on games, but rather the opposite.  Instead of offering a means by which games can be productively and thoughtfully incorporated into historical study, the authors present a reactionary stance that seeks to bind 'gamic action' within the tightly defined epistemological boundaries incorporated into textual modes of history.  While they do offer valid insight when it comes to analyzing the roles and pretenses games follow today with regards to claiming historical validation, the repeated insistence on bringing into alignment the modes of 'objective' history and playable games not only overlooks the complimentary nature of both in creating reasonably justified truths about the past (to borrow a central concern of the authors), but also ignores the more fundamental issue centered on student prosumption (production + consumption) of historical knowledge.

Photo by Caro's Lines

While the first objection stems from concern the authors profess regarding games ability to present historical 'truth' as exemplified by the monograph, the second objection goes to the core of a fundamental debate now occurring in the discipline of History.  Examining both these objections yields the insight that History must go beyond the textual when forming links outside the circumscribed boundaries current epistemologies demand.  This is not abandonment, it is augmentation.  Rather than take a simplistic, reductionist view of the interplay between history and games, it might suit both the Historian and the Student better to uncover the more nuanced and complex interoperability both spheres of knowledge possess.

Let's begin with what the authors define as the 'gamic mode'.

"A gamic mode of history is the construction of scholarly historical arguments as scholarly games, creating a relationship to commercial games analogous to that of non-fiction to fiction in literature. This enables scholars to convey their research in ways that go beyond the limits of textual monographs, digitized historical sources, and digital simulations." [3]

via schaver.com

Thus the introduction of two parallel themes that run through the entire article- first, that scholarly historic arguments can be laid 1:1 over the gamic mode and, second, that this gives the gamic mode a source of truth to which other, commercial games cannot lay claim.  Simply put, the two worlds of textual history and games cannot coexist unless they are mirrors of each other, for to allow the possibility of transition between distinct spheres of knowledge would imply that truth is relative and the certified authority of the historian is no greater than the roll of a die or play of a card.  Students/players, in the 'commercial' and 'simulative' gamic modes, are empowered to both consume and produce knowledge on a level that is difficult for traditional Historians to acknowledge, much less accept.

This fear is clearly expressed by the authors when they claim that current methods of integrating games and history steer the debate away from expressing and elaborating "a disciplinary way of creating truth" and ultimately seek to transform the discipline by altering its epistemologies and limiting its empirical rigor.  Hence the following claim by the authors:

"This [steering of the debate] in turn limits scholarly debate by increasing ambiguity and opening reader response beyond the determination of whether or not the author has presented a reasonably justified truth." [5-6]

While that statement certainly seems ominous, the real source of angst is not the debate on epistemology, truth and empirical rigor conflating history and games supposedly brings about- it's the fact that the reader is apportioned a space of interpretation hereto held inviolate by certified authorities of the historical profession.  The gamic mode, as the authors see it currently being applied, allows the reader (note careful avoidance of the term 'player') to produce responses that go beyond consumption and simple affirmation or negation of the argument presented.  The reader, enabled to produce (or, more accurately, prosume) their own 'truths', can simply avoid the argument altogether.

Instead of dwelling on this point, let's put it in our back pocket as we survey other important parts of the authors argument.

One key concept that helps the authors align fidelity of the historical textual mode to the gamic mode is procedural rhetoric, a term first introduced and elaborated by Ian Bogost, defined in this context as:

"…the use of computational processes to persuasively and effectively convey an idea. What the author creates in procedural rhetoric is not the argument itself, but a series of general and specific rules through authoring code that a computer can then use to generate the argument (Bogost, 2007). This mirrors scholarly constructions of the past as history in two important ways. First is that the argument is not the past, but a representation of it created by authoring evidential and interpretive relationships that lead to conclusions. Second is that the scholarly historical argument itself consists of facts that are converted to evidence and arranged according to a set of rules for that particular argument via interpretation. The gamic mode of history is an application of procedural rhetoric that takes advantage of the processes inherent in scholarly evidential relationships to express these arguments as games.  While different in form the argument experienced by the player would contain the same series of procedural evidential relationships that work towards a verifiable conclusion with a reasonably justifiable truth attribute that they might have expected to find in a monograph of the same argument." [6]

By linking 'computational processes' to the way in which textual arguments are assembled, the authors hope to bring authoritative strength to their claim that the gamic mode and the textual historical argument can be one and the same.  However, this viewpoint hinges on the assumption that digital games possess an internal consistency of rules and play that allow the player to understand and predict cause/effect relationships in the gamic world.  This, unfortunately, is not the case.

Photo by Ken Goldberg

Digital games are, by their very nature, closed constructions whose operation the player cannot, on face, intrinsically know or predict without engaging first in a large degree of play.  Cause/effect relationships in digital games are determined by trial and error, inference, and the acknowledgment of a reward to indicate progress.  Yet the player can never be sure every corner of a digital game has been explored because many actions are obscured by the operation of code, which the player often cannot access and modify.  In fact, a digital game could be considered the exact opposite of a monograph, where the argument and sources used are clearly articulated.  But of course, this too simplifies the monographs presence, which is never really accounted for in the article.  For while citations are visible the documents behind those citations are not.  Alternatively, we know what the scholar selected but we don't know what they didn't select, or even the range of documents surveyed.  This is not a knock on professionalism, merely the idea that History in pursuit of objectivity nevertheless is guided, perhaps unknowingly, by subjective desires.

There is also the question of why the authors are so dedicated to digital gamic action, leaving the venerable tradition of manual board gaming to the relative wayside.  I find this trend currently common in many historic approaches towards utilizing games- but without straying too far from the question at hand, I would add that board games at least allow an alternative separate from the digital gamic mode to occur.  Board games are 'open' and the player does not have to continually press the boundaries of the world to figure out its meaning, a la digital.  Complete boundaries are defined and areas of ambiguity are not hidden but rather demarcated quite visibly in a manual design.  The player can dispense with the never-knowing and move straight to analysis and interpretation.  It should also be noted that the 'open' design of manual games allows players to assert their own interpretations of the events or model depicted, something the authors, as cited above, greatly disdain.

Player-Made Twilight Struggle Card
by Mark MacRae

To put it on even simpler terms- the main objection the authors have with current gamic modes is that they produce history for consumers, while the authors would much rather produce history for producers.  This approach, currently, is endemic in the historical discipline because historians, by and large, are used to being both the producers and consumers of their own product.  This is why the authors struggle so mightily to make equivalent a textual mode of history and a gamic mode of history, to make claims that this approach can, perhaps, go beyond the textual when, in fact, the very notion of equivalence negates this possibility.  Textual modes focus on producing knowledge through reading, while gamic modes focus on producing knowledge through play.  One allows simple consumption, the other complex prosumption.

Stalwart defense of the 'consumptive' textual mode can be further seen in the authors elaboration of Alan Munslow's three broad epistemological approaches to historical scholarship, those being construction, deconstruction and reconstruction.  Because deconstruction relies upon one's own experiences to form understanding of evidence and arguments presented, the authors reject such claims of historic inquiry because "to certain extent (deconstruction) means the past is unknowable and denies a corporate understanding of history."  Reconstruction is similarly disqualified as its primary exemplar, the computer simulation, asserts that collected facts of the past can be arranged and recreated to simulate the past as it actually happened- yet this involves subjective qualifiers and emphases that the authors stress "taxes the traditional historian's ideal of objective scholarship." 

This leaves construction as the preferred epistemological approach in producing an authoritative historical gamic mode.

"Constructionist history builds up knowledge of the past and expresses the past as history by both analyzing how and what individual pieces of evidence can do, and what conclusions about the actions of historical agents (be they individuals or corporate entities) can be established through evidence relationships. In this case, evidence itself is separate from a notion of historical fact, as the fact only becomes evidence based upon its relationship to the question at hand. The constructionist approach to history, while allowing almost any question to be asked, provides parameters around how the question can be answered." [7]

What gives construction the edge for the authors is that it neatly lays outs parameters establishing how 'almost any question…asked' can actually be answered.  Construction also goes hand-in-hand with the use of narrative to act as the communicator of historical truth.  Narrative as communicator of truth is so vitally important to the authors that they express fear in letting the student have input on interpretation outside of that directed by the Historian:

"Narrative is so closely tied to our understanding of action, and as history is the study of past action, that if the historian’s prose does not present a cohesive narrative to the reader, the reader then creates one. Therefore, the gamic mode of history needs to be able to utilize narrative in the same way." [8]

This is not 'meaningful' description.
 Photo by Phil Romans

Under this rationale, it becomes easy for the authors to question the role of any gamic mode in which the student/player becomes a nexus of interaction or interpretation of historical evidence.  Simulations and counter-factuals, the bread and butter of commercial games, are thus scorned by the authors because they allow the student/player to feel as though their actions create meaningful and accurate depictions of the past without utilizing "empirical, justified truths claims about the past."

The solution presented by the authors is Shadows of Utopia: Exploring the Thinking of Robert Owen, a digital game that lets players simulate "an argument about Robert Owen's thinking."  Placing questions of education and labor reform before the player expressed through puzzles and game-world exploration, Shadows of Utopia demonstrates the idealistic thinking of Robert Owen via player transformation of the game-world's 'lazy, foolish shadow-creatures who steal and rob' into real people who attain wealth and morals through factory work.  Mimicking the textual authenticator of citations, Shadows of Utopia provides in-game source documentation in a transparent manner, going so far as to link "sources and related interpretations to the game code, user interface, and aesthetic choices," although how this is accomplished is not specifically defined.

The authors conclude that efforts like Shadows of Utopia not only can "do all the things that the textual mode does" but also "add digital utilities that augment research in imaginative and useful ways." 

Now, to be clear and upfront, I think that Shadows of Utopia sounds like a fascinating attempt to bridge the epistemological gap between what we understand to be the practice of history with the act of play encountered in the gamic mode.  However, I'm not willing to burn all other existing and potential bridges from history to games as the authors of 'Beyond the Historical Simulation' have done.  For one thing, porting (to borrow a phrase from digital gaming) over the epistemological guidelines of textual monographs and journal articles to the gamic mode doesn't allow one to go beyond the textual mode- it merely extends that mode to gamic space without taking into account the unique epistemologies gamic space inherently possesses.  (The authors want to 'paper over' the gamic space, literally, with textual modes)  To make a simple point of comparison, a monograph does not seek reader input whereas a game, by its very nature, requires player input to be utilized.  When you read a journal article, you are passively absorbing knowledge.  When you play a game, you are actively absorbing knowledge.  The authors argument presented above seeks to appropriate player activity and channel it into passive knowledge absorption.

Instead of trying to simplify the conflation of history and games, perhaps it would be better to acknowledge their separate epistemological boundaries and formulate a way to negotiate knowledge handoffs between the two spheres.  Katie King in her recent work Networked Reenactments, points the way to just such a negotiation in her analysis of flexible knowledges and pastpresents displayed in commercially produced television reenactments.  Here we often see the interplay of several fields of knowledge, represented either by talking heads or physical actualization of knowledge epistemologies through representative involvement (i.e. having a Historian and Architect work together in recreating a Roman bath), set against the backdrop of a historical narrative that links the past to the present.  When you add in the viewer angle to reenactments, the demarcation of specialized knowledge becomes less and less viable as the flexible knowledges required to fulfill the reenactment demand greater mobility than tight epistemologies might otherwise demand.  Thus King notes,

"…it is especially important that reenactments are not a way to keep pasts and presents apart-or a way to keep authorities and alternative knowledges, metaphors and referents, materialities and abstractions, forms of academic expertise and cultural entertainment, or affects and cognitions separated, managed, or delimited by membership. Flexible knowledges, transdisciplinarities, new media, all plunge us into uncertainties, risk, collusion, and collaboration; all conditions that-as with responsibilities to multiple audiences from painfully limited authorships-we do not control and in which we are elemental "bits" in emergent reorganizations of knowledge economies and among altering evaluations." (17)

The uncertainty noted by King is what the authors of 'Beyond the Historical Simulation' wish to avoid, as it potentially invalidates the Historians authoritative position in knowledge making.  But, again, King notes this aversion in traditionally defined disciplines presented with flexible knowledges when she states, "intensively experienced affect is what signals movement across knowledge worlds, as well as what indicates cognitive and affiliative shifts across what counts as authoritative."

I have tried in previous posts (one on course design, another on modeling counterinsurgency) to indicate a way towards understanding how to use games in historical study that seeks to broaden the analytical framework beyond that of the textual, even though the textual is essential to analyzing games.  If games offer us nothing but interpretations of history, something I don't fully believe, there is still valuable cultural significance worthy of study in the act of play that brings about said interpretations.  How are cultural narratives sustained or modified in play?  Why do some historical 'truths' stick to the public consciousness, while others are perennially ignored?  How are certain conflicts or simulations modeled, and why would designers build games to emulate these processes?  How does a players analysis of the game, its play-design mechanics, impact how they approach replays or creating modifications?  (In particular I'm thinking of 'pacifist' play in Skyrim and even the creation of a '72 Summit Series card for Twilight Struggle)  

King offers a potent conceptual metaphor for analysis of games with her use of pastpresent- a player literally links the past to the present with their act of play- in addition to providing a framework though which diverse disciplines can interact on the subject of games through her analysis of flexible knowledges.  This is a good start- but as the 'Beyond the Historical Simulation' article makes clear, there are still many who are skeptical of such ventures.

Photo by Mollenborg

Games are highly complex cultural artifacts that situate themselves on the borders of several disciplines, embodying fully the sort of reenactment potential for flexible knowledge discussed by King above.  While it might be nice to render the gamic mode under the auspices of textual epistemologies, these can only take us so far in our understanding on the interactions of both and perhaps limit us, arbitrarily, from expanding and utilizing historic knowledge in emerging 'posthumanities' approaches the study of games demand.  We can surely do better than advocate for the gamic mode to become backwards compatible with textual monographs.

Course Design Process: History Through Games

As part of the ongoing process that is assembling my 'Graduate Portfolio', I've decided to design a course that addresses one of my growing interests- the intersection of historical inquiry and gaming.  About a year ago, I wrote a draft essay analyzing the Cold War themed board game Twilight Struggle as a 'complex cultural artifact' using, primarily, the methodology behind material culture analysis in order to dissect the deeper narrative generative process one encounters through play.  The essay was a labor of love, not provoked by assignment, and I found the process of looking deeper into the issues related to the play-design mechanics inherent in the game to be a satisfying intellectual exercise.  What I realized through the writing of my draft was that Twilight Struggle could be read, in part, as a historical artifact- albeit one with caveats and peculiarities that needed to be addressed if one desired to utilize analysis of such an artifact to the fullest.

Now many might think it silly that I would come to such an obvious conclusion.  However, in my defense, I was not aware of the diversity of thinking, especially among academic circles, that surrounded analysis of games against a larger historical-cultural backdrop.  I hadn't read a single issue of Simulation and Gaming, nor did I know about excellent blogs like PaxSims or Play the Past (although, to be fair, Play the Past did not yet exist when I wrote my essay).  Needless to say, through my writing on a subject thought to be quite novel, I reinvented the wheel several times over in a rough manner that ill suited the smoothness in inquiry pursued by others in the field.  Being a developing Humanities scholar I am not adverse to such endeavors, but it was, in equal measure, both refreshing and discouraging to see the trail already blazed.

Yet I took comfort in the fact that most scholarship or academic writing focused on video games, leaving the table-top variety largely unexamined.  This makes sense, given the fact that video games are much more rich and diverse objects of study.  However, this should not be taken as a sign that board games possess any less diversity as an object worthy of serious analysis or study- quite the opposite.  As Ana Salter recognized in her four part ProfHacker series on 'Using Games in the Classroom' (selection from part III):

Board and card games can be a great first project, particularly for students.  Digital games are flashy, but board and card games offer the advantages for structured play with a lower barrier to entry.  They can also be good practice for learning the mechanics and structure of games without getting bogged down in programming and logic.  We've all played some version of classroom jeopardy before, and it remains an example of taking game-like mechanics and applying then to any content- but when content guides the way, board games can transcend these roots.

The last line of Salter's quote above is the key to why I want to analyze history through games.  So now I have a topic and suitable motivation- but how, exactly, do I design a course that accomplishes this task?

To answer this question I've drawn on two sources, the first from Mark Sample's two-part discussion about Course Design on ProfHacker (Part I and Part II) and the second from Chad Black's Teaching Philosophy post on his blog Parezco Y Digo.  Sample states that, in course design, we should embrace a 'backwards-design' perspective (a process he borrows from the Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe book 'Understanding by Design') that utilizes a three-step process: Identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence and plan learning experiences.  In this way, course design promotes uncoverage, as opposed to simply coverage, in order to plumb both the depth & breadth of the material we as instructors want our students to explore.  Chad Black's 'Teaching Philosophy' takes the ideas promoted by Sample and provides the linkage to my subject matter- History.  Here is a quote from Black's post on linking desired skill development (reading comprehension, primary/secondary source evaluation, identify/build casual explanations for events/structures/movements and communicate explanations in written form) to his course design goals:

I structured my courses to provide practical experience in each of these areas, mixing primary and secondary source material on the various topics under consideration and emphasizing in lecture and discussion the connection between explanatory narratives of the past with evidence.  I increasingly sought to include a wide variety of media as part of the source-based building blocks of my courses (texts, film, photographs, artifacts, etc.)  My hope for each of my courses has been that students will leave with a keen sense of the problematic relationship between the present and the past and of the problematic nature of the relationship between information and knowledge.

Black goes on to state that he looks to bring the process of collateral learning to his students, fostering the development of skills and attitudes through exposure to not just various cultures but also technical skills that will produce information literacy.  Students in Black's class are prompted to create their own content on their own sites in an attempt to 'demystify the web a bit for a generation that has grown up with the internet as a given in their lives and cultivate a capacity for DIY that is collateral to the specific content of (Blacks) courses…"

Under these guidelines, I've begun to establish the following parameters for my 'History through Gaming' course:

What results do I wish to achieve?  I want students to be able to critically evaluate a board game, or any game derivative, looking at not only its outward theme and graphics/material pieces but also the mechanics and designer motivations/inspirations that went into the overall play-mechanic design.  They should be able to situate the game amongst the larger historical narrative, demonstrating knowledge of what the game excels at modeling and what it fails to accurately portray.  In a real sense, I want students to be able to use games as one of many 'documents' in evaluating what Black identified as the 'problematic relationship between the present and the past' in addition to the 'relationship between information and knowledge'.  

What do I consider acceptable evidence?  To begin, students will need to analyze the game itself and then branch out to the designer behind the game, as well as examine the source materials used in its construction.  Students should also cross-check their initial analysis of game materials and design construction using other critically evaluated primary or secondary sources of the period or theme depicted in the game.

What are the learning experiences I wish to utilize?  Beyond reading and evaluating source material (the bread and butter of historical practice), I want students to actually engage with the games we study through the act of play.  Many modern day board games strive to create a narrative through play and I want students to become observers of this process, yet go a step further, analyzing the structure and limitations of this narrative generative experience.  Because many games rely upon the experiences, both past and present, a player brings to the table, I want to use a coordinated approach of tweets to create a real-time experience backchannel, allowing others to view and comment, in addition to having students produce longer explanatory essays, once reserved for the instructors eyes alone, on blogs of their own creation that will be shared with the entire class.  I also want students to produce 'modifications' of the games we study, based on research they have conducted throughout the course, linking the play-design mechanics they propose on reasoned approaches to historical phenomena.

With these guidelines, the next step in designing the course is to determine a theme upon which to base the semester.  Because I am acutely aware that Russian historians are increasingly asked to teach courses outside the constraints of that particular geographic boundary, I decided that it might be best to pick a topic and era both suited to the wealth of available games and interests of mid-level undergraduates, the target audience of this course- American History.  Immediately, Twilight Struggle comes to mind- but this is a rather complex game that might serve better as the keystone, given its survey of Cold War history.  There is also the recently released Hero of Weehawken, which covers the Aaron Burr conspiracy of the early 19th century.  And, of course, there is a plethora of World War II games that cover every conceivable aspect of the American involvement in that conflict.  One constraint of the course is that I don't want to pick too many games to analyze, as learning how to play these games and then asking students to have at least one go at a complete session- in addition to reading relevant documents/analyses of the period in question- would prove too much to cover in one semester/trimester/quarter.  I also want to avoid focusing too much on 'war-games', which is why I'm considering games that tackle social issues like 'The Battle for Seattle'. 

Then there is the larger question of how to address the concept of approaching a board game (and games in general) as applicable historical artifacts worthy of study.  Here the task is much simpler, due mainly to the recent surge of academic interest by those in diverse fields of study.  A few exemplars immediately surface: Brenda Braithwaite's incredible GDC presentation on her approach to designing Train, a documentary 'People are Knowledge' created by editors of Wikipedia seeking to have oral citations included in the encyclopedia based (in part) on the evolving rules of traditional games, and a recently released collection of essays (edited by Gred Costikyan and Drew Davidson) found in Tabletop: Analog Game Design, just to name a few.  Then, of course, there are the excellent blog posts on both PaxSims and Play the Past, not to mention the deeper levels of analysis found in the works of past luminary Johan Huizinga and contemporary luminaries Alexander Galloway & Ian Bogost.  What I once thought was a desert turned out to be an ocean of thought based solely around games of all forms.  

Herein lies the promise and peril of studying games- how do I decide which texts best suit the guidelines I elaborated above?  Should I select the games I wish to study first or should I pick texts that suit my quest of elaborating the game as a historical artifact?  This is the next hurdle I face in my course design- not to mention the selection of appropriate texts suited to historical analyses of the games I select.  However, thanks to my articulation of the three questions above, I have a much better idea of what I want to pursue in fulfilling my goals for the course.  I would love to hear from others in the comments section, or on twitter (@jsantley) on either game ideas, course approaches, or texts to use.

Anyone See A Problem Here?

I normally don't engage in such short posts here on Peasant Muse, but really felt like this needed a comment.  Anastasia Salter recently posted on ProfHacker (A sub-blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education) an article titled, "A Weekend at the Engaging Departments Institute".  Here she dives into the thrill and excitement of gathering for conferences in which new ideas of how to collaborate across department lines and disciplines are discussed.  Here is a quote:

Attending an AAC&U institute can be an opportunity to have a collective dialogue on an important concern for your college or department in an environment with a lot of support. The institute involved four tracks: educational leadership; departmental outcomes and aims of twenty-first century liberal education; faculty roles; and the learning, assessment and improvement cycle. Unlike a traditional conference, where the choice of what to attend is made more or less independently, the tracks build on each other and teams are encouraged to divide and assimilate as much information as possible.

Bravo, I say.  However, further down in the piece, Salter makes the following observation that completely takes the shine off any enthusiasm one might have for the conference listed above:

However, despite the presence of a track entirely focused on twenty-first century education, technology was often remarkably absent from the conversation (and the setting). While a number of attendees were sporting iPads or the occasional laptop, conference wireless was lacking, a Twitter backchannel (as far as I could find) nonexistent, and final presentations were made sans Power Point or Prezi. We engaged in a lot of “low-tech” brainstorming, complete with giant presentation pads and paper-prototyping of curriculum design. The results did keep us very in the moment, but they limited opportunities for sharing ideas outward.

This is the epic fail currently engulfing many sectors of academia.  No wi-fi?  No continuing conversation via Twitter?  Use of paper only?  The last line says it all- "limited opportunities for sharing ideas outward."  As I argued in my response to a previous Chronicle article on 'Ideas in the Ascendent', the new digital age requires circulation of information in order to be relevant.  This conference might have had really great discussions and ideas as to how we, as educators, can improve our craft in the digital age.  But I will never know what they said, will never comment on or improve ideas given.  Others, who did not attend the conference, will also miss out.  How can you debate the best techniques for twenty-first century learning when you use outmoded twentieth century methods to discuss the ideas?  

This last quote hits on my complant squarely:

I’m entering my first year as an assistant professor—I haven’t been involved with administrative or committee work much yet. But after attending the AAC&U Institute, I feel like I have a much better idea of how things work and what some of the processes for curriculum reform and starting new initiatives might look like. I’ve also got a better sense of what some of our programs and general education requirements look like compared to universities across the country who also had teams at the institute.

 Too bad the rest of us, mingling with digital technology in the twenty-first century, are left in the dark. 

What is to be Done for (Almost) Historians? Part II

In part I of this series, I discussed the need for Graduate students to have a venue in which their ideas could be displayed.  Current academic journals, while exemplars of quality product, simply cannot accomodate in their limited 'print' space all the potential great/insightful work  produced in programs across the country and even the world.  Since I am a firm believer that information increases in value exponentially when presented with avenues of circulation, it seems appropriate to me to discuss new methods of bringing graduate work into greater recognition.  

Photo by stetted

In this post, part II, I want to look at the writings of Yocahi Benkler and the Open Bookmark project in order to begin outlining what form this 'Graduate Journal' might take.  Both are concerned with the production of knowledge that can be shared easily across platforms and populations.  To begin, let's look at what Benkler has to say about journals in the current digital ecology.

In his seminal work, The Wealth of Networks, Benkler is concerned with exploring how the ongoing digital revolution is reconfiguring not only methods of knowledge production, but also the means by which this knowledge is certified and shared.  When looking at the traditional model of academic journal publication, Benkler states that the proprietary model used in the past produced excellent, certified works of scholarship, but at the cost of increasing subscriptions rates that, in effect, mean that poorer institutions and libraries are locked out from accessing the knowledge produced.  Here is an article from the F1000 (the Faculty of 1000 Post Publication Review) magazine, The Scientist, discussing how increased costs have driven many libraries to abandon large numbers of their journal subscriptions.  A quote:

The economic downturn is hitting libraries and hitting them hard. A 2009 global survey of 835 libraries in 61 countries found that nearly one-third of academic libraries saw their budgets reduced by 10 percent or more that year. And journal subscriptions are taking the brunt of that loss: The University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) cancelled 118 print and 115 online subscriptions for 2010, as well as several databases (including Faculty of 1000 Medicine, publisher of The Scientist). Last spring, the University of Washington announced cuts of 1,600 print and electronic journals, databases, and microforms. The University of Virginia library sliced 1,169 journals, the University of Arizona downsized by 650 print and electronic titles, and Georgia State University cut 441 and is now considering the fate of another 1,092. The list goes on and on.     

There are alternatives, however, that attempt to escape the proprietary publishing model, and Benkler discusses the two varieties one will encounter.  The first follows a model closely associated with traditional publishing, but with greater emphasis on utilizing online tools to streamline the submissions and editing process.  Yet these publications require a salaried staff, meaning that funds must be solicited from a combination of grants, subscription fees, and even author fees, in order to produce the finished product.  This ensures some degree of financial stability, yet Benkler is quick to point out that these journals suffer from the 'prestige' problem- since advancement in many academic careers is predicated on being published in a reputable journal, these new journal ventures have an uphill battle to wage in terms of being considered an equal to Nature or Science.  Essentially, this is a problem of 'certification' of knowledge, an issue that will have to be addressed with any potential 'graduate journal' program.  

Photo by Tom Magliery

The second variety described by Benkler follows a model more akin to the free software movement and 'peer production', a central concept in Wealth of Nations, with the example being ArXiv.org.  On ArXiv.org, submissions are not reviewed but instead forced to adopt 'standardized' formatting, in order to prevent fragmentation of styles among the various papers.  Reviews are generated by commentators, with authors encouraged to upload updated or revised papers with their own descriptions on changes made.  The key to this model is that ArXiv.org serves a small, specialized community of scholars and researchers who are able to discern good arguments from bad.  Certification of knowledge here is produced after the fact, with the 'gatekeepers' being the actual readers themselves.  As noted in Part I of this series, social media tools are making evaluations of papers occur in rapid timeframes on a far quicker pace than traditional journals allow.  Circulation of the information allows for rapid commentary and 'certification' of the argument presented.  Yet the potential audience for historical works is far greater than the typical physics fare found on ArXiv.org (or its cousin for the Social Sciences, the SSRN- the Social Science Research Network), thus we need to consider how best to create a certification process that will filter out the bad or mediocre in favor of good papers.

One last comment from Benkler also highlights a current issue surrounding digital knowledge production- that being the issue of 'tagging' uploaded or self-published work.  The sheer volume of work that is produced and displayed online makes searching for relevant works a difficult and sometimes arcane process.  While I would not advocate trying to establish a standard of 'tagging' (many,  many others have spent a long time on this debate, creating solutions that will be reviewed in a future post in this series), I do want to present this quote from Benkler demonstrating the potential benefit standardized tagging could bring to our profession.

"If scientists and other academics adopt this approach of self-archiving coupled with standardized interfaces for global, well-delimited searches, the problem of lack of access to academic publication because of their high-cost publication will be eliminated." (326)

A lofty goal, but one within reach using the variety of digital tools available.  'Tagging' works also finds parallel in another project I'm very interested in- Open Bookmarks.

Photo by dmpop

Open Bookmarks seeks to establish and promote a standard of electronic 'bookmarking' that would work across all digital platforms and devices and also be easily shareable with others.  For History, this would be a very interesting development.  Many times as a graduate student in reading seminars, I would be amazed at how a single text could be interpreted in different ways based upon the experiences brought to the text by the reader.  (That might be a facepalm moment for some of you, but it is worth stating)  Arguments, footnotes, and passages I found interesting were completely different than what my classmates chose to highlight- not to mention the marginalia.  With the rise of the iPad, Kindle, and other very portable media devices, the possibility of sharing ones notes and bookmarks created in a variety of texts promises to dramatically increase the circulation of ideas- so long as there is a coherent system that allows one to cut through the digital 'noise'.  Here are four questions the Open Bookmarks blog believes everyone should ask of new book products or services:

Can I export my bookmarks? If you’ve highlighted or annotated text in an ereader, can you save, email and share these? Can I expose my reading list? If you’ve read a load of books, where can you or other people see these? Where’s the privacy feature? If I’m sharing or saving my bookmarks, who controls who sees them?  Where’s the backup? If this ereader or service tanks tomorrow, what happens to my bookmarks? 

This is an incredibly brief list, which points towards the central question of Open Bookmarks: who owns your bookmarks? The answer should be you, and the questions above help tease out the answer.

Let's summarize what this post covered- we know from part I that graduate students produce a large volume of work, little of which can be shared via traditional academic journals.  There exists other models of publication that circumvent, in varied degrees, the problems encountered in proprietary journals.  Online collaborative tools promise to make this barrier to publication melt away, but only if these same tools allow users to 'certify' the knowledge of the arguments presented, as well as facilitate easy sharing of notes and 'bookmarks' so that others can easily see what specifically drove one users comments or views.    By creating a standardized 'tagging' system, we can ensure that works are easily indexed and shared, increasing the circulation of ideas and dramatically speeding up both innovations and critiques.  

History and the Teaching Philosophy, part I

It's not often that I become engaged with one of my friends 'status updates' on Facebook, yet that was truly the case the other today as I fired off four (fairly) rapid-fire comments in response to "Written teaching philosophies: just that much boiler-plate nonsense." I explained that, over the past year, I’ve been carefully considering what my role as a historian should be with regards to my professional desire to teach. I cited an example in a recent NY Times article in which a graduate in media studies landed a job largely based on his use of 'social media' techniques to reach a larger audience. Within the profile, the student confessed that he initially went into college with the hopes of being a history teacher. However, problems arose.

"I thought I was going to be a history teacher, but after taking some of the core general ed and psychology courses, it seemed like history was all about memorization, and I wanted to do something more hands-on, so I made the segue to media studies. The range of courses you could take made it great: production, marketing and journalism."[i]

Now what struck me about this statement is the way in which the student-turned-worker perceived history; namely, it was a process of memorization. I have no doubt that the majority of undergraduates who take history courses feel this way as well. To them, history is nothing more than a trivial pursuit, useful only for the occasional 'one-up' with other history buffs or the even rarer appearance on Jeopardy. To be truthful, the way most programs are taught this is not far from the mark. Why? For me, at least, it boils down to two factors: one, professional skills used by historians are not properly inculcated because, two, the not-so-secret workhorse of many departments, the graduate assistants, perform much of the teaching/grading load and are themselves in the process of mastering the skills they should, in theory, one day pass on to their students. When professors actually teach a course themselves, they often focus on content and little on historical/analytical skill usage. Usually, if you are taking a history course where an actual professor is the instructor (often at the higher levels of history courses) they assume you have already mastered said skills and will gloss over them accordingly.

Rather than focus on the second point (I will speak to that in a later post), I would like to use this post to discuss why the first point, that essential skills used in history are not properly taught, parallels the statement my friend made, that "written teaching philosophies" equals "just that much boiler plate nonsense."

I draw inspiration from a John Dewey essay, entitled "The Problem of the Liberal Arts College" in which Dewey traces the development of liberal arts education against the rise of the scientific revolution and pursuant democratization that dissolved barriers between 'liberal' and 'useful' knowledge. ('Liberal' was the domain of the elite, while 'useful' remained in the hands of the poor- think artisans and craftsmen) Once scientific knowledge gained appreciable respect for its ability to explain and predict the natural world, it thrust itself into the liberal arts college mainly on the grounds that it was useful for social affairs. (Think Economics and Political Science) This intrusion provoked practitioners of the 'liberal arts' to take a conservative stance, to assert that a clear distinction exists between true 'liberal arts' and 'other' subjects. Yet, Dewey is of the opinion that such attempts to isolate the liberal arts will not reestablish the old model of the medieval university and, further, that the implication of such division possesses serious consequences. 

"At a time when technical education is encroaching in many cases upon intelligent acquaintance with and use of the great humanistic products of the past, we find that reading and studying of 'classics' are being isolated and placed in sharp opposition to everything else. The problem of securing to the liberal arts college its due function in democratic society is that seeing to it that the technical subjects which are now socially necessary acquire a human direction. …they cannot be liberating if they are cut off from their humane sources and inspirations."[ii] (Emphasis in the original)

This, to me, is one of the central problems of higher education today. We are so concerned with producing business majors, engineers, chemists, physicists, financiers, etc… because they, in turn, produce the so-called marvels of our age that we don't mind if these students skimped on studying the humanities. What use is history in the production of new vaccines? Or in the manufacture of complex debt instruments? History, along with the humanities in general, is becoming bankrupt in the eyes of the masses because the 'professionals' of these disciplines long ago abandoned the pursuit Dewey elaborated above. We no longer give the technical subjects a 'human direction'. And yet, there is a severe disconnect in this reasoning when the masses blame bankers for their role in the financial crisis- how can we become angry and judge a profession that was never, in any real way, taught their connection to 'humane sources and inspirations"?

This brings me back (albeit in a rather round about way) to the point I am trying to make; history has failed because those students who actually engage with the topic do not take away appreciation for the skills involved. What skills am I talking about? Essentially, history is about the critical evaluation of sources and forming a cogent argument in written form using those sources. All sequencing of events and explanatory theories/models used in history derive from these fundamental skills. When I taught undergraduates at the University of Kansas, I was amazed at how students approached diverse topics in much the same way; they created a chronology and then proceeded to memorize that list. When I pressed them to look at the sources presented in class, be they trial records, tax registers, newspaper articles, or even secondary sources written by established historians they took the very words they read (if they read them at all) for gospel. When I took the time to show them how history uses a critical eye towards the evaluation of these sources it was like a light bulb finally turning on for the first time. For many students today, simply being in a book equates to truth. In our current age of mass marketing and psychological profiles, could anything be further from the truth?

Thus, historians at all levels need to seriously consider their position vis a vis teaching philosophies. Perhaps the reason my colleague felt that all teaching philosophies were "boiler-plate nonsense" is because that is what they have become. Later, in our Facebook to and fro, she admitted that non-historians don't read our teaching philosophies- only a select panel or hiring committee will glance at it, preferring to instead focus on the actual work produced by the candidate. Now, of course, this should be one of the primary qualifiers for a potential hire or certification for doctorate but I argue that teaching philosophies should also be just as important. As a graduate student who studies Imperial Russian history, and peasants of the 19th century in particular, this is one of my central concerns. How can I make this topic relevant to students today? How can I draw them in? However, these are questions best asked after a student has mastered the ability to critically evaluate sources and written arguments. It is my belief that too few history courses actually spell out the acquisition of these skills, instead opting for the traditional 'chronology' approach that many students regard as trials of memorization- once students believe that, it is only a short jump to viewing history, on the whole, as trivial. They no longer see the practice of history as relevant to their lives, even though the essential skills I elaborated on above are applicable to a wide range of activities.

In this way, teaching philosophies are only a first step towards bringing a 'human direction' to the study of history. As this is a theme that requires much more deeper analysis, I will revisit this topic and explore practical models that can help re-shape the way we consider history to be taught. At the conclusion of his essay on the liberal arts college, John Dewey stated,

"The present function of the liberal arts college, in my belief, is to use the resources put at our disposal alike by humane literature, by science, by subjects that have a vocational bearing, so as to secure ability to appraise the needs and issues of the world in which we live."[iii]

I couldn't agree more. Stay tuned for more posts!

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[i] Robin Finn, “When Youth Is a Job Qualification,” New York Times, 8 September 2010.

[ii] John Dewey, “The Problem of the Liberal Arts College,” in The Problems of Man. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 86-87.

[iii] Ibid, 87.