who needs gold teeth, when you can have jade?

Maya Jade Teeth Inserts. Photo: Dennis David (Flickr)

(H/T)

Images like this one make me wish, at times, that I’d gone into archaeology rather than history. So cool. And, I also think it’s worth noting that humans have long applied technology to manipulate appearance for reasons of culture, ritual, and vanity. Does that make modern plastic surgery any less vacuous?

(Cross posted here.)

 

what I’m reading these days

Now that the semester is back in full swing, my reading habits are again drawn to fulfillment of teaching responsibilities, but not entirely. Right now I have a handful of books underway- some for my classes and others not. So, here’s what I’m reading these days:

Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. This is the first book we’ll be discussing in my seminar on the Spanish Conquest and is, I think, required reading for anyone interested in the subject. The book is particularly effective at dissembling notions of European superiority, in their many guises, by demonstrating the centrality of indigenous people themselves in the process of Conquest. We’re using it first in order to play off the many representations of the Conquest that emerged right from the beginning, as European participants sought to frame and legitimate their own actions.

Georg Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge. Also a class text, but for my Honors Research Methods course. Not sure yet how much I actually like it, or how useful it will actually be. I was looking for a single book that would give the quick and dirty overview of shifts in modern historiography, and this seemed like it would do the job. But, as one might expect, I find his prose a little too…. german.

Yanna Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca, I picked this one up at the AHA after skimming it from our library collection, and I’m very excited about it. Yannakakis, who is newly at Emory after starting her career at Montana State, provides an excellent analysis of the role of native intermediaries who were, from the opening moments of conquest (see above) integral to the success and stability of the society Spain forged in the Indies. Native intermediaries between the Spanish and indigenous worlds quickly learned the rules of the game and worked them to protect their own, and often their community’s interests in the face of Spanish colonialism. And since the Spanish were so dependent on communication as filtered by through their intermediaries to grease the works of colonialism, the class of educated indian nobles (and non-nobles, in the form of yanaconas in the Andes, for example) were very consequential for the process of empire building.

Chris McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superatheletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Ever Seen. Ok, I’ll admit that I’m reading this book right now because of my interest in barefoot running, and because a number of friends have recommended it. But, I find it’s pop anthropology to be maddening as it trades in tropes of noble savagery and Indian exoticism. The dude is simply a bad writer on top of that, which is frustrating for anyone with an interest in Latin America, indigenous issues, and, well, serious  non-fiction writing. But, hey, it appeals to my suppressed athelete.

I’m about to start Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Don’t ask me why, because I’m not exactly sure other than the fact that I have a copy of it. I mean, it’s my impression that people read Vonnegut either in high school or early in college and find him interesting simply as a function of cognitive and social development. I’m hoping I’ll be disabused of that impression, but only time will tell.

And, finally, I’m also reading Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, which I like for the sparseness of the prose. “Who shot him? Someone with a gun.” The continental op is a modern-day western-er, and Hammett’s turns of phrase are powerful in their simplicity, their straightforwardness, their economy.

Anyway, as I get through these and add others I’ll offer my assessments. I’d also love to hear what you’re reading these days, as the commute offers ample time for textual engagement.

 

from google books to a digital humanities/digital history divide?

I was one of those people engaging in the Twitter back-end during The Association for Computing and History’s panel, “Is Google Good for History?” (or rather, google books) at last week’s AHA. As makinghistory notes, that panel was probably the most successful of the conference from a twitter coverage perspective because almost everyone who was at the conference and on twitter was there. (The tweets for that panel are here.) That also resulted in a plea for #twitterstorians to diversify their panel attendances a bit. It certainly highlighted the extent to which a back-end discussion channel is dependent on a critical mass of individuals, which we just didn’t have.

The combination of Dan Cohen’s comments (posted here on his blog– read the comment section too) and those of Paul Duguid, and the evasions of Google’s Brandon Badger highlighted a dynamic that I think is, in a certain way, related to the sparring over digital humanities and new media studies going on over twitter and in the blogosphere (here’s a list of recent posts on the subject). Dan’s comments pointed to the limitations of Google Books for historians from the perspective of usability, and with a desire for the text mining potential of all those old books. And its the old books he’s interested in, as far as I can tell, because the only full text accessible works are those in the public domain. Of course that’s what historians are interested in, otherwise we’d be journalists (snark). Duguid’s comments focused on the completely botched job Google has made of the metadata in scanning the books. I completely agreed with both of them. I, for one, would love to see the LOC data attached to all the scanned books so that one could have more robust searches, but also to reproduce the experience of browsing the stacks. How often do we find adjacent works in the stacks that end up being important but never showed up in searches? <!–more–>

Anyway, Badger’s response, belying his last name, was to grin and bear the criticisms, and evade truly responding to them. He was interested in two things– 1. improving the search algorithms, and 2. highlighting a potential user experience that was aimed at what regular people are currently reading and connecting that to some sort of social media on the site. Now, Google’s interests, and those of its engineers, are about search in support of ads and also, depending on the outcome of current litigation, its ability to further monetize orphaned and copyrighted books by selling them. The search algorithms and the social media meet there. And, with Badger, this was highlighted by his allusions to what he was reading on the plane (a book on how to improve one’s short game in golf) as an example of the perceived limitations of Google’s ability to get good metadata on their scans, and to “sharing what Sally’s reading” on the social media side. In neither case did these responses reply to the the type of reading and search that Cohen and Duguid were speaking about. The panelists were talking past each other, rather than too each other, often using a shared vocabulary. (You can also find a write up from IHE here.)

So, what does this have to do with a digital humanities/digital history divide? The past week or two there has been a lively discussion on the future of digital humanities, essentially in the wake of the MLA, Brian Croxall’s MLA paper, and the (if still somewhat) hesitant embrace of new media at the MLA. I was struck in reading Ian Bogost’s manifesto on the future of DH, and even more so in the comment section as the discussion quickly evolved into a debate on whether or not New Media Studies and Digital Humanities were synonymous, by the extent to which digital humanities as a concept is used in the blogosphere actually as a synonym for some for or another of literary studies, criticism, rhetoric. Certainly, if New Media Studies defines the digital humanities, then History is straight out. But, that’s also the case if digital humanities conceives of the humanities simply within the disciplinary perspective of the MLA. We do read differently, and in fact we also present/represent our knowledges differently. Reading the comments struck me much the same way that Cohen, Duguid, and Badger were speaking past one another with different languages that hinged on the relevance and use of text in their own forms of reading. If the clarion call of interdisciplinarity or disciplinary destruction is to put the Humanities in Computer Science and Computer Science in the Humanities, or engineering, or simply outside the academy, then there are real limits to how this will transform the practice of History. Bogost’s post and the comments therein struck my by their pervasive presentism. Is it that case, then, that digital humanities and digital history are not the same thing, that there is a divide propelled by our own forms of reading and representing, our own peculiar disciplinary epistemologies? Dave Parry suggests in part that this is the case in his recent post “Be Online or Be Irrelavant”:

Generally speaking (painting really broad but accurate brush strokes here) Digital Historians, and Digital Literary Scholars have had significantly different approaches to incorporating “the digital” into their respective scholarship. Digital Historians have leveraged the digital to expand and engage a wider public in the work of history. As examples of this think of Omeka, or leveraging social media to engage in crowd sourced projects. That is, Digital Historians have often begun by asking “how does the digital allow us to reach a larger/public audience?” Now this could be because many of the folks working in Digital History come from a public history background . . . But in the case of literary studies the “digital” projects have not, as much, changed the scope of the audience. So that if you look at digital literary projects they often look remarkably similar to projects in the pre-digital era, just ones which have been put on steroids and run thru a computational process. Seems to me that the Digital Historian model is a better one.

I think it may be the case, though, that the difference between Digital History and Digital Humanities described here goes deeper than an interest in building audience (which all too often is far from the radar of practicing professional historians), and more to do with notions of how we historians read and what we are trying to represent, particularly in the post-narrative age of historical writing.

My own path towards digital history (I’m not saying I’m there yet) was first eased by my use of digital tools to conduct my research. What digital tools? Well, a camera and a research database. I used a 5 megapixel camera to photograph almost every document I used for my dissertation and first book. I took tens of thousands of photos of manuscript pages. This enabled me to put together a portable set of thousands of cases that I analyzed the good old fashioned way- by reading, transcribing, and taking notes on all of them. The manuscripts I work with are all handwritten from the 18th and early 19th centuries- so there is no OCR solution on the transcriptions. Handling this large body of information went far beyond my own capacity to remember, and I made inventories of my own that I marked up by hand to code for what each case could do for me. I put it all in research databases, first ScholarsAid and later DEVONthink Pro Office when I switched platforms. And now, I’m working on another set of documents gathered this past summer– some 19,000 more photos to transcribe and analyze. This time, I’m experimenting with hacking ethnographic QDA software for my purposes, and producing .txt files to code/tag. I’m interested in contextualizing language at varying points of criminal prosecutions of sexual deviance to help find popular expressions/understandings of tolerable sexual behavior within litigation.

My path towards digital history has also been pedagogical. It combined hatred of Blackboard and a recognition that my own use of technology in the classroom was gimmicky. I wanted to use technology to more effectively present, and also engage and discuss the historical phenomena that provided the fodder for my classes. In discovering the possibilities of wiki, blogs, and other forms of social media for the classroom, I also began to rethink how I would present and represent my research work in the future. The result has been a real rethinking personally of the role of this blog, or the need to construct web spaces for any number of projects I’m working on as a means of disseminating my work in accessible and attractive formats, of the possibilities of something like comment press, etc. For me, there is no distinction between the research half, utilizing digital tools, and the presentation half, utilizing digital media tools. They are the two faces of professional historical endeavor, and by extension I would suggest of digital humanities itself.

 

some aha reflections

I’m back from San Diego and the AHA and have a few simple reflections to my conference experience this year. This is my fourth AHA, and the first to meet in a place where the weather was positively excellent. And that’s reflection #1- the AHA needs to break out of the ridiculous cycle of Northeast/Midwest cities (with the occasional diversion), and make the Southwest/West coast a regular feature. The city’s are set for the next six years or so, and where are we going? Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, New York, Atlanta. You see the pattern here– north and east (plus Chicago) for two years, then south or very occasionally west. They really should consider swapping the cycle, because the weather made this a much nicer experience.

 

twitter, the mla, and public spheres

It always irritates me when academics bag on twitter, diminish it by accusing it of diminishing language. Not surprisingly, this just happened in the august permalinks of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Sure, it’s easy to look at the twitter trends and take away that microblogging is simply a means for news, gossip, crass consumerism, and tv/movie reactions. Or things of less substance. But that’s not how I use it, nor really the near-200 people I follow. In fact, in the months since last April that I’ve been on twitter (you can find me at @parezcoydigo), I’ve found myself involved in or exposed scholarly conversations I would have had a hard time to before. Do these conversations occur just in 140 character snippets? No, they don’t, because twitter is a pathway to scholarly community. Of course, those of you on twitter know this.

 

Off to #AHA2010 in a few weeks

The AHA is set to go in a few weeks in San Diego, CA. I’m happy, actually, that its in southern California this year instead of the more frequent northern climes. (Next year, unfortunately, it’s back to the northeast and Boston.)The History Department at UT, Knoxville has a few professors and a grad student presenting at the AHA this year. Here’s the list:

Jay Rubenstein, Knowing, and Not Knowing, Your Enemy: Changing Attitudes toward Islam during the Crusade Era, Christian-Muslim Relations in the Age of the Crusades: Toward a Synthesis. AHA Session 56, Medieval Academy of America 2.

 

blogs for students and course management

I finally decided to move into the realm of web hosting. My professional site has been simply an iweb, mobileme hosted site since I put it up last year, and I’ve used wordpress.com to run my courses the past few semesters (ex, here, here, here). Part of what pushed me to paying (sort of) for hosting, were both positive experiences and frustrations with free services over the course of the last few years.

 

The Future of Andean History

Following are the comments I’ve prepared for the CLAH Andean Studies Roundtable, “The Future of the Andean Past.” I’m going to be posting these comments at the Roundtable blog this week, but I thought I’d put them up here first. And feedback would be greatly appreciated. Essentially, what I’m offering is that Early Andean History, what is conventionally known as the colonial Andes (what can I say, I was trained by a Lockhartian) would benefit from deploying ethnohistorical methods, or historical ethnography, on the vast mestizo/afro-descendant/poor-Spanish sector, and the establish a dialogue with traditional Andean ethnohistory to deepen our understanding of processes of acculturation and cultural formation.  See more below the fold.

 

Quito á la Condamine

I’ve been derelict on the blog the last few months. This semester has been my first as a full time commuter, flying most weeks back and forth between the South and the Southwest. I also taught an overload, banking a course for some future research and writing time. Along the way, my manuscript was accepted for publication (yeah!). My semester ended last week, and since then I’ve been tidying up the manuscript, making the agreed upon revisions, and trying to figure out my map situation. It looks like I’ll be able to get a couple of maps made through our Geography Department, one of Quito and its Five League corregimiento, and the other of the city itself. Both of these maps will be based on original 18th cent. maps, one of which I have in my own possession. From my burgeoning collection of two old maps, here is Quito and surrounding pueblos circa 1752:

 

Are we certain Charles II had no heirs?

This past week in response to a lecture on the War of Spanish Succession and the Bourbon Reforms, some students in my History of the Early Andes class made a compelling argument against the prevailing belief that Charles II was incapable of producing an heir. Charles II, whose death led to the end of Hapsburg rule on the Iberian peninsula, was a renown for his, shall we say, feebleness. The students provided persuasive visual evidence:

Getty Lee, descendant of Charles II?

From feebleness to lyrical mastery in just 280 years? I’ll leave to you all to reach your own conclusions. We simply report, you decide.