Yesterday was Victoria Day in English-speaking Canada, the annual holiday that commerorates Queen Victoria’s birthday. Nowadays, Victoria Day is essentially a bank holidy, just an excuse for a long weekend in May. In Quebec, the Monday before 24 May is know as the Journée nationale des Patriotes. It commemorate the rebellion against British rule that took place in Lower Canada in 1837, which was the year Victoria ascended to the throne. Check out this video of patriots day celebrations in Quebec. I really like the part where a speaker’s statement “Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837” is greeted with jeers from the audience. In 2010, Canada is probably the only place in the world where a factual statement about Queen Victoria would elicit an emotional response from a drunken crowd of political activists.
The conventional wisdom is that giving inventors patent protection encourages technological progress. Without the ability to make money from a valuable patent, why would anybody spend thousands of hours trying to invent a better mousetrap? The contrarian view is that patents actually slow down the rate of technological progress.
Needless to say, this is an important debate with massive implications for one of the most important realms of public policy. It also have implications for the study of economic history. The experience of Britian during the Industrial Revolution provides evidence both for and against the view that patents encouraged economic growth. The lively scholarly debate on this issue, which centres around Watt and Boulton’s controversial patent extension for their steam engine, is discussed in a recent blog post by Dick Langlois.
Professor Langlois writes:
“I found the Selgin and Turner argument about Watt persuasive. They are certainly right to make fun of the idea that the Boulton-Watt patents retarded the industrial revolution by ten years, especially as Nick von Tunzelmann has calculated, in a Fogel-like exercise, that if Watt had not invented the improved steam engine in 1769, British national income in 1800 would have been reduced by only 0.1 percent. Nonetheless, I remain sympathetic to the general thrust of Boldrin and Levine’s skepticism about patents, especially wide-scope patents. In automobiles, the famous Seldon patent protected the very idea of an motor car powered by an internal combustion engine. Although it’s hard to say how much if at all this retarded innovation in automobiles (before Henry Ford rose up to demolish it in court), one would certainly be hard pressed to argue that it helped innovation in any way.”
See also Selgin, George and Turner, John L. (2009) “Watt, Again? Boldrin and Levine Still Exaggerate the Adverse Effect of Patents on the Progress of Steam Power,” Review of Law & Economics: Vol. 5 : Iss. 3, Article 7
Check out this piece in The Times HES. Some people think that open plan offices are the way to go– they are green, cheap, keep people from goofing off with the door shut, and promote the sharing of ideas. Some hate open plan offices because they are noisy and facilitate the spread of diseases. Other people think that while they may be fine for other people, open plan offices are bad for academics, especially for those who work in disciplines that are individualistic (in history, co-authored articles and team-taught courses are rare).
I have mixed feelings about open plan offices. I’m pretty used to my solitary office. It seems to me that new technology may make the traditional academic office obsolete in the near future.
The early life of Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, has been put under the microscope by Republicans trying to find dirty linen.
Some conservatives have argued that Kagan’s undergraduate dissertation, which was on the history of the labour movement in New York City, should disqualify her from sitting on the Supreme Court.
Ronald Radosh, a retired history professor of conservative political leanings, has looked at Kagan’s thesis and concluded that the charges that it displays pro-Communist sentiments are bogus. In fact, Radosh reports that Kagan’s thesis shows that she was sympathetic to the non-Communist unions and hostile to the Communists who tried to infiltrate the labour movement. This suggests that Kagan was, at the age of 22 or so, a social democrat rather than a Communist, which isn’t surprising since she is being nominated by the Democratic president.
Radosh writes that: “As a historian who has read widely in socialist and communist history, and written about the topic myself, I found her thesis to be academically first-rate, based on a wide-ranging use of primary and secondary source material, with a thoughtful analysis and sound conclusions that derive from the evidence.”
Elena Kagan Meets Leonid Brezhnev On Top of Lenin's Tomb, Red Square, 1982.
You can read the entire thesis here, if you really want to….
THATCamp is a user-generated “unconference” on digital humanities developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. The London THATCamp will be hosted by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) at King’s College London, and will run the 6-7th July, 2010.
THATCamp London 2010 will be held just before Digital Humanities 2010. At DH2010, the world’s premiere academic conference on the Digital Humanities, you will hear papers and see presentations and perhaps give a single talk yourself. At THATCamp, by contrast, you will discuss, build, argue, share, compare, create and hack: every session you attend will also be a session you participate in fully. Attending DH2010 might be compared to attending a series of fascinating formal lectures, whereas attending THATCamp London might be compared to attending a series of engaging relaxed seminars. We fully expect that having both conferences together will spark some exciting new ideas.
More tangible things than ideas usually come out of an unconference, however. A room will be reserved at THATCamp London for developers who are interested in pursuing the Developers’ Challenge, for instance: an unconference is the ideal place not only to meet like-minded and talented colleagues but also to work with them on a new project.
The deadline for applications has been recently extended to 1st June, but applying for THATCamp entails little more than writing an informal paragraph or two about what you’d like to discuss, build, or solve. We therefore urge you to apply now.
THATCamp is a trademark of and was originated by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.
Omeka is a free, open source web publishing system for online digital archives that was developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. It allows users to publish cultural heritage objects and curate online exhibits with digital objects. Its software is currently being used by the New York Public Library, the Newberry Library, as well as many small museums and historical societies.
A comprehensive list of Omeka generated websites is here. In my opinion, the best of these websites is Lincoln at 200, a collaborative project of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, the Chicago History Museum, and the Newberry Library. This professional looking website went live in 2009, the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth.
This fantastic website does more than present short essays on various Lincoln-related topics (e.g., Lincoln’s reaction to the Dred Scott decision). The website allows readers to look at primary sources from the period. See below.
I am organizing a panel for the next Business History Conference, St. Louis, Missouri 31 March-2 April 2011.
Proposed Panel Title: Banking in the History of North American Regions
The panel will deal with the history of banking in North America. Ideally, the panel would have four members, each presenting on a different region of the continent. My paper will be about Canada in the nineteenth century. The other papers might deal with banking in New England, California, the antebellum South, or some other region. The aim of the panel would be to explore what the regions had in common while emphasizing what made the banking history of each region distinctive.
If you are interested in being part of this panel, please contact me.
I am currently involved in planning a digitization project that will see primary sources placed online. As part of my preparatory research, I have been looking at some of the leading institutions in the field of digital history in various countries. I wanted to find out which universities were leaders in this new approach to history and what they were doing. I’ve taken the liberty of posting some of my research notes online.
Keep in mind that my focus is what university departments have been doing in the field of digital history, so this blog post doesn’t really deal with the good work being done in the field by national archives, etc.
United States
In the US, the epicentre of digital history is the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. George Washington is located in a suburb of Washington DC and is thus conveniently located near the Library of Congress. was established by the late Prof. Roy Rosenzweig in 1994 to research and use digital media and information technology in historical research, education, digital tools and resources, digital preservation, and outreach. Rosensweig, who was born in 1950, was a social historian who went to graduate school during the heyday of quantitative history in the 1970s. At that time, the use of computers in history was pretty much limited to big mainframes used for crunching numbers such as the census of 1860. Rosensweig, who lived to 2007, played a major role in the transformation of historical computing into a mechanism for disseminating data.
Rosensweig based his early research on the labour movement and the history of Central Park on newspapers and other 19th century primary sources. He quickly grasped that the advent of the internet had created a new set of primary sources that ought to be preserved for future historians. The CHMN rose to prominence after the September 11, 2001 attacks, which took digital snapshots of the internet during the catastrophe.
Today, the CHNM provides important resources to different groups of users: elementary secondary school teachers; professors; public historians and museum people; and general history buffs. The resources is has created include online galleries of images, how-to-guides for ditigal humanities, and software useful for people who want to make historical websites.
CHNM is responsible for the development of two impressive open source software projects: Zotero and Omeka. Zotero is a Firefox extension that operates as reference management software. Omeka is a web publishing system that uses the Dublin Core metadata standard to build digital archives, and publish digital exhibits. Both projects are free, and reflect CHNM’s dedication to democratizing the practice of history.
Imaging the French Revolution is another experiment in digital scholarship. In a series of essays, seven scholars analyze forty-two images of crowds and crowd violence in the French Revolution. Offering the most relevant examples and comments from an on-line forum, those same scholars consider issues of interpretation, methodology, and the impact of digital media on scholarship.
CHNM has also developed some projects with an explicit focus on broad, public audiences. Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives, a web-based exhibit funded developed in collaboration with the Gulag Museum in Perm, Russia, looks at the Soviet system of concentration camps.
CHMN is funded by a variety of government organizations and charities. It has roughly 30 staff members listed on its website, some of whom are academics.
The director of the CHMN is Dan Cohen, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at George Mason University. Click here to see him speak.
His research is on European and American intellectual history, the history of science (particularly mathematics), and the intersection of history and computing. He was the co-author of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) and the author of Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
United Kingdom
The Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) is an academic department in the School of Arts and Humanities at King’s College, University of London. It appears to be the leading UK academic department in this field. King’s has been a pioneer in humanities computing since the 1970s.
The School of Humanities at King’s was rated in the top 3 UK institutions for research excellence in the last four Research Assessment Exercises, the UK government system for ranking research quality and output.
Digital Humanities has been a strategic priority for King’s for more than a decade, and CCH has received specific mention in the past three strategic plans of the College, identifying this activity as one of its distinctive strengths. In the current Plan, a core strategic commitment is made to ‘Creating Culture’, and the College’s strength in the digital humanities is seen as central to this commitment.
CCH initiated the world’s first PhD programme in Digital Humanities and is responsible for two Masters programmes in the subject: the MA in Digital Humanities and the MA in Digital Culture and Technology. The latter programme, which involves the Schools of Arts and Humanities, Social Science and Public Policy, Physical Sciences and Engineering, and Law, is the most inter-disciplinary programme in the College. From September 2009 CCH will be offering, jointly with the Centre for e-Research, a new MA in Digital Asset Management.
A list of CCH projects is available here. The projects include the Desmond Tutu Digital Archive . Most the CCH projects appear to be designed to appeal to academics rather than the general public, schoolteachers, etc. This makes the CCH very different than the CHNM in the United States, which funds many projects that are connected to the school curriculum.
Moreover, while the CHNM projects mostly deal with relatively recent periods of history (after the invention of photography), the CCH projects tend to be focused on the more distant past. A fairly representative CCH project is the Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism project. “The aim of the Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism project is to gather evidence for the use of Greek Bible translations by Jews in the Middle Ages, and to make these texts available to scholars as a corpus, together with the information necessary for an appreciation of their historical background, meaning and exegetical implications.”
I think that it is fair to say that the Byzantine Judaism website will generate fewer hits per week than the one about the Gulag. It is still a worthwhile scholarly resource, but the CCH clearly serves a different mandate than the CHNM.
The CCH has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; The Arts and Humanities Research Council; The British Academy; The Heritage Lottery Fund; The Leverhulme Trust.
There are roughly 30 members of “core staff” listed on the website.
Canada
Canada has no single centre for excellence in this field. However, there are several universities worth mentioning.
Concordia University, Montreal
Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling serves as a point of convergence for collaborative digital historical research, teaching, and publishing among faculty and students at Concordia, as well as members of local, national and international communities. The Concordia Oral History Research Laboratory (COHRL), integrates digital media and oral history to open up new nonlinear ways to access, analyse and communicate life stories.You can listen to the podcasts created by the oral historians here.
The Concordia Digital History Lab uses new media to share the task of historical research and interpretation with online audiences worldwide— researchers, students, and the general public. The Digital History Lab has so far out the following resources online: the S.A. Rochlin Collection of South African Political and Trade Union Organizations Database and the Guantanamobile Project, which tries to inform and collect public opinion about the U.S. detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Lab also got money from the SSHRC Image, Text, Sound and Technology fund to create plugins to enhance Zotero, the new open source research tool produced at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in the United States that I mentioned above. Zotero helps historians to write their footnotes by automatically grabbing bibliographic information from online library catalogues. It’s a great technology. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well with many Canadian websites because the current version can’t handle French that well. The SSHRC grant will pay computer programmers to tweak the software so that it works with Quebec online databases and archival collections.
Brock University
Kevin Kee is the Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing. He is located in the history department at Brock University. He also runs that Centre for Digital Humanities there. His projects are listed here. Check out these YouTube clips. They are obviously designed for undergrad recruitment, but they give a sense of what Kee is doing.
Beth Dulabahn, Director of Integration Management in the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress, will talk tomorrow about the donation of the Twitter archive to the Library. For more, see here.
The Past Speaks 