New Website

I have just finished completing a website dedicated solely to me! I created the website using Googlesites and the finished product can be seen here. Using Googlesites was very easy and having learned some rudimentary HTML code, I was able to appreciate the ease of use that comes with Googlesites. As a very modest and humble person, I always find it difficult to admonish myself to others with credentials. However, facing the difficult prospect of either entering the workforce or obtaining more degrees, I had better learn quickly. This exercise definitely helped me along this path!

It's refelection time!

I am a very reflective person. My brain and I have a good working relationship in caching experiences then rehashing them through introspection. While I never explicitly present this process in the form of a journal, it is something I am extremely aware of. When you have trouble sleeping for the first 17 years of your life, you learn a lot about what is going on inside that skull of yours. This is why I am truly excited to be writing a final blog reflecting on my experiences and developments over the course of my first term Digital History course. One can only include so much information on a teacher evaluation sheet, and even then, the information is not intended for personal reflection but merely personal assessment.

Upon entering this class I was really excited to learn what the digital world could hold for future and current historians. To tell the truth, technology does frighten me to an extent. Their are the usual Luddite reasons, however having read many books on the notion of primitivism versus modernism I understand how to contextualize such fears. My fears lie in the unknown, as with all human fear. Maybe in that light, it is not fear but rather apprehension and anxiety about the unknown that drives such anti-modernist sentiments. Perhaps because my generation has already seen such a drastic change in the human condition, I expect this change not only to continue unabated but to continue along an exponential ascension. This may or may not be true, but change in certainly happening and there is no slowing it down. Historians in general seem to be ultra-conservative in terms of change perhaps due to the fact the we like old things, pine for old things, and immerse ourselves in antiquated philosophies and realities. Perhaps this has been one of the greatest lesson I have learned over the course. Whether we historians want to confront it our not, we need to change along with the world. The Internet and technology not only broaden our potential mediums for communication but also display new possibilities in research methodology leading to entirely new horizons of interpretation. This is exciting! It is also does not destroy the traditional modes of scholarship. This would be another one of my fears of technology, that is destroys traditional bases of knowledge. This is true and for some skills, technology certainly will be the Shochet waiting in the wings. Yet this does not mean that all skills will die off and give way to new ones. Historians will still need their panache for research, their motivation to search hours and hours for the 'golden nugget' of information, the ability to interpret many different analyses to form a coherent narrative and the ability to transmit and communicate ideas.

As a public historian the ability to communicate is by far our most important skill. We are the mediators between the academic realm of history and what actually matters to people. One question posed by my professor Bill Turkel for this final assignment was what makes history interesting to the public. My response to this is quite literally, history separates us from the animals. Being a fan of anthropology I always found it interesting to note that one major difference between humans and our closest relative chimpanzees was the ability to transmit information between generations. A chimpanzee and human can both fashion tools in order to perform a task. However a chimpanzee cannot teach another chimpanzee how to make his or her own tool or even how to use the tool fashioned by the first chimp. It is this ability to transmit ideas, technology and once we developed language stories down from generation to generation. I have never even thought to connect this for the human desire to know history, transmit history our even produce history but I have come to this revelation now. When we discuss why the public has a thirst for history, I feel it is directly connected to this animal trait unique to humans, the ability to transmit information for generation to generation. The question now is, what history does the public want to know. The academic realm looks down on the public appetite for history with disdain. 'If only they could grasp our concepts and the importance of our work' seems to ring down from the tower tops. Indeed I have heard many history students echo that entertaining to a public audience constitutes a secession to the 'dark side' of history. I tend not to highlight the fact that the world's first historian Herodotus, produced his history for public consumption. Indeed, historians should always be mindful of the public consumption of history. This does not mean that scholarship needs to depreciate in quality in order to boost consumption. However, historians need to be mindful in the changing scholastic landscape of how information can be disseminated.

Another lesson I have learned in this class is the pressing need for historians to harness the new mediums of intellectual exchange in order to create a two way dialog with the interested public. One major reason that I entered a public history program as opposed to a traditional academic program was this desire to connect historical study with a larger audience that pines for it. The proliferation and success of historically based movies, television shows, videogames, novels, documentaries, websites and the attendance of museums and heritage sites testify to this public desire. Historians have so many ways now to get their interpretations and analysis to people, it would be occupational suicide to ignore them. One way that we can do this is blogging. I have already blogged about this subject and why it is imperative for historians to adopt blogging. However, simply by becoming a little Internet savvy, historians can fashion websites dedicated to their particular research interests. The beauty of websites is that historical information can now be a two way discussion between scholars and their audiences. Historians almost never focus on an audience past the dozen or so academics in their field. History has to be more inclusive then this! Technology can definitely bring us together, historians need to embrace this new connected intellectual environment. We have been so scared to let people into our world that we have alienated ourselves to people who are interested in what we do, we can’t afford to shut them out any longer.

My journey into the technological realm of history is not complete so I feel it would be premature to make some final assessments of my development. Next semester I will be engaging in an interactive exhibit design course which again will marry technological processes with historical initiatives. This first inculcation to the digital humanities has gotten me very excited about this next chapter in my development. I have learned about tools which I thought only existed in science fiction, or at the very least, possessed by the military in total secrecy. Perhaps the greatest lesson learned by anyone over time of their life is to never doubt one’s own capabilities and to always keep and open mind to new experiences. As a self professed primitivism, technology and me seemed like two positively charged ions on a collision course bent for instant and total repulsion from each other. However I find myself energized by what I have learned over the past four months. Rather than being scared of technology, well I think actually I am still a little scared to be honest. Rather than being consumed by fear, I now see that there can be a harmony between past, present and future. Are we in the process of a major change in the very nature of human existence, I would say yes. Does that mean we as humans have to fear such a large development? My answer before this class would almost assuredly been yes. Even though I understand how large scale evolutional technological initiatives have almost always improved the human experience, I would have still talked as though the world was transforming in ways that would hamper the human experience. But now, I see things not necessarily in a more positive light, but certainly in a much more balanced way. Will the Internet and digital technology change humanity for the better or worse. The answer is both! After learning about the new kinds of technology on the forefront for humanists and the general society at large, I can say that the future is here. Overall, humans will continue to live and our lives will change due to currents now unstoppable in their momentum. However, this is not a bad thing. Talk to a version of me four months ago and I would not have even contemplated these answers to such a daunting question! The journey has been started, I’ll report back in another four months when I’m a little farther down the road.

Clausewitz: What data mining can reveal!

Is warfare just the continuation of politics by other means? Carl von Clausewitz's bold theoretical assertion in On War has enthralled many a military historian since its publication in the 19th century. Writing in the wake of his own experiences as a Prussian officer in the Napoleonic Wars, Clausewitz's analysis is stunningly contemporary to rise of nationalism/imperialism in Europe and has been argued as a major ideological foundation for the first world war. If we want to learn more about his infamous work, we must explore the new ways to encounter texts. In the digital age, historians have many new tools to develop new research techniques. One of the most accessible is text and data mining software. What new themes can we find by examining the metadata of Clausewitz? The one that I would really like to explore in this blog is the most central to Clausewitz theory and also his practice of warfare: Warfare is the continuation of politics by other means.

The first task I performed was a simple text search to see which words were mentioned the most in the text. While unsure what this would show me, I figured it would be a great way to start. The three most used words (other than pronouns, prepositions and general verbs) were battle (266), means, and general (both 259). Words that associate the interrelationship between politics and warfare do occur a great deal. Examples are power and influence (both 94), political (77) and superiority (62). This initial step was illuminating, but not very revealing in terms of interpretation. I next tried a concordance analysis using the words politics and warfare. I did not find anything information of value using these words. However I realized that the word politics is not used by Clausewitz, and I checked my initial text search to confirm this suspicion. I then used the word policy instead of politics and got a much better result. The concordance reads as follows:

renewal of the era of     warfare      be a change for the  ONLY A CONTINUATION OF STATE     POLICY      BY OTHER MEANS . This  always be the aim of     Warfare      . Now War is always  therefore , will action in     warfare      be stopped , as indeed  it is called forth by     policy      it would step into the  step into the place of     policy      , and as something quite  a want of harmony between     policy      and the conduct of a  prior right to consideration .     Policy      , therefore , is interwoven  IS A MERE CONTINUATION OF     POLICY      BY OTHER MEANS . We  the tendencies and views of     policy      shall not be incompatible with  if we regard the State     policy      as the intelligence of the  only if we understand by     policy      not a true appreciation of  War may belong more to     policy      than the first . 27  object of particular acts of     Warfare      , and therefore also the  an intimate knowledge of State     policy      in its higher relations .  of the War and the     policy      of the State here coincide  at the different scenes of     Warfare      , or to send there  is still more like State     policy      , which again , on  scale . Besides , State     policy      is the womb in which  end of the act of     warfare      , and modify or influence  at the present state of     warfare      , we should say that  displays itself most in mountain     warfare      , where every one down  lie towards the province of     policy      . The preparations for a  SUSPENSION OF THE ACT IN     WARFARE      IF one considers War as  suspension in the act of     Warfare      , strictly speaking , is  Nevertheless in this kind of     Warfare      , there is also a  which , with a shilly-shally     policy      , and a routine-ridden military  as the real activity in     Warfare      , which , by its  are cases also in modern     Warfare      in which this has not 

The results display each time warfare and policy are mentioned in the text. If tweaked a little in terms of grammar, this result could be abridged to produce a overview of the overall theme of the book. The concordance works well to illustrate how to identify a theme in the book. When using a word pair search with policy and warfare, there are no results. So text mining to me seems like a great tool once the book has already been read. One would need to read the book in order to ascertain this specific theme in order to begin asking questions.

Like all good historians, I know that the hardest and most crucial part of our inquiry is asking the right questions.  In terms of text mining, I simply do not know the questions to ask in order to find out the information I desire.  Luckily for me, the TAPoR software which I used for my text mining offers a great 'recipe guide' to finding useful information through text mining.  I decided to try the recipe for Exploring Themes Withing a Text since I have been searching for Clausewitz's theory.  At first I had to generate a word search using words related to the theme I was searching for.  This is certainly an area where I am not very comfortable.  Word associations remind me of grade 12 English, not historical research.  But herein lies the challenges of this new type of interpretation, forcing us to think outside of our comfort zone.  With enough practice, historians could be forging new links between themes and theories using these novel digital tools.  For Clausewitz and the theme of nationalism engendered by policy and warfare, I chose to enter only four words: warfare, policy, nationalism, superiority.  Next I had to determine the senses of the words.  Again, deja vu of grade 12 English.  After determining the senses I then had to find synonyms and antonyms of my chosen words.  There were no synonyms or antonyms for any of my words.  Using all my words, I then used the concordance tool to find all the instances of use for each word.  I came up with a very similar result as my first concordance test.  I then needed to finish the recipe doing a collocates search.  Unfortunately, my words came up with no result.

Overall, I can definitely see how useful text mining can be for historians and scholars.  However, I simply do not know the right questions to ask to uncover any meaningful information for new interpretations.  I started on this quest hoping to find something new about On War.  I did not learn anything new about the text,but I did learn something about how I have interpreted it.  Perhaps I should have expanded my initial observations on the books themes and not focused on such a narrow aspect.  Perhaps the best lesson that I learned was the difference between Human language and Machine language. If we are going to harness the power of computers to advance scholarly research in the humanities, we had better learn how to speak effectively with them.  The biggest obstacle that I ran into was asking the right questions of the software.  I needed to be more descriptive in my word selections and better attuned to the use of language in On War.  The real skill of text mining is knowing what the computer requires in terms of information to produce the results you want.  In my first attempt, I was way off!  The computer and I were speaking a different language.  The next step for historians is to figure out how to ask the right questions of computers.  We have gotten pretty good at questioning humans, now its time to face a new challenge.

I was able to perform text mining of this book with the help of TAPoR.  This website has a text analysis portal that can be accessed by scholars and students with great ease.  The site is easy to use and has a wonderful tutorial to help all new users.  I used the Gutenberg Project to extract the text for On War.  This digitization initiative contains over 30 000 e-books for free download and use and continues to add to its extensive collection.

Abundance Abounds!

Throughout this fall term, we have been constantly addressing the new 'culture of abundance' that the internet affords us. As I sit in the basement of Weldon Library as I type, I am confronted by my own abundance issue. I am currently working on a report for Fanshawe Pioneer Village where I am supposed to track the evolution and variety of fields crops in the London area between 1820 and 1930. Wow, that's a lot of years. I was instructed to compile as much data as I could find in order to carry out this assignment. I though that finding data would be relatively easy and that I would pretty much all I needed to write a comprehensive report detailing everything that happened in this one hundred and ten year period. Boy howdy was I in for a wake up. I was right that finding data would be simple, and for the most part it has, my problem is now that i have far too much data to compile into a 25 page report. I truly believe that everything I have been able to find would need a book the size of...well, let's just say it would heavy in order to effectively discuss all of this information! While writing a preliminary introduction and methodology to my study, I had a realization about the nature of digital initiatives.

My report is a microcosm of the dilemmas faced by archivists, librarians and historians. How in the world do you make sense of all this data in a quick, concise yet comprehensive way. For my project I have focused myself on producing a research guide on the subject, a one stop shop for someone researching local agriculture in this area in the future. I am making my own data tables for analysis, highlighting where to find sources on every area related to the subject and revealing which source reveal nothing at all. My interpretation merely lies in pointing people in certain research directions based on the ridiculous amount of data I have encountered. I feel that this is also the first step in tackling the immense amount of information on the web. We cannot even fathom what it all means by simply attempting to understand it at once and on the whole. It is the job of archivists, historians and librarians to compile and organize the seeming unending mass of data now on the internet in intelligible ways that will aid future research. This may not be the most glamorous job, but it is imperative if we are to harness the potential of conducting research on the internet. So to all those out there who are compiling, organizing and interpreting the collection of data I salute you. I now also know how it feels (albeit on a much larger scale) to perform this seemingly thankless job. However, our job is vital to all future research and potential breakthroughs that result from this organized chaos. After all, if you want to build a skyscraper, you better have a damn good foundation!

The books from Christmas Past

With the holiday season gearing up, it it always nostalgic fun to look back upon Christmas' past. For this blogging assignment, I have been asked to pick six books from the 1913-1914 Eaton's Christmas Catalog and attempt to located them in their entirety on the Internet. I have selected relatively well known books in order to display just how accessible valuable cultural knowledge (in this case classic literature) is in today's world. The first thing that struck me when beginning this assignment was the attempts made by the Internet Archive to make their digital online version of that catalog as lifelike as possible. This includes the outline of a book cover behind the pages and also the pages physically turn resembling real life interaction between the reader and the book. While I have read many online articles and even some major portions of books, I have never come across such a real life digitization effort. Another excellent quality to this digitized catalog is that the text has been marked up to allow it to be searchable. This is extremely efficient as it removes the need for a physical index to be consulted for a desired search. For the future of e-books, this is certainly a promising development as many people have a difficulty reading text from an non-interactive screen. By adding real life physical movement and employing marked up text, the reader now can interact directly with the book rather than having to passively navigate the screen. The Internet Archive's attempt to bridge this disconnect is a positive movement in the integration of e-books into a generally acceptable form of print media. However, as I begin to search for my books, I notice the trend backwards into static text displayed in a screen in a lifeless manner. Despite this format constraint the real object of this exercise is to hunt for content, of which there is an abundant supply on the Internet.

The first book I have chosen is the bible, perhaps the most widespread book in all of human history. This is also the first page of book listings and I felt should not be neglected from my search. The edition that I was trying to find was simply entitled The New Testament. I was able to locate this version fairly easily by using a simple google search. The website I found can be located here and is a fairly good website. It has the text organized by book and chapter for easy navigation however the text is not searchable. The second book I wanted to search for was Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher-Stowe, an extremely important book in the emancipation movement in the mid 19th Century United States. The third book I wanted to find was Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, a literary classic. Again, I was able to find the full text for both of these books by simply entering the title in a regular google search. However, the site which I found the texts for both books can be accessed here(Uncle Tom's Cabin and Robinson Crusoe) has marked up text allowing the text to be searched. This has some excellent potential values as one need not flip endlessly flipping through pages to find character references or major plot themes resulting in more efficient searching and opening up new modes of analysis. This is an instance of an historic book being given added value through the digitization process. The fourth book I wanted to search was another classic, Charles Dickens' David Copperfield. Again, using a simple google search I was able to find the entire text online. The site that I found can be accessed here and also contains marked up text, however in an entirely different format than Uncle Tom's Cabin and Robinson Crusoe. To my surprise the markup on this site did not allow the text to be searched but instead linked words to advertisements. The words could be completely taken out of context such as " 'the blank' of my infancy", with 'the blank' linking to a site describing how to fix computer blanking errors (something that Dickens would have thought endlessly about while writing the novel). To add to this confusion, once a 'link' was clicked, it would disappear as a link and then most of the words around the original link would then become their own links. This allows the text to serve as a constantly updating advertisement stream. David Copperfield illuminates the difficulty in offering an open source novel while simultaneously generating profits for the sight. In this extreme example of the uses of markup, it is clear that digitizing text can be distracting not only in format but also in content as well (if manipulated properly).

The fifth book I decided to search for was Aesop's Fables. Due to the children oriented stories of Aesop I expected to find a site with much more interaction than just text as children often need more to hold their attention that mere text. However, I soon realized that using multimedia to enhance each and every fable would be extremely time consuming and difficult and thus tempered my expectations on finding such a vibrant source. Using a simple google search I was able to find a site which contain over 650's fables and also had lots of multimedia attachments. The website, which can be located here has a good amount of imagery as well as audio recordings of many of the stories. A nice addition on this site is the use of a translator which allows each fable to be translated into a plethora of languages. By having digitized text, this website is making the fable's accessible to many people beyond English speakers and have created a universal site. The sixth and final book I wanted to search was the classic Christmas story The Night Before Christmas ('tis the season!). Again, begin heavily geared towards children I was expecting a much more decorative and interactive online source for the full text. Also, since the Eaton's listing of the book was merely an illustrative addition to the original poem I would expect there to be some more interactive reproductions of the poem online. Unfortunately, I could not find a the site I had envisioned. Again, using a google search was more than sufficient to find the full text, which can be viewed here. I was disappointed to not find a really vibrant page that could bring the poem and the text to life. A big drawback for reading digital text is the lack of interaction between the reader and the screen (unlike the physical interaction one experiences when reading a book). I was very surprised to see such a famous poem lack any extra panache on the web where integrating multimedia aspects is becoming easier everyday.

Overall I have learned a few valuable lessons about finding complete texts online. The first being that you can find pretty much anything you want by using a simple google search. All I had to do to locate the books was to type in their title and voila, I had a link within the first ten options to the full text. Secondly, I learned that many classic works of literature have been compiled and marked up to allow more effective researching techniques than merely possessing the book. In particular the website http://www.online-literature.com/ has a tremendous database of marked up classic novels. Thirdly I learned that our expectations of what the Internet can provide us with sometimes needs to be moderated. I was expecting to find some very elaborate and exciting websites for the popular children's stories and poems I wanted to search, but could not locate them. With the vast potential of the Internet at our disposal, sometimes we can forget that it takes hundred of hours of manpower to create those wonderful sites and there just hasn't been enough time or motivation to make some of these potentials into realities. The case of e-books and digitization of text clearly illustrates this dilemma. There has been so much already accomplished by ambitious projects such as googlebooks and the Gutenberg Project, yet theses project have only scratched the surface of what can be accomplished. We must also remember that as well as being an educational tool, digitized text can be distorted and used in other ways not conducive to the learning or entertainment experience, as evidence by Dickens words being used as advertisement for shoddy online products and services. It is amazing what you can discover simply by going on a treasure hunt for old literature!

It's about time I blogged about blogging

As a deep believer in the positive power of reflective introspection, I feel it is time for me to look back on my evolution as a blogger over the past two months. What I have gotten out of blogging? Is this what I expected blogging to be like? What will my future blogging look like after this initial feeling out process? I was never one to keep journals or a diary but was always aware of the power of introspection. Always scrolling through thoughts, ideas, fears and dreams in my memory rolodex kept me in tune with my ever evolving self. Can blogging allow me to achieve similar results for my professional self? How can I use blogging to further my passion in history and gets others involved as well? Here is what I have learned so far...

1. Blogging is fun because we can all share!

As someone who never cared to write a diary, use journals or even a calendar for organization, I am finding this type of personal outlet enjoyable. I think that the potential possibility for communication is the straw that stirs my drink when it comes to blogging. A journal is meant for one person only, the author and the author only. A blog is different in the fact that it can be a personal journal meant to be viewed by anybody patrolling on the internet. I love the idea that I can talk about anything of interest to me at a particular point in time on my blog and someone interested in the same thing can find me. It's this communicative potential which is the real power of blogging. Historians especially should be harnessing this capability to engage in dialog not only between themselves but to the public as well. Too often historians perch in the ivory tower unwilling to engage in constructive dialog about their passions. But what good is a passion that is left unshared with people? This does not include the few dozen academics worldwide who may have read your latest publication, or couple hundred for the successful ones. I'm talking about engaging with lots of people about something that inspires us: History! Blogging is not a collective production, we still control the ideas and words of our blogs. However, blogging allows others to get into our brains without the constraints of language, form and content which are inherent in almost all scholarly publications. So relax everybody, the warm world of blogging is within our comfort zone of academic production, we just need to harness it!

2. Blogging is flexible, start stretching!

One thing that I really enjoy about blogging is the many forms it can take on. You can structure a blog anyway you want to discuss any topic you want. The freedom is astounding! Some bloggers prefer a very rigid focus that defines their blog. This blog is written to discuss x ideas on y subject. These blogs are great for content since they have defined parameters and all blogs are streamlined to fit within the overarching focus of the author. They are usually easier to find (another benefit) and can generate excellent discussions as people reading the blog will no doubt be passionate about the same particular subject. Conversely, you can blog about nothing in particular at all and everything all at once. You can blog about what you are thinking at a particular time, the great time you had last night or even about a really cool blog that you just came across. The possibilities are endless! These blogs are great for a lark, entertainment and also can be very elucidating about human nature (due to the spontaneous nature of this kind of blogging). I believe that I am somewhere in the middle of this dichotomy. I like to talk about historical things, but anything relating to history can be game for my blog. Already I have blogged about Holocaust Denial, Canadian National Identity and The Mongol Empire! Something biblical is probably coming too since I find the bible as a historical source to be extraordinarily fascinating. I even find myself blogging about entirely different ideas within a blog then I maybe started with (this blog no doubt will be the same I am sure of it!). For historians, this gives us a myriad of potential ways to structure a blog. We can blog about one thing in history or many things. We can have an academic tone or a casual one, or both. I say it's time for us to have our cake and eat it too! And while we are eating cake, let's share it with everyone as well.

3. Blogging is great, but people need to be able to find it!

The one real hiccup when it comes to blogging is getting people to read it. In the new age of the long tail, how can one stand out from the crowd? First things first, make sure your blog is good, no one wants to read a bad blog. Next it's time to start deploying a few tricks of the trade. Having learnt a few of these tricks from my Digital History Professor Bill Turkel (nice name drop, I’ll tell you why in a little!) about how search engines work, we historians can easily make them work for us. Using efficient keyword in your titles, linking sites with other historians (hence the name drop) and generating word of mouth buzz are all great ways to make your site show up where it counts. Historians have a head start in some respects since we have built in audiences ready to be tapped. There is such a public thirst for history that all we need to do is go out quench it. The internet allows us a communicative potential that far exceeds all the capabilities of reaching a physical audience. If historians are looking to get their ideas out there, the internet is only the most vast reaching social communication system ever conceived by man. Shouldn't this be the first place to go?

In the end this blog about blogging has really opened my eyes to the potentials of blogging for historians and for myself. Blogging is whatever we want to make it. Historians for too long have been cooped up away from any human contact outside the academy. If we really want our work to mean something, let’s share our passion with the world. Did musicians who wrote the wonderful symphonies and songs of generations past want their music to be heard by no one? Authors of great novels surely have a particular audience in mind, but their stories need to be read by great amounts of people in order to have deep seeded influence. The same goes for all forms of art, share it if you want it to mean anything! Historians are passionate about history. We weave seemingly unrelated events and ideas into extremely artistic narratives to espouse our interpretation of the past. Let’s share our passion and art with the world. Start blogging, it's a great way to start!

Genghis Khan - Now available in web 2.0

For me, there is no single individual who captures the imagination of what can be achieved in one's lifetime more than the founder of the Mongol Empire Temujin, or as most of us know him Genghis Khan. Depending on what source you may read, he is either one of the greatest political and military leaders in history or the most successful of a long line of savage nomadic warlords who contributed nothing to the world expect despoliation and destruction. Having read countless books and articles on him, I have definitely formed my own opinion, but where and what can a novice on the subject access in terms of information on the internet about Temujin? Since we have been studying folksonomies I thought I would digress from my usual first point of destination 'google' and try the user generated delicious.com to search for content on Temujin.

For a novice , the first link that appears seems to link Genghis Khan with the human genome project. I would highly suggest a novice starting with this ongoing science project and Genghis Khan's relation to it. This article by the Guardian would be a great starting point for someone who knows nothing of Genghis Khan. Finding out that at least 16 million people today can be genetically linked with the great leader would instantly impress upon me the sheer scale of his importance in history as no other individual can claim such a genetic tree. Now that we know that Genghis is indeed an important historical figure, where can we find a biography? Strolling down the delicious search results, I find the obvious link to Wikipedia, however at this point in one's journey I would not suggest visiting this online encyclopedia. The wikipedia page on Genghis can be viewed here but it contains far too much information and does not specifically focus on the man himself. It is a great reference source however I would direct searchers to the National Geographic online timeline to discover the basic biography of Genghis Khan. I like this source better than wikipedia for a couple of reasons. The first being that one is not bombarded with information as in the wikipedia case. This timeline provides succinct information which is highly structured and contextualized by chronology and very elementary in its nature. Secondly, this website provides a great bibliography and links so that one may continue learning from the page. Thirdly, the site also describes the modern geographic science involved in uncovering the history of Genghis Khan to show how primary research on Genghis is conducted.

After visiting National Geographic I would then send the searcher to the wikipedia to delve deeper into any particular aspect of Genghis' life. If one wants to know about his religious beliefs, political practices and military strategies and tactics this is a great place to go. Because of the hyperlinks embedded within every Wikipedia article it is very conducive to illuminating the type of information the user desires. One can start on the Genghis Khan page and easily navigate through each military campaign and also many individual battles. You can click on a link to learn about Genghis deeply held spiritual beliefs and his mandate of religious toleration. Or peruse through his political practices which for the most part abolished patronage in the place of a more 'democratic' style. Wikipedia in this case can serve to focus one's interest in Genghis Khan since there is a wealth of specialized information which stretches beyond just the man himself.

At this point in the search, I would suggest switching over the the beast that is 'google' since many of the delicious sites link to the same articles and there is not much variability. One of the downside of the folksonomy it seems is that miniature differences in user nomenclature produce the same pages over and over. There are some good links to newspaper articles such as this one from the LA Times which discusses the organizational brilliance of the Mongol Empire created by Temujin. However, for an interested person after wikipedia I would send them to the primary sources available online. Specifically I would direct them to the only Mongol literary source of the 13th Century The Secret History of the Mongols. This source is an epic poem (similar to the Greek styles of epics) about the origins of the Mongol people and the biography of Genghis Khan himself. The book is written in a wonderful prose and is highlighted by spiritual and moral undertones but there is a great deal of history as well. With the access created by the internet, anyone can now access this source via PDF in many translated languages here (English version). Written shortly after Temujin's death, this book reveals how the Mongols viewed themselves in the world. A great introduction to text found here would be a good read before one begins diving in the 13th century epic.

There is also one great one-stop-spot for Genghis Khan that is worth mentioning here before I wrap up this post. This website edited by Tim Spalding provides a detailed annotated internet bibliography on Genghis Khan. In essence, this is the website which manifests the purpose of this blogging assignment. As someone who is very educated in the Mongols and on Genghis himself, this is a little overwhelming even for me, let alone someone who is not educated on the subject. The beauty of this site is that it is organized by thematic content so that if you want to find a link on his politics, you simply click on that topic. The same goes for his military and religious practices as well! Perhaps the best attribute of this website are the links to primary sources. I directed the searchers to the Secret History but by using Spalding's site, one can access all the opposing viewpoints from the 13th century that have survived are are digitized. This website also gives a great balance between academic and popular choices and also offers many multimedia options including picture and movies making it accessible for all internet browsers. I find it a little ironic that I am presenting a site which completely undermines my posting assignment since it has created a far better guide than I have. But at the same time, my ability to share this link with the world is what propagates the revolutionary communicative ability of the internet. What I deem important and interesting may resonate with thousands of others whom I may never have gotten the opportunity to connect with without such a forum. By participating in this blogging assignment, I have learned that although the democratic nature of the internet can sometimes miniaturize an individual project (like my Genghis guide here), it is through each of these individual prerogatives and social activities such a tagging that our collective knowledge is enhanced and the information made more accessible.

Memory as History is fine, unless your brain is bad!

While doing a reading for our oral history seminar on Thursday I was immediately compelled to 'spill the beans' about the myriad of ideas swirling through my brain. Michael Frisch's essay The Memory of History from A Shared Authority in which he discusses how memory and history are severed and connected from each other through our recollections, shaping our interpretation of past events. This idea resonated with a long standing historical dilemma I have encountered and have been fascinated and horrified with for many years. Specifically, I am talking about Holocaust deniers! As a Jew, I certainly have my own ideas of what memory and history mean to this particular event. As a Jew with family who both survived and perished in the event, I feel a certain personal connection both to the history, and to the ongoing evolution of its interpretation. A more than casual observer if you will! The ideas purported by Frisch illuminated to me again a great need for historians, both public and academic, to connect collective memories with history.

I read a book once that has ingrained in me this 'holistic responsibility' of historians: History on Trial by Deborah Lipstadt. I believe this book should be a mandatory read for anyone who wishes to eventually call themselves a historian. In this book, she recounts her experience in British Libel court against popular historian David Irving. Irving sued her for libel because she labelled him a holocaust denier (rightfully so!) and in British Libel law, the onus is on the defence to prove what she said was true, unlike in North America where the onus falls upon the plaintiff. The trial in effect (and by the design of Irving) becomes a court case on the existence of the holocaust. I am sure that some fellow historians unaware of this case have had their jaws dropped to floor and rolled back up again in horror. How can you place a historical event on trial, especially one of the most documented events in all of human history? To me, this is where the issue of memory and history really becomes interesting.

Take the thousands of testimonials from both survivors, liberating forces, Nazi officials and any other observing party and you have an extremely rich oral history reserve. What does it all mean? To a global society? To a solitary individual? How can our recollection of the past preserve the history for future generations in spite of a vast reservoir of sources? Years after finishing Lipstadt's book, I still have not come to a conclusion. Again, this idea of memory plays a massive factor, one I have not confronted until this blog entry. If social memory can be altered on a large scale, then history in general can be transformed even despite sources! This is the main objective of Holocaust deniers. Streamline your arguments into one cohesive contention, clear out any ideological biases (it's very hard but they are quite successful) and present it to the public. If they buy even a fragment of the argument, then collective memory over the event in question has been altered. In this almost tit-for-tat trade-off, historical 'truth' can be whittled away to nothingness. However, one rearguard against this form of 'historical murder' is the function of memory of the peoples involved. This is why a digital project, such as the SHOAH Foundation, forms such an important historical function as it preserves these testimonials for future generations to weigh against revisionist interpretations. The scary reality is that sources themselves do not constitute history for those intent on presenting a new history. Hence the importance of always maintaining a strict connection between memory and history. Otherwise who knows what type of future history we might end up with?

I started wanting to talk about memory and history and how they interplay with each other to form understanding. Where I am now I am not really sure. Are my thoughts jarring? Perhaps. Are they disjointed? In this instance almost certainly. I am still left with a decaying feeling in my stomach that despite documentation, commemoration and publication any historical 'truth' can be wiped away and changed forever. All we need is a realignment in our collective memory for an event to change meaning. I am positive this has happened to many events over time as the real event or situation was buried by a collective shift in memory. I feel as though this is a very natural phenomenon and a main reason for the changing face of all historical events over time. As we discussed early on in Digital History class in regards to myths, people will believe anything they want. And in a lot of cases, facts’ repudiating those myths only emboldens the believers. Perhaps this is the source of my anxiety over the issue in question. No matter how many books are written, movies made or primary sources collected, people will simply always be asking the question 'Did six million really die?'

Canadian Identity: Defensive Heritage

I have always been fascinated by the notion and development of Canadian national identity. For me it always starts and ends with the question "What is a Canadian'. More specifically, what other traits other than our geographic proximity makes us Canadian? For many countries around the world, an apparent ethnic association is usually sufficient to answer that question. Culture plays the biggest part in my opinion but this usually takes centuries to develop into a distinct national culture. So how then can Canadians answer this question?

While reading the first chapter in C.J Taylor's Negotiating the Past:The Making of Canada's National Historic Parks I came across a term that I have long thought best describes how Canadians identify themselves: Defensive Nationalism. Taylor was using the term to refer to the Loyalist Tradition in Canadian History as a reactionary understanding of culture.¹ I think that this term is extremely applicable to how most Canadians view themselves in terms of a National Culture. Because we live in such a diverse country where ethnic, religious, social and even cultural enclaves are celebrated it is hard for Canadians to assert a culture that is our own and common to all Canadians. We seem to define ourselves by what we are not, in a particular regard to our gigantic neighbour to the south.

Most Canadians react violently to idea that we are a 'northern State of the Union' saying we are not like them because of all these reasons... which I will not begin to address. It is much easier for us to define ourselves in this way as a national culture. Yet, we are really not that different from Americans at all, a point which many Canadians would loathe to admit or accept for that matter. Reading about the loyalist tradition made me realize that Canadians have always engaged in this type of cultural construction since confederation. Perhaps it is our proximity to Britain and America near the turn of the 20th century that had us negotiating a middle position between them from the onset. A loyalist might answer the question of national culture like this: "We are like the British in this sense, yet unlike them because of this and don't even get me started on the Americans, we are nothing like them!" Add in the French heritage which is so rich and has cultivated a great deal of its own culture that it can stand outside of Canada altogether. This is evidenced by the Federal Governments acceptance of Quebec as a 'nation' in itself. If we add aboriginals (which we certainly should) to the mix, again our history confounds the creation of a national culture simply because of the multitudes of cultures operating in Canada throughout its existence.

I guess to sum up my ideas to a national culture is that I am no clearer about its source than when I started writing this blog. I was hoping to come to some conclusion about why we can't seem to define a national culture. Perhaps it's because we simply do not have one, but I for one reject this idea. A nation must certainly have its own culture that is reflected in its institutions, art, beliefs and values. I think that Canadians just cannot pin it down because of our rich heritage of multiculturalism in terms of historical nation building through colonialism all the way to our concerted effort to live in a multicultural society today. Canadians have always had a very difficult time expressing who we are as a national culture without excluding other members of Canadian society (Loyalist can define themselves but at the expense of the other groups in Canada). However, from reading Taylor it seems that historically speaking we have always defined ourselves by happily pointing out what we are not!

Endnotes

1. C.J. Taylor, Negotiating the Past:The Making of Canada's National Historic Parks(Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1990), 4-5.

Scarcity of Abundance? Which historians will be affected?

Scarcity or abundance? How does the access to information change our perceptions of the world around us and our place in it? Does the more information we know or have access to transform our ideas of historical consciousness both for professionals, amateurs and the public? Why or why not? These are fascinating questions that are shaping the role of historians and the very nature of history itself. Our seemingly endless technological ascent only expediates the process and forces us to confront the question head on lest we be perpetually playing catch up. I for one am fascinated by intellectual paradigm shifts that occur on a large scale and believe that we are indeed living through one as scholar Roy Rosenzweig clearly demonstrated in his article Scarcity or Abundance. The shift is what he describes as the transition from the culture of scarcity to the culture of abundance.¹

What is the culture of scarcity and how does it shape our perception of the past and how does it differ from the emerging culture of abundance? The culture of scarcity refers to the limited access of historical documents and sources by scholars and the public alike. This refers both to the limited number of people who were allowed access to these sources as well as the relatively small amount of actual documents that those with access could study. Conversely, the culture of abundance refers to seemingly endless amount of information now being collected by and preserved through computers. A historian looking to study the Clinton administration will need many lifetimes just to sift through his administrations email, let alone to fully interpret his presidency. As technological advance continues, the amount of information that can be preserved is staggering. For future historians, tackling this amount of information will focus on new strategies for research and will create new types of interpretation. But will all historians be affected by this paradigm shift? I have a particular interest in Classical History and Medieval History but how will the culture of abundance affect this area of history? This is one area of history that I believe will not be fundamentally altered, such as modern history, by the culture of abundance. Even with this paradigm shift, studies of antiquity and classicism will remain in the realm of the culture of scarcity simply due to the amount of sources that have been lost and can never be recovered.

Given this development I feel that historians who deal in modern history are the ones who are confounded with this new culture of abundance. Historians who study older times periods, especially medieval and classical will greatly benefit from this technological paradigm shift. There are few remaining literary sources from that time period and each has been studied meticulously for generations by previous classical scholars. Above that, there is a great deal of physical remains left from antiquity but again, we do not get an entire picture and are only left with puzzle pieces. The new technological environment does change how classical and medieval historians can communicate with each other, their access to sources and even new types of interpretation. Yet, there is not the dramatic assault of information that is present for modern historians. Disparate sources that were previously isolated from scholars are now available in digital forms and can be shared across continents. Digital imaging has allowed these historians to recreate the environments and buildings of ancient human civilizations, which further helps them to recreate and interpret the past. I feel as though these historians will always deal in the culture of scarcity, and the shift to this new culture of abundance only enhances their studies. They have harnessed new technology to enhance the limited amount of sources they can work with and to promote more communication between scholars. This new technology is great, but it can’t bring back all the sources lost over time meaning some historians will never get to dabble in the new culture of abundance.

Endnotes

1. Roy Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era,” American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (June 2003):

Cultural Flavour of Collection

"White people don't know what to remember and what to forget, what to let go of and what to preserve."¹ This is a quotation taken from David Loewenthal's The Past Possessed: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History describing an Aboriginal interpretation of Western Culture’s desire and obsession with collecting. When I first read the quotation, I immediately pictured my bedroom at home filled with endless amounts of objects and materials I have been 'saving' for the past five to ten years. I know that I'll never need many of these items again, yet I just keep on saving them. While I do not necessarily agree that it is 'White people' per say that have trouble dealing with the issue of collecting, I believe it more to be a cultural phenomena amongst Western societies.

Lowenthal continues along this line of thought by suggesting that White people are unsure of their past and therefore strive to keep everything.² This idea I can understand due to the massive amounts of migration in the European and consequently North American populations. With such a great dispersal of cultures, it only makes sense that a migrated community would want to preserve all the remnants of their native culture. People are always striving for continuity with the past so that they may easily trace back to their origins for a better understanding of their present selves. The reason for saving everything is that we fear losing our identities! Given our consumer driven culture of today, does it not then make sense that what we would want to keep everything from the grandeur to the mundane. Never in the history of the world have humans had such an abundant material culture. Given this cultural stipulation, I understand now why collections both by institutions and individuals are expanding at exponential rates. The more things we have, the more things we have to preserve.

The really interesting ideas that emerges from all of this are the 'why' factors. Why MUST we collect everything? Why do some cultures feel the need to preserve every artifact, yet others can simply throw them away without a second thought? Is it in our collective interest to preserve all aspects of material culture? Would it be more beneficial to society if we were able to collectively forget, or move on? I do not have the answers to these questions. I have already flirted with ideas about the migration of cultures, and even on cultural makeup as possible explanations. What I ultimately think is that it boils down to our cultural interpretation of what history means to us. For many Western Cultures we view history as a sequence of events with a logical start and end. We need to mark our position on the line of time so that our future generations will be able to discern information about our lives and learn from them. This also ties into the idea of immortality which is omnipresent in many western societies as we fear death more than anything (except for public speaking of course!). This is the discrepancy that Lowenthal's Aborigine points out. For non-Western cultures history has a different meaning which results in a different interpretation. I find it fascinating how culture can materialize itself in all facets of the human experience. I just never thought to relate my cultural definition to the mounds of objects I've hoarded in my room!

Notes.

1. David Lowenthal, The Past Possessed: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 29.

2. Ibid.

Freedom of Information - Good or Bad?

The Office of the Historian of the United States of America has released another set of classified documents this following year. I find this practice fascinating as the most secretive inner workings of strategic policy initiatives become public property. It underpins the most basic of rights of a democratic constituency to expect from their elected representatives. Almost all government activities take place behind closed doors are the representatives involved are usually classified with information that they cannot reveal. Yet, after a defined statute of limitations all of this classified information becomes opened to the public. There are many interesting questions that automatically pop into my head when I think of this civic practice.

The most intriguing questions to me relate to the possible negative consequences of revealing highly secretive materials. Do the rights of the citizenry to transparent government outweigh the need for nations to maintain their survival through national defense? Can highly secretive documents cast doubts in the minds of the citizenry strong enough to disrupt the democratic evolution of a society? How much time should be passed before letting documents such as national defense strategy, military tactical and operational strategy and doomsday scenario evaluations to ensure that the general safety of the nation can be maintained? How might documents pertaining to economic strategies and development be used by other nations to grab an upper hand in the global economy? These questions all rely on a central underlying theme: The notion of National Defense/Preservation in contrast to the Democratic/Civic Rights of the nation's citizenry. I for one believe that the rights of the citizenry should be upheld at all times but almost never in substitute for national defense. We can see this premise in action during the mass mobilizations of WWII and the restrictions imposed upon everyday citizens in terms or rationing, curfew and even freedom of speech. There are many shades of grey relating to this idea and I encourage anyone of interest to relate your opinions along with me. Personally, I want to be able to know what my government is doing as long as my knowledge of the processes does not jeopardize the country and its institutions. Let me know what you think!

If you are interested to see any of the new documents released by the Office of the Historian follow this link http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/. The latest set of documents relates to American Intervention in Latin America in terms of economic development and military interjections.