edwired

Yesterday I took up the question of the future of the American Historical Association in the Web 2.0 world. Today I want to continue that discussion by taking a look at the part of the report I mentioned that deals with the AHA’s plan to “maximize use of the Internet.”

I think that the committee charged with drafting the report was absolutely correct in making the changes being wrought by digital media on our profession a central aspect of the report. So for that they deserve praise.

But I also think that they’ve really missed the boat with their recommendations and so I’m very pessimistic–at least for now–about how this report is going to have a positive impact on what the AHA does with respect to digital media and history.

The first problem I see rears its head right at the beginning of the “Internet” section of the report:

“Thus it is incumbent on the AHA to both understand and utilize all the cutting-edge possibilities of these new technologies, while transferring its traditional role as gatekeeper and authority for the discipline to this new medium.”

Yes to the first part of this sentence, but a definite no to the second. “Gatekeeping” and “authority” are concepts that worked very well in the analog and even Web 1.0 world. But for the AHA to really be relevant in the Web 2.0 world, where “authority” is a much trickier concept and “gatekeeping” is almost anathema to the whole idea of social computing, the association is going to have to really rethink this approach. As scholarship moves more and more toward the open source model, a focus on maintaining authority or being a gatekeeper will seem pretty anachronistic. Already it seems so 2005.

A second problem with the report is that the authors say that the AHA should “become known as the home for a number of history blogs…” Alas, that ship has already sailed. The History News Network already offers such a place to history bloggers. And, because the blogosphere is a place of dispersed conversations, seveal sites have already begun to aggregate history blogs on specific topics–the excellent Frog in a Well site being the best example I can think of.

The other part of the sentence I just quoted asserts that, in addition to history blogs, the AHA should become home to “gated discussion forums for members on specialized subjects.” Alas, that ship has both sailed and is foundering. For a very long time now (in Internet years) H-Net has provided an admirable platform for such gated forums. I know the report’s authors know this, so I’m puzzled as to why they would propose duplicating what H-Net already does. And, as I have previously written here, I think the entire gated discussion forum idea is doomed.

Moreover, the whole idea of creating “gated discussion forums” specifically works against the other big goal of the report, namely, to expand the AHA’s membership base. I’m simply at a loss to understand how denying the general public access to what we are discussing among ourselves will in any way help to expand the association’s membership list.

The last of my complaints is that there is no mention of digital scholarship. Could the report’s authors have missed the transformation of the profession taking place before their eyes? Born digital historical work is appearing all over the Internet in all sorts of shapes and sizes. To not even mention a role for the AHA in this transformation of the discipline is, well, very surprising.

Lest it seem like I’m down on the whole thing, I have to say that this part of the report is not all bad. While I think it’s a really bad idea for the AHA to invest its scarce resources in hosting blogs, I do think that the AHA could play a very positive role in a slightly different way. The single biggest problem with history blogs is that they go off line and disappear. Thus, one thing they AHA could do that would be a real service to the profession would be to create some sort of partnership with the Internet Archive to archive and aggregate history blogs and put an access point on a redesigned AHA website. Rather than acting as a gatekeeper or “authority”, the AHA could provide a very useful (and quite inexpensive) resource to its members and the general public.

I loved the language in the report about making sure that someday the entire annual meeting will take place in a wireless environment. This year’s meeting in Washington was mostly wireless and that was a real boon to those trying to do digital work at the meeting–blogging, presentations, looking up information, etc. I would also encourage the AHA to create a blogging space at the annual meeting where history bloggers can sit together in a sandbox environment, work, collaborate, and put faces with blog titles.

I could go on with what I think is good and less good about this report as it relates to digital history, but I think you get my drift by now. I think it will be a real shame if the AHA Council decides to act on these recommendations without putting them out for further review and comment–in particular review and comment from leaders in digital history. To do otherwise will be to commit the association to spending money on ideas that are, as I said above, so 2005.

What if the American Historical Association held an annual meeting and no one came?

That’s not likely to happen, but it’s an interesting question to ponder, especially in light of the recently published “Final Report and Recommendations of th Working Group on the Future of the AHA.” This report is well worth reading, both because it is an admirable summary of the challenges facing the AHA, but also of the challenges facing scholarly societies in the digital age.

Once upon a time the annual meetings of scholarly societies played a vital role in the exchange of information among scholars. Those with new ideas would come, present a paper, take careful notes on the feedback they received, and then go home and rewrite that paper into something like an article or a book chapter. Important issues for the discipline also were central to the annual meetings–teaching developments and challenges, advocacy, etc. As a result, annual meetings were the place to find out what the “next big things” were in a discipline and to possible have an impact on the directions of one’s profession.

Sometime after the Second World War, the annual meetings of many scholarly societies took on a new function–as job markets. Academic departments interviewed candidates on the fringes of the annual meeting (or in space rented to them by the association), those on the market presented papers in hopes of impressing search committees, and senior faculty wandered the halls networking on behalf of their doctoral students. To an awful lot of younger scholars who never knew the AHA annual meeting before it was a job market, this function became the primary reason one would want to join the association and attend its meetings.

The Final Report makes specific reference to this fact, citing the drop off in membership among younger scholars once they secure a tenure-track or other permanent position. If this is true, and I have no reason to doubt the report, I think it is pretty clear evidence that at some point in the past few decades the AHA lost its way with respect to its signature event.

So imagine this unthinkable scenario. One year in the not-to-distant future, the AHA Council decides to ban all job interviewing from the conference and makes an explicit statement that job seekers and search committees should henceforth consider the annual meeting unfriendly territory for their activities. Would anyone attend the meeting?

Of course they would. But the further into the future one projects this idea, the more likely it would be that the number of attendees would be small. Why? Because those other functions of the annual meeting I listed above are happening more and more beyond the confines not only of the AHA annual meeting (and all of the subsidiary smaller conferences historians attend), but also beyond the Association itself.

With each passing year more and more new ideas are being run up a digital flagpole rather than being read from a paper (no more than 20 minutes please!) at a scholarly conference. And the major issues of the day are being discussed more and more in blogs, on social networking sites, and in other digital venues. So if we can do all of those things online, why bother spending all that money to travel to a meeting?

Thus, I don’t think it is enough for the AHA Council to simply “redesign the annual meeting so that up to 25 percent of all sessions are dedicated to programs targeted toward” new constituencies identified in the report–AP teachers, community college faculty, and “public” historians. That just sounds like an expansion of the current structure to make the big tent of the AHA a little bigger.

Instead, I think that more radical surgery is required. Rather than nibbling around the edges of what’s wrong with the annual meeting, I think the Council needs to carefully consider the fundamental assumptions behind the meeting. Is it a job market? Is it a place for the exchange of information among scholars? Is it a place where new and interesting things can happen? And whatever the meeting ought to be, how should it change and how quickly?

As my colleague Roy Rosenzweig was fond of recounting, the last big “innovation” by the AHA happened in the Interwar years and was the addition of a discussant to the three paper panel (thereby making it a four paper panel and allowing for even less audience participation). Let’s hope that this time around the Council can do better.

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll consider those aspects of the Final Report dedicated to “Maximizing Use of the Internet.” In that post I’ll offer some suggestions for just how the annual meeting might change to make it more relevant in the digital age.

I think it’s safe to say that most American children learn about the Holocaust sometime in late elementary or early middle school (around grades 5-7). And I think it’s also safe to say that for most of them, their first introduction to the Holocaust is via the Diary of Anne Frank.

My own experience was different, because one of my neighbors was a Holocaust survivor and it was from him that I first heard what had happened to the Jews of Europe–not in full detail, of course, because I was only about eight years old. But one day while I was visiting a friend’s house, his father Eddie Willner (Mr. Willner to me, of course) came home from work. I noticed that he had a scar on the back of his head and being eight, I spoke right up and asked him about it.

He sat me down and explained to me that when he was a teenager, he had been taken prisoner in Germany by the Nazis who were running the government and that when he and some other prisoners escaped, he got that scar. I asked him why he was a prisoner and he told me it was because he was Jewish. Being eight and living in a very waspy suburb, the only thing I knew about Jews was that Jesus and his followers were Jewish, so I said something to the effect of, “You mean Jewish like in the Bible?” He nodded and said, “Yes, like that.”

This, of course, didn’t satisfy me, so I asked why being Jewish would get him arrested. He then gave me a very short eight-year-old-friendly version of the Nazis and their hatred for the Jews and that this hatred had resulted in lots and lots of Jewish people dying. I still remember his face and how serious he was when he told me all of this. Needless to say, it made a big impression on me. And when, several years later, it was my turn to read the Diary of Anne Frank, I read it knowing that this was not some abstract story, but something that had happened to my friend Albert’s father too.

Eddie Willner died this week (see the link above to his obituary). I had not seen him since 1977 when I graduated from high school, but I’ve told his story many times to students of mine. I teach the Holocaust every semester in one course or another and my own frame of reference always begins with Mr. Willner and his patient kid-friendly explanation of what happened. For that, I’ll always remember him as a great man.

If you’re like me, you probably took four or five classes in graduate school that prepared you for the world of digital rights management, online copyright, fair use, and other legal niceties of the digital age. Of course, that version of me who took all of those courses lives in a parallel universe only loosely affiliated with the one we inhabit.

The reality of teaching today–whether you teach in a K-12 institution or a college or university–is that the incredibly conflicting body of laws, court decisions, and urban legends governing these issues makes it very hard for us to do what we do best–teach.

And so, in Episode 24 of our Digital Campus podcast, Dan, Tom, and I confront these issues head on. Do we have solutions? If we did, we’d be billing clients something like $250 per hour rather than giving away podcasts for free. Do we provide at least some useful insights into the issues and how educators might deal with them? I think so. But you be the judge. Give us a listen and see what you think. And don’t be afraid to write in, either here or on the Digital Campus site, and vent your frustrations too. It’s healthy.