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April 28, 2006

What's for dinner?

One of the enduring (and horrific) tales of the expansion of the American Republic westward is the story of the ill-fated Donner Party. A group of more than 80 emmigrants to California, the Donner Party set out for the West Coast in 1846, but made the mistake of following what was known as the "Hastings Cutoff." As with so many shortcuts, the Hastings Cutoff turned out to be problematic. In this particular case, it meant that the wagon train of the Donner Party ended up snow bound in a pass in the Sierra Nevada, where they attempted to survived the winter. Slightly more than half of the expedition's members made it.

That much is not in dispute.

What is in dispute is what happened to the remains of those who died before the rescue parties finally arrived. The accepted version of what happened is that once the expedition's animals had been eaten, the living began to consume the dead. Survivors later admitted to cannibalism, but the disputes have arisen over the amount of cannibalism (if any) actually occurred. The emmigrants had split into two encampents--one consisting largely of members of the Donner family, and the other consisting of others in their party. In the 1980s, Donald Hardesty of the University of Nevada found human bone fragments mixed in with those of butchered cows at the second of these sites, leaving little doubt as to what happened there. However, what happened at the Donner family camp has long been in dispute, largely because the testimony of survivors from that part of the expedition has been conflicting.

In an article in the April 24 edition of the New Yorker, Dana Goodyear offers a compelling narrative of the work of two historical archaeologists--Kelly Dixon of the University of Montana and Julie Schablitsky of the Museum of Natural History at the University of Oregon. Dixon and Schablitsky's excavations at the site of the Donner family encampment found 16,000 bone fragments, almost all of which showed signs of butchering, but none of which could be identified as human.

The analysis of those fragments is what is so intriguing. Read the article to get a sense for the techniques they used--it was all very CSI and must have cost a fortune just in electron microscope time. But the lesson for historians is that if the artifacts can be extracted from the ground, our colleagues in archaeology departments (or crime labs) can help us answer historical questions. One suspects that many more such analyses will appear as the years go by and the costs of these technologies drops.

For more information on the Donner Party, all of which take the cannibalism as fact, not as something in dispute, see:

- The Donner Party Diary, which is the number one link appearing following a Google search;

- The PBS episode on the Donner Party on American Experience;

- New Light on the Donner Party, a website maintained by a librarian in Utah;

- the Wikipedia entry. This last item is especially interesting, because it likewise offered cannibalism as a fact. I edited the entry on April 28 around 11:00 am EST to reflect some doubt about what actually happened. It will be interesting to see how long that edit survives. Given that the Wikipedia is where most of our students will go first to find out what happened to the Donner Party, I'll be particularly interested to follow the fate of this entry.

Posted by mills at 08:37 AM

April 18, 2006

The Rise of GIS in History

I've been blogging a good bit about my own interest in the use of GIS in historical research and teaching. So I thought I'd pass along a little bit of data about the rise of GIS in the historical profession. I supervise a postdoctoral fellowship program here at GMU and in that capacity run the search for new postdocs each year. In the five years that I've been at it, I've read something like 450 applications for the fellowship, spread across all of European history--from very ancient to very contemporary. Reading all those applications offers me a great opportunity to see what's happening in PhD programs these days.

Five years ago we received exactly zero applications that included some use of GIS in the candidate's research. The same was true four and three years ago. Last year we had two. This year we had six. In addition, we had two tenure-track searches this year. I sat on the European history search committee and we had three applications that included some use of GIS. I don't know how many there were in the American history search, but one of the three finalists we brought to campus used GIS extensively.

These numbers are still small, as compared to the number of candidates who are writing about "sites of memory" and "commemorative practices", but I'm convinced it is just the beginning of what will become a very generative line of methodological innovation.

Posted by mills at 07:27 AM | Comments (2)

April 17, 2006

Are you sure you really want to create one more PowerPoint slide?

Anyone who knows me knows how I feel about PowerPoint. Like Edward Tufte, I believe it is truly one of the worst things that has happened to education since, well, forever. Earlier this year my older son who is in fourth grade came home and proudly told me how they had spent their entire day in science class learning to make a PowerPoint. When I asked him what they learned about science that day, he said, "How to make a PowerPoint." Why, I think it's fair to ask, do 9 and 10 year olds need to be able to make PowerPoint presentations? What possible educational purpose is served? Okay, so I'm ranting, but it's a good rant.

More to the point of my professional concerns--and an area I can actually, maybe, do something about--it the unrelenting spread of PowerPoint to the college and university classroom. What do you mean you don't use PowerPoint? How can you be so unhip, so unwired, so un-ramped? Chalk and (shudder) overhead projectors are so last century! Heaven forbid we should actually just talk with our students when we can show them slides with text that appears and disappears on command.

But students love it, demand it, give you bad teaching evaluations if you don't use it. Right? Why don't we let one of them tell you in his own words (from a recent self-reflection of my students wrote on his learning thus far this semester):

There have been many classes that I have taken where I come out of the class knowing nothing more than I did when I walked into the class. Sometimes the classes are just so boring and repetitive; reading thirty or so PowerPoint slides a day in class and having to memorize certain parts, does not really force me to learn anything. This is because soon after the class ends I will forget much of what I had to memorize.

Sounds like a ringing endorsement to me. What about you? Now get back to creating those slides for Monday's lecture!

Posted by mills at 06:19 PM | Comments (2)

April 11, 2006

Changing History?

The other day I received an email from Randall Bytwerk at Calivin College asking me to unlink a website from the archive of one of my class blogs from last year. The site, the Adolf Hitler Historical Museum (Hitler.org), is the first site to come up if one types "Hitler" into Google.

This is a website that I use with my students to help them come to grips with the perils of casual web searching...If one isn't careful, one can end up at a site like this one and get taken in. The "Hitler Museum" site tells visitors right up front what a good source it is:

And then it goes on to hone its unbiased credentials:

Is it possible to slander Adolf Hitler?

In any case, the unwary undergraduate or high school student may well be taken in by this attempt to convince the world that this site is "unbiased." One quick link check in Google, however, indicates the degree to which this site is deeply connected to neo-Nazi websites around the world.

Which brings us back to Randall Bytwerk. He is waging a campaign to knock this website off the top of the Google list by writing to people like me and asking us to unlink it from their websites (which is one reason I don't link to it here). I'm sympathetic, because when I first discovered the site, I wrote to several website owners who provided links for high school teachers to urge them to unlink this site. I was worried not about the Google rankings, but that these link aggregators were steering unwary high school teachers and/or their students to this site.

Recently, my colleague Dan Cohen wrote in his blog about just the opposite thing...optimizing search engine positioning. Bytwerk is trying to de-optimize (if such a word exists) the Hitler Museum site.

All this back and forth about optimization and de-optimization raises an interesting question for historians. Can we "change history" in this way? By that I mean, can we change the practice of our craft by using the trade-craft of the advertising industry, boosting certain sites up the Google ladder and driving others down, thereby influencing what our students (and the general public) looks at first, second, and third? Is this a good use of the professional historian's time? Is it much different than the reviews we right of books, making them more or less likely to be assigned to our students?

Posted by mills at 09:41 AM | Comments (1)

April 10, 2006

Collecting the History of A Big Surprise (cont'd)

The GMU Hoops Archive has been a big, albeit short-term, success. Since the site went live on March 30 just under 5,000 visitors have been to the site and the archive contains just under 300 digital objects (159 stories and 135 files). The list below shows that this site, which is tied so closely to a phenomenon (the success of the University's basketball team), is largely dependent on the hype and hoopla surrounding that phenomenon. Now that the basketball season is over and attention has moved elsewhere, so has the traffic.

What's the lesson for historians trying to collect history online? If you're going to collect the history of something so transitory, you better be prepared to act quickly, getting the database and the website up and running in a hurry while interest is high. And you need to be aggressive in your flogging of the site imemdiately, before your moment passes.

Hits
..7459 (Site goes live on March 30 around 4:00 pm)
50014 March 31
32940 (Mason's game in the Final Four)
33448 April 2
34590 April 3
23897 April 4
19286 April 5
16956 April 6
14918 (On-campus celebration and parade)
10332 April 8
.6543 April 9

Posted by mills at 08:30 PM | Comments (1)

April 06, 2006

No More College For You!

One advantage of having a blog is that you can use it to brag about your students. Today I want to brag about a PhD student I've been working with for the past four years, Orli Fridman, who successfully defended her dissertation today. From now on we have to call her Dr. Fridman. Of course it also means she can't go to college any more and so has to go get a job.

Orli's dissertation, " Alternative Voices: Serbia's Anti-war Activists, 1991- 2004," offers a nuanced investigation of the anti-war and anti-Milosevic political activism in Serbia during the years after the collapse of Yugoslavia. The greatest strength of this work is that it offers us a much clearer understanding of the opposition to the dominant political discourses in Serbian politics told from within the opposition community. To date, any study that you care to read about post-1989 Serbian politics describes the opposition from outside. Orli gathered more than 60 formal interviews with anti-war and/or anti-Milosevic activists (not always the same thing) while living in Belgrade. The dissertation allows these activists to speak with their own voices, rather than through theor opponents or through the eyes of outside observers. With some polishing, I'm certain this dissertation will become an important book.

Posted by mills at 07:24 AM | Comments (1)

April 04, 2006

Teachers and their blogs

Teachers around the country are getting into the blogging act. This story from the Washington Post details some of the ways that they are using blogs and, not surprisingly, much of their use of the technology has been like the rest of the world's--the keep some sort of online diary. Reading between the lines of this story, one senses some squeemishness over using blogs as teaching tools, whether it's because students might just write any old thing (horrors!) or because the teachers themselves haven't come to grips with how best to use the platform.

This latter concern is an appropriate one, because as is true with the use of any digital media for teaching, unless the assignment is carefully constructed and closely tied to specific learning objectives, then it's just a bell or a whistle. And, just to give you an idea of how time consuming those bells and whistles can become, the 24 students in my Western Civ class this semester have thus far generated more than 400 entries in our class blog. Do I read them all? Of course not. I can't do that and do everything else I have to do as a teacher and administrator to read every single one of those postings. Instead, I use a tracking system to make sure I've read and commented on everyone on a somewhat regular basis throughout the semester. That and the references I make to their blog postings during class indicate to the students that I am keeping track of what's going on in the blog.

So, what teachers at all levels have to decide is how the use of a blog will serve specific learning objectives in their course and then integrate the blog into the class in ways that support those goals. Otherwise, it's probably not a bad idea to be a little squeemish.

Posted by mills at 09:54 AM