Month: June 2020

I remain confident in the concept and now have a better sense for the media that I’d like to include. In line with your advice in response to last week’s update, I’d like to show, for example, just photographs on the first page. And maybe just headlines on the second. Something intriguing that will pique visitors’ interest and keep them coming.

I am still hunting for sources, and have found fewer on the capitalist side, interestingly, than on the communist. This is a concern, especially since the West did not pour as many resources into their front publications as the Soviet bloc did into theirs. So I’ll keep searching.

Here is an example of one that I do have, and that I posted to Omeka for Mills Kelly’s class. The resolution on this picture is better than on others, but I’m not sure what the amateurish photography means for the visitor’s experience. Does it make the publication somehow more authentic? Does it make the site seem unprofessional?

The other problem concerns Omeka. I haven’t found any plug-in that will let me let the visitor click on one side or the other and have that input appear on a subsequent page, so that you wind up with a score at the end. If this proves impossible, then I’ll have to just go analog by letting visitors keep a tally themselves, and show them the answers in a final page. I’d prefer to do something flashier, but I don’t have 1/10 the coding skill to make that happen. Which brings me back to the issue of what platform to choose. I’m still wondering, should I just do WordPress? I’ve had trouble with my WordPress version of the site, on the front end. So it’s not as if everything there is easy. But the plugin universe is so much larger there that surely my button-pressing function will be possible. And then there’s the smartmaps option that Carol brought up on the call last week…

All told, I’m behind where I’d like to be. Having reviewed the course calendar, it looks like I won’t put the site on display until July 11, when we show it to classmates. Is that right? In that case I’ll have time to bear down and catch up once things settle down for me–the APs are done and my grades are in. Thanks for your understanding on that.

Like most 20th-century-born lecturers, I continue to think Powerpoint is cutting edge. It’s a subliminal but still powerful notion. Our teachers fiddled with overhead projectors and VCRs, and now we have every image imaginable, coupled with slow-populating YouTube clips, at our fingertips. I show a nibble of The Name of the Rose for Erasmus’s comedies, and the opener to Triumph of the Will to show a godly dictator descending from the clouds.

But as the readings for Module 5 remind me, Powerpoint is by now passé. And so is Prezi. Today’s experiments are no longer about how to engage students as passive listeners, but how to engage them in the act of history-making. This was the premise of “historical thinking” in the 2000s, and it’s the same one that digital humanities initiates have brought to assignments and assessments. I, for example, just gave my students a choice ten days ago. For their second paper, they can either write 1800-2000 words, or they can make a 10-minute Spark Video–both in response to the same question. I’ve since learned that Spark maxes out at around ten minutes. And I’ve confirmed what I anticipated, but didn’t have the time or experience to outmaneuver. The medium is too different from a traditional expository paper for students to know what they’ve produced is sufficient, and the same for me. In short, what can a Spark Video do that a paper can’t, and what can’t it that a paper can?

What I learned from the readings is that digital story telling is best suited to visual sources and phenomena. The Spark Videos that I’ve seen show lots of text, in excerpts from the assigned books, and a few token images taken from Adobe’s catalog. But the deft editing seen in the GMU projects is missing–there isn’t the time. And so is the weighing of contrary evidence and counterarguments that I require for all papers. There is no reason why this can’t happen in a video. But what is the visual that can not only accompany but advance that argument? That remains an open question.

I’m not yet sold on the intellectual rigor of digital story telling, but I’m curious to experiment further.

The premise of the project is good, and the publications that I’d like to display and have site visitors compare are available. The challenges that I haven’t met concern (a) the selection of issues from said publications, and (b) the structure of this feature of my site.

The publications that I have in my photo archive are the Soviet bloc-backed World Youth and the CIA-backed Student News and Information. The photographs are not of great quality, something we’ve discussed. And I have tried to improve the quality of some, with so-so results. Were they old yellowed documents, the poor quality would be forgivable. Because they’re full-color 20^th-century magazines, it’s problematic. The chief problem is not appearance, though, but content. It would be good to start viewers off with two issues that address similar topics. I could then show issues with wildly different themes to suit a higher level of difficulty. In which case I’d have to use two new publications, the titles of which are not yet familiar to the user.

The structure of the site concerns what visitors see when. My plan as yet is as follows (I’m afraid I pasted from Word).

Home page for “Cold Fronts.”

Menu

            1. Organizations (each site accompanied by images of its publications).

            2. Maps

            3. Analysis

            4. Which is whose?

                        A. Opening page introduces the comparison.

1. On this page is a list of demographics (students) or perhaps events (Vietnam War), each of which links to a page with a sheet from two front publications—one communist and one capitalist.

               a. Vietnam War (example)

i. At the bottom of this page is a simple toggle to select “which one is whose.”

             Here I need some kind of extension on Omeka that will show users “congratulations!” or “wrong!” in response to their entry.

What do you think of that structure, Professor?

As communism fades from memory-history into discipline-history, so does one meaning of “front.” In Cold War parlance, a front was a political shell company, an organization funded by and beholden to the interests of a government. The irony of the Cold War was that it saw the flowering not only of state-funded propaganda on an unprecedented scale, but also of the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), an entity celebrated for its autonomy from political influence. Here was the Cold War’s antithesis—international NGOs like the UN or the Olympic Games that stood for peace and mutual understanding. What history has lost sight of, and my site seeks to bring back into view, are the international fronts that emerged after World War II, styled as NGOs. A contradiction in terms, they constituted a key arm in the war of ideas that made the Cold War “cold,” yet about which hardly anything has been written.

My existing website plots out where the “cold fronts” met, and so give viewers a visual representation of East/West, Iron Curtain/free world competition that contests those categories. Communist fronts met outside of Communist-led countries almost as much as Western ones met outside of liberal democratic countries. The site will add to this geographic feature samples from the print propaganda that they produced—namely, magazines. Here, visitors will be asked to determine which publication belonged to which alliance. Who published World Youth, for example, with its interview with Sting the musician in 1986?

The historical thinking featured on the site is substantive inasmuch as it will devote a separate page to each of the state-backed NGOs that appears on the map. It will employ procedural history by asking users to infer the origins of a document based on content alone. The site will thus be of use to teachers who wish to take their students beneath the categories of Cold War propagandas to their contents.

The principal expectation of history teachers advanced by non-history teachers has been remarkably consistent over the last century: that they teach fact. As Cornell Carl Becker argued in 1931, and a chorus of critics echoed more recently, the expectation is blinkered, or by psychologist Sam Wineburg’s diagnosis, outright “crazy.” Time and again, standardized testing has shown that students know far less about names and dates and customary causal narratives than their elders think they should. When we add to this the fact that “substantive,” fact-based teaching was the norm a century ago, but yielded results little different from today’s, the view that students know too little because they’re taught too little what and too much how—not least how good history is conducted—is specious.

            So how might digital technology help history teachers turn back the tide of fact-obsessed curricula and tests in favor of a more “inquiry-based” model that empowers students to conduct historical research, with teachers acting as coaches rather than spoon-to-mouth instructors? Mills Kelly’s call for teachers to have students “make, mine, mark, and mash” offers a hint; but Kelly’s laundry list no more specific on how to do so than I do when I write under student outcomes for my course: “[students] will interpret sources mindful of the biases they carry.” And herein lies the challenge. The digital turn offers teachers and students a toolbox different from the notebook, laptop, and textbook. Yet historical scholarship remains unchanged: in print with a few illustrations at best, and not a drop of real-time interaction with the reader. Digital history, meanwhile, is set aside for teaching purposes by history professors, rather than for citations in upcoming publications. And yet, when the time does come to teach, modules like the ones in “Reflective of my Best Work” remain on the shelf. We heard at the end of our first class a professor comment on the digital syllabus that she had written in the course, but hadn’t yet “had a chance” to teach. I could not help wondering whether it was that the department didn’t allow it, or that the gravitational pull of familiarity proved too strong. That same pull of tradition works is even harder on the general public than it is on teachers. So to return to the question of when digital technology will jar history loose from the constraints of substance over procedure, knowing over thinking, it’s only when parents and PTOs and lawmakers acknowledge the digital toolbox as a vital component of any public education that history curricula assignments will be allowed to evolve. What the history paper was to 20^th-cen. lawyers—a first step on the way to writing thesis-driven briefs based on legal precedent—Wordpress might train to their 21-st cen. successors.