digital history

BANCROFT LIBRARY – U.S. HISTORY SCENE FELLOWSHIP IN DIGITAL HISTORY

Michael J. Kramer

The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley and U.S. History Scene are pleased to announce competitions for a new fellowship: The Bancroft Library-U.S. History Scene Fellowship in Digital History.

http://www.ushistoryscene.com/uncategorized/digitalhistoryfellowship/

The aim of this fellowship program is to familiarize scholars with emerging digital technologies and digital archival collections, including the digital publication of original scholarly research. The fellowship will introduce history graduate students to specialized skills, methods, and professional networks for conducting digital research using online digital primary source collections at the Bancroft Library, aimed at innovating K-12 history education and curriculum development.

Eligibility for Awards:

The fellowship is designed to support qualified doctoral students in the humanities or social sciences from any recognized institution of higher education in the United States.

Size of Awards:

The fellowship will include a stipend of $1500 to support 6-8 weeks of research and writing to be paid by the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley directly to the fellow. Residency at the Bancroft Library is not required.

Scope of Eligible Projects:

Fellows will advance digital research practices with primary sources housed at Bancroft Library, identify new sources that should undergo digitization for public access, and receive peer-reviewed digital publishing training through U.S. History Scene for public education. The fellowships will result in digital publication of articles and curriculum plans related to their research topics to be presented on the Bancroft Library and U.S. History Scene websites. This is a virtual fellowship, allowing scholars a flexible schedule through telecommuting to participate (although residency at the Bancroft Library is welcomed). To accommodate this flexibility, primary sources will be digitized and sent to researchers directly from the Bancroft Library for their research use.

Topics that fellows might explore include:

  • Native American life and culture
  • Pacific exploration, maritime history, and empire
  • Mapping and settling the West
  • Missions and cross-cultural exchange
  • The Gold Rush
  • Overland trails
  • Mormons in the U.S. West
  • Mexican-American War, Civil War, & Reconstruction in California
  • Native and African American Slavery in the Early American West
  • Formation of National Parks
  • The U.S. home front during World War I & II
  • Organized Labor & Unionization
  • Environmental History / Natural Disasters
  • Railroads and Transportation History
  • Water, Oil, and Mining
  • Land Grant Acts
  • The Great Depression & Dust Storms
  • The Great Migration
  • Major social movements of the 20th century: Civil Rights, Black Power, Chicano Movements, Feminism & the Women’s Movement, Disability Rights, GLBT Rights
  • The West in the Cold War
  • Chinese Exclusion
  • Japanese Internment
  • Role of military & the federal government
  • Mass Culture in the U.S. West
  • Frontier & Western Mythology

Applying for Awards:

Applicants should submit a C.V. and a research statement indicating the scope and purpose of their proposed research, identifying relevant holdings of The Bancroft Library that will support their research. The digital application form, along with documentary evidence of current enrollment at a college or university, and two letters of recommendation must be sent by June 10, 2014 to editors@ushistoryscene.com. Awards will be announced June 24, 2014.

For all questions please e-mail:

Rhae Lynn Barnes, US History Scene at: rlbarnes@ushistoryscene.com

Mary W. Elings, Bancroft Library at: melings@library.berkeley.edu

Digitizing Folk Music History 3.0: The Syllabus

Michael J. Kramer

X-post from my Issues in Digital History blog: http://www.michaeljkramer.net/issuesindigitalhistory/blog/?p=1230.

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Today I am turning away from the roiling waters of “What is DH?/What is not DH?/DH is evil!/DH is great!/DH is managerial neoliberalism wolf in flexible team member sheep’s wool (boo!)/DH is nice actually-existing socialism (hooray!)/etc.” (see here and here for starters) to a few posts on my current teaching. Oh, don’t think won’t be leaping back into that debate soon!

In the meantime, to teaching. I am in the midst of the third installation of Digitizing Folk Music History, in which a group of talented (and this year they are once again extraordinarily talented) upper-level undergraduates study the US folk music revival with me and then complete what I call interpretive digital history projects on a WordPress platform using original artifacts in the beta-version of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Digital Archive. The WordPress platform and beta-digital archive are password protected right now for various reasons. First, there are still intellectual property issues to work out in terms of public digital use of the archive (we are confident these can be worked out by and large in the coming year). Second, I am still on the fence about public digital work by students (see a nice reflection on this here: http://hastac.org/blogs/superadmin/2012/11/30/guidelines-public-student-class-blogs-ethics-legalities-ferpa-and-more). But I suspect that next year the course’s digital components will be almost fully public in some manner.

In the meantime, here is the syllabus for the course. Your comments, critiques, suggestions, thoughts, and questions are all most welcome.

And in the coming weeks, I and my students will provide a few more peeks into the coursework itself as it has developed this spring term.

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Digitizing Folk Music History Syllabus

Course Overview

Overview

Using the digital archive of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival, students explore the history of the folk music revival, American music, the culture of the Cold War, and theories of the archive while also working on the cutting edge of new digital history. In addition to weekly mini-blog assignments, students complete a final interpretive digital history project based on original research in the Berkeley collection. This project fulfills the History 395 research paper requirement. In the course, we ask what was at stake in the Berkeley Festival, which ran from 1957 to 1970, in relation to American culture and politics, questions of race, class, gender, age, and region, and issues of memory and music-making. We also seek to discover how digital media and tools can aid in this pursuit. This is an upper-level research seminar and includes intensive reading, listening, and viewing assignments. Be prepared to complete all work, participate actively in seminar discussions and an online course blog, and challenge yourself both in terms of how you understand history and the digital. Neither musical expertise, nor computer programming skills are needed to enroll in the course. Each student will be evaluated based on class participation, digital mini-projects, blog posts, presentations, and final interpretive digital history projects in WordPress based on primary sources found in the Berkeley Folk Music Festival collection.

Course Objectives

  • Deepen understanding of the folk music revival as a lens on modern US history.
  • Sharpen historical research skills by wielding evidence effectively to produce new analyses that are in conversation with existing interpretations of the past.
  • Investigate the new field of digital history: working with multimedia evidence and multimodal argument; using the digital database as a new kind of historical research and publication tool; doing “close reading” and “distant reading” of evidence in digital form; discovering new relationships between digitized archive, research workshop, publication, and scholarly communication; generating new modes of individual and collective historical inquiry using digital tools; creating new modes of narrative and historical interpretation in digital formats.
  • Contribute to the emerging digital repository for The Berkeley Folk Music Festival and the Digital Study of Vernacular Music Project.

Required Materials

(books available at NU Norris Bookstore and on 1-day reserve at NU Library Reserves desk)

  • Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
  • Ron Cohen, A History of Folk Music Festivals in the United States (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008)
  • W.J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley At War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)
  • Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005)
  • Additional articles, videos, audio available on course WordPress website.
  • 1964 and 1968 Berkeley Folk Music Festival Digital Archive in Omeka. Log in here: http://webhost1.mmlc.northwestern.edu/bffsite/omeka/users/login.

Evaluation

  • Ten blog mini-projects, 5% each = 50%
    • Original post. Usually due on Sundays by midnight, except at end of the term.
    • At least one substantive and thoughtful comment on a fellow classmate’s post. Be critical, ask questions, respond meaningfully, but do so constructively and supportively. Usually due on Mondays by midnight.
    • One followup comment on your post in which you reflect on the mini-project in hindsight. What worked and did not work? What did the mini-project make you think about in terms of history, the folk revival, and using the digital to study the past? Usually due on Wednesdays by midnight.
  • Final interpretive digital history project = 30% (http://bfmf.northwestern.edu/blog/2013/01/30/final-project-instructions/)
  • Class participation and discussion = 20% (Please come to seminar meetings prepared to discuss the following: What is the most important point you learned from today’s materials? What is the most important question you have about today’s materials? Each student will receive a midterm evaluation, evaluation of final project, and final term evaluation in the course.)
  • You will receive a midterm evaluation before the drop deadline and a final evaluation at the end of the course.

Notes on Using a WordPress Course Blog

We will be using a networked WordPress blog as the main arena for writing, conversation, and digital research and publication beyond our classroom meetings. The blog url is http://bfmf.northwestern.edu. Log in using your Northwestern Net ID and password at https://bfmf.northwestern.edu/wp-login.php. WordPress is very simple blogging software. For basic instructions, see: http://codex.wordpress.org. But I suggest simply diving in and using it as WordPress is fairly intuitive.

Please note that by enrolling in the course, you agree that it is acceptable to share your classroom work as part of the larger Berkeley Folk Music Festival and the Digital Study of Vernacular Music Project. If you have any concerns—technical, personal, ethical—about public uses of your course blog entries, please feel absolutely free to confer with me to make arrangements. Generally, I advocate what has become known as “open access” in digital work, but there can be very important and worthy exceptions to this philosophy. If you are curious, here is more on the ethics of public blogs for classroom use here: http://hastac.org/blogs/superadmin/2012/11/30/guidelines-public-student-class-blogs-ethics-legalities-ferpa-and-more.

Academic Integrity

All Weinberg College and Northwestern policies concerning plagiarism and academic dishonesty are strictly enforced in this course. See http://www.wcas.northwestern.edu/advising/integrity for more details. In addition, because we are using potentially copyrighted materials in digital form, you will be asked by the Northwestern library to sign a waiver form that you will not violate any copyright laws. If you do so, this also constitutes academic dishonesty. If you have any question as to what constitutes plagiarism or academic dishonesty or copyright violation, please feel free to contact the instructor. Please note that under WCAS and Northwestern policy, the instructor is required to report any suspected instances of academic dishonesty. The instructor also reserves the right to assign a failing grade for the course if a student is found to have violated college or university policy concerning academic integrity.

History Writing Center

The History Writing Center is a place students enrolled in history courses may come for help with their writing assignments. While the University Writing Place (http://www.writing.northwestern.edu/) remains an excellent resource, the History Writing Center, staffed by a department graduate student, offers advice tailored to the specific challenges of writing in a historical mode.

Special Needs

Students with special needs and disabilities that have been declared and documented through the Northwestern Office of Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) should meet with the instructor to discuss any specific accommodations. For further information, see the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) website: http://www.northwestern.edu/disability.

Instructor

Dr. Michael J. Kramer

History & American Studies

email: mjk@northwestern.edu

Office hours: by appointment

Office location: 1908 Sheridan Road

Technology/Research Consultant

Josh Honn

Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital Curation

email: joshua.honn@northwestern.edu

Office hours: by appointment

Office location: Digital Collections, Level 2, East Tower, University Library

Week 1. Introductions

This week’s schedule:

  • Thursday, 4/4/13. Introductions. Of folk revivals and folksonomies: taking the folk revival digital.

Readings/Viewings/Listenings for Tuesday, 4/9/13:

Week 2. What Was the Folk Revival?

This week’s schedule:

  • Tuesday, 4/9/13. Discussion (Olivier, Kelp, Time article). Folk, Roots, Vernacular Music? (Readings from Week 1).
  • Thursday. 4/11/13. Computer Lab #1: WordPress for digital historians: the basics of site setup, posts, pages, widgets. **Meet in Multimedia Learning Center, Kresge 1-315.**
  • Sunday, 4/14/13. Blog Assignment 1 (Text annotation) due by midnight, instructions: http://bfmf.northwestern.edu/blog/2013/01/29/blog-assignment-1-text-annotation/.
  • Monday, 4/15/13. Blog Assignment 1 Comments due by midnight.

Readings/Viewings/Listenings for next Tuesday, 4/16/13:

Week 3. What Was the Folk Revival? Continued

This week’s schedule:

Readings/Viewings/Listenings for Tuesday, 4/16/13 and Thursday, 4/18/13:

Week 4. Reviving the Revival: Thinking About Sources and What Is Digital History?

This week’s schedule:

  • Monday, 4/22/13. Sunday. 4/21/13. Blog 2 Comments due by midnight.
  • Tuesday, 4/23/13. Discussion. Sources and themes in the Folk Revival. **Meet at Special Collections Library, Level 3, Deering Library.** See readings due below.
  • Wednesday, 4/24/13. Blog 2 Followup due by midnight.
  • Thursday, 4/25/13. Discussion. What Is Digital History? See readings due below.
  • Sunday, 4/28/13. Blog assignment 3 (WordPress Experiments 1) due by midnight, instructions: http://bfmf.northwestern.edu/blog/2013/01/30/blog-assignment-3-wordpress-experiments-1/.

Readings/Viewings/Listenings for Tuesday, 4/23/13:

  • Ellen J. Stekert, “Cents and Nonsense in the Urban Folksong Movement: 1930-1966,” in Transforming Tradition, 84-106, Access through Blackboard, https://courses.northwestern.edu.
  • Robert Cantwell, “When We Were Good: Class and Culture in the Folk Revival,” in Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, ed. Neil V. Rosenberg (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 35-60, Access through Blackboard, https://courses.northwestern.edu.
  • Sam Hinton, “The Singer of Folk Songs and His Conscience,” Western Folklore 14, 3 (1955): 170-173; reprinted in Sing Out! 7, 1 (Spring 1957): 24-26, Access through Blackboard, https://courses.northwestern.edu.
  • Susan Montgomery, “The Folk Furor,” Madamoiselle, December 1960, 98-99, 118, Access through Blackboard, https://courses.northwestern.edu.
  • Alan Lomax, “The ‘Folkniks’—and the Songs They Sing,” Sing Out! 9 (1959): 30-31, reprinted in Alan Lomax, Selected Writings, 1934-1997, ed. Ronald D. Cohen  (New York: Routledge, 2003), http://bfmf.northwestern.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lomax-The-Folkniks.pdf.
  • John Cohen, “In Defense of City Folksingers,” Sing Out! 9 (1959): 33-34, Access through Blackboard, https://courses.northwestern.edu.
  • Film: Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, dir. Jim Brown (2007), Access through Blackboard, https://courses.northwestern.edu.

Readings/Viewings/Listenings for Thursday, 4/25/13:

Week 5. Dylanology

This week’s schedule:

  • Monday, 4/29/13. Blog 3 comments due by midnight.
  • Tuesday, 4/30/13. Discussion. Dylan, Chronicles, 1-104.
  • Wednesday, 5/1/13. Blog 3 Followup due by midnight.
  • Thursday, 5/2/13. Discussion. Interpreting Dylan: Shank, Hale, Scorsese.
  • Sunday, 5/5/13. Blog Assignment 4 (Deformance and Performance), instructions: http://bfmf.northwestern.edu/blog/2013/01/29/blog-assignment-4-deformance/.

This weeks’s readings/viewings/listenings:

  • Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).
  • Ellen Willis, “Dylan,” from Cheetah (1967), in Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 1-20, Access through Blackboard, https://courses.northwestern.edu.
  • Barry Shank, “‘That Wild Mercury Sound’: Bob Dylan and the Illusion of American Culture,” Boundary 2, 29 (Spring 2002): 97-123, Access through Blackboard, https://courses.northwestern.edu.
  • Grace Elizabeth Hale, “Black as Folk: The Folk Music Revival, the Civil Rights Movement, and Bob Dylan,” in A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 84-131, Access through Blackboard, https://courses.northwestern.edu.
  • Film: No Direction Home, dir. Martin Scorsese (2005), Access through Blackboard, https://courses.northwestern.edu.

Week 6. Berkeley in the Sixties

This week’s schedule:

  • Monday, 5/6/13. Blog 4 Comments due by midnight.
  • Tuesday. 5/7/13. Computer Lab #2: Open session for final project development in WordPress; **Meet in MMLC, Kresge 1-301.**
  • Wednesday, 5/8/13. Blog 4 Followup due by midnight.
  • Thursday, 5/9/13. Discussion. Berkeley in the Sixties.
  • Sunday, 5/12/13. Blog Assignment 5 (Thinking Spatially: Geocoding) due, instructions: http://bfmf.northwestern.edu/blog/2013/01/30/blog-assignment-5-thinking-spatially-geocoding/.

Readings/Viewings/Listenings for Thursday, 5/9/13:

Week 7. Thinking about Festivals

This week’s schedule:

Readings/Viewings/Listenings for Thursday, 5/16/13:

  • Ronald D. Cohen, A History of Folk Music Festivals in the United States (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008).
  • Robert Cantwell, “Feasts of Unnaming: Folk Festivals and the Representation of Folk Life,” in If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 71-110, Access through Blackboard, https://courses.northwestern.edu.
  • Ellen Willis, “Newport: You Can’t Go Down Home Again,” in Out of the Vinyl Deeps, 165-172, Access through Blackboard, https://courses.northwestern.edu.
  • Film: Festival, dir. Murray Lerner (1967), Access through Blackboard, https://courses.northwestern.edu.

Week 8. Remix: The Folk Revival Revue Review

This week’s schedule:

Readings/Viewings/Listenings for Thursday, 5/23/13:

Reread:

  • Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory  and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
  • American Roots Music, Episodes 1-4, Access through Blackboard, https://courses.northwestern.edu.
  • Archie Green, “Vernacular Music: A Naming Compass,” Musical Quarterly 77, 1 (Spring 1993): 35-46, Access through Blackboard, https://courses.northwestern.edu.

New articles/materials:

Week 9. Final Reflections Hootenanny

This week’s schedule:

  • Monday, 5/27/13. Blog 7 Comments due by midnight.
  • Tuesday, 5/28/13. Open for continued discussion, etc.
  • Wednesday, 5/29/13. Blog 7 Followup due by midnight.
  • Thursday, 5/30/13. Computer Lab #3: Wireframing and Storyboarding. **Meet in MMLC, Kresge 1-315.** (Note: Professor Kramer out of town at a conference. Josh Honn and Matt Taylor will oversee.)
  • Sunday, 6/2/13. Blog Assignment 8 (Field Recording Experiment) due, instructions to come.
  • Monday, 6/3/13. Blog 9 (WordPress Experiments 3: Wireframing) due, instructions: http://bfmf.northwestern.edu/blog/2013/01/30/blog-assignment-9-wireframing/. Blog 8 Comments due by midnight.
  • Tuesday, 6/4/13. Digital Hootenanny: Presentations of projects in progress. Blog 8 Followup due by midnight. Blog 9 comments due by midnight.

Final, Due 6/13/13

Final Project Instructions

Your final task in this 395 research seminar is to develop an interpretive digital history project based on original research. Your final digital project must develop a convincing and compelling interpretation grounded in, but not necessarily exclusively focused on, materials in the Digital Berkeley Folk Music Festival Archive using the digitized materials in Omeka. You may add additional materials to this source of material as well.

A successful project will address specific arguments in the existing historiography of the American folk music revival and related topics based on the secondary materials we have explored or additional relevant scholarship. It will do so by demonstrating how new primary evidence relates to this extant literature. The project will also explore inventive and creative uses of digital technologies, tools, designs, and capabilities with the WordPress content management system (cms) to further the interpretive stakes of the project. In other words, your job is not to simply past a paper online, but to investigate how to use the WordPress environment and the digital in general to create a new kind of publication based on original historical research.

Projects will be evaluated by its ability to (1) perceive new aspects of the source material in relation to an existing historiography (secondary literature; existing interpretations); (2) compellingly frame your research question and your thesis (you might quite literally create posts, pages, and/or widgets that articulate your research question, the existing interpretations, the materials and methods you plan to use, and your thesis/argument; (3) compellingly express the arguments of other interpreters; (4) narrative your interpretation by using the digital to wield historical evidence effectively in service of an argument about your topic and theme; and (5) track your research progress effectively in some section of your final project.

The final project should pair one person from column A with one theme from column B. If you have a different idea for the final project, speak with instructor to develop a revised version of assignment.

A

Joan Baez

Doc Watson

Sam Hinton

Charles Seeger

Almeda Riddle

Archie Green

Alice Stuart

New Lost City Ramblers

Mike Seeger

John Cohen

Tracy Schwarz

Bess Lomax Hawes

Barry Olivier

Alan Lomax

Schlomo Carlebach

Jesse Fuller

Congress of Wonders

Song of Earth Chorale

Sandy and Jeanie Darlington

The Gand Family Singers

Steve Mann and Will Scarlette

Karen Williams

Diesel Ducks

Clarence Van Hook

Sawtooth Mountain Volunteers

Dr. Humbead’s New Tranquility String Band

Dave Frederickson

Allan MacLeod

Maybe Smith

Larry Diggs

David and Tina Meltzer

Vera Johnson

Paul Arnoldi

The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company

Howlin’ Wolf

John Fahey

The Andrews Sisters of Berkeley

Crome Syrcus

The Morning

Huge Roach

Quicksilver Messenger Service

It’s a Beautiful Day

ED Denson

Daniel Moore

Richard Rollins

Ed Kahn

Mitch Greenhill

Theodore Bikel

Paul Hansen

Merritt Herring

Kathy and Carol

Pat Kilroy

Chris Strachwitz

Mark Spoelstra

DK Wilgus

Herb Pederson

Ralph Rinzler

Janet Smith

Carl T. “Doc” Sprague

B

Shifting definition of folk music

Genre

Free Speech Movement

Politics of 1968

Counterculture

Academic folklore

Commerce

Politics

Gender

Race

Class

Region

Age/Generation

Public space

Personal expression

Sound and history

Theories of culture

Imitation/Appropriation/Inspiration

Instrumentation (Significance of electric, acoustic, etc.)

Politics of dancing

Listening and sonic history

Sensory history

Urban

Rural

West coast

Cold War

Vietnam War

Labor movement

Radicalism

Conservatism

Romanticism

Authenticity

Community/Commons/Group/Social Belonging

Individuality

Freedom

Obligation

Responsibility

Americanness

Global culture

Concepts of the “vernacular”

Rubric:

1. Interpretation 25%

·      What is the interpretation?

·      Is the interpretation clearly, precisely, and evocatively conveyed?

2. Use of evidence 25%

·      Is the evidence from the Digital Berkeley Folk Music Festival Archive linked to the interpretation effectively and precisely?

·      Does the project deepen a reader’s understanding of the evidence from the archive?

·      Does the project effectively draw upon additional primary sources?

3. Use of secondary material 25%

·      Does the project effectively and compellingly link its interpretation and evidence to secondary materials?

·      Does it explain existing interpretations cogently?

·      Does it demonstrate clearly what is important about its intervention in the existing questions, debates, and dilemmas of scholarly understanding?

4. Use of the digital 25%

·      Does the project make innovative use of digital tools, capacities, technologies, and design to communicate its interpretation?

·      Does it do so conceptually?

·      Was the project able to implement this technology effectively?

NOTE: Citations and Bibliographic Requirements:

Your digital project should include an integration or section that lists credits and citations. These should include secondary sources (authors, titles, publications, dates) and any photographic credits you can locate. You may use Chicago Manual of Style as a rough guide for citation formats, but use common sense as well. Your task is to give your reader access to the sources you made use of in a clear and concise way and to credit ideas and materials you draw upon.

Examples of final projects:

Blog Assignment 1: Text Annotation

1. Create a crocodoc account (free) at http://personal.crocodoc.com/. This will allow you to save your annotated document as you work on it over time.

2. Use text annotation tool—http://personal.crocodoc.com/—to upload a pdf file of one of the readings and annotate it with your observations about particular words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs. What particular parts of the article seem most important to you? What do you observe about those particular parts?

3. Download your annotated PDF from Crocodoc by choosing “Download” and selecting the marked up PDF.

4. In WordPress, create a new post and upload/insert (click “Add Media”) your marked up PDF.

5. Embed your annotated PDF into your blog post. To do this:

  • In Crocodoc, click “Share”

  • Select “Embed” and copy the code

  • In your blog post, select the Text tab, paste code where you want the PDF to appear. Select “Visual” tab to return to composing your blog post.

6. Under the Tools icon on the lefthand side of your dashboard, select and use the wp-table-reloaded plug in—wp-table-reloaded. *Be sure to first create a copy of the table template, then use the copy, following the format for title.* Cut and paste or copy a description of each part of the document that you annotated (for instance a quotation from the text, a particular word) into the table in your blog post under item. Add in your description, analysis of significance, and any other comments as you think about the annotated item [WP-Table Reloaded Instructions].

7. Using the wp-table-reloaded plug in, embed your completed table into your blog post [WP-Table Reloaded Instructions]. There are two ways to do so. You can cut and paste the code from your WP-Table Reloaded table itself; it is written in the sentence “On this page…” above your table. Or you can use the “Insert a table” icon, which is just below the “visual” tab.

8. Assemble and edit your annotations into a coherent short analytic essay about three to five (3-5) paragraphs long. In the essay, your task is to flesh out what the precise link is between (a) the evidence from the article, (b) your annotated observation about that piece of evidence, and (c) the significance of your observation. Your essay should have a strong introductory opening, a clear and compelling sense of development, a clear topic sentence to begin each paragraph, explicit and articulated linkage of evidence to interpretation, and a strong conclusion.

(7) Select blog category from category choices–Blog 1.

(8) Add tags–the keywords of significance for your annotation and essay.

**Sample Blog Assignment 1 post: http://bfmf.northwestern.edu/blog/2013/01/01/sample-blog-1-assignment/**

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(9) Print, sign, and return Researcher Agreement Form (pdf).

(10) Print, sign, and return Transfer Agreement for Research Papers/Portfolios Form (pdf).

Blog Assignment 2: Timeline

1. Go to the Timeline JS website, read the “About” section (particularly the “tips and tricks”) and browse and play around with some of the example timelines.

2. At the top of the page, click on “File Formats” and then select “Google Doc Template.”

3. In Google Docs, use this template to create your timeline data. First, retitle the document as “Last Name – BFMF Timeline.” In the document, follow the template format but update the data provided to include information on at least 10 events you wish to portray in your timeline.

4. When your spreadsheet is complete, follow the instructions from the “File Formats” page on Timeline JS website.

5. In Timeline JS, go to the “Embed Generator” and paste in the link to your Google Doc spreadsheet. (You don’t need to worry about any of the settings, but feel free to play around with the font choices if you’d like.)

6. Click “Preview” to make sure everything looks the way you want it.

7. Copy the embed code.

8. In WordPress, create a new post.

9. Select the HTML tab and paste the embed code.

10. In Google Docs, for File > Download as > Open Document Format (.ods) and upload/insert that file into your blog post.

11. Compose your post and click the big blue “Publish” button when you are finished.

12. Develop a short essay (1-3 paragraphs) that reflects on the experience of developing a timeline for the folk revival. What was difficult? How did you choose certain names, dates? Using what you learned from the decisions you made for constructing your timeline, what observations do you now have about the history of the folk revival in the US? What observations do you have about the entire concept of constructing a historical timeline and thinking of history in a linear chronological manner?

13. Select category Blog 2.

14. Be sure to add tags (keywords) to your post.

Blog Assignment 3: WordPress Experiments 1

1. General introduction to WordPress, what you’ve done so far (assignments 1-2)

2. Log in to WordPress, navigate to your final project WP site

3. Update the site metadata (title, subtitle, etc.)

4. Log in to Omeka, browse, locate, download one object, http://webhost1.mmlc.northwestern.edu/bffsite/omeka/users/login 

5. Back in WordPress, create a new page and upload/insert object

6. Step back and discuss widgets, menus, navigation, etc.

7. Play around, change a few things, see what happens.

8. Make a post in your final project space: write one paragraph imagining the topic (performer) and theme on which your final project might focus. Use the column choices from the final assignment instructions: http://bfmf.northwestern.edu/blog/2013/01/30/final-project-instructions/.

9. Back on the spring 2013 collective blog create a post. Paste in your proposed topic and theme paragraph, followed by any questions you have about using WordPress, developing the final project, etc. What is still confusing? What else did you notice?

10. Chose category Blog 3.

12. Add tags (keywords) to your sring 2013 blog post.

Blog Assignment 4: Deformance

1. In Omeka (http://webhost1.mmlc.northwestern.edu/bffsite/omeka/users/login), browse and select an image that interests you to download.

2. Read all of “Glitching Files for Understanding: Avoiding Screen Essentialism in Three Easy Steps” by Trevor Owens.

3. Go back and follow the steps he took in the “Edit an Image with a Text editor” section using the image you downloaded from Omeka. Make sure to save each version of the file as you follow the instructions. When you are done you should have (1) the original .jpg file, (2) the post-cut up .jpg file, and (3) the .jpg file after you pasted new information in.

4. On the web, go to paper.js, select one of the examples, play around and then select “source in the upper right hand of the screen.” Try and read the code, look for numbers in blue, and experiment by inserting new numbers. Click “run” in the upper right hand corner of the screen and see what’s changed. Feel free to repeat/go crazy.

5. In WordPress, create a new post and upload/insert each of your 3 images.

6. Write a one-two paragraph reflection: Might the unlikely concept of “deforming” evidence lead to new historical insights or not? Did you notice anything new or surprising about the object by “deforming” it? What was your experience of playing with javascript in paper.js? What does code allow you to do with objects? Did this make you think about the archival material in a new way?

7. Be sure to choose category Blog 4.

8. Add tags (keywords) to your post.

Blog Assignment 5: Thinking Spatially – Geocoding

1. Explore examples of mapping and geocoding:

2. In WordPress, create a new post and click “Save as Draft.”

3. At the bottom of the page, under the text editor, locate the MapPress section. Select “New Map.” Give your map a title. [see How to use Map Press Pro (scroll down to the “Using the Plugin” section for details).]

4. Open the PDF of 1968 address cards: http://bfmf.northwestern.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/inu-brkflk-22-5-1.pdf

5. Select 15 or more artist address (when there’s a choice, use permanent address) and copy and paste each address into your map by under “Add Location.”

6. To edit and annotate each address, select it from the left side of the map and then select “edit” on the annotation box that pops up. Add title and annotation. You do not need to save the address in the annotation title and box once you enter it onto the map as Mapquest Pro preserves the address.

7. Give each location a different letter marker by clicking on the marker icon in the upper right hand corner of each annotation box. Choose the annotation markers with letter (A, B, C, etc.). Each location should receive a different letter.

8. When all of your addresses are entered, annotated, and marked, you can resize your map by using the plus, minus signs in the upper lefthand corner of the map and the center button located next to the save button.

9. Click “Save,” roll over your map title to reveal the option to “Insert Into Post.” Click on “Insert Into Post.”

10. Using the wp-table-reloaded plug in—http://bfmf.northwestern.edu/spring2013/wp-admin/tools.php?page=wp-table-reloaded—cut and paste your annotations into the table in your blog post [WP-Table Reloaded Instructions]. (You may alternatively assemble a spreadsheet on your own computer then cut and past annotations into the wp-table-reloaded template.) Each table item can be labeled using the respective letter of the marker in the time code slot, the title you have given the annotation for a title, and your annotation, plus any significance notes you wish to add.

11. Place your completed table into your blog post [WP-Table Reloaded Instructions].

12. Develop a brief explanation (one to three paragraphs) describing what you notice about your map. Are there any conclusions you can draw from the map? Anything that struck you in thinking spatially about performer locations?

13. Choose category Blog 5.

14. Add relevant tags (keywords) to your post.

Blog Assignment 6: WordPress Experiments 2

1. In WordPress, navigate to your final project space.

2. View your site and familiarize yourself its design and layout.

3. In the Dashboard, go to Appearance > Themes

4. Preview some of the themes and select a new one for your site by clicking on “Activate” under the theme of your choice.

5. View your site and see how its design and layout has changed.

6. In the dashboard, go to back to Appearance > Themes and under “Current Theme” see what types of options are available: Customize? Theme Options? Header? Any others? Feel free to change any of these settings—you can always undo them.

7. View your site again and capture it by taking a screenshot.

8. Repeat steps 4-7 with at least one other new theme.

9. In WordPress, create a new post on the collective blog. Upload/insert your screenshots to you post and then develop a one-three paragraph essay in which you note what strikes you about the relationship between theme design and historical narrative. Do the different themes offer different ways of telling a story? Describe specifically.

10. Choose category Blog 6.

11. Add relevant tags (keywords) to your post.

12. Finally, as you begin to develop your final project, in your site, add a preliminary interpretive digital history research question and thesis in a post, page, or widget (the question and thesis will most likely change as you continue your research).

Blog Assignment 7: History as Remix

1. Using Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net), create a remix using any of the sound files related to our course (archival recordings from the Berkeley collection or songs from the listening mixes). You may add additional material in if you wish.

2. Export your Audacity remix file as an mp3 file. Give it a title “Last Name – Remix.”

3. In WordPress, upload your Audacity remix mp3 file to the media library.

4. In WordPress, create a new post and link to your Audacity remix mp3 file.

5. Below the linked Audacity remix mp3 file, write a brief reflection (one-three paragraphs) that develops an explanation and analysis of your remix: what sound files did you bring together? What remix strategies/ideas/tactics did you use to create the remix? Did this make you think about the original recordings in a new way? How would you use your remix to think about the history of the folk revival or another related history topic.

6. Chose category Blog 7.

7. Add relevant tags (keywords) to your post.

Blog Assignment 8: Field Recording

1. Make a field recording of music, sound, or some other aural material and upload to the collective blog. You may use Garageband, Italk, or some other recording software of your choice. Ipads are available for rental at the library. Josh Honn and Brendan Quinn of the NU library are available for any technical consultation you might require. Output the file as an mp3 and use Audacity to edit if needed.

2. Develop a one-two paragraph essay describing and analyzing your field recording. What was it like to become a “song catcher,” or at least a “sound catcher”? Did it make you think about the work of folklorists such as Alan Lomax in a new way?

3. Chose category Blog 7.

4. Add relevant tags (keywords) to your post.

Blog Assignment 9: Wireframing

Now that you are familiar with WordPress and its themes, it’s time to begin creating wireframe and storyboards for your own final project. Even though the themes available to you may ultimately limit your vision, it’s good to use the wireframe and storyboard tools to map and design your argument for your online space.

1. Go to wireframe.cc (Wireframing is a practice that is still very paper-based, so feel free to mock-up your website on paper, take photos of those, and upload/insert them to WordPress. If you are using an iPhone, you may want to check out the POP app too.)

2. Begin drawing in the browser window provided. Play around with the tools available (add a picture, add some dummy text, etc.)

3. Construct a wireframe for the first page users will see when they visit your website.

4. Click the save icon and copy the unique URL that is created for your wireframe. Paste that URL somewhere safe so you can come back to it later.

5. Now begin a new wireframe for one of the pages in your website that is not the front page. Think about how that page might look different and how users will navigate from it to other pages, etc.

6. Repeat step 4 (and repeat step 5 as many times as you’d like).

7. In WordPress, create a new blog post and paste the two (or more) URLs of your wireframe

8. Develop a one-two paragraph reflection comparing your wireframe designs with any constraints you see for implementing the wireframe designs within WordPress. What might work? What is difficult to achieve? What is the interpretive thrust driving your design? What is the narrative of your design? How do these emerge within your wireframe? How might they function within your final WordPress project? What can you do outside of WordPress that themes enable within WordPress? What are the limitations of WordPress themes? Which theme might be most appropriate for your project? What else did this exercise make you consider about your final project and developing an interpretive digital history project in general?

9. Select category Blog 9.

10. Add relevant tags (keywords) to your post.

Blog 10: Tag Cloud Analysis/Reflections

1. In a WordPress blog post on the Spring 2013 Collective blog, analyze your experience of designing an interpretive digital history project in WordPress. How has working in the digital domain, particularly in WordPress, been similar and/or different from a traditional research essay? What do you feel you have learned thus far about the folk revival, modern U.S. history, digital history, or simply history in general? What have been the challenges, dilemmas, or problems of researching and writing history in this form?

2. Examine the collective blog tag cloud for the spring 2013 course. What do you notice in terms of keywords? Try pasting texts of posts into http://voyeurtools.org/. Do you notice anything qualitatively in the quantitative analysis of the corpus/archive of our course blog (or some portion of it)? If so, describe.

3. Look back at your initial sketch from our first class meeting, in which you quickly drew out a vision of what folk music was. Has your sense of folk music changed? Has anything been confirmed? Explain with reference to the sketch. Draw a new sketch and upload it to your post if you wish to do so.

4. Select category Blog 10.

5. Add relevant tags (keywords) to your post.

WGBH Media Library and Archives

Beth Corzo-Duchardt

From: Allison Pekel <allison_pekel@wgbh.org>
Date: Wed, May 1, 2013 at 12:04 PM

I am working with a project that I thought might be of interest to the
American History Community.

I work for WGBH, Boston in the Media Library and Archive and the Archive
has been funded by the Mellon Foundation to work with academic scholars who
have interest in utilizing our moving image and sound materials through the
course of their research. We hope to increase public awareness of the vast
collections that digital repositories hold by publishing our entire
archival catalogue online, for open access and use.

Placing the catalogue online however is only the first step, as records may
be incomplete or misleading. To help enhance the quality of our records, we
are inviting scholars, teachers and students to research our catalogue and
contribute their own discoveries and findings back to us. There are even
limited opportunities there to catalogue and curate an online collection
specific to your field of research as part of Open Vault (
http://openvault.wgbh.org<http://openvault.wgbh.org/>). Final products
could include essays on your topic, streaming public access to one
selection of media in your collection, supplying metadata for the items in
your collection and/or presenting your findings at a conference.

As a producer of Frontline and Boston Local News, we have quite a few
materials in the American History genre, so if you have an ongoing research
project and would consider utilizing moving image and sound materials in
your work, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Allison Pekel
WGBH Media Library and Archives
Allison_Pekel@WGBH.org

Kramer’s HASTAC 2013 Talk: The Digital Berkeley Folk Music Festival & the Sonification of the Ephemeral Past

Michael J. Kramer

Slides for my short talk today at HASTAC 2013 in Toronto. You can follow the proceedings online, many panels being streamcast, plus on Twitter at hashtag #hastac2013.

NU GIS Working Group Opportunity

Michael J. Kramer

From Ian Saxine:

Hello colleagues,

Ann Aler, the GIS specialist at the library, has agreed to host several training workshops for interested history grad students and faculty in the fall quarter of 2013. GIS (Geographic Information System) is a program that allows you to present and manage geographic data. Useful for everything from creating a customized map, to more complex tasks like categorizing, organizing, and presenting research findings (such as shifts in criminal activity in a city over time, economic patterns, etc.), GIS familiarity can enhance your dissertation or monograph. If people are interested in participating in several GIS workshops next fall (scheduling TBD) we have an opportunity to secure funding for them. The workshops would teach you to use the GIS lab technology in the library on your own in the future.

 

If you would like to participate, please send a brief response to iansaxine2014@u.northwestern.edu. The level of interest will influence the success of our funding proposal.

 

Regards,

Ian Saxine

Talk Today, 4/22: Sarah Igo, Tracking the ‘Surveillance Society’

Michael J. Kramer

DH-relevant talk today over at the Program in Science in Human Culture:

SARAH IGO (Vanderbilt)

“Tracking the ‘Surveillance Society’”

Description: This talk explores the cultural effects of new ways of housing and accessing personal data in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. It was in this period that citizens first mobilized around what they had known, in low-grade fashion, since at least the 1930s: that many agencies, public and private, were collecting information about them. New suspicions attended the mundane data-gathering operations of agencies like the Internal Revenue Service and Census Bureau, while hidden monitoring devices, vast warehouses of private information, and menacing bureaucracies loop through the cultural and political texts of the period. Faster computers, larger bureaucracies, and expanding databanks, I will argue, generated novel claims and claimants for the protection of “private” information. They also led to a distinctive understanding of the postindustrial U.S. as a “surveillance society,” which depended on the collection of personal data for its very operation.

Hagstrum Room (University Hall Room 201) on Mondays from 4pm-5:30pm.

http://www.shc.northwestern.edu/klopsteg/index.html

Fascinating and DH-relevant article by Igo: Sarah Igo, “Knowing Citizens,” Sensate Journal.

New Upcoming HASTAC Forums

Michael J. Kramer
HASTAC@NUDHL Scholars and other interested folks, HASTAC just announced three new upcoming forums.
Dis/Ability: Moving Beyond Access in the Academy:

http://hastac.org/forums/disability-moving-beyond-access-academy

  • What strategies do you use in your classrooms to increase accessibility or even to cater to or accommodate particular disabilities? What challenges have you faced making your classroom more accessible? Have some strategies backfired? Are there particular issues that have prevented you from making accessibility-related changes?
  • What technologies are people using (whether assistive technologies or broader tech like YouTube & Twitter) to meet the needs of students? What technologies are used to create and/or support online disability identities?
  • How can our own scholarly research be more accessible? I mean this both in terms of wider availability (open access publishing, perhaps) and in terms of ensuring that a range of people with various physical differences can access our new media projects. How might accessibility enhance a digital or multimodal project?
  • How does disability theory intersect with technology, particularly in relation to race & resistance studies; “assistive” technologies; innovation, hacking & appropriation; and gender & queer studies?
Alan Turing: The First Digital Humanist?
  • What does it mean to include Turing as a digital humanist?
  • Is the “uncanny valley” still a useful concept?
  • What does it mean to consider technology queer?  Is information queer?  How might both be queered and to what end?
  • In considering the idea of the posthuman as queer, can we understand disability and /or illness to always already be posthuman? To never be posthuman? something else? What is the role of the state in creating the posthuman through technologies such as Turing’s chemical castration?
  • Why has Turing been a particularly important icon when thinking about the history of computing? In which histories is he highlighted or ignored?
  • The history of cybernetics is full of other interesting thinkers and makers, and many have gone unsung. We’d love to hear about the people, inventions or movements that you can add to this history.
  • What are your most interesting questions about cybernetics, posthumanism or Turing?
Visualizing Geography: Maps, Place and Pedagogy
  • How can web tools represent the literary spaces that a reader encounters (or imagines) in literature? What types of tools would fill the existing technological gaps in geospatial information studies?
  • How do narratives travel and replicate over geographical space? What would mapping these processes yield? How can we do it?
  • Is it problematic to represent literary and historical geography with modern interfaces like Google Maps? Should we be concerned that these visualizations may not be accurate representations of how our subjects would imagine space, or can we be content in uncovering new (and previously impossible) readings of old texts?
  • How does using maps as a pedagogical tool affect our understanding of both real and literary environments? Does mapping change the way we make connections even when we aren’t thinking about geographical space?

NUDHL #6, Fri., 3/8, 12-2pm: Research Presentation – Michael J. Kramer, “Alan Lomax, Harry Smith, and the Proto-Digital Study of Folk Music”

Michael J. Kramer

THEME:

Alan Lomax’s controversial “cantometrics” study of folk music worldwide, begun in 1959, was an early use of quantitative data and digital technologies (punch cards) to study vernacular music and culture. Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, created in 1952 for the famous Folkways label, offered a different mode of research: a whimsically annotated, quasi-mystical collection of rare American folk, blues, and ethnic commercial recordings from the 1920s and 30s. As two distinctive sonic and informational conceptualizations of how to organize musical traditions, these “proto-digital” projects offer valuable lessons for thinking about the representation of folk music within contemporary digital humanities research, particularly when it comes to assembling and interpreting what a digital archive can be and do.

Additional material below.

TIME:

Friday, March 8, 2013, 12-2pm.

PLACE:

Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Conference Room, Kresge Hall, 1880 Campus Drive, #2-360, Evanston, IL 60208 (map: http://maps.northwestern.edu/#latlngz=42.051%2C-87.675%2C17&lookupid=116).

FOOD:

Lunch provided.

SLIDES AND TEXT OF TALK:

**PLEASE NOTE: THIS PRESENTATION IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR CIRCULATE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF AUTHOR, mjk@northwestern.edu**

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL:

More on The Berkeley Folk Music Festival and the Digital Study of Vernacular Music Project at www.bfmf.net.

Alan Lomax’s Global Jukebox Demonstration Video (1998):

A Cantometrics coding card:

Armand Leroi, “The Song of Songs” – Evolutionary biologist uses data from the Global Jukebox Project (video, 2007).

Cover of liner notes booklet to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952):

The rest of the liner notes are here.

Gadaya’s “Old Weird America”: an online study of the Anthology of American Folk Music.

Drew Christie’s “Some Crazy Magic: Meeting Harry Smith”: short animated film about John Cohen meeting Harry Smith:

Excerpt from documentary film about the Anthology of American Folk Music (From The Harry Smith Project: The Anthology of American Folk Music Revisited):

Alan Lomax’s Association for Cultural Equity.

Harry Smith Archives.

NUDHL 4: Critiquing the Digital Humanities, Fri, 1/25/13, 12-2pm, AKiH

Michael J. Kramer

Please join us for the fourth NUDHL research seminar of the year on Friday, 1/25/13, 12-2pm in the seminar room of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Here are the details on readings and location.

Hope to see you there!

X-Post: Digital American Studies

Michael J. Kramer

X-post from my Issues in Digital History blog:

reviewing lauren frederica klein’s review, “american studies after the internet.”

Lauren Frederica Klein’s illuminating book review, “American Studies after the Internet,” published in the December 2012 issue of American Quarterly, examines a number of new works related to digital culture in order to ponder what a digital American studies might be. Oddly, Klein spends much time focusing on how we might comprehend, define, historicize, and conceptualize the digital, but she never quite does the same for American studies. On one level, this is fine. After all, she is writing a book review with limited space. But she misses an opportunity to use new digital work to also grapple with recent transformations in American studies itself as it has moved definitely toward a merging with ethnic studies and a more overtly leftwing political agenda in its scholarship. How do the recent changes in American studies themselves connect to the rise of the Internet and the digital?

Klein’s review implies an important, but often overlooked, parallel between digital computing and American studies. They were both born from the political and cultural dynamics of World War II and the Cold War. The development of digital computing, from uses of the Turing machine to the development of ENIAC (by women, as Klein points out, drawing on the work of Jennifer Light), to the Internet itself, received an enormous boost from federal support for the war effort in the United States and from the rise of the military-industrial complex during the decades immediately thereafter. Similarly, American studies, while already developing before the war (as were explorations of computing of course), also took off in the aftermath of World War II. The US government, corporations, and foundations sought out and supported narratives of American exceptionalism to accompany the rise of American global empire. So too, scholars and citizens (and more often than not scholar-citizens) grappled with this situation (for an excellent glimpse at this in both American studies and early British cultural studies, see Joel Pfister’s marvelous book Critique for What? Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies).

So there is a very real historical connection here, one that both Klein and the writers whose books she reviews begin to explore: the digital and American studies have parallel, perhaps even intertwined, historical legacies in the American context of World War II and the Cold War. Perhaps this provides the background for why recent shifts in American studies have occurred at precisely the same time as the rise of the digital humanities. What it means to do American studies and what it means to pursue digital work collide around the struggle in recent United States history to grapple with a post-Cold War world.

The books Klein reviews suggest as much for the digital. All take a historically-informed and theoretically-inquisitive approach to the topic. Nathan Ensmenger’s The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programers, and the Politics of Expertise retraces the ways in which what we might call the gender “codes” of computer coding underwent a considerable change: what began as feminized clerical labor somehow became, in more recent times, the highly masculinized world of adolescent hackers, nerds, developers, macho entrepreneurs, and brainy boys. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Programmed Visions: Software and Memory probes the concept of software as a structuring digital media form that shapes knowledge and power in the contemporary world, creating hidden hierarchies within the very languages it uses, but also offering new opportunities for “intervention, action, and incantation.” Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White’s edited volume, Race after the Internet, asks not just how the digital has affected race in a supposedly (but never decisively) postracial age, but also whether race itself has become digitized, a set of codes, networks, and indexes that guide existence in America today. Finally, Matthew Gold’s celebrated essay collection, Debates in the Digital Humanities, which probes this amorphous but emergent field through collaboratively peer-reviewed essays, blog posts, and responses, rounds out the books she reviews.

But what of when and where the digital intersects, or at least runs in parallel, or even at times is directly in tension with American studies?

First the intersections. Today, both fields are dialectically implicated in the rise of certain modes of neoliberal economics. Digital humanities finds itself at once part of the logic of neoliberalism and a field of desires and efforts to oppose neoliberalism’s relentless effort to break down Cold War-era institutions of democratic collectivity (deeply imperfect and flawed in their time, of course, but in retrospect powerfully potential sites of social change). The university, the public school system, the social welfare system, the state itself: the digital is supposed to “transform” these through the pastoral dream of technological solutions to social and political problems (hello Leo Marx?). The political question is whether the digital humanities will merely become a mechanism for further destroying institutions or, alternatively, will it reinvigorate their best aspects? Does the digital humanities’s focus on “data,” for instance, offer deeper paths to quality knowledge, learning, thinking, and living, or does it introduce quantification’s dangerous potential for dehumanization (some digital “humanities” that!)? Will DH’s repeated calls for collaboration make intellectual labor (not to mention the labor that produces the equipment undergirding the so-called Information Economy) even more precarious and undervalued than it is already? Or will DH’s new approaches to knowledge be able to unleash a new vision of social democratic political economies suitable to the cooperative work so many envision the digital enabling? How will the pulsating networks of the digital relate to the traditional social safety net of the welfare state? What should the hierarchies—if any?—be in a world of digital modularity?

The digital is a kind of possibility, but also a problem for humanists (including those who advocate post-humanism, I would argue) as they struggle under difficult conditions to make sense of their own particular disciplines, of academia as a whole, and of the relationship of their intellectual work to the larger political dynamics of the contemporary world, a place in which the Cold War discourses and assumptions that gave rise to the digital as we know it no longer rule.

Similarly, American studies finds itself a central field in which scholars, activists (and scholar-activists) are attempting to piece together the complex ideological, affective, and corporeal relationships among factors of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, region, and class as *both* cultural and material factors, but are doing so without a fully clarified geopolitical framework in which to pursue this project of conceptualization. One danger here is that as American studies scholars gain ground on diversity issues, they are merely absorbed into the neoliberal economics of the university. How to conjoin calls for inclusivity to calls for democratic transformation of institutions at their root?

Another challenge in contemporary American studies for the digital age is raised in a book edited by Brian Edwards and Dilip Gaonkar, also reviewed in the December issue of AQ. How, I understand Edwards and Gaonkar asking, might American studies scholars think about America outside the binary between exceptionalist and anti-exceptionalist frameworks, both of which quite sneakily reintroduce the ideological debates of the Cold War era into today’s post-Cold War context? Does the digital, when both historicized and examined in its current ideological logics, appearance as functional tools, and formations as a set of semiotic codes and affective regimes, offer one way in which to offer some responses to the question posed by Edwards and Gaonkar? Perhaps.

“Why isn’t American studies more digital?” Tara McPherson asked at the 2011 American Studies Association conference. As Klein’s review begins to indicate, one answer to that important question may be that it is and always has been more connected to the rise of the digital than we realize. As scholars continue to work back through the intertwined wires (or at least the ones running in historical parallel) of American studies and the digital during World War II and the Cold War, we may also be able to look around now, at the labs and centers, conferencing and “un”-conferencing, the thinking and feeling, the scholarly inquiry and political possibilities, with more clarity as well.