Hi guys! The class has been a pleasure. Check out my final course website proposal below, and my prototype here. Also, if you’d like to gain access to the SharedDoc portion of the site, comment and I’ll send you an invitation. Thanks!

Introduction:

This website is envisioned as a crucial learning supplement to a proposed upper-level course in American intellectual history. Incorporating readings from journalists, cultural luminaries, reformers, and average people as well as the “great men” of the time, “American Thought in the Long Nineteenth Century” introduces students to some of the main trends in the intellectual history of the early United States. The course encourages students to critically examine primary documents and to relate them to the larger historical context.

This latter goal can prove rather difficult in a class where students have a wide range of ability levels and familiarity with the overall arc of American history. Thus, one of the major goals of this website is to provide differentiated background resources for the students in the course. This includes students who may be lacking basic definitions or general chronological mooring. Identifying and addressing these deficiencies in a class period can be difficult for a variety of reasons; however, with the final realization of this proposed website, students in need will have a low-threshold clearinghouse for information that is crucial to comprehending the primary texts. Furthermore, with links to external content and secondary scholarship on certain topics, advanced students will be able to independently move beyond what can be done in the classroom. The objective here, then, is to approach the students in ways that are appropriate for their varying needs, but that conserve the professor’s sanity and continue to reinforce the student’s ultimate responsibility.

In addition to the aim of supplying much-needed historical context, the site is also intended to provide students with tools and exercises designed to bolster their critical reading skills in directly useful ways. The syllabus incorporates a variety of reading assignments that use a collaborative annotation interface. By making the student reading and reaction process more transparent, the professor will be able to see where students are missing key points independently, therefore using instructional time more efficiently. Occasionally, the professor can model their own reading process for students, bridging the gap between their homework and the development of professional skills. Finally, on assignments that involve large-scale collaboration, students can help each other through difficult concepts, or engage in extended discussion about points of interpretation. The goal of these exercises is to get students to draw a firmer connection between reading merely to prepare for class, and reading as a process which stimulates thinking and comprehension.

Concept:

Keeping the goals of context, differentiation, collaboration and skill-building in mind, the project entered an initial stage of conceptualization and comparative research. Two main research strategies were utilized: an evaluative survey of some successful websites (course-based and otherwise), and an interview with the producer of a successful course website and with a member of the site’s target audience.

The first website surveyed was actually a book: Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. While there were many fascinating aspects to the book itself, the element most pertinent to this project was Fitzpatrick’s use of CommentPress, an application that allows readers to comment in the margins of the text. In addition to exploring CommentPress, other collaborative marginalia platforms were investigated, including a CommentPress variant called digress.it, and a collaborative document hosting service called SharedDoc.

Instructional websites were investigated next. Professor David Pace (Indiana University) hosts two main course websites: one for an introductory course aimed at first-year students, and an upper-level cultural history course about Paris and Berlin in the 1920s. Although they show their age a bit in terms of design concept, both are wonderful resources, filled with images, primary sources, and learning strategies that would be immensely useful to students in the course. Pace’s decision to split the site into three units, comprised of pages of origin for each week, each equipped with standard features (readings, questions, web resources) created a very straightforward format for the site. Each website incorporates the ability to submit weekly assignments through the site, ensuring that students are visiting the site at least once a week for a short amount of time. However, Pace’s assignments also require students to explore at least some of the content on the site, and occasionally other external sites. This is a good way to encourage students to see the website as an integral part of the course, rather than just an optional add-on.

I was also able to gain access to two course websites hosted by Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Harvard University). Professor Ulrich is well known for using digital media to enrich and extend her teaching – a wonderful example of this, albeit for a public audience, can be found at dohistory.org. The first of Professor Ulrich’s course sites is on New England as a region, and the other is about life in the Revolutionary War period. Like Professor Pace’s websites, these both utilize images of the period particularly well, helping students to begin to understand how to appreciate images as suggestive historical evidence as opposed to just aesthetically pleasing works of art. Professor Ulrich seems not to have arranged the site by units/weeks, opting instead for a conventional PDF syllabus. However, on the regional site, she does include a variety of activity modules which correspond with different phases of the class. Both of Ulrich’s sites incorporate a host of supplementary material, including primary sources, video clips, external resources and even the occasional chance to examine scholarly articles.

In order to find out more about the process of developing a course website, and using them in the classroom, I interviewed Professor Pace. He began developing his sites in the mid-1990s, after students’ repeated queries about images used in class made him realize how helpful it would be to have a clearinghouse for all of this visual information that would be impractical to include in a conventional course packet. (However, he also mentioned that many students still prefer printed readings.) Over time, the scope of the websites has shifted to support the submission of students’ weekly responses. Additionally, Pace mentioned that his own sense of the technology’s potential had shifted: “My breakthrough moment was when I realized that the set of limitation imposed by the technology had lifted. The site still needed a core, but my goal became to seed the site with materials that they could use, and to provide the students with tasks that would the materials without dictating the exact parameters.”

Pace also mentioned that students seemed to respond well to the technology – that most recognized the amount of work that had gone into the websites, and saw it as a good-faith attempt to connect with them in a comfortable medium. That viewpoint was echoed by a former student, who also appreciated that the website struck a balance between amorphous and super-structured. “Lectures are impermanent, so the website helps with that. […] It’s a meshing of assorted info, some of which is directly relevant, some of which is just interesting.”[5] The student also mentioned that it would be useful to have a digital element to the collaboration that Pace stresses in his classes, although he acknowledged that the quality would depend upon individual students’ willingness to contribute. Different motivational strategies for this collaborative work were discussed, including the concept of “micropayments,” where participation is recognized in a way that rewards effort, but makes it difficult to game the system without learning anything.

Development:

After this preliminary research, the project entered a pre-draft brainstorming stage, where ideas for the website interface were considered. The initial part of this phase involved synthesizing: (1) the evaluations of the website models surveyed; (2) the information gleaned from producer/consumer interviews; (3) the specific needs and goals of “American Thought in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Once a final design was selected, the project went through initial revisions as gaps between the original website plan and the designer’s technical skills appeared. Nonetheless, the prototype fulfills several important goals of the project as envisioned. The second unit has been developed most fully, but a similar vision should be assumed for all other units.

Adopting Professor Pace’s structure of units and lessons, the site has been constructed in three main sections, dictated by the syllabus. However, I have adopted the uniform sidebar idea from Professor Ulrich’s regional history website, thus facilitating easier navigability. Key concept pages for each lesson will provide the basic background information on things like Transcendentalism and the Mexican War, but they also hint at the vast majority of professional scholarship available on these topics. Biography pages provided for the author of each primary source help the student to connect the ideas on the page with the life experiences of these nineteenth-century individuals, and therefore to understand the role of intellectual history in the larger scope of historical change.

External links will take the student beyond the confines of the course website to approved educational resources, again expanding the amount of time that interested students are engaging with ideas relevant to the course. In addition to external links, extensive intra-linking helps students see how these thinkers and thoughts were connected in their time. This navigability between different themes and units should help students begin to think comparatively about the trends and main ideas of the course.

In addition to the contextual function of the website, the external SharedDoc platform and accompanying collaborative/demonstrative assignments and opportunities will help students approach the assigned texts more productively. Taking into consideration Professor Pace’s findings, these digital texts do not replace a printed course packet. They do go beyond the course packet, however, in that they can be used to create a digital transcript of students’ reading strategies, and promote a collaborative text-centered environment of reflection, discussion, and clarification. If students have found planned course websites helpful because they capture lectures that are otherwise transient, hopefully this flexible format can capture some of the give-and-take of classroom-style discussion.

Finally, students who need a concrete incentive to participate in the non-compulsory collaborative opportunities will find a reason in the potential to earn ¼ of an extra credit point per substantive comment, with a maximum of 5 points to be applied to their participation grade. Hopefully, after twenty answers, students might become acclimated to participation in the discussion! This incentive has the added benefit of getting them into the website itself, with the hope that they’ll use the information there to enrich their understanding of the material.

Future Goals:

Although the prototype for this course website shows promise, there are several improvements that could be facilitated by grant money or the services of a tech-savvy assistant. The most obvious goal is to finish the other two units, and to continue to add background information and externally-linked content to unit 2. (The benefit of using Dreamweaver and CSS, of course, is that flexibility of revision is built into the code.) With the help of a committed assistant, the biographical and “key concepts” content could become truly polished in a shorter amount of time, not to mention extensively digitally footnoted in ways that could lead students to helpful resources.

Another major goal would be to migrate the site to webspace that would support the CommentPress plug-in – or to design software that allows students even more control over the type of annotation that they do. While SharedDoc has many benefits, the fact that students must be invited to each document individually is inefficient, and the viewing panels leave something to be desired. An ideal interface would allow students to annotate graphically – highlighting, underlining, stars, double-bars, etc – and would enable threaded comments linked directly to lines or words, but would hide them behind an expand-text command or mouseover, so that the screen stays relatively uncluttered. It would also be good to have levels of privacy and visibility set, so that for some assignments, students could see each others’ annotations, collaborate and comment; and for others, the document would only display to them their own work. A highly-customizable master interface would be an integral part of this new software. Something that would allow the professor to cycle through students’ submissions on a single document, sort the responses according to specific passages or sentences, enable search strings, etc, would be ideal.

However, one thing about SharedDoc that would be good to retain and extend in later versions of the website is the capacity for levels of secrecy and private content. I’d like to be able to password protect certain parts of the website – especially if, as per another revision I’d like to make, students will be submitting some assignments online. It’s only reasonable that students’ contributions would be kept safe and non-searchable; and it would probably best if at least some of the original content of the website was kept under wraps.

Alternatively, another option would be to clone the course website and make a crowdsourcing-enabled public resource out of the primary source documents, biographies, key definitions, etc. Obviously, this would expand beyond the original structure of the syllabus, becoming more like an American intellectual history wiki. Students could contribute to this larger site, interacting with visitors of varying levels of expertise, and experiencing the challenges of creating quality content for a public site. This is rather a departure from the initial project, but the idea of student contributions could work even for the more conventional course website, as well.

Conclusion:

Ultimately, the goal of these proposed revisions, and of the website as it currently exists, is to pique students’ interest in learning about what can seem like a dry collection of opinions and essays – but which are crucial to questions about American identity and experience during the nineteenth century. Along with building interest, students will build foundational knowledge and critical reading skills, which are exportable to contexts beyond the history classroom. The course website for “American Thought in the Long Nineteenth Century” goes beyond what can reasonably be covered in the classroom; it is an invitation for students not only to work up to their potential in the classroom, but to learn and explore beyond the framework of the syllabus.

The readings for this week offered a wonderful blend of reflection on writing, thinking, researching, and teaching in the digital age. After designing a course website this semester (write-up to follow), I feel like I have a heightened appreciation for Professor Ulrich’s course websites, which manage to combine a wealth of information with easy navigability and an attractive design. As I’ve asked some previous presenters, I would love to hear some of your stories about teaching these courses: were they “born digital,” or did you incorporate a digital component into them later on? I would also be curious as to how flexible these websites are: with such a beautiful structure, do you and your students tend to treat the site like a museum, to be walked through and experienced? Or do you and your teaching assistants see the websites more as modular buildings, to be altered and shelved and expanded and contracted in response to the needs of the individual class?

Finally, I’d love to hear some of your thoughts about the footprint of A Midwife’s Tale, both in the field and in the public eye. Has your relationship to this unique project has changed over time, especially as it’s become symbolic of the vast potential audiences that exist for works that combine solid historical scholarship with approachable prose (and appealing central figures!)

…but in doing some background reading for my course website, I came across just that very thing (page 54, in case the link isn’t exact).

Not only is it a jarring reminder of the human labor that goes into this project, it’s just plain jarring and kind of creepy! (And makes it tough to read Lowell’s snark on Margaret Fuller, too.)

I assume that you both will give us some background as to how you arrived at the point where you decided that your courses needed a significant digital element, but just in case — that’s something I’d really like to know more about! Had you taught these courses in a more traditional form, or were they “born digital,” as it were? If there was a transition involved, what factors really made you decide to embrace this technology? Were your projects developed “in isolation” (or with a co-teacher), or did you have significant support either from IU or colleagues at other institutions?

I’m also interested as to how/if the feedback from students has changed over time. The articles suggest that students generally appreciate the attempt to reach them in a format that is more “native” to many of them — but I’m wondering whether this willing adoption was always the case,  if it’ll continue to be so, and what the costs are of assuming that all students are prepared to work in this digital paradigm.  For instance, my initial impression of T. Mills Kelly’s article from 2000 was that it was dated — 40% of his kids don’t own their own computers?! …and then I thought more carefully about the assumptions of class and culture that were evident in that reaction. Still, obviously campuses have made enormous strides towards providing labs and rental equipment that close some of those gaps. (These days the great hardship seems to be intermittent wifi.) But I’d love to know if either of you have had any type of significant student resistance to this format or if you’ve found a learning curve that have changed how you approach digital pedagogy or the requirements of your courses.

Another question that these articles address (rather brilliantly, in some cases) is the problem of actually measuring whether digital pedagogy is more or less effective than traditional forms of teaching. Have either of you have experimented with these comparative methodologies? What means do you both rely on to gauge the effectiveness of new digital strategies and formats? And, while I realize that the plural of anecdote is not “data,” do you have any information about how students who are taught with these methods perform in their later history classes?

Finally, with continued reference to the larger collegial context: Professor Pace, in Amateurs in the Operating Room, you comment that one factor that may discourage adoption of the scholarship of teaching and learning is its incompatibility with pre-existing structures of faculty evaluation.  This question of how (or if) non-traditional forms of scholarship/research/service  “count” in the tenure process seems to be coming up again and again for me this semester, whether in your article, the other projects in the digital humanities that we’ve examined, or some of the “public intellectual” political/advocacy/activist work that I’ve been discussing in my AMST class. I wonder if you or Professor Capshew could provide some historical perspective on how institutional recognition of these very valuable types of work has changed or has changed since you wrote the article, or even since you’ve been teaching. Professor Capshew, using the model of your 2020 unit in the IU class, I’d also love to hear your predictions for how this might change in the future, as well.

Thanks for sharing the two chapters of your upcoming book — it was really fascinating not only to read about historians’ projects that merge GIS and humanist aims, but also to think through some of the philosophical implications of the GIS data project. I discovered that while I like to think of myself as a cultural historian and someone semi-hip to postmodernism, thinking spatially apparently stimulates the positivist in me: mound or mountain, you’re still going to burn more energy going over it or around it (or through it).

Nonetheless, I certainly recognize the imperative of maintaining a plurality of vision when it comes to mapping space and place. To those ends, we’ve been discussing crowd-sourcing on and off through this course, as well as Google, with all its benefits and drawbacks. I’m wondering if you had any thoughts about the individual mapping technology that Google provides — the power to label, annotate, demarcate — and share —  multiple maps of your own, based on their data. While it’s lacking some of the fluidity that we would ideally want for smooth historical simulation, this seems like it could be a good teaching tool for students starting to think about cultural fluidity of space and place, as well as a personal tool for historians trying to map changes in the landscape over time.

The project that I intend to attempt for this class is a course website for a syllabus I made last semester. American Thought in the Long Nineteenth Century is obviously an intellectual history course, but since I take a rather broad view of “intellectual history,” the assigned readings come from philosophers, political thinkers, public intellectuals, journalists, cultural luminaries, social scientists, reformers, etc.  Students taking the course thus must be able not only to parse nineteenth-century prose (something which often throws them), they must also be able to parse it as a historian would – i.e, with an awareness of pretext, context, subtext and retext that comes from a wider awareness of the social and intellectual milieu in which these people were operating.

This can be very difficult to accomplish in one semester – particularly if students are coming in with minimal background.

So, the point of creating a course website is to give my students an opportunity to rehearse these skills and gain some larger context in a way that I simply don’t have the time to execute in the classroom – even if I was able to discern absolutely what the majority of the class’s “needs” in that department seemed to be. In addition, it allows for some differentiation – students who need basic context can get it, while more advanced students can explore parallel and related content offered by other websites.  On a more basic level, it will give the class a sort of “virtual center,” an organized zone of community and intellectual interchange that is accessible 24/7. Shy students, or students who are not morning (or even afternoon) people may be able to use the project’s interactive features to shine outside the bounds of the 90 minute sessions twice a week.

I have big dreams for the website (obviously), but I also realize that I have limited skills and time within which to accomplish this project for evaluation in this class. I have included below a list of objectives for the actual site that I THINK I’ll be able to accomplish before May 4.

A reasonably well-designed home page for the site. One of Professor Sword’s mandatory items, this home page will establish the “tone” of the site, and will force me to think about overall organization and navigation. These sorts of spatial and design considerations will also clarify the raison d’etre of the site – just like in a colloquium paper, I’ll need to “signpost” the parts of the site that most directly accomplish the goals of the project! While I know that I can figure out the actual plumbing of the web coding (thank you Dreamweaver), I *am* concerned about stuff like graphic design, etc. I’m nobody’s artist, especially not in the medium of pixels, and I’d like this to look decent.

Pages devoted to individual lesson days for at least one of the three “arcs” of the class. While I want to make sure that students can still rely on my printed syllabus, the online “syllabus” with pages of origin for each lesson will allow students both to focus on the themes of that individual day or week, and to connect those themes with previous material, and material outside my own site. Obviously something like this will be a work in progress throughout my teaching career, as links die, new content is generated, and as I re-organize the class according to what worked and what didn’t.  But these lesson pages should provide some of the basic context and advanced connection to which I referred earlier.

An interactive repository of most class readings for at least one of the three “arcs” of the class. Since one of my main goals for the class is helping students learn to read a text like historians do, I want them to be able to participate “publicly” in the digital annotation and interrogation of important texts.  I’ve been experimenting with different formats that might allow me to do this – Digress.It  is one option, as is something called SharedBook. I’m hoping that my classmates will join me in taking these for a test run, and will give me some feedback as to the benefits and drawbacks of both projects. (If you email me, I’ll invite you to the SharedBook text I have so far!) I’m probably going to have some trouble integrating these applications into my actual site, so they may be sort of an independent paratext to the website – mandatory linkage for the students on each lesson page.

I see these interactive texts as functional in four ways:

Elucidatory: On the most basic level, this should help kids who maybe just don’t GET what the passage is saying, or who don’t understand specific words in their archaic context. The ability to explain this stuff outside of class, complete with OED or even (gasp!) Wikipedia linkage will hopefully encourage students to ask questions that will enable them to get beyond wrestling with the text as “big words”, and to let them see what it’s actually doing rhetorically and argumentatively, and what those ideas mean for trajectories of American thought.

Didactic: Since I plan to sprinkle some of these with my own thoughts, this can help kids see how trained historians approach a text that they’re unfamiliar with, connecting it to their own research and what they already know. The process of making connections across different genres and periods should be helpful for the exams and for conceptualizing the larger arcs of change over time.  

Collaborative: Since students can respond to each other’s comments, the marginalia function should hopefully allow for some co-teaching that isn’t as intrusive (or as chaotic) as in-class group work can be. Ideally, I hope that students will answer each other’s questions, pose new ones, and debate points in the margins – just like in old colonial newspapers.

Evaluative: I’d need to think further about how I wanted to assess students’ participation in these discussions – personally, I hate the “comment at least twice on the class blog” type assignments, because you tend to get crap from students. This might shift from year to year, depending upon students’ level of skill and engagement.  However, you should be able to trace at least a bit from this online activity which students are really getting it, and which need a little more help.

A formal project proposal will also accompany these digital offerings. I envision the proposal as expanding upon the background, scope and rationale for the project that is offered here, as well as offering a comparative dimension provided by my analysis of other course websites.  I am, however, somewhat concerned about my ability to gain access to other course websites, particularly beyond the scope of IU. Most professors understandably try to keep their course sites within the circle of the class, both for issues of copyright and student privacy. I have already arranged to interview Professor David Pace, who has expended a great deal of time over the years in compiling his course websites. I’m hoping that he can both give me some perspective on the creation process and also maybe point me to some other quality examples! Still, the question of access to source material may limit my ability to do as exhaustive a comparison as I would like.

While I know we’ll be doing a poster presentation on April 16^th, I’m hoping to incorporate feedback from my fellow students into the process in these early design stages. I mean this particularly on the interactive features, but I would also appreciate any “design for dummies” suggestions you might have – or even challenges to the merit/purpose of the project. Does the marginalia idea sound gimmicky, rather than helpful? Do you have other sites or applets you’d like to suggest , or websites about the nineteenth century that you think my site should link to? Finally, I’ll email my syllabus and rationale from last semester out so that people can have some context for this whole thing!

It’s nice to see that the Oral History Association’s General Principles and Best Practices for Oral History recommend a “lead” that would address some of the questions about metadata ( location, date, “publisher”, etc) that we’ve been talking about with reference to more conventional texts. However, I’m curious about the challenges of recording what you might consider the non-textual metadata particular to oral history – things like posture, fidgeting, gaze, emotion, expression, eye contact — in short, body language rather than just spoken words. This is particularly interesting to me in terms of indexing and searchability of non-textual elements. I have a friend who’s in a class about the politics of emotion right now, and I would imagine that a search function that enabled him to search for tears or laughter in a repository of oral histories would be tremendously useful!

Of course, I can also see some  issues arising from the attempt to index this sort of data — the role of the interviewer in interpreting/codifying the source’s body language, particularly through the filter of age, physical debility, or cultural difference, could get very subjective or judgmental. Nonetheless, it seems like an important aspect to consider when thinking about making these texts available! Anyway, I would be very curious to hear your thoughts about the usefulness of this type of data: how you’ve interpreted it sensitively within the context of your own work, and/or how you envision the interaction of digital access and oral history.

Along with Franco Moretti’s piece in the New Left Review, reading the intro and conclusion to the Fall 2009 issue of Representations stretched some old comparative literature muscles that I haven’t used in quite a while! As a historian, I’m fascinated by the larger social context of these modes of criticism — specifically the symptomatic reading as a result of the 1960s Marxism-inflected imperative towards ideological demystification, etc. (Conclusion 143). I’d be interested to hear what you think about the influence of computers/ the Internet, and free-market/free-information ideologies as perhaps a similarly important influence on “how we read now.” Although the intro piece does touch upon literary critics’ possible use of computers as a means of analysis and taxonomy that gives more attention to rich surface information (17), there’s not much attention given to the impact of the more democratic creation and dissemination of  creative and critical texts that the Internet enables. Could an distinctly expanded (though still exclusive) arena of textual production and engagement have contributed to the decline of the heroic model of criticism? Or has the model of the heroic critic simply moved elsewhere? And do the activist/re-activist hallmarks of Web 2.0 — comment threads, forums, Twitter feeds, wikis — have an impact on this new version of symptomatic reading that envisions itself as reading “beside” the text? (Conclusion 145)

Finally, any thoughts about the impact of the explosion of amateur-created textual media on the work of either historians or literary critics? I concede without debate the fact that much of the Internet’s user-created content is of minimal merit — even as I muse that historians and scholars of cultural studies have done good work with fragments of low culture. Nonetheless, much of what’s produced may rightfully be below the radar of  literary scholars. Still, to appropriate Moretti’s term,  I see the possibility of  a “wave” of text threatening to overwhelm us in the era of digital abundance! To take a different tack though, despite Mayer-Schonberger’s assertions to the contrary, I do worry about the plasticity of digital records — the ability of persons to delete or alter the text and record of reaction in ways unnoticed by the casual observer. Issues of “edition,” authority, and citation become problematic in the digital age.

Apologies for a long set of rambling questions!  I will be attending the entire session on Thursday (barring any unforeseen schedule snafus), and I look forward to your response to any of this that might be relevant to your own work.

Of course, the VWPP is more than a historical artifact — it’s also a useful database which is being revamped and expanded to take advantages of the technical advances since 1996. I look forward to hearing about the goals of the project tomorrow! I am particularly curious about how the VWPP 2.0 will factor in some of the concerns about metadata that were raised in the readings for last week. Also, I wonder whether there will be any attempt to provide an interactive element to the new project — whether crowd-sourcing information, forums for discussion of these texts and apposite context, or a “behind-the-scenes” sort of blog for visitors to see how the project continues to evolve.

These are, of course, elements to keep in mind as I consider my own project for this class — a course website for a class on American intellectual history in the nineteenth century. Since I’d like to integrate the website into students’ experience of the class, obviously I need to make sure that there are interactive elements that guide them through the material and allow them to record their reactions, questions, and interpretations.  It would be interesting to find a way to feature user-created content, as well. Do you think a “class blog” would be useful or merely a gimmick? Alternatively (or in addition), it would be great to have them do some reading of the class texts online, using the CommentPress software that Kathleen Fitzpatrick uses for Planned Obsolescence.  This would let me pose reading questions to them “in the margins,” and to have them respond with their own marginalia. I need to think more about the benefits and drawbacks of this technology, but I think it could have distinct uses for helping the undergrads learn how to read a text in the same way that historians do — a major bottleneck identified by the History Learning Project.

My original idea in using the Nineteenth-Century United States Newspapers Database would be to test how good the database was at registering text in classified ads — material that might be considered “unimportant” by digitizers not thinking historically, or material filled with graphics and font changes that might puzzle OCR scanners, resulting in a high degree of inaccuracy. The results that I got from typing in several search strings (“Chinese restaurants,” “Chinese restaurant,” “Chinese cookery,” etc) showed me that either I was correct in diagnosing classified ads as a weak point of the newspaper database…or that most Chinese restaurants did not take out newspaper advertisements in this period…or that the database’s holdings only represent newspapers from towns where Chinese restaurants didn’t take out newspaper advertisements. To test whether my results were at fault, I checked the New York Times, and rather few hits on Chinese restaurants came up before 1900.

Despite the lack of classified ads, however, I was surprised at the frequency with which Chinese restaurants were mentioned within regular news articles. Although the database turned up no hits before 1850, 310 citations were found between 1850 and 1899. Some of the most fascinating of these pieces were essentially a hybrid between a restaurant review and a feature piece, as in “A Cuttle-Fish Dinner: A Reporter Dines with the Editor of The Chinese American” (Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, 5/20/1883; reprint from New York Morning Journal). Some, like “Row at a Chinese Restaurant” (San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, 6/10/1859), simply mentioned events at a Chinese restaurant, while others mentioned Chinese restaurants within the context of the article, like “The Cleanly Heathen” (Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, 7/17/1879):

“NEW YORK, July 16 — The Tribune, describing the visits of the tenement house inspectors to the worst places in baxter and other streets, says, “The Chinese have taken possession of South Mott street. It is  curious fact that while the most debased among the Irish women of the quarter live with brutal Italians, the younger, best looking, and neater of the live from choice with the Chinese on Mott street, who it is said treat them kindly, do most of the housework themselves and make provident masters. Even the basement rooms inhabited by them smell sweeter than the upper stories where the Italians congregate. At a Chinese restaurant across the street, four Chinamen were found at dinner. The neatness of the table and appearance of the viands would have done credit to a second-class American restaurant, at least. The ware was apparently of choice patterns of porcelain and the food quails and rice.”

The great benefit of an archive like this is the searchability of massive amount of text. From the small article above, which easily could have escaped indexing in more conventional periodical sources (and which could have been indexed under “tenement” or “Chinese” or “marriage, relationships, and family” instead of “restaurants,”), the reader learns about middle-class impressions of working-class approaches to race and sexuality;  she sees early signs of Asians being presented as the “model minority”; she sees that Chinese restaurants were presented in some sources as palatable venues; she catches hints of journalists’ tendency to portray Asians as insufficiently masculine; and (after seeing that many of the earlier articles come from the West), she learns that readers in the Midwest were interested in learning about conditions in the slums of New York.

The Nineteenth-Century United States Newspapers Database is fairly easy to navigate, with a user-friendly interface that allows the researcher to search by keyword and to restrict the search by specific date, date range, and to select individual papers or states in which to search. It keeps a list of past searches, which can be recalled at any time during the search session — very useful when tabbing between search strings and following up impulses from one article to the next. Sources can be printed, or a whole set of them can be emailed as a full-text PDF file to the researcher — a very useful tool for someone compiling their own digital archive on a topic. Plaintext citations can also be emailed.

However, there are limitations — one of the big ones being that the articles are images or PDFs, and not designed for interaction with the text. Quotes must then be retyped as opposed to copying and pasting them. Also, as the historian-bloggers from this week’s assignment suggest, there are quality issues with the automatic scanning and text-recognition, as in the article titled “Chinese CooAery” (the top half of the “k” was lighter than the bottom angle, resembling the pointed angle of an A). And as mentioned, while the range of texts offered is amazing for the scholar willing to search through throwaway references to the topic at hand, for the scholar who wishes a level of specificity somewhere between “mentioned in the title” and “mentioned fulltext,” the lack of filter may be frustrating. (Nonetheless, I have to imagine that it beats the heck out of simply paging through old papers hoping to find something!)

While my original classified ad idea is less plausible with this archive, the project it does suggest — tracing the appearance of Chinese restaurants throughout journalism more generally to gain a sense of regional variation in opinion and gradual attempts to “know” the Chinese — would be well supported by Google Books as well. Google Books yielded a selection of periodicals with articles on Chinese restaurants and cooking, many of which would be useful in the same ways that I envision sources from the first archive being useful. There were also a variety of books that includes chapters on the Chinese and their restaurants. However, it’s important to remember that a scholar who had really done his or her work would also combine research on these digital sources with work at a physical library, in order to take advantage of the resources available on microfilm and microfiche, and perhaps smaller ethnic newspapers that haven’t been well-digitized. For example, if copies of Chinese-American newspapers have been preserved, it would be interesting to see how and if Chinese restaurants (or restaurants in general!) advertised there, and how the copy from one imagined audience to the next might have changed.

In summary though, there’s no doubt that digitization has changed how we research. The types and amount of sources we expect to be able to master for a project, the types of sources we imagine (and forget) to consult, and the way that we organize our ideas and research have all changed because of digitization and widespread availability of sources. I feel privileged to have university access to these databases, but I must agree with Dan Cohen that some similar public job needs to be undertaken in order to create similarly rich public archives. (Anti-recession digitization boondoggle jobs, anyone?)