2008
Excitement about the Obama Campaign
My son, who is in the eleventh grade, has long supported Senator Obama, but now he is even making phone calls on behalf of the Obama campaign. It does my heart good to see youth get excited and even hopeful about politics in this way. Sure, my son didn’t grow up on Watergate and defeat in Vietnam, as I did, but his generation was exposed to other things that could be expected to cause cynicism, namely the scandals surrounding Clinton’s sex life and Congress’s ridiculous decision to impeach him. The way that Bush came to the White House the first time or the U.S. started the war in Iraq could also be expected to make youth feel cynical and powerless. Instead though, there are people like my son who have decided that cynicism has no place in their lives or this country’s political future. Good for them.
When Experts Are Forced to Talk to Outsiders
Baking Bread
We were out of bread, and my wife asked me if I would bake some. It had been a while, so I said yes. Now three small loaves of whole-grain wheat bread are rising on a cookie sheet with a clean thin cotton towel over them. They look beautiful too. If only I had a camera! Of course, then I’d also have to know how to use it. Food photography, I suspect, is not easy.
The bread contains whole-grain wheat flour, yeast, water, barley syrup, oil, and salt. Simple, healthy ingredients. Also good was all the kneading. There’s something satisfying about that. The bread tastes twice as good when I make it myself, maybe because it is part of a more authentic experience than going to the store represents.
One thing I would do, if I had my druthers, would be to grind the flour fresh from wheat berries. But we don’t have a mill like we used to when we were living in Augsburg, Germany back in the early 1990s. Also, wheat berries are expensive and not available here in DC in large quantities. In Augsburg my wife drove with a friend out to a farmer to buy sacks of grain—wheat, spelt, rye, barley, millet, and Grünkern (spelt harvested while only half ripe and then roasted). We ground the grain as we needed it with a little electric mill. We milled fine flour for baking or course stuff for cooking entrees of various kinds.
Now the bread’s in the oven.
Baking bread requires several periods of waiting. First I had to wait for the water and yeast mixture to bubble. During that time I made supper. Then I had to wait for the dough I made rise. During that time I made some whole grain ginger cookies. Then I punched down the dough, made the loaves and had to let them rise. Washed dishes, listened to the news, and began some blogging. Forty-five more minutes till nirvana.
I used to bake a great deal more, and then I went years without doing it. I started again last winter, but the heat in the summer put me off it. Well, winter’s here again, so a hot kitchen feels good.
Google Alternative to Wikipedia?
Adam C. Engst of Tidbits reports that Google is talking about creating an alternative to Wikipedia in which each page or “knol” is controlled by one author. The idea is to give Google a chance at reaching the first spot in its own search results so it can serve ads on that page. Like Engst, I’m unimpressed.
Knol is an interesting example of the tension in Google between its primary mission as a search engine and its competing goal to provide platforms for generating ad revenue. While this new project does not mean Google has turned to content creation itself, I wonder how neutral it will be when it comes time to serve links in its search results. It has been neutral with pages served by two of its other children, Blogger and Google Page Creator. Let’s hope that trend continues.
Historians Speak about the Profession
Producing Knowledge
Mills Kelly of Edwired responds to the notion that the historical profession is about writing and therefore about publishing in traditional academic print media:
It seems to me that the essence of scholarship is the circulation of knowledge and the discussion of that knowledge among both peers and other interested parties. How is knowledge circulated? Print, the Internet, a museum exhibit, film, radio, are all methods for circulating knowledge and all of them require some sort of writing–even if that writing doesn’t result in yet another monograph or journal article. Just as one example–this blog had more than 75,000 unique visitors in 2007. If I’m lucky, my book will sell 1,000 copies. So how is more knowledge circulated?
Teaching Survey Courses
In The AHA Guide to Teaching and Learning with New Media, John McClymer makes an interesting point about one major difficulty of teaching introductory history classes:
I routinely begin our explorations of topics by asking students to come up with questions. There are several reasons. The most important is that it legitimates confusion. All learning begins in puzzlement, but teachers and students routinely connive in the illusion that students understand the causes of the French Revolution and any number of equally complex developments. The first and second year students in my “Modern Europe and U.S.,1815 to the Present” do not. This is not a failure on their part or mine. A good undergraduate math student can learn to integrate equations in a Calculus I course. An equally good history student cannot master the causes of the French Revolution in an introductory history course.
Ron Paul: Paranoid Racist
James Kirchick published a piece called Angry White Man in The New Republic on January 8th. Kirchick waded through some three decades' worth of Ron Paul’s newsletters, which he quotes extensively. I do not want to repeat the inflammatory racist and paranoid language he found, but Kirchick’s summary of the newsletters' source value bears repeating.
What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing–but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.
Normally I would just ignore a right-wing crank like Paul, but he’s been gaining too much respectable attention lately. I’ve also seen well-meaning opponents of the Iraq War support him who would be horrified by his decades-long history of racism and fear-mongering. The more blog posts about this subject the better.
Maybe the mainstream media will finally pick up on it for the presidential debates. Who knows? Maybe Ron Paul’s fellow Republicans will show some backbone and call him out on this too. Or are they afraid of losing the votes' of Paul’s supporters after he loses the primaries? Something needs to happen. As Kirchick writes,
Ron Paul is not going to be president. But, as his campaign has gathered steam, he has found himself increasingly permitted inside the boundaries of respectable debate. He sat for an extensive interview with Tim Russert recently. He has raised almost $20 million in just three months, much of it online. And he received nearly three times as many votes as erstwhile front-runner Rudy Giuliani in last week’s Iowa caucus. All the while he has generally been portrayed by the media as principled and serious, while garnering praise for being a “straight-talker.”
The truth about this man deserves the widest possible audience.
See also Selections from Ron Paul's Newsletters. Hat tips to Deborah Lipstadt for pointing out Kirchick's article in her blog and Ian Thal for pointing out the separate piece summarizing highlights from the newsletters.
Nonsmoking Workers Fired in Germany?
There’s a strange story going around that in northern Germany the boss of a computer company fired employees who had requested a non-smoking workspace. To avoid such complaints in future, he has vowed only to hire smoking employees. Other sources say the three employees were fired for other reasons. And then there’s a commenter for the story who says he made it all up. Wherever the truth might lie, the story’s resonance (evidenced by the accompanying comments as well as those on another site that picked it up) points to an interesting circumstance: non-smokers in Germany are increasingly willing to stand up for their right to clean air, and smokers have to defend their supposed right to smoke. This situation is the opposite of what I experienced in the previous two decades. The balance is tipping.
When Google Gets it Wrong
My wife is reading a crime story I got for Christmas and read over the holidays, Christian von Ditfurth, Mann ohne Makel. It's sleuth, Josef Maria Stachelmann, is a historian of the Third Reich. Wonderful read, if you know German. Anyway, my wife asked me about the Hossbach Protocol that Stachelmann is supposed to give a talk about. My memory failed me, so I took the easy way out with Google. Bad idea.
The first two hits on Google led to web sites that seek to appear legitimate, but which are in fact sites that deny the Holocaust and consider the Nuremberg Trial a travesty of justice. How did Google mess this up? Have some Nazi would-be academics learned search engine optimization (SEO)? Or was this blind luck? I'm not sure how Google's search engine works, but the results here certainly point to the limitations of algorithms that rely on the syntactic relevance of a site. Also, while no one is linking to the articles about the Hossbach Protocol directly, there are many links to the main sites on which the articles appear. (You can determine who is linking to a site by typing link:www.name-of-site.com into the Google search box, unless the site is using the nofollow attribute in its links.) In other words, the sites appear to be popular and therefore relevant in Google's eyes. In fact, Google has blessed both sites with respectable, if not overwhelming page ranks (PR). The first one Historical Revisionism, comes in at a PR 4, and the second one, Institute for Historical Review, at PR 5 on a scale of 0 to 10.
Now I could stop with this warning about the limitations of Google search results, but perhaps there is more to be learned here. Perhaps I should also issue a plea to historians to both learn SEO and write for general audiences on the web. Like it or not, Google is the first place many people turn for answers, and anyone seeking one on the Hossbach Protocol can be easily led astray. Actually, historians might not even need to learn SEO. Wikipedia already has a high page rank and its pages turn up regularly at or near the top of Google search results. Perhaps all that is needed is more and better Wikipedia articles. The Hossbach Protocol doesn't show up in Wikipedia. If it had, the search results would have been different.
Wikipedia brings up another twist. Typically, when one uses one term in Wikipedia that is more commonly known by another, Wikipedia will at least offer alternative results. (It's better than Google that way. Google can only offer spelling alternatives.) In this case, though, the more typical American name for this document did not show up in the search results. Only after I typed Hossbach Memorandum did I find what I was looking for. I then typed this term into Google and came up with much more satisfactory results. Only one of the right-wing links came up on the first page, and this time near the bottom.
This final result brings me back to Wikipedia and SEO. We need to enter all possible variations of terms in Wikipedia articles so that they show up in search results. (Sure, I should have entered "Hossbach Memorandum" right from the start, but I translated directly and that was that. As the first set of search results shows, others have done so too.) We also need to do the same thing with web articles and blog posts. It won't do to leave the field open to the bad guys, simply because the world of SEO isn't part of our training and does not make or break historical careers. I don't know if Deborah Lipstadt does any SEO, but her three-year-old blog combats holocaust denial and has a PR 6. More established historians need to follow her example in their respective fields.
The Ups and Downs of Tumblelogs
I began blogging in May 2007 with a tumblelog on Tumblr. A tumblelog is a loose collection of images, quotes, videos, sounds, and short chunks of text. I’ve seen the genre compared to a stream of consciousness, although we’re not talking The Sound and the Fury here. In fact, there is no stream but rather bursts of varying length at random intervals. Hence one journalist has called the tumblelog the punk rock of blogging, an apt comparison insofar as tumblelogs are also lean and often undisciplined. But punk offers more coherent narratives than most tumblelogs I’ve seen.
I used my tumblelog for fun and random thoughts, but soon I began blogging for real on Blogger about history and the Mac. The point was to teach and help out. The focus was narrow. My “real” blog was still my tumblelog, where I put the most interesting tidbits from past and present.
After some six months of blogging, however, I have found that there is much more interest in my blogs than my tumblelog. Part of the reason is that my blogs offer hard information, but my previous post suggests another compelling reason for the lukewarm response to my tumblelog. People with a natural appetite for narrative and an authentic voice leave my tumblelog amused, perhaps, but still hungry.