"Journalism schools across the country are now focused on "convergence" -- the need to impart skills to students in multiple media techniques (video, photography, writing, sound, new media) -- in order to meet the needs of a multiplatform industry. But they miss the essential point: stories will not be told in the same way. The power relationships among author, subject, and reader will evolve, as will the filters, and the linear narrative based on the authority of a single voice, is up for grabs in an increasingly nonlinear, decentralized media environment."
-- Fred Ritchin, After Photography (W.W. Norton, 2009), p.109
While there used to be much excitement about "CD-ROMs" and then "websites" for scholarly publishing, the iPad (and within a couple of years, its imitators), offers academic authors a fundamentally new way to think about our role as "authors" and how we educate the next generation of historians. Since the iPad is still a couple of months from market, this is pure conjecture at this point based on the tantalizing scraps that the unveiling provided and the explosion of commentary among tech geeks and wizards about what they think they know about it. (For two good examples, see the epic coverage provided by Macbreak Weekly or the more concise remarks by John Gruber on CBC's Spark, for example.)
Despite being somewhat heretical for a historian, I want to at least start thinking about what this future might look like. As Ritchin points out, within the university, but not only there, our audiences possess a different cultural and media literacy; while many will choose to wring their hands about a generational pandemic of short-attention spans, there is something else to (re)consider -- the possibilities of multilinear narratives that are both intensive in theme and analytical focus but also extensive as a reading experience. In this admittedly vague future (I am thinking out loud here), this is something that is a hybrid of the traditional book and the movement and flow of web-based hypertext. This is not a future where historians are Jonathan Coulton's code monkeys, but one in which we do what we are trained to do best: produce meaningful cultural engagements with the past.
As the second edition of Home, Work, and Play: Situating Canadian Social History moves closer to print (shameless plug), and as other opportunities present themselves to me, I am thinking a great deal about a future that seems to be more imminent than it was even a month ago. And it is exciting. For while the author may be dead, her authority as the guardian and gatekeeper of historical knowledge remains unchallenged within scholarly publishing. And nowhere is this more true than in the "textbook", that dreaded (and always big and expensive) book upon which students and professors rely so heavily. Yet textbooks represent the best opportunity for scholarly publishing to begin a new phase of experimentation where the context of classroom (ideally with some component of small group learning) can create a social space to extend the kind of dialogic, intensive-and-expansive reading experience that a new kind of textbook might provide.
Allowing our students, and all of our reading audiences, to take a more active role in their learning is not merely the right thing to do if we are to remain relevant. It is also the best way to make our audiences engaged and present, something that enriches both our own time and place and those of the past.
UPDATE: While I appreciate the irony of posting a video that appears in Flash (like the iPhone, the iPad does not support Flash) and deals with an example of a partnership with Adobe, Wired Magazine is getting ahead of the curve. The important part of the video is the kind of reading experience they are going to be providing. This, it seems to me, is where textbook publishing ought to be headed.
UPDATE #2: Penguin Books, UK, is one of the publishers trying to get ahead of the iPad curve, and this video (apologies for the quality) gives their overview.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Persistence of Place
Faro is a small town in the southwestern nook of Yukon. I have never been there, and until recently I did not know it existed. I suspect in both cases, I am firmly within the majority. Faro's story, however, is only too well known. I implore you to clear 10 minutes of your time to hear it:
As we learn in the film, history has not been kind to Faro. The mine and those who worked for it are like ghosts whose absence and loss are made only too apparent by the empty homes that Murray Hampton shows prospective buyers. Despite Mr. Hampton's poignant comments about the pain and suffering the mine closure engendered, the film does not linger very long on it nor on the fate of the mine's workers and families. What happened to those people? Where did they go? How did they cope? What culpability and responsibility does the Cyprus Anvil Mining Corporation hold beyond the generic explanation of "globalization"?
Instead, the film is more interested in the new story that Faro boosters are telling about themselves and which we see vividly at the 2004 Yukon Home Show. This new story is about the "persistence of place" and it is a narrative focused exclusively on those who stayed and those that have arrived since the closure. It is a rather hopeful narrative, which, in the context of the present, is certainly comforting. And the film captures the hopes and dreams of people like Murray Hampton by showing us happy children, houses being filled, folks giving storefronts a makeover, and even a municipal golf course (of a sort).
Storytelling is no mere epiphenomenon for Faro's boosters, a cultural byproduct of other forms of structural change. As we see in the film, and indeed through the film itself, storytelling and narrative are at the forefront of efforts to make such changes possible. When the mines closed and so many went away, Faro's landscape of abandonment must have been a cruel mocking of the words that used to be blazoned on the town's signage:
In their efforts to save Faro's place on the map, boosters have undertaken great efforts to change how the landscape of abandonment is to be seen and known. In this new form, the empty houses and the surrounding wilderness are constitutive of a landscape of opportunity ("only $60,000") and a landscape of renewal (young children and a fresh coat of paint). Faro is, Murray Hampton tells us, "a modern suburb type of installation but right in the wilderness". It is certainly not what it was, as another booster explains: "We're not a mining community anymore. We are just a really nice place to live." Both of these remarks are underlined at the town's website, in the photograph and map of Faro provided there:
Words, photographs, films, websites, and maps are all being put into the service of a new narrative, one that, for the moment, seems to be allowing Faro to maintain itself as a place. Yet I wonder what role(s) public history might play in all this. For while the persistence of place would seem to frame the past as little more than a "problem" to be solved or "challenge" to overcome, it is, like Murray Hampton, too stubborn to go away. As we see in the film, history is inscribed in the landscape and local civic culture, and it has taken residence in both private and public memory. What is not clear, though, is if history might also be part of Faro's salvation and not merely a record of its destruction. A lot, I would suggest, will depend on what kinds of stories and narratives the people of Faro choose to tell about themselves and which others, from away, tell about Faro.
As we learn in the film, history has not been kind to Faro. The mine and those who worked for it are like ghosts whose absence and loss are made only too apparent by the empty homes that Murray Hampton shows prospective buyers. Despite Mr. Hampton's poignant comments about the pain and suffering the mine closure engendered, the film does not linger very long on it nor on the fate of the mine's workers and families. What happened to those people? Where did they go? How did they cope? What culpability and responsibility does the Cyprus Anvil Mining Corporation hold beyond the generic explanation of "globalization"?
Instead, the film is more interested in the new story that Faro boosters are telling about themselves and which we see vividly at the 2004 Yukon Home Show. This new story is about the "persistence of place" and it is a narrative focused exclusively on those who stayed and those that have arrived since the closure. It is a rather hopeful narrative, which, in the context of the present, is certainly comforting. And the film captures the hopes and dreams of people like Murray Hampton by showing us happy children, houses being filled, folks giving storefronts a makeover, and even a municipal golf course (of a sort).
Storytelling is no mere epiphenomenon for Faro's boosters, a cultural byproduct of other forms of structural change. As we see in the film, and indeed through the film itself, storytelling and narrative are at the forefront of efforts to make such changes possible. When the mines closed and so many went away, Faro's landscape of abandonment must have been a cruel mocking of the words that used to be blazoned on the town's signage:
In their efforts to save Faro's place on the map, boosters have undertaken great efforts to change how the landscape of abandonment is to be seen and known. In this new form, the empty houses and the surrounding wilderness are constitutive of a landscape of opportunity ("only $60,000") and a landscape of renewal (young children and a fresh coat of paint). Faro is, Murray Hampton tells us, "a modern suburb type of installation but right in the wilderness". It is certainly not what it was, as another booster explains: "We're not a mining community anymore. We are just a really nice place to live." Both of these remarks are underlined at the town's website, in the photograph and map of Faro provided there:
Words, photographs, films, websites, and maps are all being put into the service of a new narrative, one that, for the moment, seems to be allowing Faro to maintain itself as a place. Yet I wonder what role(s) public history might play in all this. For while the persistence of place would seem to frame the past as little more than a "problem" to be solved or "challenge" to overcome, it is, like Murray Hampton, too stubborn to go away. As we see in the film, history is inscribed in the landscape and local civic culture, and it has taken residence in both private and public memory. What is not clear, though, is if history might also be part of Faro's salvation and not merely a record of its destruction. A lot, I would suggest, will depend on what kinds of stories and narratives the people of Faro choose to tell about themselves and which others, from away, tell about Faro.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
RobinHolland.jpg)
Monday, November 9, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Thank You, Professor Orwin
While the ignorance and sloppiness of Margaret Wente's original column in the Globe and Mail is undeserving of anyone's attention, here is a mature, civil, and most-welcome response from Clifford Orwin.
************************
In autumn, a professor's fancies lightly turn to thoughts of teaching. As I told the students in my (monstrously large) introductory course at the University of Toronto last week, I've never attended the Toronto International Film Festival, never felt the least excitement about it. That's because it falls during the first week of classes, when the real action is on campus. I noted that a glimpse of Natalie Portman wouldn't change their lives, while their courses well might. I didn't tell them what is also true - that well into my fourth decade of teaching, I still never sleep the night before my first class.
This piece is not about me, and I mention these things only in response to a recent column by The Globe's Margaret Wente. To hear her tell it, professors don't do much, and what they do accomplish is short on what matters (teaching) and long on what doesn't (research).
I'll ignore the suggestion that professors are lazy. That's, like, so 1973 (the year I started teaching). There were in Canada then many pseudo-Oxford dons whose claim to fame was that unlike those awful American professors, they didn't do very much of anything. That's all changed. Today, the indolent are an endangered species. My colleagues in political science and I can announce that we are all Americans - by which I mean workaholics. A great deal of that work is teaching. Universities take teaching not less but more seriously than they did a generation ago.
True, I spend just six hours a week in the classroom. Ms. Wente grants that there must be preparation time and grading - "But it's still not much." Much must be a relative term. I spend 40 hours a week on preparation (times 24 weeks) and something like 120 hours a year grading (80 essays times 90 minutes), plus supervising the grading of my teaching assistants.
And true, we're not free to spend all our time on teaching. We're also expected to administer, be active in our respective professions, be public intellectuals, show the flag for our programs by delivering lectures elsewhere, practise community outreach, recruit graduate students, raise money for those students and eventually find jobs for them, write research grant applications, pen countless letters of recommendation, referee an endless procession of manuscripts, answer thousands of e-mails, assess colleagues for tenure and promotion, and so on.
So I work 70-hour weeks. Some colleagues work less, but some work even more. You can forget the mythical sherry-slipping slacker. We do enjoy long summers, if you want to hold that against us.
Just a blurry haze of mint juleps, summer, as I try to get a year's worth of research and writing in. And my teaching depends on that research. To teach is to communicate enthusiasm for learning, and what sustains that enthusiasm is continuing to learn yourself. It's also to set an example of progress to nourish in your students the hope that they too can contribute to progress. No, not all research done at universities is valuable. The surprise is how much of it is. And yes, there is always room for another study of Plato or Tolstoy, for great works are both inexhaustible and must be presented anew to every generation. You can't rest on the laurels of the past, for anything worth learning requires to be constantly relearned.
As for devoting more time to teaching, that's not up to us. Society demands that we be research machines, our heads always smoking with relevant discoveries, and not only in the sciences. It's also society that prescribes, through underfunding, that our teaching be wholesale, not retail. I didn't ask to teach a class of 500 this year, and my department (which cares very much about teaching, thank you) didn't ask to offer one. It had no choice, and I drew the short straw.
If you want your kids to be in classes of 20, you'll have pay for it, like the parents who shell out $45,000 a year for their offspring at Swarthmore College [http://swarthmore.edu], near Philadelphia.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not seeking your sympathy. I differ from a tree in that my sap rises twice yearly - once in the spring with the approach of research season, and once in the fall with the return of the cycle to teaching. While I would rather teach fewer students, you shouldn't confuse that with wanting to do less teaching. My colleagues appear equally sappy. Teaching may not be our only business, but we're serious about it.
************************
In autumn, a professor's fancies lightly turn to thoughts of teaching. As I told the students in my (monstrously large) introductory course at the University of Toronto last week, I've never attended the Toronto International Film Festival, never felt the least excitement about it. That's because it falls during the first week of classes, when the real action is on campus. I noted that a glimpse of Natalie Portman wouldn't change their lives, while their courses well might. I didn't tell them what is also true - that well into my fourth decade of teaching, I still never sleep the night before my first class.
This piece is not about me, and I mention these things only in response to a recent column by The Globe's Margaret Wente. To hear her tell it, professors don't do much, and what they do accomplish is short on what matters (teaching) and long on what doesn't (research).
I'll ignore the suggestion that professors are lazy. That's, like, so 1973 (the year I started teaching). There were in Canada then many pseudo-Oxford dons whose claim to fame was that unlike those awful American professors, they didn't do very much of anything. That's all changed. Today, the indolent are an endangered species. My colleagues in political science and I can announce that we are all Americans - by which I mean workaholics. A great deal of that work is teaching. Universities take teaching not less but more seriously than they did a generation ago.
True, I spend just six hours a week in the classroom. Ms. Wente grants that there must be preparation time and grading - "But it's still not much." Much must be a relative term. I spend 40 hours a week on preparation (times 24 weeks) and something like 120 hours a year grading (80 essays times 90 minutes), plus supervising the grading of my teaching assistants.
And true, we're not free to spend all our time on teaching. We're also expected to administer, be active in our respective professions, be public intellectuals, show the flag for our programs by delivering lectures elsewhere, practise community outreach, recruit graduate students, raise money for those students and eventually find jobs for them, write research grant applications, pen countless letters of recommendation, referee an endless procession of manuscripts, answer thousands of e-mails, assess colleagues for tenure and promotion, and so on.
So I work 70-hour weeks. Some colleagues work less, but some work even more. You can forget the mythical sherry-slipping slacker. We do enjoy long summers, if you want to hold that against us.
Just a blurry haze of mint juleps, summer, as I try to get a year's worth of research and writing in. And my teaching depends on that research. To teach is to communicate enthusiasm for learning, and what sustains that enthusiasm is continuing to learn yourself. It's also to set an example of progress to nourish in your students the hope that they too can contribute to progress. No, not all research done at universities is valuable. The surprise is how much of it is. And yes, there is always room for another study of Plato or Tolstoy, for great works are both inexhaustible and must be presented anew to every generation. You can't rest on the laurels of the past, for anything worth learning requires to be constantly relearned.
As for devoting more time to teaching, that's not up to us. Society demands that we be research machines, our heads always smoking with relevant discoveries, and not only in the sciences. It's also society that prescribes, through underfunding, that our teaching be wholesale, not retail. I didn't ask to teach a class of 500 this year, and my department (which cares very much about teaching, thank you) didn't ask to offer one. It had no choice, and I drew the short straw.
If you want your kids to be in classes of 20, you'll have pay for it, like the parents who shell out $45,000 a year for their offspring at Swarthmore College [http://swarthmore.edu], near Philadelphia.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not seeking your sympathy. I differ from a tree in that my sap rises twice yearly - once in the spring with the approach of research season, and once in the fall with the return of the cycle to teaching. While I would rather teach fewer students, you shouldn't confuse that with wanting to do less teaching. My colleagues appear equally sappy. Teaching may not be our only business, but we're serious about it.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Errol Morris
A friend of mine wrote to tell me that he had just watched The Thin Blue Line and in his words: "I had only read about it previously, but the real thing utterly blew my mind. I have never been so totally mesmerized by a visual narrative over a sustained period." Morris has produced what I consider the very best documentaries of the last 25 years -- but don't take my word for that. Go to his website and Youtube, and then, please, to a good video store, and discover for yourself what a relentless commitment to storytelling, to truth, to justice, and to humanity can produce. Morris teaches us about ourselves but he also has become, arguably, one of the great historians of modernity. That he mostly makes films rather than writes books and journal articles is part of my rationale: Morris understands that the image is one of modernity's greatest inventions. The image can be salvation and liberation. The image can also lead to domination and imprisonment. The image, Morris seems to understand, is both life and death.
Here is a small reason why I am hardly alone in feeling as strongly as I do about Morris
Here are the trailers for his latest two films, Standard Operating Procedure and The Fog of War. I urge everyone, everywhere, to watch these films. They will not leave you.
Here is a small reason why I am hardly alone in feeling as strongly as I do about Morris
Here are the trailers for his latest two films, Standard Operating Procedure and The Fog of War. I urge everyone, everywhere, to watch these films. They will not leave you.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Mapping the Recession
Richard Florida has an essay in the March 2009 edition of Atlantic Monthly, and in it he provides a rather intriguing representation of the current economic malaise and the similarities / differences it has with those of the 1970s / early 1980s. Here are the paragraphs that caught my eye:
"But that was then; the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs. The economy is driven by key urban areas; a different geography is required.
The housing bubble was the ultimate expression, and perhaps the last gasp, of an economic system some 80 years in the making, and now well past its “sell-by” date. The bubble encouraged massive, unsustainable growth in places where land was cheap and the real-estate economy dominant. It encouraged low-density sprawl, which is ill-fitted to a creative, postindustrial economy. And not least, it created a workforce too often stuck in place, anchored by houses that cannot be profitably sold, at a time when flexibility and mobility are of great importance.
So how do we move past the bubble, the crash, and an aging, obsolescent model of economic life? What’s the right spatial fix for the economy today, and how do we achieve it?"
Florida's emphasis on rupture, discontinuity, breakage, fissuring between the relatively recent (80 year) past, the present, and the future, opens up for him a whole new way of imagining the social and physical geography of the United States. It is no longer about people's labour making things or even providing services: for Florida, the economy is all about "ideas". He points to Pittsburgh as a model example: once home to a thriving steel industry and a population of 700,000 people in the mid-20th century, it is now a city of 300,000 people focussed on high tech industries and the creative, intellectual work of its universities and colleges. So where did all the people go? They went to places like Mesa, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix that now has more than 500,000 people, the bulk of whom arrived since 1980. And what ought to happen to Mesa, Arizona? Florida says that the government should speed up and "ease" the foreclosures that are currently occurring in Mesa (and other Sun Belt suburbs) by compelling the banks to offer previous owners the chance to rent their homes from the new owners, the banks. And if people have to move, this, for Florida, is not a bad thing at all: he seems to lament a time when people were more apt to move every year.
Movement, or what Florida likes to call "velocity", is fundamentally good because, we are told, it allows people, societies, and most importantly it seems, "the nation", to have an economy that is nimble, light-on-its-feet, adaptable, malleable. You can see why Florida has so much disdain for an economy that would strike to make material goods: unlike ideas, the making of cars, furniture, computers, and so forth, needs to be anchored in place for a long time. It requires investment, commitment, and fidelity on the part of manufacturers in the same way that workers invest, commit, and stay loyal to jobs that treat them fairly. But who would want that?
Certainly not Richard Florida who, despite seeming to have some empathy for those being dislocated by the recent economic downturn, is fueled by a sort of anti-humanist fever for "systems" and "flows" and the creative destruction of free-market capitalism and by a willingness to allow globalization to write its own story of "inevitable" and "natural" change. With all due respect, Florida's prescriptions for the present carry with them the same set of assumptions (ideological and political) that made possible the deregulated horrors of the current condition of things.
The narrative has to change: how we talk about "the economy" has to change. Macroeconomic mappings of the type offered by Florida are "big pictures" that pay too little attention, and offer too little understanding, to the immense burden being carried by those people who can least afford to do so. The very meaning of the word "economy", as the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, has changed:
"The art or science of household management, esp. with regard to expenditure. Now only in domestic economy (see DOMESTIC adj. and n. Special uses).
The manner in which a household, or a person's private expenditure, is organized or managed. Now rare.
The proper management of the body; (also) the rules which control a person's mode of living; regimen, diet. Obs. rare."
What kinds of "economic" stories might we tell if we broadened our analytical lens to once again talk about what people are able to eat, how they are able to rest, how they are able to work, to relate to one another in a household?
I am not sure what the answer to that question is, but I do know those kinds of economic stories are in short supply right now even though the demand is very high.
"But that was then; the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs. The economy is driven by key urban areas; a different geography is required.
The housing bubble was the ultimate expression, and perhaps the last gasp, of an economic system some 80 years in the making, and now well past its “sell-by” date. The bubble encouraged massive, unsustainable growth in places where land was cheap and the real-estate economy dominant. It encouraged low-density sprawl, which is ill-fitted to a creative, postindustrial economy. And not least, it created a workforce too often stuck in place, anchored by houses that cannot be profitably sold, at a time when flexibility and mobility are of great importance.
So how do we move past the bubble, the crash, and an aging, obsolescent model of economic life? What’s the right spatial fix for the economy today, and how do we achieve it?"
Florida's emphasis on rupture, discontinuity, breakage, fissuring between the relatively recent (80 year) past, the present, and the future, opens up for him a whole new way of imagining the social and physical geography of the United States. It is no longer about people's labour making things or even providing services: for Florida, the economy is all about "ideas". He points to Pittsburgh as a model example: once home to a thriving steel industry and a population of 700,000 people in the mid-20th century, it is now a city of 300,000 people focussed on high tech industries and the creative, intellectual work of its universities and colleges. So where did all the people go? They went to places like Mesa, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix that now has more than 500,000 people, the bulk of whom arrived since 1980. And what ought to happen to Mesa, Arizona? Florida says that the government should speed up and "ease" the foreclosures that are currently occurring in Mesa (and other Sun Belt suburbs) by compelling the banks to offer previous owners the chance to rent their homes from the new owners, the banks. And if people have to move, this, for Florida, is not a bad thing at all: he seems to lament a time when people were more apt to move every year.
Movement, or what Florida likes to call "velocity", is fundamentally good because, we are told, it allows people, societies, and most importantly it seems, "the nation", to have an economy that is nimble, light-on-its-feet, adaptable, malleable. You can see why Florida has so much disdain for an economy that would strike to make material goods: unlike ideas, the making of cars, furniture, computers, and so forth, needs to be anchored in place for a long time. It requires investment, commitment, and fidelity on the part of manufacturers in the same way that workers invest, commit, and stay loyal to jobs that treat them fairly. But who would want that?
Certainly not Richard Florida who, despite seeming to have some empathy for those being dislocated by the recent economic downturn, is fueled by a sort of anti-humanist fever for "systems" and "flows" and the creative destruction of free-market capitalism and by a willingness to allow globalization to write its own story of "inevitable" and "natural" change. With all due respect, Florida's prescriptions for the present carry with them the same set of assumptions (ideological and political) that made possible the deregulated horrors of the current condition of things.
The narrative has to change: how we talk about "the economy" has to change. Macroeconomic mappings of the type offered by Florida are "big pictures" that pay too little attention, and offer too little understanding, to the immense burden being carried by those people who can least afford to do so. The very meaning of the word "economy", as the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, has changed:
"The art or science of household management, esp. with regard to expenditure. Now only in domestic economy (see DOMESTIC adj. and n. Special uses).
The manner in which a household, or a person's private expenditure, is organized or managed. Now rare.
The proper management of the body; (also) the rules which control a person's mode of living; regimen, diet. Obs. rare."
What kinds of "economic" stories might we tell if we broadened our analytical lens to once again talk about what people are able to eat, how they are able to rest, how they are able to work, to relate to one another in a household?
I am not sure what the answer to that question is, but I do know those kinds of economic stories are in short supply right now even though the demand is very high.
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