My technical skills being raw as they are, there are some features of the old blog that I was unable to transfer. The major hole in the new blog is my inability to create a “subscribe by e-mail” function. The “widget” that I used on wordpress.com just isn’t available on the new site and my experimentation with various plugins did not seem to yield any easily viable options. But, I am still on the hunt and if any WordPress aficionados out there want to chime in, I am open for suggestions. For now, those who subscribed by e-mail may want to receive posts in an RSS Reader, such as Google Reader.

As my technical skills increase, you will hopefully be able to enjoy more features as well as a much more aesthetically pleasing blog in the future!

KEY:
Green = Black Republicans
Red = Republicans
Blue = Democrats
Purple = Other

The historic map (1861) is definitely dated, especially for the 1890s. Hence my earlier request for rubber sheeting techniques.

Instead, I’ve decided to re-visit a project that I did for the D.C. Historical Society’s annual conference a couple years back. As I only had about a week’s notice to put together the presentation, I have wanted to examine this topic in greater detail ever since. The general thesis for 19th century Members in our recent book on African-American Members of Congress is that those who served early in the Reconstruction Era served as representative examples northern victory in the Civil War, “the Fifteenth Amendment in flesh and blood,” to quote one contemporary journalist. They were friendly with fellow Republicans (all 19th century black Members were Republicans) and generally accepted in their immediate social circles. In the late 19th century, however, Members had more difficulty getting their voices heard. Rarely recognized to speak–even on issues incredibly pertinent to their own political rights–these Members were shunted aside, both socially and politically. Using the Congressional Directories to create Google maps to locate where they lived, I concluded that their geographic isolation mimics much of their social ostracization. Whereas black Members in the 43rd Congress (1873-1875) lived closer to the center of the city, in nicer neighborhoods, and near prominent Republicans, Members in later Congresses lived farther outside the city or were more likely to gravitate toward black-majority neighborhoods. This makes sense, as segregation policies solidified in Washington and elsewhere in the South; but it worked as a further disadvantage to these Members. Policy making was still relatively social in the late 19th century, conducted off-hours and occasionally at home. I drew these conclusions, however, using very few data points (due primarily to time constraints), as you can see in the images I’ve pasted below.

That said, I would like to test my theory using full Congresses. Did earlier Black Members really live near most their prominent colleagues, or Republicans in general? How isolated were later Members from their peers?

I tested my ability to create and upload a map file with an entire Congress this weekend. Fortunately, I had a list of Members from the 54th Congress (1895-1897) pre-made in Excel for another project I am completing at work. Unfortunately, the only black Member in this Congress (George Murray of South Carolina) arrived late as a result of a contested election. Therefore, his address is not listed and I will not be able to use this map (though I will find other uses for it at work). That’s pretty frustration, because I found that adding the addresses proved difficult (many Members still lived in local hotels, which I needed to track down) and it took me a better part of two hours to put this together. As well, I experimented with various geocoding programs with little success until I found batchgeo. This program allows users to paste in data directly from Excel, customize the output, and it will spit out a kml file for uploading into Google Earth. The result is the following:

(The red markers are Republicans, Blue are Democrats, and Green are Populists)

This map demonstrates a theory I had about this particular Congress (which, as you can see, was heavy on Republicans). I’m noticing less partisan clustering in where Members lived than has been demonstrated (anecdotally) in previous Congresses, though small pockets of clustering still exist.

I layered the map over a historic map pre-loaded into Google Earth. It’s from 1871, so a bit dated for this Congress (1896), but just right for one of the Congresses on which I will focus in my project.

I was amused also, at Willinsky’s chapter on politics, from whence my title quote is derived. The truth is, having only ever worked for Uncle Sam (at least for a salary), my work has never been subject to copyright law. And I get paid a decent salary (and I love my job) so I don’t really mind. In fact, I enjoy being able to give away my work to the masses; the grateful voice on the other end of the telephone or those sending an e-mail sometimes just plain makes my day. Dr. Cohen and Dr. Rosensweig nail the only hang up that I have with my “free” work when they note that historians “fret more about the sin of plagiarism than the crime of copyright infringement” (200). It’s happened and it’s occasionally irksome, but I can’t really say I fret too much. For a mild example, I’m pleased that they link back to us, but the biographies found here, were a little alarming when I was accustomed to seeing them…well…here. Where we put them.

That said, I have taken a conservative approach in my encounters on the other end, that is obtaining permission to use material. For example, a coworker and I spent a great deal of time tracking down the rights to several San Francisco Chronicle images we wished to use in our documentary on the Florence Kahn, the first Jewish woman to serve in Congress. Unfortunately, we were attempting to contact the Chronicle when they were on the brink of bankruptcy. The headaches involved made me wonder if we could have claimed “fair use,” but the ambiguity seemed like too much of a risk. This murkiness was highlighted by all authors this week; unfortunately, that means better safe than sorry (and a lot of extra work) for digital historians.

As I’ve mentioned before, my job as a congressional historian tends to straddle the ever increasing divide between history and political science. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m firmly in the former’s camp. I enjoy the evidence-based, personal, and populist aspect of political history. Political science, on the other hand, seems less grounded in what really happened and more focused on theory, bolstered by absurd equations that I left behind in algebra class and written in a language that I swear only other political scientists can understand. But what political scientists do well is take a step back and look at the big picture, getting an idea of sweeping trends in legislative behavior. I can’t help but think that the distant reading methodologies we’ve discussed over the last few weeks will allow me, proudly wearing my historian’s hat, to make similar observations.

That said, among the older wars between political scientists and congressional historians appears to be the strength of the so-called “boardinghouse caucus” in the early 19th century Congresses. During this period, Washington was a small, rather provincial city, travel to and from the capital was arduous, and congressional sessions were short. Thus, Members of Congress, would rarely bring their families to the city. Instead, they would take up temporary residence in local hotels or boardinghouses. In his 1966 Bancroft Prize winning book, James Sterling Young argues in The Washington Community, 1800-1828 (Columbia) that these group lodgings became a community for transient legislators, especially in the earlier period, when party affiliations were not quite solidified. Using anecdotal evidence—primarily pulled from diaries, letters and memoirs left the the Members themselves—Young argues that Members’ interactions over meals and during their leisure time, moreover, influenced voting behavior. In other words, Members of the same “mess” might vote together on a particular issue, having discussed and debated it “at home,” so to speak.

In 1975, two political scientists, Allan G. Bogue and Paul Marlaire, took issue with Young’s boardinghouse thesis in an article, “Of Mess and Men: The Boardinghouse and Congressional Voting, 1821-1842,” published in American Journal of Political Science. Using three different Congresses—the 17th (1821-1823), the 22nd (1831-1833), and the 27th (1841-1843)—they examine roll calls on key issues in each Congress, and compare voting agreement against several affiliations: boardinghouses, state, region, and party. I still don’t understand their math, yet, somehow, they conclude that regional and state affiliation, and, as the Second American Party system solidifies, party affiliation are stronger predictors of voting agreement than boardinghouse residence.

Bogue and Marlaire make a rather convincing case as to how Young might have misconstrued some of his anecdotal evidence, however, I also take issue with some their methods (those that I understand, at least). What muddies the water further is that boardinghouse residence, regional, and party affiliation are likely connected. A Member might live with others  in their state delegations or political parties. Or maybe, as is evidenced by Young’s anecdotal evidence, they live in a boardinghouse with the cheapest rent, best location, nicest landlady, or most welcoming accommodations.

So, that leads to my initial question: how closely affiliated were mess mates, outside of their shared lodgings? Were individual messes dominated by one state, region, or party? This might be relatively easy to map. Old Congressional Directories include the home and local addresses of all Members. Though some are vague as to the exact location—they might read “Mrs. Smith’s Boardinghouse,” for example—some digging might reveal the block on which that building sat. The data gathering stage might be a bit time consuming, but I could pull together the name, lodging, party, and state, of each Member of one or more Congresses examined by Bogue and Marlaire, and upload them to a Google Map or Google Earth from there. This might be especially do-able, seeing as the D.C. “grid” has been in place since the beginning (and it appears that historic D.C. map overlays exist).

Once I have that in place, perhaps I can move on to voting analysis….gulp!

What do you guys think?

As I mentioned before, I love visualizations. I use them to organize my thoughts when I take on a large project. When I was writing my undergraduate thesis ten years ago (before I had or knew about technology to do this digitally) I spread a large piece of poster board and a full set of Crayola markers across my family’s kitchen table over winter break. As I preceded to map out the different aspects of my argument and evidence in a spiderweb, color-coded fashion, my ever sarcastic father quipped, “What are you drawing? A road map of Boston?” Ha ha, Dad!

That said, the electronic visualizations available in Many Eyes would have probably helped me avoid allowing my visualization to take on the appearance of a map of this nation’s most unnavigable city! Unlike their analog cousins, digital visualizations are a lot more malleable. In other words, sites like Many Eyes allow for two, what I believe to be, crucial aspects of attempting to visualize data in a meaningful way: 1) it allows users to play or experiment with their data by focusing on specific pieces or trying various visual outputs; and  2) The community aspect of Many Eyes allows for feedback from multiple perspectives and different (sometimes failed) experiments with different visualizations.  With visions of multiple cups of coffee in my future, I’m realizing that “play time” is going to be a huge factor in our second projects. As well, feedback from our classmates will be very fruitful. I get the impression that every individual can look at a visualization and draw a different conclusion.

I’ve encountered HistoryWired before. I find it almost a little overwhelming and I find the two sets of “categories”—one listed across the top and the other segmenting the tree—perplexing. I also found the different box sizes within the tree misleading. Are they supposed to indicate something? The relative importance of each item? To me, it seemed rather random. However, this is a great way to lasso the problem of abundance by organizing so many objects in a meaningful way; it does a fabulous job of contextualizing each object (within categories and on a timeline) without having to navigate away from the page. Given the number of objects involved, it has an elegance to it.

Facebook’s Gross National Happiness reminds me of our election night experimentation with TweetFeel; however, instead of being in the moment, one can determine trends over time. Yet, I think it has the potential pitfalls the we observed in TweetFeel: sarcasm or negative words used in a positive light could be easily misconstrued.  I was also disappointed that normalization methods used on these graphs preclude any ability to compare happiness from one country to another. One stark observation looking at the multiple maps is that the spikes in “positivity” corresponded with a spike in “negativity.” Is this a phenomenon of use of sarcasm to indicate an opposite feeling? Or, as these spikes correspond frequently with holidays, an indication of the psychologically observed increase sadness around major holidays. Or is it just because more people have time to post on holidays and there’s a larger pool of status updates to pull from? I left this visualization with more questions than answers.

This post is getting long. I am chewing on project ideas, so I will put those in another post later today or tomorrow.

William G. Thomas and Edward L. Ayers’ The Differences Slavery Made provided far and away, the best balance between presenting/deriving quantitative evidence (maps, graphs, tables, etc.) in a “Moretti fashion,” looking at traditional textual sources that we historians are comfortable with (monographs and textual primary sources), and interpreting this evidence to make a historical argument. Stated in the Introduction and recapitulated in the Conclusion (like one would do in a traditional monograph) Thomas and Ayers argue that “slavery did not bear a simple relationship to emergent forms of modernity in the economic, cultural, or political realm,” concluding that “slavery and modernity need to be seen as parts of the same process in the United States.” That link to tradition was comforting and it provided an “end,” a conclusion to be reached.

Like Erin, I found that bopping around the website looking at different pieces was difficult do with our training in the art of the “hard skim.”  Thomas and Ayers actually admit that narrative was difficult to achieve at the end of their own Introduction section; two of their suggestions for subsequent efforts in electronic articles involve re-inserting the narrative.

But the question then arises: Is tying digital work to “narrative” limiting the potential of this new form of scholarship because we are so accustomed to the old? Is it okay that (with their argument in mind) I clicked around rather haphazardly and “chose my own historical adventure,” by following the evidence that perplexed me or captured my attention? Though I think that a better “bread crumb trail” might have helped with what Erin called “navigational abandonment,” I am actually coming to grips with the fact that I could look at the website in a hypertextual rather than traditionally chronological fashion. As well, there are some advantages to this method; rather than follow the prescribed logic of the authors, I followed my own logic through the evidence. It allowed me to connect like pieces from different arguments. I think Thomas and Ayers might appreciate this. After all they quote Vannever Buch in their Presentation section: “The human mind operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.” Thomas and Ayers conclude: “That is what this article attempts: a language of exposition that works by branching and layers and connections rather than operating on one plane of exposition.”

The other websites we examined focus less on interpretation and more on evidence and they invite comparison because of their focus on cities. Hypercities (and I’ve examined it before) has always perplexed me; the idea is creative, but I’ve never been able to manipulate the maps and collections so as to draw any conclusions from this website about changes in urban architecture, life, etc. It seems to provide more “bells and whistles” than any useful historical information (let alone interpretation) for me.

PhilaPlace and the Euclid Corridor Oral History program struck me as similar digital depositories of information.With very little (if any) interpretation, it’s almost as if they belonged in the first part of the class. However, the connecting factor for these two websites—the navigation using geographical locations—was useful in different ways. Whereas one looks at PhilaPlace in a hypertextual (and thus, less narrative, format), the numbered, “left to right” Euclid Corridor navigation gave the evidence a sort of narrative as you moved through the city. Perhaps this form of navigation is a nice bridge between my narrative-trained historical brain and the natural inclination to make connections across different planes?

With most historians I’ve met, there’s a consensus that our drift toward the humanities came, in part, because of an antipathetic relationship with mathematics. I’ve had my share of “love-hate” moments because I’ve always been enamored by statistics, but calculus, ultimately, was my downfall. As someone who digests things visually, I frequently create graphs to get a long view of my work, mostly in an attempt not to get too bogged down in the details. So, I guess I’ve engaged in “distant reading” ever since I became interested in history. One such caffeine-fueled adventure ended in this, a version of which accompanies every chapter of the Minorities in Congress series my office has written so far:

I had to laugh at how much it resembles Franco Moretti’s graph on page 19 in Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models For Literary History.  That said, I was fascinated this week to see a concrete discussion of methodologies attached to something I’ve been doing intuitively for years. As Dr. Cohen writes, the method of analyzing data from a distance is the basis of computer science. I agree with  him and what Moretti dubs the inspiration for writing the book: that we can learn from the methodologies of natural and social scientists.

But, I also agree with Moretti that the quantitative approach provides data, not so much an interpretation. I also think this is what differentiates political historians from political scientists in my field. Whereas political scientists often crunch numbers to look for abstract patterns in behavior, historians add a narrative and a sense of humanity to those patterns. We also hone in and in some ways appreciate some of the exceptions to the rules captured in the broad view. As Timothy Burke writes in his response to Moretti, “The most important concern I have about Moretti is that I think he has the same problem that the Annalistes and world-systems analysts have had with modernity: a difficulty explaining rupture, breach, or novelty.” I agree; the exceptions often overly complicate and even disprove the rule.

I also think that this interpretation can be very hard to parse out. As I’ve stared at my quantitative data this past week—examining, for example the five largest “flips” or turnover of members when the majority changed in the House—the most difficult part is explaining the data. Why, for example, was there a significant change in membership in the 1894 election, wherein the Republicans swept into the majority after the Democrats lost a whopping 33 percent of the total House membership. The addition of new Members following reapportionment? An adverse reaction to the policies of Democratic President Grover Cleveland? Economic hardships that factored into the voting public’s psyche? A combination of all three and so much more? The graphs demonstrating this change in membership were easy to develop; the interpretation is proving a lot harder. Yet, the numbers don’t make sense without the human element behind them.

That said, it would be wrong of me to end this post without providing interpretation for the graph posted above.

“It was a game-changing technology, and they said it would destroy life as we know it. On March 22, 1876, The New York Times wrote about a new device called the telephone, detailing the promises of this machine that could capture the voice of one person and transfer it over wires to someone miles away. But it also warned of a sinister outcome, church pews and music halls left empty. People would stop coming since they’d be able to hear the sermon or the concert performance from the comfort of their homes.” -Transcript from the Kojo Nnamdi Show, 28 September 2010, available here.*

I guess the above examples and the reading this week make it clear: new technology changes how we learn and, yes, sometimes it scares us. I think I’ll be clear right away; I do not think digital technology will replace books, at least in our lifetimes. You just can’t scrap 1000 years of “technology” overnight. But, I can’t say I have a crystal ball either…..

As well, I’ve mentioned before on this blog my own difficulties with screen reading; I’ve also pointed to the New York Times series on “Your Brain on Computers,” which examines the psychological effects of computers on human learning and attention. I’ve advocated the need for digital literacy as part of a history education. So let’s just say, I was nodding my head vigorously this week. That said, I will not repeat my treatises of past posts. But there are  two points in our reading so far this week that caught my eye the most.

David Bell, in “The Bookless Future: What the Internet is Doing to Scholarship,” gives a fascinating explanation on why screen reading is just so unpleasant. Citing the physical discomfort, he also points to the ease of scrolling and searching for information on a computer. “Reading in this strategic, targeted manner can feel empowering,” he observes. “Instead of surrendering to the organizing logic of the book you are reading, you can approach it with your own questions and glean precisely what you want from it. You are the master, not some dead author.” He then concludes, “this is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master. Information is not knowledge; searching is not reading; and surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns.” I disagree with his inference that we always read books in chronological fashion—especially historical monographs—but the way an author lays out his or her information often weighs on his or her argument. Also, what is interesting about this statement is that he is accusing the aspects of digital technology we embrace for teaching and learning (the ability to search, pinpoint knowledge, and interact with texts, or in other words, ceding a certain amount of control to the technology’s users) also hinders the learning process.

I found Patrick Leary’s discussion about 21st century research skills most interesting in “Googling the Victorians.” He writes, “Electronic searching
may require that we arrive at a consensus about what it means to have ‘consulted’ a source and that we develop new conventions for indicating more precisely what that consultation has involved and how our colleagues can replicate it” (10). This gets into the “abundance” factor discussed earlier by Roy Rosensweig. In dealing with the abundance of sources, we often rely on specific searches to narrow the corpus we are examining. Do we, as historians, have an obligation to document our search techniques in the same way we might cite the hierarchically organized archival collection we use in our texts? Leary also indicates that “searching” electronic sources has developed into a new research skill. “Search engines present, after all, a quite peculiar way of interacting with groups of texts; literal-minded, they bear out the old warning about being careful what you wish for,” he notes. “As anyone knows who has spent much time at it, this means striking a careful balance between precision and inclusiveness” (10). This speaks to the research skills of 21st century historians. While we do not want to be caught on the wrong side of Leary’s “Offline Penumbra,” we have to develop ways of thinking about information that our predecessors do not.

And that means watching an hour-long video that includes (gasp!) math put forth by computer science brethren, whether we like it or not!

* I heard an excerpt from this radio show last week. I have only scanned the transcript and I have not listened to it yet. It’s on my “To Do” list. It looks really interesting!