In general, this blog is ostensibly about environmental and digital history. This post, however, marks a brief divergence from those themes, mainly in the interest of getting something posted in June. As such and as a long time science fiction fan, I cannot resist posting these trailers for Halo: Reach:

This last one, of course, has noting to do with the Haloverse …

Cottonwood Grove in the Fisher Pastures. Photo by: Richard.

People, outside of academia, often ask me what Environmental History is and why I study it instead of, say, the Revolution, the Civil War, or World War II (the most commonly referenced histories). Most of the time, I am at a loss about how to respond to their questions. Generally I mumble something about the environment as playing a very important and specific role in shaping our American History and leave it at that. Of course, this is not necessarily fair to them, or me, or for EH in general.

Now I have an answer … memories of my childhood, roaming the Diamond 4 ranch with my border collie, Mark, in tow and a .22 in hand. Those memories remain with me always, and thus I have a strong connection to my history and the very important environments that shaped that history. This photo, taken last October while hunting with my Dad, I think best describes that connection. I spent many hours and days wandering through those trees under sunny, blue skies. To answer the question, I study what I study because it connects me to my past and thus our past. ¹

Ruger .270. Photo by: Richard.

Last Thursday, Dave, John, and I went shooting. We a great time and poked numerous holes in targets (60 down–range myself) on the 100-yard range. After shooting, John took us to Pho Ha for huge bowls of Vietnamese noodles and we followed that up at Dave’s house with a few beers while we cleaned the rifles: .270, .223, .25–06, .65–06, .30–338 (x2), and a wildcat .458 Vincent. You can view other photos from this set on Flickr.

With this post, I think I need to put together a post on Sport Shooting, Hunting, and Conservation in American History.

Here is a selection of notable links from the design and web development front. For those working with type on the web, I highly recommend the following 24 Ways article written by Richard Rutter: “Compose to a Vertical Rhythm.” I also recommend Meagan Fisher’s 24 Ways article“Make Your Mockup in Markup.” Are you exploring progressive enhancement in your designs via CSS3? Then CSS3 Please! The Cross–Browser CSS3 Rule Generator is just your ticket. For some POSH (Plain Old Semantic HyperText) design, I think the following articles on markup and semantic class names are quite useful:

• “The Elements of Meaningful XHTML,”
• “Competent Classing,”
• “Keep Your Classes Clean,”
• and “A Touch of Class.”

Of course, I would be remiss if I did not provide a few notable links from the digital history front. To that end, I suggest George Lakoff’s articles on “Gulf War Metaphor, Part I” and “Part II” as well as Cameron Chapman’s “Applying ‘A Pattern Language’ To Online Community Design” as worthy reading. Both Lakoff’s and Chapman’s articles made me wonder about the of role language—both used and constructed—in digital history? I think this is a particularly intriguing question when one considers how digital historians use one language—e. g. POSH—to construct digital history tools and another language—e. g. English—to develop and promulgate (the language of?) community and collaboration via digital history tools. Finally, on a “non” digital history front but engaging nonetheless is Paddy Donnelly’s “Learn To Fucking Spell.” His post is engaging not only for its subject matter but also how that subject matter is effectively communicated through the lush illustrations—another language in its own right—that heavily inform the post.

The smartphone, in my case the iPhone, is the marvel of the digital/personal front of the early 21st century. I feel that I have now—as a purported digital historian (though I think that is a suspect term in its own right)—finally engaged the 21st century in its potential. Of course, as with other tech breakthroughs of the past (the auto, the radio, the movie, etc.) this too shall pass and to so firmly state that the smartphone is the “marvel” is more than likely too strong. I do, however, strongly feel that it is one of the most remarkable things to impact our lives, particularly as the POSH semantic web emerges with greater force. For me, it is the beginning of a “true” realization—at some level—of the cyberpunk dream: cowboys, black ice, wilsons, and AI whispers in the dark.

In the modeling/hobby realm KitBashing “is a practice whereby a new scale model is created by taking pieces out of commercial kits.” I would imagine that in the digital humanities, the process of KitBashing is equivalent to hacking, remixing, and the Mashup. I am working on a hand-rolled custom theme, but that is several long weeks away as I do have grad work to complete. As such, I am temporarily KitBashing this site using hand-rolled CSS/CSS3 on top of the WP-Framework theme I am currently running. Ultimately, this means that there are/will be things broken and non-functional for awhile in Firefox, Opera (upgrade to Opera 10.51 for increased CSS3 support), Chrome, Safari, and particularly IE (read: IE[vi]L).

Thank you in advance for your patience as I KitBash my way toward a new site, and please accept my humble apologies if you have problems or are unable to view particular pages/items on the website. If you have questions or comments, please contact me: richard { at } goatrockresearch { dot } org.

At any location on earth, as the rock record goes down into time and out into earlier geographies it touches upon tens of hundreds of stories, wherein the face of the earth often changed, changed utterly, and changed again, like the face of a crackling fire. The rock beside the road exposes one or two levels of the column of time and generally implies what went on immediately below and what occurred (or never occurred) above. I wish to make no attempt to speak for all geology or to sweep in every fact that came along. I want to choose some things that interested me and through them to suggest the general history of the continent by describing events and landscapes that geologists see written in rocks.

– John McPhee, Basin and Range, in Annals of the Former World, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998: 37.

In my research, I want to suggest, as McPhee does, something about the nature of places by describing the the events and landscapes—both natural and human—recorded in the rocks, climate, soil, flora, fire, fauna, and suburbia found in the Puente Hills of Southern California.

Armistice Day the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month … when major combat ceased on the western front (fighting continued on other fronts). Armistice Day was officially amended in the USA to Veteran’s Day in 1954 to honor all those who had served. To those of you, especially my Dad, that served, thank you for your service.

From Awaiting Armageddon:

U.S. paralysis on civil defense could be credited to an inability to face the prospect of nuclear war or simply to a sense of futility. … Intellectually, Americans knew the hazards of nuclear war, but America was not ready [during the Cuban Missile Crisis] … The United States simply had refused to accept that war might erase or, at the very least, devastate the future. As a result, civil defense was kept on a back burner, partially because the nation’s leaders failed to tell the public the truth that the United States had little means of protecting its citizens from total war. This disconnection in the American psyche an inability to face the loss of the future that could result from rabid anti–Communism left the nation vulnerable to war and to false claims of safety. Cold War culture taught Americans to fear, but it did not offer a refuge from the deadliest threat, nuclear attack (61).

From “When Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction:”

In November 1983 a routine NATO nuclear readiness exercise code-named Able Archer could have led to a Soviet nuclear strike against the West. What is remarkable about this possible Soviet strike is that it was perceived by the Soviets as a defensive and pre–emptive strike. Therefore, the Soviets somehow believed that there was an impending Western nuclear attack that they had to pre–empt. American rearmament, NATO missile deployment, and Reaganite rhetoric somehow convinced the Soviets that the nuclear endgame was near. These fears climaxed in November 1983 during a seemingly innocuous nuclear-readiness exercise by the West. It has been described by historian Christopher Andrew as one of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War.

How many other such “moments” exist?

I am participating in a panel discussion on “The Public and Private in Media” as a part of an art exhibition: The New Normal. The New Normal examines the issue of private information becoming less private in our technological society. Regardless of how well I present/discuss today, this exhibition has made me reexamine my ideas of the private as increasingly public beyond that of  identity theft and and the Patriot Act to include that of the culture of privacy surrounding humanities research. This is a topic that I have struggled with: expressing my thoughts in an open forum via a blog and the “publishing” of my research library via Zotero (see this post by Mark Sample for a thoughtful reflection on publishing your Zotero library).

I choose to publish a blog and my research—to make the private public–for two reasons. First, an online identity is fast becoming a prerequiste in the academic world, and while it may be one that is not necessarily our choice or under our control we can make it our choice and control it by doing. Second, as Cameron Blevins and Mark Sample have effectively argued, making one’s thoughts and research public offers scholars a new, important, and powerful way to collaborate and contribute to humanist scholarship at a greater level that ultimately makes one’s own work as well as that of other scholars better. The kicker, however, is that while I control—choose—the dissemination initially, what happens to the private made public may quickly leave my hands. The question is, then, is this necessarily a “bad” thing (maybe despite using a Creative Commons license)? The essays by Michael Connor (curator of The New Normal), Marisa Olson, and Clay Shirky, I think, point out that the private made public is not necessarily bad or good only that the individual must become evermore aware and proactive in managing the private/public (Skirky’s idea of the “opt-in, opt-out, don’t ask”?).  This is not to suggest that there are not “bad” aspects; one need only have followed the controversy over Facebook’s Term of Service (also see this short Flash presentation), let alone the issues surrounding the Patriot Act. Nonetheless, I think the issue of the private made public as contained and examined in The New Normal is examined as a complicated issue that is as much grey as it is black and white, and that, ultimately, the issue becomes one of choice, of control and when we have control over the private made public and when we do not.

I must admit that I feel that I will be out of my league during the panel discussion, that I have not had enough time to internalize the material and the idea of the way in which the private is becoming increasingly more public. I do, however, know that my participation, the airing of my private thoughts in a public space even if incomplete about the private and the public is good: good for furthering collaboration; what I can learn from the other panelists and the audience; for furthering my own work in the digital humanities; and understanding the issue of the private and the public as it relates to one of my digital projects, the Oral History Catalogue.

In response to my last post on “the Stream,” Cameron Blevins (History-ing.org) pointed out that one “issue with the stream is the seem­ingly eter­nal one of breadth vs. depth,” and that one of the “biggest” chal­lenges for a user was the “transi­tion from hori­zontal skim­ming to ver­tical bor­ing down” into the stream. I agree with Cameron that transitioning from one level to the other is a fundamental skill and a challenge to learn and practice. I do, however, believe that these are skill sets humanists already use/practice to a greater (or lesser) extent. I had to develop both skills, especially the skimming technique, for history grad seminars: 1 monograph (+ any needed supplementary material) / class / week @ 2 — 3 classes / semester. In fact, I am still developing these skills as I prep for quals this spring.

The deep drilling is, I would agree, the hardest to negotiate. The question, at least for me, is how digital tools may help us with deep boring the ever-thickening data stream—particularly with respect to the point Dr. Cohen made in “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History” ¹ about research and drilling deep in a research project. What the tools are/is/will be is an open question, at least for me.

I think that the API Workshop hosted by NiCHE looks very promising in helping the digital humanist find and/or create such tools:

Historians and other humanists now have access to digital primary and secondary sources on an unprecedented scale, but almost all of these resources are delivered through web browsers with the assumption that a person will be plodding through them one at at time. What we need now are ways to make these sources readily available to computer programs: intelligent agents, machine learners, adaptive filters, data mining packages, you name it. We need to be able to recombine information from multiple sources in a way that supports the discovery of new information. And we need to provide tools that allow networked collectives to work together and leverage the power and diversity of the individuals that comprise the group.

– William Turkel

Our ability to tap the stream, whether on a horizontal or vertical level, as Cameron noted, is the one area “that has the great­est poten­tial for real advance­ment, especially in the dig­i­tal human­i­ties.” Our skim v. bore skill set honed in seminars, quals, and research in general gives us (I think) a unique perspective in developing or realigning existing digital tools to address this issue.

What are your thoughts on this issue? What other issues exist for the humanist with respect to the real time stream? What are the tools that exist or should exist for  deep boring this stream?

I spent yesterday trying to catch up on my feeds and found my reading taking me down the “stream.” Here are some links to yesterdays discoveries:

1. The Evolution of Blogging
2. How Internet Content Distribution & Discovery Are Changing
3. Why Blogs Need to be Social
4. Distribution… now
5. Dimensionalizing the web
6. Welcome to the Stream: The Next Phase of the Web
7. Mining The Thought Stream
8. Towards a Programmable Web

What relationship/role/understanding/use of the stream should the digital humanist develop?

I have wanted to blog for some time, but I have not had the courage to do so, at least until now. I have had a RSS reader for several years now (make that 6 years) and have followed many in the web standards and digital humanities spheres. I think fear was the biggest stumbling block for me, fear of judgement, etc. However, this year I asked my digital humanities students to blog. I could not in good faith require my students to blog if I did not blog myself. Thus, I bit the proverbial bullet and added a blog to my site. So far, I am finding it a rather enjoyable experience (though one I have not had much time to do).

Many of the students in my class have also found that blogging was not something they had considered before, but are now finding their blog an intriguing addition to their work as scholars (as well as anxiety producing one): What to Write, Entering the Blogging World, Posting, and Coming to Terms with Blogging. In addition to these posts, Cameron Blevins recently made some very good points about blogging as an important part of his intellectual and community building experience within academia and digital humanities in particular.

Only time (and good posts) will tell if I, too, find blogging helpful in connecting me to a wider world. Ultimately, I hope that the students from my class find blogging as good a tool as Cameron does in building intellectual and community connections within their own respective spheres as well as outside those spheres. So far, it appears that they are finding it so.