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Cliopatria's History Blogroll Part I / Part II.

Friday, October 23, 2009

On the Internet, anyone can be a historian

The Washington Post has a flattering profile of a young Wikipedian, Adam Lewis, who worked on the article for Washington, D.C. The punchline comes a few paragraphs in:

Lewis joined thousands of other amateurs toiling in obscurity on Wikipedia, where facts are more important than the star historians who tend to dominate the popular view of history. On Wikipedia, anyone can be a historian.

Posted on Friday, October 23, 2009 at 9:03 PM | Comments (6) | Top

Thursday, June 18, 2009

The history of the future of journalism?

In the wake of the Iranian election, lots of the people who focus on the changing journalism landscape have been talking about the significant role Twitter and other social media are playing in organizing and spreading news about the protests. Two of the leaders of the broad journalism discussion are Dave Winer and Jay Rosen, who have a weekly podcast called Rebooting the News. In the latest edition, Winer looks back to September 11, 2001 as the first time when the online social web foreshadowed the kinds of citizen journalism that Winer and Rosen see as a major part of the future of news. As he explains, he had no TV at the time but strictly through the Internet he was just as informed and up-to-date as he would hae been following the events of the day through traditional media.

Around 2001 is also the horizon for historians; for events after that, the archival richness of the internet accellerates from then until now in terms of the experience of ordinary people in major historical events and trends.

In that vein, here's a paper I wrote in 2005 for a course on narrative history with John Demos, about the usenet traces of the kinds of the thing Dave Winer reflects on from 9/11. (I tried to weave in the pop psychology framework of the five stages of grief, to mixed results.)

Posted on Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 1:58 PM | Comments (3) | Top

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Biology Today, the '70s textbook that would have made me a biologist

A few weeks ago, thanks to the blog A Journey Round My Skull (via Crooked Timber), I discovered Biology Today, an amazing college biology textbook from 1972. You can get the basics from the Wikipedia article I put together: [[Biology Today]]. But there's a lot more to it than what I could put into a Wikipedia article without running afoul of the "no original research" policy--and a lot more than I can fit into a blog post. The reviewer of a bowdlerized later edition got it right: "The true story of the development of Biology Today would make an interesting book in itself."

Posted on Sunday, May 24, 2009 at 12:33 AM | Comments (4) | Top

Thursday, May 14, 2009

The Two Cultures, 50 years later

7 May was the 50th anniversary of C. P. Snow's famous lecture The Two Cultures. Snow, a novelist who had studied science and held technology related government positions, decried the cultural rift between scientists and literary intellectuals. Snow's argument, and his sociopolitical agenda, were complex (read the published version if you want the sense of it; educational reform was the biggie), but, especially post-"Science Wars", the idea of two cultures resonates beyond its original context. The current version of the Wikipedia article says:

The term two cultures has entered the general lexicon as a shorthand for differences between two attitudes. These are

The increasingly constructivist world view suffusing the humanities, in which the scientific method is seen as embedded within language and culture; and
The scientific viewpoint, in which the observer can still objectively make unbiased and non-culturally embedded observations about nature.

That's a distinctly 1990s and 2000s perspective.

Posted on Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 11:30 PM | Comments (11) | Top

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Stanley Fish and saving the world one book at a time

Stanley Fish has a challenging column in Sunday's New York Times: "Neoliberalism and Higher Education". As the contents of Cliopatria, and indeed much of the academic blogosphere, attest, the trend of market approaches to the running of universities is on a lot of minds.

Posted on Tuesday, March 10, 2009 at 3:22 PM | Comments (6) | Top

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