Profhacker is hosting a new teaching carnival, with useful links for teachers and students alike.
Blog
Productivity Tools
Two of my favorite digital humanities blogs, Profhacker and Gradhacker, are collaborating on a series of posts highlighting strategies and tools for using technology smartly. I highly recommend that my students take a look as they begin work on their research projects.
Half of Recent College Graduates Can’t Find Full Time Jobs
In the course of my morning blog and news reading, I come across this devastating fact via Ezra Klein. Half of recent college graduates can’t find full time jobs. This is a major failure at many different levels of government and higher education, puts what scan only be deemed a student loan crisis in perspective, and will have major ramifications far into the future.
Images of Urban Space via Gallica
Although Google Books continues to improve as a research source, I continue to believe that the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s digital library, Gallica, is easier to search and use for those interested in French language sources. The two most recent posts on the Gallica blog piqued my interest. First up is a list of the fifty most-downloaded documents. The list includes a number of notable names, but is otherwise most surprising for its eclecticism. The second post introduces readers to a newly digitized collection of images documenting Paris of the second half of the nineteenth century. I’ve only gone through a few pages of them, but they are too most notable for their very banality. Here’s one example, not chosen at random:
I came across this particular image by searching within the collection for the “Quai de l’hôtel de ville,” a street as the name implies that progresses along the river and forms one border of the Place de l’hôtel de ville. This specific street has stuck with me since my archival research because it was one of the few locations noted by the police has being the site of bars and cafés catering to men who sought sex with other men during the 1880s and 1890s. There is little in the image itself to suggest male-male eroticism, unless we stretch ourselves a bit and imagine that the two figures to the left are pressing together — certainly not an impossibility, however unlikely.
But I do get a bit of pleasure knowing that this kind of ordinary socializing was precisely what one would most likely have encountered had you entered one of the cafés whose clientele consisted of men who sought sex with other men. The police frequently noted how the men who went to these locations utilized various techniques — playing cards was mentioned a couple times — to deflect away any accusation that their intensions were anything other than honest male sociability. In other words, although there is nothing explicitly in the image to suggest that the men it depicts were anything but upstanding citizens, there’s also nothing to suggest that they necessarily were. Some would perhaps argue that I’m seeking out ambiguity where there isn’t any. I would respond by arguing that to understand the urban spaces of the late nineteenth century as anything but ambiguous is to fundamentally misconstrue the meaning of the transforming city.
Some Digital Humanities Links
— The Chronicle of Higher Education describes a new effort to map archival materials online. Mostly for Americanists at the moment, it seems.
— AcademiPad lists 30 online resources for academic life, writing, and technology.
— ProfHacker announces the Digital Humanities Winter Institute. I almost went this year to the summer event, but for a variety of reasons decided against. Maybe see you in Maryland this winter?
Want to Critique Black Studies? Read Some Books
Timothy Burke provides would-be critics of Black Studies with a required reading list. Only required for those wishing to keep their day jobs at the Chronicle of Higher of Education.
Use Scrible to Grade Web Based Assignments
I wish I had known about this when one of my classes was putting up their Wikipedia pages this semester, but in the course of searching for a better way of grading my blogging assignment for Modern Europe, I came across a nifty tool called Scrible. Scrible allows you to annotate webpages without converting them to a clunky pdf version (I tried to do this using Adobe Acrobat Pro and the resulting file was just huge). Basic annotation tools — notes, highlights, you can even change the text formatting — are all I need for grading, though the alignment between a note and its relevant text on the page could use some work. Scrible is in beta and comes with a free library of 125 MB for storing marked up pages, which is perfect for saving graded blogs to e-mail to students once they’re all done (which you can do straight from the Scrible toolbar). For any more research-oriented needs, Instapaper (for ease of access on the go) and Evernote (for keeping everything in one place) are clearly better solutions, but for this particular purpose it’s everything I could ask for.
Integrating IPad PDF Annotation with Zotero
Although I continue to advocate storing pretty much everything in Evernote — alongside efficient tagging and organization — I still really wanted to find a way to integrate annotating PDFs directly into my favored citation manager, Zotero. I’m hoping that I’ve hit on a solution.
1) I use the Zotero extension Zotfile to organize and rename attachments to Zotero entries into a folder on my desktop. The attachments are therefore links to local files, not files stored in the Zotero servers.
2) That folder is synced to the cloud — and my office PC — using SugarSync.
3) I open and annotate the PDF using GoodReader, which will then automatically sync the annotations with the files linked to the Zotero entry.
I had been using ZotFile’s “send to tablet” function, alongside iAnnotatePDF’s Aji Reader Service to push files back and forth from my tablet to my PC and then to both Zotero and the cloud. This new method avoids a number of problems that method entailed. First, everything is done without having to download individual files via the web or selecting individual files to sync and instead is done automatically. This ensures that I always have access to the files without worrying about finding the most recent version. It also means that I don’t have to be on my home network to update my files. Second, the files remain on my desktop in addition to the cloud and are automatically organized. Third, I avoid quickly exceeding Zotero’s limited free storage space.
I still also e-mail the annotated files to Evernote, since I also want to have all my notes in one place. But until Zotero includes a more robust note taking system, an integrated PDF viewer and/or an iPad app, this method seems to be the best way I’ve found to link annotated articles directly to their metadata.
Lessons of the Holocaust
Two of my courses are in the midst of World War II, a moment I mostly hate teaching, but will almost certainly find myself doing so for the rest of my life. I hate teaching it not simply because of the morbid fascination it always seems to evoke in people — and certainly not just in undergraduates — but because it’s so often cited as the reason to study history in the first place. Learn from the past, so we never repeat it. The Holocaust has come to stand in for the lessons of the past as a whole.
This conviction, propagated by memorials and memoirs, is one I try to challenge as I lecture and as we talk about the Holocaust. And it’s why I’ve assigned Ruth Kluger’s absolutely brutal Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered
When I tell people…that I feel no compunction about citing examples of my mother’s petty cruelties towards me, my hearers act surprised, assume a stance of virtuous indignation, and tell me that, given the hardships we had to endure during the Hitler period, the victims should have come closer together and formed strong bonds. Particularly young people should have done so, say the elderly. But this is sentimental rubbish and depends on a false concept of suffering as a source of moral education (52).
I hate teaching the Holocaust because every time I return to this beautifully, scandalously, brutal book, I can’t help but agree. Primo Levi depicted Auschwitz as a giant laboratory in which one could see how men and women functioned when placed in the most dire of situations. In doing so, he assumes that there is something, however, horrible to learn there. Kluger implies, as Lore Segal’s wonderful introduction notes, that in fact Levi “died of his knowledge” (10). I don’t think that the student of the Holocaust should come away with a newfound appreciation of the resiliency of the human spirit because doing so simply fits the event into a preconceived narrative that allows us to forget what the Holocaust actually was. Instead, the study of the Holocaust is an opportunity to question received ideas and ask whether we’ve been listening effectively to the voices of the past in the first place.
Blogging History
My Modern Europe students begin blogging history using historical newspapers and periodicals today. A list of topics and links to their pseudonymous blogs can be found here: http://aiross.wordpress.com/teaching/modern-europe-winter-2012/modern-europe-winter-2012-student-blogs/.