Man Camps: The Poster

Next Saturday, I am sending a poster to a Community Connect Forum in Buffalo, ND as part of the team studying the social and cultural changes associated with the Bakken Oil Boom. This poster will present some of our work on man camps in Williams County. These forums are meant to foster communication and a sense of community between researchers at UND and residents of the state. So, it’s a great opportunity to show our work to people who might be more directly impacted by the oil boom and changes in settlement.

This means that over a two week period, I’ll be presenting something in Buffalo, ND and Buffalo, NY. I’m not really sure whether this is cool or not, but it’s going to happen.

So here’s the poster:

I’ve uploaded a legible version of the poster here. I rarely make posters, although they are becoming more and more common in academic settings. I probably used too much text and could have done more with my images, but hopefully it presents some idea of our recent work.

The Community Connect forum will also feature the world premiere of Kathy Coudle-King’s documentary Off the Map. I mention this because it was edited in the Working Group in Digital and New Media lab. While community outreach has never been the highest priority for the Working Group (nor is it something that we’ve particularly avoided), it is cool to see two Working Group members presenting in Buffalo.

So, if you’re in Buffalo, ND, check out our poster and the other cool stuff going on in the state.

Popular Byzantium: An Interview with Paul Kastenellos, Part 1

Right before Christmas, I was surprised and excited to receive an unsolicited copy of a novel set in Byzantium: Paul Kastenellos, Count No Man Happy. (New York 2011).  I was even more surprised to discover that Paul Kastenellos was the pen name of Vincent O’Reilly who was a history major at the University of North Dakota in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Needless to say, the intersection between Byzantium and the University of North Dakota is exceedingly rare, so I contacted the author and struck up a conversation about Byzantium, popular culture, and life at UND.

I discovered that Vincent had more than just a casual interest in Byzantium. His book is richly textured (with pleasant edge) and historically vivid making it more than suitable for a fictional companion to an undergraduate Byzantine history course. For the uninitiated, Vincent has provided some companion material on his website including a lovely Illustrated History of Byzantium.

The following is a lightly edited version of our email correspondence which focuses on that often strange intersection between the academic community and passionately interested lay reader. As most Byzantinists realize, the past two decades have seen a growing popular interest in Byzantium which, so far, most Byzantinists have not successfully captured to our field’s advantage. Perhaps this interview with a participant in this popular revival can provide some new insights for us…

Bill Caraher: Thank you so much, Vincent, for taking the time to chat about your book and giving those of us on that academic side of the aisle a perspective on how you came to learn, to love, and to write about the Byzantine centuries, and why (and whether!) we are genuinely experiencing a “Byzantium boom” in the popular culture of the first decades of the 21st century.

Paul Kastenellos:  I thought I might anticipate your questions with a little general background. I need not tell you how important that is to understanding. I entered UND in 1957. At that time TV was fairly new, most families not getting a set until about 1950. Educational TV was a bore – some college prof in a suit lecturing at a podium. What we learned in high school was mostly English history with a few asides to Charlemagne, Julius Caesar et c. My only recollection of anything Byzantine was the statement in some textbook, talking about the fall of the Roman empire, that “it maintained a shadowy existence in the east for another thousand years.” Now imagine my shock in Dr. [Felix] Vondracek’s class when he,, who saw history as a succession of battles. told us about Adrianople and stirrups, Belisarius and Antonina (Wow); and insisted that we memorize lists of popes and Byzantine emperors (Yawn!). Vondracek had his faults, no doubt about it; but his lectures were never dull.

*[Felix Vondracek was a popular and cantankerous history professor at the University of North Dakota.]

Fast forward fifty years. Students learn more. High school teachers are better prepared. Television is running out of things to tell people about. Perhaps most important, the comfortable parochialism of my youth is no longer acceptable. Black history was assumed not to exist in those days and we studied American history in a vacuum, ignoring anything south of the border after the conquistadors and never realizing that colonial history is intimately interlinked with European.

In my college years there were not more than four or five books on Byzantium in print at any time. We had Bury, Diehl, Pirenne, and Vasiliev; and Vondracek was anxiously awaiting a translation of Ostrogorsky. Once in a while Oxford University Press might kick out a new volume but they were pricey and would not long remain in print. But Praeger was creating expensive art books some of which were about Byzantine art.

To confirm what I just wrote I looked at my aging Viking Library “Portable Medieval Reader” (c 1949). In seven hundred pages the only Byzantine author is Anna Comnenaand that is her description of the western crusader knights. With such a dearth of information it should not be surprising that there was little interest even among the educated. We were still stuck in Gibbon’s negative view because no one was reexamining it at the high school level.

Today Americans have a broader outlook. Most educated people have traveled. TV has run out of fresh Hitler footage. Color images on videotape are much more vibrant than even color film, much less the black and white of 1950s television. Modern art may possibly have made people more willing to look at stuff other than the purely representational.

So there is nothing remarkable about the interest in Byzantium. There is also interest in Mongolia and substantially more interest in the Indian cultures of South America than when I was young. In grade school and high school my only knowledge of these peoples was which Spaniard had killed them. Our understanding of Persia was entirely through Greek eyes, and of Spain through British eyes. There was a definite prejudice against Byzantium inherited from Gibbon, just as there was against Spain which we viewed through the filter of Elizabethan English propaganda. One look at the Hearst papers leading up to the Spanish American War will show that.

We knew nothing of the Byzantines but then we knew nothing of Japan (see my essay on the Asian War on my website) and what little we knew of India was still through the eyes of Kipling. North Africa was to us Beau Geste and the French Foreign Legion, Africa was witch doctors and safaris, and Egypt was still “The Curse Of The Mummy’s Tomb.” Our parents had at best a high school education as did our newspaper reporters. China was seen through the eyes of “China watchers” who seem never to have left the bars of Hong Kong. Now all these states are intimately intertwined.

My point is that the interest in Byzantium can not be seen as something unique. It is not that somehow it has become interesting, but rather that my youth was a benighted pit from which internationalism and international travel and communication has raised us. We are looking for new interests.

But only so far. There is Byzantine stuff on TV but it doesn’t go much beyond pretty pictures of Hagia Sophia. The Orthodox church still remains outside the interest of most people. In fact religion generally is something modern secularists don’t want to discuss except in a negative way. I do think the Metropolitan exhibitions gave a boost to Byzantine art. I saw the first one and it definitely was broader than the expected bunch of old icons. Why not “Russia and Byzantium,” “Byzantium and the West,” The Crusades Through Byzantine Eyes,” and of course, “The Fall of Constantinople.”

I just checked Barnes and Noble and am amazed with the variety of material now available. There are many popular books on the Byzantines. I have one on their cuisine (and would readily pass on it.) There is even fiction though the two novels I’ve read were disappointing (Stock adventure stories with a cross thrown in here and there.) Alternative history is blessed with David Drake and Eric Flint’s “Belisarius series” which I enjoyed. Though it had little to do with Byzantium, I liked their take on the character of Belisarius. One might ask why these authors chose to write six books with Belisarius as the protagonist. I would answer that the motivation was not Byzantium, but alternative history which sells well. I wish it were the reverse.

BC: So, you became interested in Byzantine history through Prof. Vondracek’s classes, but surely not everyone in these classes has gone on to write novels on Byzantium. Was there any other thing that influenced your interest?

PK: Let me detail a bit of personal history… Vondracek threw a searchlight on my understanding of medieval history which up to then had been entirely western. In a way that was understandable if narrow. Our society does descend from western European. After graduation I had to earn a living. Although I pretended to be as interested in Byzantium as in my college years in truth it faded. I was going for a masters in library Science and working. When my daughter graduated from St John’s College in Annapolis she took a job with Bill Moyers and used her first paycheck to give me and my wife, Tamiko, tickets to Istanbul.

To my great surprise and delight my interest in Byzantium came flooding back as though it had never waned. Two characters in Vondrachek’s lectures had never really left me:

BC: Which two characters are those?

PK: Belisarius and Constantine VI.

BC: Why those two of all the memorable characters from Byzantium?

PK: Belisarius is obvious. How can it be that such a notable general went unmentioned in any history of great generals that I had read? Pure western ignorance and bias. That Antonina accompanied him touched the romantic in me and her infidelity to a man who loved her deeply made me curious. (These things I had learned from Vondracek who loved nothing better than to reveal the private lives of famous people.)

Vondacek also told us of poor Constantine VI and related how he was blinded by his mother and how Theodote, in his words, “followed him around like a puppy dog for the rest of his life.” He also told us that he had been infatuated with the daughter of Charlemagne whom he was betrothed to but never met. I have no idea why these things stuck in my mind when so many other things in Vondrachek’s lectures have faded out of memory, but they did. Unfortunately, while I remembered both these things about Constantine I somehow had a disconnect in my mind that they were the same person. Nonetheless they stayed in the back of my mind and came back with other things about Byzantium when I first visited Istanbul.

Now I had always wanted to write. In fact I entered the news business (United Press – Movietonews) in order to simplify and improve my writing style which I was aware had been damaged by too much reading of diverse authors in college. Why had I not gone into a field of history after college? Because my interest was in Byzantium and as the worst language student who ever lived I knew that I could never be a scholar in that subject. I had no interest in simply teaching high school.

Somewhere along the line I saw the movie Laura wherein a detective falls in love with the portrait of a (presumably) dead woman. I did not think the movie played out the idea all that well but was fascinated by the concept. So somewhere in the mid ’90s I started to write a bit of fluff that I jokingly referred to as Constantine VI meets Bettie Page. (It is amazing how many guys of all ages [and even gals] are familiar with Bettie, but one doesn’t know that until someone in the group dares to bring up the subject. I even joined the BettieScouts of America fan club.) Then I remembered that Constantine was the same guy whose mom blinded him.

Problem.

One can’t write fluff about someone whose Mom blinded him. I tried writing Beth (inspired by Bettie) out of the story but had come to like the character that I was developing too much. I needed such a character to boost an otherwise depressing tale of Constantine and his mother. I thought to have him dream of someone who’d lived before him. That would not have had to be fantasy but I couldn’t find anyone that I could use without totally changing her character. So Beth stayed. Of course it means a story that will turn off people with a serious interest in serious history; but whatthehell, to quote Mehitabel the poetic cockroach.

…

Click here for Part 2 of the interview with Vincent O’Reilly author of Count No Man Happy.

Playford Thorson and Leadership

Prof. Playford Thorson passed away this past week at age of 86.  He had been retired for several years by the time I arrived at the University of North Dakota, but his like many retired professors who stayed on in the area, he remained visible on campus at various lectures or public events.

When I was working on my Departmental History in 2007, Thorson generously agreed to have a conversation with me about his time in the Department of History. He was hired in 1960, as part of the new wave of faculty members who arrived to help manage the unprecedented growth the University experienced at that time. He was still a Ph.D. Candidate and would not completed his dissertation at the University of Minnesota until 1972, but this was not particularly unusual for that time.

His obituary in the Grand Forks Herald has a particularly nice testimony to his passion for learning and students, and I don’t think that I can add much in that particular area.

I can, however, point out that Thorson made several particularly significant contributions to the Department of History, particularly as the leader of a group of faculty who became known as the “Young Turks”. This group formed in the early 1960s were instrumental in the final phase of modernizing and professionalizing the university. To do this, however, they clashed with the older generation of faculty who had largely been hired before World War II and, in many cases, had seen the university through the difficult interwar years. By all accounts, Thorson was among the ringleaders of this group of reform minded faculty and they presented to President George Starcher, who had been hired in 1955, a list of demands which focused in particular in the quality of education at UND during a time of rapidly expanding enrollment. (See below for a copy of this manifesto.)

The Department was led by Elwyn Robinson and Felix Vondracek. The former led through gentle example and the latter through his position as Department Chair which he had held for over 15 years. Vondracek was largely blamed for the rapid turnover of faculty in the late 1950s, which included many up-and-coming faculty stars like Louis Geiger, George Lemmer, John Harnsberger, and Jerry DeWitt who chaffed under Vondracek’s apparently imperious style of leadership. Thorson, who came to the Department during this time of rapid turnover and discontent, stepped into at least an unofficial leadership position. In 1962, he submitted a letter to President Starcher with five other faculty signatures attached demanding the ouster of Vondracek and urging that department chairs served on a rotating basis. This appears to have coincided both with the general policies advocated by the “Young Turks” as well as the opinion of Starcher and his right-hand-man William Koenker, the first Vice President of Academic Affairs.  As a result of this letter, Starcher (or perhaps the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Robert Witmer) offered Thorson, then without his Ph.D. the position of chair. Thorson declined the position (or, according to Robinson, Witmer withdrew his offer to Thorson and offered it to Robinson when he – true to his “Young Turk” leanings – had attached to it a list of demands.)

As the University looks to get its footing in the 21st century, it is probably useful to reflect a bit on the role that people like Playford Thorson played in forcing the University to adapt to changes in the 20th century. Let’s hope that we have the same cantankerous faculty leaders now as we had back then.

View this document on Scribd

A Faculty Salary: A Historical Case Study

Over the past weekend, during my downtime, I started going through Professor Elwyn Robinson’s memoirs (for more on this project look at these posts) and pulling out financial data. Robinson recorded various bits of financial information in relatively fine detail.  For example, I know that a refrigerator in 1941 could cost $60, a used piano would run you around $255 in 1945, and a 1949 Studabaker Champion would run just a bit over $2000.

More interesting, of course, are these numbers in relation to Prof. Robinson’s salary. He was hired at the University of North Dakota for the princely sum of $1400 a year. By 1951, he earned $5000 a year. While this is an impressive increase in annual earning, comparing it to historic consumer price index figures shows that Robinson’s actual earning power remained relatively level.

At the same time, Robinson consistently takes pride in his salary increases each year and recognized them to be a product of his hard work and the popularity of initiatives like his “Heroes of Dakota” radio broadcasts.

It is also striking that when adjusted against the Consumer Price Index for 2011 (itself a problematic measure), Robinson’s salary remained lower than the average salary for UND faculty (even in the humanities) for the first 15 years of his career on campus.  It is also interesting to see that some years where his salary increased, the actual purchase power of his salary, in fact, decreased (e.g. 1944-1947).

Over the next few months, in my spare moments, I hope to collect all the major financial and economic data from Robinson’s memoirs and think about how I could present this information in a graphically engaging way.

Thinking about Collaboration and Digital History in Practice

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

Over the past half semester I’ve been working with a dedicated group of graduate students on public and digital history practicum. The practicum focused on the creation of a digital history collection and exhibit celebrating the Chester Fritz Library’s 50th Birthday. This project has had its ups and downs and we’re only half way through the experiment, but I felt like we had gone far enough along to reflect on some of the things that I’ve learned coordinating a class in an intensively collaborative, digital environment.

The class was designed, at least in theory, around the needs of our “client” the Chester Fritz Library and through several meeting with various stakeholders in the process – the Director of Libraries and the heads of various divisions – and sitting in on a  town hall like meeting of library staff, we developed an overall strategy on how to approach the library’s 50th Birthday as a digital, public history event. The library helped us set some deadlines and shape some expectations for how this project would fit within the festivities that they had already planned in the fall of this year.

Check out the page here

The class itself consists of a five student dream team (as an Eagles fan I can say that): 3 Ph.D. students and an M.A. and a B.A. student.  At the midpoint of the semester, I asked the students to reflect upon their experiences in the class and my observations below derive in part from these reflections.  I not only received their generous permission to reflect on their reflection papers, but I’ve also asked them to check out this post and comment on my efforts to summarize their thoughts.

So here they are:

1. Structure and Room to Fail.  When I initially imagined the class, I had figured that our conversations with the library would help us shape our project, its deadlines, and goals.  So I did not create a formal syllabus, but rather created a list of suggested deadlines for various aspects of the project. In other words, the course lacked much in the way of formal structure, in part, because I hoped that our stakeholders and the students would set deadlines and goals.

They did move in this direction, but I overlooked one small issue in the planning of our public, digital history collection: the time to struggle and even fail. Some of the students initiatives which seemed quite reasonable involved far more time than any of us expected. The combination of unexpected delays, problems with workflow, and even plans or projects that didn’t work out, slowed the project down and the lack of a firm class structure gradually eroded a sense of urgency. Only a firm intervention set the class back on track, but by then, I think that the class was behind where we all hoped we would be as the public festivities started around homecoming week.

In the future, I think a firm structure would have provided some context for the kind of risks/reward analysis that my team considered when embarking on a more difficult or ambitious component of the project. In other words, we might have been more conscious of delays and other risks of ambitious plans, if there were checks on he system throughout the process.

2. Digital Immigrants. The digital learning curve was steeper than expected even for the most committed digital immigrants (i.e. students who were committed to learning digital tools but not “natively” familiar with them. I dislike the term “digital native” and “digital immigrant”, but in this case it seems particularly useful). In particular, I found that the students struggled to keep pace with the expectations of the digital world, where content has to appear continuously or at least at regular intervals to attract attention in the din of the internet. Student work patterns tended to encourage episodic writing usually toward the end of the term when papers become due. Asking them to produce content continuously throughout the semester and to write it directly into the digital stream (via a blog, a Twitter feed, and a digital collection) clearly created issues for our students who felt more at home with crafted final papers that emerged from long(ish) gestation periods and were refined over multiple drafts.

History is rather unique in that it tends to privilege to final product over the process. Historians tend not to dilate long on methods. The importance of the final product over the various intermediate steps that a scholar would take along the way, contributed to my students’ reluctance to expose their creative process to the world. So not only was the pace disruptive to their workflow patters, but they had few examples of pre-publication, public work to look to for guidance (and they do not read my blog or any other academic blogs.)

3. Collecting vs. Interpreting. One of the most interesting challenges of the process of producing web content on the fly is that my students initially insisted on a rather rigid division between the process of building a digital collection and the process of interpreting it. This divide, of course, is grounded in traditional models of historical research which imagines the first step to be data collection which forms the foundation for the analysis and interpretation.  This approach relies on a view of historical artifact as objects that exist outside of the interpretative process.  In fact, historians are still something bothered by the idea that our research questions can and do shape the kinds of evidence we look for in our sources and collections.

The dichotomy between collecting and analyzing is not grounded in reality, of course, (as any graduate student in the field could tell you): historical evidence and collection are the product of conscious decisions and selection processes. In other words, the collection itself – with its limits and character – is the product of historical thinking in the same way that more formal, written analysis and interpretation is.  Understanding these two processes as separate created a rift in their workflow and contributed to their difficulty in creating content continuously for the collection

4. Collaboration. In working with a group of students, I somehow expected a magic moment of collaboration to occur as individual’s found complementary interests, abilities, and schedules. So far, this has not happened. In fact, most of the year it was a challenge to get the entire group together at one time (we did not have a scheduled class time because I anticipated having to meet in different venues and with different stakeholders; this oversight is related to my point 1) much less having them work together as a cohesive unit.

The lack of collaboration between the students led them to be concerned that they were working on the same projects at the same time. Moreover, it became difficult for the students to synchronize content production, analysis, and interpretation across multiple sites and across different forms of content. The result is a series of fine semi-independent projects that are attractive, intriguing, and almost exciting, but not nearly as good as they could have been.

I’ve learned the collaboration requires a certain amount of leadership on my part as the instructor.  On the other hand, understanding how collaboration worked and didn’t work brought to the fore the challenges of public and digital history as a process. While collaboration always seems like a way to make a project easier, it also requires that all participants have a commitment to a particular approach to documenting and understanding the past. Finding this middle ground for all the collaborators likely requires more effort from everyone involved that simply letting team members go out and work on related, but ultimately independent projects.

Of course, this is the genius of promoting collaborative work at the University. It forces collaborators and supervisors to not only articulate a (frequently shifting) final product, but also forces everyone involved to focus on process. As so much of what we do in the humanities is refining our processes (methods, procedures), I have come to appreciate the value of collaboration not as a means of getting students to work together, but rather as a means of unpacking the process of creating the knowledge.

5. Final Projects. As the semester crosses the half-way point, I’ve begun to think about what I can expect of this group for a final project. To some extent the work itself – with all its flaws and strengths – represents a final product. On the other hand, it seems like a public work should represent more than just an exercise in process. To manage a final product, we have to have consensus on what would make our efforts to collect and analyze a digital collection successful. (This does not mean that the process has to be closed or the final results definitive.)

At the same time, we need to have some kind of reflective component to the class so that we can all consider the academic, intellectual, and practical lessons of our work. My hope is that this blog post is a first step toward that.

Crossposted to Teaching Thursday.

Building a Small Digital Archive

Over this past semester, I worked with a couple public history graduate students to build a small digital archive of M.A. theses produced by students at the University of North Dakota during the first half of the 20th century.  Their work concentrated primarily on theses focusing on aspects of North Dakota history. Over the course of the semester the students scanned around 25 theses and uploaded them to an Omeka.net site.

This group of theses represent the first wave of graduate students in the departments of History and the School of Education. Their reflected the efforts of Orin G. Libby to develop a solid graduate program in the Department of History at UND and many of these works contributed to Elwyn Robinson’s seminal History of North Dakota.

As a final part of the project, we worked to create an online exhibit of these theses.  Check it out here.

Digital History Practicum: North Dakota History Goes Digital

This semester I am supervising a small digital history practicum.  The goals (as I have explained elsewhere in the blog) is to begin the process of digitizing Master’s Theses stored in Elwyn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections at the University of North Dakota.  These theses document the early history of the study of history at UND and provide some valuable historiography for the study of the history of the state. In fact, some of these theses date to before the establishment of state or local archives or to times when these archives existed only at the most rudimentary levels. As a result, they could contain references to documents that are now lost.

For example, we have Myrtle Bemis’s 1909 M.A. Thesis on the Settlement of Swedes in North Dakota. Much of the evidence for her argument comes from conversations and interviews with Swedes who had settled there just 20 or 30 years earlier.  This appears to be the earliest thesis in our collection here and it was prepared under the guidance of A. G. Leonard (Geology), Orin G. Libby (History), and John Gillette (Sociology).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Among the more interesting theses, however, does not touch on the history of North Dakota at all. Elmer Ellis‘s M.A. thesis, followed in the footsteps of Orin G. Libby’s work on the quantitative, geographical study of American political allegiances, but emphasized minority parties from the Civil War to 1900.  As readers of this blog know, Ellis went on to earn his Ph.D. and become the 14th president of the University of Missouri.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We hope to begin to release these theses by early March with short interpretative introductions, some discussion of our methods, and a proposal for digitizing the entire series of M.A. Theses in the archive.

At present we are a bit stuck as to how present these theses to the public. Our initial instinct had been to use Omeka, an online collection management application, and, specifically, their hosted Omeka.net service.  For public history students, learning to use these kinds of tools is an important skill, as many small to mid-sized museums and institutions have begun to develop their web presence in a more serious way.  Omeka allows the students to familiarize themselves with the Dublin Core metadata for objects as well.

Unfortunately, we have not been very successful in getting Omeka (or Omeka.net) to display textual artifacts. While the self-hosted version of Omeka (version 1.1) does allow for a document viewer installation (using Google Docs viewer), it is pretty limited in where it can be deployed. For example, it does not appear to work when arranging various items in the database for a formal exhibition. Omeka.net, while a great tool for image collections, does not support the viewer at all. So we can develop the metadata for these objects and even display images of their front page (like in this blog), but we can’t actually display the text in a way that is easy for the visitor to the site to scroll through without downloading the entire thesis.  This may be an acceptable solution for the present, but it is hardly optimal.

Since the scanned theses will eventually (we hope) make their way into the libraries digital collection in ContentDM, we are a bit reluctant to develop too much of a front end for their display. At the same time, the practicum had as its goal more than just creating a digital collection. We wanted to make sure that our collection could present our collection to interested members of the local community.