What am I testing?  Throughout the book, Igo asserts that there were general scientific terms associated with the three surveys she examines.   The Kinsey reports helped people understand what was “normal” sexuality, the Middletown studies provided insight into what was a “typical” American community, and pollsters like Gallup and Roper shed light on what the “average” American was thinking.  Currently, I am in the process of text mining popular magazines such as TIME, Ebony, Life, and Jet in order to see if the frequency of these terms correlate with particular events.  I will run the charts against these events:

1929:  First Middletown study published

1936:  Gallup and Roper both gain national recognition after each pollster accurately predicts Franklin Roosevelt’s election win

1937:  Second Middletown study published

1948:  First Kinsey Report, Sexual Behavior of the Human Male, is published

1953:  Second Kinsey Report, Sexual Behavior of the Human Female, is published

Below are a few sample visualizations can help understand what I intend to produce:

Chart URL: Above is a chart that shows how TIME magazine used the word “average.”  Note:  TIME’s first issue was published in early 1936, so the first set of data might be ignored.

Chart URL: Above is Billboard magazine’s use of the word “average.”

Chart URL:  An extended version of this study might include particular collective phrases like “the people.”  Click on “Chart URL” to see the full chart.

In addition to the book’s blanket argument, I would also like to test some of her sub-arguments.  Igo argues that after the first Kinsey Report was published, its findings “gained much of their authority from a discourse that trafficked in ‘facts’ and ‘reality.’  This was a potent vocabulary, and academic and popular commentators alike adopted it readily” (p. 244).  These two terms I would like to also analyze in popular magazines to see if these terms increased in frequency during the years right after the first Kinsey Report was published.

The 1947 Jimmy Stewart film, Magic Town, is the story of a pollster who discovers a shortcut to obtaining the perfect statistical representation of the American people. Stewart finds that Grandview is the ideal town, average in all respects. Once his secret is out, thousands of people migrate to Grandview in hopes of becoming part of the average, normal, and typical American community.

For my next history project, I would like to produce a work of digital scholarship that tests the thesis of historian Sarah Igo.  In her 2007 book, The Average American:  Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public, she argues that Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown studies (community studies), the work of pollsters like George Gallup and Elmo Roper (public opinion polling), and the publication of the Kinsey Reports (sexual behavior research) created a mass public by providing Americans with a way to look at themselves.  In doing so, these helped create a new sense of national identity (to hear a 2007 NPR interview with Igo, click here).  In her study, Igo consulted letters to pollsters, newspapers, popular magazines, and scholarly monographs to provide support for her historical argument.

How do I plan to do this project?  Instead of proving or disproving her thesis based on readings, I will do this with digital methods.  I would like to create a series of charts, graphs, visualizations, and other text-mining products to create a historical paper.

I decided to start with text mining popular literature.  The TIME Magazine Corpus, designed by Mark Davies of Brigham Young University, is a useful resource for those wanting to analyze the evolution of linguistic terms in twentieth century America.  What is great about this site is the user’s ability to get an immediate sense of the how much a cultural term was used.  Igo argues that between the 1920s and 1950s, Americans became more conscious of what was “representative” and the “majority.”  With this corpus, you can test this.  I can easily search the use of terms such as “public opinion” and “the people” and the see the frequency (by decade) of these terms in TIME’s editorial content.

George Gallup, profiled by TIME in 1948.

Ideally, I would like to search through other corpora to get a better idea of how much particular terms were embraced by American culture; however, it is difficult to find some all text, well-organized corpora of newspapers.  There are many online databases for both newspapers and magazines; however, it appears that most of these databases are not in the desired format.   Some even charge, such as the Washington Post, which has an archive collection that dates back to 1887.  The New York Times, which would have been an excellent source, does have a corpus that is in an organized format.  However, this dates back to only 1987 and is not open access.

I am just now really getting into this project, but I would like to create a visualization of words used during this time period and/or years around the three decades of Igo’s study.  Also, one of Igo’s arguments were that salient consensus of what was “average” had a white middle class bias.  It would be great to be able to create a visual to test this; however, this will require more thinking on my part.

UPDATE: Since my original post (above), I have expanded my text mining to include some of Google Book’s entire runs of magazines.  They have all LIFE magazine issues since was purchased from Time Inc in 1945.  Also, I will include magazines that are not so “white targeted,” such as Ebony, Jet, and Black World (originally called Negro Digest).  While Google Books does not house the first years of the later publications, what they do provide should still be adequate in providing data for a comparison visual that shows whether terms like “average” and “majority” were ingrained in American black culture.

In John Willinsky’s, “The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship,” Willinsky makes the case for open access in scholarly research.  According to Willinsky, the open access movement “is concerned with increasing access to more of the research literature for more people, with that increase measured over what is currently available in print and electronic formats. The open access movement is acting on a scholarly tradition that has long been concerned with extending the circulation of knowledge.”  Willinsky argues that open access is about human rights, greater circulation of knowledge, and increasing the impact of research.   He says that open access models of scholarly publishing will lead to the expanding circulation of knowledge, which will mean that research will be shared with more people.  This will move research from being only available to those on campuses with paid subscriptions, to people of every economic status worldwide.

As pointed out in the article, the print industry’s woes cannot be attributed to the rise of the internet.   People didn’t stop buying print because of the internet.   The problem was already there.  The internet only accelerated the industry’s downward spiral.  Willinsky notes that commercial publishing houses acquired new debt in an effort to make more money.  These publishing houses bought up other titles or created new ones in order to turn scholarly research into a purchasable commodity.  In order to make money off of this newly acquired debt, journal subscription prices were raised in order to pay for this, leading to numerous libraries canceling their subscriptions.

Willinsky, and others in the open access movement, are attempting to put the publishing back into the hands of the people who produce the scholarship.  He brings up an interesting issue of research production and copyright.  With the current state of academic journals, operating within the market economy, copyright is used to protect the publishers right to make money.   This would make sense if the academic was making money off their article’s publication, but that is note the case.  Authors hand their work over to publishers, in hopes of increasing their reputation and advancing their career.  They are not financial partners and not receiving royalties from their published work.  This is a contradiction to copyright laws, which were enacted in order to protect the creator’s right to make money off of their creation.

If authors are not making a dime off their work and the circulation of their work is decreasing as a result of the market economy’s ever-increasing subscription rates, would it not be more beneficial to submit your work to an open access journal?  You are still not making a dime off of the publication and you are almost guaranteed more views, thus helping advance your career.  According to Willinsky, “copyright interests of researchers are to have their work reproduced, read, and accurately cited among as wide a readership as possible. The economic interests of faculty are not hurt, for example, as are those of publishers, by the distribution of free copies of their published work.”  Due to the atmosphere of publishing in the market economy, researchers have no choice but to severe themselves from that industry.

In addition, Willinsky makes an ethical case for open access.  He says that it opens up the research field to universities in developing countries and that it can improve democracy by providing “a check and balance to the one-sided representations of interest groups, political parties, and governments.”  Greater circulation of research among the public could “encourage people to explore issues of interest in more depth, checking out the facts for themselves, asking questions and pushing for more work on a topic, rather than simply leaving such work to pundits and panels of experts.”  Why just rely on scholars, television pundits, or elite journalists to tell us “how it is?”  If research is available, people can test what is said, creating a more democratic system of information.

There is already successful and widely used open source software to help nonprofits, universities, and scholarly associations move to open access.  As reported in a 2002 New York Times article, these new web-based technologies eliminate other costs (in addition to the obvious publishing costs) and make global collaboration more efficient.

Are advocates for subscription paywall journals carrying the water for commercial publishers who only seek a buck?  Is there a vanity issue with supporters of commercially published journals, where some believe that only those at universities are privileged enough to access them?  Willinsky argues that it is the responsibility of the scholar to share their knowledge with as many people as possible.  Others have already benefited from embracing principles of the gift economy, isn’t it time for academia?

Felton takes a unique approach to his report’s by utilizing graphics to visually communicate complicated statistical information.   He makes the report centered more on visuals rather than being text-focused.  He uses maps, charts, and graphic text to give his audience a pleasing presentation to his yearly summary of books he read, food he ate, how much he paid in transportation, and any other personal information that he can quantify.  In the end, he an easy-to-read report of his life’s complex  and monotonous information.

What does this accomplish?  Felton’s reports are interesting because they are able to integrate information that ones might either consider unrelated or have difficulty imagining the interrelation.   In one of his reports, he juxtaposes a timeline of the year’s events against a map, pinpointing where he was when he did something.

For me, the greatest part of the Feltron Reports is that fact that you don’t have to look at a graph or chart, first understand how the graph was set-up, and then read and spend time interpreting the visual.  While these graphics might require an understanding or shared visual language between the report author and the reader, they are not that difficult to understand and I do not need to get out my old undergraduate statistics textbook to understand the meaning of the variables.   Instead, I am able to look and see patterns.  However, this data might not be of value to an academic or professional historian.  Maybe it is kept simple for popular culture.   What do you think about Felton’s synthesis of complex statistical information and visual graphics?  Does it work and is it useful?

The Euclid Corridor Transportation Project is a great example of a historical website that urban historians and planners would enjoy navigating.  The Euclid Corridor Transportation Project was a Cleveland initiative that sought to connect the downtown to University Circle.  Not only was a bus rapid transit system designed, but the entire Euclid Corridor was revitalized through pedestrian-oriented street re-development and re-designing building fronts.  This site provides an interactive map of the entire Corridor, that allows user to click on individual locations, see historical photos of people and buildings, as well as listen to related podcasts.  While this site might not provide a lot of information for a professional historian, it is a great value to urban land scholars and the lay public of the local community.

Hyper Cities is another valuable website.  This website is still in its infancy, but shows great potential since it is a collaborative effort to show cities and their layouts over time. The site layers maps directly over others.  For someone who studies urban trends, this could be useful to see where people lived, how far they lived from particular modes of transportation, and where in relation their homes were located to places of mass social gathering or historical events.

One website that I was impressed with was William Thomas and Edward Ayer’s The Difference Slavery Made website.  The website aims to compare two counties during the decades prior to the Civil War, Augusta of Virginia and Franklin of Pennsylvania.  This website is not only a great place for researching, but it is actually a published article that provides an argument while disclosing all the information used by the authors in drawing their conclusions.  It provides a combination of tables and maps, allowing users to actually examine the authors’ sources and see how they came to particular conclusions.

Unless your research is focused on a particular local population and you are examining the physical, social, and cultural shape of an area, then such spatial sites might not be of much value.  However, if this is your area, then these can help you understand how space, location, and time influence history.

Moretti is correct in that quantitative histories can lead to new discussions; however, it would be a mistake to favor this over qualitative analysis.  When I did my thesis in political communication, I conducted a content analysis of horse-race election coverage.  While the qualitative analysis of certain variables (i.e., trends in the number of Republican vs Democratic source citations) were instrumental to supporting my main argument, I could not have adequately defended my research without examining the significance of themes and expressed ideologies in election coverage text.

I do understand where Moretti is coming from with his idea about graphs being a simple presentation of straight facts.  When I did my thesis, there were many graphs from my SPSS output that I could not explain with my previous research, theoretical ideology, or the study’s content analysis.  This involved additional analysis and research in order to better explain my results.  As a result, I ended up not only looking at the sociological and professional practices of political beat journalists, but instead I ended up synthesizing the sociological aspect with the journalism industry’s political economics.  This ended up strengthening my argument, creating a more well-rounded study that examined multiple aspects of the journalism industry, not just one.  In the end, I had a easy time deflecting arguments during my thesis defense.

With my above example, I would have to say that even in the case of my study, my amateur analysis did benefit the conclusion drawn from the study.  I think that the same can be said for historians.  Quantitative information can teach something before a final conclusion is made.  In short, quantitative data can provide an explanation that at the very least, can give a historian pause before he/she provides an interpretation.

Not only is it changing behaviors.  As Leary states, “What will make that difference is not simply the ubiquity of the internet, or our students’ (and our own) ingrained reliance upon it, but the sheer scale of what is coming online.”   Leary makes the point of saying that googling for information is not the future, but the present.  Years ago, we would have said that the internet is no substitution for the physical library, but now one can argue that the reverse is just as true. Almost everything is first appearing online or going through the digitization process.  Both Leary and Bell say that this is transforming scholars’ relationship with text.

Both of these works raise the question about the future of the physical library.  Physical libraries can be financially and politically expensive.   With a sluggish economy, it is hard to find the backing to sustain these much-needed facilities.  This month, it was reported that Camden, New Jersey was preparing to shut down its entire library system (3 libraries) due to budget cuts.  This would leave Camden residents unable to borrow a book or browse library sources for school, work, and other needs.  It seems that the proliferation of online content has led to decreases in people going to libraries, thus justifying these types of cuts.  Some libraries, like GMU’s own Fenwick Library, has even resorted to the shameless “outsourcing” of its building to Jazzman’s coffee kiosk in order to raise funds and draw students through its doors.

What does the future of scholarship look like?  Is it similar to the present?  Bell’s article focuses on the trial and errors of e-books and electronic devices that resemble the physical book.  Bell goes through a list of e-book reader products that at one time seemed “sticky” but failed to catch on.  Since Bell’s article was written, we have seen the introduction of various e-book readers, including Amazon Kindle and the iPad.  It is too early to tell whether these products will be able to replace the natural feel of the physical book, but two things are clear:  (1) these products are signs that companies will keep trying until they hit the mark and (2) eventually all libraries and research practices will be transformed to accommodate.

The proposed Index page for my history website.

This website would have to be ran through a university’s history department since it involves digitization of old analog film as well as the ability to acquire grant money to pay for copyright licenses.

Proposed Search page for history website.

Anyone can enter the site and search for a particular show.  When clicking on the “search” link, they will be directed to an advanced search page.  Here, all users (even non-subscribers) can see if this database contains the digital video for a particular show.

Proposed Abstract page for history website.

After search results are generated and users have clicked on an individual result, they will be directed to an abstract page that has the basic information for the individual show.  There will be buttons which (a) opens a new window with the show’s transcripts, (b) opens a new window with the digital video in RealPlayer, and (c) a link that allows you to order a hard copy of the video or download (for a fee).

At the bottom of this page, is the open-source section.  This portion allows all users to submit comments and upload documents that relate to that particular show.  Everyone, even non-subscribers, can view the comments as well.   So, this website seeks to serve those who are looking for video (those who attend/work at a subscribing university) as well as being a collaborative source of information (for non-subscribers, reporters, bloggers, political junkies).

Some suggestions that were made in class include:

1.  Looking more into how to go about getting copyright permission, costs, etc.

2.  Concerns about whether the open-source/social media component contradicts the pay wall portion

3.  Having the website be more clear about what subscribers see vs those who do not

We were short on time, so any additional comments would be appreciated.

After reading this chapter, two things put me in a bad mood:  (1) having the permission to use a television corporation’s material, and (2) the costs of using this material if permission is granted.

As mentioned previously, a historical database that is both similar to mine and well-respected is the Vanderbilt Television News Archive.   If you log-in to their database, you will notice that even they do not digital video for all television networks.  They only have streaming video for the NBC Nightly News and one CNN program (Anderson Cooper 360).  The other videos must be requested/borrowed for a fee.  In order to borrow, your college’s library must be a subscriber to the database, since the analog video will be sent directly to your university library.

The Vanderbilt Television News Archive has been around since 1968 and is partnered with the Library of Congress; however, it appears they may even have trouble getting the copyrights permission to show streaming video from ABC, CBS, and Fox.   That is something that is pretty intimidating for my start-up history site.

I was a little aware that this might present a hurdle.  Cohen and Rosenzweig even say that in many instances, “the noncommercial nature of most historical projects generally protects you from several noncopyright legal hazards that other websites face.”  Therefore, I assumed that if my site was either a nonprofit or ran by a public university, it would not have an easy time getting permission.  Vanderbilt is a private research university, so that could be a reason why it has had some difficulty using digital video from ABC, CBS, and Fox (if it is a permission issue rather than a staff issue or time issue).

Finally, the cost concern was a bummer.  If the website were to be run by a start-up nonprofit, it might be difficult to find the funding for annual fees that could range in the tens of thousands of dollars for just one program.  Therefore, my website would almost have to be ran by a large public university, which would help with obtaining grant money, alumni donations, among other financial support.

Every semester, I have to emphasize to my students how Wikipedia is not a credible source to cite.  However, I make sure to point out that the major flaw with the website is the lag time between something false being posted and when it is finally removed.  As Rosenzweig states, this can range between 3 minutes to months.   This is a problem.

But a positive is the site’s dedication to having entries being written from a neutral point of view, ensures that simple facts are given greater weight than interpretation.  This same neutral point of view is what plagues professional journalism, making it a mind numbing report of facts without a journalist ever deciphering the facts to come to a definitive conclusion.  However, since all facts can be included, Wikipedia is a great way for a student to acquire background knowledge about the subject, reading facts from both sides.  There is not an established gatekeeper as there might be with a book which has one editor.  Note, I am not referring to the written entry portion of Wikipedia, but rather the external sources and references at the footnote section.  I often tell me students to explore the sources first and then move on.

Rosenzweig explains that since Wikipedia is important to students, it should be important to professors and professional historians as well.  We must remember that the world is not all behind a subscription  pay wall or in the stacks of our libraries.  Wikipedia is high in the search results when someone Googles a topic; therefore, it is frequently the first point of reference for not only students, but anyone wanting to find out more about something they recently heard or read about.

As Rosenzweig states, the historical profession is very individualistic and wants credit where credit is due.  Why would someone want to have the “honor” of updating or creating a new Wikipedia entry, especially if that entry runs the risk of being edited?

I think the problem is the idea that Wikipedia is user-generated and thus user-centric and inaccurate.  But is this so? Sandra Ordonez, a former communications manager for Wikipedia, says that the collaboration process is messy and like a sausage, since it tastes good but you really don’t want to know how it was made.  However, she says that the collaboration led to more credibility since it pooled resources.  Or as former San House Mercury News technology columnist Dan Gillmor once said, “My readers know more than I do.”   The point that Gillmor’s statement says about not only journalism, but any type of research is:  The more participation you have, the better that research will be.

Therefore, if the crowd is sourcing material in a collaborative way to generate encyclopedia articles, it is generally working quite well, and this is the most prominent way the lay public is acquiring background knowledge, then historical professionals really have an obligation to participate in this process.  Wikipedia’s users don’t hold all of the correct information and neither do historical scholars; however, everyone’s input to this open access platform will greatly improve public knowledge.