Several people have written to me individually to express concern that they haven’t seen me on the Internet much lately. (Thanks for getting in touch! I really appreciate it, I just haven’t had the time to respond individually.) Since January, I’ve been very busy with professional and personal matters which have taken a good deal of time and will continue to do so. But there’s some good news amid the hard work:

I’m excited to announce that I’ve accepted a permanent faculty position in the history department at Florida International University in Miami, where I will be starting this fall.

My position is at the rank of Instructor, but it’s an unusually-structured position– a blend of classrooom instruction and service. I’ll be teaching 2 courses per semester, focusing primarily on digital history methods. In my service capacity, I’ll be advising faculty and graduate students on digital research and analysis methods. I’ll also be working with the university library on a number of digital projects, including but not limited to:

• digitization of some interesting archival collections;
• grantwriting to support these projects and development of digital-humanities infrastructure in the university libraries;
• helping out with a digital asset-management platform used by FIU’s libraries and museums;
• and helping to bring FIU’s digital collections into wider use within the history curriculum.

This is a great faculty opportunity with an alt-ac flavor, and I’m very enthusiastic to start working with FIU’s history department and library staff. Accordingly, for the next few months, I will mostly be scarce on the Internet, as I work hard towards a dissertation defense. Think of it as a social media sabbatical.

One of the few exceptions to my generally-offline spring and summer will be today and tomorrow, when I’ll be participating in the American Antiquarian Society’s conference “Research Libraries in the Digital Age: Needs and Opportunities,” which will be on Twitter at #AAS3rdCentury. More on that later, perhaps. For now, off to Worcester!

The American Historical Association annual meeting is the largest of scholarly conferences that historians usually attend. As far as I can tell, it’s a conference that faculty members will gripe (quietly or not) about going to, because:

• it’s gigantic, and research talks usually only draw the 5–10 people interested in what you’re working on
• it’s a jobhunting conference, so faculty members are locked in rooms with candidates all day.

As far as I can tell, neither of those two has changed for many people. However, compared to the two previous AHA annual meetings (San Diego in 2010 in Boston in 2011), this conference has a measurably livelier vibe.

• First, the unseasonably warm weather in Chicago–in the 50s Fahrenheit yesterday–puts everyone in a better mood.
• Secondly, the conference hotels this year have substantial lobby areas with ample seating and free wireless internet, which means that at almost any hour there are historians with laptops and portable devices hanging out as well as the usual array of scholarly sociability.
• There is also substantially more wifi-enabled session space this year, which is making the twitter stream rather livelier, with many historians I haven’t ever seen on Twitter dipping their toes in to report on sessions they’re attending. (Kudos to the AHA and thanks to the many new faces on Twitter.)
• But the real contributing factor for me and a lot of digital historians is this year’s substantial programming track on digital history, which included a THATCamp unconference. I wasn’t able to attend the AHA THATCamp due to other obligations, but friends who attended are saying glowing things.

From what I know, we have AHA president Tony Grafton and program committee member Dan Cohen (of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media to thank for this. (Well, maybe not for the weather, though who’s to say?)

Yesterday, I was so busy that I only had time to attend one session, the preliminary-report meeting of the AHA Task Force on LGBTQ Historians, which I livetweeted and about which more later. Today, it’s off to the Committee on Women Historicans breakfast, and then to chair our exciting experimental-format session Crowdsourcing History Collaborative Online Transcription and Archives, in Sheraton Ballroom IX at 11:30. You can follow and contribute to the tweets at #AHA2012 #session138.

Feeling like you're in over your head with that research project? You're not alone. Here's one tool for learning to swim.

Recently, I stumbled on Rachel Leow‘s series of posts (part 1, part 2, part 3) about DEVONThink Pro Office (DTPO) and how she used it for organizing her dissertation sources and writing (on decolonization in British Malaya). Chad Black, who studies early Latin America, is also a big fan of DEVONThink.

I’ve known about DTPO for years, but I held out on buying it. It’s relatively pricey for a grad student (over $100 even with a 25% student/educator discount), although the versions of DEVONThink without optical character recognition (OCR) features are cheaper.¹ I experimented with an earlier version of DTPO a few years ago and didn’t see anything overwhelmingly awesome about it, plus it was slow on the hardware I had at the time. But Marta Rivera Monclova‘s recent effusive praise about DTPO led me to try it again (there’s a 30 day free trial version), and the current version (2.3 as of this writing) is much better than the last time I looked. I now wish I’d gone for it sooner.²

DTPO doesn’t have any major features that you can’t find in various other Mac software (OCR with Adobe Acrobat Pro or AABBYY FineReader; file management and fulltext-search with Finder/Spotlight; tagging and notetaking with Evernote; prose composition with the editor/word-processor of your choice.) Nor does it precisely replace them; if you do a lot of PDF manipulation or image processing, you’ll still need to have a dedicated tool for working with those. Where DTPO shines is in integrating all those features extraordinarily well, in making them Applescriptable, and in doing them for large quantities of data without slowing to a crawl.³

Since I started using DTPO about a month ago, I’ve been putting more and more of my archival research photos into it (not to mention PDFs from Google Books, JSTOR, etc.) Since I have a lot of JPG photos of typescript material from the early 20th century, DTPO’s ability to convert those images en masse into searchable PDFs is a huge time-saver. PDFs are a lot smaller, and my “Archival Photos” folder of JPGs was getting just too big and unwieldy— over 30GB.⁴

Because some of my images aren’t great-quality to begin with, the OCR isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough to index typed material well.⁵ Especially because the OCR picks up common words reliably, I can search on state names to answer some of my questions about birth registration in particular states. Because the government collections I use have interleaved pages of manuscript letters and typescript replies, I don’t sweat a lot about the fact that OCR won’t catch old handwriting. The typescript replies are a good-enough index for the correspondence, and if I need to transcribe something, I can add an Annotation to that image which will sit, searchably, in the same folder.

I like DEVONThink Pro Office, and there’s a lot about how I’m using it that I’m not detailing in this post. If you’re working on a major research project, you might want to try it. If you do and it works for you— or not– I’d be interested in knowing more about the details.

International copyright law isn't quite as pointy as this, but the effect is similar. (Image credit: Cornell University Library/Flickr Commons)

The comments on my previous post about Google Books research hacks and further conversation on Twitter revealed an aspect of historians’ evolving digital practices that I hadn’t known before.

Historians around the world can see different things in major digitized-books collections depending on the place where they’re working. Which open-access digital collections they use depend on a combination of their own scholarly interests and the vagaries of international copyright law.From Australia, Brett Holman pointed out that for him, every US government document I’d linked to on on GBooks was snippet-view-only– even the ones that are public domain in the US. Further investigation revealed that HathiTrust would show more of those to him. ¹

Brett studies the 20th century (aviation), so early-20th-century US government documents could conceivably be important to his practice as a historian. But from a scholarly perspective, it’s a bit absurd: Here’s this amazing global information network that can’t deliver US government documents— some of the least copyright-restricted print material in the world— to him… for legal reasons.²

From Germany, Katrina Gulliver reported that she also saw snippet-view-only for those public-domain-in-the-US government documents on Google Books. But Katrina works mostly on the 19th century, and so her issues are different. She wrote:

So, readers, I’m curious:

• What do you work on (place and time period), where do you work from (geographically), and what openly-accessible digital collections do you find most useful?
• What digital collections do you know of that contain published materials you need that are out-of-copyright or public-domain in their country of publication, but copyright-restricted in the country where you primarily work? Are there other digital collections that make those same materials accessible to you?
• If you can’t get online access to these digital materials from the country where you work, how do you work around the problem? (“Interlibrary loan of print materials” and “travel to that country” are viable answers. I’m trying to understand how commonly we resort to samizdata, and how often we relocate media or ourselves because we can’t move bits.)

I’d welcome blog posts on this from others as well; if you write one, please comment below and link to it.

Sometimes, getting what you need out of Google Books feels like this. (Photo: Jack Delano, FSA/OWI, 1939, via Flickr Commons)

In recent months, I’ve been using a lot of US government reports from the early 20th century— mostly publications by the Children’s Bureau and Census Bureau. There’s a lot of what I need in the collections of Google Books, Internet Archive/OpenLibrary, and HathiTrust, but works that have been digitized aren’t always available to me in useful formats.

• “US Government works” can’t be copyrighted, but not all works published by the Government Printing Office are “US Government works,” and some GPO-published works contain material produced by contractors (which can be copyrighted) or excerpts of copyrighted material.
• Google Books takes a cautious approach; it routinely marks GPO publications published since 1923 as still-in-copyright. You can report something that’s inappropriately marked as copyrighted, but Google doesn’t act quickly to release those works from copyright jail, because they don’t primarily exist to serve scholars. And Google Books metadata is a huge jumble— particularly for item dates.
• HathiTrust, which does exist to serve scholars, is much more responsive about releasing works from copyright jail and metadata corrections, when you report errors. Unfortunately for me, only users affiliated with HathiTrust member institutions can download full PDFs of those works, and my home institution isn’t a member.
• OpenLibrary sometimes has GPO-published items I’m looking for, but their collections are hit-or-miss for these items.

Here’s how I worked around these problems to get what I needed. Maybe this trick will be useful for someone else out there.

To answer my research questions, I wanted the US Children’s Bureau annual reports, roughly 1924-1933— just after the 1923 copyright border. That made everything tougher, since Google Books has only snippet views for all the post-1924 reports, due to mis-administered copyright restrictions. Some of the reports might have been included in the Department of [Commerce and] Labor’s annual reports, which are occasionally less copyright-restricted, but the DCL reports are 600-800 pages each and the Children’s Bureau reports are, at most, about 100 pages.

But wait, there’s a solution.

While poking around, I found a Google Books version of the 1924 report, but it was available only in ePub format, which loses page numbers from the original. To find a better copy with original pagination, I copied a long sentence related to my research: “A colored doctor has been added to the bureau staff, and she is at present assisting the Tennessee Health Department in an investigation and educational campaign among colored midwives of the State.”¹

When I pasted that sentence, in quotes, into the Google Books search box, I found three GBooks items which contained it. The first hit was the ePub referenced above; the third hit was copyright-locked; and the second result was a PDF of a bound series volume containing the reports for 1920 and 1923 through 1932.

I downloaded the PDF, then used Acrobat Professional to split it out into each year’s reports and OCR it for searchability. Works like a charm.

The reason this Google Books entry wasn’t copyright-locked was that it’s a library-bound volume, and the first publication in it has a date before the 1923 copyright barrier. I suspect that many bound-pamphlets volumes on Google Books probably have similar metadata errors, which scholars working on the 1920s (and maybe even the 1930s) can use to our advantage.

But if you’re researching the Children’s Bureau, save yourself time.

Only later did I discover that Georgetown’s Maternal and Child Health Library has a nearly complete set of Children’s Bureau publications in PDF, including the Children’s Bureau annual reports. Which, as far as I can tell, don’t show up on Worldcat.

Writing History in the Digital Age is a “born-digital, open-review volume” to be published by the University of Michigan Press, exploring the following general questions:

Has the digital revolution transformed how we write about the past — or not? Have new technologies changed our essential work-craft as scholars, and the ways in which we think, teach, author, and publish? Does the digital age have broader implications for individual writing processes, or for the historical profession at large?

The editors, Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, are conducting an unusual process for collecting essay proposals and other ideas that contributors want to see addressed: they’ve opened a big discussion page which is open until June 30, 2011. There, you can add your own proposal for an essay or comment on other proposals. Contributions are due on August 15, 2011, and they’ll be reviewed in the open by other contributors as well as invited expert reviewers.

I’m not sure that I’ll have time to write something, but I’ve just suggested some ideas meant to spur contributions from scholars who work on women’s history, African-American history, or other minority histories. If you have thoughts about any of these questions or are considering writing on them, I’ve provided links below where you can comment on the anthology’s website.

Digital Methods, Source Scarcity, and Unheard Voices

For Americanist historians in the last 40 years, some of the most innovative approaches to source-scarcity problems have been pioneered by scholars working on women’s, African-American, and other minority histories. What is the current state of digital research methods in these subfields and why? By “digital methods,” I mean any of the following:

• the use of fulltext-search source databases (nonprofit and commercial; open-access and subscription-based)
• researcher-produced archival photography and/or researcher self-publication of primary sources
• optical character recognition (OCR) of publications or archival materials to build one’s own searchable collections of primary source materials
• use of geographic information systems (GIS) or other mapping systems (Google Maps, GeoCommons, etc) as exploratory tools
• other tools (describe them and explain what they’re useful for)

How do digital methods modify source-scarcity problems in these subfields? What opportunities do they offer and what challenges do they pose in terms of institutional and personal resources, professional training, and/or pedagogy? What new kinds of questions can we ask and answer within these subfields using digital tools, and how are those digitally-enabled answers changing larger historical narratives?

(This is partially a proposal for an essay I’d like to write and partially a question to pull in a wider range of contributors. It relates to topics 3, 30, 33, 25, and others. As written, it’s targeted to Americanists (because that’s what I’m planning to write about) but mutatis mutandis, it could also be an appropriate question for scholars who work on minority histories or women within other national contexts, or on pre-19th-century periods.)

Please comment on this topic at the WHitDA site.

Digital methods and classroom diversity

Another avenue of exploration for contributors might be around demographic diversity (of students and faculty) and the use of digital methods in the classroom. Access to one’s own computer at an early age– in the exploratory, experimental style known as ‘hacking’– is a privilege which isn’t often available to working-class, non-white, non-male students.

To what extent does the ‘digital divide’ (race/class, and to a lesser extent gender) affect who has the skills to do digital research in minority histories? How can we use courses in digital methods as ways to expose a broader range of students both to digital tools and to minority histories as an area of inquiry?

Please comment on this topic at the WHitDA site.

I recently received a very nice email from a colleague who read my piece on using a digital camera for archival research. That talk’s several years old, though, and technology has advanced. My correspondent asked a question that I can’t answer, so I pitch it to you, dear readers. Slightly rephrased:

You recommend a camera and a monopod. What about an iPad? One of my students is using hers to make digital copies and prefers it to cameras because she can immediately see the image and evaluate its quality.  But….can an iPad be mounted on a monopod?

Here’s what I wrote, along with my answer to another question about photographing legal-size and larger documents using a monopod:

Using an iPad for archives research photography

I don’t have an iPad (version 1 or 2), so I can’t comment from experience. I do know that there are starting to be tripod-mounting adapters for smartphones, and a quick Google search (“ipad camera mount tripod”) reveals at least one tripod mount for the iPad 2.

When someone gives me an iPad and the money to purchase a tripod mount (hah), I’d happily write a review. Until then, I’ve put out the question to Twitter and to my blog’s readers. I would say that with the weight and cost of an iPad, you’d be best off with one of the higher-model monopods (MP-16A or MP-20) because they support heavier cameras than the MP-16 I’ve recommended. [Edited to add: @annamcnally reminded me to point out that many archives don't allow any kind of tripod, monopod, or portable camera stand in their reading rooms; in which case you're left with holding a heavy device over your archival material all day. Tiring, and part of why I like smaller, lighter camera options.]

Some cameras also can be connected to your laptop with a USB cable for previewing and remote shutter triggering; that would be another option if you want to be able to see the image quickly, but sometimes it’s slower.

(Part of this hardware choice depends on one’s taste in photography and time use. I find that I prefer to shoot lots of images without looking at them in the archives, because otherwise I get fussy about the framing of the shot and waste more time than I’d like.)

Have you used an iPad for photographing archival documents? What kind of camera mount or stand did you use, and how did that work for you? Please comment below.

Photographing larger items with a monopod

On Amazon, one of the customer reviews of the monopod in question complained that it could only elevate the camera a foot off the table.  Do you find that to be true?  If I need to copy legal-sized and over-sized items, won’t I need to back up more than a foot, at times?

The distance you need to be from the document varies depending on the zoom level of your camera. If you’ve got a reasonably wide lens and a camera with a macro mode, I’ve found that the 16-inch column of the basic MP-16 is good enough to get most legal-size pages– but I also have sometimes shot 2 images (one of the top, another of the bottom) just to be sure. If you shoot a lot of 19th-century legal documents or other large pages, the MP-20 model has a 20 inch column and might be a better choice.

For poster-size pages– like old-style naturalization certificates and passports– I just unmount the camera from the tripod and raise it up with steady hands. I shoot multiple images to increase the likelihood that one of them will come out crisply, and I sit in the brightest location available so that the shutter speed will be fast (and less likely to be blurry). At NARA College Park, which has little vertical dividers between the desks, I mount the monopod on one of the dividers to get another few inches of height.

When I was photographing these images. I set the zoom of my camera so that it would easily get all of a letter-size page, with a clear border around the page that usually includes the folder label for use in my citations.

Here are my Twitter notes from the Berkshire Conference panel on “Queering the College Campus,” which explored late 20th century history and current politics related to LGBT students and faculty in North America.

Panel on “Queering the College Campus”, June 10, 2011, 15th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women

• Chair: Nicholas Syrett, University of Northern Colorado
• “Creating Sexual Violence for LGBTQ Students on College Campuses,” Stephanie Gilmore, Dickinson College
• “Learning Alternatives: Student-Led Gay and Lesbian Studies in the U.S., 1969-1989,” Susan K. Freeman, Minnesota State University, Mankato
• “The Classroom as Therapeutic Culture? Gay Students and Their Professors in North America from the Student Revolt to Today,” Heather Murray, University of Ottawa
• Discussant: Shante Smalls, New York University (and now of Davidson College)

Please note: This post is intended to preserve some of the key ideas from the session as I understood them. I have edited this transcript to remove factual errors made in the speed of the moment. As with most of Twitter, it prefers soundbite-style brevity to nuance. If I’ve misquoted or misrepresented what was said, please feel free to correct me in comments (or to expand on ideas you heard in the session.)

• After a magical mystery tour to the Cape Cod Lounge, settling down for "Queering the College Campus" at #Berks2011. Nick Syrett introduces. ->

“Creating Sexual Violence for LGBTQ Students on College Campuses,” Stephanie Gilmore, Dickinson College

(Gilmore started out by saying that this wasn’t primarily a historical paper, but an effort to explore how LGBT students at highly selective liberal arts colleges do or don’t classify their experiences as “sexual violence.” Her home institution has been in the news recently for its handling of sexual assault cases.)

• Stephanie Gilmore, Dickinson Clg: "Creating 'sexual violence' for LGBTQ students on college campuses"; based on 3-campus study #Berks2011 ->
• LGBTQ students at college students experience sexual violence but have no institutionalized ways to discuss them. #Berks2011 ->
• This past yr, Dickinson Clg LGBTQ students successfully executed a 4-day sit-in to push administrative policy change. #Berks2011 ->
• Women & LGBTQ students minimize the impact of sexual violence (& avoiding it) bc of institutionalized lack of good policies. #Berks2011 ->
• What is at play when we confront institutional & individual silences? Gilmore gives brief history of .edu nondiscrim policies. #Berks2011 ->
• LGBTQ people aren't specifically covered by any federal educational nondiscrim policy, like Title IX. #Berks2011 ->
• Colleges have adopted LG(B) inclusive policies to boost student/fac/staff recruiting; many leave gender id/expression out. #Berks2011 ->
• By 1990s, LGB(T) ppl generally rhetorically included as part of campus "diversity" initiatives, but campuses still chilly. #Berks2011 ->
• Campus nondiscrim *policies* matter to students/faculty/staff, but good *practices* are difficult to find. #Berks2011 ->
• Gilmore does ethnographic, IRB-approved rsrch on 3 highly-selective SLACs; but most college admin records are sealed for 25 yrs. #Berks2011 ->
• She relies on interviews w/tenured faculty, longterm administrators, etc. In all 3 .edus, Title IX officer is in Athletics Dept #Berks2011 ->
• Many administrators don't think about sexual violence as a Title IX issue & use FERPA as shield to keep silence on events. #Berks2011 ->
• Campus administrators are watching the Yale frat case but aren't connecting sexual violence & nondiscrim policies systematically. #Berks2011 ->
• Gilmore describes "heartwrenching" stories from students about incidents but faces a stone wall of archival records. #Berks2011 ->
• misconception that if assaulted students do not pursue some judicial process, then there's no record: not actually true. #Berks ->
• Gilmore reports that campus activism against sexual violence is often led by LGBTQ students *and/especially* women of color #Berks2011 ->
• LGBTQ students are recording the sexual harassment they face on campus & are putting those documents in college #archives. #Berks2011 ->
• This means we can write those histories in the future. #Berks2011 ->

“Learning Alternatives: Student-Led Gay and Lesbian Studies in the U.S., 1969-1989,” Susan K. Freeman, Minnesota State University, Mankato

• Susan Freeman, Minnesota State U-Mankato, on history of student-led course offerings in gay & lesbian studies, 1969-1989. #Berks2011 ->
• Talking about courses colleges agreed to create because students demanded them, even without faculty on hand to teach them #Berks2011 ->
• Further student activism was a result of lesbian/gay-themed classes, even when courses not esp. academically rigorous #Berks2011 ->
• Spring 1973: Sacramento State U had 5 gay-titled courses. #Berks2011 ->
• During 1970s & 80s, student-power movements successfully allied with faculty & local communities to get identity-based courses #Berks2011 ->
• In some schools, gay studies explicitly followed the model of ethnic studies, women's studies, latin@ studies, etc. #Berks2011 ->
• Discusses "free universities" in 1960s: "anyone can learn, anyone can teach;" usually unpaid instructors; coopted later by .edus #Berks2011 ->
• RT @historying: Presenting a poster this afternoon at #Berks2011 on text mining midwife Martha Ballard's diary: http://bit.ly/iwEB7H ->
• Freeman talks about what students learned from the gay studies classes they ran & how it shaped their lives. #Berks2011 ->
• Gay Liberation Front activists offering courses at NYU's "Alternate U" in 1969-70, with (illegal) dances afterwards. #Berks2011 ->
• One of these dances & police crackdowns produced the founding of activist grp Street Tranvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) #Berks2011 ->
• U of Louisville (KY) students affiliated with GLF won university defense of their student-led gay-studies courses #Berks2011 ->
• At Florida State University's Ctr for Participant Education, 1971, GLF's "the homosexual in america" cancelled by administration #Berks2011 ->
• FSU's courses were eventually approved with different names & different instructors of record. #Berks2011 ->
• Freeman listing off early 1970s courses at many different schools' free universities, all over the US. #Berks2011 ->
• The places she lists aren't just in parts of US now seen as "liberal"; lots of college towns in what we'd now call "red states" #Berks2011 ->
• Freeman closes: Institutionalization of LGBT studies has a longer history worthy of further study. #Berks2011 ->

“The Classroom as Therapeutic Culture? Gay Students and Their Professors in North America from the Student Revolt to Today,” Heather Murray, University of Ottawa

• Heather Murray, U of Ottawa, on "gay students & their professors in North America from the student revolt to today" #Berks2011 ->
• Murray starts with quote from an interviewee about his 1960s crush/love feelings for his college's dean, blurring into mentoring #Berks2011 ->
• 1960s gay liberationist students watching their closety older gay profs: seeing them as kind of sad, also fascinating. #Berks2011 ->
• 1960s gay-lib students worried they couldn't be mentored by closety faculty who were in the "straightjacket of a normal life" #Berks2011 ->
• Murray talking about gay-lib students trying to get their profs to bond with them as gay by (as we might say) "dropping hairpins" #Berks2011 ->
• Gay-lib students belittled "the closet" & its effects on older profs but were also fascinated by it. #Berks2011 ->
• Murray retells Terry Castle's published story of relationship w/female prof: fascination with psych scars of closeted generation. #Berks2011 ->
• These student behaviors, overall, started to make gay faculty discuss whether it was important to come out in their classes. #Berks2011 ->
• Murray uses "gay" repeatedly but it's not clear whether she studies mostly men or whether she's repeating the era's term. #Berks2011 ->
• "Broader concern with expression of emotion in the workplace in the 1960s"- could older gay faculty really be honest in classes? #Berks2011 ->
• #Berks2011 is a constant struggle against dehydration. Many in this room are visibly sweating. (Again, it's Women's History Summer Camp.) ->
• Murray: evolution of the idea of the gay teacher as role model; Castle's idea that lesbian prof proves gay adulthood is possible #Berks2011 ->
• Murray cites 1993 MA Governor's Commission on Gay & Lesbian Youth, calling on L/G teachers to support L/G students. #Berks2011 ->
• I note that @PhDeviate testified for that 1993 MA Governor's Commission hearing/report. Congratulations, you're part of History. #Berks2011 ->
• The 1990s notion that a prof might have a moral influence on students freighted idea of the gay prof– made being out difficult #Berks2011 ->
• Murray: how useful is concept of a generational rift btwn profs & students when both were experiencing "gayness" at same time? #Berks2011 ->
• So what we're learning from Twitter at #Berks2011 is: pick sessions based on the AC in the room? ->

Comments by Shante Smalls, New York University/Davidson College:

• "Queering the College Campus", Cape Cod Lounge, #Berks2011: @ShanteParadigm beginning official comments. ->
• .@ShanteParadigm addresses "LGBT safe zones" on campus when campuses are often not physically safe. #Berks2011 ->
• .@ShanteParadigm : Trans students' difficulty accessing medical care amid "diversity" policies & LGB "just like you" rhetoric #Berks2011 ->
• Homophobia, heterosexism, *and* homonormativity all impede LGBT students but don't block college admins' ability to function. #Berks2011 ->
• .@ShanteParadigm says: all these projects highlight the importance of keeping a queer archive: ephemera, buttons, oral histories #Berks2011 ->
• .@ShanteParadigm: Freeman says these Marxist-style courses built counterpublics, predated institutionalization of queer studies. #Berks2011 ->
• Nontraditional pedagogies are important for producing archives that don't repeat homonormativity, corporate patronage. #Berks2011 ->
• .@ShanteParadigm says these different queer archives can show alternatives to current G/L focus on marriage & military service. #Berks2011 ->
• .@ShanteParadigm explores Murray's questions about what kinds of power people could/can wield from the closet. #Berks2011 ->
• At many of 1960s universities, profs & students "looked alike" (race, culture, class, gender); this is less and less true now #Berks2011 ->
• As profs start careers at younger ages, & students are getting older- sharing cultural references- how does mentoring happen? #Berks2011 ->
• Importance of ethics & boundaries in mentoring, especially for queer profs also being pushed by administrators. #Berks2011 ->
• .@ShanteParadigm raises questions of who has access to campus; perceptions of campus as idyllic refuges, actual sexual violence. #Berks2011 ->
• .@ShanteParadigm's comments end; Q&A opens. I'm not going to try to keep up with tweeting this segment. #Berks2011 ->
• Yours truly caught on camera at #Berks2011 by @TenuredRadical: http://bit.ly/knEYhv ->

Yesterday on Twitter, I wondered:

This post is an experiment in one way to keep the momentum of the Big Berks going: by fostering a more permanent record of what was said.

If you have thoughts for the Berks conference organizers on this or anything else about your experiences at the Big Berks last week, please leave a comment on the section of the website devoted to feedback. (You could comment even if you weren’t able to attend but learned about the conference events via Twitter. As I mentioned yesterday, they’re really looking to figure out what to do with their website and social media.)

And, with that, another Twitter recap post, this time from Saturday morning’s Feminist Legal History roundtable.

Roundtable on “Feminist Legal History”, June 11, 2011, 15th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women

• Chairs: Leandra Zarnow, University of California, Santa Barbara and Jane DeHart, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Reva Siegel, Yale University Law School
• Elizabeth Katz, Independent Scholar
• Constance Backhouse, University of Ottawa Law School
• Serena Mayeri, University of Pennsylvania Law School
• Joan Sangster, Trent University

Please note: This post is intended to preserve some of the key ideas from that session as I understood them. I have edited this transcript to remove factual errors made in the speed of the moment. As with most of Twitter, it prefers soundbite-style brevity to nuance. If I’ve misquoted or misrepresented what was said, please feel free to correct me in comments (or to expand on ideas you heard in the session.)

• Someone who's going to CC 162 (radical women of color: new research), please tweet or share good notes. #Berks2011 ->
• Torn between the feminist legal history session in CC 1001 & the African-American Women's Activism session in CC 904/908. #Berks2011 ->
• In CC 1001, Leandra Zarnow, UCSB, recapping the state of feminist legal history; courses often team-taught by JDs & historians #Berks2001 ->
• Constance Backhouse, current president of ASLH, is on this panel; yet recent Law & History Reviews are light on women's history #Berks2011 ->
• Where is feminist legal history in legal history, & the law in women's history? Zarnow suggests ways we can broaden studies. #Berks2011 ->
• The richest moments in feminist legal history are recognizing what our shared work is producing & how it's shaping our fields #Berks2011 ->
• Jane DeHart, UCSB, intros Reva Siegel, Dean of Yale Law School, with a very long list of her (amazing) publications. #Berks2011 ->
• Siegel is mentor of 2nd spkr, Serena Mayeri, UPenn, whose diss won Lerner-Scott Prize. #Berks2011 ->
• Constance Backhouse, U Ottawa, works on Canadian women's legal history; New projects include a cohort bio of 100 feminist lawyers #Berks2011 ->
• Joan Sangster, Trent U; Elizabeth Katz, writes on history of family law & works in law firm; both introduced by Zarnow. #Berks2011 ->
• Reva Siegel: planning to talk about how she started doing history after her training in law school. #Berks2011 ->
• Siegel went into law school at a time when the ERA was reintroduced, yet didn't think about it; but Nancy Cott was at Yale then. #Berks2011 ->
• Siegel cites influence of historians Kerber, Cott, Bettina Aptheker, L. Gordon, C. Smith-Rosenberg, J. Jones, on her work. #Berks2011 ->
• …all historians writing about law but not like lawyers do; Siegel was reading critical legal studies & thinking about history. #Berks2011 ->
• Siegel started teaching law in the early 90s; she says these were the years of what Susan Faludi calls anti-feminist "backlash" #Berks2011 ->
• Siegel was interested in 19c efforts to reform marriage, grant equality; saw parallel btwn married wmn's earnings laws & present #Berks2011 ->
• Siegel Law works by "preservation through transformation"– which is why it's so hard to change women's status/rights with it. #Berks2011 ->
• Siegel's been working on social-movement conflict & how it animated arguments over social stratification. #Berks2011 ->
• Siegel: she's become skeptical that there's a systematic logic to the legal controversies & structures she writes about. #Berks2011 ->
• Serena Meyeri begins: legal hist of feminism in 20c US, from perspective of having taught 5 yrs in a US law school. #Berks2011 ->
• Meyeri: legal history has become receptive to interdisciplinarity: rise of the "law and ___" movements. #Berks2011 ->
• Meyeri: influence of earlier scholars' work & their engagement with legal academy on purportedly "bigger" fields #Berks2011 ->
• Meyeri: this engagement helped legitimate feminist legal history. Social movements' conflicts generated intersectional theories. #Berks2011 ->
• Meyeri: Feminist legal advocacy in 1960s-70s has been characterized as white, preoccupied w/formal equality; well, maybe. #Berks2011 ->
• Meyeri: but intersectional analyses have a long history in law: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Holmes Norton. #Berks2011 ->
• Meyeri: legal history of feminist activism pre-1960s requires looking back to non-"feminist" orgs like NAACP legal defense fund #Berks2011 ->
• Meyeri: RB Ginsburg argued that sex-based affirmative action might be a good model for thinking about race-based aff action. #Berks2011 ->
• Meyeri: intersections btwn historical subfields & law. after SCOTUS rightward shift, feminist lawyers downplayed the connections. #Berks2011 ->
• Meyeri: her students want to be feminist legal advocates; she's been thinking about how teaching legal history relates to this #Berks2011 ->
• Constance Backhouse goes to the podium. Points out that 3 eminent Canadian feminist legal historians are in audience. #Berks2011 ->
• Backhouse speaking on feminist legal biography: "women firsts" are a foil for observing relentlessly white male legal profession #Berks2011 ->
• CB: we can watch men's resistance to "women firsts" lawyers/judges to understand their ideas of the true (male) nature of law #Berks2011 ->
• CB writing bio of about Mme Justice ___ LaRue-DeBée (?) 2nd woman & 1st Quebecoise on Canada Supreme Court #Berks2011 ->
• Backhouse describes LaRue-Debée's unconventional education in a live-in convent. Post-lawschool, worked for a man she l8r married #Berks2011 ->
• Backhouse: Claire LaRue-Debée worked on divorce law & helped to legalize divorce in Quebec, but didn't identify as a feminist. #Berks2011 ->
• Backhouse on her 2nd project in progress: cohort biography of 100 feminist lawyers, who graduated from lawschool in 1960s-70s. #Berks2011 ->
• Backhouse started working on 25 interviews, & referrals to others snowballed. When she got to 100, she stopped. #Berks2011 ->
• This project is about the generation of women following Mme. LaRue-Debée. "The collectivity dominated, not the individual stars" #Berks2011 ->
• But there were so many- at least 1000 self-identified feminist activist lawyers in Canada then. a "revolution of lawyers" #Berks2011 ->
• During this period, number of female lawyers in Canada multiplied 24 times over. This cohort describes hitting a brick wall. #Berks2011 ->
• Brick wall: institutional sexism, racism, homophobia; sexist professors & legal texts; porn & strippers at lawschool events #Berks2011 ->
• This generation also protested institutional discrimination in huge numbers: created community, worked hard, had fun. #Berks2011 ->
• "Why did so many feminists choose law in this period, & how did their presence change law school?" & other interesting questions. #Berks2011 ->
• I note that everyone so far seems to be talking about law in courts, not administrative law or legislation. #Berks2011 ->
• Joan Sangster, Trent U, begins, speaking of feminist generations in law. "Many of us" trying to use laws to make social change #Berks2011 ->
• Sangster questions feminism's ability to change law; law is also a tool of legitimating class privilege & liberal individualism #Berks2011 ->
• Sangster: influence of social history's stress on wrkng-class agency; in Canada, First-Nations histories; less poststructuralism #Berks2011 ->
• I'm loving the number of Commonwealth-nations scholars here; work on familiar-looking legal systems w/different cultures from US #Berks2011 ->
• LEAF (feminist activist lawyers) used postcolonial feminisms to push 1st nations rights; worked on issues of criminalized women #Berks2011 ->
• Sangster refers to Constance Backhouse, Color Coded, on lgl hist of racism in Canada; K. Crenshaw's work very influential in .ca #Berks2011 ->
• Sangster: Questioning intersectionality: when arguing for criminalized women in .ca, intrsectnl arguments don't work in court. #Berks2011 ->
• Sangster: In .ca legal history, intersectionality also risks losing focus on class. She names scholars I didn't catch. #Berks2011 ->
• Sangster: A lot of feminist legal victories have come not solely from courts but from the social movements around them. #Berks2011 ->
• Elizabeth Katz: speaking on younger scholars "still thinking of joining this field"; JD, hasn't entered Ph.D. studies (yet). #Berks2011 ->
• Katz speaks of her own questions about "am i a feminist legal historian? Do I want to be one?" #Berks2011 ->
• Katz double-majored in Studies of Women & Gender/History. #Berks2011 ->
• Katz: working on a paper on Thompson v. Thompson, SCOTUS, 1910; domestic violence case; can a woman sue her husband for DV? #Berks2011 ->
• Katz: US courts restricted wife-beating not out of respect for women's bodily integrity but as men keeping other men in line. #Berks2011 ->
• Katz: most anti-DV groups in early 20th century US were made up of men– not women. #Berks2011 ->
• Katz talking about "what is feminist legal history?"- feminist analyses? writing on sex & gender, can you *not* be a feminist? #Berks2011 ->
• Katz: the gendered history of auto insurance in the early 20th century, before mandatory-insurance laws. is that "feminist"? #Berks2011 ->
• Katz: "Is history 'feminist' based on whether the narrative it creates is used (or not) for contemporary political purposes?" #Berks2011 ->
• Katz: Feminist legal analysis is a method: looking for untold stories. eg, stories of men abused by wives in early 20c. #Berks2011 ->
• Katz: how do advances in technology change how we can and should do feminist legal analysis? Fulltext newspaper databases! #Berks2011 ->
• Elizabeth Katz is *sharp*. Also, if you want to talk about fulltext databases & feminist histories, come to my talk at 3:30. #Berks2011 ->
• In CC 1001 (feminist legal history) going to Q&A and roundtable discussion. My tweets will be sporadic as I try to follow. #Berks2011 ->

The intellectual experience of the Big Berks is like drinking from a firehose, except without the phallic imagery.

Now that I’m home and mostly-recovered from the Big Berks, I’ll just say: one of the best conference experiences I’ve ever had. (And, certainly, the only one with a Saturday night dance.) For now, read recaps of the event by Tenured Radical, Knitting Clio, and Another Damn Medievalist. If you attended, you should also take the opportunity to send your own comments in for publication at the Berks website.

I’ll post further recaps of my conference tweets later this week, as I get to it, but today I’m thinking about the theme of the conference: “Generations: Exploring Race, Sexuality, and Labor Across Time and Space.” Attending the business meeting on Sunday afternoon has left me with a few thoughts on generations– feminist, internet, and otherwise.

I’m not sure where I learned this, but a bit of advice to early-career scholars: if there’s a recurring conference you like, go to the business meeting. It’ll give you valuable insight into how the conference gets run, and you can meet the people who make the magic happen. (If you’ve got an idea for how to improve the conference next time, it’s also the place to show up.)

I’m not a member of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians (“Little Berks”), which sponsors the Big Berks triennial conference as well as smaller annual members-only get-togethers (also known as “Little Berks”).  The Berkshire Conference helped to form the field of women’s history. Since the mid-1970s, it’s harbored groundbreaking feminist historical thought and served as a mentorship meeting-place for thousands of scholars.¹

I totally understand the historical importance of women’s organizations in helping women to navigate institutional sexism in the professions– I wouldn’t be in graduate school now if it weren’t for having graduated from Smith. I think mentoring is really important, especially for people from groups who’ve been historically excluded from academia, and I want to support that work. So, at the risk of being the noisy d00d in a roomful of women, I showed up.

A thriving network of scholars (if not particularly wired)

What I learned was really interesting. I don’t want to reveal anything that’s not general knowledge, but I think that those of us contemplating the future of scholarly societies on the internet sometimes speak without enough specificity about actual existing scholarly societies.

• The conference did surprisingly well, financially. Despite the ugly state of the economy, over 1400 attendees registered– up about 20% from the last conference, held in 2008.
• The Little Berks also had a nice membership boomlet, which is typical for the year of the conference– as I remember, membership went up from the low 300s to the high 300s, about 20%.

In other words, the Berks is the rare scholarly conference and society that’s doing well in this economy. That’s probably because it has a reputation for being the place for women’s history scholars to find good networking and mentoring. As far as I can tell, that reputation is well-deserved.

At this conference more than others, I had some great conversations with scholars who’ve been around the block. I think I’ve finally begun to understand why many aren’t comfortable with the era of online open peer review and other novel scholarly fashions, but that’s probably food for another post. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’d do to bring the Berks more fully into the era of the DIY internet-based scholarly society.

The scholarly-society website: what should it do?

The Berks is an all-volunteer organization that happens to have a budget. (That is, unlike the AHA, it doesn’t have a full-time professional staff.) Their online-media people– most of them graduate students– did a great job with the conference’s website and Twitter account, given the organization’s limits. Even so, it’s clear to me that the Berks hasn’t yet, as an organization, figured out all the ways they want to use a website, let alone social media. (But the conference leaders were thrilled to see the publicity that participants generated on Twitter.)

Some of this is a problem of infrastructure: the conference registration was done by UMass conference services, the paper-submission system was done by an outside vendor, and the organization’s website is separate from the 2011 conference blog. That’s 4 separate systems, and everyone involved agreed that this needs not to happen again.

One of the chief things I noticed– in this business meeting, but I’ve also noticed it in other organizations– was that there’s still a real tension between making an organization website where the “leadership” communicates with the “members,” and the peer-to-peer, anarchically organized online social networks some of us use professionally.

• On one hand, one wants the organization to look “professional” and “authoritative,” with an editorial vetting process for all website content.
• On the other, an unchanging website for the organization means that people don’t visit regularly or participate in the few interactive sections of the site.
• On the third hand, isn’t peer-to-peer connection and breaking down hierarchies part of what intersectional feminisms (in their best incarnations) ought to do?

While the organization sorts these things out– which will take years– this means that the History Carnival, its Twitter-collected spinoff The Broadside, and the rest of the women’s-history blogosphere play more of a day-to-day role in many Berks members’ intellectual lives than does the Berks organization. Is that desirable? I don’t know, but it does open the question of how the organization will function in the future.

I don’t think the Berks’s web situation is is a matter of throwing good money after bad, any more than it is at the AHA. Changing an established organization, especially in academia, is like steering a cargo tanker: it takes a long time and it’s harder than you’d expect, but you do have to know where you want to go first.

Here’s an example of what a small (or large) scholarly society could be doing online, and to my knowledge no historians’ organization yet does it systematically.

Online infrastructure for face-to-face conferences: a wishlist

One of my best conference experiences was the Sunday morning workshop session. The AHA may have recently suspended precirculated-paper sessions because no one reads the papers, but they’re alive and well at the Berks.

Presenters posted their papers online at the UMass ScholarWorks site, which made it possible for me to download them and read them as I was sitting in the workshop (mine was “Historicizing the Troubled Womb.”) I had a real experience of the conference’s intellectual heft as I contemplated 8-10 concurrent paper-workshopping sessions, each one running 3 hours and containing 4-8 papers. I loved the chance to drop in on 6 very smart people workshopping their current projects and taking questions from the other participants.

The same openness which made that session great may be perceived as a weakness by some. There was no way for the organizers to protect workshop papers from general viewing– no restricted logins only for conference registrants. Since all the papers were works-in-progress designed for a specific event, their authors presumably wouldn’t want them floating around. Now that the conference is over, those papers have been taken offline– which is a pity, since I totally would have spread the word about several papers I heard.

Since returning home, I’ve also experienced a related annoyance. Berks is one of those conferences where everything is cross-scheduled with everything else– which is wonderful. Every time I met someone who wanted to know about my roundtable presentation but couldn’t attend to hear it, I told them that I was planning to put it online after the conference.

I was hoping that my account at Academia.edu would let me put my paper online and restrict it only to registered members. It turns out that’s not possible, so you’ll just have to read the abstract and email me if you’re interested in a copy. (Or suggest a good WordPress plugin to accomplish the same goal. I don’t want to have to futz with member logins; I just want people to be able to request access to the paper and me to grant access.)

In a better world, the Berks website (or the AHA website, or any scholarly society I’m a member of) would provide at least this much functionality related to a conference:

• paper pre-circulation for authors who choose to do so
• post-conference paper circulation and contact-the-author functionality
• perhaps a CommentPress-style system for commenting on papers behind a membership wall (at authors’ discretion), with either the option of sending private comments to the author or making name-attributed comments readable by other reviewers

The fact that Berks doesn’t have this isn’t a failure of the organization. It’s a sign that we don’t yet have common, DIY-easy practices for scholarly infrastructure online. Someone who develops a good how-to on running a real-world physical conference, with housing and a budget and a paper-submissions-and-review system, using DIY-style open source tools, will be doing the scholarly world a great service.

There’s a need here. Someone, please step in and fill it. And, if it exists already, please tell the Berks 2014 organizers— or, better yet, jump in and help them.