Have you heard the saying “What would Jesus do?” Who hasn’t? In the 1990s the phrase became a fad among evangelical Christians, who printed the abbreviation WWJD? on bracelets, t-shirts, and posters, spawning in turn a host of mocking pop culture imitations. WWJD can provide a useful lens for looking at evangelical consumer culture of the late twentieth century. But the phrase can also serve as a parable about contemporary copyright law.

The phrase “What would Jesus do?” originated in a novel titled In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?, published in 1897 by Charles M. Sheldon. Sheldon was a Congregational minister in Topeka, Kansas, and a Progressive concerned with Christianity’s relationship to the social politics of his day. His book is a parable about the Reverend Henry Maxwell, a minister to a wealthy middle-class congregation. Maxwell comes into contact with a poor man who owes his plight to industrialization, and is thereby jarred from his complacency about social issues. He challenges his congregation to seriously consider the question “What would Jesus do?” in all their actions. As his congregation takes up the challenge, their views on politics, class, race, charity, and corporations fall in line with the social gospel.

The long reach of Sheldon’s In His Steps is due in large part to its message, which appeals to both mainline and evangelical Christians, and to its simple though not particularly literary prose. But its long reach also due to a simple mistake by Sheldon’s publisher: the book was never properly copyrighted.

In the 1890s, copyright was opt-in, not opt-out. In order for a book to be copyrighted, the publisher had to register it with the federal government. Chicago Advance, Sheldon’s publisher, incorrectly registered the copyright, and so the book was available in the public domain. Many publishers issued their own editions of In His Steps, which sold widely. About the sales of the book, Paul Boyer writes:

Owing to a defect in the copyright, sixteen different publishers soon had editions of the book in the market, and by the summer of 1897, 100,000 copies had been sold. And this was merely the beginning. While Sheldon’s own later estimate of 30,000,000 sales is overdrawn, Frank L. Mott, tabulator and chronicler of American best-sellers, suggests that a figure of 6,000,000 for total world sales would probably not be far amiss, with perhaps 2,000,000 of these in the United States.

To be sure, In His Steps would not have been a bestseller simply because of a mistake in the copyright registration. Sixteen publishers would not have issued the book unless it appealed to the reading public. Nor can the resurgence of WWJD? in the 1990s be attributed to the book’s being in the public domain—by that time the book would have long been out of copyright no matter what. And it is worth noting that the book was a bestseller: the failure of copyright registration did not mean that the book was available for free, just that Sheldon made hardly any royalties from it. Even today, the book is available for purchase in many editions, though it is available free from several sources.

But would the explosive sales and long-standing popularity of Sheldon’s In His Steps have been possible if the book had been subject to, say, the Copyright Act of 1976, or the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, or, worse, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act? If the point of copyright is “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” perhaps there is something to be learned from the case of Charles Sheldon and his novel—a fitting parable for a Progressive reformer, indeed.

[Bracelet image courtesy of Flickr user bodzasfanta under a Creative Commons license. The image of the cover of In His Steps is in the public domain, and is available from Wikipedia.]

Today the Washington Post ran an article about college professors who ban laptops from their classroom. The article sparked a conversation among the digital humanities crowd on Twitter, some sympathizing with the ban, but most protesting. The debate reminded me of playing Trivial Pursuit this weekend.

Trivial Pursuit is ostensibly about your ability to recall facts—bits of trivia. But anyone who played with  access to the internet would easily win. Which cities hosted the Summer Olympics? I don’t know, but Wikipedia does. If the game were really about recalling facts, it would be a complete waste of time. Any computer could play it better. Rather, the enjoyment of the game comes from the human element: gambling that you can remember one more fact, arguing whether a yeti is the same thing as the abominable snowman, laughing at what you consider obvious and your friends consider obscure (or vice versa).

My point is that education should be about teaching people to know and to do in ways that only humans can. This is especially true in the humanities. To be sure, computers are an extraordinarily useful tool for knowing and doing in human ways: the term digital humanities is not an oxymoron. But computers are not the only tool, nor are they always an essential tool. Discussing a book or a collection of primary texts, working through an argument, proving a theorem—these are parts of human learning for which a computer is usually not necessary and often may not be appropriate tool. When computers are a good tool for learning, by all means bring them into the classroom. But if education can happen without them, perhaps the laptop should take an excused absence.

For the laptop as a physical device is inherently distracting. The glowing screen of any computer demands attention over paper and even over other people. The vertical screens of laptops in particular erect a barrier between people in a discussion or a seminar or (far less desirably) in a lecture. Perhaps a device will be invented (Kindle? iPad? flexible e-Paper?) and made affordable enough to overcome these physical shortcomings of the laptop. But for now there isn’t such a device. In his recent TEDxNYED talk, Dan Cohen remarked, “We have to show precisely what the weaknesses of the old are … and we have to show how the new works better than the old.” Perhaps for many kinds of human education, our new technologies are not yet as useful as our old.

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user erik_found and available under a Creative Commons license.]

Last weekend I attended a conference at Yale University titled The Past’s Digital Presence: Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities. I’m only just starting to explore how I’ll relate my own scholarship to digital methods and products, so the conference was a help in getting acquainted with the issues within the field of digital humanities. It was also good to meet a number of grad students and scholars working in digital humanities. In this blog post, I want to reflect on a few of the talks that I found most engaging.

Peter Stallybrass’s keynote lecture on Saturday morning was eye-opening. Stallybrass argued that conceptions of the codex as a device for linear reading are mistaken. The innovation of the codex as against the scroll was allowing for “random access” to the contents of a book. He backed up that point with numerous photographs of medieval manuscripts and artwork that illustrate technology for reading, such as hand-drawn fingers pointing to important passages (ancestors of manicules or printer’s fists) and book weights, lazy susans, and artificial fingers. He drew the inference that by using the codex, Christians enabled typological readings of the Old Testament. His key methodological point was that photographs of manuscripts and rare books are, in some ways, more useful than the actual artifacts. Photographs permit access to texts at times and places distant from the library, and they permit researchers to look at texts more closely than one can do with even a magnifying glass.

Stallybrass’s point about photographs was questioned (though not directly) in a panel on “The Material Object in Digital Culture.” Two panels by Heather Ball and Jessica Weare asked what we lose by looking at digital copies of sources. Ball pointed out the richness of the actual sources, while Weare pointed out an instance of where Google Books (possibly, allegedly) may have removed a printer’s notice from a book they scanned. I’m certainly sympathetic to the notion that we must account for the biases that digital research introduces to our research. As an example from my own research, I’m heavily indebted to Readex’s digital Archive of Americana, but I would be a poor Americanist indeed if I never got beyond the digital edition of printed texts to examine manuscripts or other sources. But I think the point of this panel was overdrawn (and far too eagerly accepted by some of the audience members who were hostile to digital methods). The implied dichotomy was between digital copies and the artifacts themselves, but that dichotomy is false. Digital and analog work best together as a complementary, not competitive technologies. When there is a dichotomy, it is not between access to digital copies and access to actual artifacts, but between access to digital copies and no access at all.

Shane Landrum (fellow PhD student in history at Brandeis University) continued the discussion about photographing sources in his very practical talk, “Camera, Laptop, and What Else?: Hacking Better Tools for the Short Archival Research Trip.” Shane described how he photographs  documents in almost an industrial process. Shane’s process is impressive, but I’m ambivalent about implementing it for myself. As I understand it, Shane reads very few of the documents while he is photographing them, saving the actual research for after his trips. Perhaps I’m overly optimistic about the amount of time I’ll have to actually read in the archives: I’m certainly fortunate to live within an hour of several of the main libraries for the topics I research. Then too, I work in a period that has many fewer documents than Shane’s. But I like to think that reading the sources in the archive has served me well. I’m often surprised by the discrepancy between what I think will be important before I get to the archive, and what I find to be important after I get there. But, like Shane, I photograph everything I think I might cite or quote (at least at archives that permit me to), so I’m sure I’ll benefit from the suggestions in his talk.

Simon Wiles gave a very impressive talk about “Buddhist Authority Databases.” Wiles is a scholar and programmer who works on a set of databases that (as I understand it) provide time, place, and person authority records from Buddhist sources. Wiles’s work is sophisticated in how it deals with several Asian languages (which makes this Americanist react in awe), but perhaps most of all in how it is radically open. The databases are publicly searchable, but also publicly downloadable as SQL dumps. This is all the more radical in that the databases are politically charged sources in China. More digital humanities projects could do with this kind of radical openness.

One talk that I regret missing was Julie Meloni’s “Toward a Realization of the n-Dimensional Text,” the text of which is fortunately available online.

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For a long time I’ve looked for a website that could catalog my book collection. I wanted something where I could easily import the books, but with the power to edit the metadata if I chose. The emphasis of the site had to be cataloging, but social features would be nice too. And the site had to work with any book, not just the latest vampire thriller. I tried GoodReads, Shelfari, and the my library section of Google Books, and they were all useless. I finally found the application that I liked: LibraryThing.

LibraryThing is very powerful at cataloging—so powerful that some libraries use it as their catalog. I’ve added something like 350 of my books so far. I enter the ISBN or title of the book, LibraryThing searches a library catalog of my choice (usually the Library of Congress), and imports the book into my catalog. From there, I can edit the metadata and change the cover. Maybe the single greatest feature of LibraryThing is it’s concept of a work, as opposed to specific editions. For example, I can link to a work page, which includes all the editions of that book.

LibraryThing’s cataloging tools would be powerful enough, but they have some interesting social tools too. For example, the top-three books that I share with other people are The Riverside Shakespeare, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.

LibraryThing gets both Web 2.0 and Library 2.0.

For each of my classes, I have a Zotero collection. For each of the assigned readings, I import an item and take notes on it. In class discussions, I then have access to my notes.

The problem is that by midway through the semester, I have dozens of items in my collection, and so it takes a lot of awkward fumbling around to find the few assignments for that day in class.

Too many Zotero items

My solution is to give each item a tag with the date it will be discussed in class. For example, items that will be discussed today I tag “2010-02-01.” After I filter the collection by that tag, I have list of just the items I need to refer to.

Just the readings for today

A simple solution, but it helps me.

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This semester I’ll be taking three classes:

• Colloquium in American History, covering US history from Reconstruction to the present;
• Writing History; and
• Radical Religion in England and America, 1550-1750, at Harvard Divinity School.

I’ll also be writing a research paper and participating in a group that will read Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self.

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In a few days, I will hand in a revised version of my semester research paper. So now I can safely admit that this is my first semester doing serious archival research. Not my first semester doing serious research, but my first semester in the archives.

Where I went. I spent most of my time in the Massachusetts Historical Society. This Historical Society is housed in a beautiful old building on Boylston Street in Boston, an easy bus ride from my apartment. The first time that I was there, I walked into what appeared to be an exhibit room. It turned out to be the office of the librarian, but he was kind enough to give me a tour of library and to show me John Quincy Adams’s diary, which was sitting on his desk for a photo shoot.

I visited two other archives as well. I spent a day at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, which is just a couple hours down the Mass Pike. Since the AAS has probably the largest collection of materials on early America, I’ll likely be back often. I also spent a long morning at Yale’s archives in the Sterling Library. Because the research didn’t take the whole day, Kellen took me to lunch at the Educated Burgher, and then on a tour of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and of New Haven’s Grove Street Cemetery.

Who I saw. While I was at the MHS, it was nice to run into a fellow Brandeis graduate student and friend on a couple of days. While I was at the AAS, I saw from the sign-in sheet that I was sitting next to a BIG NAME historian of early American religion. I googled him to make sure, and it turns out that there are actually two historians by that name, and the one who was there was not in my field.

What I brought. I’m not sure that used the most efficient method while I was in the archives. I’ve seen some people suggest that the best procedure is to photograph everything, leaving all the reading for later. Perhaps that is the only thing to do if you have tons of material and very limited time. But I much preferred actually reading and taking notes on as much as possible, while photographing anything that I thought I might quote directly or that I thought I might be misreading.

Besides the computer, pencil, and cameras, the other essential tool was a sports coat or blazer. The extra pockets are very useful for keeping things in when you have to put your bag in a locker, though the librarians might look at you with suspicion. I see that Shane Landrum will be giving a talk on tools to use in the archives, so perhaps he will have some insights into what might be better.

What I read. Most of what I read were the sermons and papers of the ministers who played a prominent role in my paper: J. S. J. Gardiner, Timothy Dwight, William Bentley, and the like. I did fairly well with the handwriting, I thought. Timothy Dwight had terribly messy handwriting, but it was very easy to read. William Bentley’s handwriting looks very neat, but I nearly wept after the first two hours spent on one page.

My most important finds were several diaries that recorded listeners’ thoughts about the sermons I was reading. I found them on the last day of research, just a couple weeks before I turned the first draft of the paper in. I had looked for diaries earlier, but hadn’t found anything worthwhile. Then I read a post on the Massachusetts Historical Society blog about how to find all of the diaries in their collection by year. From there, it was easy to find quite a few diaries, several of which had very helpful material. In retrospect, I learned three things. First, I should have asked the reference librarian. Second, serendipity is more a part of research than I might care to admit. And third, the most powerful digital humanities tool is probably still the library catalog.

Photo courtesy of mike.benedetti.

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I’m planning to read a few biographies, perhaps ten or twelve, to get a feel for the biographer’s craft. I’m not looking for the top ten biographies ever, by whatever criteria one could make that judgment. Rather I’m looking for books that demonstrate different ways to do biography. These are the books I’m considering:

• James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D
• Catherine Drinker Bowen, Yankee from Olympus: Justice Holmes and His Family
• Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith
• Richard Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
• David McCullough, John Adams
• Kathleen Minnix, Laughter in the Amen Corner: The Life of Evangelist Sam Jones
• Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus
• Plutarch, Lives
• Carl Sandberg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
• Harry Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and Rise of Modern Evangelicalism
• Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians

Any suggestions or replacements?

Here is a line from a biographical sketch of the minister Samuel Worcester (1770–1821), written by his son:

He very seriously impaired his health, in the first year of his academic studies. His constitution never fully recovered from the shock which it then received, by the crowding of more than two years of hard study into one. Not a year passed, after my remembrance of him began, when he was not more or less severely afflicted by sickness or infirmity. And it was always, with rare exceptions, work, work, WORK, let his health be as it might. (William B. Sprague, ed., Annals of the American Pulpit, 2:406)

I have letters to William Ellery Channing from his grandfather, William Channing, asking the young Channing not to study too hard nor to preach more than twice a week.

Here is a description of Thomas Jefferson’s study and exercise habits:

By his college days, Jefferson was studying fifteen out of every twenty-four hours, often long after midnight. . . . To keep himself fit for these systematic sedentary sieges, Jefferson, ran, took hikes, and swam back and forth across a pond. He habitually bathed his feet in cold water every morning, a practice to which he attributed his lifelong freedom from colds. (Williard Sterne Randall, Thomas Jefferson: A Life, 41–42)

Here is a description of James Madison’s ill health after graduating from the College of New Jersey:

Madison asked his father’s permission, after graduating from the College of New Jersey in September 1771, to remain “in Princeton this winter coming,” and perhaps to return again after a spring visit home. He later wrote that he stayed because intense study had left him too weak to make the journey home. . . .

When Madison finally returned to Orange County, he confronted two major uncertainties: he was so sickly that he feared an early death, and he had not yet decided on a career. Madison’s health presents perplexing  problems. He was described frequently as “feeble,” “pale,” or “sickly,” and he wrote repeatedly of bouts of illness and fears that poor health would prevent his doing something or other, yet he lived to be eighty-five years old and until his last years seems not to have suffered seriously or chronically from an identifiable disease. Of Madison’s illness upon leaving Princeton, Irving Brant argues cogently that the young scholar suffered from a functional ailment modern medicine calls epileptoid hysteria. . . . In any case, Madison’s unwillingness to call the disorder epilepsy, and the uncertain diagnosis of it in his day, leave the possibility that he suffered from a nervous disorder not now identifiable and which for some reason plagued him more severely after he left college than at any other time. (Ralph Louis Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography, 51–52)

I’m sure that one could easily find examples of more scholars in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries who attributed their chronic ill health to their studying. Jonathan Edwards and William James come to mind; Thoreau went to Walden Pond, and found both health and the opportunity to read. I seem to come across statements like the one about Worcester frequently.

Is there something that ties together these disparate cases? Was it true that these people were harmed or in danger of being harmed by excessive studying? Or is a concern for the health of the student a trope, an American manifestation of the classical idea that epilepsy was a visitation from the gods, or the Christian image of the scholar Jerome in the wilderness? To be sure, those centuries were not an ideal time for being healthy, for anyone. But I wonder whether there is something more to it than that.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this summer Robert Townsend of the American Historical Association reported that religious history is now the largest single thematic subfield in the AHA membership. In the blog post on AHA Today, Townsend includes a chart that visualizes changes in the subfields of historians. Using the same data (PDF), which the AHA generously provided, I’ve created another chart to visualize the same change in a slightly different way.

Data provided by the American Historical Association. Used by permission.

This chart shows that the study of religious has gone from being a significant but only middle-of-the-pack subfield in 1992, to being in the top three subfields in 1999, to being the top subfield in 2009. Religious history is by no means dominant, considering the extraordinary diversity of the AHA membership, and especially in comparison to the dominance of social and even women’s history in 1992. From 2008 to 2009, the percentage of religious historians has slipped slightly, even at the same time that it overtook the percentage of cultural historians. (All of the top ten subfields declined as a percentage in 2009.) My tentative conclusion is that religious history is a growing subfield whose growth relative to the profession as a whole is magnified by long-term shifts towards increased diversity in the specialties of AHA members.

I should provide a few caveats about what this chart does not say. First, this chart reports AHA members identifying with a given subfield as a proportion of the total identifications, not as a proportion of the total membership of the AHA. AHA members are asked to identify with up to three subfields. So, from this data one cannot say that 7.7% of historians in 2009 identified as historians of religion. (That number does seem to be correct, however, calculated a different way.) Second, this chart does not give an indication of the numerous other subfields that AHA members identify with. I have chosen the top thirteen subfields in 2009, because they are the only fields garnering more than 3% of the responses. But in 2009, other subfields garnered 38.3% of the responses, compared to 18.3% in 1992. Third, it is important to recognize the fine distinctions between subfields. Over time, if I understand correctly, the AHA has added more subfields, so the increasing reported diversity of subfields may be driven as much by changes in the method of surveying as it is by actual changes in the membership. The fine distinctions in subfields also makes it difficult to rank them. For example, for 2009 this chart ranks women’s history third (6.4%) and gender history sixth (4.9%). But if those subfields were considered combined, say as women/gender history, then the total percentage (11.3%) would easily top all other subfields. Of course there is both overlap and distinction between those fields.

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