From the Lunchbox

You can see it

2011-10-04T16:21:00.001-07:00

Queer theory parties on while Paris burns

2011-06-14T15:51:00.000-07:00

This Spring, I took a feminist theory course. It was hard. It was hard because I am a scientist by training and trade, and the language and concepts of the course worked new and unfamiliar brain synapses. But I loved the material and stretching outside my positivist, empiricist self. And I love the teacher, but that's a different story.

Throughout the quarter we traveled the long roads of postcolonialsm, poststructuralism, orientalism, standpoint epistemology, etc., concluding our term with an exploration of queer theory. The discussion was anchored around a number of articles[1] and the film, Paris is Burning[2], a story about the ball scene in New York City in the late 1980s.

Part 1 - It's My Party

"A few swim in riches and the majority drown in poverty, pollution, and violence."

---John Perkins, Confessions of a Hit Man[3]

Reclaiming Privilege. Queer theory, the pop culture wannabe of firmly landed theoretical models, is as intellectually substantive as a box of Frosted Flakes is nutritious. It’s genre of performative coolness arbitrates a collective suturing of hipness across otherwise disparate populations. Paris is Burning painfully illustrates the great distance between the queer theory haves and have nots, and quite-by-accident betrays the reality that the have nots aren’t going anywhere. The theoretical home base of (mostly) educated, white middle- and upper class people, queer theory shrewdly markets itself as the latest and greatest. Under exciting and trendy Fifth Avenue packaging, queer theory works to re-establish the (white) patriarchal stranglehold, covertly uninviting the disenfranchised from the party. You can almost hear the whiny power-elites reclaiming entitlement to power vis-à-vis their glamor theory.

The intersections of race, class, and gender in America construct a clear hierarchy of social power. For the poor, non-White, gay, and transgendered men of Paris is Burning, a particularly unique form of social vulnerability is constructed. While fully aware of their low social location, the men of the New York City ball scene briefly escape it by simulating the privilege of others living far outside their local reality.

The Filmmaker: An examination of class. Jennie Livingston was born into power. Her upper crust family endowed privilege. She had resources that allowed her to enter an exotic world of people far outside her material class, to objectify its subjects, to appropriate their culture for profit, then to exit, leaving her world intact but enriched, leaving their world infiltrated and exploited. The advantaged have never been slow to use others for their own profit. Paris is Burning has grossed nearly four million dollars. The Paris performers had to bring suit before Livingston honored her promise to share in the revenues. Fifty-five thousand dollars was ultimately distributed to the performers.

Material life is a reflection of power. Power is a reflection of material wealth: housing, health care, safe neighborhoods, consistent and good nutrition, and access to of goods and services. Living in a precarious social position—hungry, homeless, under- and unemployed—the men of Paris fantasized wealth, beauty, and leisure that imitated the materiality of those in power. “I want to be a spoiled white girl,” said one performer, “They don’t need anything.” Another performer wished, “I want to be a woman. White. Rich. Successful. Happy.” (When one is not crushed by oppressive hegemonic structures or hunting down the next meal, “happy” seems like such a simple thing.) Because the performers weren’t invited to the real ball, they made up their own, an excursion into class and power, followed all too quickly by a return ticket back to their daily reality. “The ballroom tells them ‘I’m somebody.’ But when they go home, they have to tell themselves they’re somebody. And that’s where people get lost.”

Later ... Part 2: Race, Gender, Death

[1] Walters , Suzanna Danuta. 1996. “From Here to Queer: Radical Feminism, Postmodernism, and the Lesbian Menace (Or, Why Can't a Woman Be More like a Fag?).” Signs 21(4): 830-869.

[2] Paris is Burning. 2005. DVD. Directed by Livingston, Jennie, Paul Gibson, and Jonathan Oppenheim. 1991; Burbank, CA: Miramax Home Entertainment.
[3] Perkins, John. 2004. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. New York: Plume Publishers.

Postmodern Polar Bears and Paper Bags

2011-05-11T06:16:00.000-07:00

The postmodern turn. Who would have expected to find that discussion buried in the evaluation and analysis of a digital finding aid? “Postmodern archival theorists point to inadequacies in archival description…call[ing] for the researcher input and assert[ing] that the record is not a static artifact, but rather a ‘mediated and ever-changing construction’ affected by its use.” (Krause & Yakel, 288). Let’s start with some definitions and then examine how postmodernism might fit with the digital archive.

Finding Aid: Narrowing the scope of this definition for this brief reaction paper, “finding aid” will mean a search tool for digitized materials made available to (re)searchers online. Whether available online via the rather vague cloud (out there somewhere) or on a locked down on a local area network, finding aids assist in site and archival access, linking, understanding, participation, browsing and searching activities.

Positivism: The scientific method which values empiricism; an analytic movement basing knowledge on quantitative results.

Postmodern: Made famous by Jacques Derrida in 1966, “postmodern” has shifted the arts and social sciences. It approaches truth as an objective, qualitative experience, difficult to pin down, suspect if a claim is made that it has indeed been pinned down, and with an emphasis on the meta-narrative, a master (universal) narrative. Which brings us to a phrase for digital archivists: meta-data, “data about data” or “content about content.”

Finding Aid + Positivism + Postmodern = Archival Revolution?

The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections developed a “next generation” finding aid which invites user contribution to the archival content. Believing that the prejudices of the archivists’ interpretations create a condition of subjugated knowledge, the Polar Bear team has an open and participatory format, which collects macro-appraisals from the population of visitors in the belief that collections of artifacts take on meaning in a societal context.


Aldred S. Buckler in a multiple image taken in Murmansk, Russia. Buckler served with the U.S. 339th Infantry during the American intervention in North Russia, 1918-1919. http://polarbears.si.umich.edu/index.pl?node=Aldred%20S.%20Buckler%20photograph%20collection&lastnode_id=356

Beyond Brown Paper, a collaborative effort at Plymouth State University, invited participation from an interested public at their 2008 exhibition around the closing of the pulp mill in Berlin, New Hampshire. A transcript and interview from the Brown Paper team is available in the New Hampshire public radio archives. Public participation at the physical and online exhibits places the objects in a social context that would have been lost if only the archivists meta-tags had been attached to the digitized images.

Archived Image and the online public comment: "The Cole Primary School was built in 1895, which replaced the first Cole School that was moved almost across the street. In the late 1920’s it became Berlin’s police station, which before was in the basement of the City Hall. They remained there until going into the present building in the late 1960’s. It was on the corner of Cole Street and Mason Street. It is now a parking lot." http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/40854#comment-20181

The physical sciences have been slower to pick up the linguistic turn, and archivists, members of this group, have a particular attachment to the physical object within the laboratory backdrop. The postmodern archivist distrusts the positivist process as incomplete and tries to incorporate cumulative evidence of the populace in the broader understanding of archival collections and materials. It is a contemporary tool of the digital archivists skill set.

Week 5 Reaction - Copyright

2011-05-04T14:08:00.000-07:00

What’s the difference?

Copyright: Copyright is a form of intellectual property protected under Constitutional law covering both published and unpublished “original works of authorship,” including scholarly, literary, and artistic works including stage and theater, musical scores, soundtracks and songs, poetry, novels, movies, and computer software. The copyright protects the form of authorship but does not protect the actual facts, ideas, or systems being represented. Essentially, copyright covers the way subject matter is expressed. A photo or a soundtrack are also methods of describing a location or an emotion. The location cannot be copyrighted, nor the emotion, but the expression of each can be. If you understand the operation or usefulness of a safety pin in a uniquely different way, and describe in original language your conceptualization of it, then only your description is protected under copyright. Copyrights are registered by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress.

Trademarks protect branding

Trademark: Trademarks protects words, phrases, designs, symbols, or devices used in trade which identify the source of good and distinguishes them from goods of others. A trademark prevents others from using similar and misleading marks, but does not prevent others from manufacturing or selling the same goods under a distinctly different mark. Controversies about the use of trademarks in the branding of geographic areas (“The Branding of America”) have created civic debates and litigation when popular regional vernacular, part of the public domain, is trademarked by a corporation. In Montana, the Paws Up luxury resort in the verdant Blackfoot Valley (owned by an out–of–state Las Vegas businessman) tried to trademark the shared, common use, and locally beloved phrase, “Last Best Place.” A statewide uprising ended with Federally sponsored legislation to prevent that particular trademarking. Trademarks are registered with the Patent and Trademark Office.

Servicemark: A servicemark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies, distinguishes, and protects the source of a service rather than an actual and tangible product. The terms "trademark" and "mark" are commonly used to refer to both trademarks and servicemarks.

The safety pin, patented in 1849

Patent: Patents are issued for inventions and grant property rights to the inventor. Those property rights conferred by the patent are "the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling" the invention in the United States or "importing" the invention into the United States. Essentially, a patent excludes others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention. Back to that safety pin. Let’s say that rather than having an artistic epiphany about the use of the safety pin, you actually invent a completely different (and hopefully better) safety pin. Here is where you protect the actual object from re-creation. The idea is not new (the safety pin was first patented in 1849). The scientific description of the safety pin is factual, so not protected. Only the object itself, an original invention, is protected from replication.

How this translates: An example. The “Omeka” name is trademarked, as is the logo, which prevents others from marketing products under similar branding. The Omeka website is copyrighted, and the original form of authorship cannot be copied. The software application behind Omeka, GNU operating system and web-publishing platform, are both open source, which means the software is freely available and may be redistributed with or without modification.

Week 4 Reaction - Collecting History Online

2011-04-27T08:49:00.000-07:00

Cohen and Rosenzweig, in “Collecting History Online,” use the example of the ancient Greek historian, Herodotus as a model for how one might engage the project of collecting historical accounts, data, and artifacts. Basically, collect everything.

Go Digital, Get Current. Using modern computing and communications technologies, the digital historian can leverage diverse opportunities to reach out to many different publics and to maximize one-way collection and two-way participation. “The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has supported dozens of online collecting projects on science and technology,” Dan Cohen states in a 2005 CRM journal publication made available on his web site, “in the belief that the history of these subjects is growing much faster than our ability to gather it through more conventional means.” (Cohen does not explain what is meant by this, so the reader is left to gather a posse of friendly digital historians for a round of exploratory discussion.) As an example, National Public Radio offers not only traditional radio news and entertainment, but also a broad range of oral history, interviews, and mash-media content through a partnership with Hearing Voices and Story Corps, delivered to consumers in audio, written, podcast, social media, and email formats. Story Corps has an easy-to-reach web page on recording your own story, including a downloadable Do-It-Yourself Guide.

Create Alliances and Diversify the Delivery. Parallel to Cohen’s claim of historical growth, technology is growing faster than our ability to consume and learn it. We all have information and skill gaps, and have to specialize around and into the complexities of the many abundant tools available. There will never be enough time to learn everything we need to learn. Digital historians must collaboratively combine their specialties—putting pieces together to create the whole—and undertake communal learning philosophies. Creating alliances with contributors, in addition to professionals, means appropriate and targeted marketing, seizing and maintaining momentum once established, building a trust environment that encourages visitors, and providing tools that collect reliable information from participants. Contributors, like professionals, have multiple online skills and strengths. Having a clear definition and understanding of the data to be collected will help define and manage the decisions around how to collect data. Knowing the target audience and having sensitivity to their expected skills will also contribute to successful tools selection and marketing approaches.

Be Aware the Temporality. Data, software tools, and hardware have an amazingly brief lifespan. This may seem obvious, but 1) follow best practices, 2) document, 3) if possible, use non-proprietary storage formats, and 4) backup.

Flickr Commons. Backed by an impressive group of participating institutions, including NASA, Cornell University Library, Smithsonian Institution, and many more national and international organizations, the Flickr Commons launched in 2008 in partnership with The Library of Congress.

The Commons has two main objectives:

To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and
To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge. (Then watch what happens when they do!)

Paul Strand, Spokane Baseball

The idea is simple: “The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.” An easy to find and easy to use search box provides near instant return of images with a supporting list of contributors. A search for “Spokane” returned 21 historic pictures from the U.S. National Archives, The Library of Congress, and the US Digital Collections. Click on the contributor link and only those images that belong to the contributing institution are displayed. Copyright information is provided with the picture specifically and more generally at the Commons Usage site.

Picasa Slideshow and Map

2011-04-25T16:49:00.000-07:00

Twenty pictures: one slide show, one map.

View 20 Pictures in a larger map

Week 3 Reaction - Historical Information Online

2011-04-20T14:19:00.000-07:00

Reaction-Part 1: Cohen & Rosenzweig

Traditional teaching and learning methods and complementary online opportunities are approaching a point of permanent intersection as their two trajectories approach in an inevitable collision. Technology is so accessible, entrenched in society*, that it creates challenges and opportunities for traditional pedagogies. Educators and researchers have new models of incorporating technology tools into their teaching, learning, and research. Traditional scholarship and classroom opportunities are enhanced by new sources of streaming audio and video, social media, databases with smart search functionalities, and digitized records, photographs, and documents.

Cohen and Rosenzweig, in their chapter on “Designing for the History Web,” encourage historical web site developers to create sites that “enable and inspire [the visitor] to think about and grasp the past,” and to avoid design schemas that “relegate thinking to a secondary status.” They optimistically assert that “good [online] writing produces willing readers.” This sounds a little bit like the 1989 movie Field of Dreams and sloga, “If you build it, he will come.” Critical and engaged reading is not as simple as making a movie or writing well. Only with careful attention to new relationships and opportunities created by the collision of the traditional learning and technologies, will pedagogy and content be combined to create judicious and analytic online learning. One inspired tool engaging this early collaboration of scholarship and technology is the Kindle handheld reader, bridging the traditional hard copy book and online ebooks.

Digital historians, among other academics using online content delivery, necessarily need to be attentive to initiatives in the K-through-HigherEd cohort, and actively pursue holistic learning that imparts critical thinking and careful reading whether on paper or online.

* Accessibility and entrenchment in this case includes primarily the One-Thirds world populations, and within this group, to that subpopulation with contemporary in-home technologies or ready, open, and affordable access to up-to-date technology resources.

Reaction-Part 2: The Proceedings of the Old Bailey

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey website is a significant effort to organize hundreds of years of court documents into useable online data, a painstaking attempt to provide access and robust searching of these proceedings. The Old Bailey is a “fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.” A search for “Irish" and "Priest” yielded one Daniel Macarty (also spelled “Macarte,” “Maccharty,” and “Mackarty) who was put to death in 1680 for being a practicing Catholic Priest, against the English Statute of 27 Eliz, a capital religious offense. Macarty was an Irishman in England, a Papist in a Protestant state, and put to death for high treason as a “Popish Priest or Jesuit.” He was one of 24 condemned to die, “14 burn'd in the hand, one to stand in the Pillory, three to be transported, and three to be whipt.” (I cannot reconcile the difference between the 24 condemned and the accounting of only 21 punishments.)

Image of the original document of Danial Macarty's court proceedings.

There are so many questions to ask about Macarty and those condemned with him, but so little information is actually available. How do we turn limited information from transcribed documents into a meaningful and coherent project? How do we successfully use contemporary computer applications and tools to explore and learn the archeology of words, how language was used, the relations between the dominate power group and dominated, and what may have been missed, lost, or mistranslated? How are complex human variables engaged?

The XML-model of content analysis used by the Old Bailey cannot, on its own, adequately take into account the nuances of relationships between different social hierarchies—gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, age, religion, class, etc.—and the multiplicity of intersections as they truly existed under old English law. Constructing these intricacies can only be performed by a researcher who respects that the Old Bailey and similar sites are limited tools. It is the researcher's job to engage in the valuable exercise of interrogating and analyzing the many different voices and lives sparingly represented in the digitized court documents.

Week 2: Reaction - Who are the Players?

2011-04-13T15:42:00.000-07:00

Answer: At first appearance, this might seem like Abbott and Costello’s signature baseball routine, “Who’s on First?,” a burlesque skit creating its own kinetic confusion as the duo vigorously engaged runners on bases. But, honestly, its not quite that bad.

Translating intellectual labor into a web-based digital world is complex and subjective. Some theoretical, qualitative projects may have a much better fit with “traditional” (analog) academic and publishing practices. The “promise of digital history” may not resonate with the tweed coats and leather elbow patches. (I portray quite unfairly.)

Other intellectual work and research may neatly pigeonhole into a digital format, like the digital history site at the University of Huston, a website devoted to supporting teachers and students as they actually “do” history. This surprisingly rich site invites multi-level exploration and one click after another leads to narrative histories, audio and video features including historical music, active games and learning, photographs and images, Flash-based interactive timelines, a reading and reference room, and virtual exhibits. Each of these many digital tools are discussed in Cohen and Rosenzweig’s Digital History featured readings-of-the-week, “Getting Started” and “Becoming Digital,” providing a variable and multi-layered experience for exploratory visitors.

An interrogation of online digital history sites reveals different levels of sophistication and tools used. Sites can be rough around the edges, amateurish, and of questionable pedigree, like the Home of the American Civil War, or they can be professional, sophisticated, and of good peerage, like the Center for History and New Media (CHNM).

The sheer number of online sites and the information digitally available is overwhelming, creating that problem of site and information abundance. On any single site, even the most intrepid online adventurer risks being overwhelmed by a profuse number of options. CHNM, in three helpful categories, offers over fifty tools to create and supplement online teaching, publishing, and exhibits. The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), offers at least twenty-five different tools, project, research, and database links.

And the sheer number of tools available to create, maintain, organize, secure, and share sites generates its own problem of tool abundance. So many options, so much to know, so little time. The online tools available for purchase are as numerous as the options at CHNM. If one Google searches for “web design software,” only one small drop in the very large bucket of digital necessities, one hits the hard wall of realization that simply choosing a product is challenging, and after purchase, there is large investment of time to learn the product and actually create a decent website (assuming one has a server upon which to host that website).

How does a historian navigate this digital maze and intelligently utilize technology-based tools in a coherent and efficient manner? And for the technology expert (technology itself a field so complex that narrow specialization is compulsory), how do they pick up the language, theoretical frameworks, and methodology of the humanities to contribute material of value? We all have (more than) fulltime jobs in our chosen professions. It takes a great deal of personal perseverance and off-duty time to learn a whole new set of skills (the scientist and humanist morphing into a digital scholar). Or, more reasonably, it takes a collaborative (and funded) effort of multiple people with multiple skills to construct and sustain a vigorous, useful, and contemporary site.

RSS Drinking Fountain

2011-04-11T13:21:00.000-07:00

This RSS feed was found in the Showalter Hall drinking fountain.

The drain...

Understanding the Web

2011-04-11T11:37:00.000-07:00

Digital History, digital humanities, digital anything requires at the very least a basic understanding of the web, how browsers work, the inner machinations, and how you can have not only a civil relationship with the web, but also a productive relationship.

http://www.20thingsilearned.com/home

From the Table of Contents (Things) for the Google Chrome eBook on Learning the Web

Reaction: Creating New Understandings

2011-04-06T12:49:00.000-07:00

The web sites for this week’s readings created opportunities to explore and experience different models of digital historical deployment. Primary articles included “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History” and sections of “Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web.” The variety of readings for the week illustrated some basic digital tools and strategies: a book published online, a compilation of conversations, link-based navigation of book excerpts; audio interview responses to prepared questions, newspaper articles (NYTimes) with relevant inter-article linking, and a satirical, graphically themed website featuring the intrepid Boilerplate complete with an online gift shop.

The Interchange dialogue amongst digital historians, which occurred in 2008, is approaching an electronic lifetime ago. But while the sophistication of specific tools has changed and expanded, the overarching concepts discussed at the roundtable are still relevant. The authors brought different specialties to the dialogue and so were able to explore nooks and crannies of large topic questions. The question of analog and digital histories and the tensions between them is a considerable divide that exists between traditional historians and those historians who are embracing contemporary technologies. Digital history—the application of new technologies to knowledge structures and pedagogic practices—breaks with the long tradition of academe and opens new, essentially unexplored opportunities for learning, participation, and collaboration. Cohen speaks to the power of smart search engines as a tool to bring together dispersed and seeming disparate historical resources. (More on this below.) Turkel opens a conversation on ownership, availability, and cost of historical scholarship, a digital supplement to scholarly labors and time-honored long-form monograph.

An intriguing possibility of digital information and the ability to cross-pollinate from multiple sources is if the categorization of hierarchical relationships, understanding, and assumptions will change. Under old, manual systems of classification for written materials, hierarchical definition of relationships, a definition of normative, and the creation of the Other, established artificial structures of power and presumptions of difference. For example, both the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) created hierarchical structures of knowledge. (Reference Hope A. Olson’s (2001) “The Power to Name: Representation in Library Catalogs.”) The Google search engine, a construction of user search phrases and frequencies, reflects to some degree this same hierarchical structure and learned values. Digital cataloging, unlike traditional analog cataloging, is a free for all, dependent not on formal numbering systems, but open to unlimited and visionary rethinking of how material and data can be perceived in new and original constructions.

The Digital History book available online by Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig puts the philosophy of open learning and collaborative sharing into practice. The book, available in bound, printed form, is also available online. Published in 2005, this book might be considered ancient against the warp speed timeline of technologic advancements. However, the introductory themes are still relevant to the novice digital historian. Teaching and Learning, a short section, takes the reader beyond the electronically posted syllabi into larger projects, online trends, and pedagogic philosophy.

The future of digital scholarship and learning is an exponentially expanding field, moving with such rapidity that all new scholars must engage with the new tools or become, as does the material they study, become part of history.

Installing Gmail offline

2011-04-04T13:05:00.000-07:00

Hey, need to know how to set up your Google gmail as offline? Click this link which will take you to Gmail instructions. Installing Gmail offline

Screaming Queens - Drags in the Tenderloin

2011-04-01T17:39:00.000-07:00

Three years before the Stonewall riots in New York City, San Francisco’s Tenderloin District had the first but little known riot between police and of transgender women, drag queens, gay clientele, and neighborhood activists. Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, a 2005 documentary by Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman depicts the forgotten 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot when transgendered women and gay sex workers resisted police harassment, a catalyst for the larger Gay Rights movement.

Susan Stryker earned her Ph.D. in U.S. History at the University of California at Berkeley in 1992, and later held a Ford Foundation post-doctoral research fellowship at Stanford University. She currently works at Indiana University in Bloomington as a professor of Gender Studies.

Victor Silverman earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1990, and is currently a faculty member in History at Pomona College.

Vimeo carries a 25 minute segment.
(NOTE: This embedded link to Vimeo seems to works only in IE and Chrome. It does not work in Firefox.)

Screaming Queens - The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria on Vimeo.

Smaller clips from the embedded video above can be found on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDefl11mCGk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFThqNHvWz0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYtGxwFxYkM&NR=1

What about those museums?

2011-04-01T15:38:00.000-07:00

The Pinky Show is a non-profit educational project focusing on "information & ideas that have been misrepresented, suppressed, ignored, or otherwise excluded from mainstream discussion, and do this in a way that is informal and easy-to-understand." The very light-hearted but informational FAQ helps excavate the mystery behind Pinky, the mascot cat and best friend bunny.

With images and videos, The Pinky Show illuminates and educates on such subjects as Structure, Power, & Agency, Hawaii vs. U.S. Imperialism, and What's Wrong with GMO's, to list a few from a very long list of video options. Clicking on the video link delivers streaming video and typewritten script.

Here's a promising Pinky video! The video embedded below can be found on YouTube, but why send you there when you can look at it here with only a single mouse click. Let's unwrap that mummy and see what lurks behind the sheets of "coercive institutions." And now, for a brilliant learning moment, presenting We Love Museums... Do Museums Love Us Back:

The Hen House... continued

2011-03-31T12:13:00.000-07:00

The Hen House “play[s] against a canonical sense of the past,” and its value is in its staging of history within an *experiential* register, as it will obviously not be one of the great works of Public History. “Low museums,” such as the Hen House, chronically short of funds, if funds were ever available in the first place, make do with what they have, but aren’t obligated to adjust themselves around the sensitivities of a patron. (They may, like all, be obligated to other social or cultural pressures, but, unlike funding, these pressures aren’t quite as direct.) The low museum candidly exists in its simplicity and authenticity. There’s no calculation, no deliberation, no corporate sponsorship complication: Just some guy and his muddy farm boots pulling stuff together for the sake of his love of local history and his passion for “micro-canonizing” in ways that escape any formalized understanding of public history.

My larger and more personal question around Hen House as a heuristic device is to what extent does (or perhaps should) public history engage with or move into the realm of ontology, the unknown, and the existence of phenomena that escapes or exceeds discursive analysis? Do we want to understand and define the experience of the makers of the Hen House and of the campers who encounter it? Or do we just want to allow it to exist on its own? What motivates us to control, define, and exhaustively categorize history or historical experience? What are the power relationships behind historical codification? In the tension between the epistemic (what we can know) and ontological (the possibility that something is there that cannot be known), the public historian faces the question of who ultimately gets to approve or deny the reality of or access to history. I am reminded of a passage in Carolyn Steedmans’ article, “Bimbos from Hell,” (1994) that speaks to the construction of reality across gender and writing, race and privilege. She pulls from Catherine Hall’s “White, Male and Middle Class” (1992) when she uses Hall’s terminology “colonial discourse:” that “pleasure of speaking for the oppressed.” (Hall, 213) Steedman continues to define the practice of discourse on behalf of others as one that is used by those who own not only things, but also power (Steedman 1994, 66).

My main point in the original post is that the very rugged granularity of this small display, and its seeming lack of sponsorship, is a critical component of the larger, comprehensive effort to understand, share, and experience history. Campers on their summer migration, with their lawn chairs and children and hot dogs and marshmallows, were invited on their turf and their terms to encounter—and experience—history. Contemporary and formalized collections, museums, and displays are by no means the enemy. Nor are public historians or curators. But at Lake Solano Park, the Putah Creek historical display belonged to the everyday camper (whoever that is?). As you suggest, there is a whole universe of historical display—big and small, humble and lofty, relevant and extraneous. In the end, something for all of us.

Referenced: Steedman, Carolyn. 1994. “Bimbos from Hell.” Social History (19)1:57-67.