1. SB2515 fixes tuition and fees at all UT campuses at their current rate until 2021. I know that many will see this as a welcome relief. But mind you, state support has collapsed in recent years. TN is still better than some, in that the legislature appropriates $474 million, or 23% of the $2 billion budget of the university (counting both restricted and unrestricted education and general funds). Looking at just unrestricted E&G revenues, totaling around $1.2 billion, state appropriations now constitute 38 percent of the budget. At the end of the last century, state appropriations accounted for 66 percent of unrestricted E&G revenues. So, while the state continues to reduce its appropriations in real dollars, legislators want to freeze tuition with no plan for making up the differences. 

This controversy only primed the pump for another at the end of the Fall semester. Heading into holiday party season, the Office of Diversity posted a set of suggestions (just suggestions!) for how to have inclusive seasonal parties on our religiously- and ethnically-diverse campus. The burden of pluralism proved too much for Tennessee’s politicians, and a row arose with GOP opportunists going as far as to call for the resignation of Chancellor Jimmy Cheek and Vice Chancellor for Equity and Diversity Rickey Hall. The Chancellor came out relatively unscathed, though the same can’t be said for Vice Chancellor Hall. In response to this second controversy, Cheek office released a statement saying that Hall had been “counseled,” and that the website of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion had been placed under the editorial control of the Office of Communications. This indignity, in which a Vice Chancellor of the University has lost control of the campus voice on the very real and important issues under his authority is apparently not enough for some in the Tennessee General Assembly. In the midst of the controversy, state representative Micah Van Huss called for defunding diversity efforts in the UT system, and using that money to paint “In God We Trust” on all state and local law enforcement vehicles. That didn’t happen, but a new pair of bills introduced for this legislative session is taking what may well be a more pernicious approach.

SB 1902 (pdf) and HB 2066 were introduced in the past week by Senator Frank Nicely and Representative Martin Daniel respectively. Both of them serve the Knox County area, home to the main campus of the University of Tennessee. This bill seeks to do four things: 1. Restrict spending on diversity staff, administration, and programming at all University of Tennessee campuses to a total of $2.5M; 2. Implement onerous reporting requirements on all expenditures on staff, administration, and programming in support of “diversity, multiculturalism, and sustainability”; and, 3. Prevent all employees of the University system not hired explicitly for diversity work from engaging diversity programming during work hours; and  4. Restricting all diversity staff and administration to minority student and faculty recruitment, but not actual hiring processes. The Knoxville campus would be restricted to 60% of the $2.5M, or $1.5M, leaving a paltry $1m for the other campuses and entities (UT Chattanooga, UT Martin, the UT Space Institute, the UT Health Sciences Center, the Institute of Agriculture, and the Institute of Public Service).

To put this in explicit fiscal context, current the UT system spends more than $20M on diversity staff and programming on all campuses combined. Of that, some $16M goes towards scholarships for minority and first generation college students, while the rest is spent on federal and state reporting requirements, administration, and programming. Programming here includes all kinds of diversity-related intellectual and cultural content. If anything, this is way to little for a system with a total budget of around $1.3 billion.

I teach Latin American History at UT, and looking closely at the bill one could interpret the content of my courses, which are without question multicultural by the standards of the state of Tennessee, as violating Section I Part b.2:

An employee of the University of Tennessee system or one (1) of its institutions whose primary responsibilities and duties are in areas unrelated to diversity, multicultural, or sustainability programs shall not participate in diversity, multicultural, or sustainability programs during the times when the employee is to perform work duties.

This is astoundingly invasive into the daily operations and intellectual pursuits of the university, in part because it is so poorly and generally written. It also would appear to violate the bylaws of the Board of Trustees, which establish the financial, operational, and intellectual authorities in the system. As noted in Section I of the bylaws, by statutory authority the Board of Trustees,

which is the governing body of The University of Tennessee, shall have full and complete control over its organization and administration, also over its constituent parts and its financial affairs.

The authority over budgetary line items does not, in fact, reside with the Legislature. And, on curricular questions, which I would argue include diversity programming, the authority doesn’t even reside with the Board of Trustees but with the faculty. Section 2 Part A of the bylaws states that the Board shall,

Establish policies controlling the scope of the educational opportunities to be offered by the University and also policies determining its operation in general; however, the planning and development of curricula shall be the function of the faculties;

Finally on the bill itself, Section I Part D would put significant restrictions on diversity officials at all of the campuses, reducing their jobs to little more than an advisory role in recruitment:

Employees of the University of Tennessee system or one (1) of its institutions whose duties are related to diversity, multicultural, or sustainability programs, shall only work and have duties in areas related to:

(A) Nondiscrimination; (B) Recruitment of minority students; and (C) Recruitment of minority faculty or administrators.

(2) Although employees whose duties are related to diversity, multicultural, or sustainability programs may work on recruitment of minority faculty or administrators, they may not otherwise be involved in the hiring of faculty or administrators for the University of Tennessee system or any of its institutions.

It’s worth noting here that the University of Tennessee, Knoxville campus and the whole higher education system in the state of Tennessee has a long and troubled history with employment discrimination as documented by the Geier vs. State of Tennessee case, which was filed in 1968 and lasted something like 32 years, ending with a consent decree under which the State of Tennessee agreed to allocate $77M in state funds for diversity initiatives across Tennessee higher ed. Racial discrimination did not trigger this current backlash against diversity at UTK, but the net affect of this bill will set Tennessee higher ed back from the advances made in the wake of Geier. Furthermore, the backlash is rooted in a political intolerance of religious and sexual pluralism.

The very existence of bills like this which are a reaction to movements toward greater university inclusivity demonstrate the need for doubling down on our diversity efforts.

UPDATE:  

I say above that racial discrimination was not a trigger for this particular assault on diversity in the University of Tennessee system, but is undoubtedly still at the root of this proposal. A colleague pointed me to a 2013 report on Senator Niceley that I had totally forgotten. In November 2013, Niceley was a Featured Speaker at the Southern National Convention, an offshoot of the League of the South. Both of these groups are considered neo-confederate hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Quoting the announcement of his participation by the SNC:

[Niceley] will provide several proposals for legislation which Delegates can take back to their respective State legislatures. One of Senator Niceley’s proposals is to have the State legislature nominate US Senatorial candidates. This would change the electoral dynamics of the US Senate as the Senators would have to be more responsive to the States rather than that nebulous concept of “the people.”

Every attention will be given to ideas which promote the Sovereignty of the several Southern States.

That last bit is coded speech for secession, which the League of the South advocates and Niceley has gone on record in the Tennessean supporting.

To document the build, I’m going to start this post. It will be a work in progress. First up, the basics I’ve worked out so far.

Frame and Contact Points:  

• Surly World Troller frame and fork, size M (18″) in Milque Toast White
• Seatpost: Ritchey aluminum
• Saddle: Brooks B17
• Stem: Ritchey WCS OS, 100mm
• Bars: Jones Loop Bar
• Grips:
• Pedals: Performance Bike 10-pin Platform

Drivetrain and Brakes:  

• Crankset: Shimano Deore 2×10 (40-28T)
• Front Mech: Shimano XT
• Rear Mech: Shimano XT
• Chain: SRAM 10-speed
• Cassette: Shimano XT 11-36T
• Shifters: Microshift Thumb
• Levers: Avid Speed 7
• Brakest: Avid BB7 MTB mechanical discs, 160mm rotors

Wheels:

• Rear: Shimano XT hub, 36-hole, Velocity Cliffhanger rim
• Front regular: Shimano Deore hub, 32-hole, Sun-Ringle Rhynolite rim
• Front dyno: SP PD8 disc dyno hub, 36-hole, Velocity Cliffhanger rim
• Tires: Vitorria GEAX Saguaro 26×2.2

The President of the Board of Regents released this statement in response to the faculty’s vote. Interestingly, I found the original version that the BoR wrote before sending it through the PR washing machine, which I reproduce for you here in full.

9-8-15

Contact: Josh Lameman

555-555-5555

Statement from Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter on University of Iowa Faculty Senate Vote of No Confidence

We are changing landscape of higher education so as to make the current ways of operating unsustainable. The Board of Regents brought three highly qualified candidates and one ringer to campus during the search process and humored them by feigning a discussion their abilities to help lead the University of Iowa through the changes that we are foisting upon higher education.

Throughout this process, Board members heard repeatedly from non-university monied and political interests from a small segment Iowan society about the type of ‘university’ they want, and the ways they can use it to transfer public goods into private hands.

After listening to the governor, his friends, and many other non-academic interests, as well as having frank conversations with each of the candidates about their willingness to implement our transformative vision of higher ed disruption, the Board unanimously thought Bruce Harreld’s experience running a fast food chicken chain twenty years ago, and his vision and willingness to disregard faculty and staff still involved in actual teaching and research, would ultimately provide the destructive disruption we know they need.

We are pissed that faculty have decided to their follow their commitment to maintaining the public good that the University of Iowa has long been over opportunities to endorse their own dismantling, as well as the end of that institution they love, and to focus their efforts on stopping us instead of accepting our unquestionable authority to fuck them over like a pig on a one way trip to Sioux City.

So there you have it.  I’d say it’s a good thing they have editors working hard to soften the edges of Board of Regents’ press releases.

The most recent release of Gitit allows users to specify the default filetype of pages to be converted in the wiki. Originally, this was set to .page. This was fine for a new project, but I had tons of older repositories with lots of .txt files I didn’t want to change. So, I was excited to get the ability to specify the file type, which means I can use the front end on pre-existing projects filled with many folders and files.

What is more, I can use Gitit’s configuration file to simply spin up a wiki on any of my repos whenever I need or want the kind of search and display features that a wiki provides. I now have a folder named projects that includes all of my various research, teaching, and brainstorming repositories. Each of those repositories is source controlled with Git of Mercurial, and synced using source control to a repo on bitbucket:

Projects
|___conf/
|___dh_archive_book/
|___prescott/
|___quito_wiki/
|___reading/
|___sex_crime/
|___teaching_ideas/
|___tmp/
|___writing_misc/

and so forth.

In the conf folder, I have all the files needed for Gitit, including configuration files for each of the repos:

conf
|___gitit.log
|___quito_wiki.conf
|___reading.conf
|___teaching_ideas.conf
|___static/
|___templates/


Using the configuration files, I can point Gitit to one set of static files and templates, one log file, and the appropriate repository of files for whatever I’m looking for. To do that, I change the default configuration file to search for the project folder, instead of the default wikidata folder Gitit usually uses. Then, at any point when I need to search for things have a different front end that the terminal window, I’ll spin up a wiki from the Projects folder with this command:

gitit -f conf/repoName.conf


I like this very much, because I’m not tied to Gitit’s default folder or filetype structure, I can work in my repositories the way I’m accustomed to, and still get the benefit of a wiki whenever I want it. Easy to do. Works like a charm.

NOTE: A correction has been made to this press release regarding the review of the University’s tenure and post-tenure review process by deleting the inadvertent and incorrect reference to “de-tenure” under the sixth bullet of the president’s action plan noted below.

The new language in the sixth bullet point is:

Tenure and post-tenure review process: The UT System Administration, with involvement by the Faculty Council, will conduct a comprehensive review of the University’s established tenure and post-tenure review process.

While I think this retraction is a small victory, it strains credulity that a press release describing the plan presented to, and approved by the Board of Trustees would include such a toxic and alarming term as “de-tenure” by mistake. As a typo. I believe that the individuals who wrote, read, and approved the original language for release were transcribing the intent of the proposal to review P&T procedures at UT.

The System has had a procedure for post-tenure review, and even removal, since 2003. Cumulative Performance Review (CPR) is currently triggered after two consecutive years in the preceding five of an overall rating of 1 on a scale of 1-5 in the Annual Review process. Or, CPR can be triggered with three years in the preceding five of a combination rating of 1s or 2s. This is followed by a process of review by a specially-appointed committee of a faculty member’s performance.

Chancellor Cheek and DiPietro describe this process as ponderous or confusing or some such, and say that it is in need of change. And, this is brought up in the context of a plan for cost cutting. I see de-tenuring and firing-with-tenure as a distinction without a difference.

The larger context for the connection between the budget and seeking a path to dismissing tenured professors is Tennessee’s turn towards “Outcome Based Budgeting” which ties remittances to the University by the state to performance measures. This kind of fiscal discipline really has no place in public universities, who exist as a service to the citizens of the state. I can say with full confidence that the University of Tennessee Knoxville is more productive than it’s ever been by all kinds of rational measures. Our faculty are much more productive in research than in generations past. We graduate more students as a university, and have bigger incoming classes than ever before. We do so with demonstrably fewer resources. In fact, the College of Arts and Sciences would need close to 40 lines to get us back to the same level of FTE positions as we had in the mid-1990s. Additionally, quality education is an inherently inefficient process by the measures of capital. We give our most advanced and valued students (grad students) courses in a format that is most efficient at teaching them the values, methods, and content of historical practice. We do that in small seminars, not because they measure well on institutional efficiency, but because the seminar room in the most efficient means of teaching deep thinking, research, analysis, and the like.

This talk of productivity shows that the failed business model under operation here is the model of treating university education like a business. Neither Cheek nor DiPietro agree.

President Joe DiPietro and the UT Board of Trustees voted yesterday to make the tenure process, tenured compensation, and de-tenuring a key element of its plan to cut costs and expand revenues in the wake of reduced state support for higher education.

The Board of Trustees held its winter meeting on February 25-26 in Memphis. In recent meetings, the System President DiPietro has been talking up plans to deal with the University’s “failed business model.” This model, according to DiPietro, is based on replacing state dollars with tuition dollars. I’ll start off here by saying that that is not a “business model,” but rather a response to a “political problem.” The governor and state legislature, over the course of the last 10 years, have failed to fully fund the state’s own formula that determines its contributions to the university system.

At the June meeting, DiPietro forecast a $155M shortfall over the next ten years due to falling state contributions to the system. That forecast shortfall at the winter meeting has grown to $377M, a convenience in the context of the President’s presentation of a plan to cut costs and increase revenues. For most of the last year, I believed that DiPietro was playing a shame game with the legislature and governor (whose family name adorns myriad buildings and programs at UTK), prodding them to fully fund the state’s own formula.

Until today.

The plan DiPietro presented, and that the Board approved, centers on six points to address tuition shortfalls, forecasted salary gaps, and decaying infrastructure in the system:

1. Program realignment and consolidation: campuses will address low-performing programs to fund program reinvestment and perform a feasibility analysis and develop a plan for program consolidations to save costs.
2. Allocation and reallocation plans: set aside 3 percent of base year’s total unrestricted E&G expenditures to address strategic initiatives, address deferred maintenance and identify cost savings from voluntary retirement and other workforce development options.
3. Unfunded mandates for tuition waivers and discounts: the UT System Administration will study these discounts, estimated to be $7.4 million annually System-wide.
4. Tuition structure review: Options include expanding differential tuition, increase enrollment of out-of-state students and the 15-4 tuition plan.
5. Non-formula fee structure: Non-formula units (Health Science Center, Institute for Public Service and Institute of Agriculture) will review whether outreach efforts are capturing actual cost of delivery and determine whether fees should be charged.
6. Tenure and post-tenure review process: To be conducted by UT System Administration and with involvement by the Faculty Council, to look at awarding of tenure, post-tenure compensation and enacting of a de-tenure process.

The first five points read like standard responses to fiscal cuts– realignment and consolidation of programs (read, cutting departments?), fee structures (raising student costs without raising “tuition”), moving money around, etc. The last one caught my attention.

What in the world is a “de-tenure process”, and what place does tenure, a bulwark of academic freedom and security for the risks of academic training and employment, have in a conversation on cutting costs and increasing revenues?

To understand more, I watched DiPietro’s presentation of the plan to the Board of Trustees. The President noted to the board that from now on, in response to this manufactured economic crisis, all actions by the System must either cut costs or increase revenue. Here is a transcription of DiPietro’s comments on point six, which begin at 24:01 in the linked video:

The last item on the list which will be led by the System is to take a look at tenure and post-tenure review process and it will be conducted by us at the System level. This will be a review and make recommendations on needed revisions regarding post-tenure review. I would like it to include adjustments for compensation for high performers in that post-review time frame and also to look at policy for termination based on unsatisfactory performance. I will do this in concert with the Faculty Council and a group of people. We will keep them tuned in. But the reality is the post-tenure review processes that we currently have from the standpoint of the CPR program is not very effective.

So, here we have it. In a move that I don’t know any faculty were forewarned of, DiPietro has opened the door for the Board of Trustees to undo the protections of tenure at the University of Tennessee.

I tweeted that transcription, which immediately elicited a harsh response from the academics I know over there because they see it for what it is… a blatant attack on tenure in the name of cutting costs. DiPietro responded to @historianess on twitter, who called “de-tenure process” what it plainly is, an attack on tenure, with this:

UTPresidentJoe @historianess I fully believe in the concept of tenure. 2/27/15, 5:55 PM

I’ve asked him to clarify how that is, on twitter, but you know, he hasn’t answered yet:

parezcoydigo @utpresidentjoe @historianess Could you explain, then, how a tenure and a de-tenure process has any place in a convo on cost-cutting? 2/27/15, 5:59 PM

This is in direct conflict with the Knoxville campus’s push towards being a  Top 25 public university, our current campaign to improve UTK. It’s in direct conflict with many of the most cherished values of the academy and higher education. And, I’d love to provide DiPietro’s explanation for how his belief in the concept of tenure squares with having a “de-tenure process” that is not connected to disciplinary issues. If he provides one, I will post it immediately here, or provide a forum for him to do so directly. I’d really like to know, in the context of budget discussions, what the meaning of “de-tenure” actually is.

What contributes to this misconception (that the Internet is chaotic rather than highly controlled), I suggest, is that protocol is based on a contradiction between two opposing machines: One machine radically distributes control into autonomous locales, the other machine focuses control into rigidly defined hierarchies. The tension between these two machines—a dialectical tension—creates a hospitable climate for protocological control.

Alexander Galloway, Protocol (MIT: 2004): p.8.

I like this quote very much, because it articulates the structure of control not just of the distributed network of the internets but also of the early modern Spanish empire. Which is to say, Spain’s empire exercised long term control over its territories in the Americas (and Asia) without a standing army through the mediation of the judicial protocol. Judicial protocols mediated contending claims to centralization and decentralization, of the king’s authority and local custom; of jurisdictional hierarchy and jurisdictional flexibility/conflict; of legal predation and legal protection. The ambiguities of this judicial mediation likewise created “a hospitable climate for protocological control.”

Up and running

As we discussed during our first meeting, participation on the class blog will be a key component of our learning process. It will extend our discussions before and after class, and provide a platform for much of the important writing and critique that we will do together. In this post, I will provide the promised mini-tutorial on getting up and running on the class blog. But, I would also like to write a bit about the systems that form the foundation for the site. So, first up will be a step-by-step guide for getting GitHub and prose.io up and running, followed by some further discussion of jekyll, git, and HTML and Internet technologies.

Github

Our course site this semester is built on a set of free and open source technologies that evolved in response to the culture of open source software development over the course of the past few years. First and foremost among these is GitHub. As the company explains of itself,

GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers.

We won’t exactly be sharing code (though I hope by the end of the semester, a few of you will be). Instead, we’ll be sharing our explorations of digital histories. Github still works really well for this, because our entire course site is built using GitHub Pages.

Each of you will need a GitHub account in order to access the front end for writing our blog posts. This is as simple as signing up for any other web service.

Step 1.

Sign up for a GitHub account. There, that was simple.

Ok, it’s only slightly more complicated than that. Two things to think about– what do you want your github identity to be and what do we do about passwords? You may make your ID whatever you’d like as long as your classmates know who you are. The ID name is important, because it is what you will use for the author info on your posts. Passwords are more difficult. If you use a password that is robust (ie, long and made up of a variety of types of characters, ie alphanumerics and symbols), it will be hard to remember. If you use a password that is easy to remember it likely won’t be very robust. Might I suggest you consider using a password manager to generate passwords for you? If not, then at the very least do not use the same password for all of your accounts– email, bank, gmail, github, etc. Doing that makes you more vulnerable. Onwrad, though.

Step 2.

Email me your GitHub username, so that I can add it as a collaborator on the course site repo. That’s even easier, assuming you have my email address. You do, don’t you? It’s up top over there.

Prose.io

Once you have been added as a collaborator to the course repo, it will show up as one of your own repositories on your Github home page. With that, you could clone the repository onto your local machine, write your posts there, and push them back to the repository. I’m guessing that you didn’t understand pretty much anything that I just wrote there, though. So, to make all of this easier on you, we are going to use a web editing interface provided through a service called Prose.io. To use prose, do the following.

Step 1:

Make sure that you are logged in to your github account.

Step 2:

Navigate your browser to http://prose.io. On the landing page, click on the “Authorize on Github” button.

Step 3

Once you’ve authenticated, you will see a list of repos on your account. Unless you’ve gone ahead and created your own repos, the only one will be history580.github.io. Click on the repo, and you’ll find yourself in the _posts folder, with access to all the previous posts written for the site and the ability to create new ones.

Click on the green button to create a new post.

Writing with Markdown

Prose.io was created by the web development team behind the government’s new healthcare.gov site, which provides a portal to resources and the exchanges mandated by the Affordable Care Act. It is intended to be a web editor that provides an easy place to write text snippets that will be inserted into web page templates. Thankfully, it does not require you to write raw HTML, but rather uses a simple language syntax known as Markdown. Markdown was created by John Gruber with the intention of making it easier to write content for the web, and it has been an almost unbelievable success. There are now many favors of Markdown in the wild, but all of them share some basic syntax originally defined by Gruber. This syntax allows you to write in plain text, but signal to a processor how the text should be transformed into more semantically rich HTML. The syntax is not complicated, but does require a little bit of a learning curve. With it, you will be able to make links, embed images, write footnotes, use block quotes, produce ordered and unordered lists, and clearly define code snippets.

You can find Gruber’s original documentation on Markdown here.

I’m also writing a complete list of options for our version of Markdown here. Once it’s done, you can simply print it out as a cheat sheet.

There is also help from within prose.io by clicking on the ?.

Back to creation

After clicking on the new button, you may enter your markdown-flavored text into the editor directly, or paste it in from a plain text file you wrote on your computer. If you go this route, it’s important to use a text editor and not Word.

Note too that you can click on Edit to revisit a post, or the trash can to delete it.

In any case, there are three last steps to publishing your post.

• Enter a title. Click on the lightly-shaded word Untitled and give your post a title. It should be descriptive of the content. Please don’t go the lazy route of naming your post something like “Post 1” or “Print Proposal”.

• Click on the metadata button on the right side of the screen. This will bring up a dialogue box. Fill your github username in as the author of the post. This is the name that will show up on our homepage listing of new posts, and also on the post itself.

There are other metadata possibilities for that can be entered in the box, but we can leave that discussion till later.

• Save your changes. Really, what you’re doing in saving is committing your changes to the repository, which is tracking every change made to the files on which the site is built. Each commit produces a new state. Make sure to enter a short message into the commit box documenting the changes that you made. If you don’t enter anything, prose.io provides some boilerplate that will be recorded.

Note that the metadata that I’ve set to automatically generate, along with the metadata that you’ve entered, shows up appended to the top of your post between a set of triple dashes.

---
layout: post
published: true
title: your title
author: your name
---

That information helps jekyll create the site by setting important variables and choosing the appropriate template to put the new html into.

How it works

I was going to end this post with a bit on the architecture of this site, and how it works so that you understand how our site is made. Instead, I think I’ll encourage you to do two things:

1. Right click on this page and choose ‘View Source’ and take some time to look at the html. Where did the content I wrote for this post get inserted? Where did the rest of the information come from? What does it do?

2. Take some time to poke around the files on the course site repo, available to you through github, and see if you can intuit/figure out what each of them are doing. What do the various folders do? See what you can figure out. The jekyll documentation might be a good source.

Looking forward to your own first posts.

But Breaking Bad holds a dear place in my Albuquerque-missing heart.

Our house in Albuquerque was scouted as a possible location for Ted Beneke’s fall, but we missed out on that brush with fame. A fair bit of Season Five was filmed at the end of our street.

It’s not just proximity to the show, though. For me Vince Gilligan and the show’s production has shown Albuquerque and New Mexico as a place of beauty. For the landscapes involved, meth production and distribution are distractions to beauty and perseverance. The skies. The wind. The browns. And the saturating light.

I moved to Albuquerque in 1997 for graduate school. I chose UNM for what, by the standards of advice I give to students now, were very wrong reasons. Northern New Mexico reminded me of parts of Ecuador’s Andes. I wanted to be near that. In one of the first weekly issues published after I moved of Albuquerque’s weekly paper, the Alibi ran the results of a contest for a new nickname for the Duke City. I don’t remember what won, but runner ups included “Stripmallbuquerque” and “Shit Hole.” I laughed, but quickly came to see something else. I always liken Albuquerque to a dandelion growing through a crack in a worn piece of pavement. One can look at that and see failing infrastructure and weeds. Or, one can see perseverance and beauty in a stark landscape. That’s how I saw Albuquerque.

And that’s what Albuquerque does for a dark show set in a land of drenching sun.

So, I’m going to write about Breaking Bad a bit as the final season comes to a close, and probably in conversation with the show that has marked perception of my new city, Baltimore’s The Wire.

At the start of this final half season, one of the things strikes me most about the arc of Breaking Bad is the relationship between Walt’s cancer and involvement in the drug trade. Walt’s relationship to cancer is an inverse of his relationship to meth. Meth is a social and familial cancer, and it destroys everything around him. But it doesn’t destroy him. When he’s cooking he’s healthier, as if the act or decision itself is what staves off death. And, when he leaves the business, his cancer returns. The system he finds himself in is either one of corporeal decay or social decay. And, in both cases those processes are moderated by markets (one regulated, the other not).

In the beginning of the show, Walt was compelled to enter the drug trade in search of cash– to protect his family and to fund the exorbitant costs of cancer treatment. He becomes a knowledge worker in the unregulated, neoliberal market of illicit drugs in order to survive the regulated pharmaceutical cancer economy, at least long enough to do for his family what he believes needs to be done.

This decision, which sparks the emergence of Heisenberg, shifts Walt’s existence from one in which property rights (including the intellectual property rights of his wildly successful former friend and business partner) mask the social and personal violence of markets to one in which the reality of that violence is laid bare. As Walt embraces that violence, he gets relief from the compulsion of the licit pharmaceutical market and the cancer goes into abeyance. And yet, Walt has to embrace that violence to escape a repetition of the alienation of his labor that put him in a high school classroom in the first place. And so he rises as an antihero, who uses the violence-laid-bare of neoliberal markets to overcome alienation. It’s ugly, but its the underlying truth of neoliberalism everywhere. The cancer that symbolized his alienation is shifted to damaging, parasitic amorality at a social and familial level because that is what neoliberal markets do.

Some complain that, like Mad Men of late, there are no likable characters in Breaking Bad. And, maybe, as with Mad Men, that needs to be, because what the meth trade does is to show markets in their true colors, bathed in gorgeous light and framed by unending blue skies of expansive possibility.

But it got me thinking.

Why entrust to even a single group of administrators decision-making ability for hundreds of campuses? We can engage in a little creative destruction in the interest of leveraging the efficiency gains of an algorithmic approach to administrative decision making. No need for any humans to be involved at all. Netflix, eHarmony, Amazon and the rest of our technological overlords have already showed us the magical future of “the algorithm.” Sure, Siva Vaidhyanathan has warned us about such googlization. But, in the case of university administration, I can’t see how much more harm could be done by automation.

So, let’s design this algorithm.

Here’s a start:

adminHealth = 0
Policies = [policy1, policy2, policy3, policy4]

def policyChange(policy):
    x = policy()
    if x == helpsFaculty:
        return adminHealth -= 1
    elif x == helpsStudents:
        return adminhealth -= 1
    elif x == helpsAthleticDepart:
        return adminhealth += 3
    else:
        return adminHealth += 5 

while adminHealth <= 1000000:
    for policy in Policies:
        policyChange(policy)

Please, add some new functions so we can get this algorithm right. That way, we can dismantle the university much quicker, and the denizens of the algorithmic future can feel good about themselves as they save us all from the inefficiencies of, you know, values, morals, leisure, depth, thought, consideration, and all the rest.

I’m doing a lot of reading as well, and taking notes. It’s been a while since I spent a lot of time in DEVONthink, and in the interim I’ve been completely converted to vim and markdown. I very much like taking notes in vim, leveraging the pandoc vim plugin and its tab completion of bibtex citations. The thing is, for some reason I much prefer vim in the terminal to MacVim. I don’t know exactly why, though I suspect its because vim in the terminal is much more integrated into the programming workflow I’ve been using the past year.

It’s very easy to open a DEVONthink record in an external editor. I take all my notes in DEVONthink as plain text notes, part of a commitment I made a couple of years ago to using plain text whenever possible. MacVim is the default editor for .txt files on my machine. In DEVONthink, you can open any file in your database with the system default application either by clicking a toolbar icon or using the keyboard shortcut SHIFT-CMD-O. But, what about terminal vim? A little more complicated.

So, I cobbled together a Automator application from posts here, here, and here that opens a highlighted record from DEVONthink in vim in a new tab in the terminal.

For my own documentation, and maybe to help you out, here’s how it works (click on the images to make them larger):

1. Open Automator and select a new application.
   
2. From the Automator script library, first drag over the DEVONthink action Get Selected Records.
   
3. Next, drag over the DEVONthink action Get Item from Records.

   


4. Go to this page and down load the file Get File Path, which is an Automator action to get the full file path of any file.

   Once you file is downloaded, double click on it to install it in your Automator library. Then, drag into fourth place on the workflow.

   

5. Now it’s time from some Applescript. Once we have the file path, we pipe it to a script that opens a new terminal tab, and then opens the file in vim. So, drag a Run Applescript action to the workflow and enter this code:

   on run {input}
   	set the_path to POSIX path of input
   	set cmd to "vim " & quoted form of the_path
   	
   	tell application "Terminal"
   		activate
   	end tell
   	tell application "System Events" to tell process "Terminal" to keystroke "t" using command down
   	tell application "Terminal"
   		delay 0.25
   		do script with command cmd in front window
   	end tell
   	
   end run
   

   

6. Save the file in ~/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink Pro 2/Scripts. Name it something that makes sense, like OpenInVim.

That’s it. Now, you can select that from the scripts icon off the topbar. Or better yet, set an application-specific keyboard shortcut, which you can do in the Keyboard section of the System Preferences. I set mine to OPTION-CMD-o, so as not to clash with DT’s open-in-external-application shortcut.

Following last week’s announcements of new contracts between Coursera and a whole host of public institutions (coverage at IHE, CHE, NYTimes), I requested a copy of the contract signed between the UT System and the online MOOC provider. Tennessee has a public records act, which I mentioned in the email asking to see the contract. When I opened my email this morning, there it was. (Thank goodness for sunshine laws and the temporary good sense behind them.)

I have only skimmed it thus far, but I’m putting it up here for others to read. I’ll come back with more of my thoughts on the contract once I’ve had a chance to read it more closely.

A couple of notes of explanation:

1. The contract reveals the extent to which Coursera is looking for new opportunities to leverage its Platform (videos with embedded quizzes and a discussion forum — is that really a platform?). This contract is quite different, at least in the stated goals of the System, from others we’ve seen, like the one signed by the University of Kentucky system.

2. This contract was signed by the University of Tennessee system, which includes five campuses: UT Chattanooga, UT Martin, the UT Space Institute (Tullahoma), UT Health Science Center (Memphis), and UT Knoxville. The UT System is governed by a Board of Trustees. There is a second system in the state called the Board of Regents system, which includes campuses like East Tennessee State University. The Board of Regents system has also signed a contract with Coursera, though I don’t know how much it differs from this one.

3. The contract covers an 18-month period during which UT will evaluate Coursera’s platform as an alternative to its current online course technology provider (which I believe is Blackboard Connect). Thus, we’re talking about implementing two courses with multiple sections across campuses. I have a problem with that from the start house. Speaking of which, my favorite quote thus far…

The Platform will support cross-institutional simultaneous enrollment at Institution in a single-class instance to allow for the creation of larger cohorts.

So, without further ado, here it is: Coursera Contract

Please leave any thoughts in the comments below, or on twitter, where I am @parezcoydigo.

For a final project, I gave the students the option of writing a paper on three films, critiquing the films using Matt Restall’s Seven Myth. I also gave them the option of forming small groups to put together a choose-your-own-adventure text game on some aspect of the conquest. An intrepid few chose the latter, mostly because they were fatigued by the notion of writing papers. Given the short time span, I was particularly impressed with a couple of the games.

We used Twine to write the stories. Twine is nice because it is multiplatform, and uses simple wiki syntax to construct the story. That’s because Twine is essentially a wrapper around TidlyWiki. It’s intuitive, and easy to work with, as long as you remember to name the first entry “Start”.

The students essentially turned the classic document collection Victors and Vanquished into text games, and conveniently one group chose the Spanish perspective and the other chose the Mexica. Click through those links to see the finished products.

One note on doing this– the process of writing such a story lends itself to reproducing the myth of exceptional men, in which individual decisions and actions are preeminent in making the conquest. We talked so much about that, though, that the groups noted it when they presented their work today.

At any rate, as a short order experiment over just a few weeks of class (15 class days!), I think it was successful. I’ll definitely do it again.

During this break, I’ve been grinding through neglected inventories of cases that form the archival core of my current work on popular sexuality in the Spanish Empire. These cases are drawn from the Archivo Nacional del Ecuador (ANE), and are drawn from the Criminales, Civiles, Matrimoniales, Residencias, Fondo Especial, Prisiones, and assorted other Series from the ANE. The most important of the cases are from the Serie Criminales, of which my case set counts some 900 of about 3400 extant criminal cases from the colonial period. The Serie Criminal for the colonial period includes cases dating from 1589-1820, though through the middle decades of the 17th century, there are very few surviving cases. Of the 900 cases I’m using from the Serie Criminales, 333 are sex-related cases, in which the individuals being investigated are accused of sex-related acts. The other 600-odd cases relate to contextually interesting criminal prosecutions: 1. drunkenness; 2. domestic violence; 3. insults; 4. magistrate abuse of power; 5. gambling; 6. horse racing; 7. murder and assault; 8. etc.

I’ve chosen these cases in order to better understand the nature of sex-related prosecutions, and their potential for an ethnohistorical-like investigation of popular sexual norms. I decided in the process of putting together my inventories of cases to keep track of the relative frequencies of sex-related prosecutions in the criminal archive. I then plotted these frequencies across boxes and years. As with many archives, the ANE Serie Criminales is divided into numbered boxes (cajas) full of individual cases folders (expedientes). It is impossible to draw too many conclusions from the cases that have been preserved over the centuries because we have no way of knowing what’s behind the particular preservations. Was part of the archive damaged or destroyed in a previous age? Were some magistrates or notaries better or worse at collecting, preserving, and passing on their files? Likewise, we have no cases from the first 20 years of Quito’s existence as an Audiencia, and only a smattering into the early 18th century.

Nonetheless, charting the cases in my archive does show some interesting trends. So, two charts for you. (Click on each chart to get much larger images.)

1. Total and Selected Cases, 1601-1820:

This chart includes both raw counts and rolling 15-year averages of case counts for the total Serie Criminales and my 900-case subset. It’s divided by archival box, rather than by case year– which gives an impression of a much more consistent archive size over the years. Note that there are two periods where my selection of cases deviates a bit from the total case trend line: 1. from around box 45-55; and, 2. from box 185 onward. Temporally speaking, boxes 45-55 correspond to the period roughly between 1755 and 1765, the early years of Charles III’s reign (1759-1788). Box 185 onward takes us from 1802-1820, through the end of colonial rule. (Ecuador officially became part of Gran Colombia in 1822, but I’ve truncated at 1820 for convenience only.) This was an era of liberal ascendance and crisis. That said, in the raw counts its visibly the case that cases I find interesting begin to decline in the Box 140s, or around 1790, which corresponds to the end of Charles III’s reign. I should have plotted this with a different trendline. Why a 15 year rolling average? I don’t know, it’s my own experience that 15 years might be a chunk of time that produces a sort-of epoch of prosecutorial priorities.

2. Total and Sex-Related Cases by Year, 1601-1820:

Here I’ve changed the x-axis from box to year, and plotted only sex-related cases. It’s much more obvious in this chart that the Serie Criminal is really an archive of the 18th century. The first real uptick in cases begins around 1722, the second around 1743, and the big explosion amps up in 1779. By the way, the second peak corresponds to the first decade of the 19th century. I’ve also included 4-year rolling averages in this chart. Sex-related prosecutions peak in the same general time frame as overall prosecutions peak, but their percentages are anomalously high. As a percentage, sex-related prosecutions peaked in 1788 as 27% of the extant criminal cases in the Serie Criminales. This comports with jail censuses.

You’ll note there is a little bump in the trendline for Sex-Related cases earlier in the 18th century. Right around 1745, when for a cluster of a few years those cases again reached into the 20% range of total cases. What do the 1740s and the 1780s have in common? Well, for one thing they have periods of epidemic disease and natural disaster in common. Could natural disorder account for a rise in sex-related prosecutions, when a reformist government might be interested in making order?

The devil in that question is in the details, and it’s interesting to note that prior to the 1780s, sex-related prosecutions were dominated by instances of forced rape, incest, and cases involving young women. In the 1780s, cases are dominated by descriptions like illicit relationship, concubinage, and adultery. This suggests the state takes a very different interest in sex acts at the point that prosecutions dramatically increase.

What am I doing with these cases?

This project has evolved over time. What I’m actually interested in is both methodological and historical– understanding popular attitudes towards sex through prosecutions. So, I’m taking especially cases of concubinage and adultery and looking at a number of factors. How do magistrate and defendant portrayals of these relationships differ? How long did relationships last before they were brought before legal authorities? What were the circumstances that made relationships prosecutable– what accounted for their transition to notoriety? What I’m finding is that defendants use arguments from customary practice that are similar to legal defenses across the spectrum of criminal and civil litigation. I’m also finding that relationships were very frequently long-lived, often producing children and never drawing the attention of the state until something outside those relationships sparked a conflict. This could be violence, nightly patrols by judicial authorities, commercial disagreements, and any other number of conflicts that had little to do with sex and much to do with other aspects of neighborhood tranquility. What to make of that? The cases paint a picture of toleration without tolerance in popular sexual attitudes in the eighteenth century.

I’m also finding that as the 18th century wears on, the insults people hurl at one another become increasingly tied to racial terms, including those hurled at women. More and more, phrases like “(s)he treated my like a zamba/india” show up. But, that’s another post altogether.

I want to get this working because, in part, I want to reproduce the lessons Matt Jockers presented on text analysis in R at the Digital Humanities Winter Institute.¹ The Python Data Analysis Library provides the kind of data structures needed to do the kind of analysis offered in R. At any rate, it brings me back to matplotlib again.

So, I have tried the prescribed solutions to the problem of installing in every imaginable combination– installing and uninstalling dependencies in different orders, to no avail. I was doing this using OS X’s built-in python, which with Mountain Lion is 2.7.2 and serves my purposes, generally.

I finally decided to try using a virtualenv, and magically matplotlib started working. So, here’s how I did it:

1. Using the package manager homebrew I installed libpng, freetype, and pkg-config.

   $ brew install libpng freetype pkg-config

2. Using virutalenv and the truly awesome virtualenvwrapper to set up a fresh python instance just for this kind of text analysis.

   $ mkvirtualenv text_analysis
(text_analysis) $ pip install numpy
(text_analysis) $ pip install scipy
(text_analysis) $ pip install pandas
(text_analysis) $ pip install nltk
(text_analysis) $ pip install ipython
(text_analysis) $ pip install tornado
(text_analysis) $ pip install zmq

And then, finally,

(text_analysis) $ pip install matplotlib

The only package of those listed above that is required for matplotlib is numpy, but the others are useful for what I’m working on.

Whereas doing this exact same thing with Mac’s built-in python produced constant Import Errors, regardless of whether I installed matplotlib with pip, with another package installer, or building from source.

I’m glad to have it working again. If you’re having trouble getting matplotlib working, then try installing in a virtualenv, and by all means use virtualenvwrapper to manage your python envs. This may well require a change in your workflow, but it will be a change for the better. It’s good working practice to isolate your development environments, and better than sudo site package installs on your system python.

A couple of words on managing python environments:

1. To ensure your scripts will work with the activated env, make sure to use the correct shebang line at the top of the file:

   #! /usr/bin/env python

2. As you get used to using envs, you may find a few standard sets of site packages you use again and again. pip allows you to install packages from a special requirements file. While working in an environment, such as my text_analysis environment, you simply use a pip freeze command:

   (text_analysis) $ pip freeze > requirements.txt

Then, in a new env you simply bootstrap with pip:

(new_env) $ pip install -r path/to/requirements.txt

If you’re interested in using ipython or ipython notebooks, you’ll also need to install readline. The ipython folks recommend installing it with easy_install instead of pip, because it works better for reasons I’m not entirely sure of. The process is the same as above:

(text_analysis) $ easy_install readline

Finally, virtualenvwrapper makes it very easy to list site packages (lssitepackages), make new envs (mkvirtualenv), and list and switch between them (workon). For more, see the documentation linked above.

One might claim to see a parallel between the dotcom bust and the general loss of academic standing by critical theory….

and

[Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and other critical theorists’] approach to textuality remains very helpful in understanding our experiece of hypermedia. And vice versa. *

 in connection with my recent piece on long-form historical narrative. The context of these comments comes with Landow’s admission that poststructuralism waned in the academy, even as the read-write world of Web 2.0 exploded. He’s right in his contention that poststructuralists provide excellent analytical tools for understanding hypertext and the read-write web. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect example of Deluezian/Foucaultian emergence than the explosion of hypertextual writing in the post-dotcom era, materially manifest in the LAMP stack (linux, apache, mysql, php), and served to the world through the well-masked control of Protocol. 

Historiography always maintained a tenuous relationship to poststructuralism. And the demise of the latter has been celebrated by many Historians if only in continued silence and a smug sense of having “correctly” ignored it all along.  

Historians, to generalize to a ridiculous extent, simply struggle to incorporate theoretical challenges that simultaneously lack historicity AND that set out to undermine narrativity.  

Which brings me back to my discontent with current options for long-form narrative online. Is my discontent related to the theoretical implications of hypertextuality itself?

*George Landow, Hypertext 3.0 (Johns Hopkins Press, 2006):xiv.

The session began with a reminder that accountability in higher education has “increased over the past decade and accelerated with the recent recession.” Due to pressures from accreditation agencies, like SACS, as well as I’m sure tons of other interest groups, “we nee to transition to a culture of assessment.”

Cultivating a culture of assessment in Higher Education is, apparently, a new thing. All the forms of assessment that professors use with their students aren’t what we’re talking about here. That sort of assessment doesn’t ensure students, parents, and legislators that learning is happening. What will ensure it is choosing a set of learning goals, writing a rubric to assess them and the programmatic level, and then of course make changes based on the result. I love how agencies assume as an opening gambit that such things aren’t already happening, and assume such because the iterative process of education isn’t written in the correct formal language.

What is that formal language, you might ask? It’s a language that is shared amongst institutions undergoing the process. To write learning goals and assessments correctly, one can simply google sacs accreditation and look at materials institutions put up on the web. A “Culture of Assessment” is really about a “Language of Assessment.” It’s one of many newspeaks in operation on campus today, and together with MBA-Speak and associated corporatization-of-academia-speaks, I find it simultaneously vapid and invidious.

Assessment-speak, like corporatist language on the university, claims to promote efficiency and accountability. But how and to whom? Institutions facing SACS re-accreditation are encouraged to construct an elaborate set of learning objectives using verbs tied to Bloom’s taxonomy of learning. That’s right, a significant portion of SACS approval hinges on the facade of a set of terms related to educational research published in 1956. The taxonomy is, of course, hierarchical and posits that students move to higher levels, from remembering to creating, as they learn more.

My experience is that students don’t move from lower to higher levels in a linear fashion, but rather iteratively and messily. Nonetheless, we get to write learning objectives that draw on the higher levels, and demonstrate movement to them. These are supposed to follow a particular form:

The student will verb object.

Despite the learning objectives drawing on the higher end of the taxonomy, they’re also supposed to be simple and measurable. I figure, the easiest way to do this, appropriate to the rigor of the process, is to automate it. So, as a service to history departments across the country facing regional accreditation, I present to you Bloom’s Picker, a simple web app that will write your learning goals for you. Just refresh the page. Three to five are usually sufficient!

The thing is, the sentences produced by the app almost always work and could be copy and pasted straight into an assessment rubric. This isn’t a commentary on the rigor of academic history. I’ll leave it to you on what it does measure.

DHWI was as a very interesting experience. I took a class on large scale text analysis in R taught by UNL’s Matt Jockers. There was tons of code, and a learning curve for me in getting used to R’s data structures and syntax. I’ll admit I struggled a bit with visualizing in my head the various types of matrices that constitute much of R’s data structures. I have more to say about this class too, but in another post.

I drove each day to College Park from Baltimore together with Alex Galarza. Alex and I talked a lot sitting in traffic on I-95. At some point during the week we ended up in a discussion on something I’ve been thinking a lot about in the last year or so– frameworks for long form (historical) narrative online. We both share some misgivings about many of the platforms currently in use in Digital History projects, including WordPress, Drupal, Omeka, KORA, etc.

I’m not a designer, and I think that I lack a vocabulary to explain exactly what my misgivings are about the current platforms and how they affect the potential for presenting long form historical argument. In the case of the platforms I listed above, in each case the idea of constructing a long form narrative on the platforms always feels like a hack. WordPress is a great platform for writing blog posts. It doesn’t take much, though, for an individual post to get to the tldr level. The UI of a blog sets limits, at least of expectation, on the length one will spend reading an individual piece. That’s not, of course, the condition of an Omeka or Drupal, both of which might be used in a blog-like manner, but which are intended at a more fundamental level as expressions of modeled relationships between entities that exist in their databases. The way that the elementary entities of the various CMSs are conceived affects the organization and delivery of information using that platform. Raf Alvarado gave an excellent talk on this very thing a few years ago at THATCamp Prime. I put up my notes from that session a few years ago, which was the best presentation I’ve ever heard of the connection between the ontology of a CMS and its resulting product. I bring it up here because I think that Raf’s idea about the way platforms (CMSs) model content has direct bearing on my own discomfort with them as current options for long form historical narrative.

Let’s take Omeka as an example. In Raf’s presentation he noted that for Omeka, the elementary unit is the ITEM. Items belong to Collections, and have Dublin Core metadata, keywords, and tags associated with them. Combinations of items, organized by membership in collections or linked through metadata, keywords, or tags allow information to be accessed through Exhibits. Raf described this, borrowing a term from Landow’s Hypertext, as “Axial Hypertext,” or a “sequential content model.” On the face of it, it may seem that a sequential content model would be the best for historical presentation, encouraging the reader to go through a sequence curated by the scholar through the construction of exhibits. Reading that sentence, I imagine you imagining a museum, which is appropriate given the genealogy of Omeka. But, it highlights what remains an unspoken divide in historical scholarship– between what is traditionally called “public” vs. academic history. The narrative of a public history exhibit, and that of an Omeka site as well, is intimately tied to Item objects. This isn’t the case in the kind of history I and most of the History professoriate write.

Long form narrative is not object oriented, to butcher a phrase associated with philosophy and computer programming. While historical writing is certainly evidentiary, it’s not a sequential presentation of evidential objects. Omeka doesn’t force one to parade objects, but it is predisposed to organizing information in that manner. I’m not trying to pick on Omeka either, because I have problems with all of the major platforms and the models they impose on the information-knowledge complex. They can also all be hacked for the purpose of long form historical narrative.

Why does this matter, even? We have epubs for tablet reading. Isn’t that the electronic substitute for the book? It is I guess, but it falls short for me for two reasons. 1. Epubs truly do cede design elements to the platform. 2. Epubs do little to utilize the interactivity made possible by hypertext. They’re an ugly simulacrum of the book. I also don’t like the movement of more and more information to apps, as opposed to on the open web. There isn’t too much I can think of about the epub experience that can’t be replicated on a well designed website that is by intention responsive to screen size and computer type.

This discussion cropped up on twitter a couple of weeks ago. Alex storified it. It was started by a query about allowing users to create their own narratives from archival collections. It’s a cool question, and one that is really similar to the idea behind Scalar or Scholars Lab’s plugin Neatline for Omeka.

I’m really less interested in existing or new platforms that can be coerced into long form historical narrative, especially those where evidence objects are the central focus of the platform’s “data object.” I’m more interested in general design principles for presenting either wide-ranging or deeply analytical historical work online. Digital History has focused more on the object of evidence, in part because of its roots in public history and in part because really the Web provided for the first time the capacity to share sources ubiquitously. As a result of that orientation, and with exceptions of course, DH has not offered much to historians working in a more academic mode. And that’s a shame. And that’s a shame that has affected the perception of DH in the traditional academy. If you doubt that, read the Introduction to Allan Megill’s *Historical Knowledge, Historical Error, which is essentially a scathing review of Valley of the Shadow. The problem, if it is one, is the extent to which Digital History has turned it’s practitioners into curators or archivists to the neglect of long-form narrative and analysis.

It’s my contention that part of that is platform driven. I’d like to call, instead, for an html/css/js framework for historical narrative. The success of a css framework like Twitter’s bootstrap is in part its platform independence. There has been a backlash against bootstrap, in part because of its success. And its success is rooted in providing a set of icons, css layouts, javascript ui that makes it easy for people without design chops to prototype a site quickly. I don’t, though, find bootstrap to be particularly readable for the kinds of sustained interaction historians are looking for. We’re not talking about web applications here, as much as a newly imagined book.

What would a framework for historical narrative include?

1. A minimalist interface.
2. Good typography that conveys the seriousness and temporality of the narrative. With today’s screen resolutions, I think we can go with serif fonts and large type. We’re not selling SAAS or any commodity, so why take our typographic cues from that world?
3. Navigation. Finding one’s place, and finding it again is important for scholarly reading. Together with navigation would be, I’d say, the ability to cite by paragraph. And, to be honest, I’m neither a fan of scrolling or pagination. But maybe that’s just me.
4. Javascript popups for footnotes/endnotes, and maybe for evidence objects as well. One of the things that hypertext has done to sustained reading is present a huge array of interesting and distracting linked elements. But, every time I leave a page to look at something, finding my way back and refocusing can be difficult. Better embedding would help this.
5. I’d really like some means to visualize embedded metadata/rdfa/microdata as well.

What else? What else would you want to see in such a framework? The upside of such a framework is it could be used with any platform, or by itself with book-length works written in Markdown. This isn’t exactly the direction the conversation on twitter was taking, but as Jeremy Boggs tweeted in the storified conversation:

@parezcoydigo @galarzaalex @anneperez @tjowens @wragge @miriamkp we’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do with good ol HTML & CSS

— Jeremy Boggs (@clioweb) January 23, 2013

With the ease of authoring with Markdown, I think he’s exactly right that there’s still much to explore with just HTML and CSS.

Flask is great, from my perspective, for a couple of reasons. 1. It’s in python. (I’m comfortable with python, so I don’t have to learn a bunch of new language conventions while also learning to build the web app.) 2. Even though as a microframework, Flask doesn’t handle a ton for you, there are already a bunch of extensions out there that help quite a bit.

The past two years or so, I’ve been building my course sites with hyde, a python static site generator much like ruby’s jekyll. I think that most of what we do with course sites can be done statically, with just a little client-side javascript. And, in fact, there is nothing on this new site that I couldn’t do that way.

So, why bother with Flask then? I don’t know. Shits and giggles? The chance to learn how to deploy a wsgi app on Dreamhost? Learning at a very basic level about routing views, app configs, etc. I still didn’t want to mess with a SQL database for the site, because other than tracking student posts there’s no point in it. Everything else my course sites need, at least for now, are better served as, essentially, static files.

So, individual pages for the site are all written in Markdown, and served using a flask extension named flat-pages. It’s a nifty plugin. When the app receives a url request, the path is checked against a folder named pages. So, for example, http://history475.chadblack.net/syllabus/ checks for a file named syllabus. Since it’s there, it takes the text of that file, which is still in Markdown, converts it to an html snippet and serves it through a page template. This is, in many ways, what a static site generator does, and what Frozen Flask does to produce static sites from a Flask app. (I’m going to do that when this course is over. There’s no need for an in-active site to be anything but a static site.)

This brings us back to a page of student post feeds. I require my students to each start a wordpress.com blog for my course. They write weekly, and I always have a place on the site that aggregates their feeds. There are many easy ways to do this. For my previous static sites, I’ve used a number of javascript options. For my personal site, I use feedjs for an up-to-date feed of this site. For course sites I’ve been using Google’s Feed API, which lets me embed a whole bunch of feeds into a singe frame. It’s also nice because Google caches feeds and lets you control a number of features. Sharon Leon is using a Google Reader bundle for The Digital Past, which is very nice given the ease of putting together and sharing bundles in Reader. I always actually track student posts for grading purposes that way.

But all of that is too easy. For my Flask site, I first put the feed retrieval directly in site logic with a function that checked feeds each time someone visited the student work page. By the way, I’m using a python package named feedparser for getting the feeds. This works. But, it’s also very slow and requires a whole bunch of resources to do retrieve things that are rarely updated. A better solution would be to store student feeds in an SQL, or even NoSQL database. But, I only want to show the most recent post on the site, so all the caching and checking, and then the overhead of adding an ORM to the app seemed like more trouble that it’s worth.

Solution? Why not write a script that gets the most recent post of a student site and have it directly write Markdown to a file in the pages directory? So, that’s what I did. I run the script with a cron job. Speaking of which, that’s another thing I learned doing this– how to write a crontab entry and deal with script path problems and the like.

feedparser returns a dictionary-like object that is fairly complex, so it took a bit of time figuring out where the elements of the feed were that I wanted to display. Then, I had encoding problems. Because Python 2.x always ends up in an encoding problem. feedparser returns unicode objects, and Python’s normal file writer tries to encode everything as ASCII.

The result is this page, which is essentially programmatically-written Markdown. All the code for the site is on github.

Next semester I’m teaching a grad/undergrad seminar on Digital History. That site will also be a Flask app, but this time I’m going to have students write posts directly on the site through an admin interface. Yes, I’m going to reinvent the blog, because doing it the hard way is better for me.

This evening, a retweet originating with Brian Croxall came across my feed highlighting an ad that should have come from the mlajobs tumblr. But it didn’t. It’s real:

Penn State U, DuBois – Full-Time Non-TT Assistant Prof. of English (DH, Lit, & Composition) – INTERVIEWS SCHEDULEDEdit

Full-time Nontenure-Track Assistant Professor of English

Teach three courses (9 credits) in Digital Humanities, Literature, and Composition a semester using traditional and hybrid delivery modes. Publish in refereed journals. Participate in professional organizations and in course, curriculum, and program development. Stay current in pedagogy appropriate for discipline through scholarly activities. Advise students and provide career guidance. Participate in campus, university, and community service activities. Position may be renewable. MLA interviews. Qualifications: Ph.D. in English, with specialty in Digital Humanities and expertise in British or American Literature. Evidence of potential in scholarship and professional development is expected. Commitment to high–quality instruction in a student–centered environment is desired. Interest in the instructional use of technology is required; interest in active and collaborative learning is an advantage. Prior college–level teaching is preferred. Enthusiasm for teaching in a multidisciplinary environment is important. Applicants should include a list of links to their significant digital humanities work, with appropriate access information. Finalists will be contacted and asked to provide a list of references.

How offensive. Penn State Dubois wants to hire an English PhD, with a specialty in Digital Humanities and British or American Lit, who has published in refereed journals, who’s up on their pedagogy, and who will have to advise students, do service, and is expected to be active in program development. That’s the description of a tenure-track professor. But, is this job for a tenure-track professor? No, of course not. It’s for a lecturer whose contract “may be renewed.”

The level of experience this ad describes doesn’t even fit the bill for many new PhDs who haven’t yet had a tenure-track job.

Now, Penn State Dubois offers Associate Degrees, which I guess means it is as much a community college as an extension campus of PSU. And it may be that community colleges are more used to and more likely to hire off track. But, the description here is the that of an R2 or quality SLAC. What does PSU Dubois expect? Do they simply think that DH people are all into that #alt-ac thing, and so don’t need the promise of traditional academic promotion in return for a commitment to research, publication, and teaching? Or is it simply that PSU Dubois knows there’s a large enough pool of surplus academic labor that they can get away with this? Or is this ad written for an inside candidate? If its the latter, then shame on you for putting other people through the MLA job wringer. If its any other reason, then shame on you for helping undermine the profession.

The conference interview is such a strange, and artificial part of the hiring process. It’s uncomfortable for everyone involved, on both sides of the table/couch/chair/cattle-pen. Whose idea was it originally to have awkward interviews in hotel rooms? I once had an interview where the school sent nine people to interview their candidates at the AHA. It was such a big crowd that we had to sit in a closed circle of chairs. This made it very hard to make eye contact. There are much, much worse stories out there than that. Suffice to say, we all need to figure out a few good strategies to make best on a less than ideal situation.

Advice posts circulate around every year, but I figure– why not one more? So, here are a few tips from an interviewer to an interviewee:

1. Relax. I know, that’s easier said than done. But, as a committee we are really interested and excited to talk to you. Think seriously about strategies to manage your nervousness. If coffee and caffeine make you nervous, don’t double down on it. If sleep really helps you, then do you best to make it an early night before. New Orleans will be a tempting place to take in a bar and restaurant scene. You’ve made the first hoop, and the committee wants to talk with you, learn about your work, and learn about you.

2. Be prepared to talk about your dissertation/book/work in a few sentences. You are guaranteed that you’ll be asked about this. If I’m interviewing you, I promise this question won’t be turned into something silly like, “What would you say to someone at a cocktail party if they asked what you do?” I hate those kinds of questions. But, some committees will feel like a gimmicky question gives them insight into you. So, be prepared for this, or any other question, to be asked in a gimmicky way. You should have a short and sweet answer to the dissertation question, and also one that is more extensive.

3. Be prepared to talk about teaching. Committees want to know that you’re interested and excited about teaching, and that you’re prepared to design and implement your own courses. We don’t just want to know that you can teach courses already listed on a course description page or in a curriculum. If an ad mentioned some specific type of course, be prepared to answer questions about how you will approach that class. But, don’t go do to much research on course catalogues– you have no idea how long courses have been in the catalogue, if they aren’t taught, if they’re the bailiwick of a particular faculty member, etc. Be able to speak to both general and specific approaches. (BTW, everyone who teaches history likes to use primary sources. Saying you do that isn’t enough.) If the program has both graduate and undergraduate offerings, be prepared to talk about both. Have a seminar in mind that you could teach next semester.

4. For schools with high research expectations, be able to talk about what needs to be done to your dissertation/manuscript for it to be publishable, and what presses you think would be a good fit (even if you haven’t contacted them yet). We’re in a transition period, and for historians the single-authored-monograph is still the gold standard for promotion. The AHA interview is not the place to litigate its efficacy. Many times readers of this blog are more technologically sophisticated and forward looking that those who they’re interviewing with. Just remember that initial interviews aren’t the place to grind axes, and at this stage in the game you have to speak in a both/and frame, rather than a either/or one.

5. Have a couple of questions to ask the committee. I think something like, “Where do you see your department in five or ten years” is a good one, because it gets the committee talking about themselves. Be careful not to craft a question that might be interpreted wrongly by people who could feel defensive about their school, student body, or geographic location.

6. Don’t bring extra materials to the interview. If committees want to see more from you, they will ask for it.

7. Scope out the layout of the hotels before the morning of your interview. Know how long it takes to walk from one to the other. Know where the right set of elevators are ahead of time so you don’t have to stress about it five minutes before your interview starts.

8. If the subject of service comes up, connect it to something you’re particularly passionate about– undergraduate teaching? graduate teaching? outreach?

9. I’ll say it again– try to relax. I’ve listed a bunch of stuff above, but remember first and foremost that the hiring process is about finding colleagues. People want to hire people they want to work with. And that goes both ways. It’s more the case in an on-campus interview, but you’re interviewing us as well.

Any other recommdations? Please share them in the comments below.

I’ve been doing most of my writing, coding, notetaking, and other work in Vim for a few months now. There has been a slow accretion of wisdom and workflow, and muscle memory. (I frequently find myself reaching for Vim keyboard shortcuts when using other text editors or word processors, and find myself frustrated when they don’t work.)

I’m going to start posting an irregular series of posts on using Vim for the kind of long-form writing historians and other humanists do. In part, I’m doing this because I learn a tool better when I write about it. (That was certainly the case with Devonthink.) In part it’s because Vim gets better with customization, and when ever I move to a new machine I forget half the things I’ve done, or how I did them. So, it’s also an exercise in personal archiving.

My favorite tool for writing has long been Scrivener. What I most like about Scrivener is the ability to split the screen and view source material as I write, and export to a variety of file formats of a finished draft from its constituent parts. I also like its file navigation and little bits like distraction-free writing mode. I’m less interested in its summarization and the many complex forms of metadata one can add to files. Another thing I don’t like about Scrivener is that the package contains full copies of all the files in one’s research folder, as opposed to symlinks. This means for a large research project you can end up with a very large file, and one that is duplicative. With a few plugins, Vim can easily handle many of the things that I like about Scrivener (if not most). There are a few bumps in the road, though.

Most of my research files, notes, etc. are text files. But, of course, as an academic, I also have tons of pdfs and legacy files in .doc or .docx. These files are, obviously, not accessible by vim. I’m working on a couple of lugins that will make them accessible by converting their contents to text or markdown automatically with filetype detection. (As it stands now, using NERDTree, it’s easy to open these files in their external system editors (Word, Preview, etc.). At any rate, what do I want from a Vim Scrivener set up?

• multilingual spell checking
• file navigation
• split screen editing
• PDF text layer viewing
• web page downloading/markdown conversion
• export to pdf, docx, or rtf
• sensible line wrapping
• directory search

Much of this is already available from Vim and a few good plugins. So, I’m going to start an irregular series of posts for the Vim Humanist on how to customize Vim for our writing and research needs. If you have ideas or tricks, let me know and I’ll include them in the series.

If you read the comments on the gawker and jezebel pieces, you’ll find a bunch of commentators excoriating gawker, Chen, etc. for violating the privacy and anonymity of redditors, an act so vile as to bring them to the defense of people like Brutsch and subreddits that celebrate the anti-consensual consumption of women and girls as objects.

In a coincidence of timing, this story was breaking in the days surrounding the UN’s new International Day of the Girl on Tuesday. Erwin C. wrote a post for the Day that provides just a few snippets of data on how deep gender inequality continues to be in Latin America. (h/t to Colin) From the post:

• In 2009, 15.5% of Mexican girls between the age of 15 and 19 had at least one child partly as a result of 61.2% of teens who did not use birth control.
• 69% of the 7551 reported cases of domestic or sexual violence in Peru during the first eight months of this year involved girls under the age of 17.
• A survey taken two years ago showed that 43% of women in the Dominican Republic aged between 20 and 49 had married before reaching the age of 18.
• 70% of Bolivian girls do not got to school while 30% of girls residing in rural areas finish elementary school.
• 248 girls under the age of 14 were killed last year in Colombia,which is up from 176 in 2010.
• 14% of Ecuadorian indigenous girls between the ages of 5 and 17 do not attend school.
• Roland Angerer of the Plan International NGO told EFE that for Central American girls the “quality of education is worse” than other regions and the levels of malnutrition are “worrying”.

I’m struck at the cognitive dissonance of these two bits of news. While redditors debate the value of their anonymity to act out misogynistic fantasies, real girls around the world struggle daily for access to school, with sexual and domestic violence, for control over their fertility, for economic opportunity.

I find this enraging. I think there are good cases for internet anonymity– for whistleblowing, for political dissent in countries with real consequences for such dissent, etc. This is simply not the case here. In the bubble of anonymous internet communities, though, the real and daily struggles for life and justice for women and girls aren’t compelling. Trolling and violation are. These people deserve to have their identities outed. Their sense of outrage is rooted in the same gender privilege that justifies their daily violation of women’s consent on those subreddits. It’s abhorrent, and should be called such.

There is a page on the homebrew wiki that explains how brew handles installing Python and its package managers easy_install and pip. Following the instructions, including prefixing your PATH with /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/share/python, is supposed to leave you with both easy_install and pip installing packages for Python2.7, without the need to use sudo. It didn’t work for me. So, here’s the simple fix I had to make to get pip (and easy_install) working correctly:

If you type which pip at a bash prompt, and followed the instructions correctly, you’ll find it (and easy_install) in /usr/local/bin. If you open that file in your favorite text editor, though, you’ll find a shebang line at the top:

#! /usr/bin/python

that points pip to the system python. Edit that line to:

#! /usr/bin/env python

and pip will then correctly install packages for homebrew’s Python instead of system Python. I banged my head against the wall for a while trying to get pip to install packages correctly, until I thought to look at the pip file itself. Maybe now you won’t have to do that.