American Studies at the Digital Crossroads
(Participants: Randy Bass, Bruce Burgett, Sharon Daniels, Glenn Hendler, Deborah Kimmey, Tara McPherson, Curtis Marez, Timothy Powell; Date and time: Friday, October 17, 12:00-1:45)

American Studies and Anthropology: The Road Less Traveled
(Participants: Amber Clifford, Kathryn Marie Dudley, Robin Hanson, Carrie Lane, Aubrey Thamann; Date and time: Friday, October 17, 4:00-5:45)

I’ll be at ASA this year, presenting “Online Tools for Open and Collaborative Research” with Sharon Leon and Jeremy Boggs.  What are ways that DH tools like Zotero and Omeka can enhance teaching and learning in American Studies?  And how can I integrate web resources like Crossroads and the Encyclopedia of American Studies into my class?  We’ll tackle these questions among others.

Perhaps we should get on the blogwagon and start a discussion — what do you think?

The American Journal of Play will feature articles on such disciplines as child development, education, psychology, anthropology, history, communications, and museology and is aimed at a general audience of educators, psychologists, play therapists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, museum professionals, and others interested in children and the importance of play.

If you haven’t seen Crossroads in a few years, give the main site a look as well – it has a terrific new design and some useful material for teaching and learning in American Studies.

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS
AMERICAN PLAY: SPORTS, GAMES, ENTERTAINMENT, AND FANTASY IN AMERICAN CULTURE

A special international conference jointly sponsored by the Middle Atlantic American Studies Association (http://www.hbg.psu.edu/hbg/research/maasa) and the Great Lakes American Studies Association (http://www.ohiou.edu/glasa) in Rochester, New York, USA, in cooperation with the Strong National Museum of Play.

Date of Conference: April 4-5, 2008
Deadline for Submission of Proposals: December 14, 2007
Electronic Submission: massa_glasa08@yahoo.com
Location: Strong National Museum of Play, Rochester, New York
(http://www.strongmuseum.org) USA.
Conference Hotel: Hyatt Regency Rochester
Contact: Professor Simon J. Bronner, American Studies Program, The
Pennsylvania
State University at Harrisburg, 777 West Harrisburg Pike, Middletown, PA
17057-4898 USA, 717-948-6039 (o), 717-948-6724 (fax), sbronner@psu.edu.

Proposals for papers and presentations are invited for a special conference addressing the theme of American Play: Sports, Games, Entertainment, and Fantasy in American Culture to be held at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, April 4-5, 2008. Play is conceived broadly in this call and proposals are invited that explore and expand the definition and application of play in American Studies. The organizers are especially interested in interdisciplinary perspectives on play across the life span, including adulthood and old age; cultural meaning of play and entertainment in theme parks, film, literature, television, advertising, and political protest; uses of fantasy in new media and technology, including video gaming and the Internet; material and visual culture of play, including toys, furniture, dress and the body, costuming, sports, and board games, for adults as well as children; the topography of play, including parks, stadiums, playgrounds, and gyms; play in consumer culture, including intertextual connections between merchandise and film, music, advertising, and television; relationships between play and work, and the idea of leisure and recreational industries as they have historically emerged in the United States and its border regions, especially in Canada; verbal play, including humor, speech, jokelore, and legendry; intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and age in sports and recreation; the ethnography of play behavior, especially controversial traditions such as pranks, hazing, gestures, and “extreme” sports; comparative cultural analyses of games, sports, and entertainment in the United States and other countries.

Proposals for individual papers and presentations (15-30 minutes for each presentation, depending on the number of presenters in a session) should include one sheet with title, name and affiliation of author, and 150-300 word abstract. Another sheet should include a brief CV or biographical statement with full contact information of the presenter, including email. Proposals for panels, roundtables, and workshops should include a summary of the panel’ concept and a list of participants and special roles (chair, discussant, respondent). Send materials by email BEFORE DECEMBER 14, 2007 to maasa_glasa08@yahoo.com. Proposals will be evaluated by a program committee composed of representatives from the sponsoring organizations of the Middle Atlantic American Studies Association and the Great Lakes American Studies Association, and notices will be sent to presenters in February 2008.

Publication of papers from the conference will be encouraged. Presenters will be invited to submit papers for a special issue subject to peer review in the American Journal of Play, edited by Dr. Jon-Paul Dyson. The American Journal of Play is intended to increase national awareness and understanding of the critical role of play in learning and human development and the way in which play illuminates the cultural history of the United States.

The setting of the Strong National Museum of Play is significant for this conference because it is the first and only major museum in the world devoted to the study and interpretation of play. The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York (already home to the National Toy Hall of Fame and the world’s most comprehensive collection of toys, dolls, and other play-related artifacts) nearly doubled in size in 2006 to 282,000 square feet after a $37 million expansion. Attendees at the conference will have an opportunity to tour the collections of the museum in addition to having the benefit of free admission to the exhibitions. To encourage family participation, the Strong National Museum of Play will extend a 50 percent discount to family members accompanying attendees (an adult needs to accompany visitors under 17). Rochester is also an attractive destination for American Studies students and scholars because of famed material and visual cultural institutions, such as the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Genesee Country Village and Museum, Susan B. Anthony House, Mount Hope Cemetery, and the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester. Significant nearby attractions include the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, Corning Museum of Glass, Hill Cumorah-Mormon Historical Site, Sonnenberg Gardens Mansion State Historic Park, and the Jell-O Gallery. The setting of the Strong National Museum of Play is also significant in its representation of the collaboration of public heritage professionals, academic institutions, and community scholars that has been a priority of the sponsoring organizations. The organizers especially want to encourage opportunities for exchanges among public and academic sectors and lively discussions among participants on the theme of play. It is a theme, the organizers want to emphasize, that merits interpretive work characteristic of American Studies as play affects significant aspects of American life and letters, including public policy, education, family and human development, environment, and media.

For more information, contact Simon J. Bronner at sbronner@psu.edu.

I’m exploring a solution to ingest websites tagged amst on del.icio.us into American Studies Web, and attribute them to users who have accounts – more on that later this week.

Portions of the responses featured in the issue are on The Atlantic’s website, including several of my favorites by John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Ann-Marie Slaughter, Cornel West, and David Foster Wallace. They collectively begin to dissect the mythical foundations of our citizenship, and the idealism that encompasses all that it means to be American. It’s well worth the read.

Museum Blogs.org
http://museumblogs.org/
Despite its “forever beta” tagline that’s suspiciously similar to Clioweb‘s “history is a perpetual beta”, Museum Blogs is the best academic blogging directory I’ve seen. The site topically categorizes museum blogs, and aggregates them into one large feed on their homepage. What’s interesting is how they use “authority” to filter results – blogs with more authority become more visible. Authority is determined based upon how many people link to the blog, which is likely an outgrowth of using Google’s custom search. Anyone can create a Google custom search for free – allowing them to search the text of specified websites, a terrific tool that’s easy to use when creating a blog directory. Several of my readers may want to consider adding their blogs to the directory.

Cliopatria’s History Blogroll
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/9665.html
I was pleased to see myself included in the Blogroll, and appreciate the indexing work of Jonathan Dresner. My first observation was that my blog is listed under United States History – ok. True, my background is in American Studies, but my own blog often deviates from US history, dealing more with the digital humanities and ludology among other things. It’s obvious that Jonathan was aware of these limitations when indexing it in the first place, writing:

Categories are an abstraction. Many blogs do not categorize well. We’ve done the best we can. Neither category, order or position are intended as value or quality judgements.

Despite the limitations of abstraction, I’ve found the blogroll to be an incredible resource – finding many terrific history blogs just this afternoon. Authority is decided by whoever created the blogroll, however when users have left comments pointing to their individual blogs, they’ve been included in the blogroll as well. Individual posts haven’t been aggregated into one feed, and users must visit each individual blog to read their contents.

The Crossroads Project Blog Directory
I’ve been working on creating an American Studies blog directory for the Crossroads Project that combines the better parts of both the Cliopatria History Blogroll, and MuseumBlogs. Given the wide-range of topics covered within the discipline, it requires a comprehensive solution to make it usable. I’ve been working to integrate this blog directory into the American Studies Web search engine I created last winter as well. Here’s the solution I’ve come up with:

Google’s custom search is incredibly powerful, allowing you to search the contents of each page/site indexed. My hope is to integrate this into American Studies Web, so when a blog is added to the directory, it’s also made entirely searchable. In addition, blogs will be topically tagged, so they can be included in more than one narrow categorization. I’d also like to create a master feed for each tag, where you could read all American Studies blogs tagged as “gender studies” or “material culture.” These are all reasonable and relatively simple additions to make.

A step beyond this integration would be to categorize each individual post, based upon upon the contents of each. You could use the tags associated with each post, however bloggers are inconsistent about what tags they use, and if they tag their entries at all. To some degree this necessity is diminished by the Google Custom Search. If anyone can offer any new ideas on how to approach this, I’d love to hear.

I’m reminded of the Digital Campus podcast where Jeremy Boggs was a guest, discussing web design in academia. At one point in the episode Designed to Make You Think, Jeremy said:

As academics we’re already thinking about user interfaces. The way we present text in a book – the way we organize text in a book, if we want to move a sentence into the middle of a paragraph or if we want to move paragraphs around. The way we title paragraphs – this is all information architecture. This is all user interfaces. A book is a user interface.

The interactive graphic is effective is due of its user interface – predominately displaying the photos and bios of the businessmen, while also including supplementary information such as their life span, or a link to their obituary. It uses a simple and sexy user interface that links to further contextualizing information, and avoids overloading users with too much information. One of the shortcomings of the American Studies Tagline I created is that the visualization remains too cluttered — the approach of the NY Times is much more effective in that regard.

Thanks to all who have provided some great feedback on my American Studies tagline so far, keep it coming! I’ve already begun compiling a list of ways to improve the next version of it. Special thanks to the bloggers who have plugged this and other projects recently including Dan Cohen, Rob MacDougall, Citizen of Somewhere Else, historians in Switzerland, Tom Scheinfeldt, and others.

The American Studies Tagline textually analyzes the articles in Maddox’s book and shows the most used words in a larger font and new terms in brighter colors. You can drag the slider to control the year – allowing you to clearly see what critics looked at, and how that has changed. I used open source software, also used by this incredible Presidential Speeches tagline which originally gave me this idea. The process was simple – I copied the contents of all these articles, dumped them into an XML file, and then used a cloud generator to visualize the text. This is something that historians and enthusiasts with limited knowledge of PHP and creating web pages can set up and use themselves.

Visualization tools tend to be confusing, especially tag clouds. Since the American Studies Tagline charts both the frequency of key words, as well as indicating how new terms are, I think its usefulness is clearer. In particular, the ability to use the slider – moving through articles in consecutive time periods allows visitors to travel through disciplinary history. A great example of how this could be used would be to look at the emergence of “ideology” within these texts, and then encourage students to analyze what texts use the term, when it came about, and engaging in dialogue about how that relates to shifts in thinking.

My plan is to include an improved version of this tagline in a future Crossroads Project exhibition. I’m interested in hearing from American Studies professors and students who use the tagline – particularly about what the tagline can tell you, ways they’ve used it, and how it fails and/or succeeds as a learning tool. A future version of this tagline will include a list of strategies for using this and similar history visualizations, and perhaps a greater library of visualized texts.