Tag Archives: History

Next month CBS premiers a primetime reality television show called “Kid Nation“, blending references to the frontier with what amounts to a social experiment – letting 40 kids (or as CBS refers to them, pioneers..) fend for themselves for 40 days without adults. Today’s New York Times reported that that CBS producers possibly violated child safety and labor laws while filming the series. Controversy aside, it offers an interesting lens into history, and another example of how the frontier is evoked in marketing. CBS describes the show as follows:

These Kids, ages 8-15, will turn a ghost town into their new home. They will cook their own meals, clean their own outhouses, haul their own water and even run their own businesses including the old town saloon (root beer only). Through it all, they’ll cope with regular childhood emotions and situations: homesickness, peer pressure and the urge to break every rule they’ve ever known. Will they stick it out? In the end, will these Kids prove to everyone, including their parents, they have the vision to build a better world than the pioneers who came before them?

Following the recent indexing of Cliopatria‘s History Blogroll, it’s worth offering a side-by-side comparison of two different approaches to academic blog directories. This follows several months of experimentation of approaching my goal to establish an American Studies blog directory as part of the Crossroads Project. The two fundamental differences between the directories I’ve seen deal with categorization and aggregation. My purpose isn’t to criticize any approaches, but spur discussion on how to measure authority and organize the content of academic blogs.

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’ve recently become aware of Old West muds and moos that predate the historical roleplaying I’ve observed in Second Life by five years. Moos and muds are text-based virtual worlds that became popular in the early 90′s; Second Life is sometimes referred to as a “graphical mud.” So far I’m aware of two different Old West muds – 4 dimensions and Maddock.

The 4 dimensions mud reads very much like a history lesson — its text is descriptive out of necessity. In this Wild West mud, users are encouraged to roleplay – and even fight one another. Here is the description when you first enter the Old West mud:

By now “civilization” and science have changed the world considerably. There were horses and carts during the medieval era too of course, but now there are trains driven by steam engines. Robin Hood and his merry men used the longbow, which was a formidable weapon, but the ranged weapons in the Old West are much more powerful firearms, like Winchesters, revolvers and shotguns. And during no time period, before or after, has the horse had such an important role in everyday life as here.

Maddock is a fictional town in the Montana Territory set in the 1870′s. Similarly to Sigil, there has been an attempt to historicize the roleplaying within this virtual world. Their website serves as an incredible resource, documenting the (fictional) history of Maddock, events, and profiles of roleplayers, including Isolde Balcombe.

The Oregon Trail computer game’s gender bias is narratively implicit, but visually explicit. Users control a character that is never textually referred to as a specific gender, however its visual representation is indisputably that of a male figure. In the game, the wagon leader makes the decisions along the journey and is presented as male, apart from the rest of the company. With his hand on the yoke of the oxen, it’s clear that the male is both leading the oxen and holding the gun. When hunting, the pixilated character the user controls can only be discerned as having a male appearance. While the user is able to choose the name of the character for him or herself, the visual representations of the game’s protagonist remain male.

Women only appear to have subservient roles and are pictured wearing pink dresses and bonnets; usually beside the children. They are absent from hunting, and infrequently appear throughout the game. By focusing on male-oriented jobs within the game, the role of females is erased (Bigelow 86). Along the journey, the user playing the game can choose to “ask for advice”, where another character in the game offers advice on how to get to Oregon safely, or shares his or her fears of the journey. The only time female characters are featured is to offer advice, for example, Aunt Rebecca Sims tells you:

I hear terrible stories about wagon parties running out of food before Oregon – the whole party starving to death. We must check our supplies often; we might not get there as soon as we think. Always plan for the worst, I say.

While she offers helpful advice along the trail, such concerns are consistently voiced only by female characters. The recurrence of female characters in this role portrays them as powerless and unable to contribute toward the journey. Conversely, men are portrayed as workers and decision makers on the trail. However, in 1848 and in preindustrial America when the game’s narrative takes place, there was no developed ideology of a “woman’s place.” Women often contributed to a family’s income and did physical labor on the farm (Faragher and Stansell 152). This role is wholly absent from the characterization of women in the game.

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Japanese firm NTT has unveiled a system that makes three-dimensional images solid enough to grasp. The system combines a 3D display with a “haptic glove,” with no special glasses required. They’ve suggested two interesting uses for the device:

1. business people could shake hands from across the globe
2. allow museum visitors to feel precious exhibits that are normally out of reach

Is this the future of virtual museums? Backtracking to a previous post on museums in Second Life, a lively debate currently taking place is between imitation and innovation – how can virtual worlds help students learn beyond what already occurs in the classroom? What are practical uses of simulated environments? Devices like this may be the answer to those questions by creating physical interfaces to navigate virtual representations of objects. Normally when you visit a museum there’s a barrier between visitors and artifacts; this device could remove that, and allow museums to be entirely represented in simulated environments. Imagine being able to hold an ancient sword, or object that would normally be encased in glass. It would change the entire experience of museums.

Building physical interfaces for experiencing history may sound familiar – it fits right in with Bill Turkel’s idea of creating history appliances. The article stated that NTT is currently working with the British Museum in London to create a touchable exhibit; the future isn’t that far off.

Several years ago McGill University created a simulation designed to teach students about the history of a Quebec. The simulation is free to download on their site. (Windows only.. sorry Mac users! [myself included]) One of the largest problems with the educational use of computers simulations is a lack of augmentative instruction. Beyond the content of the game, students need ideas to be reinforced, or at least prefaced with contextualizing information. The McGill simulation’s site contains a terrific library of lesson plans, activity sheets, and information pages that should be a model for other educational sims. Here is a description of the project:

“A Journey to the Past: A Quebec Village in the 1890s” is a 3D world which recreates a Quebec village of the 1890s, complete with characters of that time with whom elementary school students can interact. You can use this 3D world to teach students about life in Canada (and specifically in Quebec) at the end of the nineteenth century, and encourage students to compare life in that place and time with their contemporary lives in order to understand better the changes that have taken place.

Kevin Kee, Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing of Brock University helped develop this simulation while working at McGill, and is currently working on a historical simulation in Second Life. I’ll definitely be posting about this in the future

Virtual Powwow was a living museum in Second Life, proposed as a final project in Bernie Dodge’s graduate-level Exploratory Learning through Simulation and Games class. By recreating a powwow, the simulation visualized an environment hosted by Native Americans where students could experience Native American culture and dance.

Although not exactly roleplaying, Virtual Powwow and living museums in Second Life offer a starting point for future discussions of the educational uses of historical roleplaying in virtual worlds. It may also bring together the seemingly disparate topics of this blog, including Wild West and Native American roleplaying in Second Life, visualizing history, and educational roleplaying games. The powwow itself can be contextualized within two pertinent discussions: the shifting of knowledge from experts to amateurs, and innovation vs imitation.
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Lucy Maddox’s Locating American Studies: the Evolution of a Discipline is commonly required reading in American Studies theory and methods courses because of its breadth and analysis of the evolution of the discipline. What if we could visualize that disciplinary evolution? What ways could we see the shifting theoretical perspectives of scholars, and how can we begin to understand what precipitated those changes? Lastly, what are meaningful ways to convey that knowledge to students? An answer I’ve come up with is the American Studies Tagline – a timeline-based tag cloud that takes the essential American Studies texts in Lucy Maddox’s book and visualizes their contents.

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.

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If you’re not already familiar with it, explore Google’s new experimental search – it augments search results by visualizing them as a timeline or map. I’m interested to see how refined this tool becomes, potentially being an incredible place to start when beginning research. An example search they suggest is Thomas Jefferson – here’s the timeline they create for him:

The frequencies of events are grouped by decades, and the life of Jefferson is visualized with encouraging accuracy.

While I’m riding the Google train, I stopped by Google Trends to visualize some recent tags I’ve used on my blog. I was disappointed to see that “fun” is much trendier than Second Life, robots, and cowboys combined. Maybe I need to start posting fun blog posts..

But wait, fun isn’t everything! I added “history” to my search and it dominated the charts, including fun. YES, history > fun. I expected the chart to say history IS fun. Google must still be working out some bugs.

My point in showing this is to provoke the question, how can we use these visualization tools to do research? And perhaps more importantly, how can the average internet user use these new tools? It’s one thing to see your search results, but another thing to understand what these visualizations can tell us.

In her 2005 presidential address to the American Studies Association, Karen Halttunen delivered a speech that would be published in American Quarterly the following year, entitled “Groundwork: American Studies in Place.” She discussed the “disneyfication” of American place-making; the replacement of reality with an idealized vision that engenders racism and sexism. What occurs in disneyfication is the substitution of place with an idea – one that is idealized, homogenous, and limiting. Disneyfication is problematic in that it only presents a simplified version of reality. The name obviously comes from Disney, whose presentation of ideas to children has traditionally been an idealized, optimistic representation of the world that doesnt engage the realities of the world. This amounts to the filtration or censorship of ideas – ideas that fall outside a utopian vision of reality are eliminated.

I’ve been witnessing the disneyfication of historical roleplaying in Second Life. Since the closing of the first Wild West roleplaying sim, Sigil, a number of new RP sims have been created to take its place. It’s difficult to keep track of these sims – they briefly appear and then, just like Sigil, completely vanish. Their significance is not in the number of simulations that have followed, but the manner which they conduct business. Many of these new environments resemble historical amusement parks or shopping malls more than they do roleplaying environments. A good example of this is Sand Ranch, where the streets are lined with small shops selling “authentic” avatar clothing, as well as stylized clothing that can make you look like a Country singer. The historical accuracy of these environments isn’t necessarily intended nor desired – their goal is to create a profit.

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