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?

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.

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.

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.

The ability for women to offer advice suggests certain leisure in their daily life which would allow them to socialize with others. However, the recent scholarship of New Western Historians suggests that this was not the case at all for women. With research done into diary entries from the Oregon Trail, it appears that women were often busier than men (Pascoe 41). While men were often able to enjoy periods of rest from their hard work, the work of women was structured around that of men (Bogue 224). In addition to duties such as preparing all the meals (which was a nonstop task) and taking care of the children, gender roles quickly became malleable once the journey West became underway. As the journey became harder, women would often have to drive the oxen, or even hunt, in addition to their other tasks (Faragher and Stansell 156). Despite their active and critical role on the Trail, women were both under and misrepresented in the Oregon Trail Game.

Another striking omission in the game is that of Indian women. While there are many times the user comes in contact with the Indians in the game, there is never any mention of Indian women at all. Their absence further reinforces the masculinity of the journey westward, and at the same time the male Indian character remains only a peripheral character in the narrative the game tells. The inclusion of Indian women would challenge the way the game’s narrative entirely. Not only are women insignificant in the game, but Indians are also. Additionally, if there were Indian women included in the game, there would likely be Indian families or tribes. These social groupings would complicate the relationship between Indians and Whites in the game.

Works Cited

Bogue, Allan G. “Frederick Jackson Turner Reconsidered.” The History Teacher 27.2 (Feb. 1994): 195-221.

Bigelow, Bill. “On the Road to Cultural Bias: A Critique of The Oregon Trail CD-ROM.” Language Arts 74.2 (Feb. 1997): 84-93.

Faragher, Johnny, and Christine Stansell. “Women and Their Families on the Overland Trail to California and Oregon, 1842-1867.” Feminist Studies 2.2 (1975): 150-166.

Pascoe, Peggy. “Western Women At The Cultural Crossroads.” Trails: Toward a New Western History. Ed. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Cylde A. Milner, II., and Charles E. Rankin. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991. 40-58.

The Oregon Trail. Apple II. 1st ed. MECC, 1985.

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.

“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

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.

The largest difference between Virtual Powwow and the Native American roleplaying I’ve studied (which includes authentic dance and ritual) deals with ownership and who controls the historical narrative manifested within the simulation. The roleplaying sims I’ve come across are typically created by enthusiasts, who are “playing Indian” (yes, a direct reference to Philip Deloria… more on that in another post) as opposed to the more traditional presentation of historical knowledge by experts. In many cases, the results of this shift are historical inaccuracies, and the emergence of stereotypes within the fragmented knowledge of amateurs. That is not to say that amateurs are incapable of accurately representing history through roleplaying, but instead indicates the necessity of developing new computer-based teaching strategies and augmentative instruction to guide amateurs through their learning.

The group struggled with representing native groups accurately – particularly regarding who participated in the virtual powwow. Their website shared the following:

Initially we were thinking that we could have the learners participate as dancers in the powwow. However, after initial investigation related to this, it was decided it would be a potential problem having non-natives participate as if they were natives. We subsequently changed the design to have the dancers be accepted members of the host group. The host group would consist of Native Americans with knowledge of powwows.

Even though the simulation was intended to engage students and individuals who attended the powwow, the history and culture represented within the simulation was controlled by natives, who themselves were “experts.” Students attending the powwow remained spectators. That distinction hits at the heart another hot topic within the Second Life educators community, “innovation vs imitation.” Although there is an impulse among tech-savvy educators and digital historians alike to use technology for everything, this use of technology seems be nothing more than a recreation of what already happens in real life. While the virtual powwow may be a great way to learn across long-distances, it pales in comparison to physically attending a powwow.

Rather than imitating what happens in real life, my vision of a virtual living museum is innovative. In many ways it’s not a museum at all – but a historical laboratory where students can explore history in the virtual world. Instead of limiting the participation of dance to natives, students could be engaged. In my historical laboratory they would spend time creating the artifacts used within the simulation, and learn about the history of the tribes they represent. Citations are attached to objects and the environment they create is no longer a place they visit to observe others, but one which they have ownership of. Each piece of the simulation and living museum is an assignment, which gradually builds throughout the course of a semester as students learn. If actual tribes were interested in participating, that would be another way of historicizing the content within the sim. Collectively, these students share their ideas and participate as a class together in a powwow, which becomes a celebration of culture and the knowledge they’ve gained.

That ideal scenario outlines the basic thrust of my pedagogical research in Second Life. I’m not wedded to this exact idea, however I see great deal of potential for students to represent ideas and themselves within virtual worlds, particularly through the creation of objects “in-world.” That synthesis alone makes further research worthwhile, but the technology itself also lends itself to a unique form of communication and learning through our own virtual interactions.

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.

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.

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.

My criticism of disneyfication directly relates to my studies of the Oregon Trail computer game, Second Life historical roleplaying, and the potential use of virtual worlds for educational purposes. I should clarify that not all roleplaying simulations have been simplified into historical amusement parks. What has occurred is a shift in ownership – several successful historical roleplaying sims persist with group ownership. New simulations take advantage of the popularity of these environments and market their products to that community of users. The disneyfication that occurs in these newer roleplaying sims is largely due to an imbalance of ownership. When one person, or only a select few control how ideas are represented within a sim, they are naturally limited.

One of the exciting things about Sigil and other historical roleplaying sims is how collaborate these environments become. For example, Sigil itself had virtual town hall meetings, where virtual citizens would gather together with the mayor to discuss pressing issues. There were a list of roles that citizens could take up, and each person collaborated to affect the sim’s narrative structure. How the West, and history itself was represented within the sim depended on these individual users. The disneyfication that occurs in many newer Wild West sims can be attributed to this lack of community and collaboration. Traditional computer simulations, the Oregon Trail included, were limited by the presentation of ideas. Since all actions are hardcoded into the software, only a few select “experts” could present the West’s narrative, while Second Life as a social space has no such limitations.

The power of Second Life and any type of new social media is that it allows user interaction and the creation of relationships between individuals and environments. When learning history, those elements are critical to the retention of knowledge. Must there be disneyfication of historical roleplaying in Second Life? I would argue no – not more than there is any other process of learning. There is abstraction to some extent – we can only learn so much and most of us will not become experts. But there is the potential for Second Life, as a collaborative and social learning environment, to allow students to reach beyond the limited knowledge presented by experts, and learn through their peers in ways that mean more to them individually – a process of internalization that is the intention of learning.