The Pedagogy of Place

A recent article in Inside Higher Ed, called the “The Pedagogy of Place,” focuses on the popularity of courses that get students out of the classroom and into their local communities to conduct research.

Oddly, the article says nothing about getting students into local archives—even those at the institutions where such courses are taught. The missing link with archives is highlighted at the end of the article, which concludes by reporting that professors are often unsure what to do with students’ material since “professors aren’t archivists.”

I am always happy to support such community-based research projects at my institution, and I am happy to add to my archives good research material that might help others understand or pursue a topic further.

While more and more research is being done virtually (i.e., with electronic resources), there is still much interest and value in having students work with physical source materials, such as the unique records, rare books, and artifacts that are found in archives, special collections, and museums.

Link to “The Pedagogy of Place”: http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/04/history

Image: My daughter picking Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, October 2007.

Twilight of the Books?

From Communication

The recently released NEA report “To Read or Not to Read” has generated quite a lot of commentary about the present extent and nature of reading.  A recent article in the New Yorker by Caleb Crain, “Twilight of the Books,” reviews a number of interesting studies on orality and literacy to explore the question “What will life be like if people stop reading?”

The question many respondents to the NEA study are asking has to do with the impact of the internet on reading.  Crain refers to one related study in his article: 

The Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy. Researchers recently gave Michigan children and teen-agers home computers in exchange for permission to monitor their Internet use. The study found that grades and reading scores rose with the amount of time spent online. Even visits to pornography Web sites improved academic performance. Of course, such synergies may disappear if the Internet continues its YouTube-fuelled evolution away from print and toward television.

The future of books is another question. 

Link to “Twilight of the Books” http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain/

Link to “To Read or Not to Read”: http://www.nea.gov/research/ToRead.pdf

Update

Maryanne Wolf responds to “Twilight of the Books” in the January 28, 2008, issue of the New Yorker: 

The addictive immediacy and overwhelming volume of information available in the “Goggled world” of novie readers invite neither time for concentrated analysis and inference nor the motivation for them to think beyond all the information given.  Despite its extraordinary contributions, the digital world may be the greatest threat yet to the endangered reading brain as it has developed over the past five thousands years.

The Short-Term Future of Digital Movies: Analogue Film

First, there was preservation by benign neglect: put your cultural artifacts in a cold, stable environment and leave them alone until they are needed. Then came certain artifacts that required a mediating technology, and things started to get a bit more complicated.

The New York Times article “The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies” draws attention to a report, “The Digital Dilemma,” which attempts to quantify the incredible costs of maintaining movies in digital form.

What we know:

To begin with, the hardware and storage media—magnetic tapes, disks, whatever—on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries. Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable.

Difficulties of that sort are compounded by constant change in technology. As one generation of digital magic replaces the next, archived materials must be repeatedly “migrated” to the new format, or risk becoming unreadable.

What we don’t know: what to do for the long-term preservation of digital objects. So, short-term strategies are pursued, such as storing born-digital movies in film format (which, unfortunately, yields images of lower quality than those obtained through a pure film process).

Also discussed in this article is the added problem of the proliferation of material in digital form: “digital production … sometimes generates more storable material.” This raises the need for appraisal.

Link to “The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies”: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/business/media/23steal.html

Authority in the Digital Age

Not in spite of, but because of, the digital age: “Happy New Year to Libraries,” from the Chronicle: http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/katz/happy-new-year-to-libraries.

Inspired by Hunter Rawlings’s ARL keynote address, available from: http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/mm-f07-rawlings.pdf.

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” (T. S. Eliot)

Libraries have and always will contain our nation’s heritage, the heritage of humanity, the records of its triumphs and failures, of mankind’s intellectual, scientific, and artistic achievements. They are not repositories of human endeavor alone—they are instruments of civilization. They provide tools for learning, understanding, and progress. They are a source of information, a source of knowledge, a source of wisdom, and hence, they are a source of action. They are a laboratory of human enterprise. They are a window to the future. They are a source of hope. They are a source of self-renewal. They represent the link between the solitary individual and humankind, which is our community.
—Vartan Gregorian, “A Sense of Elsewhere,” American Libraries, November 2007, 46

Literacy and the Information Age

As literacy became widespread in a culture, the act of reading silently invited each reader to go beyond the text; in so doing, it further propelled the intellectual development of the individual reader and the culture.
—Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, quoted by Richard Cox in “The Brain and the Document,” http://readingarchives.blogspot.com/2007/10/brain-and-document.html

I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants—silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.
—David Brooks, “The Outsourced Brain,” The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/opinion/26brooks.html

Ancient-Future Libraries

In a recent New Yorker essay, “Future Reading,” book historian Anthony Grafton makes a number of interesting and helpful observations about books and libraries in the digital age.

Grafton concludes his essay by describing the two ways that we now have to access information:

For now and for the foreseeable future, any serious reader will have to know how to travel down two very different roads simultaneously. No one should avoid the broad, smooth, and open road that leads through the screen. … If you want deeper, more local knowledge, you will have to take the narrower path … The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books (54).

Grafton also draws attention to the fact that libraries are returning to an “ancient model” of “accumulating large holdings and … making and disseminating copies of key texts” (51). In the ancient Near East, libraries (and archives) at Nineveh, Qumran, Caesarea, and elsewhere supported the organically related activities of collecting, reading, interpreting, creating, and disseminating texts. The support of such interrelated activities “became a deep structure of Christian scholarship, forged in late antiquity, then reproduced again and again in the Middle Ages and the early modern period” (Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea [Harvard, 2006], 18).

Soon after Grafton’s New Yorker essay appeared, the Harvard Crimson ran this story: “New Library Director Calls for E-Scholarship.” Book historian Robert Darnton, who until recently was on the faculty at Princeton with Grafton, is now the director of the Harvard University Library. Darnton is eager for libraries to embrace new models of digital dissemination: “I want to continue to strengthen Harvard’s fabulous collections in old printed material … but at the same time I want to help Harvard move into the world of digitized information.” The article highlights a project of his that would “meld the e-book and the ‘old book.’”

It is exciting to see two prominent book historians focusing their attention on the future of books and libraries (both also mention records and archives). When we digitally reformat our historical collections or build institutional repositories for new digital material, we are not doing an entirely new thing. There are historical precedents for such practices—in ancient and medieval librarianship and, in the more recent past, the historical manuscripts tradition—that show us how in the past libraries and archives supported a range of textual activities that enabled the creation, collection, and dissemination of knowledge.

Image: Cassiodorus as Ezra. Ezra Page, Codex Amiatinus, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence.

Link to “Future Reading”: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/05/071105fa_fact_grafton

Link to “New Library Director Calls for E-Scholarship”: http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=520414