Shared Experiences of Different Times: Academic Empathy and Recognition in Blogging

Academic bloggers write for all sorts of reasons. Many write to share their research with a wider diverse audience than is to be found in professional journals. Others do so to "test drive" ideas with familiar folks before they move into working with them in formal scholarship. Some write as an opportunity to respond to contemporary events and to interact with others. One feature that I have noticed though is writing as a mechanism for coping with and working through challenging problems we encounter when doing our research and analysis.

I recently wrote about my struggles with questions of morality in the subjects I work with in my research, and lo, it seems that particularly in these cold winter months, others are in a similar position.

Robert Greene II, in "When History Knocks You On Your Behind," describes how he stumbled across a historical figure who shares his name (sans an "e") and the questions, concerns, and opportunities this provided. Along the way, Robert shares his experience of interacting with, and finding, subjects of future scholarly or personal interest.

Over at S-USIH Blog (the blog for the Society for United States Intellectual History), Robin Marie shared her experiences with tackling her emotions while working on racial, gender, and other social iniquities in her post, "Writing Through Rage." Despite these issues, she continues to push through with both her research and writing. Also at S-USIH Blog, Ben Alpers discusses questions of pessimism and optimism in students today in his post, "The Ceremony of Innocence is Drowned." Both of these posts are fascinating, and make sure to take a look at the comments as well.

Kathryn Hamilton Warren recounts working with of her students who was morally opposed to the literature that was a part of one of her first classes in "The Reluctant Reader." This encounter, she suggests, reminded her that there is more than one perspective on the value of encountering new material.

The bloggers over at Lingua Franca often infuse their discussions of grammar, linguistics, and vocabulary with analysis of contemporary society, their everyday lives, and the issues of being in the academy.

The common thread between all of these bloggers is the attempt to use their writing as a mechanism for coming to grasps with what they've encountered in their professional lives. While surely we turn to those in our homes, workplaces, and places of faith for issues we confront, academic bloggers take the chance to try to negotiate these questions in a way that is both cathartic and hopefully useful to our peers that might be experiencing similar circumstance. 

Despite the image of the floofy professor in the coffee shop smoking and quoting obscura, those in the humanities are individuals who passionately want to understand, challenge, preserve, and render the arts, history, and values of the world around us into a fashion that improves society. Often, though particularly as of late, these attempts are marginalized and challenged. Some of this criticism is warranted, there are excesses in every endeavor. This does not mean that we as a nation should turn our backs on this challenge. Rather, we should take advantage of the thing that makes us humanists, our humanity, and turn toward each other with understanding and try to learn from, and lean on, each other as we confront the world in front, behind, and around us.

Finding That Spark: Slogging Through Writer's Block

This post will be a bit different from anything that has gone up recently, which you might have noticed has been nothing. With the past semester's writing projects (including, I'm happy to report, three pending publications), I set aside writing on the blog in favor of academic work. Additionally, I've been struggling with perhaps the most difficult elements of thesis work, burnout and writer's block. So to that point, I'm going to outline roughly what projects I've been working on and what still lays ahead. My hope is to (1) provide an update for anyone who might be interested, (2) offer up some possible directions for future work — and to seek out potential collaborators on that work — and projects, and (3) to break through the latest round of writer's block by changing gears.

Publication Pending

Three of my recent projects are working their way through the printing pipeline. Each is a little different, and each one provided unique opportunities.

Cooperative Extension

The first of these publications provided the chance to look at two categories I don't typically work in: organizational and labor history. For this project, I looked at records from the Cooperative Extension Service in White County, IN. I outlined what these records can tell researchers about government programs during the Great Depression and how genealogists and family historians can use them to gain insight into the lives of ancestors. Along the way, I was fortunate to work with some records generated by one of my own ancestors, Ralph Alvin Chitty, who was one of the first C.E.S. Agents in Indiana, and for that matter, in the U.S. That research will reach print later this summer in the Indiana Historical Society's The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections. 

Bible Records

Another publication analyzes the role of family bible records related to a mid-nineteenth century lawyer from Fountain County, Indiana. These records are discussed as a tool for genealogists as well as for other historians. These records are discussed in relation to using newspapers and campaign materials as sources for understanding political action in pre-twentieth century America. This article will be published sometime in early fall.

Historic Diaries

My third and final pending publication looks at using historic diaries as sources of finding names, as well as understanding social dynamics between individuals. The diary of interest relates to a teenage girl from Martin County, Indiana in the early 1930's. As a part of that work, I've indexed the names of individuals included within her diaries from the period. This article will be published sometime in early fall.

Completed, For Now: Paratext and Education

One of the most interesting projects I had the chance to work on this spring was a "big" history of paratextual development in European education. Spanning from ancient history to the mid-nineteenth centuries, this term project focused on how paratextual elements including typography, tables of contents, indicies, page numbers, and marginalia came to be incorporated to form what we now know as "academic" texts. Special emphasis was placed on how major educational figures over time would have experienced the texts that they studied and produced. I am hoping to post a more user-friendly version of that work at a later date.

Current Research

As to current projects, I have two major efforts, and a significant search for a permanent job, underway. Both still have significant hurdles ahead, but both hold the possibility of providing fascinating insights into twentieth-century America.

 Understanding Factory Work During the Depression

The first project is using the diary of a young woman who worked for a shirt factory in Loogootee, IN to understand issues related to the private and working lives of Hoosiers during the Great Depression. The company she worked for had factories throughout the Midwest, and her experience provides a personal window into understanding the daily struggles of a working woman during that time. 

Thesis: Public Intellectualism in the Early Cold War

This is the biggest project I've ever undertaken, I suppose as it should be. Though this project has morphed over time, the major theme has remained the same. My hope is to look at the milieu of public intellectuals in the early Cold War. While the topic does, as most of my family knows, involve fiction author Ray Bradbury, I will forgo explaining further at this point in time (namely so I don't invite a competing thesis or article). 

Future Directions/False Starts

Along the way, there have been several false starts on projects which might provide interesting avenues for future research. Interesting prospects and possibilities exist when time permits. I'm happy to potentially collaborate on these projects, or for resources that might be of use.

Scouting in American Society

Being an Eagle Scout, I have long held an interest in scouting related materials, and think that working with those that I've managed to cobble together (including several decades of manuals, magazines, and field guides) might provide a unique opportunity to look at changes in American values.

Rural Electrification

A tangential topic to the aforementioned article on the Cooperative Extension Service, rural electrification was aided by CES under the auspices of the Tennessee Valley Authority and other New Deal programs. My hope is to look at both the impact this had on rural families as well as the lives of early employees of the electric co-op system.

Indiana's Fighting "Basketbrawlers"

While working on another project, I came across numerous references to riots and fights breaking out as a part of basketball games in Indiana. I'd like to go back and see if these incidents were limited to the court or if they occurred during other sporting events. I would also like to see what life was like for these players after they moved on from sporting.

Big Picture History in Daily Lives

In exploring several diaries while working on another project, I noticed recordings of what many people might consider to be "big" events (presidential elections, assassinations, scientific discoveries). I would like to go back and explore whether individuals' recordings of these types of events in diaries and other unpublished sources hold up over generations. Does the speed with which we now receive news change our perception of its importance to our everyday lives? Have we fundamentally altered the way we commemorate these events as individuals? Are our heat of the moment responses to major events any more accurate today than they were in centuries past? So many questions exist, and there seems to be a treasure trove waiting to be examined.

Records Retention Policies in Public Universities

In the category of what my wife calls "boring historian stuff" is an interest in looking at the records retention policies of public universities. I would like to try to look at this issue from multiple perspectives including from those of records producers, facility managers, administrators, privacy advocates, information technologists, and historians. While the topic may seem dry today, the retention (and disposal) of records changes what stories will be and can be explored by the historians of tomorrow. My hope is that this would lead to some form of policy recommendations for universities and other public institutions that try to balance stakeholders concerns.

Little Suggestion

For some great reading on history and the issues it's facing today, try the National Council on Public History's Blog, History@Work. It makes quick reading of some of the things going on in our world relative to history. :)

The Challenges of Misattribution

Attribution of quotes is an important part of all academic work. Academic integrity is essential to us as scholars to be able to do our work and for it to have some meaning. Nowadays, there are numerous stories in the news about the academic world where misconduct and lack of citation results in problems, see this story in the New York Times. This is a distinct challenge to our credibility and place within society. This isn't limited solely to academia though, see a recent article about controversy regarding a Quote Linked to Orwell.

The Power Of Hashtags

One of my work tasks is to reach out via social media and try to engage with the public in the study of our topic. While this is often interesting work (finding quotes and presenting them in an engaging way), we struggle at times to get our voice heard.

I have always been hesitant to use #hashtags because of their connection to poor speech and a lack of well reasoned thought on the part of a writer. I have always been taught that text language and similar methods are less than academic and should be avoided. I forgot however one key lesson of anything you are presenting, consider your audience.

By incorporating hashtags to the end of our tweets and posts, we reached a significantly bigger audience than our previous attempts. For example, on average about 20 people would read a post on Facebook and about 1-2 would retweet or add us relative to any one post. By including hashtags as a change, we received 4 retweets, 2 favorites, and 5 new followers on Twitter. This is a dramatic increased our success rate. On Facebook, our post was explored by over 60 people within a matter of a couple of hours.

Who cares? Well the reality is that we are becoming more successful in our outreach and helping to generate interest in our topic. By incorporating hashtags, we've made our postings easier to find, access, and less daunting to a reader. With such a simple change a historian is capable of, in a military term, force multiplying, or making their efforts exponentially more successful by reaching more people.