History697

Different focus--Manassas Industrial School

I have come to realize that I don't have the time to learn aspects of design, new code, and do research on a historical topic. In order to help reduce my own stress I have decided to use an old paper as the basic topic of my website rather than the work I am planning to do later in my career. I wrote a paper for Dr. Jefferey Stewart several years ago that looked at the Manassas Industrial School. This school was the only institution that provided secondary school (and higher) education for African Americans in Northern Virginia. It was founded by a former slave and supported by a wide ranging extended community of philanthropists from the north. I think it will be useful site to the local community and the school is an important example of conflict when local African American community visions of education conflict clash with the ideals of the local white community and the extended community of white supporters from the north.

Snowblind

I haven't had much to say. I have been slowly working through problems with the type project through trial and error.

Instead I wanted to point to another cool digital source to suck more time out of your life. GIS. I am sure most of you know about this tool but I wanted to put a plug in for the Libraries because my colleague Joy Suh teaches people like me how to use this great tool. Here is her InfoGuide. It has tons of resources on it and I am learning to use this resource more myself. I was thinking that it could be interesting to map how many squirrel scalp bounties were paid out in Virginia between 1728-1742. (see David Hardin. Laws of Nature...Virginia Geographer Vol 22 n.2 Fall/Winter 1990))Not sure if it will make it into my site but one can never tell.

Also this is a great resource National Historical Geographic Information System to check out.

Well back to trying to get footnotes to work.

Academic writing on the Web

I have been following the interesting conversation on Lynn's blog regarding footnotes and it occurred to me that most of the people that write about this topic focus on the question of structure and/or content.

In my opinion there is another element to think about...context. The footnote is a product of academic scholarship, lots of people point this out. Therefore, it seems to me that looking at the reasons that works get published would be helpful.

The idea that scholarship is about the transmission of knowledge and new ideas is very trite to a librarian that with close to 8 million dollars/year in their medium sized state university library system. Publishing is a business. Web publishing, in the way we are using it is "free." Does being free diminish the value of an item? Some argue no. Content is king. I am not sure if that argument holds up beyond editorialized content in the blogosphere. The open source movement is very interesting and promising to a disillusioned librarian but I will wait and see how many leading academics turn to this model.

This leads to the real problem, as any nontenured faculty member will quickly inform us, the goal of the first academic book is, in part, to be tenured. Academia has not fundamentally changed their expectations for tenure. Most peer review committees would not seriously consider our web-sites as examples of scholarship because it is not peer-reviewed. For example at one extreme Professor Petrik's site demonstrates a valuable accumulation of knowledge over time. I would argue that if she was not already a full professor (producing traditional works of scholarship) she would not be afforded the opportunity to work on this type of scholarship.

Many traditional scholars, like Gertude Himmelfarb long for a day when an academic was left alone with their work. She is a serious scholar that looks back for a time where virtues were important and where scholarship, and scholars, were special. Those that do not share her vision are simply not serious scholars. Frankly, many in the academy see work like "digital history" as, extra, or ancillary to the real work of a historian. Thus the footnote remains trapped within the context of the environment of academia. Where those, like Himmelfarb, will long for the good old days when scholarship was special. Personally, I wonder if they were so good. There is lots more to say on this but I will let the academics say it...I better go back to the library and buy more books.