It was physically demanding labor
Hello, Goodbye - CDS Bids Farewell to Mainframe, Ushers in New Beginning
In 1998 the Catalog Distribution Service of the Library of Congress shutoff its mainframe computer and switched to a new system.
During the 1970s, the mainframes were used primarily to print catalog cards, which CDS once produced by the tens of millions. In those early days, as many as 30 staff members were required simply to service the units, performing such tasks as changing tape reels, threading tape and programming. "It was physically demanding labor," said Mr. Billingsley.
(Revised and republished April 2nd, 2025)
Digital Matisse
Speaking of museums and their digital presence, MoMA has an interactive exhibit covering their recent Matisse exhibition. I was lucky enough to be in New York for the AHA conference in early January, and I was able to see "Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs" before it ended. Photography was not allowed inside the exhibit, though, so the images here are from the web. The New York Times also has an interactive Matisse "walk through." It functions as an active panoramic image, whereby you can scroll as though you were walking through the exhibit at MoMA.
Both of these interactive digital projects are wonderful, but of course nothing compares to viewing the artwork in person. I was surprised to see how large and expansive the cut-outs were, like The Parakeet and the Mermaid (over 11 feet high, and over 25 feet wide).
UCLA Differential Analyzer - 1948 film
UCLA’s 1948 Mechanical Computer Was Simply Gorgeous To Watch in Action (Wayback Machine link), by Matt Novak at Paleofuture, 2013.
I’ll need to get more information on the film clip’s provenance – it’s shown here through Gizmodo’s Vimeo channel without a source reference. It’s listed in the Paleofuture article as released by Popular Science via Paramount Pictures, 1948 (possibly through Shields Pictures Inc.).
More information at UCLA, Historical Research Highlights, “The Thinking Machine”
In December of 1977, the last working model of a mechanical differential analyzer in the world is donated by UCLA to the Smithsonian Institution for its pioneering computing display. The differential analyzer introduced much of Southern California industry to automatic computing, but became obsolete beginning in 1960 as it was replaced by computing machines with electronic circuits and vacuum tubes. From 1960 on, it was used mainly as a display piece, clanking away occasionally for student and public demonstrations.
Two more video clips of the UCLA differential analyzers at the Computer History Museum: http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/analog-computers/3/143
(Revised and republished April 2nd, 2025)
Files and Folders Before Computers
Filing Cabinets, a Neglected Piece of Business History, by Linda Gross, the Hagley Library:
Dr. Robertson is an associate professor of media history at Northeastern University. He explained to us that he is currently researching the early history of the filing cabinet (1890s-1930s). Robertson contends that the filing cabinet has been largely neglected in the history of information technologies, with punch card machines (a clearer precursor to computers) taking a leading role in histories of early 20th century information technologies—this despite the importance of “files” and folders” to how we organize information on computers.
“This Big, Urgent Question of Protection for Operating Files and Records,” Remington Rand Inc. brochure, ca. 1948, Hagley Digital Archives.
(Revised and republished April 2nd, 2025)
Matthew Kirschenbaum - Track Changes
Kirschenbaum’s Tumblr blog on his book project - http://trackchangesbook.tumblr.com
Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Literary History of Word Processing, Harvard University Press blog post:
It’s interesting to see how Kirschenbaum’s research on the effects of one technological innovation—word processing—is being so shaped by his own embrace of another, social networking. Until recently, it wasn’t often that we got to watch research unfold so publicly, but Kirschenbaum’s style of transparent, internet-based process documentation is becoming more and more common, especially among practitioners of the digital humanities.
Over the years I’ve used WordStar, WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and many other word processing programs. At the moment I’m moving to Scrivener for larger projects like my dissertation, and Apple Pages for everyday writing. (In 2025, this has changed quite a bit!)
WordStar running in DOS, ca. 1980s (via Wikipedia)
(Revised and republished April 3rd, 2025)
Gladwell on the Social Life of Paper
Paper strips shown at faa.gov (Wayback Machine link)
Malcolm Gladwell’s 2002 article on paperwork at The New Yorker.
“The Social Life of Paper” (Wayback Machine link)
Gladwell.com link: http://gladwell.com/the-social-life-of-paper/ (Wayback Machine link)
It is only if paper’s usefulness is in the information written directly on it that it must be stored. If its usefulness lies in the promotion of ongoing creative thinking, then, once that thinking is finished, the paper becomes superfluous. The solution to our paper problem, they write, is not to use less paper but to keep less paper. Why bother filing at all? Everything we know about the workplace suggests that few if any knowledge workers ever refer to documents again once they have filed them away, which should come as no surprise, since paper is a lousy way to archive information. It’s too hard to search and it takes up too much space. Besides, we all have the best filing system ever invented, right there on our desks — the personal computer. That is the irony of the P.C.: the workplace problem that it solves is the nineteenth-century anxiety.
(Revised and republished April 3rd, 2025)
Museums and Digital Presence
It’s wonderful to see museums considering their digital presence as an extension of their purpose – online exhibitions and other digital projects greatly enhance the collections. This article at the New York Times describes the interconnectivity between museums and visitors that the digital provides, and also the possibility of connection between museums themselves:
Sooner or later, all museum websites will be interconnected, so that any museum might take advantage of scholarship produced by any other. There’s no reason, after all, that the Museum of Modern Art shouldn’t link its Jackson Pollock page to Pollock pages of museums throughout the world.
...Where is all this going? The British Museum has a succinct answer in the concluding sentence of its About Us page: “The website is not merely a source of information about the collection and the museum, but a natural extension of its core purpose to be a laboratory of comparative cultural investigation.”
I visited the “Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World” exhibition at LACMA a few years ago, and thanks to their digital archive of the exhibit I’m able to share videos like this with my students.
(Revised and republished April 19th, 2025)
Q & A with Craig Robertson on The Passport in America
Craig Robertson, by Christopher Klein at the Boston Globe, 2013.
The assumption behind the system set up after World War I was that you needed an identity document. Of course, this is a time when very few people had driver’s licenses, so the birth certificate was the key document. The US didn’t achieve universal birth registration until 1933, however, and in 1942 the Census Bureau estimated that 40 percent of Americans still lacked birth certificates. So the State Department required those without birth certificates to get sworn statements from one of three people who was deemed to have been able to witness the birth: the mother, a doctor, or a midwife. And if none of those three were available, a friend who was a US citizen had to vouch for your citizenship. So you were no longer seen as a reliable source of your own identity. You needed someone else to verify it.
United States Passport for American epidemiologist, Fred Soper, 1920. National Library of Medicine revised 2025 link, image doesn't seem to load. Wayback Machine link for image.
(Revised and republished April 3rd, 2025)
Paperwork Studies as an Historical Field
The Paper Trail Through History (NYTimes gift link), by Jennifer Schuessler, the New York Times, 2012:
Ms. Gitelman’s argument may seem like an odd lens on familiar history. But it’s representative of an emerging body of work that might be called “paperwork studies.” True, there are not yet any dedicated journals or conferences. But in history, anthropology, literature and media studies departments and beyond, a group of loosely connected scholars are taking a fresh look at office memos, government documents and corporate records, not just for what they say but also for how they circulate and the sometimes unpredictable things they do.
(Revised and republished April 3rd, 2025)
Project poster and talk last October
Last October I gave a “brown bag” talk (Wayback Machine link) over lunch in the History Department Library at the University of California, Riverside. I spoke for about 40 minutes and gave a wide overview of my project, using images and video clips to help illustrate my research. It was a great turnout of both professors and graduate students, and I received some terrific feedback that I was able to use for future talks.
At the top is the poster I created for the talk at UCR, and the images come from a variety of primary source materials. The inspiration for the color scheme comes the brochure cover just above, which is featured in the online exhibit, “Selling the Computer Revolution,” at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.
The brochure is for an IBM 705 EDPM (Electronic Data Processing Machine), a mainframe computer produced in the mid 1950s. Mainframes like the IBM 705 were powerful workhorses in the business world during the postwar era, handling payroll for thousands of employees. The brochure’s cover features a computer processing unit at the center, with punched cards and magnetic tape for data storage.
(Revised and republished April 6th, 2025)
Paperwork Explosion
This video, created by Jim Henson in 1967 for IBM, makes a great first post. So much anxiety, so little time, if only there was someone to help…like IBM!
Ben Kafka discusses this video in the Conclusion of his book, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (2012), and also in this online West 86th article (Wayback Machine link):
The “paperwork explosion” expresses both a threat and a wish. The threat, of course, is that we are being overwhelmed by paperwork’s proliferation, its explosion — a threat that historian Ann Blair has recently traced through the early modern period. The wish is to convert all this cumbersome matter into liberating energy, which is exactly what explosions do. From Chaptal’s “electric fluid” to IBM’s “Machines Should Work, People Should Think” to USA.gov’s “Government Made Easy,” we remain attached to the idea that someday, somehow, we can liberate this energy, put it to other uses.
The “liberating energy” that Kafka speaks of also requires containment, it needs direction and control, services which IBM was ready to supply.
Two other aspects of paperwork which I’m researching are: (1) the degree to which IBM was instigating the “paperwork explosion” itself, where was it coming from, who else was worried about it, and (2) how the militaristic response to the demands of paperwork figure into the Cold War environment.
(Revised and republished April 6th, 2025)
My post on Wikipedia Edit-a-thons at NCPH Public History Commons
A few months ago, I wrote about a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon workshop at the UCR Library on the CDH (Critical Digital Humanities) and HGSA (History Graduate Student Association) websites. From these posts I was approached by Amy Tyson of the National Council on Public History's History@Work blog (Wayback Machine link). Amy covers the "In the Academy" section and she asked if I'd write about my experience at the workshop, which I happily agreed to. As it turned out, I also attended a THATCamp with a Wikipedia component, and I included that in my article as well. My post, "Editing in public: Online identity and the Wikipedia Edit-a-thon," is now live on the Public History Commons website.
The Impact of Wikipedia - Adrianne Wadewitz, 2012:
(Revised and republished April 19th, 2025)
Cultural Studies Association - Critical DH Roundtable call for participants
Critical Digital Humanities is putting together a roundtable for this year’s Cultural Studies Association. The conference will be held from May 21-24, 2015 in Riverside, California at the Riverside Convention Center. This year’s theme is Another University Is Possible: Praxis, Activism, and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy. In keeping with this year’s theme, we would like to explore the question “What does critical digital humanities look like?” The goal of this roundtable is to open a dialogue about critical approaches to digital humanities. Each participant will give a brief 5-7 minute provocation followed by a discussion.
Some topics for consideration, but not limitation:
- critical approaches to digital pedagogy, big data projects, data visualization, and digital scholarship
- specific campus initiatives, classes or programs that fall under the category of “critical digital humanities”
- limitations of critical digital humanities
- theory vs. practice in DH
- cultural studies and DH
- public scholarship, public humanities, and public history
Building off of the terrific energy from THATCamp, we would like to invite the DHSoCal community to consider having a role in this conversation! If you are interested, please contact http://cdh.ucr.edu/ and let us know what you are interested in discussing by Dec 1, 2014.
(Revised and republished April 23rd, 2025)
All Things Digital at UCR
At a few recent meetings we’ve talked about the new digital projects and resources being developed at UC Riverside, as well as other opportunities for graduate students and faculty interested in digital humanities.
Digital Scholars Lab
The UCR Rivera Library will be opening a new Digital Scholars Lab in the coming months. Over the Summer and Fall quarters, I’ve been working for the library as an advisor on digital scholarship projects and digital humanities in general. Once the Lab is open it will be a meeting place for graduate students, researchers, and faculty to start new digital scholarship projects or get help with existing ones. Although the Lab isn’t officially open at the moment, the Library is still happy to work with scholars and has many resources available. I’ve also made a website as a place to keep my notes for the development of the Lab. The website is a work in progress and it is not the official Lab website, but it does list many resources on digital scholarship and digital humanities: scholarslab.net
THATCamp DHSoCal
THATCamp DHSoCal: Diving into Digital HumanitiesOctober 24th and 25th, 2014 San Diego State University
THATCamp is “The Humanities and Technology Camp,” and it is an “un-conference” meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.
THATCamp DHSoCal: Diving into Digital Humanities will be held at San Diego State University, but it is organized through a unique digital humanities-style collaboration between 4 regional institutions: San Diego State University (SDSU), University of California at San Diego (UCSD), California State University at San Marcos (CSUSM), and University of San Diego (USD).
Visit http://dhsocal2014.thatcamp.org/ for more information and to register online. It is free and open to the public.
The spirit is inclusive, so, please send this email far and wide—to anyone (colleagues, students, friends) interested in learning about the digital humanities, getting involved in regional collaborations, and geeking out on the intersection between traditional humanities and digital technologies.
Join us to dive into the digital humanities!
More information on the DHSoCal digital humanities group can be found at: http://dhsocal.blogspot.com
(Revised and republished April 19th, 2025)
Digital Pedagogy workshop for TAs
Ever wondered what digital pedagogy is? Want to know what it’s like to teach online?
Wonder no more.
On February 19th, 2014, join us for an introductory session on digital pedagogy.
We will introduce you to the LMS (Learning Management System) Canvas, and we'll show you some of the applications that make online teaching as good (and sometimes better) than face–2-face teaching. We’ll also discuss some of the best practices for online education in the physical classroom and in the virtual one.
Location: UC Riverside, Surge 170
Date and time: Wednesday February 19th, 2014. 4–6PM
This is the first of hopefully many sessions aimed at training graduate students (and anyone else) in digital pedagogies.
(Revised and republished April 19th, 2025)
Notes on TEI and Markup Fundamentals workshop
My post at Critical Digital Humanities on a recent workshop: TEI and Markup Fundamentals http://cdh.ucr.edu/2014/02/16/notes-on-tei-and-markup-fundamentals-workshop/
On February 13th I attended a workshop on TEI and Markup Fundamentals sponsored by the Graduate Quantitative Methods Program. The workshop was given by Rochelle Gold and Kimberly Hall from the Department of English at UC Riverside.
TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) is a method of encoding texts with markup language for digital representation. TEI markup focuses on rendering the semantic qualities of texts more visible. For example, sentences and clauses can be marked within a text, as well as the lines and features of a poem. This granular level of encoding allows for digital representations of these texts to carry details and information beyond their normal forms, which is valuable for critical interpretation.
→ read more at the original post
(Revised and republished April 19th, 2025)
Event Archive: Rethinking Debates on Digital Learning . 12 Feb 2014
My post at Critical Digital Humanities on a recent talk:
CDH Event Archive: Rethinking Debates on Digital Learning
Yesterday CDH sponsored a talk by Professor Juliette Levy of the Department of History at UC Riverside. In her discussion, Professor Levy described her own evolution toward using digital technology in order to broaden the learning experience for her students.
Professor Levy’s talk began with a common experience many in academia have shared — traditional methods of teaching are not being adapted to the changing needs of students in our modern world.
The RSA talk by Sir Ken Robinson, which was turned into an animated video, was central to describing this need for change. There is a great chasm between the needs of students and the pace of innovation within the classroom.
→ read more at the original post
(Revised and republished April 19th, 2025)
Notes on Virtual Lectures
The virtual lecture that Professor Levy gave to her CHASS F1RST class on Monday went very well. This was the first time we attempted to produce a virtual lecture, and I’ve compiled some notes on the process and our experience.
1. The setup will take 5–10 minutes.
Professor Levy and I had both done Google Hangouts before, but never for such a large audience. Just connecting the laptop to the projector can take a minute or two, and then there’s the webcam, and the initiation of the Google Hangout. In order to keep students engaged during all this, I played the “#Hashtag” video with Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake. The idea here was to inject a little humor, and also consider digital technology as a theme for the lecture. After the video, Judy (the TA), addressed the class and let them know about the video conferencing aspect via Google Hangouts.
Virtual Lectures and the Digital Classroom
This winter quarter I am a research assistant working on digital pedagogy and instruction at UC Riverside for Professor Juliette Levy. The class consists of about 60 students, and it’s a CHASS F1RST Humanities Course (Wayback Machine link) covering the history of Latin America. Even though this is a regular in-class course, we’re using a variety of digital tools to help broaden the learning experience. These tools, which are helpful for managing the class itself and also creating real interaction between students, include: