Furta Sacra

Chris Schabel Visit (April 30-May 2)

We had an alum visit last week, Chris Schabel (University of Cyprus), though I'm only getting around to writing about it now because it's the last (teaching) week of the semester and sleep is becoming a precious commodity!

Professor Schabel has spent the past several years working (and publishing extensively on) the history of medieval Cyprus and on interactions between the Latin West and the Greek. Not an area of medieval history I know a lot about, I must admit, but one I was eager to know more of!

His first talk was on "The Mendicants and the Quarrel Over Unleavened Bread in the Eucharist." That there were theological conflicts between the eastern and western halves of Christendom during the Middle Ages (and of course later) is something that is well known to those who work on the history of Western Europe. Less known perhaps—at least, something which I was not aware of—was that this conflict was not confined just to the filioque dispute, or to the vexed question of the proper role of icons, but also extended to the issue of what kind of bread was appropriate to use when celebrating the Eucharist. The Catholic view was that either leavened or unleavened bread could be used, with a preference for unleavened bread; for the Orthodox, however, only leavened bread was suitable for consecration and the use of any other kind of bread branded one a heretic. Schabel traced the rhetoric about this "azymite" controversy through the writings of several theologians—the sometimes bemused incomprehension of the Latin writers contrasting sharply with the staunch refusal to compromise of the Eastern "fermentarians."

No accommodation was ever forthcoming, and the ill feeling on the subject led to the martyrdom of 13 monks at Nicosia in 1231. The resentment lingered for a long time. John Jerome of Prague, writing in 1430, recorded that:

"I saw with my eyes in Nicosia and in Rhodes that when a Catholic priest was lifting up the host during Mass, the Greeks that were present turned their backs and the obscene part of their bodies against the Sacrament of the Altar."

Not the most diplomatic response, perhaps.

The other lecture of Prof. Schabel's which I attended was on "Pope Honorius III (1216-1227) and the Greek East." Honorius' letters are one of the few sources which we have for Cypriot history during this period. Given the reasons which tended to prompt the composition of most papal letters, of course, they give us a perhaps rather one-dimensional view of the state of the island at this period, focusing as they do almost entirely on problems.

That said, what the letters do show us is fascinating: the tangled interconnections of cultures, faith and politics which occurred where West met East. There were all the machinations which went into the planning of the Fifth Crusade, the installation of Latin bishops in Greek areas, the faltering rule of the Latin emperors in Constantinople—no wonder that, as Prof. Schabel puts it, while memory of this period had faded in Western Europe, it's still fresh enough in Cyprus to be referenced in the in-flight magazine of Cyprus Airways!

The most interesting part of Schabel's talk, though, was the discussion of the career of Archbishop Antelm of Patras (1205-ca. 1241), a thoroughly nasty piece of work. The charges levelled against him in 1224 are more than a page long in translation, and include striking a priest during Mass, performing "the vice of infamous incontinence", gouging out the eyes of numerous people, and tying a cleric backwards onto a donkey. All of this earned Antelm a grand total of one year's suspension because Honorius couldn't quite manouevre without him—probably one of the best examples I can think of of how principles could be subjugated to politics in the medieval period.

And speaking of ruthless necessity, it's time for the final grading portion of the semester to begin!

The Rhetoric of the Flesh - April 25

You know, this was probably the first lecture I've been to which has asked me to pay particularly close attention to artistic representations of Christ's nipples! Or which included the phrase "transgressive sado-erotic response to sacred nudity." Art historians clearly have all the fun! Prof. Sherry Lindquist's lecture, "The Rhetoric of the Flesh in Late Medieval Art", was a really fascinating look at how medieval artists used depictions of nudity to represent complex theological ideas, their patron's piety and sensuality, or their own sense of themselves as artists.

Lindquist examined three different manuscripts. The first, Louis of Bruges' "Twelve Ladies of Rhetoric" (BnF fr1174), depicts the eponymous ladies performing a variety of artisans—except for the last lady, Glorious Achievement, pictured to the left. Now, when I first saw that image, I thought Glorious Achievement was a medieval argument against the perils of sun exposure, but she is apparently actually dressed in a skin-tight gold garment which is used to make her nudity even more titillating. Glorious Achievement is also hidden in earlier panels in the text, like a sort of medieval Where's Wally, so getting to the end of the text sheds a new light on all the previous pages which the reader has looked at.

The next text examined was the Belles Heures of the Limbourg Brothers, a manuscript which depicts the human form in some idiosyncratic ways which don't occur in the brothers' earlier or later works. Lindquist identified a contrast between the suffering, unclothed bodies of the martyrs here being contrasted with sinful, tempting and clothed bodies. There's something very interesting going on there, particularly in the scenes showing the torture of St Bartholmew (pictured right) and also Christ's scourging at the pillar. I was fascinated by how the Bartholomew scene in particular invites the viewer's complicity—the knife lying waiting for someone to take it up, the voyeurism of watching the dismemberment of Bartholomew's naked body, the sheer gusto with which the torturers approach their task. Lindquist pointed out that when later medieval artistis copied this image—which they often did quite faithfully by tracing—they tended to omit those elements. There's something going on here, some aspect of skin as a marker of identity (of sexuality?) that the Limbourgs seem to be working through here. Perhaps, Lindquist suggests, this is a reflection of the patron who commissioned this work, Jean duc de Berry, whose homosocial tendencies were the subject of much gossip during his lifetime.

Lastly, Prof. Lindquist looked at the "Hours of the Earls of Ormond" (BL Harley 2887), which is an interesting look at how medieval artists addressed the thorny issue of how to depict the Trinity. All parts of the Trinity are supposed to be co-equal, and yet Christ became incarnate and the Holy Spirit is often referred to or depicted metaphorically/symbolically.

This leads to a rather delightfully strange series of depictions of the Trinity in this manuscript: the Trinity is depicted several times in the same basic composition—as seen to the left in f. 33v—where all three figures are shown nude from the waist up, the sun's rays emanating from them. In all of the images, Christ is shown with pale, "human" flesh, while God and the Holy Spirit are shown with golden flesh (echoes of Glorious Achievement's depiction). In all, the Trinity is crowned and holding a book. Yet in some of the images, their hand gestures are different; in some, only Christ has legs while in others all three figures do; in some, only Christ has a belly button and nipples (products of the Incarnation), while in others all three figures do. I'm not sure that it's possible for us, at this remove, to be able to understand the artist's motivation in providing such different representatons of the Trinity all within the same text, but the process of speculation is surely fascinating!

Escaping the Shallows

Crossposted from my HASTAC blog; you can find my original post here at the HASTAC site.

I attended a very thought-provoking installment of the University of Iowa's PDH4L lecture series yesterday, entitled “Escaping the Shallows: Deep Reading’s Revival in the Digital Age”, given by Professor David Dowling of the School of Journalism.

Professor Dowling was exploring some of the recent reaction to digital culture and practices, likening the recent push back against the pervasiveness of technology in our lives (as written about by Harkaway, Carr, Turkle et al) to the Romantic reaction against the Industrial Revolution. Dowling accepted a number of their points: the mediums we use to communicate shape us more than we'd like to think, and there's pretty irrefutable scientific evidence that, say, the kind of multi-tasking promoted by digital culture does damage some of our cognitive skills. Readers of hyperlinked texts, for instance, have lower recall than readers of plain scrolling text, while the kinds of "scan and skim" reading that people tend to use when reading online work against deep text processing and the formation of long-term memory. (When you read a hyperlinked text, in other words, your brain is always thinking about not just what you're reading, but what you're reading and whether you should click on that tempting link.)

This is pretty frightening stuff—the click click click online reading culture has the potential even to damage our ability to feel compassion for others—made all the moreso when we realise that much of the internet is designed to be what Prof. Dowling termed an "ecosystem of interruption technologies", amplifying these negative effects. Basically, it's in the interests of Internet Goliaths like Google and Facebook to make us click on as many different things as possible as quickly as possible. Online, our attention is a commodity, so our attention needs to be parcelled out into as many different saleable units as possible.

While acknowledging these issues, Dowling feels that these "Romantic" critics mischaracterise the nature of pre-digital reading, and that they're too apocalyptic about digital reading's implications. They advocate a return to "linear" deep reading, but Dowling argues that was never the case. Nineteenth century texts, for example, were often demanding, densely allusive works which required outside knowledge in order for the reader to appreciate them. The reader needed to return to texts in order to understand them more fully and on a richer level—a practice which Dowling terms "radial" or recursive reading. In other words, the relative disappearance of long-form linear texts is not the problem.

Indeed, Dowling points to a recent resurgence in long-form texts online to argue that online reading doesn't have to mean the abandonment of long-form reading: for instance, LongReads.com (a social network for those interested in long-form pieces) or "Snow Fall", a recent New York Times piece (which is I think a pretty stunning example of how video, images, infographics, maps, etc, can be integrated with text). Dowling also argues that the development of "affinity spaces" (where people come together around a shared interest, engaging in peer-to-peer learning or discussion, motivated by the desire to gain new knowledge and insight or sharper skills), like collective reading projects online such as #1book140, work as collaborative attempts to sustain focus and make connections.

This is an intriguing idea: the concept of new forms of reading emerging which allow for collaborative engagement with texts. There is undeniably potential for people to subvert or work around platform limitations—I'm sure that a lot of work has been done on this in, for instance, fan studies. And yet if your conversation is taking place on Twitter or Tumblr, how thorough can that subversion be? The architecture of the site works against that deep engagement. Here is where I start having issues (and sadly we ran out of time at the Q&A so I didn't get to ask Prof. Dowling about this in any depth): how do we learn to engage in deep long-form reading that nurtures a serious engagement with a text in a digital context? How do we mitigate those damaging effects on our attention span, our long-term memory and so on, all of which is so thoroughly documented? I felt that there was a gap there between the idea of (digital) reading as individual exercise and praxis, and collaborative reading response.

The latter, I agree, seems to hold a lot of promise in the digital age, but I'm still not so sanguine about the former. I know that the plural of anecdote isn't data, but I've definitely noticed a change in my concentration patterns and work habits over the last couple of years. What do you guys think—is there an ability for us to "retrain" our brains to work, concentrate and focus more effectively within this digital ecology? Or is there a connection, a possibility, here which I'm just not seeing?

 

FURTHER READING

These are some of the texts referenced by Professor Dowling in his presentation.

• Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains. 2010
• Harkaway, Nick. The Blind Giant: being Human in a Digital World. 2012
• Howe, Jeff. Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. 2009.
• Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. 2006
• Lanier, Jaron. You are Not a Gadget: a Manifesto. 2010
• Lee, M. J., & Tedder, M. C. "The effects of three different computer texts on readers' recall (based on working memory, risk-taking tendencies, and hypertext familiarity and knowledge)." Computers in Human Behavior, 19 (2003: 6), 767-783.
• Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. 2008.
• Turkle, Sherry. Alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. 2011
• Welch, Matt. "When Losers Write History" in Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done To Fix It. 2011.

The Perils of Political Biography

We're at that point in the semester when grading is making caffeine less a luxury and more a necessity, but when there also seems to be more and more to do on campus. I suppose in large part that's because now that the Iowan winter is finally in retreat, it's easier for people to make it here without through the snow. (Though this winter and spring, it's been more the rain that we've had to worry about.)

It makes for a busy schedule, though, which was why I was glad that some chai was served during this Monday's lecture, given by James Brennan (Urbana-Champaign) on "Writing the history of a nationalist/'traitor': Oscar Kambona and the perils of African political biography." The history of sub-Saharan women and gender was one of my comprehensive exam fields, and between that and my trip there a couple of years ago, I'm quite interested in Tanzanian history—sadly, it's not an interest I get to indulge much, between teaching and dissertation work. This means that I hadn't heard of Oscar Kambona before Professor Brennan's talk, but he was clearly a strange and fascinating figure.

Around the time of Tanzanian gaining its independence in the early 1960s, Kambona was the second most powerful man in the country, second only to the baba wa taifa—father of the country—Julius Nyerere. By '64, Kambona was Minister for External Affairs and Defence, General Secretary of TANU and the Chairman of the OAU; within three years he was living in penurious exile in London, regarded in his home country at worst as a traitor, at best as the pioneer of his eponymous hairstyle. (While it looks quite innocuous nowadays, back in the day that strong side-part with a slight bouffant was apparently quite radical in Tanzania!) The circumstances of Kambona's abrupt departure from the country are still murky—he may or may not have been involved in an attempted coup, though Prof. Brennan thinks it more likely that the root of the conflict between Kambona and Nyerere lay in the fact that the former was a "patronage" politican whereas the latter was a "conviction" politician.

What I found most fascinating was Brennan's discussion of Kambona's later years in exile, and of Brennan's own process of researching those years, using papers still kept by Kambona's family in London. Kambona seems to have spent his days petitioning people for money, and writing letters to various people in a code almost embarrassing in its lack of subtlety: "Oscar Wilde" needed thousands of dollars from his friends in Saudi Arabia to pay for "his sister's wedding." (The thoughts of Oscar being involved in political intrigues and coups made this Irishwoman laugh.) Brennan spoke of the possibilities created by focusing on dissidents or 'traitors' in part because to do so requires historians to think in terms of counterfactuals: the what ifs, the roads not taken. How much would a government headed by Kambona have shaped and changed the development of Tanzania? It's an interesting mode of history, though one I think not often practiced by medievalists (at least not explicitly). Perhaps it's because what actually did happen is often still opaque enough for us.

Prof. Brennan also spoke of the potential for unease inherent in accepting the generosity of Kambona's family in giving him access to private papers and video tapes, in return for which he will publish work which may not present their father in the most flattering light. As someone who is primarily a medievalist, this is not an issue I have to deal with, by and large—studying nuns who've been dead for eight hundred years doesn't require me to gain IRB approval. This is one of the reasons why I think an engagement with modern history is a good thing for a medievalist to do every now and then—it provides us with a little course corrective, a refresher, on the ethics of our practices as historians, a reminder of the duties we owe our subjects and our readers.

Putting Iowa on the WorldMap

Crossposted from my HASTAC blog; you can find my original post here at the HASTAC site.

Yesterday's University of Iowa Digital Studio for Public Humanities lunchtime talk, "Iowa on World Map", was given by Professor Colin Gordon of the Department of History. Professor Gordon provided an overview of WorldMap, an open source web mapping platform that is being developed by the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard to allow scholars to visualise and share geospatial information.

 

Professor Gordon's talk focused mainly on the interactive mapping project hosted on WorldMap which he created as an accompaniment to, and extension of, his book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City. Mapping Decline examines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis, arguing that both private and institutionalised racism and classism, as well as subsequent attempts at urban renewal, resulted in "white flight" from the city's centre. Gordon briefly discussed other mapping platforms which he had considered at the start of his project, such as Map Story, ESRI/Story Maps and Hyper Cities, some of which he liked but all of which he found limited in that they are designed for use with a single, discrete data set and are not necessarily scalable. He far and away prefers the WorldMap platform, and listed the following as its pros:

• Open access and open source
• Ability to host multiple maps on one digital 'globe'
• Plug-ins for Google Earth to allow 3D views
• Accepts geo-rectified historical maps, and has access to scanned and geo-rectified maps from the David Rumsey Collection
• Can import data from other geo-servers
• Sustainable and scalable, and does a pretty good job at accepting different kinds of data layers
• Allows for links with geo-referenced YouTube and Picasa feeds
• Layers can be public or private, and if the former scraped and reused for other maps.

Certainly both the St Louis mapping example which Professor Gordon showed, and his most recent project (Digital Johnson County, bringing together digitised historical maps and other data to do with the county in which the University of Iowa is located) are impressive examples of the kinds of projects which can be carried out using this platform. There's a real sense of immediacy which comes from being able to connect the visual with the interpretive so readily—with being able to compare, say, a map of St Louis in 1900 with one of the city in 1950 and to do so on multiple scales, from the metro level down to individual streets or neighbourhoods. History does seem to be taking a spatial turn at the moment (it's something I'm trying to do with my own work, and I'm excited at the prospect of being able to incorporate the maps that I've gathered of medieval France into this platform and seeing if it helps me discover new connections about my data).

However, there are still some downsides to the WorldMap platform:

• Data layers must be created somewhere else and then uploaded to the site; no real editing capability in the platform
• No true inbuilt feature that provides temporality as yet; current revision should add feature to allow for time slider
• 1900+ projects already on the site, but no real way to search for completed/active projects, etc.
• No double-checking for layer/data accuracy, so scrape layers at your own risk!
• Adding narrative/interpretive panes only possible in very limited, clunky fashion

That last element is the one which gives me particular pause. Professor Gordon at one point said that he thought the future of historical research was digital projects like this—that "the book is dead." Now, you can tease me for being a Luddite if you want to, but I don't think that statement's true. Maybe it's just that being a medievalist means I spend a lot of my time working with very ancient texts which have survived centuries more or (admittedly sometimes often) less intact, but if you take the long view, the codex form is pretty durable, and it does offer a lot of advantages which I just don't think digital texts have yet surpassed. Many of these mapping platforms haven't yet figured out a good way to marry visual and textual explanation—and sometimes complex ideas do require more than just an infographic in order to convey them. I have a Kindle, and it's great for travel, but when I'm reading and taking notes I still default to physical book, paper and pen. For me, I think digital projects like this are fascinating, but I think they are complementary to the monograph/extended textual essay (and vice versa); just as radio didn't replace live music, or TV the radio, or so on.

What do you guys think? Are you likewise taking the spatial turn with your research? What do you think are the pros and cons?

The Classroom Rewired

Crossposted from my HASTAC blog; you can find my original post here at the HASTAC site.

On February 23, the University of Iowa was host to Rewiring the Classroom, a symposium which focused on critical applications of digital technologies in undergraduate classrooms. My fellow University of Iowa HASTAC scholars (Audrey Altman and Craig Carey) and I were so excited about the enthusiastic response we received (and a little scared, it's true: nothing like having to close registration early because we had no room to put more people!) from both people who wished to attend and from departments and centres across campus. We owe particular thanks to the Obermann Center and to the Digital Studio for Public Humanities, who provided some invaluable logistical support and advice.

Our presenters (who all braved the bitter Iowan February weather—troopers all) offered practical, hands-on workshops about new technologies, paired with critical discussions about the pedagogical values of these technologies. As you can see from the programme, they covered an astonishingly wide array of topics in just one day: WordPress, Wikipedia, badge systems, Omeka, recorded sound, public engagement, OS Grid, geographical information systems, and bringing research and archives into the classroom.

The one real downside of being a conference organiser is, of course, that you don't have the time to experience all the wonderful discussions that people are having because you're too busy making sure that there's still enough coffee and everything is running on time. I can't sit down to write and reflect about the sessions because I experienced them only in bits and pieces, refracted through the conversation of our participants in the hallways and at lunchtime. 

Resources

Luckily, our conference attendees have stepped in to bridge the gap, and to both provide commentary about Rewiring the Classroom as it happened, and to discuss it afterwards! Several people live tweeted throughout the day, and you can follow along with them at #uirewire. One of our speakers, Prof. Bridget Draxler of Monmouth College (and a former University of Iowa HASTAC fellow), has written a fantastic post about Rewiring the Classroom. Check it out for her discussion of the sessions in which she participated: on Omeka and Google Sites, on engaging a diverse public through the digital classroom, and on public writing and social media. Sadly, one of our microphones decided that Saturday was a good day to give up the ghost, but we did manage to get recordings of two of our roundtable discusssions, which you can check out embedded below.

And of course, if you were an attendee and have links to other reactions/reflections about the day, please drop me a comment or an email! We'd love to hear from you.

 

An Abundance of Fishes

"Spring Break" doesn't mean the same thing for graduate students as it does for undergrads—my students are off enjoying the sun in parts south, while I'm shivering through an Iowan March as I face down a pile of grading and what feels like an equally large "to do" pile. Part of that is catching up on writing about events that happened, oh, say a fortnight ago?

The Graduate History Society's Guest Speaker this year was Richard C. Hoffmann (Emeritus, York University). Professor Hoffmann's work is of course known to anyone with an interest in medieval environmental or ecological history—he's one of the founding figures in the field.

Hoffmann gave GHS's keynote speech on March 7th, on "Higher Authority: the State, Private Rights, and the 'Common Good' in Late Medieval Resource Management." It was a really interesting analysis of how medieval theories of government and property rights intersected with attempts to promote sustainable economic practices. There is perhaps a tendency nowadays to think of an awareness of environmental sustainability being a peculiarly modern phenomenon, but of course this is not the case. Medieval people certainly had very different motivations, and a very different understanding of how the world worked, but they were still aware that economic resources had to be appropriately managed if they were to be conserved over time.

Professor Hoffmann demonstrated this by looking at shared patterns of rhetoric about public resources, and their protection and management, which spread across polities in western Europe between roughly 1300 and 1600. He focused first on woodlands in France, Venice and Upper Germany (around Salzburg and Württemberg), where perceived timber shortages, and perceived or actual misuse of woodlands by private individuals, led to state appropriation of these woods. This led to the creation of an administrative apparatus to manage these newly royal or civic woodlands (as was the case with, for example, the establishment of the post of maître des eaux et forêts in fourteenth-century France), and also to a decrease in biodiversity.

The second area of focus was rivers, such as the ultimately fruitless attempts at flood management in fourteenth-century Rouissillon, or to stave off disordine idrico (hydrological disorders) in Lombardy and Tuscany. Here Hoffmann noted signs of proto-ecological awareness in the contemporary knowledge that these floods were caused by, and exacerbating, devastating erosion. Again, just as with woodland management, the use of the idea of the "common good" as a means of harnessing support for governmental conservation efforts was prevalent, while biodiversity was reduced in riverine environments just as in woodland areas.

Lastly, Hoffmann looked at Italian, Scottish and Austrian attempts to manage their "abundance of fishes". He looked in most details at Perugian management of Lago Trasimeno from 1260 to 1368, using restrictions on net size and catching season. However, the biggest laugh of the lecture came from discussing how a twelfth-century Scottish law mandated that in order to accommodate salmon, all weirs must have a permanent midstream opening large enough to allow a three-year-old pig to turn around in it without his snout touching his tail.

Now that is a bewilderingly precise law.

Overall, Professor Hoffmann's lecture presented an image of a largely consistent framework for state intervention in later medieval Europe, where perceived resource shortages and environmental hazards created an ideology of "higher purpose", more administrative standardisation and a loss of natural diversity.

These ideas were picked up the following day in a roundtable discussion officially entitled "Sources for Environmental History" but which became much more broadranging than that, touching on the political implications of environmental history and how the field skirts with (and can and should avoid) environmental determinism. Professor Hoffmann was joined by Jim Giblin and Tyler Priest, both from the Department of History, which gave us an interesting mix of areas of expertise: medieval Europe, nineteenth and twentieth century Tanzania and late twentieth/early twenty-first century America. As a medievalist, it always makes me boggle a little to hear other historians talk about the difficulties of sifting through an abundance of materials (a problem I wish we had!), but I think that's one of the plus points of conversations across fields like this—it reminds me that history is not, and cannot be, practiced in a uniform way.

Love, Death and Digital Memorials

Crossposted from my HASTAC blog; you can find my original post here at the HASTAC site.

The University of Iowa's Digital Studio for Public Humanities' lunchtime talk series continued this past Thursday with a thought-provoking journey through some recent trends in the interactions between digital and memorial culture, ably conducted by Jennifer Shook (Dept. of English).

The trip began at Mount Rushmore. The monumental memorials of the eighteenth and nineteenth century are, as Jennifer pointed out, particularly ripe for subversion, parody and other forms of commentary. (As you may be able to see in the image accompanying this post, where one of the US presidents has been replaced with Michael Jackson; a similar image featuring Miss Piggy from the Muppets drew quite the giggle from the audience.) With their monolithic narratives about what it is to be American, and with their often imposing physical presence, they often inspire people to physically "recreate" them, to Photoshop images of them, to create online narratives which rely on people's pre-existing knowledge of the monuments for their impact.

(This was really fascinating to me inasmuch as now that I reflect on it, I don't know how much this occurs to the same extent in my home country of Ireland. We have, of course, a rich tradition of often very dark satire, but perhaps we tend to site that more in words than centring it around physical memorials? And when subversion and mockery happens, it doesn't tend to centre around the statues of famous Irish people such as Daniel O'Connell or Big Jim Larkin, but on the non-anthropomorphic Spire or the Floozie. Perhaps it's simply a reflection of the fact that we tend not to build on as grand a scale.)

Most of Jennifer's talk focused on what's happening now that this long-standing tradition of memorialising has entered the digital age. She shyed away from using the word "democratising" (rightly, I think, as it's problematic to think that we now live in an age of a level playing field), but instead emphasised how digital memorials offer more scope for a multiplicity of voices. Many of these projects, like the AIDS Quilt Touch project, take the physical memorial and make it more widely accessible; others, like the Bdote Memory Map, restore new layers of meaning to existing physical memorials which exclude subaltern voices.

I found many of these new digital memorials to be fascinating, particularly in their abilities to alter and grow as more people add their voices to them. The first iteration of the Bdote site, for example, was very different to its current form, and Jennifer's talk was very celebratory of their activist and inclusive potential. Yet these digital memorials raise as many issues as they address—what about someone who doesn't wish to be memorialised? Who finds, for instance, the thoughts of being represented to millions of people for decades to come by their elementary school photos to be quite horrifying? What happens when there's no one left to pay for the annual domain renewal, or when the server crashes and there are no backups?

One of the images Jennifer showed was of a cemetery in England which offers people the ability to have a QR code engraved on their headstone. Any curious passer by can scan this code with their smartphone and be taken to the person's life story, hosted on the cemetery's website. For now, QR codes represent an expanding form of technology, and perhaps for the next twenty or thirty years those life stories will be comprehensible and legible to people. But what will happen when technology moves on, when people forget how those blocky symbols were once supposed to function—will we have unwittingly created a digital Linear B?

(Talking About) Rewiring the Classroom

(Originally published in The Daily Iowan, February 13 2013)

One day when I was five years old, my teacher led my class across the playground to look at our school's latest acquisition: a computer. It was the first time I'd seen a computer, and it was strictly a look-don't-touch scenario. In the late 1980s, computers in the classroom were a vanishing rarity and I can't recall them ever being used as part of a lesson. Jump forward a couple of decades, and computers are no longer an educational curiosity; the phone sitting beside me on my desk undoubtedly has many times the computing power of that long defunct machine.

Yet for all the ubiquity of computers in our day-to-day life or in the classroom, it often doesn't seem as if we've gotten much better at incorporating technology into our teaching. A block of text on a PowerPoint slide is no better than a block of text on the printed page, left static and lacking in the context which provides meaning; proficiency in Twitter doesn't mean that a student has learned how to formulate a search to find that one key article online.

Discussions about the digital humanities and teaching are everywhere you turn, sprawling across blogs and newspaper columns—if you've got a couple of hours to kill and the intestinal fortitude, try searching online for 'MOOCs' or 'the gamification of education'. Yet as passionate as these discussions are, they often leave one with the impression that well-intentioned educators are either talking past one another, or not asking the right questions. Attitudes towards technology in the classroom are often shaped by preconceptions about its social, ethical or political connotations, or apprehensions about the future of higher education. Often, people forget to start with the most basic question: how can specific tools best be put to practical use in education?

The University of Iowa has made a great commitment in recent years to supporting the digital humanities, with the foundation of the Digital Studio for the Public Humanities and the hiring of several new faculty members who are tasked with exploring how digital practices can help to create new, innovative scholarship in the humanities.

On February 23rd, the University will take that commitment a step further by hosting 'Rewiring the Classroom', a symposium on practical, hands-on ways to use digital technologies in the undergraduate classroom. Through a mixture of workshops and discussions, participants will consider the myriad ways in which technology can invite more voices into the college classroom: how to create a new scenario that's all about look-touch-learn.

This conference is intended for anyone interested in creative and critical applications of technology to undergraduate education – professors, graduate instructors, librarians, information technologists, and other curious folks. Register for free by February 18th at rewiringtheclassroom.wordpress.com.

Speaking Truth to Peers: The Historiography of Medieval al-Andalus

The European Studies Group here at Iowa normally trends towards modern history, so its talks and seminars often put me outside of my historical comfort zone ("out of my historical comfort zone" being defined as "it happened after 1400"). Friday's talk was given by one of our medievalist contingent—Denise Filios, an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese—and while I can't claim to know a whole lot more about the history of al-Andalus or the early Islamic world than I do about, say, 20th century Italy, it's funny how the fact that it's classified as "medieval" puts me more at ease.

Especially funny since a prominent aspect of Professor Filios' talk was challenging the existing (geographical and/or ethnic) categorisations of medieval history—categorisations which after all are in large part the product of the concerns of nineteenth century nationalist movements, whose rise helped to fuel a new interest in medieval history. Was this Spanish history Filios was writing, or Andalusian, or Iberian, or something else?

Unsurprisingly, we didn't come up with a definitive answer to that question in the space of an hour and fifteen minutes! Still, we had an interesting introduction to a kind of institution about which I really knew nothing. Filios focused on Islamic literary salons in al-Andalus, either those which occurred among social (élite) equals and those which took place in the ruler's court. She examined how they functioned as sites in which historical narratives could be performed, created and challenged; social occasions in which an individual's adab (which I understood to mean a combination of etiquette, right action, and gentlemanly refinement) could be displayed. The particular texts which Filios discussed, then, are less useful as narrative accounts of the politics of 9th century Iberia than they are for understanding how their authors understood appropriate male-gendered conduct and the exercise of power.

There's a lot to chew over here, I think, in terms of how medieval peoples approached the writing of "history". One of the first questions I have my students ask of a text is who the intended audience is, but I wonder if I shouldn't also start also having them think about what utility the text may have, personally, for the author—are they using history to think through their own personal beliefs about righteous conduct? I also got curious for the first time as to whether many studies have been done comparing these Andalusian histories with the Christian ones produced during and after the Reconquista, or indeed with the other kinds of historical narratives produced across medieval Europe. I guess I'll be adding some books to my towering 'to read' stack soon.