Having ended up with thousands of photographs from an archival research trip to Britain, I returned to the United States and realized that I had to figure out what to do with them. In essence, by using the digital camera, I had transferred the work of sifting, reading, and note-taking the sources from the archive itself to my home. What had been a concentrated effort in the archive, with multiple layers of seeking, finding, and judging all going on at the same time, had become more spread out.

The solution lay in both new tools and new methods. Unlike my earlier approach, I actually planned out ahead of time the process I was going to use to take notes. I would load the pictures into Scrivener, my writing tool of choice at the moment, and take notes on them directly into the program. That way I wouldn’t have to switch back and forth between photo application and note-taking application. Each individual item (following my practice) would include the information or quote I wanted to remember and the citation to its source (Scrivener could do citations that MS Word would recognize and format as footnotes when I exported the prose to the manuscript, making this even more useful). If I could think of the text I might actually use in the eventual manuscript, I would try to write a paragraph incorporating the information/quote in it, with the citation. Then, when I came to writing, I would have complete nuggets of text, all ready to be placed into the draft.

This went wrong almost immediately. Scrivener was not designed to hold lots of large photos (2 MB + each) and started to slow down as I put more and more into it. It wasn’t going to be able to handle hundreds, let alone thousands of large files. I thus looked around for something that could handle such large files. Eventually, after trying a range of applications, I settled on Devonthink Pro (now Devonthink Pro Office). The developers emphasized large-scale document storage, analysis, and retention as the primary goal of the program. It had other tempting attributes: OCR was built-in, it supported scanning directly into the program, and it had reasonably useful text-handling attributes. It did lack the ability to create footnotes in its text, which munged my process a bit.

Nonetheless, I decided to give it a shot.I brought it (educational discount!) and set about importing the archival photographs. Several thousand later, I had them all in there, and Devonthink hadn’t even burped (no, I’m getting any money from them for these words, I promise).

I started back into my workflow and waded through photographs. The note-taking process was still as slow as it had been in the archive: reading, thinking, noting, reading. There’s just no real substitute for that process. But I was much more flexible in where and when I could do it. I had escaped the archive and now could do a large part of that research work elsewhere: at home, at the coffee shop, at school. I could even snip a bit of photograph with a good quote and paste it wholesale into my notes. No more lengthy retyping of quotes! I ended up with quite a massive database of photographs, notes, articles, and all the accumulated apparatus of a scholarly project (the picture at the top is of the same Roger Keyes source from the first post).

There were some problems. I hadn’t always put the full citation in with the note, which meant I had to go back and reconstruct it. Those snippets of photograph that I had been so pleased with weren’t searchable, so I had to look at them individually to see if they fit into a particular chapter. The photographs were not of high enough quality (nor, for that matter were many of the sources) for the OCR to handle effectively. For example, running the above image through OCR (an unfair challenge, admittedly) gives “rt of Stmi Cai^Zrt^lirttûrt ¿ «y ï ilnntsin,:; A1 tn•F ?”í.”/;”"‘ ” “”• -’ mcoz’^nrl for fhoir^íiur.invit Jnhn F.nnnraonrt” as a partial result. Not useful.

Once I turned to writing, I had the notes already in textual format and could simply copy and paste them into the manuscript, properly quoted and cited. I felt a bit like I was assembling legos, putting together ready-made building blocks, rather than using raw materials. Sometimes there was a bit of trimming necessary, but often the block simply clicked into place. It was different. It was fascinating as, sometimes, I would come across a block that I had written long ago, and not understand what I had meant by it, or why I had put it that way. Those were like little impenetrable notes from a stranger.

But mostly it was straightforward. I set two rules: 1. write a thousand words a day, five days a week, and 2) no editing while drafting. The first was so that the amount I did each day was not an overwhelming challenge, but also enough that doing it daily would quickly show real progress. A thousand words/day meant five thousand a week, and 20,000 a month. For a book contracted to be around 75,000 words, that meant 3-4 months of drafting. The second rule meant that I wouldn’t get bogged down in editing and re-editing what I’d already written, the sure path to paralysis, dysfunction, and writer’s block.

And thus.

Is it a perfect method? No. There are things I will likely do differently the next time, like getting a monopod for my camera so that I can steady the picture-taking, and figuring out a way to tether the camera to my laptop, so I can preview the shots I’ve taken in realtime. But it’s an efficient and effective way to work. It allows me to go to the archives and get what I need from them without the laborious and lengthy stints that were common previously. That, I think, is what technology should do: relieve me of work that is unproductive to allow me to put more work into that which is productive. That is what this technology has done.

John Tyler, the 10th President of the United States, may not have been a particularly remembered executive (except perhaps as the trailing end of “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too“), but he, his children, and grandchildren quite nearly cover the span of the American nation. Tyler himself was born in March, 1790, just over a year after the Constitution, having been duly ratified, came into force. He lived until 1862, dying in the greatest test of that nation (and also the war of the greatest American general, although Tyler tried to join up the wrong side).

During that life, he fathered fifteen children, the latest, Pearl Tyler, coming only two years before his death in 1860. Her mother, Tyler’s second wife, Julia, was thirty years John’s junior. The youngest children of that union, Lyon, Robert, and Pearl, lived well into the 20th century, Pearl dying the last of all in 1947.

Two of Lyon Tyler’s son are, as of 2012, still alive, and living in the ancestral mansion “Sherwood Forest,” Lyon Jr., and Harrison. They are the third generation of a family that spans the Republic (and is trending on Twitter), and makes it personal in their memories. I can’t help but imagine that it is that deep sense of America that informs Harrison Tyler’s judgment of Newt Gingrich: he’s a “big jerk.”

It’s positively constitutional, it is.

(Full genealogy here).

if we want to avoid an Obama landslide in November, Republicans should nominate Governor Romney

Not, mind you, “if we want to win” – just “if we want to avoid an Obama landslide.”

I think I’d be softer on an invitation to a private function. One does perhaps have a duty to advise a president. But ceremonial functions are fair game for refusals as statements.

Roald Dahl, Aldous Huxley, JG Ballard, and lots of others have turned down an hono(u)r from the Crown.

And throughout the movie, so are we. Almost every scene in this movie is about windows: we frequently see characters or important actions through windows, rather than directly, at the least reminding us that we see each other through a glass darkly.

Most of the online stills from the movie don’t show this – probably because what makes a compelling framing on the theater screen doesn’t work as a promotional photograph where we want to see the actor – but I believe I’m right about it.

Consider the scene where Control learns from Jerry Westerby that Jim Prideaux has been shot. We see stunned and immobile Control in a corner of a window, pleading Jerry partly through a doorway – it emphasizes the opacity and inaccessibility of Control’s mind, ensnaring Jerry who desperately wants to move.⁴

Or when Smiley learns who Ann’s lover is, or when Ricki Tarr first sees Irina in action. Or when we see Oliver Lacon’s house. It’s all about the windows. I have to see the movie again with this in mind really to figure out what I think about it.

The occupation of UC Berkeley’s anthropology library ended Saturday evening when campus administrators agreed to meet the demands of protesters and restore the library’s hours.

Reading this Wall Street Journal article about Newt Gingrich’s short but odd career as a history professor,* I felt the need to explore what the other people in the story were thinking. Obviously, I have no direct knowledge of West Georgia College or the people there, but I have been at an academic institution for a while.

In addition to the normal application materials, Gingrich submitted his reading list for the last three months to the history department at WGC. He had read 26 books, though they were “too eclectic for a specialist” Gingrich confessed in his letter to the department. Nonetheless, Benjamin Kennedy, the chair, talked to him on the phone, thought he sounded nice, and hired him. Even early on, Gingrich was not shy:

A year into his first full-time teaching job, Newt Gingrich applied to be college president, submitting with his application a paper titled “Some Projections on West Georgia College’s Next Thirty Years.”

According to a history professor, this “‘drew a chuckle’” from administrators. Gingrich did not get the job, needless to say, but he applied undeterred for the chairship of the history department when it came open the next year. This was not funny. It was one thing to apply for the Presidency, but presumptuous to apply for a job with real power. Gingrich’s application was not greeted “so kindly.” Kennedy ruefully recalled him as being “Well, he seemed pretty energetic, young, ambitious. God, always that.”

At this point, there seems (I speculate) to have been a meeting of minds between the administration and the history department on how to distract Gingrich into less bothersome pursuits. The answer? A committee!They put him on a two-person committee (who was the other faculty member, I wonder? Genghis Khan?) to work on ideas for updating the college. They did, so the plan apparently worked. Unfortunately for the administrators and faculty hoping for peace and quiet, the two faculty also created something called “The Institute for Directed Change and Renewal” and started trying to shop their services to state institutions throughout Georgia. The freelancing brought him to the attention of the College President, who wrote a stern letter: “‘You are not entitled to financial compensation by any other State of Georgia agency or institution.’”

So, back to the history department Gingrich went. They didn’t particularly like him, as Kennedy recounted:

Most of them thought that he was a blowhard. How you seen that cover of The Week? It has Newt as a hot air balloon. And that’s him alright. He’s a talker. The thing about Newt is he’s clever but he’s not intelligent. A mile wide and an inch deep.

Gingrich was not particularly interested in history, however, spending most of his time on ideas about the future. This gave the historians a chance to pawn him off on another department, the Department of Geography, where his “interest in long-range and broad-range planning for the future…is clearly more appropriate.” How the Department of Geography felt about this is not recorded.

Gingrich was already on his way out altogether, running twice in Congressional races (oddly as the more liberal candidate both times–this was Georgia). He was not publishing, however, which led him to the other option in “publish or perish.” West Georgia denied him tenure in 1978, and, with the Democratic incumbent in his district retiring, Gingrich left the college and successfully ran for Congress again.

Though he now regularly claims while campaigning that he is a historian, Gingrich was noticeably uninterested in history after receiving his Ph.D in 1971. It was, as Kennedy noted, “A footnote for him on the way to greater things.”

*By the way, I’d just like to mention my utter abhorrence at the fact that when millions of Americans hear “historian” they currently think “Newt Gingrich.” It is to barf.

* Probably Jefferson [spits], right? I mean, he’s usually the guy who said the stuff about the things, isn’t he? But apparently not in this case. Unless, again, I’ve missed something. Which is to say, this is chance for you to note that somebody is Wrong on the Internet! And not just any somebody, but me.

The bill also would criminalize ‘outrageous minimization’ of the Armenian genocide.

Garton Ash, presumably wearing his poker face, points out only that “minimization” will be hard to figure, leaving out “outrageous” altogether.

That said, I wonder about these passages and what follows in a similar vein:

So completely does talking constitute Matthews’s raison d’être that he mistakes it for historical research.

There is nothing wrong, needless to say, with conducting interviews, and they can be invaluable for journalists trying to set down a first draft of history. But the farther one reaches into the past, the less precise and clear memories become; and while they can provide help when existing records are unreliable or deficient, they have to be used with care.

I don’t think Greenberg intended this as an attack on oral history — because, as he intimates, Matthews isn’t an oral historian in any meaningful sense of that title — but I do find myself reading the review as an endorsement of the idea that historians should, whenever possible, be using documentary records and, as Greenberg says outright, leaving interviews to journalists. I wish Greenberg had delved a bit deeper into this point, particularly the relationship between oral history and the fallibility of memory. The idea that written sources have more truth value, or perhaps a greater capacity to illuminate the past, than oral histories, interests me, but I’m pretty sure I’m less convinced by that argument than Greenberg appear to be.

My general rule is that all sources — written, oral, etc. — should be treated like hostile witnesses. Which is to say, I’m skeptical of anything my sources tell me and, as a result, seek context and corroboration whenever I can. I suspect Greenberg would agree with that proposition, so perhaps I’m making something of nothing.

Mitt Romney’s eight-vote victory in the Iowa caucuses will be rescinded on Thursday, following a two-week review by the state’s Republican Party that found that Rick Santorum actually finished 34 votes ahead of Mr. Romney, two party officials confirmed.

So Romney was the winner when he was ahead by eight votes, but Santorum only “finished…ahead” when his lead was 34? The Times might defend itself by pointing out that the Iowa GOP isn’t going to certify a winner because they can’t be sure of votes from eight precincts, but, as Nate Silver pointed out, Santorum almost doubled Romney’s total in those precincts when counted on caucus night. The Times does not mention that. I guess being the presumptive nominee has its advantages.**

*There was a joke in my house growing up that the Times would not report things about Cornell particularly well. It was that “upstate” school. The classic example was that a Cornell victory over Harvard in football (rare enough!) would be reported by the paper as “Harvard Loses.”

**Though I’m sure that Gail Collins will connect Iowa to Romney’s dog, somehow.

The concept of “one nation under God” has a noble lineage, originating in Abraham Lincoln’s hope at Gettysburg that “this nation, under God, shall not perish from the earth.” After Lincoln, however, the phrase disappeared from political discourse for decades. But it re-emerged in the mid-20th century, under a much different guise: corporate leaders and conservative clergymen deployed it to discredit Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

This opposition of God to the New Deal is of course specious: God was a member of FDR’s Brains Trust and in His incarnation as Jesus Christ and author of the beatitudes He directly influenced the New Deal’s relief provisions. As for the public works, He explained, “Yes, I could have built ’em quicker, but only by robbing the economy of much-needed stimulus.”

He paused, and seemed to ponder his next move. The sense of drama in the room was palpable. He then said, with gravity, ‘I’d like to give some of the audience the opportunity to confirm the degree of tumescence’. With his pants at his knees, he waddled down the stairs, approaching (to their horror) the urologists and their partners in the front row. As he approached them, erection waggling before him, four or five of the women in the front rows threw their arms up in the air, seemingly in unison, and screamed loudly. The scientific merits of the presentation had been overwhelmed, for them, by the novel and unusual mode of demonstrating the results.

Suddenly, Powerpoint doesn’t seem that bad.

the government ratified measures that will bar anti-evolution groups from teaching creationism in science classes

Don’t get excited, fellow Americans – in the UK. A country where a physicist, Brian Cox, can have a prime time television special featuring major stars. A country with crap reality tv, tabloid press, and science. Behold.

Required for my spring course on “Conspiracy theories in American History.”

But if laptops replaced paper as the main way of getting notes down, the difference in the actual physical process of research was not that much altered. Go to the archive, order the sources you needed, and spend days or weeks or months taking notes on them. Copying costs at most archives were much too high to consider wholesale reproduction, and so note-taking depended on how fast you could type. Portable scanners did not really work; either one had to put the document face down on the scanner or drag the scanner along the document. Neither of those things pleased most archivists. In addition, the scanners were slow and did not offer much storage. Thus, note taking remained resolutely textual, and resulted in the production of lots and lots of MS Word documents with notes on specific sources.

That changed dramatically with the advent of digital cameras with high resolution, storage, and battery life. Suddenly, I could buy, relatively cheaply, a lightweight camera able to take hundreds of shots at a resolution that, properly framed, could be read with relative ease on a monitor back home. This advance came too late for A War of Frontier and Empire, but I decided to convert entirely over to using a digital camera for The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China, 1900. This was encouraged by the birth of my daughter Madeline, whose arrival meant that long research trips, while restful, did not contribute to domestic harmony.

But what kind of camera? I thought about getting a DSLR, but quickly discarded the idea. This was going to be an experiment, and paying over a thousand dollars for a camera to do it seemed excessive. Instead, I decided on a smaller camera, a “point and shoot.” After a fair amount of Internet research, I settled on the Canon SD800. It got good reviews, took a detailed picture (without being too large), and was reasonably priced. I equipped it with the largest memory card I could (512 MB at first; now up to 4 GB, which translates to about 3000 pictures), and set off.

From the first moment in the archive, I was ecstatic.Archival research had always been something of a race against time, desperately taking down as many notes on as many documents before I had to pack up and go home, for the day or for good. Now, I could just snap a photograph of everything. Useful? Take a picture. Might be useful? Take a picture. Potentially useful in the future? Take a picture. There were difficulties, of course. I had to make sure the camera battery was fully charged. Angling the camera correctly to take a square picture turned out to be difficult. Getting enough light required work as even the archives that allowed cameras almost universally banned the use of flashes. It was, oddly enough, less interesting than before, as rather than reading through each document, I would simply make a quick decision as to its usefulness and then either move on or start snapping photos. It became an assembly line for research.

Those issues were minor, though. My ability to cover fully an archive became much greater and more dependent on how quickly the archivists could deliver sources than my reading or typing speed. In one week-long visit to the National Archives in Britain, I took 2284 pictures, page after page after page on the Boxer Rebellion. I offer a sample of one of those, an entry in an Admiralty ledger (ADM 1/7456) that categorized the awards and mentions in dispatches of each British soldier, sailor, or officer so cited. The page is for Roger Keyes, later First Sea Lord, who was a young commander during the summer of 1900. He did rather well–this was the second page devoted to him, and the annotations have spilled over into someone else’s heroism:

My research had been transformed.

Next: making the laptop and the camera work together.