Historiarum

New words catch my eye in nearly everything I read, but often I’ve forgotten them shortly after examining their definitions, since generally speaking there is either little opportunity to use them or they are words with no real distinction from other words or phrases except to make the author seem more intelligent than he or she really is. Jargon has its place, but I find it all too regularly used as a crutch for the author and an impediment for the reader. Essentially if we want to reach an audience outside of the discipline, it should be used sparingly at most.

Reading John Lewis Gaddis’s The Landscape of History this week was my first encounter with the word consilience and it seems to me to fill a gap in our vocabulary. Certainly it qualifies as jargon, since its usage is essentially only relevant to academic disciplines. It is not specific to any one discipline, however, but instead is a term that spans all of the disciplines, which I find more useful. Gaddis quotes two definitions of consilience: “unexpected coincidences of results drawn from distant parts of a subject” and “a way of asking whether, in the gathering of disciplines, specialists can ever reach agreement on a common body of abstract principles and evidentiary proof.”(49) Barring the final chapter (in which Gaddis waffles on the ultimate value of history while setting up some arguably false and created ambiguities of historical research), the rest of his book operates with consilience as the as the basis from which he draws comparisons between historical and scientific methods, finding utility in some and fault with others.

These metaphors he drew with disciplines such as astronomy and biology were particularly useful in thinking about what historians do, and how it is done. Gaddis highlighted cartography largely as a vehicle to show the impossibility of true representation, as well as the arbitrary, but importance of decisions made by the representers. This is a familiar idea to many students of history, but an important one to keep in mind. More to the point, for a class such as this one which combines the disciplines of history and cartography it seems greatly important since we will be dealing with a mode of representation which we are familiar with in very limited senses as users, and almost wholly unfamiliar with creatively. History has usually been represented via words and text. Images are secondary. But the other part of Gaddis’s argument, that much can be gleaned from examining other disciplines can be put to work here.

Rather than setting history apart from other disciplines and holing up in our own methods and practices, it seems better to look at how other disciplines approach problems, and how they render conclusions, and what we might recognize, borrow, or discard from them. Maps have always held a place in historical analysis, but often in a very limited sense. By thinking about their potential and looking at the process of cartography, perhaps we can explore new approaches to historical research and representation.

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Looking at the articles by James Paul Gee and Niall Ferguson, as well as playing MYST III, it seems we might be witnessing a paradigm shift in the model of education. The trends away from simple textual based learning, as well as the mammoth advances in computer science over the past two decades have led to the entrance of video games into the classroom. However, the enthusiasm is far from universal, especially for those who generally do not equate learning with fun.

As Gee offers in the conclusion of “Learning by Design,” “When we think of games, we think of fun. When we think of learning we think of work. Games show us this is wrong.” Gee examines the underlying lessons that many non-educational games can offer its users such as strategic thinking in specific contexts. What he is essentially arguing is that their is a model of learning embedded in games, and that it is often far more effective than ones found in the classroom precisely because its users enjoy using the material and as such get more out of it.

To an extent MYST tries to bridge the gap between tradition and the new in its structure. While there is a certain fetishization of textual forms in the game (in the use of books as the mechanisms of time travel, as well as the high amount of reading required for a video game), most of the game revolves around following visual clues to solve puzzles. While I found the clues too disconnected and obtuse to make the game enjoyable (and thus a useful learning experience), I imagine others could have an immersive, challenging, and pleasant experience. In this sense MYST may meet Gee’s requirements for a useful educational game. What would be interesting would be translating a game like MYST into a historical context. Perhaps something along the lines of Tomb Raider, with players hoping to unlock the secrets of the Valley of the Kings, but based on the work of Howard Carter, rather than some ahistorical model. Then users would be learning both the abstract lessons Gee finds video games are most effective at conveying, as well as the historical content Ferguson thinks can make them educational tools.

What is likely most important to remember in all of this, it is that video games are becoming central to the experiences of children today whether we like it or not. As Niall Ferguson writes of the current school-age generation, “And, as they seek a deeper understanding of the world we live in, they
may not turn first to the bookshelves. They may demand to play—or
rather replay—the great game of history for themselves.” Rather than decrying this as a negative development, it seems more useful to attempt to understand the games they play and think creatively about how games and the their principles can be incorporated into a positive learning experience.

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My site is going to be pretty image heavy, and I wanted to find away to annotate the images and analyze them. The ideal method would be to figure out a way to pull in images from my flickr page and utilize its note adding capapbilities. However, this involves understanding API’s and all sorts of coding that is way, way out of my league.

So I settled on a method using CSS that I found at CSSplay. After tinkering with the code a little bit, I really liked the results I got. You can see it here. I’s love for some feedback!

Unfortunately, my notation does not appear in IE6. The author, Stu Nicholls, claims, and demonstrates, that this method should work. So something must have gone awry when I hacked his code up a little to make it suit my site better. Fortunately, Nicholls has a few other examples available, and hopefully I will either be able to fix the first method or use one of these successfully.

I offered some appreciation and suggestions for Steve, Mark this week.

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