This week, ending in March 10 2016:
Today's thread is for open discussion of:
History in the academy
Historiographical disputes, debates and rivalries
Implications of historical theory both abstractly and in application
Philosophy of history
And so on
Regular participants in the Thursday threads should just keep doing what they've been doing; newcomers should take notice that this thread is meant for open discussion only of matters like those above, not just anything you like -- we'll have a thread on Friday for that, as usual.
I’m going to publish this book review here and not Sat R&R because I’m a loner Dottie, a rebel, and it’s professional literature on the historical method, soooo it’s appropriate here I think.
#Writing History in the Digital Age ed. by Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, 2013
I read a fair amount of professional literature books, most of which consist of frantically slapped-together tenure-seeking publish-or-perish crappy case studies, sold at high cost to professional book-buying idiots (librarians) like myself, and are overall pretty low-quality. This book, however, is decidedly not any of those things. It is free, thoroughly thought-provoking, and everyone on AskHistorians should read it. I have already made 4 mods read it. Now I will make you read it. Top 3 favorite essays:
The first chapter, “I nevertheless am a historian,” which is about the public DOING history as the newest wave of what “public history” means, is incredibly relevant to what we do here, and also what /r/badhistory is all about. I also have had it running through my head for a while, that phrase, “I nevertheless am a historian,” and don’t know how to get it out.
Putting Harlem on the Map talks about how data visualizations can help us see patterns in history we wouldn’t otherwise have noticed. There’s a lot of push for maps and mapping tools in history now, but I don’t see a lot of arguments for why we should be all going map crazy in history, so this is one concrete map-dependant historical insight that you can cling to in a flurry of mapped history that otherwise just seems to be making maps for the sake of making maps.
Conclusion chapter Makes an evidenced-based argument for the future of academic publishing in a post-print-screw-paywalls world and one possible model it can work on, as exemplified by this book. Most interestingly: the essays had traditional paid reviewers, but it was also open to also whatever random academics or non-academics found the book during its peer-review process, so the authors got reviews from both sources. Spoiler: authors could not successfully guess which of their reviews were paid and free.
Reeeed itttt.