Some Words From the History Front

It's time to change the focus a little bit. My field covers a lot of ground when it comes to archives, documents, and preseration of cultural material. Since I'll be graduating in about 2 seconds and don't feel like rehacking all the debates I've been talking about for the last 2 years in graduate school, I thought I'd post someone else's words about things that we (historian-archivists) care about.

A Review of the Googlebooks Digitizing Project
(forwarded from the American Historical Association Blog by RobertTownsend

April 30, 2007
Google Books: Whats Not to Like?
http://blog.historians.org/articles/204/google-books-whats-not-to-like

By Robert Townsend

The Google Books project promises to open up a vast amount of older literature, but a closer look at the material on the site raises real worries about how well it can fulfill that promise and what its real objectives might be.

Over the past three months I spent a fair amount of time on the site as part of a research project on the early history of the profession, and from a researchers point of view I have to say the results were deeply disconcerting.

Yes, the site offers up a number of hard-to-find works from the early 20th century with instant access to the text. And yes, for some books it offers a useful keyword search function for finding a reference that might not be in the index. But my experience suggests the project is falling far short of its central promise of exposing the literature of the world, and is instead piling mistake upon mistake with little evidence of basic quality control. The problems I encountered fit into three broad categories: the quality of the scans is decidedly mixed, the information about the books (the metadata in info-speak) is often erroneous, and the public domain is curiously restricted.

Poor Scan Quality

My reading of the materials was not scientific or comprehensive, by any means, but a significant number of the books I encountered included basic scanning errors. For instance, the site currently offers a version of the Report of the
Committee of Ten from 1893 (the start of the great curriculum chase for the secondary schools). It offers a catalog of scanning errors, as Google has double-scanned pages (page 3 appears twice, for instance), pulled in pages improperly so they are now unreadable (page 147 between page 164 and 166), and cut off some pages (page 146, for example).

I've digitized a number of the AHAs old publications and appreciate that scanners dont always work as they should and pages can often get jammed. But even fairly rudimentary quality controls should catch those problems before they go live online. After years of implementing those kinds of quality checks here precisely because friends in the library community took me to task about their necessity I find it passing strange that so many libraries are joining in Googles headlong rush to digitize without similar quality requirements.

Faulty Metadata
Mistakes in Google Book Search Metadata

Beyond the fundamental quality of the scanning, a more significant problem is the incredibly poor descriptive information attached to many of the books on the site (the metadata). This is particularly evident in the serial publications, where having the proper name and date of a publication is particularly important. Take for example a volume of History Teachers Magazine that is labeled as a volume of Social Studies (the name the magazine took in 1934) and dated as published in 1953 (even though it seems to be from 1917).

These kinds of problems have two unfortunate effects. First, it makes it more difficult to place a particular work in time and thus actually locate a particular item discovered by using Google Books. At the same time, in many instances you will be unable to inspect public domain items more closely, because the erroneous date places the information on the wrong side of the copyright line.

Truncated Public Domain

These problems are exacerbated by Googles rather peculiar views on copyright.
While taking an expansive view of copyright for recent works, it has taken a very narrow view about books that actually are in the public domain. As I have always understood it (and the U.S. Copyright Office confirms), works by the U.S. government are not eligible for U.S. copyright protection. But Google locks all government documents published after 1923 behind the same wall as any other copyrighted work. Among other things, that locks up works that should be in the public domain, such as the AHAs Annual Report (published by the Government Printing Office from 1890 to 1993) and circulars from the U.S. Bureau of Education. This problem is exacerbated by the often errant data about when these materials were published which places these works even further beyond reach.

For more than a year now, Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian and media scholar at New York University, has been objecting that the rush to digitize is moving far in advance of considered thought. His concerns seemed rather abstract when I first heard them last year, but working with Google Books over the past few months made his objections seem much more tangible and worrying.

What particularly troubles me is the likelihood that these problems will just be compounded over time. From my own modest experience here at the AHA, I know how hard it is to go back and correct mistakes online when the imperative is always to move forward, to add content and inevitably pile more mistakes on top of the ones already buried one or two layers down. With Google adding in more than 3,000 new books each day, the growth in the number of mistakes seems that much higher.

The problem of quality control only exacerbates my most basic worry about the larger rush to digitize every scrap of information that we are adding to the pile much faster than the technology can advance to extract the information in a useful or meaningful way. When I have asked people who know a lot more about the technology than me about this problem, they tend to wave their hand and mumble about brilliant scientists and technological progress. Forgive me if I remain unconvinced. Even for someone fairly proficient in Boolean search terms I find a lot of the results from Google Books (and Google more generally) just page after page of useless and irrelevant information. I find it increasingly hard to believe that Google can add tens of thousands of additional books each month to the information pile many containing basic mistakes in content and
Metadata and the information results will actually grow better over time.

So I have to ask, whats the rush? In Googles case the answer seems clear enough. Like any large corporation with a lot of excess cash the company seems bent on scooping up as much market share as possible, driving competition off the board and increasing the number of people seeing (and clicking on) its highly lucrative ads. But I am not sure why the rest of us should share the companys sense of haste. Surely the libraries providing the content, and anyone else who cares about a rich digital environment, needs to worry about the potential costs of creating a universal library that is filled with mistakes and an impenetrable smog of information. Shouldnt we ponder the costs to history if the real libraries take error-filled digital versions of particular books and bury the originals in a dark archive (or the dumpster)? And what is the cost to historical thinking if the only substantive information one can glean out of Google is precisely the kind of narrow facts and dates that make history classes such a bore? The future will be here soon enough. Shouldnt we make sure we will be happy when we get there?


Robert Townsend
Assistant Director, Research and Publications
American Historical Association

For You, Aga!

Photo Blitzkreig!

Les Girls

I'm super busy and I apologize (mainly to Agnieszka, one of my greatest blog champions) for not being able to indulgently post lots of photos from the party. I'm losing my audience--I know--but hopefully some of you still check in on this every now and then. I've tried to download all your photos but these sites have complicated ways of making the photos unavailable. You'll just have to come over to see all the photos I printed out and put in the lovely album my aunt made for us. But keep sending me your pics! Especially if any family member took pictures of other family members!

Unofficial Shots of the Day

It's Never Over

The party, the party! The only problem I had with the reception is that it wasn't long enough. Thank you all for coming and making it a really amazing, high class affair. If you have snapshots, email them to me. I'm going through party withdrawal while waiting for all the media feedback. Don't be shy, send me what you got--as soon as I can I'll post them to the blog.

Much love to everyone whether you were there in person or in spirit~

xojennifer (and Fady, as I also speak for him when I say thank you to everyone for making it such a wonderful day)

Not Too Far Off

If I were a spider planning my wedding reception, here's how my webs would start looking about now. Most comparable, in my opinion, is the caffeinated one.

Cheers. Looking forward to seeing everyone in less than 2 weeks. Until then, happy end to Day Light Savings.

In the Clear, So to Speak

Back to blogging, and with still not a lot of free time, I've decided to parade around a few more photographs of me and Fady and put up information about us and coming events.

This will be brief, but here's some news: we passed our immigration interview! And, it was not easy. What made the entire experience unreal was a) 4 hours of fitful sleep, b) pre-dawn wake-up call, c) 3 cups of coffee on and empty stomach, d) 1 hour drive to Garden City, Long Island (in the cozy car of Jill and Judy, thank you Jill and Judy), and e) the thorniest interviewing agent in the land. Why us? Reports of how congenial and humane these interviews are crowded us over the last few weeks. But somehow we ended up with a stern fellow of Peruvian decent who managed not to look us in the eye more than three times and jarr us with every word he spoke. What? Why? Is this really the deciding moment of the fates of those inter-regionally and faithfully married? I do not believe so--because most of what he looked at that we provided in hand as not previously submitted to the Feds was not exactly what one would need to prove their undying love and committment. All we had to submit by hand today was photographs, bank statements and phone bills. So, we were told: they are not asking us about undying love and committment, but they are looking for it. As an archivist, a person in the field of records management, I have to say, the "documentation" we provided represents the smallest fraction of our lives, our connection--past and present. How did it satisfy what the agent was looking for? In the future, should I seek funding for a study inside a Phd program, I'd say I smell a dissertation. Alien Status Adjustment Cases: How Documents Love. But thank all the gods that it gave someone satisfaction because we PASSED, with a red stamp spelling APPROVED providing clear evidence of Fady's long-term residence (and implied hopes for a bright future).

And here we are, in Mendecino, California, December 31, 2006.



For Thanksgiving, we visited the wonderful and vibrant Christine at UNC. Thankful we were for the great news about Chris's clean bill of health, and this bit of sun and beach after days of rain during the holiday week in Carolina Country.

It's only been 2 weeks!

Goin' to the Chapel and We're...

27 September, 2006

Tyre

Tyre. Tier. Not Tire. Also known as Sour. Not sour. Pronounced like Souhre with a soft, rolling "r", as though Marylin Monroe determined the pronunciation herself. The two days I spent in Tyre turned my rainy, cold, expensive vacation in Lebanon into a sunny, relaxed adventure. Yes, relaxed and adventurous. The town is small; no building is over 10 stories. The streets are busy and full of people sitting on the boardwalk or eating kebab in the shopping district. The city is not newly rebuilt or as "Euro" as Beirut, and more women wear headscarves giving the Muslim population more visiblility. Transportation from Beirut to Tyre in a local microbus takes just above an hour. The route follows the highway south along the Mediterranean; it's a gorgeous ride, especially at sunset.

Two people I met in the hostel in Beirut, a Turkish man, Korcjan, and an Irish woman, Christina, both travelling separately, also wanted to go to Tyre. Korcjan worked for a bank in Turkey and Christina (pale, blond Irish woman) taught English in, of all places, Saudi Arabia. It's a good thing to travel with others when you have common touristic interests, especially when you will need to find a driver to take you places you could otherwise not get to with public transportation. We decided to meet at a hotel in Tyre called Al Fanar, the Lighthouse, which is located on the very tip of an outcrop of the Christian section of town, near the harbor by the historic lighthouse, just off of the business district. Korcjan and I walked from there to a reputable kebab house and had one of the better, and actually affordable, meals I ate in the entire country.

After dinner we set out to find a driver, someone who would know the places of Southern Lebanon of both ancient and modern historic importance, of both a political and controversial nature. We flagged down a taxi. The car was a maroon Mercedes, late 1980's make, and our driver was young, like us, smiled a lot and had a small moustace. His name was Abbas. He didn't speak a huge amount of English, but he managed to beg us to come with him to meet his wife, or, as we found out, his finance, Marium. She had thick, long well-managed curly brown hair, spoke very good English, and explained, while reading and turning the pages of our Lonely Planet, that her soon-to-be husband knew the back hills of this region very well, but not necessarily every site the book mentioned.

Both Korcjan and I felt quiet comfortable with our soon-to-be driver and his soon-to-be wife. He and I had swapped travel stories over dinner and discussed how we would handle strangers and negotiations. While still in the car with Abbas and his fiance, we silently communicated our acceptance then turned to them to negotiated a price, a time to meet, and encouraged his fiance to join us.

Our tour lasted 6 or 7 hours. We saw a cave where miracles from Christian lore were said to have happened. We saw remnants of the previous war when Israel had ground troops in the hills and air power above. We saw a United Nations memorial to victims of one particularly destructive hit. We saw whole villages which we were told were strongholds of the resistence group but saw not a single gun or guard on duty anywhere. Being from the area, Abbas knew the Hezbollah, but he wasn't an active member nor interested in being one. We saw mansions of wealthy Lebanese men (supposedly in the diamond mining business). We went to the border and saw a chain-link fence topped with barbed-wire stretching for miles. On a concrete block next to it a grafitti piece in the style of a Keith Haring drawing lightened the mood just a bit.

We ended the trip by climbing a few thousand feet into the bald-headed mountain-hills to find the Beaufort Castle, a cliff-top fort built by the Crusaders in the 12th century. The fort is abandoned now but had been used as a military outpost by the oft-shifting powers in the region to the present day. The entire trip conversation flowed from the front to the back seat, with questions and jokes and genuine interest in enjoying each other's company (including me and my new companions from the hostel). At the end of the tour outside the hotel, we gave them more money than previously agreed, and before getting out of the car, Korcjan turned to Abbas and said "You are a very lucky man to have this woman as your future wife." We all smiled and nodded. Then he turned to Marium and said, "And you are very lucky to have him, as well!" We all laughed in agreement. Perhaps their neighborhood in Tyre is still standing, perhaps they are still together and perhaps, despite the difficult times, perhaps they are still happy.

(PS--Three photos are posted on the 1/18/06 entry titled Beyrouth, LIBAN. Right now I don't have access to my photos so I cannot suppliment this entry with sites mentioned.)

In Memoria

My Aunt Elaine was my great aunt. She was the aunt of my aunts. She was the closest thing to a grandmother that I know. She was homemade ice cream. She was rice wine vinegar. She was liverwurst and German cold cuts with fresh mozzarella. She was the best banana bread I have ever had. She was a bicycle and English classes with Japanese ladies. She was the house I stayed at the night before I moved into my freshman dorm. She was the chairs I sat on in my kitchen. She was my mother's ancestral world. Wherever she rests now, in peace, it will be a home.

My U.S. Tour of Intercultural Sojourning

I have to admit that I am not feeling much reverse culture shock. I am elated and relieved to have made it back to the United States of America. I can't stop saying "United States of America" either. The effort it took to get out of Cairo was major because the anticipation of reverse culture shock almost paralyzed me. But my first attempt to reintegrate has been shockingly easy. Of course, it is my honeymoon period, as this scientific representation shows.

Five days in New York and Connecticut, including the celebration of the liberation of our nation from the silver spoons of the British (spoons, ha!), passed nicely. I spent most of my time with my favorite Cairene, Fedi, running around the city, dragging him from storage unit to social engagement, watching the World Cup, and, yes, eating pork! I am at home now~bacon is everywhere!

My US Tour is continuing in Denver now, then California. I will return to NYC in late July and catch more folks on the run as busy New York churns in all its glory.

My departure draws near! I take off on 1 July from Cairo and arrive on 1 July in NYC. I suppose this does constitute some sort of time travel, if it be such. But this shall not be the end of the blog of the only archivist you probably know!

Keep in touch -- I will, too.

Ma'sallamah, habibis (sadly, I don't know the plural of the most famous Egyptian word ever, habibi, meaning sweetheart, so it is written incorrectly here, but you get the idea).

Watching Soccer

These days I call it football, even to the Americans I know here, because soccer seems to be a bit of a misnomer for the sport. I do not reject 'soccer' as a term to describe the sport I grew up with, but I cannot disregard the lingo used by the rest of the sporting world for my own momentary linguistic displacement. I tend to refer to 'the match' when making plans with someone to watch the game, and I have caught myself talking about 'the pitch' instead of the field. Sometimes, depending with whom I am talking, I will throw in the word 'soccer' to emphasize the gap between American exceptionalism and yet another international agreement which the Americans have chosen to ignore (or been left out of). What I find interesting is how the word football--as used in America as a reference to soccer--will never take on a life of its own because we created our own game for the word, which, oddly enough, does not use the feet much at all during play.

I am still shy and hesitate when I talk about football, referring to soccer, because the immediate mental associations which surface when I utter the word dissolve my ability to compute the internationally recognized difference between the two. Images of black and white striped referees, the oblong pig-skin ball and yellow flags in American football evoke real heart-shaped feelings of pride in the minds of Americans. And the long string of socio-anthro-political associations of its history could compete only with apple pie and cowboys in a campaign for symbols of the Nation. As an American, I have these associations embedded in me like veins of granite through rock, and I swear it gets in my way everytime I say the word football in lieu of soccer. I often have to explain to Americans and non-Americans about my past with football, my history on the field as a player from when I was "this tall" (my hand 3 feet from the ground) to my love of the sport today now that I am "this tall" (my hand at my head). Something does not sound right if I repeat the word football in my declaration, even if I'm drinking a beer in a sports bar watching the game with English-speaking American nationals.

Does this described the last stage of ex-patriot aculturation--the internal struggle to accept not only the language of my host nation but that of internationally recognized terms for non-American sports? Could it be a final lesson on the importance of globalism and communication in non-political terms? Well, no, that would be absurd. And since the U.S. team made their exit from the World Cup in the first round, a semi-expected loss after performances that showed our effort but not our strength, it may be that we just ain't got much to say on the subject.

[ps--T minus 6 days and counting! See you turkeys soon!]

Mabruk!

Congratulations are in order. Alf Mabruk (a thousand congratulations) to Kim and John in Denver on their first child, a boy, named after my father, Jack. Ok, I'm kidding about the namesake but not the name, a great one at that. Born on June 14th, another Gemini for the world to deal with. Can't wait to meet you in July, little squirt! Congrats again; I am happy to know all are well.

It's watermelon season.

And it's my birthday.

A good combination in my estimation.

If You Would Like to...

...visit the restored reception hall of the first modern Egyptian ruler, Mohammed Ali Pascha, you can't! It's not open to the public. But I attended a reception there for the university press and went on some organized tour of the hall a week earlier. No swimming please. But if you were the Pascha you may have had a boat.



And here's a picture of the lovely Jill of Philadelphia whose life in and out of Egypt has led her to have yet another associate to fit into her schedule when she comes back in town. (And thanks for being my mule!)



A farewell dinner. Lucy and Sally have spend a long time in Cairo. Congratulations on doing it all, Lucy, and congrats on your engagement, Sally!



And one more thing, NYC has nothing on Cairo's riverfront restaurants. (But my mouth is watering still for the NYC food.)