by Moriya Vanderhoef

This week’s lecture by Paul Longley Arthur, sponsored by The Center for 21st Century Studies, was fantastic! I may be a little biased on this one, however, as history is my major and my passion.

Arthur examines, in his research and work, new ways of representing history using digital media. This new digital history, as he calls it, represents a democratic turn in the research and publishing of history. He argues that history has gone from the towers of academia to the everyperson sitting at their computer researching at home, thus eroding the authority of experts and privileging small, local histories over large, national histories. But this change effects history in other ways too, as he envisions history as the newest interdisciplinary department on campuses, as the field branches into new areas of exploration using insights and methodology from other related academic areas. These varied disciplines will all share the digital environment as their common denominator.

But how do you define digital history? Arthur explained it as a series of pathways and methods, often interactive, which lead to the exploration of history via navigation rather then narration. But definitions for this emerging field are shifting in these early years. The benefits of digital history, for historians, are not as apparent as the benefits of writing books and articles, but it is believed that as academia slowly catches up to to these newly emerging areas of publication and new forms of information sharing, they will begin to be worth more towards tenure and standing within the community.

An audience member asked, and I feel it important to mention this, “When will digital history, defined mostly by the use of this new technology and methodology, just become history once again?” When will this shift happen, if ever? Will digital history always be set apart from regular history? Only time will really tell, but I believe, much like Arthur, that one day they will merge into a single idea once again and these “new methods” will be accepted ways to research and publish along with the more traditional forms without anyone making a distinction between “old” and “new.”

Last, but certainly not least, Arthur talked about the emergence of navigation vs the more traditional narration as seen in digital history. He stated that game theorists say we have exhausted narrative, that was have reached the limitations of narration’s scope and depth, and that the future is navigation. Most emerging digital history websites today feature heavy navigation through interaction with little to no narration. During the question and answer session afterward we discussed the possibility that navigation is not free of narration, but the narration is outsourced from the writer, the traditional source of narration, to the navigator, who must provide their own navigation through the information available, much the same way one must navigate your way through a Chose Your Own Adventure book.

by Willy Dintenfass

As the world we live in becomes more and more technology driven, enthusiasm for the future mixes with a certain kind of unease. “What is our role in this new world?” people ask, and judging from Paul Arthur’s talk at the Center last Friday, academics are no exception.

Arthur, a professor at Curtin University in Australia who is teaching at Rutgers this semester, is primarily interested in historical practices performed on computers, or as he refers to it, “digital history.” Taking the impact of poststructuralist theory and technological advance as a starting point, Arthur traces various paths available for the field of history in digitally mediated environments. Working in an interdisciplinary mode, he uses literary theory, game theory and cultural studies in tandem with historical practices to raise questions about and suggest approaches for how best to use digital technology to for historical research and presentation.

The presentation on Friday, “Database History – New Designs on the Past” was heavy on questions. Some dealt with broader issues related to digital environments: are we moving away from narration as our dominant form of interaction and comprehension? Others focused more specifically on digital history: to what extent is digital history transformed by the database? How can the field of digital history be extended beyond the realm of interactive learning? What kinds of historical studies lend themselves to digital exploration? Arthur gave clues here and there–-for example, a link between oral histories and digital presentation-–but many questions went unanswered.

During the Q&A session, another question began to emerge: what is the role of the historian in digital history? One commenter seemed to get at the general tone in the room when he suggested that the term “digital history” would shortly be retired, once general excitement over the inclusion of computers/the internet into the discipline subsides. Arthur was fairly willing to allay nervousness about the future role of the historian. The best path for digital history to take, he argued, is to use technology to build on a disciplinarian foundation. As databases grow larger and more comprehensive, an expert – i.e., the historian – will still be needed to determine which paths through and patterns in the information are productive. Furthermore, databases actually privilege certain kinds of information, so part of a historian’s role will be to counteract that process.

While this line of discussion may have a calming effect on worried historians, I was a little disappointed with it. Certainly if the term “digital history” refers only to the simple equation of history plus computers then we can expect it to fall out of fashion quickly. However, the term could also suggest a progression in the field of history, one that takes as its basis what is singular and unique about the digital – which I would argue is not simply its ability for storing large amounts of information. The field of digital history could deal with how to reconcile linear modes of historical analysis with non-linear digital formats. Or it could address how to do the history of right now, when a majority of primary sources are online, and therefore prone to change without notice or outright disappearance. These strike me as complicated and rich areas for exploration, and Paul Arthur has enthusiastically grappled with some of these issues elsewhere. While his presentation at UWM covered a lot of ground, I would have liked to hear a little less about how to maintain the discipline’s old roles, and a little more about what new roles might be.

by Moriya Vanderhoef

Last week’s lecture sponsored by the Center for 21st Century Studies was highly informative and had many moments of amusement pop in at unexpected, but very welcomed moments. The three lecturers, John C. Blum, Michelle Caswell, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, were all very personable and approachable. This had to be my favorite lecture of the semester! As an aspiring academic, I thought this lecture doled out very important information on the steps someone has to go through to get an article published in a journal or a book published and made available to the public. There were golden nuggets of advice, such as, “It has to leave your computer for your work to ever be published and finally declared finished,” which seems simple, but that is the brilliance. How many students, whether an undergraduate, master’s or PhD, remember that the most important step is putting your work out there to face public opinion and stimulate discussion? I know I often forget this fact and a little nugget like this is just what I needed to remind me of it.

While I could go on and on about what a fabulous lecture the Center offered this last Friday, I thought I’d offer a few highlights of some of the advice doled out which I thought everyone would enjoy and appreciate.

For Articles:

-Volunteer at journals by offering to review books or articles. I had no idea that this was an option and when they mentioned that you often get to keep the books you reviewed I wanted to shout,”Sign me up!”

-1/3(!) of all articles submitted to journals do not have a thesis. If you want your work to stand out, put a clear, concise, well-explained thesis in your article. Frankly, this statistic surprised me. Its hard to imagine how one would write anything which is coherent and readable without a thesis.

-When you are turned down (and everyone is rejected, so roll with it), take the advice the readers gave, follow it, and resubmit it to another journal. Here is yet another piece of simple, yet brillant advice.

Books:

-Today, no publisher wants a full manuscript, so send only a prospectus which follows the publishers exact guidelines. Another surprise! I was unaware that there was a change (not that I knew much about the old process of manuscript submission), but find this change environmentally friendly as well as friendlier for the submitters’ pocketbooks, as fewer copies have to be made of the manuscript.

Grants:

-What makes you a great academic writer may not make you a great grant proposal writer. The two types of writing take totally different perspectives and answer different questions. I have no clue how to write a grant proposal, but think perhaps a class on how to do so should be required for just about everyone to graduate, as there are many fields and businesses which could profit and grow from having this knowledge.

-Grants are about the tension between risk and security. To improve your chances of getting the grant you’re applying for, you ought not to have a subject too far out of the mainstream research community, but if you show you know your field, understand it, and wish to push the envelope just enough to be innovative, then that softens the risk your research poses and ups the chances that you’ll get the grant you are applying for.

by Willy Dintenfass

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Center for 21st Century Studies. To acknowledge the occasion, the Center sponsored a symposium called C21: celebrating 40 years. The event, which was co-sponsored by the Dean of the College of Letters & Science, featured speakers Kathleen Woodward, Herbert Blau, and Victor Greene.

The symposium was something of a family affair: Woodward and Blau are married, and their son Dick Blau and daughter-in-law Jane Gallop (who introduced the elder Blau) are both UWM faculty. In a less conventional sense, the occasion exuded familial tone. A slide show at the beginning chronicling the Center’s 40 years was met with amusement as Center fellows and employees came face to face with past fashion choices.

After brief introductory remarks, Kathleen Woodward presented her lecture, “Inexhaustible Feelings: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions.” Woodward was the director of the Center for 19 years (a span that Dean Meadows referred to as the “indoor record”) and portions of her talk–a defense of the incorporation of personal experience and emotion into academic discourse–alluded to her tenure here.

Herbert Blau’s lecture “The Free Trade of Appearance: Historicizing, Hybridizing and Decentering the Real,” moved from the personal to two very different realms: the cosmological and the subatomic. Ostensibly an interrogation of historical practice (the kind performed by “history historians” as Blau termed them), the amount of time spent in space and on a particle level hinted at Blau’s first field of study, chemical engineering. At an event earlier in the day, Blau claimed Henry James as a major formal influence on his work, and at times the Jamesian nature of his sentences was liable to leave you lost two digressions back. Blau primarily seemed to be arguing for the pursuit of history as an art.

Victor Greene, a Center fellow in 1973 and 1974, led the audience through a timeline of events leading up to the conception of the Center and through its early years. Greene read a number of humorous pieces of correspondence that highlighted the academic politics that made the birthing process of the Center less than smooth. More seriously, Greene helped emphasize the goals of the Center from the beginning: to provide a space for collaborative, cross-disciplinary research and study, in an environment sheltered from some of the other distractions of academic life.

At C21, Kathleen Woodward and Herbert Blau presented lectures that demonstrated two of the numerous and diverse lines of inquiry encouraged by and pursued within the Center for 20th/21st Century Studies. Between shots of bulky shoulder pads and unwieldy-framed glasses on the slideshow commemorating the first forty years of the Center, we caught glimpses of past guests like Stuart Hall and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and couldn’t help but be excited about the next forty.

by Willy Dintenfass

In conjunction with the Center’s commemorative event, C21: celebrating 40 years, guest speaker Herbert Blau lead a brown bag lunch discussion with a small group of undergraduate students. The talk was ostensibly to be about Samuel Beckett–the students had been reading Beckett, on whom Blau is considered an authority–but in fact it took a much more fluid shape, focusing as much on Blau’s remarkable life as on Beckett’s.

An “intellectual, and proud of it,” Blau is known for an enduring curiosity and love for ideas. “When I know what I think I’m just not interested,” Blau remarked at one point, and this attitude may in part be responsible for his wild trajectory. Growing up in Brooklyn, Blau wanted to play ball, either football or basketball. As he tells it, it wasn’t until he realized he wasn’t going to be able to play sports professionally that he began focusing on academics, earning his first degree in chemical engineering. Blau was ready to head off to MIT when he heard about an army friend who’d written a play and received a fellowship at Yale. Blau decided to write a play, ended up writing two (one entirely in verse), and he too received a fellowship. Blau, who had never before seen a play, soon grew bored with what he regarded as predictable theater. This boredom would ultimately drive him to found and direct three important theater groups: The Artist’s Workshop in San Francisco, the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York, and the experimental theater group KRAKEN.

Although Blau recounted his experiences casually, pausing for bites of salad between anecdotes, the students in attendance were inspired and impressed, by his resume (he came to be friends with Beckett over the years), but also by his confidence. Several students asked questions trying to discern the source of it, but Blau, for whom it seems to be simply a fact of life, couldn’t say.

In his crankier moments Blau would chafe slightly at the implication that Beckett has exerted some huge influence over his life’s work. He claimed Shakespeare as a bigger influence, saying that he still has a tendency to “think Hamletically.” (Later he would refer to Hamletic thinking in part as “springing past inaction into action,” which, given the ending of The Unnamable–‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’– also seems somewhat Beckettian.) Nevertheless, one story in particular illustrated the power of the combination of Beckett and Blau.

In 1957, Blau and his colleagues staged “Waiting for Godot” at San Quentin Prison. The production was a success, and inmates founded their own theater group, which Blau worked with over the years. One member, Rick Cluchey, was originally imprisoned without parole for armed robbery and attempted murder. Through his work with the theater group, he was eventually awarded parole and ultimately pardoned. Cluchey developed a close relationship with Beckett himself, and has gone on to act in a number of Beckett plays.

Herbert Blau once wrote, “Art changes nothing but at least it changes that.” This was not the impression he left upon the students in attendance at the discussion, who afterwards seemed to feel that art has the capacity to change a great deal.

by Willy Dintenfass

While working on their 1994 project Bus Stop, German artists Renata Stih and Freider Schnock learned an interesting piece of information about their nation’s history. While doing research for the project—a social sculpture that took the shape of multiple bus stops put up across Berlin for fictional busses that went to different Holocaust sites—Stih and Schnock discovered that the forests in Weimar where Goethe would famously take walks were also the site of the concentration camp Buchenwald. This location, which physically connects events separated by time, events from opposing ends of the spectrum of Germany’s contributions to civilization, is an apt and powerful representation of the ideas Stih and Schnock pursue in their art.

Stih and Schnock delivered the keynote address at the Midwest Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference put on by the Center with a lecture entitled “Memory, Art and Social Sculpture.” Stih and Schnock are primarily concerned with memory as a social function, the calling forth of the past into the present, specifically in terms of public spaces. Several of their projects, such as Places of Remembrance, involve the physical overlaying of a map from a city’s past onto a map from the present, but a similar conceptual overlaying is at the heart of all their work. Stih and Schnock are interested in excavating the social and cultural sedimentary layers of a given location, reformulating these layers into sculpture, and installing them, in the present, in that location.

Functionality is also key to their work, as evidenced by their critique of Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (of which Stih said, “I have my doubts as to whether something abstract can touch people,” and perhaps more on target, “You can’t just look at the Holocaust in a formal manner.”) Stih and Schnock conceive of a range of functions for their work and are very conscious of who their audience is for each project, using whatever techniques and media are necessary to get their message across. They aim to educate, raise awareness, provoke remembrance, and force negotiations with the past, specifically related to the Holocaust. They also clearly delight in the pleasure of making connections within and about their work, and are definitely down for a little rabble rousing.

A brief question and answer session revealed an intense belief in their work, alongside a slight defensiveness towards perceived criticisms of their projects. This led to a few lively exchanges. My favorite exchange took place at the end, when an audience member asked if the artists worried that their sculptures might become routine and begin to go unnoticed after awhile, just as we fail to notice spaces we’re in often after some time. “Are you boring to yourself after a while?” Stih responded. Clearly, Stih and Schnock believe their work is part of a larger project of connection-making, that we live large parts of our lives in public spaces, and connecting these spaces with the past and making memory a visible entity situates our experiences within a history and a context that help reveal not only where we are, but who we are as well.

For more info, check out their website.

by Moriya Vanderhoef

This week’s event was the keynote to the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference. The speakers Stih & Schnock, a team of artists and historians based in Berlin, spoke on a theme which runs  through their work, “Memory, Art and Social Sculpture.”

The journey they took us on was visually interesting, thought-provoking, and heart-wrenching. Their major projects center on the treatment of Jewish people when the Nazis were in power and memorializing those lost during that horrific time in Germany’s history.

The memorial artwork they began with originally struck me as cold and flippant; it consisted of signs with brightly colored, simplistic pictures on one side and Nazi laws pretaining to the Jewish population on the other.  After much thought on their project, however, I’ve come to feel quite differently; I now feel that the signs signify the slow change through law in the treatment of a whole group of people and that they are deeply important to have in a public space.  Perhaps, through constant reminder, an atrocity such as the Holocaust will never happen again.

Many of Stih and Schnock’s works have this same, slow, sinking effect.

For more thought-provoking speakers and lectures, please see the Center’s Calendar of Events.

by Moriya Vanderhoef

The Center’s lecture last Friday caught my eye on the schedule of events. Who isn’t fascinated by ancient Egypt and Rome? The presenter, Roberta Mazza from the University of California-Santa Barbara, caught my attention right away with the question, “How can we make sense of the ancient past when we filter it through the modern influence of books, movies, video games, and blogs?”

While Professor Mazza’s lecture was difficult to understand at times, where she truly shined was in the question and answer period afterwards. Her off-the-cuff answers were clear, concise, and showed a high degree of knowledge in her field. With the talk papers left on the lectern, she truly engaged my attention to the details of her presentation for the first time. I learned more in the fifteen-minute question and answer session then I had in the presentation leading up to it. What I learned was fascinating.

From 117AD to 138, Rome had a restless Emperor, Hadrian. He was the first Emperor in Rome’s history who spent more time traveling than at home in the capitol. He had a young, attractive, male lover, Antinous (the Latin version was used during the lecture, while the Greek version of his name, Antinoos, was used to title the lecture), who was the “James Dean” of his day. While in Egypt, the two ran into a lion, which Antinous killed. During the ensuing celebration, Antinous sacrificed himself in the Nile. At the time it was believed that if you drowned in the Nile, you were deified. A religious cult soon grew and spread around Antinous, fueled by Hadrian in an attempt to control the ‘multifaceted religious faces of the Roman Empire’. Hadrian’s desire for religious control was soon able to bring everyone in the Empire under his thumb, except the Jewish people. His thirst for control may have been a contributing factor to the emergence and rise of Christianity within the Roman Empire.

See what you can learn in fifteen minutes? I highly recommend sticking around for the question-and-answer sessions after presentations; I doubt you’ll regret it!

by Vince Tripi, III

Bill Weege, one of the featured artists in the Center’s Since 1968 exhibition in Mitchell Hall, has quite the venerable past both as an artist and activist. At first, I must admit, he came off as a bit too much of an artist; he spoke of his art as if there were infinite ways to interpret his work.

However, his art was based much more in the process with less emphasis placed on the deliberateness of the content. “Big was the thing. I threw everything into it, including the kitchen sink.” That was the call of the times, of course–agitation, finding meaning where there was chaos and random, terrifying Technicolor.

Weege related that his MFA studies focused on the process of printmaking (screen printing, off-set lithography, wood cut printing), and the politics of the day. Others, Weege said, had rebuked his art’s political tenacity, asking, “Why do this? It will have no bearing later.” The haphazardness of the individual images would probably be hard to comprehend, and I think hard to defend in front of a tenure-track committee in the time it was created because too often we take the present for granted as the inevitable outcome of the narrative of history. Weege’s juxtaposed images do a good job of mixing it up so that one no longer has the luxury of viewing history in such narrow terms.

He used photographs (he couldn’t draw), book pages (never mind the copyright law), and a city planning grid as the main attractions. The use of grids and numbers were a nod back to his city planning occupation: “I would count things. There were grids everywhere.” Lyrics from pop culture also help to create the piece’s own space in time. And the saucy images of naughty ladies? There to attract your attention. On his mental process Weege commented that “[Long Live Life] was all laid out. I had to think ahead—which was so unlike me. It turned out the way it was meant to, too, which was so unlike me.”

Toward the end of his talk he noted that he had been accused of stealing from Vasarely, whom he had never heard of, but still he could not deny the possibility: “Maybe I had seen something. But you see something, interpret it, put it down, and you reinterpret it.” That’s exactly how his pieces work.

by Vince Tripi, III

The Center is hosting an art exhibition bringing together selections from the UWM Art Collection with the UW-Whitewater Crossman Gallery that will run until February 12 in historic Mitchell Hall, room 154.

These pieces, complex and intricate works on paper and paintings, are a summary of “the aftermath of 1968,” which, among other things, meant expansive social reform movements. Almost as influential to these pieces is an experimental, abstract, and juxtaposed look at what is art, speech, what is good, true; they also ask something larger, who are “we,” as a people, as a nation, as a political entity, as human beings. The following poem was written in response to William Weege’s “Long Live Life,” which is shown in the exhibition.

LBJ being sworn in on Air Force 1, Lady Bird Johnson cropped into the photo, Jackie Kennedy cropped out.

A Charlie Chaplin Hitler surveying a floor-mounted globe, as if about to dance with it.

Motion capture of a sprinting cat.

A nuclear blast as seen from the air several miles off.

A ventriloquist’s dummy.

Six colors flipped horizontally, flipped vertically.

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

“Sitting on a sofa On a Sunday afternoon Going to the Candid…”

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY WAR IS PEACE IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Rows of scores of soldiers.

LONG LIVE LIFE 1984

And number 12 from a baseball team.

Dissections of human heads and pelvises and noses.

Jet planes.

Radar screens.

Porn stars bending and lounging and spread-eagling across the entire 16 panes.

some panes are numbered

some panes have dates

how advanced are we from this asymmetrical sprawl of colored panes

how powerful we are–despite our ignorance of colored panes

how enlightened we are to have so few wars

Bright pink cogs and engines behind a nicely centered penis

This is our iconic modern history: porn and war

Ben Franklin would be so proud