No Stimulus for You!

As the official numbers on the 2010 Obama budget request are released it is clear that history largely missed out on the stimulus. For most of the programs that benefit history, funding is flat or only slightly increased over previous years. The exceptions are the NEH and the National Park Service, but even there the increases are far short of the billions and billions of stimulus infrastructure being doled out around the country. Some examples from the National Coalition for History:

• The National Archives & Records Administration will get a 1.5% increase from $460 million to $466.9 million.
• Funding for the wonderful Teaching American History grant program will stay at the 2009 figure of $119 million.
• The National Endowment for the Humanities budget will increase 10% from $155 million to $171 million.
• National Historical Publications and Records Commission grants will increase from $9.25 million to $10 million.
• The National Park Service's Historic Preservation Fund will increase from $69 million to $77 million.

History would have been a natural for stimulus funding, with so many worthy digital and oral history projects in need of funding. Some of us called for a new Federal Writer's Project just as Obama came into office. Unfortunately our national organizations remained on the sidelines as the stimulus bill was drafted. We missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!

Scanner Ready! Or, is History Missing the Stimulus Boat?

Dan Cohen has an excellent post, Scanner-Ready, over at his blog Digital Humanities. Contemplating the stimulus package and the search for "shovel-ready" projects, Cohen notes:

"But one obvious project that’s also ready to go on day one is the scanning of the contents of the Library of Congress. Today there’s a ceremonial event at the LC to showcase the thousands of books already scanned as part of the LC’s partnership with the Internet Archive, and to highlight the potential of a mass digitization project. It goes without saying that this project could be extended easily to other cultural heritage institutions."

I was making a similar point about the same time with myCall for a New Federal Writer's Project. And today I see that the AHA Today blog linked to my call in their weekly "What We're Reading" post.

Is history missing the boat on the stimulus package? I see that arts leaders recently rallied in D.C. for a chunk of the stimulus. “We wanted to make sure arts were not left out of the recovery,” said Robert L. Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, a national lobbying group. “The artist’s paycheck is every bit as important as the steelworker’s paycheck or the autoworker’s paycheck.” (So far they have picked up a $50 million line item in the stimulus bill for their efforts, though that of course might get stripped out in the Senate.) Education is making out like a bandit: Stimulus Plan Would Provide Flood of Aid to Education. (Flood = $140 billion.) But where is history in the stimulus plan?

(See also Greatest Achievements of American Socialism, a slide show of worthy New Deal projects at Salon.com.)

The Wikipedia War Over Obama's Inauguration

The Wikipedia War Over Obama's Inauguration: "Shortly before 11:00 a.m. EST on Tuesday, President-elect Barack Obama's motorcade sped along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, headed towards the Capitol. But Wikipedia couldn't wait." A fun article about a minor skirmish in the ongoing Wikipedia "edit wars," this one involving the status of Barack Obama. You can see the remains of the battle on the Wikipedia talk page for Barack Obama and the history page. This being Wikipedia, you can even view the very first Barack Obama page, created at 09:56 on July 28, 2004: "Barack Obama (born August 4, 1961) is a Democratic politician from Chicago, Illinois and only the third African-American to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention. A state legislator and law professor, Obama is currently running for the United States Senate from the State of Illinois, which would be the highest elected office he would hold thus far. If successful, Obama would be only the third African-American senator since Reconstruction. In Swahili, the name Obama means 'one who is led by God.'" Our president has had a very swift ascent!

Wikipedia is the elephant in the room in most discussions of digital history. We all know it is there and important but as professional historians we try to ignore it. You know that opinionated 19-year-old in your survey class, the one who is speaking up all the time, the guy with the loud voice who is always correcting you with some wrong historical information he learned on the internet last night? Well he is editing Wikipedia right now. For most teaching historians our approach to Wikipedia is to hope it goes away. (This is also our approach to Rate My Professor.)

Yet our students turn to Wikipedia as the information source of first resort, and we need to understand how it works. In my Public History course we recently read "The Charms of Wikipedia" by Nicholson Baker, a good and amusing introduction to the online encyclopedia. Personally I have no objection to students using Wikipedia exactly as they would any other encyclopedia--as a handy place to check basic facts and to begin research, but absolutely not an acceptable source of research for a college-level paper.

I actually assign some Wikipedia articles from time to time, such as Land Ordinance of 1785 and the related articles Northwest Ordinance, Public Land Survey System, and Northwest Territory. These articles are Wikipedia at its best, giving simple explanations of how the public lands of the United States were divided. It is important basic information in a class on Western History, but too often neglected in textbooks.

More problematic are the articles on controversial topics--Robert E. Lee, Zionism, or Leon Trotsky. The talk page on Trotsky warns users that "This is a controversial topic that may be under dispute." You think? "Please discuss substantial changes here before making them, making sure to supply full citations when adding information, and consider tagging or removing uncited/unciteable information," the warning continues. The talk and history pages of all three articles bear the shrapnel and bomb craters of full-scale edit wars, complete with multiple reversions and accusations of vandalism, personal invective, and banning of troublesome editors. For example on March 19, 2008 an anonymous user replaced the entire text of the Lee article with "I HATE HISTORY SOOOOOOOOOOO I WONT TELL YOU ANYTHING MUAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

At the end of the day Wikipedia becomes what most of it's users want it to be. So the article on Lee is generally admiring and minimizes and excuses his life-long support of slavery in a way that makes this historian uncomfortable.