数字历史

Our last session will be devoted to the presentation of your visual narratives. These are a few indications about how to do it and how we shall work it out:

- in terms of tool, I recommend using Powerpoint or a similar software for the construction of the narrative. It is not ideal, but this is a common and user-friendly tool. You may of course have alternative tools, including on line tools

- in terms of content and purpose: this is meant to make you think of how to express a historical argument based on visual documents. A historical argument is not necessarily a demonstration or an interpretation. It can also be raising questions about an issue.

- try to avoid the trap of "making up the argument first" and then look for pictures that "fit" your argument. You should work FROM the images themselves.

- in terms of presentation: you may add a few words (caption) on your visual narrative, but only very sparingly. You will NOT be allowed to speak when you present your visual narrative. Our "reading" will be based solely on the narrative itself. The discussion will start from there. Then you will be given the possibility to speak and explain your approach.

- make sure your visual document is properly referenced (last slide or separate document)

Just a reminder about to-morrow:

- students should group by pair to select one photograph/pair

- please post a thumbnail of your picture and the short essay required before class ON EACH STUDENT's blog

- your task should be completed.... this evening (so that everyone can se/read each other's work)

- don't forget: you should approach the selected image as a "source document", and process it as such.

I look forward to great discoveries and rich debates to-morrow !

AKQ

The Social Sciences began experimenting with visualization as early as the 1910s, when Franz Boas applied Kwakiutl place-names to an ordinary map to help him better explain the Kwakiutl world view. In the 1940s, scholars of folklore began abstracting these geographical diagrams into "synoptic diagrams" that showed concepts in relationship to each other. Since that time, scholars around a range of disciplines have used mental maps and synoptic diagrams for their powers at synthesizing a range of information from diverse fields.

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James A. Notopoulos, “The Symbolism of the Sun and Light in the Republic of Plato. II,” Classical Philology 39, no. 4 (October 1944): 223-240.

Briefly, visualizations do two things to rational argument that text is very bad at doing.

Synoptic diagrams are excellent at getting people on the same page. For this reason, anthropologists in the 1960s used them to synthesize everything known about cultural binaries, making sure that divergent scholars came to a consensus about the shape of world view. For this reason, too, "visual journalists" were hired in Silicon Valley from the 1970s forward to draw synoptic diagrams of a discussion, live. When everything everyone has said in a meeting appears on the wall, visually organized by the proximity of arguments, the meeting tends towards agreement. With a visual record, it's more difficult to suddenly disagree, reposition oneself from the outside or challenge the record. Visual diagrams lend permanence to thoughts and help to establish universal, structural arrangements, organizing all intellectual manifestations .

Visual diagrams are also particularly useful for ability to pan out . In a text document, it's often hard to get an overview without relying on an arbitrary abstraction like a table of contents. When reading a map, however, the scholar bends over to see more clearly the detail around a particular city, or steps back to see the nation as a whole. Just so, a visual diagram of an argument allows the reader to very quickly slip between the finite details and the big picture -- making sure that the argument fits exactly where it's supposed to.

Source : http://landscape.blogspot.com/

The upcoming session offers a set of papers with a gradient in terms of difficulty and topicality. They address central aspects of the historian's work: reading, writing, retrieving information. Think about Bell, Towsend, and Thomas' papers first. They address the basic issues. Then move to a reflection on Rosenzweig and Anderson's papers. They are more challenging, in particular Anderson's, but their contributions address head on the challenges ahead.

A reminder: you need to sum up the argument for each, then dig out and highlight the central questions that we should consider. Questions are what matters most.

For this particular exercise, try to go beyond examining the tools and their features. Test them with real texts and try to come up with concrete results and applications. You can also try to assess the degree of relevance/usefulness for documents in Chinese language.