I hadn’t encountered Joel’s blog before, so I hope I’m not reading this piece out of the context of his usual commentary. In any event, my response isn’t entirely about this one entry. I’ve only been to two events that were trying to be “unconferences” in some sense, and I’ve never been involved in trying to facilitate one, so there’s nothing about his critique that strikes too close to home, no wound it inflicts on me.

But there is something in the response that frustrates me, and it’s not just about unconferencing. There’s a pattern here that extends across a much vaster terrain. As I said in my Twitter feed, “Do as thou wilt” and “Ur doing it wrong” don’t add up. Joel is hardly the first person to try and say both of them at once.

Let’s take unconferencing. The idea here, as I see it, is to not just systematically question everything that doesn’t work about an existing model of conferencing, collaboration, and meetings but to invent new forms and practices that act on that critique. That alone makes the movement or whatever you want to call it a great thing: there’s nothing worse than endlessly circling around an awareness of how broken or stale existing practices are while feeling condemned to repeat them indefinitely. The one time I sat on a major professional association’s program committee a decade ago, I suggested that it would be a great idea if we just dropped virtually all of the standard paper-presentation sessions in favor of roundtables, workshops and spontaneous discussions, a sort of proto-unconferencing move. But there wasn’t any space in business-as-usual to entertain that idea. It was clear that if I were serious about it, I’d have to make it a crusade. My colleagues weren’t against a change exactly, but they felt there were reasons why we had a lot of small, boring sessions attended by six or seven people who passively listened to papers being read to them and changing that would cause serious problems for many members. Crusading on this subject struck me as a bit lower on my priority list than getting an unnecessary root canal. Smarter by far to just do an end run and invent new practices under new banners, as unconferencers have.

It’s the new practices part that seems to me to be the point: that unconferencing opens up what had been a closed, ritualistic and expensive domain that put very high transaction costs on collaboration, discovery and conversation between people with shared interests and projects.

It sticks in my craw when a move to openness becomes an occasion for a new closure. Which is how I read Joel’s complaint: that the unconference should have a purity test, its own Dogme 95 policed by dour adherents, that it has to be the dialectical opposite of the conference in every respect. In that case, you do not mean UN, you mean ANTI. Which will require the perpetual zombie reification of an ancien regime mode of conferencing as well. Every anti- needs its pro-, every post- needs its unhyphenated Other. To “un” something seems to me not to commit to a perfect opposite but to seek a massive radial evolution of new forms, to open a space, to emancipate.

What I hear in Joel I hear a bit of when #Occupy meetings insist dogmatically on human mics, circles and so on. Or the way that I can remember student activist meetings I participated in the 1980s mandatorily concluding with a sort of offbrand pseudo-Maoist self-crit session. Moves intended to criticize the rigidity and hierarchy of some other form of group or collaboration sometimes harden quickly into their own form of exclusionary orthodoxy, their own fetishized manners. To me a perfect unconference or rally or online collaboration or what have you would be a jam session, a moveable feast. Improvisation has signal, it has pattern, it has structure, it has plans, but it also has the freedom to say or play what it seems right to say or play at that moment. Whatever works is what I want to be free to do, what the work of the “un” ought to accomplish, to make working an always-provisional, always-scrutinized, always-open value. Let a thousand models bloom, and then cross-pollinate.

This isn’t just about one mode or tradition of collaborative practice. Ultimately this distinction, this different sense of what it means to “UN-” something, strikes right to the heart of the most extravagant and exciting promises that congregants gathered in the house of Shirky try to uphold. I really believe you cannot set yourself against attempts to protect worn-out traditions through enclosure and monopoly with your own enclosures, your own moves to exclusive ownership. Otherwise it just comes off like an attempt to evict the old sheep farmers so that you can breed goats on the same fenced-in pastures, a casting of one brand name against another, a strategy of transfer-seeking.

Openness is a sensibility long before it is found expressed in anything more concrete, and it requires a delight in the mutations and adaptations that follow from an intervention into a closed space. It rests on a gentleness of regard towards the practical and imaginary moves made by others, an encouragement of remixing and reinvention.

I’m going to tread softly here about what it might lead to, because I’ve been wrong before on tech rollouts (both overestimating and underestimating impacts). In general, most of what was discussed in this announcement seems to follow Apple’s established pattern of looking at what other companies and institutions have been trying to do and doing some redesigns of the hardware and delivery channels for those services or products.

Back in the middle of the first dot-com boom, I was asked with some other Swarthmore faculty to attend a presentation by a tech company trying to sell us on digitizing courses and moving to some kind of online delivery of a portion of our curriculum. The main argument they offered was that if we didn’t get on board right now, with their company, we’d be out of business tomorrow because everyone else would be on board with them and we’d be the last analog dinosaurs left on an Earth for small, nimble mammals. For a residential liberal-arts college that emphasizes high-quality teaching in a small, intimate community, that seemed like roughly the Stupidest Idea Ever. It was like an undertaker showing up and trying to convince you that you could save a lot on a funeral plan if you’d just commit suicide right now.

One thing that struck me during the meeting, though, was that if you created a really rich body of materials that looked somewhat like an “online course”, what you really might be doing was crafting a completely novel form of publication. Imagine a work of historical scholarship that included video of the author giving an explanatory lecture at the beginning of a section of the reading; that had direct links to a huge body of archival pictures, audio recordings, maps, and other supporting materials; that extensively linked to relevant (or competing) analyses available in digital collections like JSTOR; and where the author would appear live once every week to take questions from students reading the book in a class.

If you think about it, some “online courses”, whether the Khan Academy or the AI class at Stanford or maybe what Apple’s putting forth, are beginning to converge on something like this design: publications which incorporate materials that have a pedagogical or instructive dimension to them. As a straight-up replacement for an actual small, focused face-to-face class, it’s pretty clear that any online course is going to fall seriously short. But as a kind of publication that works alongside of classes, or that imports some of the substance of classroom pedagogy into their multimedia mix, and which are a guide to self-guided learning or a supplement to a course led by a teacher? I think there’s some real potential.

But two pieces which I read this week have really reverberated with me. The first was Bethany Nowviskie’s “It Starts on Day One”, at the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s ProfHacker column. Nowviskie argues that graduate programs in the humanities should completely wipe out all of their existing methodology courses (she uses the metaphor of a comet hitting the dinosaurs).

I’d agree with her first complaint against such courses, which is that they often teach methods which aren’t really in use any longer, or are inflected with an unthoughtful ethos of wariness or hostility towards digital infrastructure. The second argument she advances I worry about a bit more, which is that many such courses are “a crash course in academic jargon and en-vogue theories”. I’ve previously voiced my own sympathy for the “more hacking, less yacking” vision of some digital humanists, but it’s important not to kill the small mammals along with the dinosaurs, not to let an insurgent energy overwhelm some of the pedagogical wisdom that’s come out of existing practice. In this case, what that might mean is that we shouldn’t forget that making and problematizing are not binary states. Methods classes that are so entirely about doing or practicing that they never stop to be troubled about the purposes and aspirations of doing very quickly become mechanical and arid. “How” should never become the mortal enemy of “why”, “so what” or “who says so?”

Nowviskie rightfully says that a graduate curriculum must include consistent, persistent attention to the “uninterrogated policies and procedures that cover and shape the humanities in the modern college and university”. That’s very much my own feeling, and a driving force behind my continued blogging. But it’s crucially important not to turn many of the critical commitments of digital humanists into the one uninterrogated idea in that process. E.g., if we are going to teach graduate students in a new methodology course how to work with new platforms and publication forms that reconfigure intellectual property or create open access, we can’t step over the question of whether they should. Whenever you’re dealing with a whether kind of discussion, it’s important not to close all the escape hatches. That’s where methods classes have to come back to theory, to problematizing, and without any stopwatch ticking that says, “Hey, we only have five minutes for gnawing on our own entrails, then we have to get back to learning PHP.” This isn’t just an important pedagogical and ethical obligation: it’s also the currency of the humanities. Methods which are cut-and-dried, just about making, just about doing, just about following the recipe, are by their nature somewhat orthogonal to the spirit of humanistic inquiry.

This leads me to the second piece I really liked in this past week, at Ian Bogost’s blog. Now, look, to some extent this essay is just Bogost being Bogost: whether in tweets, blogs or books, you get the clear sense that he exemplifies the quip about not wanting to be part of any club that would have him as a member. The voice that I’ve built up on this blog over the years is so sedately reasonable that I can’t really write in this space any longer in a more expressive way, as I once think I could, but if I could, I’d probably write very nearly what Bogost says in this entry. Bogost says to humanists that if there’s a crisis in the humanities, they’ve got no one to blame but themselves.

To quote at length, he writes:

“We are insufferable. We do not want change. We do not want centrality. We do not want to speak to nor interact with the world. We mistake the tiny pastures of private ideals with the megalopolis of real lives. We spin from our mouths retrograde dreams of the second coming of the nineteenth century whilst simultaneously dismissing out of our sphincters the far more earnest ambitions of the public at large—religion, economy, family, craft, science.”

Digital culture, he adds, is good for the humanities for the simple reason that “computing has revealed a world full of things: hairdressers, recipes, pornographers, typefaces, Bible studies, scandals, magnetic disks, rugby players, dereferenced pointers, cardboard void fill, pro-lifers, snowstorms”.

Where the evenhanded compulsion of my public voice kicks in the wake of his complaint is simply to say that the things scholarly humanists care about, they care about earnestly, passionately, sincerely, and much of how they care about what they care about would be easier to appreciate if those passions were sized to their subject better. Bogost is complaining in part about something that Bruce Robbins observed some time ago about the political posture of many cultural studies scholars: that they simultaneously assume that the stakes of scholarly work are so very high that the least form of error (political, interpretative or empirical) is devastating in its possible impact and that scholars and intellectuals are peripheral, unimportant and marginalized (and must somehow figure out how not to be). The consequence of that dual construction is that the simple pleasures of humanistic writing and teaching get washed out and so too the simple possibilities of talking with publics about culture and ideas in a conversation that could satisfy everyone involved.

Scholarly humanists, taken as an abstract whole, are now so anxious about so many things: their prestige, their authority, their exclusivity, the stability of their subject, that they strain the patience of anyone or any group more serene in its sense of place within the university or the culture. And that anxiety often leads to lashing-out in all directions: at enemies both powerful and weak, at baffled witnesses and sympathetic friends, even to purification rituals within the ranks. I don’t think it has to be that way at all. Bogost thinks the answer is a purge. I think the answer is both as difficult and as simple as a more relaxed, humble and curious approach to being humanists, to scale down the claims we make and the stakes we impose.

It’s a point that’s well-understood in some circles and completely not in others. Witness the degree to which users continue to express some preference for couching search queries to Google and Siri in the form of natural-language questions: according to Bo Pang and Ravi Kumar, that tendency seems to be steadily increasing as users become more familiar with the functioning of search engines rather than decreasing. Users sometimes relate to Google as if it were an oracle, a non-human being with its own personality and knowledge.

Understanding search algorithms as Jones describes them means understanding that however you phrase your query, you’re really asking us, not a creature named Google or Siri. It’s not quite garbage in, garbage out, but it is “what the set of all users and producers of online information know in, what the set of all users and producers of online information know out”. The really tricky thing is to understand how extensive use of that process both changes and expands that set: not just that we put more information online, but that information begets information.

When I started research on the content of children’s television for a co-authored book that was published in 1999, I had three principal sources of information to draw upon. First, my memories and my brother’s memories of watching TV. Second, the memories of contemporaries gathered from real-world conversations and in online discussions on Usenet and other early forums. (Hooray for alt.society.generation-x!) Third, published resources of various kinds, both old and new. Online information about children’s television, independent of message board conversation, was fairly sparse.

Only a few years later, Wikipedia, YouTube and so on came into existence, and at the same time, owners of media libraries began to much more comprehensively push their content out the door in various formats. Today if I want to see every episode of Jabberjaw, know every voice actor’s casting on the show, get comprehensive information about its production and broadcasting, the title character’s appearances in other Hanna-Barbera shows, and the lyrics to a song about the show by the band Pain, I can.

The general implications of this shift are constantly, incessantly discussed. But what I’m not so sure we fully appreciate are the specific implications of online information as a mirror of what we know and how knowing what we know is something that we’ve never really known before.

It’s true that there are still many things that people know, many kinds of information, which are not strongly represented in online repositories. It’s also true, as Eli Pariser has eloquently explained, that both the deliberate infrastructure of online information and the unintended practices arising from our collective use of it, is actively excluding or hiding some information through a progressively tighter series of feedback loops. Even if the “filter bubbles” were popped in some fashion, there would be human ways of knowing and interpreting that could never be adequately included in the most capacious digital informational space imaginable.

Those cautions noted, there is still a huge unused potential for generative changes to the nature of knowledge production that requires making the intellectual paradigm shift that Jones describes, to understanding the mirror of online information for what it is and looking closely at the never-before-seen reflection it provides. Just to cite one example that I have harped on so constantly that I’m sure my Swarthmore colleagues are tempted to punch me in the face every time I say it, suppose that every professor in every institution in the United States published every syllabus they taught in a form where the materials for the course (texts, images, films, etc.) were easily stripped and aggregated as metadata.

Suddenly the canon in a particular field of study would not be a matter of folk knowledge within a discipline, or would not be knowledge residing in four or five highly fragmented and proprietary archives (publishers, disciplinary associations, bookstores, etcetera). We’d know at any one moment what professionals in a particular field of study deemed to be the most teachable, useful or authoritative material. We’d know over time how that judgment had changed. We’d know if what scholars represented as authoritative through citations was significantly different from what they chose to teach.

Notice all the things that this knowledge doesn’t resolve in and of itself. It doesn’t tell us what to teach. It doesn’t tell us why or how to teach it. It doesn’t tell us if there’s a very large missing set of materials that professors would prefer to teach but cannot obtain (either out-of-print materials or things which have never been written or created). It doesn’t tell us what students did with this material, or how and whether they learned from it.

What does it tell us, then? It tells us what mirrors always tell us, if we look at them without flinching: the gap between how we look and how we imagine and claim we look. The mirror of information, our multitudinous automaton, shows us hidden depths we’ve never noticed and blemishes we’d rather not see.

Some of what we see makes clear what a mirror will never show us (whip out your Zen koans here: your face before you were born and all that).

Some of what we see puts older just-so stories and tall tales in their place, and that’s no small feat. Think about the way that academics have traditionally represented (and deconstructed) canons to each other. A comprehensive picture of pedagogical usage might surprise us in all sorts of ways, change our sense of what we think our practices are. Yes, with some potential for perverse or unintended effects, as in the case of comprehensively tracking citations and using citations as a metric of scholarly value. But mostly I think it is fantastically generative to be able to put aside a massive swamp of arguments and studies that never get beyond an initial attempt to answer the question of “what is it that people actually do“, whether or not the answer is what we expected it to be. Whether we’re scraping data from World of Warcraft to find out what the distribution of character choice is, compiling the totality of all print publication in world history, or learning what it is that we actually all use in our classrooms, what we see isn’t just the end of some fumbling-in-the-dark, it is the beginning of some more interesting conversations.

The mirror of information clears out the dead brush from the undergrowth. If we know, really know, that some high-culture canons are an infinitesimal fraction of the totality of global cultural production over the last five hundred years, it sharpens our conversation about why that happened, whether we should be studying all of the occluded culture that was lost in the light of a thin crescent of publication or creation, or whether there’s some reason to stay focused largely on that fraction. If we really know what we’re all teaching, what we value in that context of usage, we might have a far clearer view of what we’re trying to accomplish in creating scholarship, of how we read and interpret knowledge, of what works out in usage.

Understanding that search algorithms are a mechanical Turk–that it’s just us hiding inside–is, if we choose to see it as such, another chance to step towards wisdom through self-knowledge.

But not so fast. There are Big Problems with Gabler’s view of the Big Idea. The first I suspect is going to turn up in critical responses around the Web today, namely, that he turns to a trite-and-true villain to explain the decline of the Big Idea, the Internet. The argument goes something like this: the Internet makes too much information available to too many people and doesn’t require the users of information to actually know or master that information themselves.

This common sentiment seems particularly beloved among middlebrow intellectuals of an older generation, the sort who harbored ambitions of appearing on The Firing Line and then going to dinner at Elaine’s and having Norman Mailer wave to them. They would have done it too, if it weren’t for those darned online kids. There’s a shining, golden moment that they have in their memories when the vast postwar American middle-class was willing to watch a symphony on TV, read a novel by Roth or Updike, and try to understand the theories of Einstein. Sure, Stevenson might take a shot for being an egghead, but at least everybody who was anybody knew who the Van Dorens were.

This memory isn’t completely rose-colored. Gabler knows better than anyone, given his interest in Disney, that there really was a cultural moment that now seems increasingly remote, where Walt Disney, as safely middle-American as anything could be, got on the television screens and told kids and their parents about the wonders of science’s big ideas. This is a bit of what Gabler’s getting at when he suggests we’re living in a post-Enlightenment, post-reason time.

But blaming it on the Internet just underscores what’s wrong with this memory, namely, who’s the we here? Did most Americans in 1960 really know and appreciate the Big Ideas, really take in a redacted and reprocessed version of high culture? I’m thinking not. What’s being remembered here is the public peformance of self within a certain segment of the middle-class in certain places. Push back Gabler’s account further and this gets even more sharply clear. Euro-American working-classes were far more familiar with a range of sophisticated literary work than contemporary elites suspected in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, but I still suspect that the Big Ideas on Gabler’s list circulated far less widely than his rhetoric implies. He uses “we” throughout: I think he needs a different pronoun.

It’s a Goldilocks eulogy: what’s being mourned is an imagined past where just the right number of people had access to knowledge, just the right number of people were in that “we” that cared about Big Ideas as well as the smaller “we” that had the ideas in the first place. It’s not too much information, in the end: it’s too many people. It’s not that we’ve gone from a society that valued Enlightenment reason to one that doesn’t, it’s that all the people who never signed on for Enlightenment reason have become visible, speaking subjects.

——

Two other problems with the Big Ideas as Gabler describes them, though. First, most of the things he labels as Big Ideas weren’t necessarily perceived or voiced as such when they were first articulated. What he’s really describing in many cases are retrospective labels created by popularizers and interpreters of denser or more complicated writing and research. “God is Dead”, for example, is not something that Nietzsche just said off the cuff on the Charlie Rose show some night, nor did he mean it as a simple “Big Idea”. Most Big Ideas, scientific and humanistic, appear only as such after a considerable time, and by the time they appear as a Big Idea, they’re often misleading summaries of more intricate or specialized works.

Equally to the point, a lot of what Gabler describes as Big Ideas turn out to have been actively wrong or at least misleading in the wrong hands, and one of the reasons is not the insights and findings of their initial creators but the seductive refashionings of later popularizers. The process that made Big Ideas into two or three-sentence applause lines that can be rattled off in succession in an op-ed in the New York Times is often what allowed them to turn into ideology and dogma.

If the informationally overloaded present is resistant to Big Ideas, maybe that’s not because we’re too busy watching YouTube videos of Jennifer Aniston playing with a cat. Maybe it’s because we’re acquiring an immune system resistance to the salesmanship of middlebrow middlemen trying to extract saleable Big Ideas from the raw material of knowledge production.

There’s an interesting paradox embedded in Heffernan’s essay that applies to educators, though. She runs through a long list of careers and activities that rely upon skills in digital media or with information and communications technology that already exist, and uses them as a signpost for the unknown careers of the future that will require students trained in today’s cultural and knowledge-producing environments.

The paradox is that somehow we got to this point without our education system having that orientation. That’s a lot of content, work and invention without the training that Heffernan suggests we’ll need for tomorrow’s world. So the trick for educators is not arguing about what we’ll need to operate at all, but about what kinds of improvement and range a “new culture of learning” could achieve, or what kinds of still-unseen practices we might engender. And that is indeed a tricky business: most of the people who try to envision the practices and careers that might come into being succumb quickly to goofy utopianism.

We can start smaller. I think the term “digital native” is basically nonsense. Young adults are not intrinsically and universally gifted users of digital media and online communication simply because they were born in the right generation. They are more accustomed to certain kinds of practices than many older people, sure, but that’s not to say that there isn’t a lot left to learn, lots of untapped possibilities. Moreover, the distribution of skill with digital media and online communication is uneven even in young people. I see a very wide range of know-how and comfort with new media in our population of highly selected students and elsewhere. So educators can argue that their immediate job is to ensure an even distribution of experience with new media practices and a richer exploration of interpretative and expressive work in those media.

Of course, to do so, educators themselves would have to have widely distributed skills and be practiced in those richer possibilities. This is not my sense of the current norms in higher education in the humanities and social sciences, nor do I necessarily see incoming faculty as being markedly closer to that goal, only that there are tendencies in that direction.

But the silver lining here is that what will most improve or sharpen practices of new media creation and interpretation is not technical skill with hardware and software nor is it being the most brave-new-worldish professor on the block. What would most dramatically improve or transform existing digital practices of cultural interpretation and information literacy would be the extrapolation and extension of many of the existing and long-standing strengths of humanistic inquiry. Note I do not say, “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” New media environments are new, and the jobs and practices which extend from them are also novel. Sometimes in little ways, sometimes in very big ways. But intellectuals have followed culture and ideas into new spaces and modes of expression before and accepted that in that journey, much of their own practice would have to change. This is just a bigger and more dizzying expedition. We need to be able to envision something like the transition between the spread of print culture into coffeehouses and public spaces in the 17th and 18th Centuries and the disciplined improvement and wider distribution of print communications and print-based knowledge production in the 19th Century through dictionaries, encyclopedias, public education, and the like.

The key thing, however, is that academics don’t have very long to figure out how they’re going to describe the ways in which their skilled guidance will significantly improve existing practices and professions involving information, knowledge, and representation. If we can’t demonstrate what better ideas and more ethical approaches will look like, rather than complain querulously about how nothing has really changed, stop fiddling with this new-fangled shit, young people these days are so clueless, then we really are going to be in trouble. Higher education (and K-12, for that matter) is going to have to really show what value-added work looks like in a 21st Century world, what better cultures and ways of reading and understanding cultures might be. Pure rejection, unless it seems truly aware of what it’s rejecting isn’t good enough. But neither are blank checks written to supposedly inevitable futures in which everyone is required to be a digital native, as if merely deciding to be digital sufficiently explains what the average skilled, educated digital practicioner of the future will be. If we don’t have any sense of what it is that we lack, given how much has already changed, we can’t make a convincing case for why or what we’ll need to teach.

Barring that, the real upshot of this should be than any writer who publishes in the UK should think again. And anyone reviewing or commenting or footnoting or otherwise using writers who publish in the UK should think once more beyond that.

But I’m still really dissatisfied with the available solutions for the kind of note-taking on texts, sources, documents and other research materials that I would like to pursue, and very nervous about committing too much of my work to some of the existing possibilities.

I think that my note-taking practice when I’m engaged in a long-form research practice is pretty old-school compared to some people. What I tend to do when I pick up a book, document, transcript or other textual source that I’m investigating as either a primary or secondary resource in a research project is read enough to get a sense of whether it’s going to be of use. By that time I’ve logged the full citation in some kind of database, so I know at least that I consulted the source. If I decide that it’s not useful at all, I’m content to take a quick note to that effect and leave that in my citation record. For this part of my research, Zotero is a fantastic solution. I tend to have a collection of “to be consulted” and a collection of “have consulted”, maybe with some further topical breakdowns, and I feel really good about the way that lets me manage that stage of my workflow.

But if I decide that a text or source is worth a more extended reading, then I often want to generate several kinds of notes as I read through it: a) direct quotations; b) summaries of the argument or analysis or content of a particular section or part of the source; c) my own commentary on or responses to what I’m reading. These notes can vary in length from a single sentence to the equivalent of several pages of text.

I want notes of this kind to be searchable by keywords in the text of the notes, to be group-able by the citation record that they’re tied to, and to be tagged by whatever research folksonomy I’m developing as my sense of the subject deepens as the project goes on. I want to be able to add to them if I return later to the same source, and for each individual note to be automatically date-stamped so I can recall later on how continuous my reading of that source was. (If I’m in an archive, I often have two or three documents available and open at once so I can keep several parallel lines of inquiry going and request new materials in an efficient way.) I want to be able to edit and add to each note if later thoughts occur to me and to copy-and-paste from notes as I need to.

For these purposes, I find Zotero’s note-taking to be really bad. Because I want these kind of notes to open in a clean and exclusive interface, not from a little tab alongside a boatload of other data. I want to be able to cycle through notes rapidly, search notes for keywords regardless of which citational record the notes are tied to, and so on. I get that I can open Zotero notes into a separate window, but that’s still a very far cry from the kind of thing I really want.

Ideally, my first note on a secondary source might look something like:

Pitts, Turn to Empire, Introduction

Trying to explain 1780s intellectual skepticism about empire; suddenly in 1840s, you have Mill, de Tocqueville, etc. as enthusiasts. Loosely speaking, she’s talking about liberalism, and why different kinds of liberal universalisms cut towards or away from empire. Will have to see how she manages definition of “liberalism” as book goes on. Wonder about formality of intellectual history of liberalism vs. generalized practices or conceptions of liberalism vis-a-vis empire in mid-1800s. Discusses this issue on p.3 smartly, analysis of Burke’s views of empire likely to be helpful on this point. Should read.

Tags: intellectual history of imperialism, liberalism and empire, 19th Century British Empire, causation of empire

Then my second note might be

Pitts, Turn to Empire, Introduction

“Changing perceptions of race and new forms of racism also contributed to the dramatic shift in European perceptions of many non-European societies, even among those, such as Mill and Tocqueville, who reviled theories of biological differences among races.” p. 19 Wonder if rise of exhibitionary culture, encyclopedism, etc. can fit into this space?

Tags: intellectual history of imperialism, liberalism and empire, 19th Century British Empire, causation of empire

And so on. What would be really lovely is if I could link these notes to my citational records, so that I could click on “Pitts, Turn to Empire” in the record and have my Zotero collection open up, but I’m content to just have the two databases run in parallel. But at the least I want something more orderly and database-like than just a freaking huge Word document, on the other hand.

Ideas?

I was especially keen to show my family Tuolumne Meadows and the high country around it along the Tioga Pass. I knew, however, that the snow might be so heavy that it might not be worth the drive. So two days ago I set out to find out whether the Meadows, Tenaya Lake and some of the easier trails might be free enough of snow to justify going.

When I was young, we came up here a lot. It seemed to me then that there were a fairly large number of Park Service staff who could give informationally rich answers to very specific questions about conditions from hikers, backpackers, climbers, fishers and so on. We once did a five-day backcountry trip up the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River and the rangers were able to tell us a lot about the specific conditions at each camp site.

Today? The privatization of a lot of Park services is much more markedly visible. When you talk to the staff at the Visitor Center, the Mountain Store, or elsewhere, they don’t seem to know much of anything. The one thing the Information staffers in front of the Visitor Center did say, however, was that it was absolutely not worth going up the Tioga Road. I didn’t particularly trust this opinion because the person offering it didn’t seem to know much about anything else and didn’t seem curious about what my purposes in going might be.

In the 1970s, if the staff didn’t know, then you’d probably be able to find people at the backpacker’s camps or Camp 4 who would know. Today I can search the web, if I’m sitting over at the wifi-enabled lounge at Camp Curry. So I check. Hiker boards say no, maybe, yes–if you know what you want, the question is answered very well. Do you want to hike the PCT north of the Meadows? Could be very bad. Do you want to hike to Soda Springs from the road? Boots and be ready to get wet, but ok. Do you want a simple scramble up Pothole Rock plus seeing the Meadows themselves, clear of snow but not blooming yet? (This is what I want.) Well, there’s a photo dated June 22 2011 from a hiker showing the Meadows clear. That’s all I need to know. And yet I can’t help but feel that I should have been able to know it from the staff as well as the web.

Am I remembering the past too rosily? Very possibly. I was a kid, a teenager, a young adult, and maybe too inclined to credit the ranger as a trusted authority figure. I intellectually know too well how little the management of national parks was influenced by anything resembling ecological expertise until the 1970s. I probably misremember rangers the way other people misremember professors, as Olympian figures who combined book knowledge of their responsibilities in the National Parks with a lifetime of experience with animals, environments and people.

But this trip to California, both here in the Sierras and the other places we’ve been, is giving me a glimpse of what will happen when we lose a sense of public mission in institutions like parks. And that too has parallels with higher educations, about what we lose when education is offered as a profit-seeking commodity. You can still get the bare bones of what you need but neither the people offering service nor consuming the product have any sense of enduring obligation or commitment to something beyond that transactional moment. Maybe our new technologies of communication and community will make a different public that will more than make up for that loss, and maybe there are forms of private or profit-seeking management that properly value experience, commitment and mission.