History: January 2007 Archive Page

It's hard to imagine what freshmen think when they wander into Professor Banzai's lecture hall. Weller reports that he loses a lot of students after the first class. "They thought they were going to get the easy A from old RoboCop," he says with a laugh. The 450-page course reader tells them otherwise. Those who stay get a view into Weller's two worlds. For example, his class at Syracuse on Hollywood and the Roman Empire requires watching toga-and-sandal epics (Ben Hur and The Last Temptation of Christ among them) and reading primary-source Roman authors in an attempt to reconcile big-screen Rome with the real thing. "The Romans were an unbelievably complex people, and we are an unbelievably complex people," Weller says. "We can learn so much about why things are the way they are by looking at what they did." He goes on to explain how the absence of the concept of zero in Greek antiquity laid the foundation for Western philosophical thought. --Mike Daisey --RoboCop, Ph.D (Wired)

Peter Weller, the actor who played RoboCop and Buckaroo Banzai is working towards a Ph.D. in classical history. Cool!

E-mail is , of course, cheaper and encourages quicker thought, and it introduces a peculiar blend of the personal and professional. The AIP historians have also detected a decline in the use of lab notebooks, finding that data are often stored directly into computer files. Finally, they have noted the influence of PowerPoint, which can stultify scientific discussion and make it less free-wheeling; information also tends to be dumbed down when scientists submit PowerPoint presentations in place of formal reports.

Generally, though, these new communications techniques are good for scientists, encouraging rapid communication and stripping out hierarchies. But for historians, they are a mixed blessing. It is not just that searching through a hard disk or database is less romantic than poring over a dusty box of old letters in an archive. Nor is it that the information in e-mails differs in kind from that in letters. Far more worrying is the question of whether e-mail and other electronic data will be preserved at all. --Robert P. Crease --The lost art of the letter (Physics Web)

When I write major projects, I typically save multiple drafts under different file names. But for routine work, like many people out there, I just save the new work over top of the old. I can see that denies future historians access to rough drafts.

While I doubt future historians will ever comb through my materials, the point is that historical methods will have to change to account for the fact that much of our writing is ephemeral and interactive, which means future historians will likely have to spend more time reading e-mail exchanges and tracking down obscure references to data that is no longer available, rather than reading stand-alone essays.

I recall reading that as people started doing more of their daily work via telephone, historians faced difficulty piecing together events that in a previous century would have left a paper trail. E-mail is at least more friendly to archivists than telephone conversations.

Even Twain scholars seem to have missed his foresight on this subject. I discovered it by accident, in browsing through the 24 volumes of his collected works in the "Author's National Edition." In an 1898 short story called "From the 'London Times' of 1904," he describes an invention called the "telelectroscope," a gadget hooked up to the phone system: "The improved 'limitless-distance' telephone was presently introduced, and the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues." --Crawford Killian --Mark Twain, Father of the Internet (Tyee)

I enjoy teaching Forster's The Machine Stops (1909) each year, but I hadn't heard of Mark Twain's story, "From the 'London Times' of 1904."

Killian concludes:

It is all very melodramatic, but Twain clearly understood the basic concept of the Internet: effortless world travel through an electronic medium. Just past the centenary of his imagined "telelectroscope," we who surf the web should pause to thank America's greatest author -- a man ahead of his time in more ways than one.

The story is not a particularly good technological thriller, yet the story seems to be as much about Dreyfuss Affair as it is about the telelectroscope. Given that context, I think the story is worth a closer look.

The 1954 American Quarterly article "Mark Twain and the Austrian Edison" refers to Twain's interest in Jan Szczepanik. Szczepanik, the inventor whose death is blamed on the innocent Clayton, is not merely a character on Twain's story, but an historical figure, among whose many inventions was a forerunner of the television called the telelectroscope.

The term telelectroscope predated both Szczepanik's invention and Mark Twain's story. Twain himself was an early adopter of technology, perhaps most notably the typewriter; to him, an inventor was a "poet in steel." Yet, cynical as always, in this story he demonstrates that the wonders of technology do not change human nature. As new types of evidence emerge, twisted human nature will continue to distort reason in the service of old prejudices. The crime story exists merely to set up this political statement, on a topic of great concern to literary figures and intellectuals at the time.

If I had the time, I might also investigate what Twain was talking about when he mentioned a "new paragraph added to the Constitution in 1899." Was that just a plot device to get around the double-jeopardy rule in the US legal system, or would the original audience have recognized it as a reference to something that was being debated at the time, just as the original audience would have understood the "French precedent" to be a reference to the Dreyfus affair?

Slamdance finalist Super Columbine Massacre RPG has been officially kicked from the festival due to mounting pressure from protesters and the loss of sponsorship, the game's creator told Kotaku Thursday night.

This is the first time in the Slamdance Festival's 13-year history that a game or film has been removed from the festival due to criticism or outside pressure. --Exclusive: Columbine Game Kicked From Competition (Kotaku)

I cited this game as an example in a paper I gave at the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education in November. My point was that the young audience that Holocaust educators want to reach has a different set of moral and aesthetic responses to games than the adults who don't have much to say beyond dropping their jaws. The Holocaust deniers and other promoters of hate and violence already have their issue-oriented games out there. While I think it's exaggerating to suggest that a Jew-bashing game is going to have much impact (those games, like the Christian-themed evangelical games typically have poor production values and won't really attract the interest of someone who doesn't already share the world view that the game is trying to promote). There is enough social commentary embedded within this particular RPG that I think it moves beyond cynical exploitation, and really attempts to use a popular medium in an effective way.

The designer, Danny Ledonne, speaks eloquently and thoughtfully about his creation (in this article and elsewhere on Kotaku).

Update, Jan 6: Ian Bogost offers a good overview of the Slandance controversy. It looks like it wasn't external pressure from advertisers after all, but one person's concern about what MIGHT happen if the game were to be part of the show.

I teach plenty of safe classics, but I also teach books that contain disturbing and threatening ideas. I find it amazingly hypocritical that Slamdance (an indie film festival, founded to protest commercialism at Sundance) would override the artistic decisions of the panel that agreed to let the Columbine game into the competition.

--Vintage Mobile Phones

I'd love to see one with a rotary dial... how cool would that be?