PaleoJudaica.com: Open Access controversy

A little morning-coffee post for this lovely April day...

This morning over at his blog (PaleoJudaica.com: Open Access controversy), Jim Davila weighs on with a thoughtful post on the on-going open-access controversy and the AIA's recent Archaeology editorial firmly opposing it.

A number of friends and colleagues have already made public statements about this (for example, Sebastian Heath and Charles E. Jones) and there's plenty out there on the benefits of OA, so I'm not going to rehash those specifics, but I do want to comment on the role of government. Jim writes that on the question of "whether governments should step in and enforce [OA] now, top down. The AIA says no, and I agree."

So let's be clear on just what Jim and AIA leadership are agreeing to: the more particular question here is whether the US government should require that data resulting from research paid for by the government (that is, by those of us who are US taxpayers) should be made freely available to those people who paid for it. It's already well established that lots of data that the US government pays for is freely available. Go to the Census website for example, and there you can download literally gigabytes of census data, much of it already very conveniently organized and presented in easily understood ways.

The government isn't saying that everyone has to make all their data freely available to everyone, just that those of us who benefit from government funding to obtain those data need to do that. I just don't see how that's not a fair request, and the argument that a wealthy industry will be harmed by it doesn't do much for me. Was the government supposed to shut down the internet because newspapers took a big hit? They paid for that too.

(For the record, I'm myself a beneficiary of government spending on technology as a co-PI on an NEH Digital Humanities Grant.)

Under God

Back in January, Kevin Kruse penned an op-ed for the Gray Lady on the 20th-century rise in American usage of "under God" with various prefixed words. It's an idea I'm generally sympathetic to (i.e., that many things that pass under the mantle of tradition aren't really traditional and in particular this emphasis on America as a Godly nation), but is the language part true? Kruse has written a book on the general subject, so I'm not going to try to tackle the whole thing, but what about some of these factual claims on usage? I think there might be some data the uninitiated among us could look at.

What exactly does Kruse claim in the NYT piece? First:

After Lincoln, however, the phrase ["this nation, under God"] disappeared from political discourse for decades. But it re-emerged in the mid-20th century...

and this:

Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Mr. Fifield and his allies advanced a new blend of conservative religion, economics and politics that one observer aptly anointed “Christian libertarianism.” Mr. Fifield distilled his ideology into a simple but powerful phrase — “freedom under God.”

then this:

Indeed, in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower presided over the first presidential prayer breakfast on a “government under God” theme

and finally:

In 1954, as this “under-God consciousness” swept the nation

So where could we go to check up on all this? Google n-grams! This is a nice little service from the king of data mining himself (corporately speaking) that let's you look for phrases in book corpora. This won't get us everything, but it will get us a lot. So what is there?

First let's look at Ike's phrase of "government under God." Not one I was familiar with, but I wasn't around in 1953 either, so perhaps no surprise. I'm going to look in the corpus of American (not British) books for the entire period Google makes available. Here's the result at right.

Hmmm. Those early years give large results, but since there's nothing in between that and the later occurrences, I'm going to cut those years out of the next one. Now what do we have? Well, clearly a rise around 1953, as Kruse suggests, but the rise actually begins a bit earlier (which you can see by zooming in on the n-gram), and not just in spurious hits that this service sometimes finds, like "government under God's..." (because it pays attention to capitalization, but not punctuation, for some reason): there's even a book called, yep, Government Under God. So, sure, that's a phrase we might reasonably associate with Ike's usage, but it sure wasn't original to him.

How about "freedom under God," another phrase tied with a particular person? The first search shows nothing before the late 19th century, so let's zoom in on the period after 1850. Now there's a clear rise in 1941, following some decades of fairly minimal usage. Here too there's a book entitled with the phrase, this time by Bishop Sheen. Since books might take a little time to write and publish, this suggests increasing popularity, starting in the 1930s, consistent with what Kruse writes.

And that most famous of phrases, Lincoln's "this nation, under God"? I've taken out the smoothing in this plot to show the spikiness of the trend. The first peak back in the early 19th century is actually not a good one; it's got an apostrophe following "God," so all we have in the 19th century is the Gettysburg Address. Clicking through the later references, they too are mainly quotations of Lincoln. And once again there's a book by that title, this time from 1923. Overall though there isn't really an obvious increase in references to the speech in the early to middle 20th century. In fact if anything references die off a bit in the 1930s and 1940s. The n-grams therefore don't support Kruse's argument at all.

Finally what about the simplest, unprefixed form of the phrase: "under God"? The first run shows that it's a fairly popular phrase, on its way out in the 1900s after a peak in the middle of the previous century. At the same time there is definitely a little hump there, so let's zoom in (right). In the plot we can clearly see a resurgence in the phrase around 1940, though the increase seems smaller than the underlying trend. That's the sort of thing Kruse talks about, but it doesn't seem very impressive. Naturally there are a bunch of books with this phrase in their title, especially after the change to the Pledge of Allegiance, which seems more the consequence of what Kruse discusses.

In conclusion? The n-grams don't seem to offer much support for Kruse's contention. In particular the simple phrase "under God"—which dwarfs the more complex phrases in frequency—shows only a minor increase in usage after 1940, and a lot of that has to be attributed to the Pledge in 1954. But Google's just looking at books. How about the NYTimes itself?

Well, "government under God" gets us one hit, in 1957, which suggests this wasn't a big success. The Pledge's "one nation under God" first appears in an article about the Pledge itself, also no help for the theory. "Freedom under God" does seem to appear numerous times in the 1940s, including not a few by Catholic leaders. In fact Sheen's book, already mentioned above, seems to be the first reference in the newspaper. This seems consistent with the n-gram results in which the phrase appears in several Catholic sources from the 1920s.

As for the simple "under God," that appears a whole bunch of times even in the earliest years available in the search engine (1851-). For example, here's President Harding in his proclamation of Thanksgiving Day, 1921, which was subsequently quoted by the American ambassador to England, George Harvey.:

Under God, our responsibility is great; to our own first; to all men afterward, to all mankind in God's justice.

So where are we then? Well, this quick look at easily available data hasn't really allowed us to look closely at the context for a lot of the usage, though it does seem clear that

• "under God" was a phrase Americans would have been familiar with and 
• it enjoyed a bit of a resurgence in the 1940s and after, though did not see even a doubling is usage
• Lincoln's phrase was pretty much his invention and was (and is?) quoted, but hardly re-used
• "Government under God" went nowhere
• "Freedom under God" seems to have been popular in Catholic circles from the 1920s on

In conclusion, it's not unfair to say that the 20th century was a popular time for connecting God with the nation in a linguistic way, but it's not clear from what we've looked at here that the resurgence didn't start a bit earlier than Kruse seems to talk about, and didn't ride over a strong substratum of "under God"-liness. It also might have its origins not in the Protestant Fifield, but among Catholics (who may also have been allies of Fifield), something that might not be too surprising in today's political climate.

AIA Comes out in Favor of the Research Works Act

In the middle of the holiday break, our own AIA, the Archaeological Institute of America, submitted to the  Office of Science and Technology Policy of the US government their statement on the recently proposed Research Works Act, which is in essence an attack on the growing Open Access movement. (Follow the link to Thomas.gov and check out the Wikipedia entry too.)

Leaving aside the apparent absence of this document from the AIA's own website (site search engines can be remarkably crappy when it comes to this kind of thing), why didn't they think this would be worth letting me, a member in good standing, know about? Especially now that the AAA's response—to which the AIA explicitly refers in their document—has raised a ruckus in that group!

But more importantly, where's the membership on this? Are we in favor of this stance? I'm certainly not. Anyone else?

Many of us in the profession are advocates for Open Access (a term which the AIA doesn't even seem to understand, to judge from their response), and I suspect would have a thing or two to say about the stance of our professional organization. Others have made the case already, so I won't re-argue it here, but I encourage you to read some of them (by, e.g., Kristina Kilgrove or Derek Lowe).

What's most galling though, is that this statement was made by the AIA literally days before our  annual meeting, when it would have been a trivial matter to bring up the subject in official venues and get some important feedback. I wasn't there (off in Rome with students), but I haven't had any official word of anything. And given the decades-long prominence of some of our members in what's now known as the Digital Humanities, this is profoundly disappointing.

I certainly hope that others in the AIA feel the same way about this, and I'm fixing to find out who they are!

Correction: After some discussion with a few others, including Sebastian Heath, I have to correct myself. This AIA's letter was not in response the RWA per se, but, as I wrote, to the RFI from the OSTP. The issues are the same, in that the RWA addresses the question of mandating Open Access to publications dealing with federally funded research which is what the AIA statement dealt with (along with some other things I disagree with). I'll deal with this more in another post, but I wanted to get a correction in right away and apologize for the error.

Do you have an iBooks textbook policy at your school?

Apple's new foray into the world of textbooks includes iBook Author, software that enables anyone to create a nice-looking iBook without too much trouble. This will likely mean that lots of faculty who have refrained from doing so in the past may start to create their own textbooks. And some people will no doubt be encouraged by their ability to sell these in Apple's on-line store. (Right now if you sell them at all, you must sell them through Apple's store.) Small prices + large volume = welcome income, especially for the underpaid teaching profession.

This raises some interesting questions for educational institutions, which have long dealt with instructors requiring students to buy textbooks they'd written, but almost always published through traditional presses. Sure, the faculty member would be earning money in the form of royalties, but the presence of the press as middleman provided the institution with the fig leaf (at least) of a review process. Apple's new software and store offer a way to cut out this middleman (even if the presses have signed on to Apple's efforts already).

So what's an educational institution to do? Is your institution ready for the first calls and emails from parents complaining that the professor is making the class buy the over-priced iTextbook they wrote and put up in the on-line store?

Rome Renewed

I've now been in Rome for about two weeks, with a colleague and bunch of Drew students on a Drew International Seminar. Amazingly I have not written about it at all, and I feel even worse now reading my friend Dave's post after being here only three days.

Dave writes a bit about how Rome is changed, which seemed appropriate tonight as I walked back to our residence from the main train station, Termini. For those who've been wondering when they do all the roadwork in Rome, the answer is, at least in part, at night when the streets are fairly empty. Here is a photo of a road crew busy paving over the sanpietrini of Via Cavour with asphalt. In the background is S. Maria Maggiore.

Another crew apparently is working fast to repaint the crosswalk lines ("le strisce"):

So, Eternal but updated...not that I don't prefer the sanpietrini.

Dude, where's my diss? ''

Part III, in which I produce the document

In the second installment of this multi-post topic, I ended wondering where I might store copies of my dissertation for public download. For some reason it hadn't occurred to me to use the Box account that I have. (Box is like DropBox.) Since I have now figured this out, I present below two pdf versions. This first is to a copy of the UMI version which is, as I wrote before, essentially a photocopy of the original paper version I submitted to them back in 1998. The second pdf is a searchable version I recently created. That wasn't as easy as it sounds.

It's true that it's a trivial matter to create a pdf these days. On my Mac, I can just print directly to pdf, and this was my first approach. The problem is that the latest version of Microsoft Word renders the text slightly differently from the way version 5.1a (of blessed memory) did it. As a result the page numbering got way off. (I will refrain from the obvious rant about the problems this version issue causes.) The first remedy I tried was tweaking the margins a bit, thinking that the fonts (mainly Times) were being rendered at a consistently different width. No dice. In some cases lines were longer, in other shorter. I haven't a clue why. OK, I think, so I'll just fire up version 5.1a. Well, that requires at least Classic, which doesn't run on Intel Macs anymore. No problem, SheepSaver emulates such a machine, even on my nifty new MacBook Pro. First new problem: OS 9 doesn't allow such easy printing to pdf. Solved with PrintToPDF, which creates a virtual Chooser (remember that?) printer that really sends output to a pdf file. Great. The second problem wasn't new nor was it so easily solved.

Word 5.1a does a better job than the 2011 version at reproducing the layout of my original document, but not a perfect one. For some reason it was just not matching up and once again it wasn't a simple matter of adjusting margins. So here's what I did. I figured that the smallest unit of text I had to worry about was the page, and many of them were the same, that is, they started and ended on the same word as my original dissertation printout. Some of the intervening lines look different, but since no one was going to be citing my dissertation that way, it would be OK. Where the pages didn't line up, I went in and inserted extra spaces to force line breaks, with the occasional tweak to margins, mainly in indented quotations. That got the pages right, and let my virtual 1998 Mac create a searchable pdf.

The only remaining problem with the pdf is that the text in ancient Greek is not real text. Back in the 90s we still weren't using Unicode everywhere, so the ancient Greek is really just regular Latin character codes shown in a font that uses Greek glyphs instead of Latin ones. (In reality lots of the accented Greek characters are punctuation of some kind.) The pdf displays the font fine, but it really isn't Greek text that you can copy or search for.

Here are the links. Again, they lead to my Box account, which I haven't upgraded to allow direct downloads, so you'll have to do something else to get the pdf itself:

• UMI page views
• Searchable text

What I'd really like to do is make the dissertation available as an e-book of some kind. The problem remains the Greek and the page breaks. The Greek isn't a big deal, even if I had to type it all out agin (which I don't); there's not a lot of it. Also it's not difficult to turn a pdf into one of the popular e-book formats, but my footnotes mean I can't do that without some work. Ideally I'd start from the Word doc, so a little research is needed to see what the options are.

Meanwhile...where's your diss?

"'Crisis' in Classics" briefly revisited

Back before Who killed Homer?, John Heath wrote a somewhat contentious article for Classical World (John Heath et al., “Self-Promotion and the ‘Crisis’ In Classics [with responses],” CW 89, no. 1 (1995): 3-52) in which he argued, among other things, that the significant great divide in the profession was between those elite who work at large schools and the others who work at small. In support of the argument Heath noted differing participation rates in professional organizations, which he attributed to the ability of people at larger, more resource-rich places to volunteer for such work, knowing that their institutions would provide the needed back-up. As someone working at a small, resource-poor university, I was sympathetic to that argument, though several of the respondents to his article were not.

Being a data-based kind of guy, it seems to me that this is a testable hypothesis. If the participation rates in professional organizations present the kind of skew towards larger institutions (universities) that Heath describes, that's evidence in favor of his proposition. A recent announcement of the latest officers of the major professional organization for Classicists, the American Philological Association (one of many APAs) provides one relevant data set:

President-Elect: Denis Feeney (Princeton U)

Vice President, Outreach: Mary-Kay Gamel (UCSC)

Vice President, Publications: Michael Gagarin (UTAustin)

Board of Directors: Sara Forsdyke (UMich) and Matthew Roller (Johns Hopkins U)

Nominating Committee: Donald J. Mastronarde (UCBerkeley) and Ruth Scodel (UMich)

Education Committee Member: Mary C. English (Montclair State U)

Goodwin Award Committee: Peter T. Struck (UPenn)

Professional Matters Comm. Members: Lillian Doherty (UMD) and Barbara K. Gold (Hamilton College)

Program Committee: Member Christopher A. Faraone (UChicago)

Publications Committee Member: Andrew M. Riggsby (UTAustin)

By my count, that's 12 of 13 from universities, including two from each of two places (one of which, for the record, is my doctoral alma mater in Ann Arbor), and 9 of the 10 universities have graduate programs in Classics.

I did a count a few years ago of Classics faculty by the highest degree offered at their institution. It was based on the 2002-2003 APA departmental survey data. Here's a graphical representation. You'll see that faculty at BA-offering institutions make up half of the total, with those at institutions without even a Classics major accounting for another 8%. That total of 58% is a far cry from the 15.4% (2/13) rate seen in the election results.

Lest one think this an unusual year, holders of these same offices in 2011 were employed by BU, UMD, Georgetown U, UChicago, UCLA, Stanford U, U South Carolina, Reed College, Columbia U, Duke, UPenn,* UPenn, and Brown U, respectively. That's one college out of 13 positions, two from one university,* and again two from places without graduate programs.

Of course not all universities are the same (I teach at one, for example, though it's very much a small liberal-arts college attached to a theological school), and different faculty have different workloads, but the universities in the lists above are large and in most cases wealthy institutions. Add to that the information about graduate programs, I'd say this makes a reasonable prima facie case in support of Heath's position.

* I had to cheat a bit with one of the committee memberships because they were two members elected for 2012, but only one for 2011, so I went back a grabbed the previously elected member.