Update II: "'Crisis' in Classics" briefly revisited

The APA has just announced the results of the annual elections for 2012. So what kind of institutional representation do we find the members voted for (not that there was much choice in this dimension)?

Office              Institution     Description

President           UCincinnati     Big Public U.

Financial Tr.       UC, Davis       Big Public U.

VP Prof. Matters    UVa             Big Public U.

VP Pub & Research   UT              Big Public U.

Board of Directors  Ohio State      Big Public U.

Board of Directors  UPenn           Big Private U.

Nominating Comm     Princeton       Big Private U.

Nominating Comm     CUNY            Big Public U.

Education Comm      Phillips-Exeter Elite Prep School

Goodwin Award Comm  Bowdoin         Elite Private LAC

Prof Matters Comm   Episcopal Acad  Elite Prep School

Program Committee   Harvard         Big Private U.

Pub & Research Comm Cornell         Big Private U.

So that's 6 from big public universities, 5 from big private universities, 2 from elite prep schools (1 of which has an endowment that easily dwarfs that of all but the wealthiest of LACs in this country) and 1 from an elite small LAC.

Classics' main professional organization continues to be dominated by the "haves."

Reminds me of the Romney campaign...

Previous posts in this category:

• Update: "'Crisis' in Classics" briefly revisited
• "'Crisis' in Classics" briefly revisited

My New article

I've been getting more and more involved in digital humanities, so I'm happy to announce that my most recent publication is now out in an open-access journal:

John D Muccigrosso, “Re‐Interpreting the Robinson Skyphos,” Studia Humaniora Tartuensia 13, no. A.1 (2012): 1–15

That's the old-school citation for this new-school journal, and hardly befitting a 21st-century open-access publication, so here are a couple of better choices:

1. The direct link to the journal webpage for the article
2. My Zotero library reference
3. The article itself as a pdf

The article is of course free to download (hence the OA bit), so knock yourself out. Please.

Here's the abstract:

The scene on the Robinson skyphos was wrongly identified for years as a depiction of clay‐working, either in a kiln or other preparation area. Recent scholarship has correctly identified it instead as one related to the grain harvest. This article presents a new examination of the scene, pointing out details the importance of which had not previously been noted. It also brings to bear comparanda from Egyptian art which put the identification of the scene beyond doubt.

The article began as part of an exploration of depictions of what were called potters and pottery workshops on ancient Greek pots, but which I thought were often not. It's inspired to a large extent by the work of David Gill and Michael Vickers on the elevation of ancient pottery-making to an "art" instead of a "craft" to reflect modern rather than ancient thinking. (And let's not get into the whole issue of how we distinguish between those two things!) The work actually started as an grad-school exploration of how much Greek pottery was exported, not only in terms of the number of physical pots, but also the economic value of those pots. It won't be surprising to learn that the course was taught by William Loomis, the guy who studied how much the ancient Greeks actually got paid (Wages, welfare costs, and inflation in classical Athens), and, upon reflection, the topic was probably a good indicator of my interest in what we now call digital humanities in the first place!

And for a little academic genealogy...David Moore Robinson, the classical art historian and collector after whom the pot in the article was named, was the teacher of George Hanfmann, who in turn taught John G. Pedley, with whom I studied at Michigan (though he was not my advisor) and who invited me to join the on-going excavations at Paestum, Italy at the end of the last century(!), which were conducted by Jim Higginbotham of Bowdoin College, with whom my previous article was co-authored. So far, so good. Fairly normal academic stuff, especially for a fairly small field like mine. But wait, there's more!

One of the standard works on the manufacturing techniques of ancient Greek pottery was written by Joseph V. Noble, who died in 2007, during the period in which I was working on this article. Turns out he had lived for years in the same town as me (Maplewood, NJ), just a few hundred meters from the train station where I daily stood for my commute, though unfortunately I never knew that until it was too late.

Update: "'Crisis' in Classics" briefly revisited

The candidate list is up for this year's APA elections. As usual it's dominated by big schools: only three of the 27 are small-college/prep-school people, and one of them is from a top-10 LAC with an endowment pushing a billion dollars and another from a prep school with an even larger endowment(!).

(My first post on this topic.)

Apple's Worst Interface Widget

Apple's got a tradition of being very good at their human interfaces. There've been some notable exceptions (like the wheels on version 4.0 of the classic QuickTime player - which earned a spot in the Interface Hall of Shame). The basic problem there was a common one: they tried to make the app look and act like the physical object it was analogous to, despite the inappropriateness of the physical interface to the computer screen and mouse.

Lately though I've grown really tired of an interface widget that rampant in iOS and shows up in a few places in OS X too: the on/off "slider" switch (scare quotes intended). Here it is from the Time Machine System Preference pane:

It just doesn't work very well. In fact I'll bet that many people probably don't actually slide it to toggle it from one position to the other; they tap it (or click it in OS X). Now, in both iOS and OS X you can slide it, but it only works like you'd expect in iOS. In OS X if you slide it only part-way over and then decide you really don't want to toggle the switch and move it back to its original position, it'll slide itself over anyway as soon as you let go! That is, it registers the click, not the position you slide it to.

Dumb and counter-intuitive. Sliding switches are OK in real life (though I like the old-school toggle switches myself and they more jump than slide), but with a mouse, they aren't nearly as easy to use as a button (which is probably why they act like buttons too). On iOS devices, where they do function like the real-world version, it's easier to simply tap them like buttons and avoid the possibility of missing the switch. (I'm not even sure that they did work like sliders in earlier versions of the iOS; I remember trying to slide them when I first got my iPhone and being unsuccessful. Maybe I was just missing the target.)

Variety is the spice of life and all that, but it shouldn't come at the expense of usability. So, Apple, when it works like a button, make it a button; when it doesn't work like a slider, don't make it look like one.

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.