January 16, 2012 at 2:00 PM. The date of my defence (defense?) has come and gone and it feels a bit surreal. Hard to believe the PhD is done.
The defence was actually enjoyable; we had a good discussion about notions of legal acculturation, which is one of the topics I got most excited about in my dissertation. The week is busy at the moment but I’m planning a post on the issue for the weekend. The plan is to dust off this blog and get it going again this year.
For the first time, a THATCamp was held at the AHA attracting a big group of interested DHers who had not yet been able to make it to this popular unconference. During the introduction, Dan Cohen asked for a show of hands of those who had never been to a THATCamp before and a full 70% of the crowd raised their hands. It was nice seeing so many people interested in matters at the intersection of technology and history.
After a session on crowdsourcing, we discussed the problem of how to rescue old sites from oblivion (in which the concept of the Internet Paramedics was coined), followed by a very fruitful session in which Jeff McClurken shared with us his experience teaching both digital history courses and digitally-inflected courses. Check out his amazing link of resources.
Listening to Jeff and reading his syllabi and the amazing work his students produce makes me itchy to try some of that in my own classes. Monday I begin a course on medieval Spain that will be digitally-inflected. Students will be required use extensively the wiki platform in which I designed the course website. One of the assignments is an essay based on the Poem of the Cid but instead of simply writing a paper and handing it in to me, I want them to create a page on a wiki project on El Cid. We may end up with about 50 pages on various aspects of El Cid, which we will then organize in a thematic table of contents. The second stage of this project will be to write a critique of a recent book on El Cid using resources from the El Cid wiki.
Another way the students will use the wiki is by writing notes on the lectures. Each week a team of students will be required to write a short summary of the main points of the lecture, highlighting three passages from the readings and explaining how it connects to the lecture as well as listing a few key terms and giving definitions. The rest of the class is expected to post comments on the readings to the page. Can’t wait to see what they come up with!
I’ve spent the day at a workshop at U of T dedicated to developing Drupal websites. This was organized as a Bootcamp session of the GTA version of THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp). I’ve played with Drupal before and we use it to run the ePorte site but have never tried creating a site from scratch on it. The learning curve is pretty steep to play with it on your own so it’s very nice to have a whole day devoted to it at THATCamp GTA.
Our project was to create a news site, with a news content type, designing categories for our news posts, installing a theme, editing it, and so on. It was fun and I can see how powerful Drupal is since every little things needs to be set up and can be customized in many different ways. It might be an interesting platform to use for the research project Dana and I will begin next year. In a few hours, we had a site like this:
For simple sites, WordPress still rules though.
I’ve participated of my first Yak Lab today, organized by DISC. The idea behind the yak labs is that participants would bring a problem and we would work on it together during the workshop. I was in charge or bringing a problem to the table and I brought a pedagogical one. I’m basically shopping for a digital history project to have as class project for the third-year course on medieval Spain that I’m teaching next term. I strongly believe in teaching some basic digital literacy in all my courses but often have to contend with the problem that most students don’t have my technical background and I don’t want to lose too much class time teaching tech skills.
Some of the things I’ve done in the past is to use wikis or blogs to start class discussions but I haven’t actually had students hand in research projects in a multimedia format. I’m really keen in doing that but need to have it well prepared ahead of time so we don’t get boggled down in details once the course starts.
Some of the ideas we discussed in the yak lab include:
In an ideal world, technology would just work. I’m pretty comfortable using technology in my life and work and strongly believe that part of my job is to teach my students some computer and internet literacy (you don’t really believe they are “born” digital, do you?). It’s really exciting that universities everywhere now support this notion and we see more and more gadgets and services created for education and more and more classrooms being made into “smart classrooms”. What drives me nuts, however, is that often these classrooms are not so smart. Nothing is as seamless as it should be.
Despite having one of these so-called smart classrooms with a podium with integrated computer that is built in and connected to the projector, internet, speaker system, etc, I lugged my laptop to class all of last year. Why? Well, I needed to run i>Clicker, have a few websites pre-loaded, my presentation set up so I figured it was easier to do it from my computer. Maybe it was a habit from the days I used Keynote from my presentations and needed my mac to run it properly.
This year I decided I would simplify my life, stop carrying so many things to class, and simply use the podium. I did my homework – I looked up how to run i>clicker from a USB, had everything I needed set up. And it didn’t work. First, it took me a while to log into everything I needed open – prezi and blackboard. Then i>clicker turned out to be too slow running on the USB stick. Then the i>clicker base would not run. So I had to fidget with the different USB ports. I copied the i>clicker software to the desktop. Then it wouldn’t show on top of the Prezi presentation running off the prezi website. So I copied the presentation to the desktop. Then the new-fangled updated version of the i>clicker software simply refused to show results. ARGH.
That’s it. Back to lugging my laptop. Another reason I should buy an Air.
[dusting off this blog]
Last sunday, I wrote this on evernote meaning to upload it here at the end of the day:
In about an hour, I’ll make my way to Robarts Library to work on some final cosmetic changes my supervisor suggested on the final draft of the dissertation. The plan is to finish these by tomorrow so I can pass on the dissertation to my other two committee members, who need to take a look before I officially submit it to the School of graduate Studies. SGS then sends it to external and internal reviewers wo write a report about it and we all meet at the defense, usually about 6-8 weeks after submission. Needless to say, I dont feel like it’s done yet. The defense seems too far away. I’ve always known, in a way, tha it would never feel done since a work of this nature is bound to have loose ends, opportunities missed, side roads not travelled. I am only too aware of all the issues I *could* have talked about but didn.t for one reason or another. There are also important finds that only happened late in the writing process and that could have made for a much more exciting dissertation if I had reestructured the whole thing around that issue. That would require yet another year of writing. Instead, we file it for the revisions later. Maybe for te book? It’s hard to tell at this point. All I can tell is that the end is finally in sight and exciting opportunities are lined up for te future.
It’s now five days later and I have handed in the dissertation to my other committee members. The focus now is to prepare for the first week of classes next week.
The following is a digital project I would like to put together in the near future and which I’d like to discuss in this year’s Roots and Routes Summer Institute here at U of T
The Archives of the Crown of Aragon contain hundreds of thousands of documents dealing with the history of the Jews in the territories under the control of the Catalano-Aragonese crown. Catalan and Aragonese rulers kept records from the earliest times, much of which survived the centuries. The great territorial and political expansion that marked the reign of King Jaume the Conqueror (1213-1276) and the more complex bureaucracy necessary to manage Jaume’s new territories led to the creation of the Royal Archives of the Crown of Aragon, a development furthered by the revival of Roman Law and the acquisition of paper-making technology from the Muslims with the conquest of Valencia. The chancery registers of the monarchs of the Crown of Aragon total today over 6,000 volumes of nearly four million unpublished documents spanning seven centuries. The royal chancery of Pere the Ceremonious alone (1336-1387) produced 1,164 volumes of an average of 200 folios each. Since The Crown viewed Jews and Muslims as part of the royal treasury this body of documents include much detail about the daily life of Jews in the medieval Crown of Aragon.
Nineteenth-century archivists and early twentieth-century scholars have catalogued and indexed the documents dealing with Jews in the royal chancery registers for the period of 1213-1327. Such finding aids do not exist for the later period making the process of finding documents dealing with Jews after that period much more time-consuming and tedious. It is precisely this excess of sources that often makes this crucial period for the history of the Jews of the Crown of Aragon so understudied. Over the course of one year, during my dissertation research, I catalogued about 200 registers at the ACA, covering the period 1379-1391. While much of this material is referenced in my dissertation, I hope to make this catalogue available to future scholars in a tool that can be collaboratively expanded as new registers are studied.
Making the full catalogue available would be an ambititous project that would take some time to implement since it would include tagging over 3,000 documents. The proposal is therefore to start with a far more focused project to begin to share at least some of the documentation. The idea is therefore to focus on one Jewish individual – Samuel Gracia, originally from the town of l’Arboç, south of Barcelona. Although most individual Jews appear only once or twice in the royal registers, I have located at least fifty letters dealing with Samuel Gracia. Involved in a series of lawsuits against family, Jews, Christians, and Jewish officials, Samuel Gracia presents an interesting case study for scholars interested in migration as well as the legal culture of late fourteenth-century Catalonia. I have used his case extensively in my dissertation to discuss the ways in which Jews in Catalonia and Aragon consumed Christian justice in order to settle disputed with coreligionists. Through his crafty use of multiple Christian courts and navigation of jurisdictional boundaries, Samuel Gracia exemplifies the degree to which Jews were acculturated in the mainstream legal culture of Catalonia and Aragon.
This case fits well within the topic of Roots & Routes since many ways it shows a Jew often challenging his own Jewish roots in search of ways out of legal and fiscal problems. The main idea is to build a collaborative site – or upload to e-Porte – images of the documents dealing with Samuel Gracia in order to share with the wider world. Ideally, scholars working at local archives in the areas where Samuel lived would add any documents they found in the course of their research.
The hope is that the sources and the topics they illuminate would help bridge the gap between Jewish history, Spanish (or Mediterranean) history and mainstream medieval European history. Within the fields of Mediterranean history, for example, legal cultural historians have began to show how those traditionally considered powerless such as women or slaves used law and litigation in order to shape their lives and identities. Because the assumption by these historians is that Jews resided outside mainstream legal traditions, they have for the most part been absent from these conversations. This project could go a long way in bridging this gap.
