#westernuniversity

Yes, I really am just coming out swinging at all of my own interests and potential career opportunities. These thoughts are all interrelated ideas that have been floating around recently during a few of my classes.

Recently, a professor poised the question, “are we [historians] good at our jobs?” Which then sent me into a long, impassioned speech about how the role of a historian is inherently flawed and the work will always be done badly, but we do the best we can with the knowledge and backgrounds that we have. Even a week later, with further ruminating on the question and my answer, I have not changed my mind. 

(I thought this photo of our visiting anthropologist at Vindolanda looking very done with me as I asked a question was fitting for this post)

The role of historians is to encourage constructive thought and a better understanding of one another through the studying and writing of history. Seems simple enough, but then you have to consider that when we study a person, event, time period, etc., there is always something missing, be it an event that was unrecorded, an artifact that was destroyed, or an account that was misconstrued previously. Then with writing, it is impossible to include every perspective (even if we had them) while also making it accessible to every level of interested parties and coherent as a written work in its own right. Going even further, the role of a Public Historian (to interact with the public and help in education and advancement of historical understanding) is a job that is already complicated by the aforementioned problems in studying and writing. 

Historians are bad at our jobs. Because we don’t have the tools to be good at our jobs. Those tools just don’t exist. But we do the best we can with what we have, and we are better than we were before. In the future, those historians will hopefully be better than us, but still bad, because it is a flaw inherent to our discipline.

But this failure can also be humbling, because if we recognize that we are always going to be doing an imperfect job, then we are motivated to try to do as perfect of an imperfect job as we can. Then future historians will have a stronger base to work from. I know especially as a grad student that a lot of us get hung up on the idea that any research we do has to be original, but nothing in research is completely original. We are always standing on the shoulders of our predecessors, as shaky as they may be. 

With a shaky foundation though, the metaphor continues that eventually the discipline will collapse in on itself. So why hasn’t it yet? My thoughts on why it hasn’t extend into why I think conservation is often a fruitless enterprise. One of the only guarantees that we have in life is that we will die. That knowledge, whether we can pinpoint it or not, is what motivates us to do anything with our time, because we know that time is finite. That impermanence applies to the material objects that we create too. Humans spend millions of dollars a year on embalming dead bodies in vain attempts to prevent the inevitable and ignore the reality that we will decay. Museums and archives do the same thing. We want to matter on a grand scale. Archaeology does the same thing, but in a destructive way. We go to great lengths to make our past matter, so that we matter in the present and will matter in the future. Even if we recognize that eventually everything will no longer matter, we prop up the institutions that allow for us to feel like we matter in the now, and fulfill our belief that we will matter in the future.

That got a little bit nihilistic. 

I am a Historian. I am a Public Historian. I am an Archaeologist. I participate in all the things that I just spent 500+ words saying are bad. Because wanting to matter is what it means to be human. And in my opinion, wanting to let other people know that they matter is what it means to be a Public Historian. There is a difference between telling someone that they matter and working with someone to prove that you believe that they matter, and that difference is what I like to explore. 

One of the supporting arguments that you always hear when people talk about academic materials being available online is that it makes it inherently more accessible than ever before for researchers to access and share work.

But the problem is that with everything that becomes accessible, it often brings about new ways in which it is inaccessible. Now, this is not going to be an argument against making things accessible online since we won’t be able to accommodate everyone anyways. If this pandemic has taught us anything (aside from washing ya dang hands, wearing a mask, or common decency), it is that the accessible options are always valuable - even when they aren't immediately necessary to the able-bodied community. This post is more a discussion of how the ways in which things are being made accessible at the hands of private companies and organizations creates new hoops to jump through to access the information, which in turn may make it less accessible to a different group. This discussion will focus a lot on how the pandemic has heightened a lot of these issues, but don’t start thinking that these problems are just from the academic world being ill-prepared to handle the move to online en masse.

Let’s break this down a bit:

Wealth Inequality: This is always a problem when it comes to discussions of access to information. If you do not have adequate wealth or access to free services, you are less able to enroll in universities or colleges that give their students access to online databases. For people that aren’t fortunate enough to pay 3-8k in tuition, public libraries are the centres where databases can be accessed either for free or limited time usage; but in a pandemic where public spaces are restricted or closed all together, even this is no longer an option, further reducing accessibility.

Technological Divide: This goes along with the first point. Multiple studies have come out since the beginning of the pandemic showing that schools moving to entirely online learning at one point or another has caused a lot of families and students to struggle with insufficient internet speeds/access for online modules. See this article about students hunkering down outside a restaurant to use the free Wi-Fi and being told to leave.

Endless Databases: Western University Libraries lists over 750 databases for which they provide free* access to currently enrolled students. That still leaves out a large number of databases that researchers may wish they had access to. For people who don’t have the luxury of free* automatic access to these seemingly infinite sources of information – that is 750+ potential accounts to be made and 750+ varying fees to pay for memberships to the journals/databases or even individual articles/papers. At every step of the way in that description though there is fine print to read. With Western, you must be an ongoing and currently enrolled student to have access to the databases and even the Wi-Fi on campus. This doesn’t extend to alumni, who lose access to these privileges upon graduation. But when exactly are they revoked? Polling several graduates who have been absent from Western for 1-4 years, they all have different timelines as to when they were no longer able to access Western Databases. Even the free access comes with an asterisk because is it really “free” if we are paying thousands of dollars in tuition? 

IN CONCLUSION This isn’t even all of my thoughts on the problems with accessibility in regards to scholarship, especially in light of the pandemic, but this is what fit in the current blog post and maybe I can be convinced to rant another time about this further. My problem boils down to the irony of online accessibility creating new modes of inaccessibility by its very nature of being online and often behind some sort of paywall. I do understand that it is because these are being done by private companies and they need resources to continue to upkeep such services, and that by living in a capitalistic society money must be exchanged for goods and services. Does this stop me from dreaming, though, about a completely free and all-encompassing database that is available to everyone, and for public libraries to be fully funded so that everyone despite limitations is able to access information equally? Nope.