The readings for this week discuss the merits of collaboration in all fields of study, and how the humanities can learn from the science community by co-writing and collaborating on more articles and research projects.  While the merits of collaboration are certainly apparent, it seems that the authors have a very narrow definition of what it means to “collaborate” in the humanities.  When “humanists” (which, coming from a sixteenth-century historical background, I find an interesting term to use) publish a new book, this is often preceded by peer-reviews of the material, discussion groups among colleagues and graduate students, and preliminary papers presented at conferences (which have also become more interdisciplinary over the past decade) where they receive critique and feedback.  Furthermore, there are often many acknowledgments to archivists, colleagues, and others who aided the scholar in the research process.  Are these not forms of intellectual collaboration as well?

I am assisting a professor at Wagner College in research for an article regarding Huguenot families of Staten Island for the Staten Island Genealogical Society.  I plan on further researching this topic for the digital archive and will focus on the Huguenot influence in the settling of Staten Island, specifically on a few of the founding families (and not their descendants) from the late seventeenth century.  I plan on using many archives within New York City (and possibly in Albany) to find land deeds, court cases, and other original documents relating to the families.  I will also try to find visual elements, including images of Huguenot cemeteries and seventeenth-century houses, to include as well.

David Levy discusses the lack of leisure in modern society, and how many in the post-Industrial age believe that we live life at an accelerated pace.  Yet, Levy also claims that the idea of an accelerated life is not new in the twenty-first century, but rather has been a problem throughout the entire modern era.  After reading Alex Wright’s book, it seems that this problem predates the modern era as well.  Wright discusses the “technological” push toward betters systems of organization, taxonomy, and learning throughout time, something that was often dismissed or outright punished by “elites”/top of the societal hierarchy (such as the burning of Giordano Bruno by the Catholic Church as one example).  Is the “accelerated” lifestyle of the twenty-first century, with constant e-mails and a more “democratic” output of information through blogs, Wikipedia, and other media, merely a  rhetorical trope- a renewed historical fear of the educated elite who are losing control?  Contrarily, is this digital revolution producing mass amounts of empty information due to our new, accelerated lifestyle, and should we take (and as historians, actively enforce) Levy’s advice to process knowledge before producing new information?

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Vannevar Bush and Ted Friedman both discuss positive aspects of the internet, whether it be post-World War II scientific progress or the utopian visions of cyberspace.  Yet, in Friedman’s book there is still the persistant “other” side of the dialectic of technological determinism- the denial of human agency.  Friedman’s example of the Hepburn and Tracy movie Desk Set touches on my fears as an academic in the field of manuscript preservation.  Similar to Hepburn’s fears, will the internet era of digitizing archives lead to archivists becoming obsolete (or very few in number) years from now?  Or, will the “metaphysics of presence,” which Derrida uses to describe one-on-one conversation,  when dealing with a human being in the research process continue the need for archivists rather than a series of computerized lists and digitized material?  In Friedman’s words, will we be able to “cultivate space” (8) for archivists in the future?

Hello everyone!  My name is Nicole Milano and I’m in my first semester of the Certificate in Archives program.  I just (two weeks ago) received my M.A. degree in History from the University of Florida where I specialized in Early Modern Italy. As a person who grew up in the “internet era,” I feel unusually technologically-backward and thus am looking forward to the skills I will learn in this course.  I’ve used social-networking websites like Facebook and MySpace, but have not gone any farther in creating websites.  I have some experience with archives and museums and have co-curated a small exhibit, and am now looking forward to learning how to create a digital one!