Hi all, it’s nice to be back, my thanks to Dan and all for the invitation. That said, once again I seem to be starting my run at Prawfs with too much to do in too few days. It’s finals time here in Florida, and I’ve got papers to grade by Monday. And, because it’s the sort of person I am, I’m about to leave town because I’m giving a paper at a conference on Chinese legal history this weekend. And on top of that, since I’m one of those people who work at one of those places, I get to worry about what massive budget cuts mean for my department.
Stress, it keeps us young, right?
As a result of all that, I may not be a significant presence here until early next week. But I thought I’d start things off by talking a bit about what I’ve done since I was last here. To some extent, there’s nothing particularly novel about my past year: I’ve been sort of busy with teaching a new class, giving too many conference papers, publishing some books and articles, and trying to get promoted.
But what I really wanted to talk about was my experiment with running a webinar for the past couple of years. The webinar is essentially a workshop for some younger faculty and advanced grad students who are working in the area of constitutional history (broadly, and internationally, defined). We’ve met about once every four weeks during the academic year, sometimes to read and discuss stuff that’s already published, mostly to read each others’ work in progress: from dissertation chapters to early versions of conference papers to draft articles.
It’s been interesting, on several levels.
The biggest deal, in terms of substance, has been building a community that includes people who do US constitutional history and those who do not. In a group of eleven people (about as much as the format will bear), we’ve got three who do US constitutional and legal history more or less exclusively (though in very different times and from very different perspectives. In addition, we have two others who do US constitutional history in a transnational context, three who do the constitutional histories of other countries, one person who does human rights history, one who does a mix of US constitutional and human rights history, and one person who does comparative or transnational constitutional history and US constitutional history.
Trying to find ways to have a dialog across those disciplinary spaces (we aren’t even all historians) has been a challenge for us all (of course, that is sort of the point of the exercise). But while the struggle (as we say) is never ending, I think it’s working. As you might expect, we talk past one another a fair amount, but I think over time we’ve managed to more or less talk to each other in constructive ways. So I hope to talk about that a bit in later posts.
In terms of technology, the big deal is that we went international this year by including two grad students doing research in other countries. I’m always amazed when the technology works, and I get people from Oregon, NC, California, Georgia, Brazil, and New Zealand all talking to people in Florida. But except for one hideous evening when my computer froze and things were delayed for about ten minutes while I sweated and cursed and wondered if I should just slam my fist through my screen, it’s worked pretty well.
While I appreciate that this reveals just how easy it is to amuse me, I have to say that it is just exciting to think we’ve managed to hold online conversations that cross time zones (what with New Zealand coming in we’re even talking on two days at once), and national borders.
In terms of process, we’ve managed to get the basic model pretty well set. We use a commercial webinar system (at the moment we use Gotomeeting, whether we will continue to do so is a question, my university funding for the program has dried up, so we may move to Skype or Google+ Huddle or some other free program). It let’s us fairly easily set up the conference call online in a matter of minutes (my computer permitting). It also let’s me record the webinar, which I then post in a cloud file that’s accessible to the members of the webinar for later review (or for people who missed the scheduled session).
We supplement the webinar with a fairly simple wiki (I used Google Sites), which we use for several purposes. About a week or ten days before the scheduled session, the person presenting posts his/her paper on the wiki. We also have a person comment on each paper, and comments are also posted on the wiki (either before or after the webinar). The day after the webinar, I use the wiki to set up a blog post on the previous talk; that allows for follow up comments and questions. We’ve also used the wiki for mini bios (to introduce the participants, who don’t all know one another in real life) to each other, and for links to journals and associations of interest to people doing legal or constitutional history. We’ve also been using Google+ to some extent as a place to post more time sensitive stuff like CFPs.
This summer we’re going to experiment, with a discussion that will be entirely done on the wiki blog. What we’ve tentatively agreed to do is talk about one or perhaps two symposia in journals that touch on materials relevant to our work. I’m thinking of adapting the symposium style that several blogs use: Open the symposium for several weeks, set up a vague schedule for posts, and let everyone post on any aspect of the symposium that seems interesting, in hopes that that prompts discussion. (Yes, it is a bit vague, for a constitutional historian, I have a strange love of anarchy). We’ll see what works.
As I said, I’ll try to write a bit more about this when the grading and conference excitement dies down in a week or so. I do think the issue of how to have conversations about constitutional history across fields that cross time and space is an interesting one, so I’ll try to talk about that. If there’s anything else relating to the webinar anyone wants me to reflect on, I’m glad to do that, just let me know.
Posted by Elizabeth Dale on May 1, 2012 at 07:55 AM