A Small Revolution
“It was a small revolution: you could see something infiltrate the room – pride – as this person from the University talked about their history, their story.”
I was speaking with Lisa Mibach, from Deschenes, Quebec, once an independent town, then part of the city of Aylmer, and now part of the larger city of Gatineau. We were talking about her and her group’s efforts to document the heritage of this part of the city. It’s an anglophone sector of the city. If you look on the google map satellite image, you can see one of the most significant pieces of built heritage in the entire city of Gatineau – the former Deschenes Electric Company. When you cross on the Champlain Bridge, you can see this impressive ruin to the west. This plant electrified the town of Deschenes and Aylmer, and provided the power for the Ottawa Electric Railway Company (back when Ottawa had working light rail).
Lisa’s been working hard to document this community’s history; the story she told me was about one of the ‘heritage days’ that they’ve put on. This was where they had someone come in and look at their materials that they’d collected, and re-present them to the community.
Sometimes, the public historian or archaeologist’s most important job is to listen to the community, and tell them what he’s heard. In that way, it somehow becomes more ‘real’, more ‘important’, more worthy of study and serious consideration in the eyes of that self-same community. The act of observation changes that which is observed.
I’m entranced by this small community’s history, and hope to explore there more this summer, ideally as part of HeritageCrowd.org.
Names & Dopplegangers
Just got a phone call from a friend, who was interested in my opinion piece in the Ottawa Citizen, mentioned on the radio.
Problem is, I wrote no opinion piece. Turns out, there’s a PhD student in the History Department at the University of Ottawa (just down the Canal), who shares my name, and who is the author of the piece (it’s a good article). So, just to forestall any confusion:
Sean Graham at the University of Ottawa is not Shawn Graham at Carleton University.
HeritageCrowd.org: crowdsourcing cultural heritage
I have a small summer project running, using the Ushahidi and Omeka platforms for crowdsourcing local history, called HeritageCrowd. I have two Carleton University undergraduate students, Guy Massie and Nadine Feuerherm helping me with this; we’re blogging the experience here. Please check us out; comments & critiques (and submissions, of course!) are most welcome.
Guy writes,
This project, headed by Professor Shawn Graham and students Nadine Feuerherm and Guy Massie at Carleton University, rethinks the way that people share and interact with local history and heritage. Through the use of a number of technologies such as text messaging, voice mail, and the internet, we will test the possibility for creating a database of local history knowledge by asking for contributions from the community. This type of approach is known as “crowdsourcing,” and while it has been used to gather information about ongoing events such as the violence following the 2008 elections in Kenya, it has yet to be used in this way in the area of heritage and local history. The contributions made to the project will be stored and displayed on a website for the public. On our ‘stories‘ page, students and researchers can do further research on the items contributed by the public, creating exhibitions and other digital stories.
In the same way that the Memory Project is working to record the stories of veterans from the Second World War, we believe that there is an untapped resource in the historical knowledge of members from the community. The different ways of contributing to this project mean that anyone with telephone or internet access can share what they know about a place, event, building, or other topic related to local history. Our goal is to create an automated method of storing and digitally curating local heritage and history. In this way, our research hopes to benefit rural areas, and other regions of the world, that may otherwise face obstacles in attracting interest and attention about local history from the larger public.
This project is funded by a Junior Research Fellowship, and will make extensive use of the Omeka and Ushahidi web-based platforms. It will use the Upper Ottawa Valley as a “testing ground” for the project, and in particular the Pontiac MRC region in Western Quebec.
Agent Based Modeling & Roman Resource Extraction: An Exploratory Lab
These are the slides of the talk I gave at the Land and Natural Resources Conference last week at the Free University in Brussels. That talk was a bit more free form than the slides would suggest, so I’m not quite ready to share the written version (mostly because it’s still in a process of becoming…)
But, I think I’m fairly safe to share at least the opening bit….
Introduction
Could the extractive economy of Rome (such as mining, logging and forestry) promote structural growth? What would be the archaeological signs of structural growth?
So much in the ancient world appears to rely on connectivity and mobility, either literally in terms of things like road-building (Laurence, 1999) or more abstractly, in terms of social connections, bonds of friendship, amicitia, and patronage. Horden and Purcell (2000) make the argument for multiple connectivities, both physical and social, that bound up the Mediterranean world. In my own work, I have argued for social connections becoming ‘real’ in the physical landscape, as a mechanism for the creation of notions of territory and landscape (Graham and Steiner 2008). Sometimes these social connections can be read from the archaeometry of material culture; other times from epigraphy; sometimes from history. In this paper, I want to explore how patronage intersects with natural resource extraction, and whether or not these intersections could promote structural growth. As Mokyer points out, “There is a qualitative difference between an economy in which GDP per capita grows at 1.5 percent and one in which it grows at 0.2 percent” (2005:286). Understanding which possible conditions could promote growth (and to what degree) therefore is a useful exercise.
I use an agent based modeling framework (ABM) for this exploration because I am interested not in simulating the past, but in understanding how different understandings about the past combine. ABM allows me to systematically test the ways these ideas combine and to generate a landscape of possibilities against which I may then lay archaeological or historical evidence.
Agent Based Modelling
Agent based modelling is an approach to simulation that focuses on the individual (indeed, it is sometimes known as individual based modeling). In an agent based model, the agents or individuals are autonomous computing objects – they are their own programme. They are allowed to interact within an environment (which frequently represents some real-world physical environment). Every agent has the same suite of variables (if it were a model of basketball, ever agent would have a ‘height’ variable, and an ‘ability’ variable), but each agent’s individual combination of variables is unique. Agents can be aware of each other and the state of the world (or their location within it), depending on the needs of the model. What is important to note, especially when we are interested in the past, is that we are not trying to simulate the past; rather, the model is a tool to simulate how we believe a particular phenomenon worked in the past (cf Gilbert and Troitzsch 2005:17 on the logic of simulation). When we simulate, we are interrogating our own understandings and beliefs. What is particularly valuable then is that we can build a model, and when the agents begin to interact along the patterns of behavior that we have specified (drawn from our understanding of how various processes worked), we have a way of exploring the non-linear, non-intuitive, emergent consequences of those beliefs. What’s more, in order to code a particular behavior, we have to be clear about how we think about that behavior. It forces us to make our assumptions explicit. A second investigator then can examine the code, critique these assumptions and biases (or indeed, errors) and modify the model towards a ‘better’ state. In this way, the model is both a laboratory and a crowdsourced argument about the past. In that spirit, I offer the code for this model at http://graeworks.net, and encourage the reader to download, adapt, critique and improve the argument. The model is built using the Netlogo modeling environment and language (Wilensky 1999). Simulations make their argument in computer processes, and like all forms of expression, they carry their own rhetoric which must be analysed (Bogost 2007).
Theoretical Considerations
Did Rome experience growth? If so, in what ways did that growth occur? What was ‘modern’ about the Roman economy? Why did not Rome make the leap that Europe did? If it is any consolation, historians of the Industrial Revolution are as puzzled by how it happened, as we are by why Rome’s didn’t. An important consideration though comes from Mokyr’s analysis of the intellectual foundations of the Industrial Revolution (2005). For Mokyer, it comes down to the idea not just that ‘useful’ knowledge available had increased, but that the social setting for this knowledge had expanded (2005: 287). For Mokyer, useful knowledge relates directly to the physical world, and how it works.
This is not a view that would’ve been foreign to the bien-pensants of antiquity. Columella, Varo, Pliny all set about to catalogue and categorize the world around them. The difference though is one of quality; an Enlightment description of a phenomenon attempted a degree of accuracy and thoroughness that was alien to the Roman mind.
For Mokyer, the easier it becomes for individuals to access that knowledge, the more likely technological change was to happen, thus resulting in sustained economic growth (Mokyer 2005: 295-6). Though Mokyer doesn’t say it explicitly, he is talking about how information passes through social networks. As Mokyer points out, this useful knowledge did not have to percolate down to the many (301). It simply had to reach those in a position to act on it (a figure he reckons to be at most a few tens of thousands in all of Europe, 301). In Roman terms, to talk about social networks of influence is to talk about patronage.
Once we have created a model that encodes our understanding of the phenomena under question, it remains to interpret the results. A framework for understanding our model of resource extraction in the Roman world is provided by the Canadian economic historian and media theorist Harold Innis (Innis was the mentor of Marshall McLuhan).
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