“Everything They Ever Wanted”: A NetLogo Case Study of a Model of Rebellion in the Tobacco Dark Patch ofTennessee and Kentucky

Agent based modelling appears to be gaining traction as a methodology in historical investigation. Good!

Just seen:

http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/8/2/3/2/p82320_index.html

“Everything They Ever Wanted”: ANetLogo Case Study of a Model of Rebellion in the Tobacco Dark Patch ofTennessee and Kentucky

Abstract

The Night Rider Tobacco War during the period 1904-1909
in Kentucky and Tennessee provides a model case study of rebellion/revolution/ social banditry. The use of platoon- and company-size unit operations, guerilla warfare, boycotts and sabotage by the Dark TobaccoGrowers Association against the Duke Tobacco Trust followed the trajectory of a revolution, from inception through success in overturning the power relations in the traditional small tobacco farm country. Success in gaining the aims of the movement was followed by a
melting away of the footsoldiers despite strenuous attempts by the leadership of the Association to continue activities after victory in the original aims of the group—destruction of the economic and political stranglehold the Duke interests had achieved. As the factual background of the events in the Dark Patch are known and—in most instances—well documented, it is possible to use NetLogo programming to test the validity of causational theories of revolution. NetLogo is a computer modeling environment in which agents are programmed to carry out specific, simple rules of behavior and allowed to interact—a “virtual laboratory” in which the behavioral rules can be altered to test different hypotheses and the result permitted to emerge based solely upon the operation of those rules. For each posited causative factor (Goldstone’s triad of inflation, heightened elite competition and strain on governmental finances, for example) the original position
and dominant motivation(s) can be set up and the situation allowed to play itself out to see how closely the predictions of the theory mirror the historic record. The further a theory’s predictions deviate from reality, the greater the doubt cast upon its validity.

2006 ‘Networks, Agent-Based Modeling, and the Antonine Itineraries’. In The Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 19.1: 45-64.

It occurred to me that some of you might like to read this.

04_Graham

I’ve got some other papers kicking around that I would like to expose to a wider readership; I’ll post those too, once I find them on this machine again… my how cluttered things can get!

I’ve been thinking of doing this for some time, but the kick in the pants I needed was courtesy of http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/2009/06/please-post-your-papers-on-internet.html

Abstract:

This paper presents a way of looking at Roman space from a Roman perspective, and suggests ways in which this point of view might open up new approaches in Roman archaeology. It turns on one conception of Roman space in particular, preserved for us in the Antonine Itineraries. Working from a position that considers the context of the itineraries as movement-through-space, this paper presents an investigation using social network analysis and agent-based simulation to re-animate the itineraries. The itineraries for Iberia, Gaul, Italy, and Britain are considered. The results of the social network analysis suggest structural differences in the way that the itineraries presented space to the reader/traveler. The results of the simulation of information diffusion through these regions following the routes in the itineraries suggest ways that this conception of space affected the cultural and material development of these regions. Suggestions for extending the basic model for more complicated archaeolgoical analyses are presented.

Let’s write a textbook

I’ve been talking with the folks at Flatworld Knowledge about the kinds of textbooks they’re looking for, and it was suggested that a world history textbook might be just the ticket. These things are typically in two volumes – before and after 1500. Who wants to write a textbook?

To my mind, writing another textbook that does the usual roundup of periods/cultures is not perhaps useful. As the Barenaked Ladies are wont to say, ‘It’s all been done before! ‘ A new medium of producing, distributing a textbook – a medium that allows for the content to be remixed by instructors at the coal-face, to suit their needs (read Flatworld’s material for more on that) it seems to me, needs a new approach. The folks at Grand Text Auto did a blog-based peer review for this book; perhaps a new world history textbook could be written via blog-based posts & peer review? Also, could it be written in such a way as to foreground networks & connections between times, places, and peoples: a 21st century textbook? Horden and Purcell’s volume from a few years back is apposite here; also is Urry’s Sociology beyond Societies…

…I’m just thinking out loud. Your thoughts?

Visualisation in Archaeology

An interesting project hosted by Southampton in the UK and English Heritage – see the full website here. They’re hosting what looks to be a fascinating wee conference in October:

Visualisation In Context:
An Interplay of Practice and Theory
22 – 23 October 2009
Hosted by the University of Southampton

The 2009 VIA Workshop is designed to probe the intersections between theory (which might traditionally be represented in terms of critique – linear and written) and practice (which might increasingly be expressed in terms of production – non-linear and visual) within the field of archaeology as well as other disciplines from the humanities and the sciences.

Check out the VIA  showcase:

Online Research Showcase

Centred on the visualisation of data in both archaeology and the wider fields of the social sciences, arts, and science and technology studies. Like the bibliography, these summaries aim to link practitioners across disciplines, highlight innovative visual projects, and offer a platform for future planning and discussion of best practices around archaeological visual method and theory.

		Archaeology and Community Museology: Ancient Egyptian Daily Life Scenes in Museums
		Gemma Tully University of Southampton

		Choreographic Morphologies: Interdisciplinary Crossovers in the Use of Digital Visualisation Methods in Dance and Archaeology
		Helen Bailey, Stuart Dunn, James Hewison, Martin Turner King’s College London University of Bedfordshire University of Manchester

		Fractured Media: Challenging the Dimensions of Archaeology’s Typical Visual Modes of Engagement
		Sara Perry University of Southampton

		Framing Machu Picchu: Science, Photography and the Making of Patrimony
		Amy Cox University of Florida

		Imag(in)ing the Other at Dura-Europos
		Jennifer Baird Birkbeck College, University of London

		Institutionalising Images: Early Visualisation Networks in Aegean Archaeology
		Deborah Harlan University of Sheffield

		Interactive Panoramas and 3D Modelling Based on Panoramas
		Karol Kwiatek, Martin Woolner, Simon Standing, Jes Martens University of Plymouth, Institute of Creative and Cultural Industries University of Oslo, Norway, Museum of Cultural History

		OKAPI Island in Second Life
		Ruth Tringham, Noah Wittman, Colleen Morgan University of California, Berkeley

		Pervasive Gaming, Education, and Cultural Heritage: Emplaced Interpretive Games at the Presidio of San Francisco
		Ruth Tringham, Colleen Morgan University of California, Berkeley The Presidio Archaeology Lab

		Reflexive Representations: The Partibility of Archaeology
		Andrew Cochrane, Ian Russell Cardiff University University College Dublin

		Representing Prehistory: The Biographies of the Robenhausen Lake Dwelling Collections at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (2008-2009)
		Katherine Cooper University of Cambridge

		SahulTime: Rethinking Archaeological Representation in the Digital Age
		Matthew Coller Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

		Scandalous Artefacts
		Alessandro Zambelli Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London

		Strategies of Visualisation in German Archaeology, 19th-20th C
		Stefanie Klamm Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Humboldt University, Berlin

		The Archaeological Eye: Visualisation and the Disciplinary Foundations of British Archaeology
		Sara Perry University of Southampton

		The Gateway to Sarup
		Niels H. Andersen, Maria Isenbecker, Camilla Bjarnø, Jan Solheim Moesgård Museum, DenmarkSamsøgades Skole, Denmark Supported by the Danish Ministry of Culture and the Danish Ministry of Education

		The Remediated Places Project
		Ruth Tringham, Michael Ashley, Steve Mills, Eric Blind, Jason Quinlan, Colleen Morgan University of California, Berkeley

Tenure for Digital Work

Now, wouldn’t that be grand: tenure for digital work! Folks are working on developing guidelines for it… (now, if I could just persuade these humanities folks that there is more to digital work than databases…). Seen over at the College Art Association

MLA and HASTAC Developing Tenure Guidelines for Digital Scholarship

posted by Christopher Howard
“Even as the use of electronic media has become common across fields for research and teaching,” reports Scott Jaschik at Insider Higher Ed, “what is taken for granted among young scholars is still foreign to many of those who sit on tenure and promotion committees.”

While junior professors lament the exclusion or diminution from tenure reviews of their born-digital work, whether publication or project, the Modern Language Association (MLA) and a group called the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) are tackling the issue head on with new guides that offer tenure committees help in properly evaluating digital scholarship. MLA’s Information Technology Committee is developing these guides through a wiki, which publishes both finished and in-progress work.

In his article, “Tenure in a Digital Era,” Jaschik examines the many perceptions and problems at issue, including peer review; digital and print publications; and work that crosses traditional categories of research, teaching, and service.

Canadian Historical Review – article on game for history

I’m happy to say I had a hand in this article.

History computer games have become an economic and cultural phenomenon, and historians should seize the opportunity to participate in their development. Players of history games are interested in the past and in the big questions that drive historical scholarship. In this way, games have the potential to draw players into the discipline if we can discover the best way to express history though simulation. But what research do we draw on as we study how to accomplish this transformation? This essay is the product of a meeting of historians, educators, and gamers who joined previously separate lines of inquiry to identify literature and models that we believe form the foundation for developing a theory of good history through gaming.

Résumé:

Les jeux vidéo à thème historique sont devenus un phénomène économique et culturel, et les historiens devraient saisir cette occasion de participer à leur développement. Les personnes qui jouent à des jeux historiques s’intéressent au passé et aux grandes questions qui mobilisent la recherche historique. Par les jeux, il est peut-être possible d’attirer les joueurs dans la discipline, si nous parvenons à découvrir la meilleure façon d’exprimer l’histoire par la simulation. Mais à quelle recherche faisons-nous appel quand nous étudions les moyens de réaliser cette transformation? Cet essai est le produit d’une réunion d’historiens, d’éducateurs et de spécialistes du jeu qui ont relié des pistes de recherche jusque-là indépendantes afin de repérer les études et les modèles qui, croyons-nous, serviront de base à l’élaboration d’une théorie de bonne pratique de l’histoire par le jeu

Don’t Knock the Aztecs: Civ for History, WoW for German

Still have folks in your department who dismiss games as…, well, games? Then you need to check out this article in the latest edition of the Escapist.  Todd Bryant has been experimenting with using games like Civ IV in history classes. This is no unthinking use of the game, though. For Bryant, the value lies in exploiting the gap between ‘real’ history, and the way that history is modelled (or argued, as it were: see Bogost) in the game:

A student came to my office last week and asked for help setting up a LAN game of Civ IV in one of the college’s computer labs. He was going to play my Age of Conquest mod scenario with some friends that afternoon. While I showed him in the menu how to set up a multiplayer game, he shared his strategy to play Spain and attack the Aztecs. It’s a bad idea.

[...]

For the class, students had to play the game in addition to their readings and discuss whether the scenario accurately represented the period. One of the key concepts students should have learned about was the role of belief systems as described in the book “The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other.” In essence, the book and the game make the same argument: Had the Aztecs viewed the world differently, their clash with the Spanish conquistadors would have been radically different.

He goes on to describe exploration of language teaching through immersing students in a German server for World of Warcraft. Mein Gott! Das ist wunderbar! (all that I remember from a freshman German class; that and a song set to the Blue Danube… perhaps if I’d been gaming language, things would be different…)

There are people doing similar things with Latin, as it happens (I had experimented with old school text adventures for Latin teaching, but this might be a bit more *sigh* exciting) … sign the petition now!

The Plan

I’m moving up in the world. The plan is to join the department of faculty training and development at Grand Canyon University in Arizona as a faculty specialist – putting all my online nous to work, helping other faculty make their online classes successful. Hooray!

Also, Rob MacDougall writes:

Bill Turkel and I, along with Brock University’s Kevin Kee and some great collaborators, have been awarded a generous grant for a project entitled “History at Play: Augmented Reality Gaming and the Ubiquitous Past.” The grant comes from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) as part of their Image, Text, Sound, and Technology (ITST) initiative. Basically, we will be using games and gaming models to teach some Canadian and American history and to promote public heritage sites. I’d love to say more about the cool stuff we are planning, but I am mindful of Bill’s injunction to at least cut a demo before posing with a guitar. So this summer we’ll be cutting our demo. I’ve sometimes been reluctant to cross the streams of my history day job and my gaming hobby, but I feel like this is a project I was built to do.

I’m pleased to say that I’m one of the collaborators, and this project should be a lot of fun. Of course, consider the source: anything, after stamped bricks up the yin-yang, would be lots of fun.

Interface, NETSCI09, and MHR

Oh, if I but had the coin to go to conferences… (I’ll tattoo your logo where’er you want: corporate sponsorship?)

Two conferences appearing on the networks and archaeology mailing list this morning:

InterFace is a new type of annual event. Part conference, part workshop, part networking opportunity, it will bring together postdocs, early career academics and postgraduate researchers from the fields of Information Technology and the Humanities in order to foster cutting-edge collaboration. As well as having a focus on Digital Humanities, it will also be an important forum for Humanities contributions to Computer Science. The event will furthermore provide a permanent web presence for communication between delegates both during, and following, the conference.

Delegate numbers are limited to 80 (half representing each sector) and all participants willbe expected to present a poster or a ‘lightning talk’ (a two minute presentation) as a stimulus for discussion and networking sessions. Delegates can also expect to receive illuminating keynote talks from world-leading experts, presentations on successful interdisciplinary projects, ‘Insider’s Guides’ and workshops. The registration fee for the two day event is £30. For a full overview of the event, please visit the website.

And, on the premise that great conferences always take place in fanatastic locations, NETSCI09 this year is in Venice:

The aim of NETSCI is to bring together leading researchers, practitioners, and teachers in network science to foster interdisciplinary communication and collaboration.

They have a subsection on network science and humanities, which I’d love to attend. On a related note, a paper of mine has been accepted for publication with Digital Studies, on re-animating the brick production networks of first and second century Rome -a proxy for patronage networks- with an ABM that generates civil violence: a theory of civil strife through malfunctioning patronage.

And finally, a book of interest:

Greek and Roman Networks in the Mediterranean

How useful is the concept of “network” for historical studies and the ancient world in particular? Using theoretical models of social network analysis, this book illuminates aspects of the economic, social, religious, and political history of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.

Bringing together some of the most active and prominent researchers in ancient history, this book moves beyond political institutions, ethnic, and geographical boundaries in order to observe the ancient Mediterranean through a perspective of network interaction. It employs a wide range of approaches, and to examine relationships and interactions among various social entities in the Mediterranean. Chronologically, the book extends from the early Iron Age to the late Antique world, covering the Mediterranean between Antioch in the east to Massalia (Marseilles) in the west.

This book was published as two special issues in Mediterranean Historical Review.

I’ve skimmed through the original special issues, and – I’m happy to be wrong – it seemed to me that ‘networks’ were being used more as a metaphor than an actual theory with methodological implications, as used by such people like Barabasi. (and now I’ll get some angry emails…

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research: Education and Pedegogy Issue

There’s a new issue of the JVWR out, well worth a look-see:

Summary:

This edition of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is dedicated to exploring the breadth of designs, pedagogies and curricular innovations that are actually already being applied to teaching and learning in virtual worlds. We encourage participation from a broad range of academics, researchers, educators, and educational practitioners from across the disciplinary spectrum – including, but not limited to: curriculum development, educational administration, distance education, information and knowledge management, instructional technology, e-learning, communication and education, sociology, art education, and visual culture. We strongly encourage submissions that illustrate key findings with examples and case studies; experimental research; pedagogical innovations; and best practices for the integration of virtual worlds technologies into the learning experience.