Of dustbowl ballads and railroad rate tables: Erudite enactments in historical inquiry

Information and Culture

Volumn 48, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 260-278

  Ekbia, Hamid R ^a   Suri, Venkata Ratnadeep ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HUMAN; RAILWAY; REVIEW;

EID: 84946217435     PISSN: 21648034     EISSN: 21663033     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/lac.2013.0011     Document Type: Review

References (45)

1. Harold Garfinkel, Toward a Sociological Theory of Information (London: Paradigm, 2008).
2. Hamid Ekbia, “Information in Action: A Situated View,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, Vancouver, BC, November 6–11, 2009; Hamid Ekbia and Tom P. Evans, “Regimes of Information: Land Use, Management, and Policy,” Information Society 25, no. 5 (2009): 328–43.
3. Ron Day, The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001).
4. Karl Weick, “Enacted Sense Making in Crisis Situations,” Journal of Management Studies 25, no. 4 (1988): 305–17.
5. A possible alternative to “enactment” would be the related notion of “sense-making.” However, we avoid this alternative because in information studies it has come to acquire specific connotations that stand in opposition to the situational view that we advocate here. For a detailed discussion of this issue, see Ekbia and Evans, “Regimes of Information.”
6. Venkata Ratnadeep Suri and Hamid Ekbia, “Spatial Mediations in Historical Understanding: GIS and the Evolving Epistemic Practices of History,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (under review).
7. For further understanding about snowball methods, see Matthew J. Salganik and Douglas D. Heckathorn, “Sampling and Estimation in Hidden Populations Using Respondent-Driven Sampling,” Sociological Methodology 34, no. 1 (2004): 193–239; Leo A. Goodman, “Snowball Sampling,” Annals of Mathematical Statistics 32, no. 1 (1961): 148–70.
8. The data were collected as part of the second author’s dissertation research project, which was under way at the time of writing this article. The dissertation was successfully defended on November 30, 2012.
9. Stuart Daggett, Chapters on the History of the Southern Pacific (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1922), 240.
10. Richard White, “What Is Spatial History?,” 2010, http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29.
11. Michael Magliari, “Populism, Steamboats, and the Octopus: Transportation Rates and Monopoly in California’s Wheat Regions, 1890–1896,” Pacific Historical Review 58, no. 4 (1989): 449–69.
12. Ibid., citing William D. Johnson, “Inland Steam Navigation in California” (MA thesis, Stanford University, 1952), 78.
13. Ibid., 459.
14. Ibid., 460–61, citing Stuart Daggett, Chapters, 343.
15. White, “What Is Spatial History?”
16. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 151.
17. Woody Guthrie, “Dust Bowl Blues,” on Dust Bowl Ballads, Victor Records, 1940.
18. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Great Plains in the 1930’s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
19. Ibid., 4–5.
20. Ibid., 6.
21. Geoff Cunfer, “Scaling the Dust Bowl,” in Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship, ed. Anne Kelly Knowles (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2008), 95–121, 100.
22. Boundary maps were produced by Carville Earle and Changyong Cao for 1850–1970 and published by Geoscience Publications, Department of Anthropology and Geography, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 1991. Area maps were obtained from “The Dust Bowl: Agricultural Problems and Solutions,” US Department of Agricultural Editorial Reference Series no. 7, July 15, 1940, available at the Central Library of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
23. James Malin, “Dust Storms,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 14 (1946).
24. The county is a basic census unit for any agricultural census data collected by the federal government. This census is conducted for every ten years from 1920 and for about every five years thereafter. Cunfer obtained these data in digital format from Myron P. Gutmann, “Great Plains Population and Environmental Data: Agricultural Data” (computer file), ICPSR version, produced by the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2005, distributed by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, Ann Arbor, 2005, computer file no. ICPSRO4254-V1.
25. Other resources used by Cunfer to populate the GIS databases included statistics collected by the state of Kansas for 1890–1930 as well as weather data collected by the National Weather Service from 1885. These data are available for weather station point locations and must be interpolated to the county unit, which is the level of analysis in Cunfer’s work. The sixth source that Cunfer used was the maps of the dust regions published in the Washington, DC, Evening Star, December 8, 1939, C-7.
26. Cunfer, “Scaling the Dust Bowl,” 95–121.
27. Ibid., 110. This paragraph was cited by Cunfer from a news report published in the Salinas (KS) Journal, April 1, 1880. This is an example of one of the several news articles from old newspapers that Cunfer used to identify those places where a dust storm occurred and used this information to populate the GIS database. It is also an example of how historians use a plethora of historical sources to extract geographical information to populate GIS databases.
28. James Malin’s seminal article titled “Dust Storms” was published in three volumes of the Kansas Historical Quarterly in 1946: vol. 37, pp. 129–44, vol. 38, pp. 265–96, vol. 39, pp. 1–4, 13.
29. Cunfer, “Scaling the Dust Bowl,” 112.
30. For an example of the study of objects, see Dee Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroads, 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, 2001). For an example of the study of data, see White, “What Is Spatial History?”; Stephen E. Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); David Howard Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Viking, 1999).
31. This excerpt is from a taped interview of Dr. Richard White, historian, conducted as part of the second author’s dissertation project. The original recording and the corresponding transcript are in the possession of the second author.
32. A senior graduate student in a taped interview used the term “throw-away data resource” to describe those data sources that are not typically collected and used by historians. The interview was conducted as part of the second author’s dissertation project. The original recording and the corresponding transcript are in the possession of the second author. The subject’s name has been withheld upon request.
33. Nancy Shoemaker, “Where Is the History Lab Course?,” 2009, http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2009/0901/0901tea2.cfm.
34. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979), 48–49.
35. Karin Cetina-Knorr, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 27.
36. Ibid. A key difference is that, unlike psychoanalytic subjects (patients), the objects of history are mute, unless there is access to oral testimonies of subjects involved in recent historical events.
37. This excerpt is from a taped interview of Geoff Cunfer, historian, conducted as part of the second author’s dissertation project. The original recording and the corresponding transcript are in the possession of the second author.
38. Shoemaker, “Where Is the History Lab Course?”
39. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
40. White interview.
41. Cunfer interview.
42. White interview.
43. Claudo Fogu, “Digitizing Historical Consciousness,” History and Theory 48, no. 2 (2009): 102–21.
44. Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures, 43.
45. This excerpt is from a taped interview of Frank Zephyr, historian, conducted as part of the second author’s dissertation project. The original recording and the corresponding transcript are in the possession of the second author.