Anyone wanna design a new look for CM that looks passable on IE/Win? I am about ready to go back to .txt files.

You might have found out, by now, that Google has uploaded Life magazine’s trove of photographs from the 1860s onwards onto their formidable servers. They are of decent quality – with some tags/Labels. The viewer, of course, cannot add their own notations, labels and tags.¹ I would have liked to see this in Flickr with their level of user-interaction. These photos need metadata, folks. Us historians cannot make sense or teach from them, unless you let us interact with the metadata. Not to mention that I would have loved to see a “page scan” along with the photograph to get a sense of how these images were consumed upon initial reception. As it is, I am not even sure if the “Date taken” corresponds to the date of issue or not.

Still, some amazing South Asia stuff. Moslem League, Muslim League, Jinnah, and most intriguingly, Kipling’s India.

Some newfound favorites:

(via sarah)

1. If they did allow it, I could tell them that the shopkeepers are obviously not posing in front of their “spice store” but their local optician

A week or so ago Stephen Mihm had an interesting article in Boston Globe, Everyone’s a historian now: How the Internet – and you – will make history deeper, richer, and more accurate. Mihm concentrated on the effect of crowd sourcing on history as a research/archival practice, but I have been thinking about the positive contributions to pedagogy as well.

Google Earth – the application which allows you to fly around the world and find oddities – is a case in point. Historians would be delighted to know that Google Earth has an amazing array of communities dedicated to charting out time and event in space. For example, the battles and routes of Alexander the Great which includes his route, maps of cities and sites of battles. You can download the .kmz file (aka the Google Earth file) and open it up in your copy of Google Earth. Now you can fly like a bird alongside Alexander with notes and comments from the wikipedia, from the Google Earth community, from National Geographic and host of other sources. Surely, you can see the amazing opportunity that offers as an aid-in-teaching. Or, look at the Life of Muhammad which is incredibly detailed time and place map of the Prophet. Or, Paris in 1808. Or, footsteps of Buddha. You can find your own interest at the moderated History,Illustrated forum or the broader Educators forum. You can also simply search for keywords with .kmz extensions.

Going back to Mihm, these are more than collective applications of research or documentation; they allow us to present history in altogether new formats to our students. It grants a physicality to history that often has to struggle to be taken as “real” – separated as it is with time and distance from any typical classroom (yes, I wish I was teaching Civil War history in South Carolina or Muhammad b. Qasim in Thatta). This is not simply crowd-sourcing intelligence, it is re-illuminating our solo-sourced research with crowd-generated technology.

The recent news at Google I/O was that Google Earth is coming to the browser which opens up great possibilities of creating our own versions of digital archives that adhere to the geographical spaces.

One of my favorite activity in the archive was to work on the marginalia of the manuscript – mostly just trying to decipher but often thinking through the gloss it ‘added’ to the text.

Thinking about digital archives, I have been keenly aware that this ‘conversation on the margins’ must be incorporated into the text – along with layers, annotations etc – if we are to ever fully realize the promise of hypertext. [Basically think of having the Discussion and the History sections of any wikipedia entry remaining integral to the presentation of the text while adding commenting].

We can take, at least, one step forward on that project today: The Institute of the Book’s newly released Open Source Word Press theme, CommentPress 1.0. It allows one to display a text with the unique ability that interlocutors can discuss down to an individual paragraph. The genius of course is that in breaking the text up in such a manner, it makes the text far more legible and readable online.

This is a first step but I think that the Future of the Book folks deserve a huge round of applause.

In terms of application for historians, an easy one is the ability to workshop a paper – elicit comments, suggestions, etc.

Some of us from the history blogging world will be doing a roundtable at the AHA in January. Our intention is to present our panel work at Memory Matters. On this site, in the coming months, we will expand, discuss, debate some of the themes that underline our research and which we will presenting at AHA. Hopefully, this will serve as an example – even if it ends up being a cautionary one – of extending the ways in which we share and learn.

I have been seriously amiss [um] in acknowledging the [somewhat disconcerting] distinction that friends & gentle readers of CM have bestowed [in service of a meme (those things are still around? {apparently})]: It makes them think.

Mucho thanks, folks. As a meme, it has some rules. Like linking to this post and listing five bloggers who make me think. Well, that’s easy enough: e., who I can’t believe I have yet to meet; juan who I have met and can confirm is a scholar and a gentleman; angry arab, who amazes me with his wit; joshua, who will be no surprise to anyone but still; and zp, whose posts I look forward to like none other. Ok, now I can go back to my no-meme rule.

Some while ago, I wrote up my thoughts on being public intellectuals in the new digital age. I had always meant my ‘manifesto’ to serve as an introduction to a larger piece on digital history – that I would try and get published. I wrote parts of this larger piece and presented it at a conference in Madison – but I have been severely distracted since then. And, it may have sat unfinished forever.

But recently, I got an email from Paula Petrik, Professor at George Mason University and a true inspiration for us digital historians, that she had assigned my manifesto to her graduate class, History and New Media, and that her students had responded enthusiastically. First of all, let me just ask history teachers everywhere to visit that class site and go over the syllabus to see a great example of successful incorporation of blogs/digital media in the class.

With some trepidition, I visited the class blogs to see what they said. You can read Bill’s Waiting on Abdulhamid II, Jenny’s History Polyglot: How to Translate or Interpret in a Digital World, Historiarum’s I’d Love to Take a Public Beating, Misha’s Thank you, Sepoy, and Laura’s Three Cheers for Digital History. I found the comments to be probing, provacative and interesting and it made me realize that I really need to finish the second half of the manifesto.

But it wasn’t until I read that the good people at Progressive Historians – a ribald bunch of troublemakers, also liked the manifesto that I really cemented my resolve to write this weekend.

Long Live Digital History.

While CM was being hacked, some of your correspondents ended up getting hijacked by the trendiest new web presence in town, my.barackobama.com. Within moments of the site’s inception, we began to feverishly collect friends, join groups and start movements. But now that the site is already five days old, the bloom has faded from the rose and we are ready to come home. We are not sure if, after all, we wish to be part of a nationwide email conversation about how much, how very very much, we want our guy to kick the cig habit, or how it might be fun to have a ginormous sixty minute conference call with fellow supporters across the nation.

We still love the man, and it being Valentine’s Day, we’re here to express that, despite concerns about his handling of the whole madrassa issue, and other worries yet to be discovered. So in honor of his dignity, which is being vigorously shredded from all sides, we’ve gone photoshopping for a pretty new t-shirt to help him cover his nakedness, since he is still apparently somewhat miffed about the People mag papparazzo shot. As in the sad tale of the toothsome Gavin Newsom, who learned too late, after being caught with his pants figuratively down, that all those hair gel articles recalled a simpler, happier time, the Obamalator needs to understand that he should count himself lucky when he has only been exposed literally.

CM has been broken for the last month. Maybe you noticed? And I have been in less than optimum health during that same period. I kept making stabs at fixing it – the DNS registrant mess, the hosting company mess, the recreation of the backend db mess – but, I would run out of energy or the world would run out of time.

Take, for example, the day I tried to get the DNS resolved:

And so it went. This is well after my problems with globat.com, my host. Let this be a lesson to kids out there. Pick a good hosting company. You can get out of marriages with fewer emotional scars.

But, it is all settled and done. Of course, the XML export made gobbledygook out of my squiggles category. That remains to be fixed.

Lest this post remain utterly boring, here is a conversation I overheard and, subsequently, recorded in an email from the same day as the transcript above:

And that’s lunch hour. That day went on to become a truly memorable one.

I am sure you all noticed that this site has acted flaky lately. At first, I kept thinking that it was due to my host, Globat.com not doing a proper job of, hell, maintaining ONE damn SQL db. However, on monday, I discovered that CM had been hacked by some Saudi scriptkiddie named TrusT_Me.

You can see the hack here. TrusT_Me seems to target Linux based sites running some exploit or the other. But really, I don’t know how he did it because my DAMN HOST won’t tell me anything. I used to be happy with their service but guess who is about to cancel his account? Oh yeah. Me.

And as to why this honor? Why was CM targeted? Hard to say, we are such gentle souls that I cannot imagine anyone ever getting mad at something I wrote here. The amount of roses and chocolate delivered to my home testifies to the broad love that CM generates in the hearts of men and women. It appears that maybe Trust_Me targets folks he deems are morally suspect and/or corrupt. I do plead guilty to that. But, I am also not going to let this one slide. I declare Freedom Jihad on the Kingdom РLet democrary ring from Riyadh to Jeddah. Look forward to my exposé, my behind the scenes look Рat the highly secretive society of KSA. Admittedly, I last visited at the tender age of 11 but we all know that the Orient is timeless.

All this to say that CM may continue its flakiness over the next few days, as I resurrect it at another host. It seems to be up and down and all around for no apparent reason. So, I doubt my gentle readers will be that inconvenienced.

ps. Obama announced that he is going to start thinking about this whole presidential thing. Nice!

pps. 24 is awesome but why did they kill Kal Penn! WHY do they always got to kill the desi brother? Oh yeah, they kill all brothers on that show. Do you know it is Dick Cheney’s favorite show? He accidently shot 14 LCD tvs during the premier episode.

In March, I am presenting on a panel at the annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies. A few weeks ago, we co-panelists thought about ways in which we could enhance the process of writing and discussion on the papers before the conference happens. We are convinced that our idea for the panel could be turned into a neat little book and so, we wanted to invest far more longitudinal conversations than is common in panels [my advisor Ron Inden famously quipped: "A panel compromises of 4 people who never have to speak to each other."].

Since all the panelists were scattered around the country and could not meet in person [which would make life SO much easier], I felt that what we needed were 4 sets of networked documents – annotatable, referenceable. That is, we would want to comment on an individual paper, comment on that comment, and refer to some section on a similarly marked up different paper. Perhaps, a pdf or Word document with tracking enabled and a template, being mailed back and forth, continuously. Um, no.

My working notion, then, was to create a private wiki where the co-panelists will post our papers and get those conversations started: post our primary materials, notate the main trajectories of our arguments, etc. I think it would have worked reasonably well.

Today, however, Ben Vershbow and the amazing people at Institute for the Future of the Book introduced me to their notion of a networked working paper: Mitchell Stephens’s The Holy of Holies: On the Constituents of Emptiness. Taking off of their earlier work on McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory, this newly imagined paper provides each section with a dynamic margin to the right of the text where one can post comments on individual paragraphs, and also annotate the text with links and refereneces to related materials. One thing I can think of adding is a space for the meta-discussion – that is, the discussion of the paper as a whole. Also, a space for primary materials/evidentiary stuff would be great, etc.

One can easily see the immense potential of this – especially in the many-to-one discussion model. That is, a number of people commenting/parsing one basic text. I can easily see dissertation committees all over the land jumping up and spilling their coffees in excitement. Oh wait, they never read those things. I think the key part of this experiment is to mould technologies to get their benefits without necessarily rupturing the ways in which academia functions. This is a positive and welcome step in that direction.

As Ben mentioned, “I think the history community should pay attention… this is something they could really use.” I couldn’t agree more. So, how about it, Ben? How does your prototype scale to a panel?

I have been thinking about digital archives in the humanities – specifically for historians – for a while now. I believe that certain technologies, under the web 2.0 rubric*, provide new and exciting ways for historians to completely rethink their notions of archive, access, and, perhaps, public knowledge itself.

Take, for instance, the Mughal India “virtual room” archive on Mughal India at The British Museum. It was launched in 2004 and geared towards high-school pedagogy with an object-based, click-through interface. If anyone remembers CD-ROM games/adventures/encyclopedias from mid-90s, one would be terribly at home here. I guess someone, somewhere, thought that kids-these-days like to endlessly click in virtual spaces to get information [no Second Life or WoW quips, please] but it boggles my mind. The information – the archive, if you will – is so hard to find, so piecemeal, and inaccessible that this exercise is useless. You cannot cut and paste any information. You cannot bookmark anything. You cannot even read something properly. Worst of all, there is no feedback – no community of any sort, created through this process. Not even a comment board. The organization is also hectic – there is scant reason to find things where you end up finding them. For example, would you expect to see a 3D model of the Taj Mahal in the section titled, A Day in the Life of…? A X-axis only spinning 3D model? Not me.

There is the meta-descriptions of the site available at something called The Staff Room – except it has 404s and wrong descriptions [unless Imperial China is Mughal India].

I do appreciate the fact that this is geared towards pedagogy with some lesson-plans etc. but the execution leaves much to be desired. Perhaps this could work as a downloaded, self-run flash program on the student machine. Perhaps. This certainly isn’t the way we need to think about digital archives aimed at pedagogy.

*: Incidentally, do read these excellent writeups from Jeremy at Clioweb and Mills at edwired on a recent forum, Scholarship 2.0: What Web 2.0 means for Digital Humanists.

Happy 8th birthday, Google. You have changed everything. Remember. Don’t. Be. Evil.

Today’s NYT Magazine cover story by Michael Lewis, The Ballad of Big Mike, relates a rags-on-the-way-to-riches tale about a young football player at Ole Miss. Only the most compulsive Sunday NYT readers will have actually made their way through this dull yet strangely disturbing tale of an inner-city lad weighing 334 lbs. (which figure could only be discovered when he was placed on a cattle scale), who was informally adopted by a rich family in Memphis. This ‘adoption’ led to his magnificent transformation from an underprivileged under-educated refrigerator-sized semi-zombie into a privileged semi-educated refrigerator-sized football player.

The real pay-off for reading the entire article comes right near the end when everything is in place to get him admitted to Ole Miss to play football except for the fact that all his grades are D’s and F’s. This is of course unfair, to expect passing grades of a young man who functions as a human barricade to anyone who tries to get past him on the football field, but such is the arcane bureaucracy of college admissions, even at institutions with a strong investment in organized sports. Much drama ensues and his grades go up during his senior year with the help of a round-the-clock tutor, but it is still quite difficult to get him interested in anything academic. The family is stymied by his inability to identify even with literature that speaks directly to his own most deeply felt experiences, such as Great Expectations and Pygmalion (who wouldn’t want to identify with Pygmalion?).

So what do you do with all those pesky F’s on a football player’s report card? It’s easy! You just logon to Brigham Young’s Distance Education program. From there, you can pick from a variety of ‘Character Education‘ courses. Each of these courses costs $40 and can be used to replace the F’s on your High School diploma. As Michael Lewis brightly explains:

The B.Y.U. courses had magical properties: a grade took a mere 10 days to obtain and could be used to replace a grade from an entire semester on a high-school transcript. Pick the courses shrewdly and work quickly, and the most tawdry academic record could be renovated in a single summer. Sean [the 'mother' of the football player] scanned the B.Y.U. catalog and found a promising series. It was called “Character Education.” All you had to do in such a “character course” was to read a few brief passages from famous works — a speech by Lou Gehrig here, a letter by Abraham Lincoln there — and then answer five questions about it. How hard could it be? The A’s earned from character courses could be used to replace F’s earned in high-school English classes. And Michael never needed to leave the house!

As Sean, the adoptive mother remarks, ‚ÄúThe Mormons may be going to hell, …but they really are nice people.‚Äù

Charles McGrath has written a part deux to his expose of term paper mills in today’s Week in Review section of the NYT. Let it be noted that Mr. McGrath has for some reason not discovered the Pakistani Crime Syndicate we unearthed after his article last week. The paper he commissioned this week, a comparison of Brave New World and 1984, cost a whopping $49.75 and was delivered quite late. Interestingly, it was wholly unoriginal and had been plagiarized line by line. This essay was commissioned from the allegedly Pakistani outfit Term Paper Relief, that same website that had been accused of hiring an American designer to make it look legit.

I have to admit I am kind of disappointed. I had fantasized, I now realize, that these Pakistani term-paper mills were poignant efforts on the part of cash-strapped PhDs just trying to make ends meet. I had imagined a group of young intellectuals, or perhaps some greying scholars of the humanities, sitting down and pouring their hearts into these term papers. Late at night, by the light of a dim bulb over a crummy old desk stacked high with novels like Heart of Darkness and The Great Gatsby, a group of old friends, PhD class of ’62, would smoke cigarette after cigarette and argue about what qualities really make Gatsby a quintessentially American protagonist and how we might analyze the conditions presented in 1984 in light of the fact that that calendar year has already passed.

Many of these services even offer to write dissertations! How could they do that, I had wondered, without doing substantial research on the proposed topic themselves? Would the dissertation client send in his or her research notes and then have the service provider put them together to form a cogent argument? Where would the theory come from? Would it cost extra to have the argument fit into a particular theoretical framework? But now that we know that this service is nothing better than an expensive recycling plant, I would advise my graduate student friends, those of you who may be experiencing a frisson of sinful temptation at the thought of a possible shortcut, some way out of this madness that will still give you something to frame and put on the wall, I would caution you against commissioning your doctoral theses from these enterprises. After all, how would academia survive if it were built on a foundation of recycled ideas, shaky transitional arguments and scholars who don’t know how to parse a sentence?

On the occasion of this past Monday, I decided since everyone else was doing it, I might as well hold my own little 911 observation. It occurred to me to paint a portrait of UbL, since I’ve been working on portraiture lately (by which I mean ‘making portraits’ rather than in the academic sense of ‘working on’). The result is to the left (click for a larger version). In order to prepare for my 911 observation, I embarked on an image search, hoping to find a nicely pixellated photograph of the man in question. I was surprised to find that there are basically three photos of UbL floating around on the web. They are below, with some minor variations (and of course the variations between these three is minimal; the second two were probably taken on the same occasion):

All others are either cartoons, or bits of photoshoppery that are designed to make UbL look foolish, evil, or obscene. Some videos, satirical and otherwise, can also be found on YouTube, but we can save that for another day. What interested me more was the ‘real’ art depicting UbL that I found out here.

Hollywood publicists have to be studying this phenomenon just a teeny bit: how can you keep your client protected from the public eye and manage to control the images available of him or her on the internet while achieving maximum daily exposure? On top of that, we’ve barely heard from him since 911. This paucity of visual images of UbL has forced all cartoonists, photoshoppers and artists to rely on the same images over and over again, enhancing magnificently the iconic stature of their elusive subject. This also makes his likeness quite easy to recreate, since that image is indelibly stamped in everyone’s imagination. And unless he is someday dragged humiliatingly from a foxhole like S. Hussain, or produced dead and in more or less one recognizable piece like Al-Z., this may be all we ever see of him. If some gentle reader knows of a good stash of other images, especially those captured during UbL’s youthful decadence (can it really be true that he wanted to make Whitney Houston his bride and assassinate Bobby Brown?), please speak up!

Below is a round-up of some of the UbL art I happened upon during my searches. As far as the rest of the imagery goes, there are many UbL cartoon sites, and the photoshoppage is all over the internet, most famously represented in the Bert is Evil shenanigans. You’ll notice that each of the artists below has used one of the three photographs above as models. In the Bin Laden Pieta, however, the photograph is flipped horizontally. It’s possibly the case with both the Werner Horvath paintings as well, as I believe both are taken from the same photo op, when UbL was wearing a camouflage jacket and had a banner with white calligraphy on a black background behind his head. It is also possibly worthy to note that none of these artists appear to be even a little bit from/in/around the United States.

Examples of UbL Art:

1. Bin Laden Pieta (2002) by Sokari Douglas Camp:

This pieta by Nigerian-British artist Sokari Douglas Camp is kind of mysterious, since the Mary-figure with the portrait of the planes hitting the towers in her hands looks a lot like Darth Vader. If we are to take the title as the Italian word for ‘compassion’ it makes a bit more sense. With the portraits of UbL fixed in the two upper corners of the back wall of the sculpture, one wonders if one is supposed to see him as part of the compassion, or just a related figure in the ensemble. Well, either way, who says it has to make sense, even if it is concept-ual art. And guess what, there’s good news for you collectors out there, it’s 140 x 88 x 125 cm, and it’s for sale! I’m sure the Bin Laden Pieta would make the perfect accent for any sophisticated salon in Blogistan.

2. Those Bengali folk painters have done it again!

True to the venerable folk art trafficking tradition, this appealing little painting is not attributed to any artist. The rationale I have heard for this is that folk artists do not have an auteur-centered art scene the way that ‘Western’ artists do. Instead they just paint their timeless and cyclic scenes depicting the harvest and episodes from the Ramayana in a manner handed down for generations, from mother to daughter, or father to son. And of course, not attributing authorship to particular works allows art dealers such as the folks over at Exotic India Art to block enterprising collectors from motoring through rural Bihar or West Bengal to buy directly from the artists. One doesn’t doubt that the folk painters of Bengal have been painting quaint little scenes of contemporary geo-political events for centuries. Keep up the good work, Bengali folk painters!

3. Great American Nude, by Hassan Musa

Another item that pretty much speaks for itself, Sudanese artist Hassan Musa’s Great American Nude was exhibited at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2005 in an exhibit called Africa Remix. Unlike other depictions of UbL as a nude, this one isn’t lampooning him so much as it is the US and his relationship to that nation-state. Musa is also a calligrapher, cartoonist and critic, so his style is very, ahem, graphic. You can see some pretty sweet examples of his zoomorphic calligraphy on his website and also here. I’m putting one up here because who doesn’t love zoomorphography, even if it is considered by purists to be a degraded and pandersome form of the calligraphic arts?

4. Clash of Civilizations, by Werner Horvath

These two paintings by Austrian constructivist painter Werner Horvath are actually both the left-hand side of triptychs depicting the so-called ‘clash of civilizations.’ I’m assuming he’s using the term ironically, but I could be completely wrong. The other elements in the triptychs of course also involve W (who in one painting is dressed as a crusader ripping the heart out of a stricken Statue of Liberty [at least that's what I think is going on]). You can see the full triptychs by clicking here. If you click on each of these pictures you’ll see in the larger versions the bizarreness of Horvath’s technique. If you look at the images closely, you’ll see the paint piled up in all sorts of improbable globular shapes on the canvas, but when the images are far away, or in this case, tiny, the style seems traditional enough. He calls himself a constructivist, but I’d say he’s a neo-Impressionist, or maybe even an adherent of globulism.

The NYT reported yesterday in a ‘the internet might be destroying the fabric of our society’ article that students who are desperate, dishonest or rich (or any combination) can buy made-to-order term papers on the World Wide Web for as little as $9.95. A NYT editor solicited term papers on common English lit topics from three different sites. Thankfully for the future of humanity, the resulting essays were incredibly bad! The papers produced for the NYT were of such poor quality that Harvard Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, when shown an essay on the nature of Ophelia‘s madness in Hamlet, guessed he would be unable to give it more than a D+. Of course, we assume that Harvard has its own in-house system for term paper manufacture, and that Harvard students in general have more sophisticated resources at their disposal. These are just harmless websites for regular kids who don’t want to do their homework. Or are they?

Intrigued by the author’s suggestion that some of the papers they had ordered might have been written by non-native speakers of English, and might well be just another form of outsourcing to the Subcontinent, I visited a couple of sites. On following a few links, I was horrified to learn that while there are many fine citizens of the USA helping young people churn out term papers, there are also many fraudulent, foreign sites, such as those listed on the very helpful watchdog site essayfraud.org. The authors at essayfraud.org reveal to us the seamy underbelly of the otherwise legitimate business of third-party term-paper manufacture. Fraudulent sites include essayrelief.com and nicetermpaper.com, which are both actually fronts for a vast Pakistani crime syndicate.

This Pakistani crime syndicate is charged with the following atrocities:

Fraudulent, foreign sites like EssayRelief, MasterPapers, EssayToday, BestEssays, NiceTermPaper, and SuperiorPapers hire ESL writers in Pakistan for as little as .70¢ per page so that they can offer the low prices ($9.95–$15.95/pg) that lure consumers into their traps. In general, qualified writers in America will not work for less than $12.00/pg, yet foreign scam sites like TermPaperRelief charge customers only $9.95/pg. If the company receives $9.95/pg from a customer, that means the unqualified writer receives less than $2.00/pg! Of course, foreign rip-off sites do not reveal these extremely crucial details to prospective customers. They blatantly lie about their location and qualifications. In contrast, legitimate companies in America employ professional, native English-speaking writers for at least $12.00/pg, and typically charge consumers $17-$40/pg, depending on timeframe.

What’s more, these ‘bogus’ term paper mills pose a national security threat to the United States:

In addition to their fraudulent term paper mills, the Pakistani criminals at EssayRelief.com operate non-existent, bogus “universities” and “accreditation organizations” like Rochville University, Belford University, Ashwood University, WOEAC, and BOUA, which were exposed by CNN for perpetrating blatant fraud and posing a NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT.

The main disadvantage to using these Pakistani crime syndicate services according to essayfraud.org is the poor ‘ESL-style’ English found in their products. A brief survey demonstrates that indeed, there is a special flavor to be found in the English on some of these sites (though I’m not sure the term ESL precisely covers it), such as in this quality guarantee from nicetermpaper.com:

Due to our efficient service, we have been successful to gain the name of best and the most reliable writing service on the web. All of our writers are exceptionally highly qualified and experienced; they know what they have to do. Our service includes the preparation of different types of custom term papers, essays, research papers, book reviews, thesis and dissertations. We are destined to provide the students winning chance they deserve for their academic career rather than cheated material. We custom make their papers according to their own requirements and desires.

On the other hand, honest, legitimate sites based in the US show the clear and unmistakeable writing style of a mediocre American college student. At www.superior-termpapers.com, the writers claim that they have “helped an infinite amount of students improve their GPA,” and warn us that they “…understand that a lot of sites in the writing industry don’t have phone numbers and are based out of developing countries, for this reason we want to distance ourselves from being this type of service.”

The more insidious and allegedly Pakistani crime syndicate site essayrelief.com is harder to sniff out, however, due to a recent Americanization of its format which makes it virtually undetectable as part of a vast foreign crime network. According to essayfraud.org,

The EssayRelief criminals from Pakistan recently paid a designer to give their sites a “facelift” in hopes of making them appear more “American.” They falsely claim to be from America, which is why they do not display a corporate address for verification. (However, they do have the shocking audacity to paraphrase an “Industry Warning,” which contains information that they stole and plagiarized from EssayFraud.org.) As we discovered when placing phone calls to 1-866-882-6310 and 1-866-660-1717, a person with a Pakistani accent will tell every lie in the book to secure your money. Don’t believe a single word. The material you receive (if at all) will be riddled with grammatical and spelling mistakes.

As if this weren’t bad enough, the Pakistani sites, it seems, condone plagiarism! In the list of “Top 11 Warning Signs that a Site Hires ESL Writers from Overseas,” this intriguing item comes in a #10: ” Transfers copyright to the customer (condones plagiarism).”

It seems that this is an important quality that separates the legitimate (US-based) term paper mills from the criminal ones. The allegedly American site www.superior-termpapers.com contains the following disclaimer in tiny letters at the bottom of its home page:

Superior-Termpapers.com is owned and operated by TPE Inc. All work ordered through this or any site owned by TPE Inc. remain the property of TPE Inc. and are easily available for worldwide publishing. Any written work sold by TPE Inc. are intended for research purposes only and may only be used as a reference source by students writing their own essays. All essays must be cited according to the examples given to you in the cite-us section of our site. Be advised that it is illegal to buy any of our model reports and submit them as your own, in whole or in part, for academic credit. By ordering a report through our company you agree that it is legal to do so in your city, state/province, and country.

On their faq page, the disclaimer is slightly different but a little clearer:

Copyright 2001-2003 The Paper Experts Inc. All text, images, tags and design of this site are property of The Paper Experts Inc. Our service is intended to help students improve their marks not help them cheat. We are a service that writes term papers as models or guides to be used by students in creating their own original work. Anytime you use our ideas or words you are required to properly attribute credit to The Paper Experts Inc. If you would like to inform yourself on this matter please contact us and ask. All works written by us remain our property. We are always happy to help students improve and succeed in their academic endeavors.

Just like escort services, term paper writing services maintain their legality in the US by claiming not to sell the products they produce. The threat to their legitimate business comes from offshore locations where copyright laws and plagiarism belong to a more hazy domain. As the allegedly Pakistani site nicetermpaper.com explains, “to us, plagiarism is a sin.” A sin, perhaps, but not a crime.

A few weeks ago, Google announced that one can download pdfs of public domain books from Google Print. Today comes another announcement about the availability of newspapers archives from 1700 to the present. Most of the stuff that I looked for in the archives was behind subscription walls but no matter.

Academics have always had these archives and the search tools that allow us to do our trade. However, these Google tools are really a revolution outside the academy. It allows easy public access to the archive [the millions book scanned - and now, the million newspapers scanned].

What that means for us? We oughta think about it.

ps. On the Google Print front, I should tell all the SAists that there is incredible material available. Search by time, rather than by keywords.

Some fun with Google Trends:

• Islam: And they say Muslims aren’t inquisitive about their faith. Look at the top four. Those countries are _not_ in the Middle East people. I know it is hard to fathom Muslims outside the Middle East.
• Terrorism: Top city: Washington, D.C. And look at Region. Pakistan leads [as always!].
• Sex: Pakistan! And Delhi!
• Democracy: Surprisingly, no city outside of the US is inquisitive about democracy. Was Ahmedinejad right?
• Religion: Looks like he was! At least as far as the Americas and Australia are concerned.

Your turn.

I rebuild the mySql db four times. I wrote the mod_rewrites 1,0000 times. Hell will be a gigantic database with millions of entries in millions of tables. The angel will ask me to find all instances of the *./*.html and replace it with $1/$2/. By hand. When I am finished he will tell me that I forgot the php tag. When I redo it over, I will be informed that, um, the tag was un-necessary, take it off, and put the html back again.

Oh wait. That won’t be hell because that was last night.

I think the crazy part of the transition is over. The permalinks mess. Now, I can preserve my excellent google page rank®. No fear.

I won’t have time to do the external work on the site until this weekend maybe. Before that, in preparation for Friday’s meeting, I wanted to put some thoughts on paper concerning academic blogging.

At the offset, we have to make distinctions and gradations. All blogs are not created equal. Similarly, all bloggers are not the same kind of bloggers. Blogging – a time-stamped tool for disseminating information and receiving feedback – is as vast and diverse a phenomenon as those with access to a computer terminal. Let’s chart out within that cosmos, our concern: “academic blogging”.

The wrong definition for academic blogging would be, academics who blog [yes, tenured professor who have a needlepoint community on LiveJournal do not count as academic bloggers. a w00t for them, notwithstanding]. In my opinion, the criteria should be 1. whether the person is an academic by training/profession and 2. whether a significant portion of the blog represents the person’s engagement with wider world of their academic or civilizational concerns.

I think both of these criteria are quite necessary because I think blogging is evolving into a cleaner connection with the authorial voice and authorial identity. Being trained in and/or being in the profession makes crucial difference in this public discourse. A Google engineer with a Ph.D. in CS is a credible source for understanding Google APIs just as a Sanskritist with a Ph.D. is a credible source for understanding Upanishads. Obviously this doesn’t mean either of those sources would be infallible or exhaustive. Which leads to another issue: Is a Google engineer just as credible when she is discussing Middle East political landscape? How about a Sanskritist talking about modern Middle East? See, how expertise traps you in a sandbox? What must be kept clear is that the academic stamp is only one step. The more important step is the archive that the academic puts forth for the world at large. This is where training becomes crucial – Reading primary sources, synthesizing information in a coherent and judicial narrative, being able to speak to wider and thematic concerns.

So, what exactly should an academic be doing with her academic blog? Making a critical engagement with the social and political world that she inhabits. The typical, and to a certain degree fair criticism, is that the academic world is a bubble: Micro-specialists writing abstract texts in archaic journals and books; giving each other tenure while chuckling about their liberal hegemony. The domain of “real world” – political or economical or religious is ceded to journalists or politicians or pundits. Silly is the academic who ventures to write for a “popular” audience. I think this view is an exaggerated one but it is, nonetheless, grounded in some reality. Of all the Middle East/Islam tenured faculty I know, only 2 regularly write op-eds or give interviews to radio or tv. For the rest, this may be a lunch conversation. This is where a blog as a medium comes in handy. It is no op-ed page at the NYT, but it’s a good start. It is the piece that not only can start this intellectual engagement with the public but also highlight it. Martha Nussbaum blogs. Becker and Posner blog. Obviously, everyone at Harvard Law blogs.

Why do I blog? I happen to believe in scholarship that directly engages with the political. I believe that my concerns of history, of narrative, of faith are not limited to 13th c. Indo-Persian historiography but crucial to the ways in which I perceive and understand the contemporary world. Those are the concerns that animated me to start a blog. I may not succeed everyday – but I try. As a scholar, it is not coming out of the ivory tower into the real world, it is bringing the world into the ivory tower. Two exemplars from the field of history, that I would like to point out: Mark Grimsley and Timothy Burke.

So, let us say that you are an academic and you blog largely about your concerns – does it stop you from getting a job? does it prevent you getting tenure? That seems to be the b.i.g. question, right? Dan Drezner having been denied tenure here. Except he got a tenured gig elsewhere. In the ME field, there is Juan Cole setting the standard and opening up the door for many other scholars – Joshua Landis comes to mind – and other collectives [I should note that Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes are the real trailblazers - albeit reactionary - in engaging directly with the broader public]. But, then Middle East is always in the news. In South Asia, I cannot think of any senior, tenured historian. The public sphere is left for people like Stephen P. Cohen or Hussain Haqqani or whomever lived there for a week. Akbar S. Ahmed being one exception. He is big in Europe. So, step up all ye tenured and untenured faculty.

Step up to what? Where is academic blogging heading? One hint is the UChicago Law School blog. That is, department or program level blogs that produce a clear window into the academic world for the rest of the world. Can you imagine a prospective graduate or undergraduate looking at all the blog-posts of the history department at UChicago? To see exactly what the faculty is up to…not just through bounded volume but a live discussion.

The second venue is towards collaborative projects. A collective effort – whether towards advocacy or pedagogy or anything – based around the distinct technologies like blogs, wikis, podcasts is bound to make a clear and defined impact on the field. Hence, my great hopes for the South Asia Sourcebook Project.

In the meantime, back to blogging about Disco.

Movable Type is dead to me. I am also INCREDIBLY busy.

But, here is a re-birth. pure and white.

So, gentle readers, bear with me as I slowly re-shape this mess into CM.

Maybe I will take the opportunity to do some redesigning. Was never happy with the fonts. And now that WP is here: posts in Urdu! flickr! tags! google maps! my netflix list! my amazon wishlist! library thing! cricket scores! ice-cream sundaes! ok. let’s leave it at Urdu/Arabic/Persian posts, shall we?

If there are any must-have WP plugins, drop me a hint. All comments will be moderated until I get this off the gr0und.

Most importantly, my permalinks are hosed. I have to get those fixed first. Why does this have to happen NOW?