For Its Own Sake

In terms of my historical pursuits, and many others besides, I consider myself an amateur and very much hope to stay that way.

This has little to do with hoping to maintain humility in the face of a vast amount of knowledge, or recognition of living in a postmodern world where I'm doomed not to really know anything about anything, or anything else along those lines. (There's an element of truth to each, of course; if there's anything approaching completion of an advanced degree in history has taught me, it's precisely how little I know.) What I'm talking about is a rather older definition of the term.

The word "amateur" doesn't exist merely as an antonym to "professional" (or, more insidiously, "competent"). Being an amateur, ideally, is being an amator: doing or pursuing something out of a love of the subject and a desire to pursue it, with vocational aspects as secondary. This doesn't necessarily require years of formal training in a discipline, though I obviously think that helped in my own case. Sometimes that lack of training can be worked around, often in very surprising ways, by dedicated amateurs, however.

Consider chemistry sets. As we have been Thinking Of The Children rather more than is necessary for the last several years, they have, along with rather too many other things, fallen into disuse and obscurity to the point where it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to find a “real” one. Depending on the safety level of various science-related hobbies, this is probably sometimes a good thing, but on the whole I think we’re losing something when we eliminate those kinds of incentives for learning. Others seem to agree with me. As a reaction to this sort of thing, many people and, rather likely, no shortage of kids have set about creating their own chemistry sets or ad-hoc equivalents thereof from scratch. However, the supplies needed are themselves difficult to impossible to find for the same reason a lot of the sets are.

This hasn’t prevented Darwin’s pager from being set off, however. Rather than abandon their interests due to the difficulty of getting modern materials, quite a few would-be amateur chemists have gotten together and formed their own communities [1] in which they’ve gone back to older textbooks – which often presuppose far less equipment or financial resources – in order to learn how to create the reagents or gear they need from scratch. This probably upsets the Department of Homeland Security or Public Safety Canada, but on the other hand just about anything does anyway, and I like the existence of environments like these where people can get together to learn about things.

That’s simply a more spectacular example of what happens when a bunch of amateurs get together and decide to pursue their interests than most. Similar things abound on more conventional, less high-entropy levels: ham radio operators, historical reenactors, astronomers and so on have long since provided an avenue for this sort of thing. Thanks to the various services and methods of communication brought about by the Internet, these cultures are changing in several ways. Perhaps the most obvious impact is that groups of amateurs are no longer restrained by geography. While the Hamilton Amateur Astronomers are rather obviously connected to the city of Hamilton, the members of Science Madness are less concerned about being in the same place. This can often be a hook for people who have an interest in one thing or another, but found no avenue or reason to seriously pursue it due to a lack of resources, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of like-minded individuals to create some nice positive feedback loops which encourage further learning or practice. I know I’ve picked up or maintained several interests as a result of encountering such groups, and I’m sure several of those who may be reading this have run into similar sorts of things.

The spread of these amateur cultures has been seen as a mixed blessing, of course. There are areas in which a lack of formal training or instruction really is a problem. Amateur historians or even chemists can often make those of us within the formal discipline twitch, but I’d be much happier dealing with either than I would an amateur trauma surgeon. [2] On a less life-and-death level, dealing with matters involving creativity, activism, history and so on, there are more shades of grey and room for vigorous debate, which often generates more heat than light but winds up illuminating nonetheless. At this point, in any case, there is no shortage of subjects, sites and organizations where anyone - amateur or expert - can dive into something without necessarily short-changing themselves.

A good chunk of my current history-related amateur geekery involved 513 over the last little while, as a component of our major class project where we were mounting a series of interactive exhibits built around the (very) general theme of "the sky." (My group was focused on the space race in general, and Sputnik in particular.) I've been interested in interactivity and visualization as tools to make exhibits more interesting for awhile, and thought I'd try to find some good visualizations and then ways for people to engage with them. The visualization part was a breeze, given the subject: I made use of Celestia, a fantastic - and free! - space simulation program that anyone interested in space needs to download right now. (I mean that. Why are you still here?)

For interacting with it I had planned on doing something a little more esoteric. Working with the SMART Board project for the main public history course got me interested in the idea of interactive whiteboards in general, especially when we got to the point of pushing their capabilities' limits somewhat. I like touchscreens in general, as a way of getting over that boring keyboard-talks-to-the-computer tradition. [3] To that end, I thought I'd try to build an interactive whiteboard in a roundabout way with a combination of a projector hooked up to my desktop and a sensor built from a homebuilt IR light pen and a Wii remote, inspired by Johnny Chung Lee's blog "Procrastineering."The idea was to project the image onto a wall, which could then be manipulated with one (or, preferably, two) pens to rotate, zoom, etc. the final product. I got partway through the process before the suddenly-Schrödingerian status of our having a projector - and the end-of-semester crunch season in general - caused theWii component of the whole project to end up by the wayside, forcing us to settle on the visualization and some audio I drew together towards the end. The whiteboard shall exist in time - indeed, it must, since it's going to remain a splinter in my mind until I get the thing working - but it has been relegated to a summer project.

The thing is, I wouldn't have come up with that kind of idea in my own, and would have been hard-pressed to get a hold of some of the basic theory to follow through on it, without these kinds of established and tolerated amateur cultures towards various esoteric fields of knowledge existing in the first place. While there's obviously going to be concerns about significant aspects of them - reliability for a page on historical maps, safety issues on amateur science sites specifically devoted to "fires and loud noises," etc. - I do like the variety, openness, and sheer weirdness of a lot of these sorts of resources, and I approve of living in a world where it's fairly easy to take just about any hobby or discipline and find a thriving community of engaged, helpful devotees already involved in it at any level from greenest beginners to world-renowned experts.

This is getting far more tome-ish than I originally planned, so I think I'll be belatedly polite and cut it off here. Next I want to talk about the digital aspects of this sort of thing. Between the Internet's ubiquity, its ability to help spread and coordinate amateurs of all skill levels from around the world, and its own distinct cultures as regard ideas and the transmission thereof, there are some pretty profound implications - and challenges - for historians to consider.

[1] – I was casting about earlier for some URLs connected to this, as I remembered coming across mention of it via a couple of news stories and blog posts a year or so ago. Upon asking a friend who had pointed me at said stories in the first place if he remembered where we'd seen them, he pointed me at this URL, a dedicated domain to the subject, instead. I (foolishly) expressed surprise at that and was informed that I "underestimate the Internet at [my] peril. ;)" I do indeed.

[2] – I’m entitled to one or two shameless straw men per semester, so I don’t feel too guilty about this one.

[3] - I was also inspired on this note by Jeff Han's magnificent presentation at the TED Talks in February 2006, in which he demos an intuitive interface that gets rid of mice and keyboards altogether. I want three.