Lecture #3:
Landscapes of Information: An Introduction to Your Place Paper...and to UW-Madison Libraries

Introduction:

This lecture is organized in part like your own place paper: it will help us answer the riddle posed by this photograph of Lower Campus.

University of Wisconsin Lower Campus, 1890s
University of Wisconsin Lower Campus, 1890s

Why was this area once called "Lower Campus," and when and how did that name fall out of use? We'll also consider a related question: What can we learn about the history of our campus and about landscape history more generally by studying the history of Lower Campus?

I'm going to use this riddle of Lower Campus to also tell the story of libraries on the UW-Madison campus: how they came into being, grew, evolved, and changed into the libraries we know today. So this lecture will in effect be a kind of "place paper" about Lower Campus.

Any good place paper must be selective in exploring the history of its chosen place by focusing on a particular theme, and the theme on which I'll be concentrating in this lecture will be the history of libraries and the history of information here at UW-Madison. Our understanding of information has undergone a profound transformation since the middle of the 19th century, and I'll argue today that you can see the consequences of that transformation right here in the campus landscape.

A Quick Overview of the Final Place Paper Assignment

Your place paper assignment begins with this crucial paragraph:

You are to choose some place–either located in Madison or somewhere in the United States that you know well from your home or travels–and write a brief essay discussing your interpretation of some aspects of its landscape history, using the themes, tools, and perspectives we’ve studied in class. Because this is a relatively brief paper, you’ll need to think carefully about what parts of your chosen place you wish to explore in your essay: it is far better to discuss a few aspects well than many aspects superficially. Write a description or tell a story that will explain to the reader how this place came to have the shape and qualities it has today. You should think of this paper as an exercise in historical, geographical, and environmental interpretation, asking you to read a small patch of landscape as a document of past environmental change. Just as importantly, your place should illustrate one or more important themes drawn from the course as a whole, so please be careful to think carefully about which course themes can help you interpret the past of your place, and which aspects of your place can illustrate the themes of the course.

I urge you to read the assignment in the syllabus in its entirety--in fact, please read it more than once. The assignment draws coequally on two skills: (1) your skills at reading the landscape itself, and (2) your skills in locating and interpreting primary source materials that help you understand how that landscape has changed in the past.

We strongly encourage you to read some of the excellent sample place papers that previous students in this course and (in History / Geography / Environmental Studies 460) have written to help you come up with ideas and approaches for your own place paper. You'll find a large collection of these past place papers on this page: http://www.williamcronon.net/courses/469/469_place_papers.html

Learning how to balance reading the landscape and reading primary source documents is not always easy. So you are encouraged to use this website: "How to Do Historical Research". I also encourage you to read this very helpful guide: Wayne Booth et. al., The Craft of Research 4th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), which has more coverage of online research than the earlier 3rd edition did (though you may be interested to know that you can access the 3rd edition online for free through the UW-Madison library).

Here are some goals to keep in mind as you think about selecting a good place to write about for your final paper:

  • You should try to find features of your place that reflect its past: this is not just a library research assignment, but an exercise in “reading the landscape”
  • The scale of your place should be reasonably small and manageable
  • If you choose a larger place (an entire town, for instance), you should select some particular aspect (its transportation networks, for instance, or its relationships to a natural feature like a river) to give your paper a clear focus.
  • Since every place is potentially infinite in the number of things you could discuss about it, being selective about 1-3 themes that you can analyze in detail is much better than trying (and by definition failing) to be encyclopedic.
  • The assignment works best if you spend time identifying historical features of your place that especially intrigue you--and that relate to this course on the “Making of the American Landscape”--at the same time that you gather primary documents that reflect the past of your place: the best papers happen at the intersections of these historical features and themes with documents.

 

"What are the documents?" Searching vs. Browsing in Historical Research:

History is not the only academic discipline that interprets the past: geologists, archaeologists, even astronomers study past phenomena and change over time. But unlike these other disciplines, the discipline called history has traditionally relied on written documents rather than—as an archaeologist might—physical remains or material culture.

One of the defining features of history is that historians study something that doesn't exist any longer and we cannot visit or observe at first hand; to make claims about the past, they rely on the scattered documents that have come down to us—intentionally or accidentally—from the past. Unlike the social and natural sciences, historians can't run controlled experiments or collect data.

Because historians study things that no longer exist, the second question they ask, no matter what the first question they're trying to answer, is: What are the documents?

Documents are the traces of the past that have survived into the present. Without them, we can't say anything at all about the past that no longer exists.

Because the past no longer exists and we cannot visit it for ourselves, we don’t get to choose the documents that enable us to understand it. Unlike scientists, historians cannot run experiments; we cannot create data.

Instead, we are utterly dependant on the accident of what sources have come down to us about the past.

Moreover, people who created records in the past almost always did so for purposes other than our own, so answering our questions with their documents is always a challenge. That said, it's also an intriguing challenge, since the search for documents requires historians in many ways to act like detectives. What clues can we find that will help us answer the questions we're trying to solve?

Unlike most academic disciplines, historians have few special methodologies or skills: the questions we ask are pretty ordinary, and we use a lot of ordinary common sense to figure them out.

What we’re really good at is this one key question: “What are the documents?” You too will need to grapple with that question as you decide on the place you want to write about. If you choose to write a place for which you can't find any documents, you'll be making this assignment much harder than it needs to be.

So we need to talk about how you'll find documents about your place.

Consider Google, the first place many of you are likely to turn in finding out about your place. For all of its incredible power, Google is best at answering questions when you already know the question you're asking. But when we study the past, we often don't know our questions ahead of time. We have to learn a fair amount about our chosen place (and time) before we can figure out what we really want to know about it.

As a result, history as a discipline often works by immersion: we immerse ourselves in a past world, we try to develop intuitions about what it was like to live back then, and gradually we get a better and better sense of the questions we should ask and answer about that past world.

To ask a question like "What caused the Civil War?" leaps over a whole bunch of historical information and contexts that we need to understand first before we can produce, say, a five-point list of causes of that extraordinarily complex historical event.

Here's the crucial point: Searching is not the same as browsing. When we browse, we generally don't yet know what we're looking for. Searching with a tool like Google is designed to take us straight to the information we already know we want. Browsing, on the other hand, involves a wandering, serendipitous search for connections and contexts so we can figure out the questions we need to answer.

Let me offer two well-known websites as contrasting examples of these two different ways of learning and understanding:

Google: a searcher's delight. https://www.google.com

Wikipedia: a browser's delight. https://www.wikipedia.org

Wikipedia is an extraordinary resource. It is the greatest encyclopedia humanity has ever created by orders of magnitude, and it has been created almost entirely by a vast army of volunteers. Hundreds of thousands of people voluntarilyy update entries—which means that Wikipedia manages to represent a staggering breadth of knowledge. It's of course much broader than it is deep--encyclopedias by definition have never been known for their depth or profundity--but that's precisely why it can be such a rich tool for browsing your way around the elements of a landscape. Wikipedia also has unparalleled coverage even for very small places, which is a real asset when you're studying landscape history.

I'm lingering on Wikipedia because I want you to learn to browse, to wander past landscapes without too tightly focused a goal in an effort to discover unexpected connections, contexts, and insights.

In a much later lecture on mining, I'll use Wikipedia to demonstrate how you can build a complex understanding of the history of mining landscapes by rummaging across different entries, but to give you an advance glimpse of what you might learn from such an effort, try clicking and skimming the following links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Lode

Mining >> California Gold Rush >> References / External links. The material in the "External links" category is often very different from what hits a Google algorithm would return to you, but instead point you towards a set of materials that a human brain found fascinating.

 

"What are the documents?" The Case for Libraries in a Digital Age

Wikipedia is not the only resource of browsing. In the second half of this lecture, I'd like to make the case to you that libraries (physical libraries) remain crucial resources for browsing. They can point you towards an extraordinary array of primary sources for your place paper.

In my own youth, I spent half a decade fascinating by exploring the caves of Wisconsin. In pursuit of that passion, I haunted the stacks of the Wisconsin Historical Society reading turned to nineteenth-century county histories trying to find historical references to caves in this state that have since been forgotten.

Here are some of the primary sources you'll find in a big research library like the Wisconsin Historical Society:

  • Letters and diaries
  • Photographs
  • Business and institution records
  • Newspapers
  • Government records
  • Audio, film, and video recording
  • And, of course, books

I want to persuade you that you should go into the library stacks and just rummage around looking for interesting things about the place you're researching for your final asignment. In order to do that, I want to spend the rest of this lecture talking not so much about how to use a library, but why to use a library. Most of the information in libraries is not yet digitized. (At its peak, Helen C. White held perhaps 250,000 books at its largest; now that number is closer to 25,000.) So one of the chief points I wish to persuade you of is that there are things ungoogleable today that are still worth finding and paying attention to.

 

A Mini Place Paper: What Was "Lower Campus"? Why and How Did it Change?

A Place Paper Riddle: How did a big open city block called “Lower Campus” that was once used for playing football get reinvented as “Library Mall” with buildings holding millions of books...and how has our relationship to those books changed over time?

By the 1870s, a quarter-century into the life of UW-Madison, the campus still had no library. It was not until 1878 that the building we now know as Old Music Hall was constructed as a combination assembly hall and library. If you look at the building today, you will not find skylights that had been installed for students reading in the library.

The State Historical Society of Wisconsin (today the Wisconsin Historical Society), founded in 1846—two years before Wisconsin actually became a state, and two years before the founding of the University of Wisconsin—began collecting historical documents under the directorship of its first director, Lyman Copeland Draper (1815-1891), who made it one of the most important libraries and archives in the United States. Draper was succeeded by Reuben Gold Thwaites (1853-1913), and the collecting efforts of these two men help explain why we have treasures here at the Wisconsin Historical Society like the Daniel Boone papers. In the late 1890s, the Wisconsin Historical Society and the University of Wisconsin decided to join forces to construct a new library that could house the collections of both institutions. It was completed in 1900, and is the building that sits just across State Street from us.

University of Wisconsin Bird's-Eye View, Harley DeWitt Nichols, 1907
University of Wisconsin Bird's-Eye View, Harley DeWitt Nichols, 1907

If you look at this birds'-eye view of campus from 1907, you'll begin to understand why this area was called Lower Campus. The area now called "Bascom Hill" was known as "Upper Campus" until 1920. In 1916, a fire destroyed much of what was then called University Hall, requiring a major rebuilding effort that eliminated the dome that once stood atop the building. In the wake of that rebuilding, President Edward Birge (whom you've already met as a pioneering limnologist) renamed the building University Hall "Bascom Hall"--ostensibly because Birge was amused to name for President John Bascom a building that Bascom himself never liked. With Bascom Hall renamed, the place name "Upper Campus" began to disappear, and everyone began referring to "Bascom Hill" instead.

By the 1940s, the old Wisconsin Historical Society building was filled to capacity. So the decision was made after the Second World War to build a new library: what would become known as Memorial Library (in honor of UW students who had died in the war) was built facing the Wisconsin Historical Society. Because the completion of Memorial Library in 1950 created a space between these two facing libraries, the new space between the two buildings came to be known as "Library Mall" ... eliminating "Lower Campus" from our vocabularies. In a very real sense, "Lower Campus" ceased to exist as a result, surviving only as a past memory.

Just so do places come and go, changing over time in the ways you're invited to explore in your place papers.

Once Memorial Library opened, the joint collections of the university and the Historical Society split between the two buildings, with everything dealing with North American history remaining in the Wisconsin Historical Society and everything else migrating over to Memorial Library.

 

OK, So You've Got a New Library. How Do You Decide Where to Put the Books?

To navigate the newly opened Memorial Library, you needed to consult a card catalog. The card catalog in Memorial Library followed the Author-Title nomenclature: to find a book, you had to know either its author or its title. You could also try using a separate "Subject Catalog," but it never worked very well: Google does infinitely better job with the fiendishly difficult task that the old subject catalog once tried to accomplish.

There was also a much less well-known third card catalog in Memorial Library: the Shelf-List Card Catalog, which had cards for every book in the collection arranged by call number. Finally, there was also a fourth catalog in the library basement called the Cutter Catalog.

Let's consider these different cabinets filled with literally millions of 3x5" cards as historical artifacts. What can we learn by thinking about them historically?

I'll flag for you a key puzzle that every traditional librarian had to confront on a daily basis. You have a book in your hands: how do you decide what one place on the shelf that book will go, given how many different subjects it covers? Also, how do you organize the sum of human knowledge into categories and classifications so that each book will find its way to a unique location reflecting its place in the library's classification scheme? How should this abstract taxonomic classification scheme be expressed on the physical shelves of the library so that each book will have a unique home?

At the simplest level, these were the most basic questions of traditional librarianship. They may seem quite simple on the surface...but they can be nightmarishly difficult when you try to put them into practice in the real world.

In the history of U.S. libraries, several key thinkers answered these questions in quite different ways:

(To repeat: you are NOT required to read the links in the bulleted list above...but if you peruse them even a little, you'll learn things about the structure and history of libraries that may not have occured to you before, leading to the spiraling, elaborating series of riddles and puzzles that are the heart of historical research.)

 

Google vs Library of Congress: Search vs Browse

Notice that the Library of Congress Classification System (we generally refer to it as the "LC System") can be remarkably useful for browsing. If you're writing a paper about Wisconsin, the Library of Congress system means that you absolutely must make a pilgrimage to the F576-F590 shelves on Level 2 of the stacks of the Wisconsin Historical Society and browse the shelves there to your heart's content. (You'll also find relevant documents in the Society's Government Documents collection, its Microfilm Collection, its Iconographic Collection, its Archvies, etc., etc.)

In the past, before Google, scholars had to become ever more familiar with the particular sections of the LC System that most related to their own research interests.

It's worth pondering the difference in worldview between Herbert Putnam (creator of the Library of Congress Classification System) and Sergey Brin and Larry Page (founders of Google). Those different worldviews are among the best examples I can offer of the revolution in thinking about information that I mentioned at the start of this lecture.

In Herbert Putnam's system, you physically need to go to a physical location to find a physical book.

In Brin's and Page's Google, information appears to have no spatial location at all. It may be located on spinning hard drives in data centers scattered all over the world, but that fact matters to you as a Google user almost not at all. Information appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with geographical space in this disembodied virtual world.

The same cannot be said of physical books and other artifacts in the physical world. What you need to do in a non-digital library is to find the spatial location of a book. When you do so, you should always make a point of looking at the books on the shelf next to the book you originally went to find--since the logical of the classification system will put books on similar subjects next to each other. Often the most interesting things you'll find are the ones right next to the ones you thought you wanted...but you'd never have known to looking for them without the help of the classification system.

For your place papers, we want you to wander the stacks. We want you to rummage. F576-590: here you will find books on Wisconsin as well as the rest of the U.S. and Canada. Go look for books about your home town. Go look for publications relating to places you care about. Don't forget that oversized volumes (which use the same classification sequence but have to be located on different physical shelves because they occupy so much more physical space) are also a rich source of information and photographs, easily overlooked.

 

A Few Tips for Exploring UW-Madison Libraries

Remember, we'll have tours of the Wisconsin Historical Society that everyone in 469 should take right after the midterm exam. Their schedule is as follows, and you should definitely protect one of these times on your calendar:

Tuesday, Oct 16, 4:00-5:00pm Wednesday, Oct 17, 4:00-5:00pm Thursday, Oct 18, 4:00-5:00pm Monday, Oct 22, 4:00-5:00pm Wednesday, Oct 24, 9:00-10:00am

But there's nothing to prevent you from wandering campus libraries NOW to start looking for books, maps, photographs, and other documents relating to places you're thinking about researching for your place paper. With the question "What are the documents?" uppermost in your mind--because remember, you can't write a paper about your place if you don't have documents about what it looked like in the past, you might consider wandering and exploring the following campus libraries, all of which can be especially rich for this assignment:

  • Wisconsin Historical Society (not just the general books collection, but government documents, iconographic, iconographic [historic photographs], microfilm [historic newspapers], etc.)
  • Map Library (3rd floor of Science Hall)
  • Steenbock Library (for agriculture- and environment-related topics and also for the UW-Madison archives)

For general information about all the libraries on this amazing campus, you might start here: https://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/