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Emails Sent to CHE Methods SeminarMessage about Minimum Margins for Paper Submissions, and Thanks, Sent on 5/5/10:Friends-- We've now confirmed with the copy center that will be producing our energy book next week that they will only need 1/4" for the plastic coil binding they'll use to hold the collection together. This means that the 1" margins we discussed yesterday, and that were described in the email I sent out about how to double-column format your sector papers IF it's easy for you to do so, will be just fine. So please default to 1" margins all around (especially right and left), which are probably what most of you have been using already. If some of you have designed gallery collections with significantly less than 1" margins, it's important that you correct those before submitting your final product. Thanks for a highly constructive and valuable conversation last night, and for a great (if sometimes bumpy and imperfect) semester. It has been a very great pleasure and privilege working with all of you, and I'm really looking forward to the time we'll be spending together experiencing at first hand all the things (not just energy-related!) that we've been working on this semester. Bill Message about Reformatting Web Page Documents for Printed Guidebook, Sent on 5/4/10:Addendum on 5/5/10: As we discussed at our seminar meeting on 5/4/10, the formatting choices you've made for your documents may not make it easy to produce double-columned texts as described below. If that's the case, it is FINE for you to leave your papers in single-columned format. Only produce double columns if it's not too time-consuming for you to do so. We'll definitely want double-columned text for the web pages we produce after the workshop. Friends-- As we'll discuss tonight, the final versions of the documents you submit to me will be in the versions based on Kevin's original template, along with the associated image files, so we'll need those for loading all this onto web pages. For the version that will go into the photocopied handbook for the Place-Based Workshop, a more compact (and readable) double-columned version is what we'll need, and you can save me and Andrew Case some reformatting time if you're able to reformat your sector papers using the following quite simple instructions: 1) Switch to Print View if your software makes that available (View-Print Layout in Word) so you'll see how page and column breaks appear in case you want to force any breaks for improved appearance. 2) Switch the whole file to two-columned layout (Format Columns in Word, Layout Inspector in Pages). 3) Set all four margins to 1" to increase amount of text per page while still leaving space for people to take notes. We will check to see whether any additional width is needed for the gutter, so it's *possible* that we'll wind up using more than 1" for the right-left margins, but if that's so, I'll send you an email about this tomorrow. 4) Check individual pages to see whether adding column breaks and/or page breaks will increase the attractiveness of individual pages by putting headings closer to their associated texts, or images adjacent to their associated captions, or any other such design judgments. 5) When things look the way you want, you're done. Please forward the file to me in its original word processor format, which will give Andrew and me maximum flexibility for collating for the printer over the weekend. I'll demonstrate this reformatting process during seminar tonight, since it's actually much easier to do than it is to explain. If you're not able or willing to do the reformatting yourself, Andrew and I can do it over the weekend, but whatever you can find time for will be much appreciated. It's quite possible that the galleries you've produced are NOT best displayed in two-column format, and I'm inclined to leave it to the groups to decide which format you think is best for the layout you've chosen. If you could signal to me when you deliver the final versions the kind of print formatting you prefer, that would be helpful. I think that's all for now. Again, I'll demo this process tonight. Bill Message about "Cool Stuff," Sent on 4/27/10:Friends-- It occurred to me just now that if I were participating in tonight's discussion, one of the first questions I might be tempted to ask would be "What constitutes "cool stuff," and how do we recognize it when we encounter it?" If you could have a general conversation about the attributes of really arresting, intriguing, insight-provoking information and anecdotes, it might yield valuable perspectives on how to go looking for it. My guess is that such a conversation would be helpful not just for this last part of the work you're doing for our seminar in preparation for the workshop, but more broadly for your writing and teaching and communication skills as well. Again...have fun! Bill Message about Endgame Tasks for Place-Based Workshop Guidebook, Sent on 4/26/10:Friends-- Please forgive me for being so long out of touch. Last week's conference was pretty all-consuming, and I'm still trying to catch my breath. As you'll remember, you're meeting without me tomorrow, so I just want to list the various tasks you have before you, and bring you up to date on a few details. 1) You should talk about the color pages you'd like to include in the "atlas" section at the back of the guidebook we'll be giving to participants in the CHE Place-Based Workshop. If you can identify most or all the pages you'd like to include and work to get me high-quality PDFs of these, that would be great. Remember, since we don't necessarily have to put these pages up on the Web, you needn't feel so copyright-constrained about these pages as you have about the background papers you've produced. 2) Try to get a clearer sense of the "galleries" relating to the themes of the papers we chose not to write--and any other themes that you think would offer workshop participants particularly intriguing perspectives on the history and culture of energy use and contemporary debates about energy futures. Remember, we chose to change the second assignment for several reasons: to avoid exhaustion and overwork for all of us; to make it easier for creative juices to flow in ways that will yield playful, striking results for workshop participants; and to have fun (academically serious fun, mind you, but fun all the same). So: what can we add to our guidebook that will give workshop participants unexpected and striking insights about energy? (And again, the gallery sections in the book I edited entitled Uncommon Ground may be helpful to peruse for tomorrow's discussion.) 3) Remember that the other phrase we've used to describe all the items in #1 and #2 above is "cool stuff." What "cool stuff" are you going to add to our workshop guidebook to help complement the papers you've already written? If some of this cool stuff can be put up on the Web, because you used non-copyrighted material for it, that would be great, but the workshop booklet *can* include copyrighted material (as described in item #1 above) as long as it's easily separable from the copyright-free stuff we'll put on the Web. 4) John Nelson, Steve Brick, and I met today to come up with a one-page tabular handout for workshop participants to fill out as we travel to different sites, and Steve's one-page handouts about each of our sites will also have a few places for people to add details for these sites. I'd welcome any suggestions or thoughts you might have for this tabular assignment, but for the most part I think you can stop worrying about this particular assignment. 5) Finally, when you've brainstormed the items described above and gotten reasonably close to finalizing what you'd like them to look like, please think through the tasks needed to gather and collate them, and make sure you've delegated those tasks to members of the group. Andrew Case has negotiated with the Social Science copy center so that we can deliver to them a finished PDF with all of this content assembled into a single file on the morning of Monday, May 10, and bound copies will be available at the lowest bulk-discount rate for us on Friday, May 14, the day before the Workshop begins...all good news. (Plus: the Nelson Institute has generously agreed to cover the cost of photocopying the guidebooks we're creating!). So we should be working toward having ALL content: final drafts of background papers, atlas pages, and galleries of cool stuff, finished and delivered to me or Andrew Case (we're still working out those details) by roughly Thursday, May 6. As you think through your task lists, build your timelines with May 6 as the target, and the more finished the products you deliver to me, the more you'll spare me the work of assembling everything together. Whew! I'm hoping this is more burdensome and tedious to describe as I have here than it is to do! I'll be very eager to hear what you come up with, and if someone could send out a summary to me (which I'll share with the group) after your meeting tomorrow, I'd be very grateful. Thanks...and have fun! Bill Message about Length, Color Printing, and Workshop Sessions, Sent on 4/12/10:Friends-- First, I hope you'll accept my heart-felt apology for not having gotten comments on drafts to most of the teams. The past week has been nightmarishly over-full for me (my taxes still are not remotely done), not least because I was suddenly invited last week to attend a big White House conference at the end of *this* week on the future of conservation in the United States...and, of course, the 40th anniversary of Earth Day celebrations are next week. So my life has just not been my own. A couple of you have written about whether you can delay turning in your final drafts until you *have* received my comments, and the answer is of course yes...but I fear that given what the rest of my week looks like, you may not get those from me until the weekend, if I'm lucky. So I will also say that I'm happy to have people finish off their final drafts based on the truly *excellent* editorial comments (which I *have* read) that you've given each other. It's up to you how you want to handle this. We can talk more about it tomorrow night. Right now I just want to give you a huge apology. There are some other practical questions I want to make sure you all think about before we meet and talk about them tomorrow night, so let me run them by you here: 1) We've been talking about how best to make the briefing papers you're writing available to workshop participants in May, and I think we've concluded that we really ought to provide them to people as photocopied bound volumes, even though this will likely cost us somewhere between $200-$500. This makes length even more of a concern than it was going to be already, so I'd very much like our final bound document to be no more than 200 sides of 100 back-to-back double-coiumn pages. That's consistent with the length targets we've been discussing, but I want to make sure you're all aware of one form that this final product will likely take--and the financial cost implications that go with it for our budgeting of the CHE Place-Based Workshop. We really are writing a book together! 2) One significant budgeting challenge has to do with the different in photocopying black and white as opposed to color. Every single sheet of color photocopying we include in the bound volume will cost roughly $18 for the 40 copies we'll be printing for Workshop participants, so there's a real premium on how much color we can include in the bound volume. This means that we will need to print the bulk of the bound volumes in black and white, though of course we can circulate PDF versions of the briefing papers in full color, and make them available in color on the website as well. (Here also is another way in which the iPad is preferable to the Kindle!) For all these reasons, one really crucial question I need to discuss with you tomorrow night is how to task the teams with deciding which of a very small number of pages (maybe 1-2 pages for each of the 16 teams) should be printed in color, probably to be gathered in a color atlas at the back of the bound workshop volume. 3) Finally, we've been thinking about setting aside 30-45 minutes on the Saturday morning Symposium of the Workshop during which members of our seminar could offer thoughts to Workshop participants about "things to look for and think about" while visiting the various sites we'll be touring. I'd like to talk with you to make sure you're all up for doing that, and to brainstorm about what kinds of tips and suggestions would be most valuable to Workshop participants if we commit to doing this. OK? Please give some thoughts to these questions, and I'll see you tomorrow night. Bill Message about Word Count of Team Papers, and Other Matters, Sent on 4/7/10:Friends-- I'm at the Madison airport waiting for a delayed flight to DC where I'm attending the meeting of the Organization of American Historians, so want to pass along a few quick comments relating to our seminar which, with luck, I'll be able to send off to you at the Detroit airport if my connection isn't too tight. I hope to write again tonight from my hotel in Washington when I'll have more time and Internet access. 1) I want to praise you all again not just for the high quality of your draft briefing papers on energy sectors, but also for the intelligence and generosity of the editorial comments you've been offering each other. I actually think that the assistance you've been giving each other on these projects involves the most essential skills of doing interdisciplinary work: embracing the intellectual space of colleagues and helping them move forward with their work while reciprocally welcoming their contributions to one's own work. These may seem like mundane and familiar activities, hardly worthy of time and attention in a graduate "methods" seminar, but I believe they are far more valuable (and challenging to enact) than most of us in the academy typically acknowledge. So: thank you for the good work you've been doing. It's been a pleasure to watch you engage these projects in the ways you have. 2) If you've not yet shared with me the comments you made on draft papers, please forward those to me as soon as you can. I won't acknowledge all the resulting emails, but I'm very grateful to see what you've been writing to each other. 3) I don't yet have the readings for next week's session about oral interviews, ethnography, and anthropology with Maria Lepowsky and Yongming Zhou, but I will forward them as soon as I can. 4) I've spent the past half hour reformatting Kevin's web-based template to see how much it can be squeezed down for conversion to two-column printed PDFs. (I used the Coal draft page as a sample, since it was mainly text and didn't raise thorny questions of how text flows around images.) When I convert the text to two columns, squeeze down the margins, and convert all fonts (including titles) to 12 point, I can get it onto 5.5 two-sided printed pages. If I squeeze down further to 10-point font (maybe a little too far, but I don't have access to a printer right now to check what it would look like), I can get the whole thing onto 4 two-sided back-to-back pages...close to our original target (though without images, remember). This particular text is 5800 words (without notes), so I'm going to make the executive decision (at least until our discussion next week) that we should shoot to bring both sets of papers (for energy sectors and for energy perspectives) into the length range of 3000-6000 words. It's hard for me to imagine doing them for much less than 3000 words given the complexity of these subjects, though we may want to brainstorm further next week about (optional) strategies for teams who want their second paper to be more image-based, with correspondingly fewer words. I'm certainly open to that possibility. Just so you'll have a sense of what the lower edge of this 3000-6000 word range would look like, a 3000-word abridgment of the Coal paper in two-column 12-point format would fit onto 5 single-sided pages. My guess is that most of you would find that too short, which is what makes me think that the sweet spot for the length of these papers is somewhere between 3000-6000 words. Please try (hard!) not to exceed 6000 words. I think that's all for now. I hope the formatting observations in item #3 are helpful as your teams think about the second paper, and I look forward to further brainstorming and decision-making about these targets at next week's seminar. Again, I'll forward the readings for next week as soon as I have them. Thanks again! Bill Message about USDA Economic Research Service Food Time Series Data, Sent on 4/6/10:Sorry, I can't resist sending one more link...there really is a ton of interesting stuff at the USDA Economic Research Service. Many of you will be interested in Bill Message about USDA Economic Research Service Website, Sent on 4/6/10:On Apr 6, 2010, at 8:23 AM, William Cronon wrote: Friends-- A former student mentioned to me the wealth of documents and briefing papers about U.S. agriculture on the website of the USDA Economic Research Service (http://www.ers.usda.gov/), which some of you interested in this topic might want to peruse. One recent report about energy use in American agriculture leapt out at me as possibly being of interest to several of you for the papers on which you're now doing, so I've attached a copy. I'm really impressed with the good writing, reading, and editing you've all been doing. Well done! See you tonight! Bill Message Confirming Load of Draft Papers, and Editing/Reading Line-Up Change, Sent on 4/1/10:Friends-- I believe all the draft pages are now mounted in our Google Docs collection with the exception of the page for the Grid, which should be available tomorrow. The pages I've perused thus far look very promising, so I think we can all be proud of the work you've done thus far. There's been a slight adjustment in our list of editors/readers, as follows. (If you don't already know about the adjustment, it shouldn't affect you; I'm simply updating the list in our email archive so you'll have a reference here.) BIOFUELS (Adam, Emma): COAL (Rachel, Trish): THE GRID (Cathy, Kevin): HYDROPOWER (Dee, Kiersten): NUCLEAR (Brian, Katie): OIL AND NATURAL GAS (Andy, Jesse): SOLAR (Ginny, Liese): WIND (Casey, David): Enjoy your reading/editing, and I'll see you next Tuesday. Bill Message with Instructions for Editors/Readers of Draft Pages, Sent on 3/29/10:Friends-- My apologies for being slow to send out the list of editors/readers for the draft energy pages you're all now finishing. You'll find the list just above my signature below. As for protocols for sharing your pages, you should load them into our Google Docs collection, in the appropriate subfolder under the main folder "Group Projects - Sectors." I've just looked at the collection, and in order to avoid confusion on the part of editors/readers, it'd be good if everyone could clearly mark their draft page with the word DRAFT at the end of the file name (along with a code for *which* draft which could take the form 1a, 1b, 1c, etc.). This is especially important in subfolders where team members have been accumulating numerous outlines and documents, since these will make it harder for editors/readers to figure out which texts they're supposed to read and critique. Remember that you'll find suggestions for conventions about filenames in email I sent on 3/23, available at Although it's OK to include a PDF of your page so people can see what it will look like in double-column format, remember that it's not nearly as easy to edit/markup a PDF as it is a Word file. If you're able to save your draft in Microsoft Word format, please do so and upload that version of the file. If you're not, then try exporting it as a rich text format (RTF) file and see if enough of the formatting survives to be legible. Images may not come through accurately, in which case you may want to upload a PDF so people can see your intended layout, AND a DOC or RTF file so they can make comments. If you've uploaded two files in this way, you should add a note at the top of both files to make sure your editors/readers know they should look at both files. I'm assuming everyone will have loaded their drafts by tomorrow night (March 30). I'll send out a reminder email when I see that all pages have been loaded so editors/readers can get to work on the Remember that "editors" are tasked with the most intensive form of editing (everything from fixing spelling and punctuation errors and other line edits all the way up to suggesting alternatives for clarifying whole sections or possible reorganizations of the overall text), whereas "readers" are supposed to do quick, more leisurely readings in order to make global suggestions for how to improve the clarity or interest of the text. Anyone, of course, should feel free to offer any suggestions or graphics or examples that you think would be helpful to your fellow seminar members in improving their draft--all within the constraints of our available time and energy as we move on to the second project. If you're doing your markups/comments electronically, you can load them right into Google Docs, appending your last name and the string "CMTS" at the end of the filename so team members can identify you as the editor/reader. If you use email to forward comments/edits, please cc: me when you send them to the team you're critiquing. And if you do them in hard copy, it'd be ideal if you could bring 3 copies to seminar next week--one for each of the team members and one for me. You'd probably be doing your fellow seminar members a favor if you'd send a quick email when you upload comments to Google Docs so team members can read your comments as soon as they're available. Please email if you have any questions or concerns about how this editing process is working. I can easily imagine that we're going to experience some bumps along the way, and the sooner we can identify and fix those, the better. Here's our list of editors/readers for each of the draft papers. Have fun! BIOFUELS (Adam, Emma): COAL (Rachel, Trish): THE GRID (Cathy, Kevin): HYDROPOWER (Dee, Kiersten): NUCLEAR (Brian, Katie): OIL AND NATURAL GAS (Andy, Jesse): SOLAR (Ginny, Liese): WIND (Casey, David): Bill Message about Political Ecology Readings for April 6, Sent on 3/29/10:Friends-- I'm forwarding as PDF attachments to this document the four readings for our next seminar meeting on April 6, when we'll be joined by Samer Alatout and Matt Turner to discuss political ecology (the Foucault reading is from Samer). Here are the citations: Samer Alatout, “’States' of scarcity: water, space, and identity politics in Israel, 1948-59,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26 (2008), 959-82. (PDF) Matthew D. Turner, “Ecology: Natural and Political,” in Noel Castree, David Demeritt, Diana Liverman, and Bruce Rhoads, et al., A Companion to Environmental Geography, 2009, 181-97. (PDF) Matthew D. Turner, Merging Local and Regional Analyses of Land-Use Change: The Case of Livestock in the Sahel,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 89:2 (191-219). (PDF) Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” (1971) in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader, 1984, 76-100. (PDF) I've also attached the latest PDF version of our seminar syllabus to reflect these new readings and the other deadlines we've recently put in place. Bill Message about Template and Image File Naming Conventions for Team Papers, Sent on 3/23/10:Friends-- I should have sent this to you earlier, and I apologize for not having done so, but to facilitate loading what you're writing onto the Web, it would be *extremely* helpful if you could pour whatever content you're creating into a common template to solve a bunch of web formatting problems and make it easier to load these onto the site where they'll eventually live. I'm therefore attaching a modified version of the template that our own Kevin Gibbons developed for History/Geography 932 in the fall of 2008. The instructions for using this template are pasted below. If you could review this before tomorrow's seminar, we can go over how to use it during our final hour tomorrow. Make sure you come with any questions you have about the process. All of you have presumably been writing your web pages in a regular word processing file, using whatever formats have seemed best to you, which should be just fine. My hope is that you can move the blocks of text you've written into a new Word file using this template, making sure that as you do the pasting process, you adopt the formatting of the template as you move text over. Beneath the instructions below about how to use Kevin's template, there are also instructions about how to deliver to me the image files that will ultimately have to be linked on your page when it's mounted on the web page. It's fine, indeed preferable, for you to embed the images you want right into the Word file you produce, but I'll also need your JPG or GIF or PNG or other image files for building the actual web pages. So you should look over the instructions for handling images so we can talk about these too. Remember that all of these instructions are part of the style sheet that the 932 seminar generated, so you may find other useful guidance there at http://www.williamcronon.net/researching/932_website_style_sheet.html if you're confused by any of this. I apologize again for adding these complexities at such a late date, but I'm hoping that implementing these will prove easier to implement than reading these instructions may suggest! See you tomorrow, and please do some with questions. Bill Rules for Using Kevin Gibbons' Word Template When Drafting PagesIn an effort to discipline the prose we create for our draft pages, everyone should use the Microsoft Word template that Kevin Gibbons created for the class and build their pages within the formats it provides. The file name is The main thing this template will help you do if you're not familiar with HTML is to control the heading markers that will divide your web page into sections. Basically, our pages will have only three layers of Headings: If you copy and paste section elements using the examples in the template, your page should contain the markers that will enable us to create linked tables of contents when it is loaded on the website. Avoid fancy formatting on your pages: italics and bold should be the only font styles you'll need, and left and center justification should be the only paragraph formats you'll need other than the Heading markers supplied by the template. Do not underline anything for emphasis; underlining should be reserved for web links. When inserting dashes into your text, be sure to use genuine em-dashes, which look like this: — (this is HTML code —) If you'd like to link to another page on our site, indicate this by inserting the following after the place in the text where the link will occur: [LINK TO namedpage] Drop Return to Top of Page markers onto your page wherever you think the reader might want to return to the top of the page, generally at the ends of sections and subsections. Instructions for Formatting and Loading Image Files1) When you believe you have created a final version of your web page--revised and proofread as carefully as you know how, and using Kevin's final template for the final file--please email it to me as a Word file and indicate that this is the version you want me to LOAD onto our website. Once I've done the loading, any additional revisions will have to be made by me in Dreamweaver, requiring you to instruct me about where to make such corrections--more work for both of us--so it's important that you not mark a file as ready for loading until it really is. 2) To make sure I can recognize this penultimate version of your page, please use the following naming convention for it: 3) Once you've finalized the images on your page, you need to get copies of all your JPG (and possibly GIF and PDF) files that I can use in setting up the version for loading. Given the likely size of these files, you probably should NOT plan to email them to me, but should instead give them to me on a CD. You can either give me the CD in class or drop it off in my History mailbox on the 5th floor of Humanities next to the elevators at the corner of the building nearest Memorial Library. 4) In formatting low-resolution images that will be included on your actual web page, use the following protocol if you have the software skills to do so. a) resize the original image so that its longest dimension is 600 pixels, making sure to constrain the proportions of the file so that the shorter dimension of the image will be reduced correspondingly to match 600 pixel long dimension; b) save this newly resized image at "medium resolution" as a new JPG using the naming conventions specified below; c) if you believe that the reader of your page will want to examine a given image more closely, please create a second high-resolution version of if you have the software skills to do so; this higher resolution version should be whatever resolution you think is necessary to make the image legible, but should generally not be more than 1.5MB in size except under unusual circumstances. d) once you've assembled all the resized images for your page, put them into a folder ready for loading and give them to me on a CD; ideally that CD will have 3 image folders: one for low-resolution images, one for high-resolution images, and one for the original JPGs. Again, the naming conventions for these are given below. 5) If you have made low-resolution versions of your images for use on your page, it would be a big help to me to have both your low- and high-resolution files on the CD. 6) If you could use a standardized naming convention for these files, that would also be VERY helpful. I would suggest the following file name convention: 932_name_of_your_page_figxx_highorlowres.jpg Obviously, the figure numbers should be ordered according to their sequence on the page. Using a two-digit figure number like 05 instead of 5 will guarantee that the files sort in order. If by chance you discover that you need to insert a figure number into an existing sequence after you've already named a lot of files, feel free to do so by calling it "fig05b" and then "fig05c" and so on...that way, the alphabetical letters will still sort in sequence and I won't get lost in working through the queue of images to load. 7) If you have candidates for the banner image for your page, which have pixel dimensions of 593x175, please be sure to forward these to me too. In general, you should send me the full-resolution files for your banner images candidates, keeping the cropping dimensions in mind, so that I have plenty of pixels to work with in creating the new files. Message about Style and Voice of Team Papers, Sent on 3/7/10:Friends-- My apologies for taking so long to summarize our brainstorming discussion last Tuesday about the style and voice in which your team papers should be written. In no particular order, here was the suggestions people made, all of which make good sense to me, with a few suggestions of my own added in. * Remember that your names will be on these documents, and that people anywhere on the Internet are likely to be reading them, so write them being mindful of the public image of you and your work that they will create. * Don't patronize your readers. Treat them with respect. * When appropriate, it is OK to use the second person pronoun "you" to address your reader (in which case, remember to address as broad and inclusive a "you" as you can); if you want to refer to yourselves, the first person plural "we" is probably OK, but try to make this a personal and inviting "we," not the stuffy and condescending "royal we." * Since many readers may potentially regard the topics about which you're reading as technical and boring, always keep in mind that one of your most important goals is to engage readers and persuade them that this material is a lot more important, and way more intriguing, than they might have imagined. * Possible voices to consider using are those of a really fascinating tour guide or teacher. * Why should the reader care? Keep track of this question in every paragraph you write, whether explicitly or implicitly. * Be clear and concise, inviting and engaging. Brevity is good. * When making abstract points, it's often best to couple them with concrete illustrations or anecdotes to make them more vivid and to connect more effectively to the reader. * Bulleted lists may be more effective for conveying certain kinds of essential information than dense prose would be. * Especially for the web version of your paper, be sure that there's plenty of "white space" on the page so that the reader's eye doesn't become overwhelmed; long paragraphs of gray prose rarely get read on the screen. * Be mindful of controversy and use it to raise your reader's interest in your subject; but don't be polemical or shrill. Your goal is to present different points of view in fair, disinterested ways that the holders of those views would regard as a fair characterization of what they believe. * Point / counterpoint is intrinsically interesting to read, but don't assume that every argument has to have a direct rejoinder. Often the most interesting aspects of a controversy are the ways in which debaters on opposite sides choose to position their arguments in quite different places, often without as much clash with the opposing side as one might imagine. * Use trustworthy sources. * Keep careful track of where you obtain your information, including notes and citations for all your sources, and be especially careful when copying and pasting not to plagiarize. Except when quoting, everything in your paper should be in your own words. Use the Chicago Manual of Style as your default style sheet. * When you come up with key technical terms that need to be included in your paper, please add them--along with a clear, concise definition--to our glossary file so that we can link to the latter on the website. * In using images and captions, avoid any graphics the use of which would violate copyright. Places to seek illustrations include: Remember that the History/Geography 932 seminar which created the website on "Learning Historical Research" produced quite an elaborate style sheet to try to make sure that pages generated by its team would speak in roughly similar voices. Many of the ideas developed by that group apply equally to our own work, so I would urge you to review the 932 style sheet and apply to your own team project whatever insights and suggestions seem to you most helpful. You'll find that style sheet at Remember that we are NOT meeting this coming Wednesday (because of the annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History in Portland, Oregon, which a number of us are attending), but will next get together on March 16. I'd like to suggest that teams complete polished drafts of their first papers by March 30, so that we can review them over the following week and move on to our second team projects. We can talk about these deadlines in a finer-grained way at our next meeting. I think that's about all for now. Good luck, and I'll see you on March 16. Bill Message about Using Google to Locate Open Source Images, Sent on 3/5/10:Friends-- By the way, in the email that I just forwarded from Steve Brick, he mentioned using Google to find open source images. I wanted to make sure you all understand the strategy for accomplishing this task. If you're trying to find out whether there might be an open source map or graph or image for a given theme you'd like to illustrate, you can use Google's advanced image search at Once you've gotten to this page, you first enter in the third field from the bottom the name of the domain you want to search (an open source government site like, for instance, the U.S. Department of Energy at http://www.energy.gov or the National Renewable Energy Lab at http://www.nrel.gov), and then enter the keywords that seem most relevant to the images you're seeking (in the fields highlighted in blue toward the top of the page). When gathering images, make sure they're reasonably high resolution; little thumbnail files under 50K in size are usually too pixellated to be useful. You might practice doing this kind of search just to gain a little experience with it. Bill Message from Steve Brick re NYT Article on Solar and Natural Gas, Open Source Images, Sent on 3/5/10:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/business/05solar.html?ref=business Message about Reading on Interdisciplinarity for March 16, Sent on 3/4/10:Friends-- I apologize for the fragmented emails, but I was so focused on the new lecture I had to write for delivery yesterday that I've been trying to catch up ever since. I still need to send an email about the style and voice of the papers and web pages that our teams will be producing, but I won't be able to generate that until tomorrow or the weekend. In the meantime, I want to forward to you the reading that Rob Beattie has just sent me that will be part of the session that he and Megan Raby and Andrew Stuhl will be leading about how interdisciplinary teams can work most effectively together. You'll find it attached: Diana Rhoten, Erin O'Connor, and Edward J. Hackett, "The Act of Collaborative Creation and the Art of Integrative Creativity: Originality, Disciplinarity and Interdisciplinarity," Thesis Eleven (2009) 96-83. I'll send an updated syllabus later. Enjoy! Bill Message about Finding Creative Commons images for Energy Papers, Sent on 3/4/10:Hi, everyone. I've been thinking about where you might be able to find images to include on the web pages that will emerge from the energy papers you're writing, and it occurred to me that in addition to federal and UN websites, there might be ways of using Creative Commons open source images on your pages as well. The following discussion can get you started with searching for these. The one other suggestion I might make is that if any of you run across any really great open source images / maps / graphics that you think would be useful for the papers that other teams are writing, please take the time to forward links for these, as you should for any great documents you run across. All of us will do a better job of finding great usable materials than any one of us can do by ourselves. Good luck! Bill http://www.spacebug.com/how_to_get_free_open-source_photos_for_your_website_and_presentations%20 Message about Charles Tilly's PowerPoint on Dissertation Topic Selection, Sent on 3/4/10:Friends-- I've just reencountered an old email I sent to my students a couple years ago, forwarding a brief but quite useful and thought-provoking PowerPoint presentation on “Selecting a Dissertation Topic” inspired by the work of Charles Tilly. Tilly, who died in 2008, was a sociologist by training and a leading practitioner of interdisciplinary social scientific studies of the past. His way of approaching this topic is, unsurprisingly, best suited to the approaches of the social sciences, but it’s nonetheless very suggestive for humanities and natural science dissertation topics as well. Message about Questions to Answer for Energy Resource Background Papers, Sent on 2/23/10:Friends-- Based on tonight's brainstorm about common sections we might include in most if not all of the energy sector background papers, let me offer the following suggestions. You're welcome to start researching with the following categories in mind, but we'll spend some time next week making sure everyone is OK with what I'm proposing below. I think you have enough to begin serious work with your partner on your paper, and that's most of what I care about this week. Next week we'll lock in a more definitive structure and timetable. For sections that all the energy resource background papers might include, I'd suggest the following list of topics in the following sequence. (I'm following Rachel's lead in trying organize this with some very basic, very clear, very important questions.) FOR A GIVEN ENERGY RESOURCE: WHAT IS IT? WHERE IS IT? HOW IS IT USED? HOW IS IT PRODUCED, DISTRIBUTED, AND CONSUMED? HOW HAVE PEOPLE'S USES AND UNDERSTANDINGS OF IT CHANGED OVER TIME? WHO BENEFITS AND WHO SUFFERS FROM IT? WHO CONTROLS AND WHO REGULATES IT? WHY DO PEOPLE ARGUE ABOUT IT? HOW DO WE RECOGNIZE IT IN THE LANDSCAPE? HOW CAN WE FIND OUT MORE ABOUT IT? These are the sections that seem to me most common to all the energy resources we're writing about, but we can talk next week about whether you think I've got them right. I've obviously embedded beneath my main question categories a large number of the other questions or themes that we identified during our discussion this evening, but I'd like to flag the following as approaches that might apply to many of the large sections above. Dee is absolutely right that moving back and forth between macro and micro perspectives will enliven and enrich your presentation of this material. The power of the macro is to suggest at a highly aggregated level the vast scale at which your resource affects (or potentially affects) all of our lives and the overall world economy and environment. The power of the micro is to make this vast scale concrete and personal, vivid and sensuous, compelling and poignant. A few well-chosen anecdotes can tell very small stories that are often more effective and powerful than global or national statistics...but we need the latter too to know that the anecdotes aren't just anecdotes. Liese made a very important point that we should distinguish between baseload uses of these resources as opposed to peak load uses: for what do we use these resources day-in, day-out, all the time, and for what do we use them only occasionally, and why? I'm not sure where these questions fit, but I'm absolutely certain that they are very very important, and that very few people appreciate how important they are to solving the energy challenges that confront us.) I think it was Kiersten who said that case studies can be very helpful in the discussions above, a point that is akin to Dee's point about macro vs. micro. Kiersten specifically had in mind the locations we'll be visiting during our workshop, and we should talk next week whether members of the seminar are willing to do the extra work of researching these. But whether or not our case studies focus on sites we visit during the workshop, I'm quite sure that case studies can play a role in making these resources real. So when you can use them effectively, don't hesitate to do so, even if you have only a paragraph in which to sketch them. But it's past midnight and I need to get to bed. Please mull over the musings I've offered here, start researching your energy resource to see how well these categories work for you, and we'll try to make more final decisions about all this when we see each other next week. I continue to be very grateful indeed for the creativity and positive energy you're bringing to this quixotic enterprise! Bill Message about Hotchkiss / Keller Readings for Class on 3/2/10, Sent on 2/23/10:Friends-- As promised, I'm forwarding our readings for next week, which consist of: 1) Two scientific articles by Sara Hotchkiss. 2) Several poems by Srikanth Reddy from his book Facts for Visitors. 3) A reading of these and other poems by Lynn Keller entitled "Called Back to Earth." Our discussion next week will focus on the seemingly simple (but in fact devilishly complicated) questions of "how to read a scientific article" vs "how to read a poem," as exemplars of the ways that the very different disciplines of natural science (as exemplified by palynology) and literary criticism (as exemplified by English literature and ecocriticism) read texts. Please read these pieces on several different levels: for the information and arguments they convey; for the rhetorical forms they use to express their ideas; and for whatever questions they raise for you about disciplinary and interdisciplinary reading in general. Come to class with whatever questions and observations these texts raise for you, and I'll look forward to what promises to be a really unusual and engaging conversation with two of my favorite UW-Madison colleagues. Bill Message about Sharing Files of Interest via Google Docs, Sent on 2/18/10:[Sent to entire seminar in response to a query from Liese Dart] Yes, I think it makes sense to post this into the sector folders of Google Docs, and I think it'd also make sense for you to forward it to members of any other team that you think would benefit from reading it. Since the question you ask should be of very general interest to anyone in the seminar, I'm going to cc this reply to everyone, with the following suggestions: 1) If you find anything that you believe would be of significant interest to members of other teams, send them an email like the one below containing both the link and, if possible, the pasted document you're forwarding. 2) If the document is of VERY general interest, forward it to everyone in the class using the seminar list server. 3) If you think the document is likely to be useful as a reference for the duration of the seminar, feel free to paste it into a Google Docs file and post it in the most logical location in our Google Docs collection of files--in this case, probably in the Coal folder of our "Group Projects - Sector" collection. (By the way, your message has prompted me to create a new collection of folders for our "Group Projects - Perspectives" papers, so people can start using those too.) It's probably best not to put documents into project folders without alerting the people most likely to be interested in them that you've done so, since if you don't, it'll be easy for them to miss documents they would otherwise be glad to have seen. 4) By the way, if you upload files into your own Google Docs collection but want them to be available through our project folders, you have to drag the files into the appropriate folders; if they're sitting in your own unshared account, no one else can do that dragging for you. Thanks again to Liese for asking about this. Bill Message about Energy Project Teams, Sent on 2/18/10:Friends-- I've now compiled details of our energy research project teams for the semester, and have pasted this information below for your reference. I've also posted these lists on our course web page, so if you need to remind yourself who's working on which project (in order to send them references and sources you've discovered, for instance), you can always find this information on my website. (If by chance your team wants to change the title I've used on the public website to describe your project, just let me know and I can revised these at any time.) I've also pasted below everyone's email addresses, so you can make sure you have these in your Contacts list to facilitate future communications. I will not post these on my public website in order to protect your privacy in case you prefer not to share your address with the wider world. I've added a Google Docs file with the list of teams and email addresses in it, so you can access this information that way as well. As you think about a template of sections and formats for these papers, remember that we'll be posting what you write on the public Web, searchable and discoverable by all, so you will want to think carefully about the kinds of things you do and do not want to include in these papers. Remember too that in illustrating what you write, anything we post on the public Web has to be copyright free, which means that our illustrations for the web pages we generate should generally be biased toward government documents, open source images, old documents in the public domain, and images we take ourselves. (We can circulate copyrighted images and graphics to the CHE Place-Based Workshop without putting them on the public Web, so these need not be entirely off limits if they're really useful.) We'll talk more about these issues next week and in future classes. Bill Research Teams: Major Energy Resources Biofuels: Adam Mandelman, Emma Schroeder Research Teams: Eclectic Perspectives on Energy in History and Culture Changing Household Uses of Energy: Rachel Gross, Adam Mandelman Message about Downloadable Energy Data Books from Steve Brick, Sent on 2/16/10:Friends-- Steve Brick just forwarded to me a couple of suggestions for very rich collections of energy-related statistics that are easily accessible via the Web; indeed, you can download PDFs of the entire reference books to have at your fingertips on your hard drive (or Kindle!) if you'd like. I've added the links to our Google Docs file of "Useful Web Pages for Energy Research," but thought I should probably flag them in an email as well. Here's what Steve sent: A couple of additional statistical references worth having: Bill Message out Seminar Meeting on February 23 with Gregg Mitman about Energy in Ecology, Sent on 2/16/10:Friends-- For once, I'm sending out next week's syllabus entry for the CHE Methods Seminar *before* we meet today rather than after! Our guest next week will be Gregg Mitman, founding Director of CHE and currently the Interim Director of the Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. Gregg, a historian of science and scholar of science and technology studies by training, is one of the world's leading experts on the history of ecology (along with the history of wildlife documentary film and a number of other subjects), and he has generously agreed to lead a discussion next week on a topic in which a number of you have expressed interest: the history of how different ideas of energy have informed (and transformed) the science of ecology over the course of the twentieth century. (Gregg will likely join our seminar at least one or two more times this semester to discuss other topics of interest, but since he is uniquely qualified to help with this particular topic, he's agreed to talk about it with us next week.) At the bottom of this email is next week's list of assignments for the seminar, which are arranged in chronological order. The key secondary text is by Peter Taylor, which will place the readings by Wells et al, Lindeman, and Odum in a larger frame; the essay by Lorraine Daston (which is the introduction to a book of essays by different authors and so makes numerous references to articles you will not be reading) places the Taylor reading itself in a larger epistemological frame. We'll talk more about how to approach these rather challenging readings during tonight's meeting. Gregg has asked that students in the seminar do some work this week trying to figure out when the word "ecosystem" was coined, and how and why it became so widely adopted and important to the science of ecology during the middle decades of the twentieth century. To help you solve that riddle as a collective project, I've created a Google Docs file called "Origins of Ecosystems" to which you should all contribute quotations, comments, and interpretations over the course of the week; see below for further instructions. Finally, you should meet this week with the team member with whom you're doing your background paper on a major energy source and begin to map out the work you'll be doing together. Toward that end, I've asked you to brainstorm about the structure not just of your own paper but all these papers, so that we can talk next week about the ways in which we do and do not want them to parallel each other. We'll also try to set some deadlines for when this work will be finished, and begin to give some shape to the table comparing different forms of energy that we've said our teams will be contributing to as they do their work. More details about this are below as well. I think that's all for now. See you this evening! Bill February 23 Message about Google Docs Folder for Seminar, Sent on 2/10/10:Friends-- Please retain this email for future reference. As soon as I send this message, I will have authorized each of you to access a special Google Docs folder that I've set up under my account called CHE Methods Seminar. It will contain key reference documents that anyone in our group can add to or edit. All you need to do is click on the link below (which you should bookmark in your browser) to access this folder, then click on the file you want to view or edit. The interface is pretty intuition, pretty much like any other word processor you use, so you shouldn't have too much trouble getting the hang of it. If you have questions, please accumulate them so we can discuss them in class next week. (If you cannot access the folder at all, let me know and I'll try to help you solve the problem.) All but two of you have given me Gmail addresses, and you'll use those to log on to your Google Docs window, where this folder should appear among any other Google Docs you may wish to maintain. You should be able to access the folder even if all you have is your @wisc.edu account, but my understanding is that you may encounter some problems in doing this that I may not be able to help you with. If at any time you want to get a Gmail account and switch over to it (the process takes less than five minutes), just let me know your Gmail address and I'll switch you over. Here's the link to our CHE Methods Seminar folder: CHE Methods Seminar. (I will not post this on the web page containing our archive of course emails, since I'd rather not make this link available on the public web. If you could avoid sharing it with anyone not in the seminar, I'd be very grateful. Thanks.) Take a look at the three files: I have also created a subfolder called "Group Projects - Sectors" with a sub-subfolder for each of the energy sources we chose last night for our group projects. My idea is that groups can drop their evolving texts (along with any notes or reference files) into these folders as they work together on their projects, thereby making it easy to make sure that team members all have access to the most current files. We can discuss strategies for making this work optimally for everyone as we gain more experience with this tool. Also: since a number of us will be editing these files, it'd probably be a good idea for you to compose your entries on your own machine, in your regular word processor, and then paste them into the appropriate file so as to minimize the composition and editing you do in Google Docs. That way I think we're less likely to make unintentional changes in these files or lose content that other people have added to them. I'll try to back up the files regularly, but you may want to download them yourself after making changes; that way all of us will be regularly backing them up each time we make changes. That should be all you need to know for now. Try logging on to take a quick look at the files, and let me know if you encounter any problems. Have fun! Bill Message about Document Assignments for February 16, Sent on 2/9/10:Friends-- First, thanks for a very productive session tonight. It feels like we're making good progress, and are finally getting launched on our projects. Thanks for your patience and your creative, good-humored engagement with this unfolding process. As promised, I'm sending along the syllabus entry for next week's assignment, pasted below, and also in the attached PDF file of the evolving syllabus. (You can also always get the latest versions of the syllabus from our course webpage at http://www.williamcronon.net/courses/chemethods.htm) We'll be joined for the first portion of the seminar by Nancy Langston, so keep your thoughts about her article fresh in your mind for that conversation. (You may want to come to class with particular questions to ask her based on your reading of her article and perhaps also relating to our last two conversations about how different disciplines construct "significant" questions.) We'll devote the rest of the seminar to talking about the documents you find for this week's assignment, and also finalizing the second group of topics for our energy projects. Let me also try to clarify next week's assignment so you don't spend an excessive amount of time on it. My goals here are to get you thinking about the search for documents by encouraging you to go on a treasure hunt in a relaxed and playful way. I really want you to have fun with this, so please do NOT spend hours and hours and hours looking for absolutely perfect documents for the categories I've defined. I'd rather that you wander creatively (even if you wind up in a few dead ends) than that you stress out or feel exhausted by this exercise. Being too goal-oriented will defeat the purpose of this assignment. One of the most effective strategies for your team to pursue will be to identify clusters of call numbers relating to your energy source, go to the relevant shelves in one or more libraries (remembering that books of different sizes may be shelved in different locations) and then just examine interesting books at random to see what turns up. Another strategy might be to identify sources in Nye that seem especially significant for your energy source, find the call numbers for those sources, and then look at nearby texts that may be equally interesting. For further tips about search strategies, see the "Learning Historical Research" website entries for And although I *do* want you to experience at least one new library that you've not used before, I do not mean that you shouldn't use really obvious collections that will prove essential to your work in the seminar (at the top of that list is probably the Wisconsin Historical Society library, which even if you've used before you should not hesitate to use as part of this assignment--try using a new *part* of library if you're already familiar with one part of it). Libraries that could be especially rich and helpful for this week's assignment that you may never have visited before might include the following: Finally, please use the following format to write your anecdote / "cool fact" based on your reading of Nye. Start with a lively, provocative, inviting question on the first line, followed by no more than 150 words of your own prose, citing the page or pages from Nye that you're using as your main secondary source. Then attach a photocopy of the main primary document on which Nye himself relied for this piece of information. One word of caution: because it's possible that the document on which Nye relied for a particular anecdote may not be readily available here at UW-Madison--be especially wary of archival sources which may be uniquely present only in a single distant repository--you may want to pick 2-3 Nye-based anecdotes to write about, and then wait to see which of them is easiest to find a primary document to support. If part of your own text can be based on your own direct reading of the document you find--and not just Nye's interpretation of it--so much the better. Make your prose as clear, engaging, and as polished as you can. We'll deposit these in our "Cool Facts" file in our Google Docs collection, about which I'll write in another email probably tomorrow. I think that's all for now. Thanks again for a good class tonight, and please do have lots of fun with this week's assignments! Bill February 16
Message about Change of Plans Because of Blizzard, and Reminder of Question Assignment, Sent on 2/9/10:Friends-- I've just realized that I never reminded you of one key assignment for today's CHE Methods Seminar. I'm hoping most of you will already have remembered it, but just in case not, I'm also hoping that this email will reach you in time to be helpful. In the syllabus, and in last week's long email, I included the following request: "Bring to class a single well-formed research question that you feel confident most members of your discipline would regard as valuable and significant to ask about some aspect of energy." It's now all the more important for you to do this, since Nancy Langston has just informed me that the snowstorm will prevent her from joining us tonight. We'll therefore defer our discussion of her article, probably until next week (I'll confirm that as soon as I've heard back from her), but I *do* want to talk about Michèle Lamont's How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. The research questions I'm asking you to put together with the assignment above should give us some interesting raw material for our discussion. We may also talk a little more than we might otherwise have done about my own essay on "Getting Ready to Do History," so if you've not had time to peruse that yet, that would be helpful too. The good news here is that this should give us the time we need to nail down our projects on energy, which we might otherwise have had trouble doing tonight. See you soon! Bill
Message about Poll Results for Semester Energy Projects, Sent on 2/8/10:Friends-- Compiling all your votes and comments was a little challenging, and I can't promise with absolute certainty that I counted everything correctly on these *very* long ballots, but the tabulation below should provide sufficient grist for our conversation and decision-making tomorrow night as we move toward finalizing our semester projects. I've arranged all items under the three headings in rank order by the number of seminar members who voted for particular items. As is surely obvious to all of you, we have many more great ideas than we have the time or person-power to tackle, and even though the rank order sequence below is highly suggestive of the directions in which we're likely to head, we're still going to face some difficult choices. I do want to flag the fact that several seminar members resisted the idea that all alternative energy sources be treated under a single heading, and suggested that solar in particular needs to be addressed separately, especially given MacKay's argument that it is by far the most significant form of renewable energy. I should also add my own note that although no one voted for biofuels, we are almost certain to visit a biofuel facility during our May workshop, and the politics of biofuel are extremely interesting for Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest whatever one thinks about it. I'm not sure what we do about that, but we should definitely talk about it. One possible solution to the dilemmas we face with our "Major Sector Background Papers" might be to bump one or more of them down into the "Perspectives" section...but of course, there are even more great ideas down there that we're not going to be able to tackle. So: tonight we'll face some tough choices. Please review the poll results below and give some thought to how we might navigate them. Bill CHE Methods Seminar: Semester Projects Poll Results Major Sector Background Papers: __16__Coal __16__Nuclear __15__Oil __15__The Grid __13__Natural Gas __13__Renewable energy sources (solar, wind, biofuels, hydropower, geothermal) Alternatively, we could do separate papers on the renewable energy sources we regard as most important. So either vote for the collective item above, or select the items immediately below that you regard as most important—but keep track of your total votes! __11__Broad Overview of Key Differences Among Chief Energy Sources __11__Meta-consumption patterns: __9__A Primer on Thermodynamics, Especially the Second Law.
Unexpected Perspectives on Energy: __11__Wisconsin's ties to Carbon County, WY (the chief source of the coal our utilities burn) __11__Food and energy __9__Past energy crises and how people have navigated them __8__Energy and transportation __8__Environmental impacts and toxicities of different energy types __6__Labor and social justice questions associated with different energy sources __6__The changing use of energy in American domestic households over course of twentieth century. __6__Media representations of different fuels __6__Considering the debate about sustainability and what is "green," is there a set of tools that we can assemble to assist the average consumer without the time or inclination to research in depth? It may start with "life cycle assessment," but are there other considerations that can combine with this "litmus test"? How does one figure out the practical implications of the abstract concept of sustainability when making consumer decisions? This might yield an activity sheet designed to help readers trace their own personal energy consumption. This could possibly be based on Mackay's readyourmeter.org website and "Balance Sheet" chapter, but it might include activities designed to remind readers that, for example, a good chunk of China's energy consumption goes into making cheap products for us to buy at Walmart. We could also devise a weeklong experiment/activity that helped readers imagine paying as they went for their energy consumption (using a jar of tokens or some other proxy since we can't actually pay for our heat as you did in Oxford). __6__The ways in which switching to high quality energy changed our sense of TIME. The energy available to us changes how we categorize available time, and could perhaps be shown in a project on the changing conceptions of leisure time. For instance, how were battery-powered toys deployed, how much energy did we use for leisure activities pre and post some date? __5__Energy use and access of wealthy vs less wealthy countries __4__An analysis of the concept of "energy security" as it relates to the international connections and tensions relating to different kinds of fuels. Although we often associate international conflict with petroleum, in fact even renewable energy sources could become sources of conflict among nations. This might translate into a project documenting the current major global energy trading relationships for fossil fuels (i.e Saudi Arabia - US), and how it might change for renewables (i.e. Britain-Libya). __4__A summary of the permitting process. These facilities we will visit have immense histories associated with their presence on the landscape- the choice of that particular location, the plant size, environmental footprint, impact on cultural and historic resources etc. Giving CHE folks an idea of what goes into getting a new power plant built (renewable or fossil fuel based) could be really interesting for the trip. __4__Perhaps a summary paper on recycling. This could be one of the 8 or so fuel/energy source papers. I think it would be interesting to highlight the energy saving potential by reusing materials instead of digging for and producing new ones. This might not fit into the same genre as nuclear, coal, petroleum, energy efficiency etc, but I think it could (and arguably should) be. __4__Compare energy consumption of a UW-Madison student 50 years ago to a UW-Madison student, today. This could include, as just one example, a day in the life of a UW Madison student pre and post electric lights. What did the libraries look like? The living spaces? How did students heat their rooms before the advent of central furnaces? How do the efficiencies of old buildings on campus compare with new buildings? __4__A piece on the perniciousness of efficiency talk. I was really struck by Mackay's illustration that if everyone unplugged their phone charger, they would still only be reducing the total energy budget by 1/4 of 1%, or something like that. __4__A compilation of advertisements from Life (and other popular magazines?) which show changing consumer habits, with written commentary on the associated energy consumption. __3__The energy embodied in processing foods - how were people convinced to buy packaged goods? What changes in American culture prompted the necessity of sterile packaging on everything we buy? How did this change the family dinner? This thought also connects to our desire to look at the 'stuff' we consume. __3__A project that shows participants that there are different forms of energy, and one thing we do not do well is matching the fuel source to the purpose we are putting it to. Steve's analogy of cutting wood with a string works well, but a visual collection of political cartoons (don't know that these would be the correct documents) may also help here. The tangible embodiments of energy are something we will see when on the field trips, but I think it would be good to have a sheet that also explains the differences (high vs. low PE/quality/flux). __3__The energy infrastructure of the Internet __2__”Hard” vs “Soft” Energy Paths __2__How “global climate change” altered the politics of energy __2__"The Power of Energy Policy" or "Energy Policy: Past, Present, and Future": This could follow the path of energy production and transmission through major milestones in regulations, as well as discuss what is being considered now and what experts claim must be decided for the future. It should address the history of US attempts at energy efficiency standards and programs. The point with this paper would be to explain to people that a lot of these technologies originated with Jimmy Carter's administration, and hence are not new ideas. I am imagining information about Amory Lovins, California's successful programs, VT's attitude towards energy use, maybe highlights from Wisconsin. __1__Creating a biking trip of Madison to demonstrate the first law of thermodynamics. While biking in today, I realized how well biking up a hill, and then gliding down the other side, physically demonstrates the process of taking one form of energy (food in us) and converting it into another (gravitational energy). Don't know that this is a whole paper, but perhaps we can think of other tangible activities to demonstrate the other laws for workshop participants. __1__The history of past American conflicts over energy as expressed in political cartoons. __1__The economics of a low-carbon economy __1__What is sustainability? __1__History of major energy regimes over time __1__Energy analysis in history of ecological science ____History of changing policies and regulations in key American states, and how these have contributed to different regional cultures relating to energy
Quirky or Gee-Whiz Fact Candidates: __9__Items in everyday use whose life cycle analysis involves and extraordinary amount of energy to produce- I am thinking of items like hearts of palm. I can only imagine how many calories go into a jar of those delicacies. This could be interesting on so many levels-- awareness, economics, geography.... __8__I thought it might be interesting to look at how much difference domestic efficiency could make on a house-by-house basis. In other words, how much difference can a "more efficient" house make? For example, my parents built a highly insulated house that uses passive solar heat until the temperatures dip below 40 degrees (at which time they burn wood in an "efficient" stove), and it might be interesting to see the energy comparison for different varieties of house that don't require substantial behavior change-- except at the point of builder/buyer. __7__Compare UW-Madison's total energy consumption to a few similar-sized universities in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. __6__Analysis of the amount of energy it takes for a particular species to migrate, make it through the winter, forage for food, etc. __6__How much energy is expended in removing snow from the City of Madison's streets in a typical winter? __6__When and why did women move from using curlers to a curling-iron? (The cosmetic embodiment of energy.) __5__The irrationality of high-flux consumption for low-flux uses __5__How cool tidal energy actually is __5__All the energy wrapped up in nuclear weapons, per Mackay __3__The far-smaller than we imagine (at least compared with other energy-related waste) apparent risks of nuclear waste as illustrated with Mackay's numbers __3__The fact that renewables like wind need to be backed-up by a less-variable power source of equal quantity (or the legal obligations of energy company's to supply what we demand) __2__The futility of hydrogen __2__Compare the winter energy budget of the average Wisconsin human family with the winter energy budget of a Wisconsin wolf family, bear family, etc... __2__Compare the energy budget of a UW student who flies to the Yucatan on spring break with the energy budget of a Ruby-Throated Hummingbird that flies from Madison to the Gulf, and then across the Gulf of Mexico, in the fall (energy expending flying in jet vs. the bird's energy expenditure). __1__The possibility that we can "suck" geothermal dry, per Mackay
Energy Glossary Items: Base Load Cap and Trade Carbon Tax Energy Energy Return on Investment Fuel vs Energy Source Horsepower Kilowatt Kilowatt Hour Power Risk v. Uncertainty Second Law of Thermodynamics
Message about Poll for Semester Energy Projects, Sent on 2/7/10:Friends-- Well, it's taken me many hours to process the great emails that many of you sent me about energy projects you think our seminar might want to take on this semester. LOTS of great ideas surfaced, so many that we can't possibly do all of them, but all are suggestive of the exciting materials we are likely to generate together this semester. I came away from your emails feeling even more enthusiastic about our seminar than I was before...and I've been pretty enthusiastic about it! I began with the lists of topics we brainstormed during our last class meeting, and then added in all the items that individual members of our seminar emailed to me over the past several days. You'll remember that we've been working with four broad categories of documents we're going to generate: 1) Broad overviews of energy sectors, types of consumption, distribution networks, and key concepts; 2) More eclectic discussions of changing human relationships to energy over time; 3) Much briefer "quirky facts" and "gee-whiz anecdotes and statistics" designed to change the way a reader thinks about energy; 4) A glossary of key terms and concepts relating to energy and its human uses. I tried to place student suggestions into the section that seemed to make the most sense given its focus and scale. I also combined similar student suggestions, often bringing together 2-3 suggestions as "examples" of how teams might approach a given topic. We still have way more topics than we'll be able to tackle, but the field of possibilities seems to me to be getting both clearer and richer. What I'd like you now to do is to VOTE for the topics you think we should actually tackle. You're allowed EIGHT votes for each of the two big sections ("Major Sector Background Papers" and the more eclectic "Unexpected Perspectives on Energy"), and 4-6 votes for the "Quirky or Gee-Whiz Fact Candidates." (You should vote by placing an "X" at the start of the underscore lines preceding the items you'd like us to take on.) We also have the beginnings of a "Glossary" section, which you don't need to vote for, but if you have other glossary items you definitely think we should include, please include them with your return email. In making your votes, you should try to strike a balance between how important or essential you think an item might be for people participating in the CHE Place-Based Workshop (how could we NOT do that topic vs. does that topic really merit the time we'll put into it?); how interesting it would be to work on that topic; and how difficult and/or time-consuming you think a topic would be (do we have time to take do a proper job with it?). Remember too as you think about these topics that even some of the ones we *won't* choose nonetheless offer insights about strategies we may want to adopt for approaching the topics we *do* choose. We will soon be wanting to develop templates of key questions and themes to address for the topics our teams write about, and I come away from reading all these suggestions with a much clearer sense of what some of those key questions/themes might be. Finally, as I've always suspected, our first group of papers ("Major Sector Background Topics") has a much smaller number of choices to consider than our second group ("Unexpected Perspectives on Energy") does. Depending on how we divide the first group, there may not be many choices to worry about. As will be obvious when you start thinking about your votes, the key question is whether we do a single paper on a topic like "renewable energy sources" or divide that broad category into a number of smaller topics ("solar," "wind," "biofuels," etc.). Right now, I think I lean toward combining renewables in order to give us space for other key topics, but if you don't agree with me about this, feel free to push back. Your votes in response to this email are advisory rather than final. I'll report on Tuesday night how everyone voted, suggest what seem to me to be the optimal solutions to the choices we face, and we'll then dialogue further to try to reach a final consensus. As I've said before, I'll make the final decision about the projects we tackle, but my hope is that all (or almost all) of you will agree with the final decisions I make. If any topics seem to you woefully absent from the list below, email me to that effect, but time is running out for new suggestions, since we need to make commitments and get to work. So I have time to collate and reflect on the results of our ballots, please respond to this message by 5pm on Monday, February 8, if you possibly can. Thanks for taking the time to read this long, complicated email, and please reply at your earliest convenience. Amazing Super Bowl, huh? Bill
Major Sector Background Papers: (VOTE FOR EIGHT IN THIS SECTION BY PLACING AN "X" AT THE START OF THE RELEVANT UNDERSCORES.) ____Broad Overview of Key Differences Among Chief Energy Sources This would include the following: how energy varies in its potential, quality, flux? geographic density fuel variability seasonality pollution effects global warming implications capital costs centralized vs decentralized (an alternative way to handle this would be to brainstorm a template of key items that all the major sector papers described below would include)
____Coal This would include its role in the industrial revolution, its global geographical distribution, the ways its contributions have changed over time, and its contributions to pollution and global warming.
____Oil (This should include: "Crude Supplies" - Where does our petroleum come from, and how has this changed over time? What's actually left? Where is it?)
____Natural Gas
____Nuclear (This should include a history of conflicts over this source of energy, and a disinterested discussion of the pros and cons as articulated by its supporters and opponents.)
____The Grid (This should have information on regional transmission organizations and the ever changing markets for electricity. It should also need a section on peak vs. base load: including the different start-up/shutdown times different energy sources requires versus the sometimes near-instantaneous fluctuations in energy demand.
____Renewable energy sources (solar, wind, biofuels, hydropower, geothermal) (This should include discussion of conflicts within the environmental community on renewable resources. For instance, how do wind turbines have the potential to be a source visual blight, especially as people work to preserve historic viewsheds? What are strategies for incorporating solar panels onto a historic building without destroying its historic integrity? What might be the land-use implications for agriculture and wildlands of the increasing demand for biofuels, and what might be the ecological impacts on southwestern deserts of massive solar projects to supply cities with electricity?)
Alternatively, we could do separate papers on the renewable energy sources we regard as most important. So either vote for the collective item above, or select the items immediately below that you regard as most important—but keep track of your total votes! _____Solar _____Wind _____Biofuels _____Geothermal _____Hydropower
____Meta-consumption patterns: "Who's eating our juice?" or "The Biggest Suckers" - Which industries, companies, and individuals demand the most of different forms of energy, and also of the electrical grid? Why is this so? The goal of this paper would be to give a sectoral analysis of energy consumption at the macro level, perhaps with concrete "micro" examples included to give the reader a sense of the practical reasons why industries and economic sectors differ from each other in the ways they use energy
____A Primer on Thermodynamics, Especially the Second Law. This would more clearly illustrate how much energy gets released as heat. Or maybe something that helps readers (and us!) understand how a heat pump working with a source that's only 12*C can warm a house to a more comfortable 18*C. Another comment along the same lines: I think a tangible demonstration of the laws of thermodynamics would really help the participants grasp the energy in everything. Perhaps we could work on creating an "entropy room" of chaos, and then give people different forms of fuel to fix it (vacuum cleaner, broom, bare hands ...) Don't know that this is the best way of going about this, but I remember the evening after I learned about entropy in high school having to do the dishes and thinking that this was entropy at work.
Unexpected Perspectives on Energy: (VOTE FOR EIGHT IN THIS SECTION BY PLACING AN "X" AT THE START OF THE RELEVANT UNDERSCORES.) ____Wisconsin's ties to Carbon County, WY (the chief source of the coal our utilities burn)
____Food and energy This might include, for instance, how life on Wisconsin dairy farms changed with the introduction of the electric milker. It could also include discussions of the changing energy inputs to favorite foods.
____Energy and transportation Like many other possible projects in this section, this one should almost certainly include discussions at the macro scale (how, for instance, does the energy consumption of highway-based transportation differ from rail- and air-based transportation) with examples drawn at the concrete, micro-scale (how many calories does one consume flying from Madison to Chicago as opposed to driving or walking)
____The changing use of energy in American domestic households over course of twentieth century.
____The economics of a low-carbon economy
____”Hard” vs “Soft” Energy Paths This would begin with the key analytical distinction that Amory Lovins introduced in his famous 1976 Foreign Affairs article and his book Soft Energy Paths, explore its analytical implications, and trace the history of how debate about the argument has evolved over time.
____How “global climate change” altered the politics of energy
____Environmental impacts and toxicities of different energy types
____Labor and social justice questions associated with different energy sources
____What is sustainability?
____History of major energy regimes over time
____Past energy crises and how people have navigated them (There have been a surprising number of these, and a quick overview survey could be quite interesting. Energy crises, for instance, are a key focus of Jared Diamond's Collapse.)
____Energy analysis in history of ecological science (Key figures would include Howard and Eugene Odum, Raymond Lindemann, G. Evelyn Hutchinson)
____Media representations of different fuels (This could be a wide-ranging, eclectic, and very playful survey of past advertisements for different kinds of fuels and energy sources, as well as more recent advocacy
____History of changing policies and regulations in key American states, and how these have contributed to different regional cultures relating to energy
____Energy use and access of wealthy vs less wealthy countries (For instance: I like the idea of comparing a developing world (e.g. West African) woman's use of energy in the "kitchen" to a modern American woman's energy use in the kitchen (to parallel the history of women's energy use in the kitchen). Both sources and amounts of energy could reveal some of the story of larger differences between the two societies. Perhaps they could both be historical perspectives.)
____An analysis of the concept of "energy security" as it relates to the international connections and tensions relating to different kinds of fuels. Although we often associate international conflict with petroleum, in fact even renewable energy sources could become sources of conflict among nations. This might translate into a project documenting the current major global energy trading relationships for fossil fuels (i.e Saudi Arabia - US), and how it might change for renewables (i.e. Britain-Libya).
____"The Power of Energy Policy" or "Energy Policy: Past, Present, and Future": This could follow the path of energy production and transmission through major milestones in regulations, as well as discuss what is being considered now and what experts claim must be decided for the future. It should address the history of US attempts at energy efficiency standards and programs. The point with this paper would be to explain to people that a lot of these technologies originated with Jimmy Carter's administration, and hence are not new ideas. I am imagining information about Amory Lovins, California's successful programs, VT's attitude towards energy use, maybe highlights from Wisconsin.
____A summary of the permitting process. These facilities we will visit have immense histories associated with their presence on the landscape- the choice of that particular location, the plant size, environmental footprint, impact on cultural and historic resources etc. Giving CHE folks an idea of what goes into getting a new power plant built (renewable or fossil fuel based) could be really interesting for the trip.
____Perhaps a summary paper on recycling. This could be one of the 8 or so fuel/energy source papers. I think it would be interesting to highlight the energy saving potential by reusing materials instead of digging for and producing new ones. This might not fit into the same genre as nuclear, coal, petroleum, energy efficiency etc, but I think it could (and arguably should) be.
____Considering the debate about sustainability and what is "green," is there a set of tools that we can assemble to assist the average consumer without the time or inclination to research in depth? It may start with "life cycle assessment," but are there other considerations that can combine with this "litmus test"? How does one figure out the practical implications of the abstract concept of sustainability when making consumer decisions? This might yield an activity sheet designed to help readers trace their own personal energy consumption. This could possibly be based on Mackay's readyourmeter.org website and "Balance Sheet" chapter, but it might include activities designed to remind readers that, for example, a good chunk of China's energy consumption goes into making cheap products for us to buy at Walmart. We could also devise a weeklong experiment/activity that helped readers imagine paying as they went for their energy consumption (using a jar of tokens or some other proxy since we can't actually pay for our heat as you did in Oxford).
____The energy infrastructure of the Internet
____Compare energy consumption of a UW-Madison student 50 years ago to a UW-Madison student, today. This could include, as just one example, a day in the life of a UW Madison student pre and post electric lights. What did the libraries look like? The living spaces? How did students heat their rooms before the advent of central furnaces? How do the efficiencies of old buildings on campus compare with new buildings?
____A piece on the perniciousness of efficiency talk. I was really struck by Mackay's illustration that if everyone unplugged their phone charger, they would still only be reducing the total energy budget by 1/4 of 1%, or something like that.
____A project that shows participants that there are different forms of energy, and one thing we do not do well is matching the fuel source to the purpose we are putting it to. Steve's analogy of cutting wood with a string works well, but a visual collection of political cartoons (don't know that these would be the correct documents) may also help here. The tangible embodiments of energy are something we will see when on the field trips, but I think it would be good to have a sheet that also explains the differences (high vs. low PE/quality/flux).
____The ways in which switching to high quality energy changed our sense of TIME. The energy available to us changes how we categorize available time, and could perhaps be shown in a project on the changing conceptions of leisure time. For instance, how were battery-powered toys deployed, how much energy did we use for leisure activities pre and post some date?
____The energy embodied in processing foods - how were people convinced to buy packaged goods? What changes in American culture prompted the necessity of sterile packaging on everything we buy? How did this change the family dinner? This thought also connects to our desire to look at the 'stuff' we consume.
____Creating a biking trip of Madison to demonstrate the first law of thermodynamics. While biking in today, I realized how well biking up a hill, and then gliding down the other side, physically demonstrates the process of taking one form of energy (food in us) and converting it into another (gravitational energy). Don't know that this is a whole paper, but perhaps we can think of other tangible activities to demonstrate the other laws for workshop participants.
____A compilation of advertisements from Life (and other popular magazines?) which show changing consumer habits, with written commentary on the associated energy consumption.
____The history of past American conflicts over energy as expressed in political cartoons. Quirky or Gee-Whiz Fact Candidates: (THESE SHOULD INVOLVE LESS WORK, SO VOTE FOR 4-6 ITEMS IN THIS SECTION THAT YOU ESPECIALLY LIKE BY PLACING AN "X" AT THE START OF THE RELEVANT UNDERSCORES; IF YOU'D BE WILLING TO DO THE WORK PUT ONE OR MORE OF THESE TOGETHER, PLEASE SAY SO.) ____How much energy is expended in removing snow from the City of Madison's streets in a typical winter?
____Items in everyday use whose life cycle analysis involves and extraordinary amount of energy to produce- I am thinking of items like hearts of palm. I can only imagine how many calories go into a jar of those delicacies. This could be interesting on so many levels-- awareness, economics, geography....
____Analysis of the amount of energy it takes for a particular species to migrate, make it through the winter, forage for food, etc.
____I thought it might be interesting to look at how much difference domestic efficiency could make on a house-by-house basis. In other words, how much difference can a "more efficient" house make? For example, my parents built a highly insulated house that uses passive solar heat until the temperatures dip below 40 degrees (at which time they burn wood in an "efficient" stove), and it might be interesting to see the energy comparison for different varieties of house that don't require substantial behavior change-- except at the point of builder/buyer.
____All the energy wrapped up in nuclear weapons, per Mackay
____The possibility that we can "suck" geothermal dry, per Mackay
____The far-smaller than we imagine (at least compared with other energy-related waste) apparent risks of nuclear waste as illustrated with Mackay's numbers
____The futility of hydrogen
____The fact that renewables like wind need to be backed-up by a less-variable power source of equal quantity (or the legal obligations of energy company's to supply what we demand)
____The irrationality of high-flux consumption for low-flux uses
____How cool tidal energy actually is
____Compare UW-Madison's total energy consumption to a few similar-sized universities in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
____Compare the winter energy budget of the average Wisconsin human family with the winter energy budget of a Wisconsin wolf family, bear family, etc...
____Compare the energy budget of a UW student who flies to the Yucatan on spring break with the energy budget of a Ruby-Throated Hummingbird that flies from Madison to the Gulf, and then across the Gulf of Mexico, in the fall (energy expending flying in jet vs. the bird's energy expenditure).
____When and why did women move from using curlers to a curling-iron? (The cosmetic embodiment of energy.)
Energy Glossary Items: (YOU DON'T NEED TO VOTE ON THESE--THEY SHOULD BE RELATIVELY SIMPLE AND EASY TO DO--BUT ADD ANY OTHERS THAT YOU THINK WE SHOULD DEFINITELY INCLUDE.) ____Energy Return on Investment
____Fuel vs Energy Source
Message about Readings for Meeting on 2/9/2010, Sent on 2/3/2010:Friends-- Attached you will find the PDFs of the readings for next week's meeting of the CHE Methods Seminar, along with an updated version of the syllabus reflecting these additions (the specific entry for next week's seminar is pasted below). Our guest next week will be Nancy Langston, who will join us in discussing the question What constitutes an interesting and important research question--and what shapes our judgment in deciding whether or not a question is "significant"? To make the conversation concrete, we'll read an article of Nancy's that won the Leopold-Hidy Award for the best article published in the journal Environmental History in 2008. (For reasons that will be clearer when you read the next paragraph, I've included the Leopold-Hidy award citation among your readings so you can see the specific attributes of Nancy's article that were praised by the awards committee.) Nancy will talk with us about the project itself and how she came to focus on the particular questions she did as a case study in how a highly skilled researcher goes about framing questions and problems--in this case, using interdisciplinary strategies that are of special relevance to our seminar. (Nancy's article, by the way, grew out of her work on a book that has just been published and that may be of interest to a number of you: Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES (Yale University Press, 2009). To help us think more generally about the ways in which different disciplines go about defining questions, and how "significance" and "excellence" are judged differently in different disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) contexts, I'm also forwarding an excerpt from a very interesting book published last year on the ways in which academic peer review committees decide which proposed research projects to fund. Entitled How Professors Think by Michèle Lamont, a sociologist at Harvard, it should help us think about the relationship between disciplines and research questions. As a supplement to the Lamont reading, I'm also forwarding an essay I wrote a few years ago for the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate on the training of historians, which you should read as an example of how one member of one disciplinary tradition describes the attributes of that intellectual community. Finally, if you have time to review chapters 3, 4, and 11 of The Craft of Research (the ones about framing questions, problems, and warrants), they may feel usefully relevant to next week's discussion as well. With all of this material as background, it seems to me that it might be interesting for each of you to bring to class next week a single well-formed research question that you feel confident most members of your discipline (or however you label your chief academic intellectual home) would regard as valuable and significant to ask about some aspect of energy. Don't struggle too hard to make your question deep or profound or overly ambitious; just bring a question that anyone in your field would regard as a completely legitimate and interesting question to ask about energy. I suspect we'll be surprised by how different the questions we generate will be. I think that's all for now. More anon! Bill February 9
Message about Sending Suggestions for Topics We Might Tackle for Semester Projects, Sent on 2/3/2010:Friends-- This is the first of several emails you'll be getting from me today. I'm writing now to remind you to send to me via email any and all ideas you might have for especially interesting group projects we might undertake as background papers for the CHE Place-Based Workshop on energy in May. There are several useful criteria you might keep in mind for what makes a good project: 1) It might provide essential background on an aspect of energy that everyone attending the workshop really ought to understand. 2) It might provide quirky or unusual perspectives on some aspect of energy that will encourage people to think about the topic in valuable and unexpected ways. 3) It might be especially valuable in helping members of our class think about the challenges of doing interdisciplinary work. Please send me any ideas you have by 5pm on Friday, Feb. 5. I will compile all the ideas and send out a balloting email over the weekend asking members of the seminar to vote for the topics they think we ought to tackle. Please be on the lookout for that balloting email and reply to it as soon as you can over the weekend so I'll be ready to present results to the class on Tuesday and we can start moving forward with teams and projects. Thanks! Bill
Message about Details for January 26 Session, Sent on 1/21/10:Friends-- Sorry to be a little slow in emailing about next week's meeting of our seminar. The first week of classes is always frantic, as I trust I don't need to tell you! I promised at our first meeting to send along several items, so here they are. 1) Remember that our primary reading this week is Wayne Booth et al.'s classic The Craft of Research. Please read it cover to cover, and come prepared to discuss what you've learn from it (and from your own experience) about the stages of the overall research process. 2) To supplement Booth et al., I strongly encourage you to browse the website that students in my History/Geography 932 seminar put together during Fall 2008 on "Learning Historical Research." You'll find the home page for it on my own website under the Teaching: Learning Historical Research Menu: 3) One of the key questions we'll discuss next week is "What is a discipline?" To help prime the pump for that conversation, I'm attaching a PDF file with the definitions of this word (and the words "interdisciplinary" and "transdisciplinary") from the American Heritage Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary (which seeks not just to define words but to trace their changing meanings in the history of the English language, with quotations to illustrate changing usages). 4) As our syllabus evolves, I'll send out updated versions of it in PDF format for you to load onto your Kindle if you so choose. The latest version, with an update for next week's assignment (including the two items above) is attached. 5) Finally, most of you appear to have a bad version on your Kindle of David JC MacKay's Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air. As I explained in my earlier email, you can obtain the PDF version of the book by downloading it in various formats and resolutions from http://www.withouthotair.com/ 6) Remember that to add a PDF file to your Kindle, you go through some fairly simple steps, as follows: I think that's all for now. Let me know if you have any questions, and I'll let you know when the web page for our course is mounted. I'll see a number of you at the potluck tomorrow night! Bill Introductory Message about First Meeting of Seminar on January 19, Sent on 1/18/10:Friends-- I'm writing to remind you that the first meeting of the new CHE Methods Seminar (Environmental Studies 900, "Historical and Cultural Methods in Environmental Research" is tomorrow, Tuesday, January 19, from 5:30-8:00pm in 202-204 Bradley Memorial, which is located at 1225 Linden Drive. (To see its location on the Campus Map, visit http://www.map.wisc.edu/ and enter "Bradley Memorial" in the search box; be sure NOT to confuse this with Bradley Hall, which is one of the lakeshore residence halls, and *quite* a different building!) I'm writing to share a few key details about the course so you won't be surprised by anything that happens tomorrow night. Please read carefully. 1) We obviously will be meeting over the dinner hour, and although we'll talk tomorrow about whether we want to share responsibilities for bringing snacks or any other kinds of food each week, for now I'm going to assume that everyone will have eaten enough food beforehand to survive our two-and-a-half hour session until 8pm without being distracted by hunger. So please be sure to have a meal or at least a substantial snack before you come to class tomorrow at 5:30pm! You're also welcome to bring along a snack or other form of sustenance if you'd like. 2) We'll do extended introductions tomorrow, so come prepared to spend 3-4 minutes narrating the path that has brought you to your interest in the topics we'll be discussing in this course, and any special background or expertise you have to share that may make you a resource for your fellow seminar members. 3) We have a special partnership with the UW Libraries this semester that enables us to do all our assigned reading using Kindle eBook readers. (This will save you from having to purchase any of our assigned books or print out any of our assigned articles unless you want to do so.) We'll be joined tomorrow night by the Director of the UW Libraries, Ken Frazier, who will distribute to each of you the Kindle you'll be using as a loaner this semester, and he and I will explain to you how to use these devices (which, alas, you will have to return to the UW Libraries at the end of the semester). Although I do not generally encourage the use of laptop computers in seminar-sized classes--they get in the way of small-group interactions--you should seriously consider bringing along your computer tomorrow if you're able to do so, since one thing I'll need to demonstrate is the process of loading course readings onto your Kindle. 4) Two of our earliest book-length readings are ones you may conceivably want to read in a different format, so I'll mention them here in case you want to take action on that front. For next week, you'll be reading the entirety of Wayne Booth et al.'s classic The Craft of Research (3rd edition, University of Chicago Press, 2008), which is a remarkably helpful survey of the entire process of doing academic research, especially in the humanities and social sciences. It's well worth owning in hard copy, so although it will be on the Kindle you receive tomorrow, you may want to purchase a copy of your own. (If you do buy it, be sure to purchase the 3rd edition, which is more web-savvy than earlier versions.) The Amazon link for it is 5) The course web page for our seminar is http://www.williamcronon.net/courses/chemethods.htm , but it is not yet populated with content. I'll start loading materials there after we meet tomorrow, so please be patient. 6) Remember that you are all invited to the CHE Director's Potluck this coming Friday evening, January 22, from 6-9pm. It's a great way for you to become more involved in the CHE community if you're not already a regular, and although you're certainly not required to come as a member of the seminar, you're certainly encouraged. If you do plan to come, please RSVP and let me know 1) whether you're bringing a significant other and 2) what kind of food (main dish, side dish, vegetable, salad, hors d'oeuvre, or dessert) you'll bring. 7) Please mark on your calendar the CHE Place-Based Workshop next May 15 and 17-20. Much of the written work we do for the seminar will be directed toward providing background materials for the workshop, which you're strongly encouraged (but not required) to attend. In particular, members of our seminar will be involved in putting together the all-day symposium on Saturday, May 15, about energy in southern Wisconsin, so it's especially important to protect that date if you possibly can. 8) Finally, the syllabus for the course is very much a work in progress, since I'm trying to retain flexibility as the semester proceeds and will be juggling the interests of seminar members with the scheduling availabilities of CHE faculty members who will be joining our discussions from week to week. As a result, the syllabus as it currently stands will appear to be more of a blank slate than is customary for most of my courses, organized around a series of conceptual questions more than around readings, assignments, or a given set of dates. I'm attaching a draft of the syllabus as it currently stands so you can start perusing it, but it will undoubtedly have evolved even by tomorrow night, and will gain even more form over the next few days after I learn more about your interests and we begin to set our collective goals at tomorrow night's session. Updates will be circulated as PDFs that you can load onto your Kindle. I'll explain more about this process when we meet. I think that's all for now. See you tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to working with you this semester! Bill Bill Cronon, Director William J. Cronon Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor |
Page revision date: 31-Jul-2011