Of Dustbowl Ballads arid Railroad Rate Tables:Erudite Enactments in Historical Inquiry

Hamid R. Ekbia and Venkata Ratnadeep Sun

History is a heavily document-driven field. The character of thesedocuments varies from era to era and from case to case, and their contentconstitutes what can be broadly called "historical information." Historicalinformation, however, is not fixed, stable, or even cumulative; rather, it isenacted through the epistemic culture and practices of historians. Ourstudy of two well-known historical cases in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries—the monopolistic practices of railroad operators inthe American West and the Dust Bowl phenomenon in the Midwest—show how historians enact information by adopting a fluid strategy towardtheir sources of information and their changing notions of evidence. Atthe same time, they also show that these enactments maintain a certaindegree of consistency and continuity with the overall body of knowledgeof the scholarly community, giving them a more "educated" character anddifferentiating them from the routine enactments of daily life. In this arti-cle, we explore the historiographical practices engaged by historians thatenable this kind of enactment.

The meaning of "information" remains heavily contested. The keypremise of the standard Shannon-Weaver model, which takes informa-tion as an abstract and universal quantity that can be communicatedmore or less faithfully over a comniunicaüon channel, does not seemto stand up under empirical analysis or conceptual scrutiny. Empiricalstudies of daily information seeking suggest that information not onlyis put to use but becomes information in the first place through situatedsocial practice.' It is further noted that various sources of informationreceive disparate treatments because they belong to disparate regimesof worth, which in turn give rise to various regimes of information.^

Historically, too, the term "information" has served as a strong rhe-torical and ideological force, shaping the culture and social practicesof late modernity.' In brief, these accounts provide a situadonal under-standing of information as something that is created, routinely andhistorically, through action—that is enacted, in other words. The notion

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of "enactment," which originally derives from organization theory,emphasizes the idea that people bring events and structures into exis-tence, setting them in motion through their actions."* This notion wasextended by Hamid Ekbia and Tom Evans to account for the role ofhuman activities in the creation of information as it pertains to specific"worlds" and situations.^

These situated enactments, it might be argued, only work in therealm of daily life. Perhaps we can find a less contested meaning of in-formation in the scholarly world, for instance, where disciplinary andinstitutional norms and practices seem to provide a stable backdropagainst which meanings are constructed and evaluated. While seem-ingly forceful, this expectation turns out not to be accurate, at least, notin the field of historiography, which, like many other disciplines in thehumanities, is currendy undergoing remarkable changes with the intro-duction of digitized information. Our analyses of a number of historicalcases show how the epistemic practices of historians are being trans-formed through these changes, but they also show how the notions of(what counts as) information and evidence are being contested and re-conceptualized in the community.^ In other words, historiography is nota linear progression of knowledge accumulation; historians also enactinformation by adopting a fluid strategy toward their sources of infor-mation and their changing notions of evidence. The difference betweenthese enactments and those ofthe lay information seeker is that the for-mer, as opposed to the majority ofthe latter, are more "educated." Thatis, they maintain a certain degree of consistency and continuity with theoverall body of knowledge of the scholarly community. The character ofthese educated enactments constitutes the main focus of the current es-say, with a focus on spatial history. We highhght the various activities ofhistorians in their effort to understand events of the past with what thetechnology of the time makes available to them, flexibly acting as dataanalysts, "laboratory" scientists, bricoleurs, or simulators.

Background to the Study and Methods

To illustrate these situated enactments, we draw on data from twohistorical cases. The data were collected using qualitative methods thatcombined three multisite field observations, semistructured interviews,and document analysis. Participants were identified based on theirscholarly work in Historical Geographical Information Systems (HGIS).Subsequendy, other participants were recruited using the snowballmethod, based on personal introductions and recommendation of the

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inidal group of pardcipants.' Some of these researchers were involvedin mulddisciplinary, muldsite, collaboradve HGIS projects and were wellknown to each other. Prior to the actual data collecdon phase, an ex-tensive survey of the HGIS field was conducted by talking to scholars,attending workshops, visidng digital humanides centers in the UnitedStates, and attending sessions at various conferences. Excerpts fromthese interviews consdtute the bulk of empirical data used in this árdele.To keep anonymity, the interviewees are referred to by pseudonyms inthis árdele. For reconstrucdng the historical narradve that formed thebasis for the case study examples, the authors relied on exisdng litera-ture on the development of railroads in California and the Dust Bowl.In addidon, we also obtained the relevant datasets, GIS maps, and otherdata ardfacts from historians who were conducdng the GIS-based analy-sis of these historical events.*

Case Study 1:Railroads and the Nineteenth-Century American West

"The Southern Pacific," said Mr. William B. Gurds, of that company,in 1894, in the same strain, "sells transportadon precisely as a mer-chant disposes of his wares, adjusdng its tariff to conform to the situ-adon with the object in view of inducing the largest amount of trans-portadon at fair rates." This announced willingness to differendateled in the course of dme to the greatest variety of railroad rates inCalifornia, some rates being low, some high, some public, some se-cret. Generally speaking, indeed, rates were low where compeddonwas present, and high where it was absent. The big man was favoredover die litde man, the shipper with an alternadve route over theshipper confined to one railroad line.

—Stuart Daggett, Chapters on the History of the Southern Pacific ̂

In the nineteenth century, transcondnental railroads played a majorrole in bringing economic prosperity to and transforming the physicallandscape and expanding the fronders of the American West.'" However,die social and polidcal problems that transcondnental railroads broughtwith them are less well known. Perhaps nowhere was this more evidentthan in the wheat-grov\dng regions of Galifomia, where the monopolisdcpracdces of railroads and the resuldng discontent among farmers fueleda polidcal change throughout the western United States. While farmersheld many grievances against the railroads, their loudest and most strin-gent cridcism was centered around the high freight rates that railroads

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charged for the transport of wheat and other produce from farms inthe interior valley areas to grain markets located in cities such as SanFrancisco. A key question for economic historians is how the SouthernPacific Railroad Gompany (SPR) gained such a monopolistic strangle-hold in the region. The answer to this question has changed throughoutdecades, as revealed by the examination of different accounts providedby historians who seem to have known all along about the sophisticatedaccounting practices of the SPR.

In the wheat-growing districts of Galifornia, the SPR had an un-challenged monopoly in freight business in the region north of theTehachapi Mountains for over forty years, from 1869 to 1910. This mo-nopoly and control meant that the SPR played a vital role in transportingthe bulk of Galifornia's wheat and barley to the tidewater seaports ofSan Francisco and Port Gosta located along the Garquinez Strait Fromhere much of the produce would be loaded onto ocean-bound vesselsthat sailed to England via Gape Horn, and the rest was sold to consum-ers in urban Bay Area markets."

However, the SPR did not enjoy a complete monopoly. In the 1890sin Galifornia's Gentral Valley region, railroads faced intense competi-tion from steamboats that plied the navigable parts of the Sacramento,Feather, and San Joaquin Rivers. The SPR itself operated at least twosteamboats on the Sacramento and Feather Rivers.'̂ This uniqueconfiguration of railroad and river freight services effectively dividedGalifornia's wheat-growing districts into two zones, which historianMichael Magliari called "competitive" and "monopolistic.""

The competitive zone included that region where the freight servicesoffered by steamboat companies competed with those offered by theSPR. This zone comprised areas including the entire grain belt in theSacramento Valley and the lower portion of the San Joaquin River. Themonopolistic zone, on the other hand, comprised those areas whereonly the SPR operated, including the upper portions of the San JoaquinValley and areas of the upper Salinas Valley in the eastern part of SanLuis Obispo and southern Monterey Gounties, which are separatedfrom the coasdine by the coastal range mountains. This allowed the SPRto manipulate the freight tariffs in these areas.'*

It is important to note that the notion of a competitive zone and amonopolistic zone is a classification developed by Magliari almost a cen-tury after the period under study.'̂ At that point in time in the 1800s, itwas difficult for many people to understand how the SPR actually exer-cised its monopolistic practices by manipulating freight rates. Magliariexplains the situation as follows:

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The existence of these two zones and the impact of river competi-tion on railroad rates were not clearly reflected in the publishedgrain tariffs of the Southern Pacific. Submitted upon occasion tothe Galifornia Railroad Gommission, these [freight rate] tablespresented an impartial, uniformly progressive rate structure gov-erned solely by the distance between one point on the line andanother. Thus, in June 1892, the rate from Tehama, located on theSacramento 168 miles from Port Gosta, was $3.50 per ton while therate from Fresno, 175 miles south of Port Gosta, equaled $3.60.One should beware of such figures, however. A great deal of se-crecy shrouded the SP's actual tariff system, and the granting ofrebates to large shippers was common practice. SP tariff schedulesalso hid additional costs, such as the fifteen cents per ton switchingfee assessed against San Joaquin Valley grain reaching Stockton.'^

In this case study, the conclusions of Magliari and other authors thathe cited from the nineteenth century clearly identified the existence ofthe competitive zone and the monopolistic zone where the SPR manip-ulated freight rates to compete with the steamboat companies in thecompetitive zone and exploited its monopoly in the areas where it ex-ercised complete control over the transportation industry. This allowedthe SPR to charge exorbitant prices to its customers who shipped theirfreight to areas such as San Francisco and Oakland. However, at thatpoint in time it was never clear how the existence of the two competingzones and the impact of this competition influenced iJie freight rates.

What is remarkable about this is the availability all along of the"freight rate table"—an important document that railroad companiessubmitted for scrutiny to the Galifornia Railroad Gommission. Magliariand others in their analyses did identify that hidden charges as well aspreferential rates to certain customers all added to the economic bur-den of farmers, especially smaller farmers. A full understanding of thesemanipulations had to wait until many years later, when a group of histo-rians led by Stanford historian Richard White unlocked the secret thatwas buried in the freight rate tables." If we were to assume that freightrates increased progressively with the growing distance, as reflected inthe freight rate tables, and the switching costs seemed a justified ex-pense, then why were farmers and merchants complaining? The answerto this lies in understanding how freight rates were designed to confuseand what role mechanisms like differential and tiered pricing playedin the process.

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To attain this kind of understanding. White and his colleagues appliedCIS-based visualizatioritechniqueSpto analyze the relationship betweendistances and freight rates published by the Southern Pacific RailroadCompany. This analysis revealed a pattern described as follows: "The av-erage rate per ton-mile, for example, was not a particularly revealingstatistic. Because railroads charged more for short hauls than long haulsand because they discriminated between commodities (charging less forbulk goods like coal or wheat than for luxury goods like coffee or tea), achange in the length of the haul or an increase in the amount of lowerclassificadons of freight would produce a decline in the average rate perton mile without much alteradon in rates."'*

In this fashion, through the spadal analysis of the freight rate tables.White and his colleagues attained an understanding of how the SPR op-erated and how it established its partial monopoly in the area. FromMagliari to White, the change in our understanding of the railroadfreight rate tables and their relationship to farming in the AmericanWest brings out the kinds of activities performed by historians and en-abled by the technology of the time. Before exploring these activities indetail, let us briefiy examine another case study.

Case Study 2: The Dust Bowl

I've seen the dust so black that I couldn't see a thing.And the wind so cold, boy, it nearly cut your water off.I seen the wind so high that it blowed my fences down.Buried my tractor six feet underground.

—Woody Cudirie, "Dust Bowl Blues" "

The Dust Bowl looms large in the American imagination, sometimesfinding mythical dimensions in popular culture, such as those vividly de-scribed in country singer Woody Cuthrie's numerous songs and ballads.The topic is also well researched in environmental history, having to dowith an unusual but extensive phenomenon in the American Midwest—namely, widespread dust storms that covered Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas,New Mexico, and Colorado in the 1930s. In the late nineteenth century,a number of pioneers moved into the Great Plains region of the UnitedStates and established farms. They plowed the prairie grasslands despitethe fact that these lands, because of scanty rainfall, were often unreli-able for agriculture, and farmers frequendy faced uncertainty year afteryear. In the 1920s, with the onset of die First World War, the land saw

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increased farming activity. Fanners using industrial mechanized farm-ing techniques plowed large tracts of land for growing cash crops. Bythe 1930s, when the area faced a long, punishing drought, the intensivefarming techniques had already taken a toll on the fertility of the soil.

Whether and to what degree farming activity accounted for the duststorms, however, is a question that has received various answers from his-torians. One of the first extensive studies of the dust bowls was providedby Donald Worster, who viewed their occurrence as the result of uncon-trolled mechanized agriculture driven by the philosophy that land mustbe treated as capital and agriculture as a capitalistic activity.̂ " Worster,who considered this a "complex economic culture" that supported andencouraged indiscriminate farming activity, related it to the destructionof the ecology and the arability of soil, which ultimately resulted in thedust storms:

[That] the thirties were a time of great crisis in American, indeed,in the world, capitalism has long been the obvious fact. The DustBowl, I believe, was part of the same crisis. It came about becausethe expansionary energy of the United States had finally encoun-tered a volatile, marginal land, destroying the delicate ecologicalbalance that evolved here. . . . It cannot be blamed on illiteracyor overpopulation or social disorder. It came about, because theculture was operating in precisely the way it was supposed to.Americans blazed their way across a richly endowed continentwith ruthless, devastating efficiency unmatched by any peopleanywhere. When the White Men came to the plains, they talkedexpansively about "busting" and "breaking" the land. And this isexactly what they did. Some environmental catastrophes are na-ture's work, others are slowly accumulating effects of ignorance orpoverty. The Dust Bowl, in contrast, was the inevitable outcomeof a culture that deliberately, self consciously, set itself the task ofdominating and exploiting the land for all its worth. '̂

Worster identified three important maxims that undergirded thiseconomic culture. First, people considered agricultural land as a capi-tal resource that must be exploited and from which they must profit.Second, "man had a natural right or even an obligation to use thiscapital for constant self-advancement." Third, "the social order shouldpermit and encourage continual increase in personal wealth."^^ Thenarrative developed by Worster to support his theory rested on twocase studies: Cimarrón County, Oklahoma, and Haskell County, Kansas.

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Geoff Cunfer has argued that it is, indeed, the case study approach thatgives the narradve its authendcity: "Reading it, we meet real people withnames and faces and dramadc personal stories of suffering, loss, andperseverance. We find heroes and villains. We leave the story feelingthat we know the place well and understand the role of local farmerswho created and then lived through the Dust Bowl.""

However, Cunfer challenges Worster's claim that the experiences inthese two coundes were typical of the endre Dust Bowl region. Cunferpardcularly takes issue with the thesis that the responsibility of theDust Bowl economic disaster squarely rested on the shoulders of thepioneer farmers who destroyed the ecological balance of the regionby intensive mechanized farming methods. Instead, he contends, tak-ing a broader view and conducdng a macro-level analysis would presentan endrely different picture. Furthermore, he suggests that adopdng abroader temporal scale would add value by revealing other long-termenvironmental factors that may have precipitated the phenomenon. Tothis end, he analyzed the Dust Bowl using GIS, drawing on several dataresources. These included county boundary maps, area maps, reportspertaining to federally sponsored studies, and other regional publica-dons.^" Included in the last category was a seminal and innovadve árdelethat contained hundreds of references to árdeles published in severalsmall newspapers in Kansas that reported dust storms during the periodbetween 1870 and 1920.̂ ^ These proved to be very useful to spadally lo-cate dust storms all over Kansas's coundes for a broad dme frame. Thelocalness and spadal specificity of these newspapers helped in locadngthe storms at the county level for the dme frame under study^^ In addi-don to the newspaper árdeles, Gunfer used a number of other sources."

Drawing on this vast array of data sources, Cunfer conducted severalGIS-based analyses of rainfall that allowed him to rule out potendal con-tribudng factors over extended spadal and temporal scales. In pardcular,die analysis revealed that die wheat harvest in Dust Bowl areas fluctuatedwidely, suppordng the assumpdon that the climate varied gready in theplains region. This indicated that the climate was not completely dry forextended periods of dme and therefore may not have contributed tothe dust storms. Analyses also revealed that pioneer farmers made litdeprogress in plowing up the grasslands, and hence significant amounts ofcropland remained unplowed, retaining their nadve grassland.

However, in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles and in thesouthwestern part of Kansas, the picture was slighdy different, anddiscrepancies were observed. In these areas, fourteen Dust Bowl coun-des had less than 40 percent of their original grass sod. This led to the

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exposure of considerable amounts of plowed cropland to the winds. Forexample, in Haskell Gounty, Kansas, 70 percent was cropland and 29percent was grassland by the year 1935.̂ * In the Texas Panhandle region,a dozen freshly plowed counties tracked closely the oudine of the DustBowl's southern lobe. From these observations, it may be concludedthat in these particular locations, the. fresh plow-up was a likely contribu-tor to vnnd erosion, if not the only reason. Furthermore, a significantoverlap in terms of the shortage of rainfall and dust storms became evi-dent. It leads us to conclude that dust storms often followed the droughtweather. As the dry weather moved northeast, so did the dust storms.^'

This analysis brought up several interesting perspectives. First, theanalysis at such a broad geographical and temporal scale throws newlight on the series of events such as drought over nine years that led tothe buildup of the storms. The analysis also revealed that, contrary towhat Worster predicted, the causal factors that led to the dust stormsare more complicated and may be the result of a complex interactionbetween human activity and natural factors, such as drought conditionsand low rainfall. The analysis also suggests that, while drought has thepower to cause wind erosion and dust storms irrespective of human ac-tivity, land use may have tipped the balance, enhancing the likelihood ofthe dust storms.

However, perhaps the most interesting part of Gunfer's analysis de-rives from newspaper reports such as the following, collected by JamesMalin in 1946:

Another windy, dusty, trying, headache-producing, vexatious, dis-gusting, terrific, upsetting, tearing, rearing, careerihg, bumping,sign-lifting, chimney absorbing, lung slaying, garment destroying,eye blinding, and rip-roaring storm, last Monday. The gale whichprevailed here last Saturday seems to have been an installmentwhich came up from the south over a large area of country, andwhich occasioned much damage in certain parts of the state. It wasfurious, and in this locality summoned all the dust between hereand Kingdom come to the august presence of the Salinaites. Thebuildings seemed on the point of being lifted from their founda-tions and the day was uncommonly dark from the clouds of dust.'"

Malin's extensive work on these reports demonstrated that the duststorms were a regular phenomenon in the Great Plains region wellbefore the 1900s." Building on Malin's data and coding them into aGIS-compatible format, Gunfer assigned each occurrence of a duststorm between 1854 and 1896 into one of four categories: (1) a single

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dust storm for a single location for a single year; (2) several dusty eventsin one single place; (3) several instances of dust storms; and (4) anentire season of dust storms. Each of these categories was then repre-sented with a circle that was proportional in size to the frequency ofthe storms and mapped onto the Kansas map with county boundaries.This extensive data and elaborate coding scheme allowed a novel anal-ysis, although it also generated problems; for instance, it was difficultfor anyone to differentiate between several dust storms in one monthand a month full of dust storms. To overcome this problem, Gunfer re-sorted to rounding, using an arbitrary upper and lower limit for eachof the categories. A second challenge—namely, locating the exact placewhere the dust storm occurred—was met by using the location of thenewspaper publication as a surrogate for the location of the storm.'^Althoughjustifiable by scaling considerations, these innovative solutionsserve as interesting examples of the information practices of digital his-torians, which we would like to expound on here.

Discussion

We suggested at the outset that scholars, like others, "enact" informa-tion, albeit in an educated fashion. Here we would like to expound thenotion of "enactment," as manifested in the two historical cases intro-duced above. We would like to unpack this notion, offering exemplarypractices, techniques, and technologies that are involved in the processof enactment. For this, we draw on historians' own accounts of theirpractices and what they had to say in interviews about their use of in-formation. The case studies and interviews present us with examplesof enactment in historical work, which we divide into four categories:manipulation, inscription, association, and simulation. Each of these, inturn, reveals a particular face of today's historian as data analyst, lab sci-entist, bricoleur, and simulator.

Mediated Manipulation: The Historian as Data Analyst

The railroad case study revealed a progression of historical analysisin which the focus gradually shifted from the study of objects (crops,railroads, steamboats) to the study of data, specifically the freight ratetables." However, rather than a simple linear progression, where laterhistorians build upon or correct earlier narratives, in the historiographyof each case we see enactments of information based on new insights,techniques, and technologies. As one historian involved in the proj-ect suggested, many historians never considered the importance of

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analyzing the freight rate tables purely because no one attached muchimportance to them. However, the freight rate tables were, as he calledthem, the "software" that ran the railways:

I realized there was a large body of data which is spatial in nature,some of it maps but a lot of it rate tables, freight shipments that Icould not in any normal way use either as part of the qualitativestudy or as part of a narrative study. So I gathered this stuff, I meanit was pretty much there in archives. As I moved on . . . a set of newtechnologies [became available] . . . that I could begin to use thisdata. . . . This is a dense amount of information, but at the sametime this is what made railroads work; this is the most controversial[thing] about railroads. But at the end [what] you can see is thesoftware; historians studied the hardware, they studied how rail-ways were built and are constructed, what happens to them, whatplaces that commands. But it is like recovering a computer withoutrecovering the software that made it run.'"*

In this formulation, the analogy with computer hardware and soft-ware implies that information had to be "recovered" from the availablesources (freight rate tables) and put to use for analysis. To be sure, themetaphor of hardware and software should be understood contextu-ally and relative to the technology of the time. Historians have alwayspaid attention to both the hardware and software of history by insertingtheir studies into larger interpretative frameworks and historical de-bates. What has changed, therefore, is how the information is analyzedand interpreted.

In the same vein, a student who was intimately involved in the rail-roads project explained the technique and value of using freight ratetables, which were often a "throw-away" data source for other histori-ans but which became an important piece of historical evidence in thiscase.'̂ The phrase "throw-away source" is a telling concept here in termsof how the views and practices of historians affect the significance ofinformation, in this case turning it into a valuable source: somethingthat for many decades was essentially considered useless. The contrastbetween this notion and what some historians call "surviving evidence"—that is, evidence that has stood the test of time—is interesting in that,rather than "surviving," freight rate tables were simply sitting there, soto speak, waiting for the right technology and analysis to become avail-able for their decipherment, representing a clear case of technologicallymediated enactment.'^

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Detached Inscription: The Historian as a Laboratory Scientist

Another interesting and curious development in the humanities, in-cluding history, is the emergence of "labs" in these disciphnes—a notionthat was also brought up numerous times in our interviews and observa-tions. There are, in fact, explicit pleas by some historians to turn historyinto a laboratory or "workshop" science." What is a lab in history, howdoes it work, and what function does it serve? In their seminal study oflaboratory sciences, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar describe scientistsas a "strange tribe . . . [of] compulsive and manic writers . . . who spendthe greatest part of their day coding, marking, altering, correcting, read-ing, and writing."'* As such, they argue, a great deal of lab activity isconcerned with the production of "inscriptions." Is this what happens ina history lab as well? The answer, at some abstract level, is positive, as theproduction of inscriptions is the focus of all academic work. However,at a more concrete level, there are significant differences in the processof production of inscriptions that make a history lab different from, forinstance, a physics lab.

The transition to a laboratory environment in the sciences allowsscientists to dispense with three features of the objects they study: theobject as it is, where it is, and when it happens.^^ The epistemic advantageof this transition is to detach the objects of study from their natural en-vironment and to position them in an environment pardy defined bysocial order within and outside the lab. This advantage can accrue inthe work of historians to the extent that they can detach their objectsof study from the context of their happening. This, it seems, is whathistorians have been doing all along, and inevitably so: having no di-rect access to the objects and events they study at the time and placeof their happening, historians reconstruct and recast them in theiranalyses and narratives. In this respect, their work is not dissimilar tothe work of psychoanalysts. While analysis in the latter consisted of "theprogression from outward signs (the patient's symptoms) to the motivat-ing forces that are the elements of psychic activity," analysis in historylargely involves the progression from enduring signs to the underlyingforces and processes that constitute social and historical action.""" Thereare, therefore, parallels to be drawn from what psychoanalysts, startingwith Sigmund Freud, did in structuring their discipline into a lab sci-ence and some of the current developments in history toward the samegoal. In both cases, practitioners are involved in the processing of signs,not materials, which happen to be the entities processed or emulatedin physics or biology labs, for instance. The processing of signs is a clear

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manifestadon of what we term "enactment of informadon," a detailedexample of which is captured in the following interview excerpt:

One very specific quesdon was where were the dust storms worst,so I have some geographical quesdons, and GIS is set up answering[them]. Another quesdon that was the sort of underlying quesdoninvolved in all of these was [what] caused the storms, and there Iled back to the soil science literature, you know, where sciendstshave tried to understand physics of soil, of wind erosion on soilsand on how they work, and they have idendfied pardcular key fac-tors that have to do with the texture of the soil, the amount ofmoisture in the soil, and the amount of vegetative cover, the di-recdon and the speed of wind and all of these things where purephysics determine when a soil starts to erode. And so what I washoping was that if we know there was a list of possible causal factorsor science. Then there are historical ways that I can test which ofthose factors were [sic] actually come into play at different dmesand at different places. And so I was trying to understand soil types,you know, so I used the GIS and maps and soil types across the re-gion and then used agricultural census to evaluate the vegetadoncover and the crops and used rainfall data to evaluate soil moisturefrom weather stadons and try to dismande those features in GIS tobe able to bring muldple layers from one another, and to look atthe geographical reladonship between different variables, and sowhat I had was a set of different variables and different measures ofthe environment, and then I was able to lay that off one on anotherand compare the locadons of Dust Bowls, the soil types with therainfall pattern and with temperature and the land-use pattern."'

The nodon of "tesdng" the factors in "historical ways" speaks to thekind of laboratory work some historians engage in nowadays with thehelp of computer technologies (GIS, in this case). The implicadons ofthese developments for the division of labor in historiography are far-fetched and perhaps too early to judge, especially in light of currentbroader socioeconomic developments in turning inquiry in the humani-des into large-scale collaboradve projects.

Creative Association: The Historian as a Bricoleur

There is a widely held percepdon among outsiders that work inhistory consists of the accumuladon (or, in the case of students, memo-rizadon) of informadon."^ In pracdce, however, the historian is engaged

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in a kind of bricolage, putting preexisting pieces of data together in newand creative ways.*' Archival information, for instance, does not cometo the historian in prepackaged form. Rather, a great deal of effort is in-volved in making connections between different pieces of information,as the student researcher describes here:

They look interesting, but we do not have the time to analyzethem. But the secret is we can connect them to geographical dataand make histories from i t . . . to get more complete histories fromit which other people have not been able to do. Here is a greatexample of a freight table [pointing to a document]. If it's a docu-ment like this, it's easy to read, and here is something I workedwith [pointing to the actual freight rate table that was used in data-base construction]. What we found is that these two documentsconnect. If we combine these two documents here and then wecombine these two documents here [pointing to separate freightrate tables that were related], it should tell you how much cargothey forwarded.**

What guides this process is largely driven by the historian's intuitionsabout the potential value of a given piece of information. Bricolage isanything but a systematic rummage through information. One of theinterviewees articulates this quite clearly in response to a question aboutthe selection of data:

There is [sic] two elements to that. One is that, you know, youjust observe that one doesn't always collect data knowing in ad-vance whether it will be helpful in answering a particular question.And certainly, one doesn't know what other questions might sub-sequendy turn out to be useful in answering. So the first kind ofquestion that I ask myself when I am collecting data is, you know,is this data intrinsically interesting? . . . Is it produced in an intrin-sically interesting way? Is it just rich in detail? And details couldbe important to me later on. . . . And then beyond that, thinkingabout specific research questions, the way I proceeded was to askmyself, can I hope to have the entire universe more or less of thisdata? Is that doable? Does it exist? And if so, you know, how couldthat change or help me answer my core questions?*^

Notice that what this scholar calls "collecting" is very different from"accumulation" of information, widely perceived as the mainstay of his-torical research.

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Sudfl Simulation: The Historian as a Simulator

Gomputer technologies have added various tools to the historian'stoolbox, but the most recent and perhaps powerful of these is the pos-sibility of simulation. An obvious benefit of simulation is to abstract timeaway, allowing events to unfold in a speeded-up and dynamic fashion, asone historian points out:

WTiat we have is, what we have is a data sheet, which is [sic] itself.It can be railway accidents, it can be when unions are established,it could be freight rates. All these things—what we do is not thatyou can't crack them without visualizing. What visualizing does isthat it allows us to put them into space, into a virtual space, andrelationships begin to appear. Now many [sic] these relationshipsmight be false. But the way that you can do is begin to test themvery very quickly. It looks like this is happening, but how can yourefine techniques, refine our questions to see if this is really what'shappening. And when we do that and we are asking questions tochange visualization, . . . we begin to get answers, which is not anexact answer so you refine it again.''̂

The speeding up makes it possible for historiaris to test their hypothesesand intuitions. The same historian, for instance, provided an exampleof how an incorrect early intuition about the distribution of cattie herdsacross the United States was quickly fixed through simulation. In addi-tion, simulation also allows historians to test different scenarios, "givinglife" to controversies that lie behind historical events. However, thereis a threat inherent in these practices as well that derives from the ex-pectations and constraints that computer technologies impose on theconduct of historiography work but also from the extreme malleabilityof simulation techniques, which tend to erase the line between the realand imaginary.*'

Conclusion: Educated Enactments

The types of information practices discussed above—manipulation,inscription, bricolage, and simulation—provide examples of what we con-sider scholarly enactments by historians, although, we should hasten toadd, they do not by any means exhaust the scope of all such practices.We are not interested in adjudicating the comparative merits of alterna-tive historical narratives and conclusions based upon them in our case

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studies, nor are we qualified to do so. Our interest, rather, is in how his-torians construct these narratives and how technologies such as CIS andother computer technologies play into the work of narrative construc-tion. There are, to be sure, many other practices that historians take onin building their complex narratives from various sources of information.Rather than providing an exhaustive set of practices in historiographicalresearch, our aim here was to present the key activities that have emergedfrom our studies and interactions with historians. We believe that thesepractices share a common character, which we dubbed as "erudite" or"educated" at the outset. It is this character that renders scholarly prac-tices distinct from daily run-of-the-mill enactments of ordinary folk.Scholarly work, while continuous with mundane activities of ordinary so-cial life, also "upgrades" those acdvities by adhering to certain norms andstandards. Laboratories, for instance, "recast objects of investigation byinserting them into new temporal and territorial regimes."** We saw thiskind of recasting in how historians describe the affordances of CIS, but italso applies to many other computer technologies.

A key dimension of the upgrading in historical research has to do withcertain data and informadon standards, often implicit in the character ofthe standards that historiographers adhere to. Having to do with issues ofdata "permanency," "transparency," "completeness," and so forth, thesestandards govern the criteria according to which elements of informationare selected. This is how one of our interviewees describes the criteria:

And we've developed more kind of nuanced ways with electronicmaterials to think about what state is it in. . . . At what state doessomething need to be in before it moves into that category of okay,this is something that needs to be preserved? There has to be thelongevity, has to be presumably open-ended, just like a book, let's say.And that's not an easy thing to put into practice. So in theory, theStanford library provides all faculty with just a data dump. Or theypromise to maintain, to hold, it forever, which is, whatever—forthe next ten years, for a long time. For a long time. . . . Our in-tention here is to make all of our data available. But you have theresponsibility to make sure that they know what the data is [sic]and what its limitations are. . . . It's, you know, for all intents andpurposes it's complete. There aren't any gaps.*^

While the ideal of complete, transparent, and permanent datamight never be fully accomplished, the fact that historians strive for itgives their efforts a distinct scholarly quality. By following these norms.

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scholarly enactments of information in historiography maintain acertain degree of consistency and continuity that qualifies them as "edu-cated" efforts but does not diminish their constructive character; theyare enactments nonetheless.

Notes

1. Harold Garfinkel, Toward a Sociological Theory of Information (London:Paradigm, 2008).

2. Hamid Ekbia, "Information in Action: A Situated View," paper pre-sented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Information Scienceand Technology, Vancouver, BG, November 6-11, 2009; Hamid Ekbia andTom P. Evans, "Regimes of Information: Land Use, Management, and Policy,"Information Society 25, no. 5 (2009): 328-43.

3. Ron Day, The Modem Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power(Garbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001).

4. Karl Weick, "Enacted Sense Making in Grisis Situations," Journal oJManagement Studies 25, no. 4 (1988): 305-17.

5. A possible alternative to "enactment" would be the related notion of"sense-making." However, we avoid this alternative because in information stud-ies it has come to acquire specific connotations that stand in opposition to thesituational view that we advocate here. For a detailed discussion of this issue, seeEkbia and Evans, "Regimes of Information."

6. Venkata Ratnadeep Suri and Hamid Ekbia, "Spatial Mediations inHistorical Understanding: GIS and the Evolving Epistemic Practices of History,"Joumai of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (under review).

7. For further understanding about snowball methods, see Matthew J.Salganik and Douglas D. Heckathorn, "Sampling and Estimation in HiddenPopulations Using Respondent-Driven Sampling," Sociological Methodology 34,no. 1 (2004): 193-239; Leo A. Goodman, "Snowball Sampling," Annals of Mathe-matical Statistics 32, no. 1 (1961): 148-70.

8. The data were collected as part of the second author's dissertation re-search project, which was under way at the time of writing this article. Thedissertation was successfully defended on November 30, 2012.

9. Stuart Daggett, Chapters on the History of the Southem Pacific (New York:Ronald Press Gompany, 1922), 240.

10. Richard White, "What Is Spatial History?," 2010, http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29.

11. Michael Magliari, "Populism, Steamboats, and the Octopus: Transpor-tation Rates and Monopoly in Galifornia's Wheat Regions, 1890-1896," PacificHistorical Review 58, no. 4 (1989): 449-69.

12. Ibid., citing William D.Johnson, "Inland Steam Navigation in Galifornia"(MA thesis, Stanford University, 1952), 78.

13. Ibid., 459.14. Ibid.15. Ibid.16. Ibid., 460-61, citing Stuart Daggett, Chapters, 343.

277

17. WTiite, "What Is Spatial History?"18. Richard \\Tiite, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modem

America (NewYork: W. W. Norton, 2011),' 151.19. Woody Guthrie, "Dust Bowl Blues," on Dust Bowl Ballads, Victor Records,

1940.20. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southem Great Plains in the 193O's (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1979).21. Ibid., 4-5.22. Ibid., 6.23. Geoff Gunfer, "Scaling the Dust Bowl," in Placing History: How Maps,

Spatial Data, and GIS Are Ghanging Historical Scholarship, ed. Anne Kelly Knowles(Redlands, GA: ESRI Press, 2008), 95-121, 100.

24. Boundary maps were produced by Garville Earle and Ghangyong Gaofor 1850-1970 and published by Geoscience Publications, Department of An-thropology and Geography, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 1991. Areamaps were obtained from "The Dust Bowl: Agricultural Problems and Solu-tions," US Department of Agricultural Editorial Reference Series no. 7, July 15,1940, available at the Gentral Library of the National Océanographie and Atmo-spheric Administration.

25. James Malin, "Dust Storms," Kansas Historical Quarterly 14 (1946).26. The county is a basic census unit for any agricultural census data col-

lected by the federal government. This census is conducted for every ten yearsfrom 1920 and for about every five years thereafter. Gunfer obtained thesedata in digital format from Myron P. Gutmann, "Great Plains Population andEnvironmental Data: Agricultural Data" (computer file), IGPSR version, pro-duced by the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2005, distributed by theInter-university Gonsortium for Polidcal and Social Research, Ann Arbor, 2005,computer file no. IGPSRO4254-V1.

27. Other resources used by Gunfer to populate the GIS databases includedstatisdcs collected by the state of Kansas for 1890-1930 as well as weather datacollected by the Nadonal Weather Service from 1885. These data are availablefor weather station point locations and must be interpolated to the county unit,which is the level of analysis in Gunfer's ^vork. The sixth source that Gunfer usedwas the maps of the dust regions published in the Washington, DG, Evening Star,December 8, 1939, G-7.

28. Gunfer, "Scaling the Dust Bowl," 95-121.29. Ibid.30. Ibid., 110. This paragraph was cited by Gunfer from a news report pub-

lished in the Salinas (KS) Journal, April 1, 1880. This is an example of one ofthe several news articles from old newspapers that Gunfer used to identify thoseplaces where a dust storm occurred and used this information to populate theGIS database. It is also an example of how historians use a plethora of historicalsources to extract geographical information to populate GIS databases.

31. James Malin's seminal article dtled "Dust Storms" was published in threevolumes of the Kansas Historical Quarterly in 1946: vol. 37, pp. 129-44, vol. 38,pp. 265-96, vol. 39, pp. 1-4, 13.

32. Gunfer, "Scaling the Dust Bowl," 112.33. For an example of the study of objects, see Dee Brown, Hear That Lonesome

Wliistle Blow: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroads, 2nd ed. (New York:

278 l8cC/Of Dustbowl Ballads

Holt, 2001). For an example of the study of data, see White, "What Is SpatialHistory?"; Stephen E. Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built theTranscontinental Railroad, 1863-1869 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) ; DavidHoward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (NewYork: Viking, 1999).

34. This excerpt is from a taped interv'iew of Dr. Richard WTiite, historian,conducted as part of the second author's dissertation project. The original re-cording and the corresponding transcript are in the possession of the secondauthor.

35. A senior graduate student in a taped interview used the term "throw-awaydata resource" to describe those data sources that are not typically collected andused by historians. The interview was conducted as part of the second author'sdissertation project. The original recording and the corresponding transcriptare in the possession of the second author. The subject's name has been with-held upon request.

36. Nancy Shoemaker, "V\Tiere Is the History Lab Gourse?," 2009, hup: / /www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2009/0901/0901tea2.cfm.

37. Ibid.38. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of

Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979), 48-49.39. Karin Getina-Knorr, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge

(Gambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 27.40. Ibid. A key difference is that, unlike psychoanalytic subjects (patients),

the objects of history are mute, unless there is access to oral testimonies of sub-jects involved in recent historical events.

41. This excerpt is from a taped interview of Geoff Gunfer, historian, con-ducted as part ofthe second author's dissertation project. The original recordingand the corresponding transcript are in the possession of the second author.

42. Shoemaker, "Where Is the History Lab Gourse?"43. Glaude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Ghicago: University of Ghicago

Press, 1966).44. VNTiite interview.45. Gunfer interview.46. MTiite interview.47. Glaudo Fogu, "Digitizing Historical Gonsciousness," History and Theory 48,

no. 2 (2009): 102-21.48. Knorr-Getina, Epistemic Cultures, 43.49. This excerpt is from a taped interview of Frank Zephyr, historian, con-

ducted as part ofthe second author's dissertation project. The original recordingand the corresponding transcript are in the possession of the second author.

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