So here we are. First full week back at university done and dusted and time to have a look at how it’s going so far.
At the moment I’m hovering between exhilaration at the sheer range of possibilities the course offers and a dreadful sense of trepidation at the enormous quantity of reading, and eventually coursework, that I need to plough through. On the plus side, I find myself constantly thinking about the course and the projects I might tackle by way of completing the assignments. In the middle of the night, or walking the dog, or in the middle of the washing up another idea might pop into my head and then I try and note it down before I forget it again. This is both a good and a bad thing. It’s good that I have so many ideas but I am prone to indecision at the best of times and thus a little worried that I may fall victim to what I once heard brilliantly described as “the tyranny of choice”. It also remains to be seen which ideas have actually got the legs to grow into something I can really work with and I’ve already found myself spending hours researching various topics before deciding that they are probably cul de sacs as far as this course is concerned.
To say that the university experience has changed since my last time round is something of an understatement. To give you an idea of how long ago that was, I vividly remember being at the Departmental reception to celebrate the end of the final exams when the Head of History came in an announced that he had just heard that the Argentinians had surrendered and the Falklands War was over. Personal Computers were still in the distant future and academia was firmly paper based. The biro was considered to be racy new technology and some lecturers would still only accept essays written in fountain pen. New technology and advances with laptop and internet technology have transformed study beyond all recognition and opened up vast new areas of information enabling a much faster and more dynamic environment for the spread of ideas.
The downside (if it is one) of the use of online resources is the danger of information overload. For most of the last 30 years have been working as a data architect and one of my main roles was to manage the transition from data to information to knowledge. It is an era that has seen a massive growth in the first two of these without always increasing the third. The challenge with data is the same as with history. You can’t possibly cope with it all so the thing is to choose an interesting subset and work with that.
It came up in one of the classes last week that non-historians often assume that we, as historians, are automatically familiar with the whole of world history. I can understand why people would think that, after all you wouldn’t expect to take your car to the garage to get the clutch fixed to have the mechanic say “Sorry mate, I only do alternators”. I’ve often had the same experience when people heard I worked in IT. There is a natural assumption that I will know how to fix their PC problems or be au fait with the inner workings of their companies SAP accounting system, but in truth I’m no more knowledgeable about these things than the next man. I can program in Assembler (which nowadays is roughly akin to having Latin or Sanskrit as your first language) and I know a lot about data modelling (if you want to know what that is look here) and a bit about digital media but that’s it.
History, like IT, is a complex subject in which a degree of specialisation is necessary in order to obtain any real expertise. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t strive to be familiar with the bigger picture, and as Public Historians also especially need to know how our chosen area of history is relevant to the world today but realistically we’ll all be choosing to concentrate on our own little favourite pockets of history and that’s a good thing. For many years I used to work near Brick Lane, which for those people not familiar with London is a Mecca for curry lovers. As time went by I got to know which restaurants were good or bad and which were good for particular dishes. Interestingly, the one place we learned to avoid was the one which had a sign outside proclaiming “Specialists in all types of curry”.
HIND ZEIT 