New Discovery

I'm having an interesting week with my computer. Knock wood, so far it's only the good kind of interesting. This weekend I was working on a Word document and I needed to refer to something in a window behind it. I clicked the window I was working in and moved it to the side. All of a sudden, I was in this new desktop! It was just me and my active Word document, and nothing else. No browser with 100 tabs open. No Mail. No iCal. 

After I freaked out for a second, I realized that I could just drag the window back towards the edge and return to my original desktop. Upon my "return," the desktop seemed so busy compared to the serenity I had just experienced. I still had no idea what had really happened, so I went to Google and typed in the most ridiculous search term: "second screen feature mac?" Most of the results were actually about using a second monitor with your Apple computer, but this article clarified that what I had stumbled onto was the "multiple desktop" feature within the "Mission Control," which is what Apple calls the window rearrangement function of their operating system. Mission Control is also what enables "corners," which is a feature that allows you to see all the windows open in an application (or on the desktop) just by navigating the mouse arrow to the corner of the screen. Corners is one of the most useful tools in my workflow, because I often move between documents like chronologies or indexes or notes and the document in which I am actively writing. 

There are two ways to access Mission Control. The easiest way is to press F3, but I hate taking my hand off the trackpad so I prefer to swipe three fingers upward. All of your open windows are displayed, and you can move them to the desktop you would like to view them in. For example, over the past few days I dedicated a new desktop to grant materials, but all other Word documents opened in desktop 1 (except for my chronology document, which opened in desktop 3 along with my database). When I was finished with writing and editing, I moved the Word documents back to desktop 1 to turn them into PDFs and email them off. 

Here are some clear benefits to the "multiple desktop" feature that I've seen so far:

1) Escape the web browser. I often have multiple tabs open in my browser when I'm doing research, and they can distract me from writing. I have now set Safari to only open in my "original" desktop (desktop 1) so that when I'm writing in desktop 2 or reading documents in desktop 3, I do not en up checking my email every time I catch a glimpse at my Gmail account. If I do need to look something up on the web, I can easily swipe three fingers left or right to move between the desktops quickly and easily.

2) Isolate projects or tasks. If I need to focus on one thing, It's nice to have it all together in one place without additional clutter.

3) Novelty. Starting new desktops is fun and keeps life feeling fresh. 

There are some drawbacks, of course. When you use corners with multiple desktops you are still shown ALL of the open windows in that application, regardless of which desktop it will open in. If you accidentally click on a window that's active in a different desktop, you get dragged over immediately. So it's not completely isolating or zen. Plus, the icons at the bottom do not disappear when you're not using an app in desktop 2 (or 3, or 4, etc.)--so you are still tempted to click on the Safari compass icon and end up back in the original desktop. 

Also, I really think the best thing I could do to minimize distraction would be to shut down all but the bare minimum of windows and focus on what's necessary to get any particular job done. I usually lack the self control to implement that advice, so this multiple desktop feature gets me a few extra minutes of focus without feeling like I'm denying myself the pleasures of the internet and apps. 

Has anyone else used this feature? Are there other ways to use it to improve a research workflow? I'd love to know!

 

1969, or 2014?

“Today our nation is moving towards two societies - one black, one white - separate and unequal. Reaction to summer disorders have quickened the movement and deepened the division. What white Americans have never understood and what the Negro can never forget is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it and white society condones it. A study of the aftermath of disorder leaves disturbing conclusions. Despite the institution of some post-riot programs, little basic change in the conditions underlying the outbreak of disorder has taken place. In several cities, the principal official response has been to train and equip the police with more sophisticated weaponry. In several cities,increasing polarization is evident with continual breakdown of communication.”
— "Analysis of the Problems Encountered by Jewish Community Centers in Acting on the Urban Crisis," William Kahn (Executive Director, St. Louis JCCA)

Downtown St. Louis in 1969.  Missouri History Museum.

It's depressing to read this and consider how little has changed in St. Louis over the past 45 years. I found this statement in the published transcript of William Kahn's keynote speech to the Jewish Community Center Action on the Urban Crisis Conference. The Jewish Welfare Board conducted a survey in 1968 to learn how JCCs were reacting to the urban crisis. Even after the results were published in December of '68, the organization still felt lost. Leaders wondered, how could they best guide agencies towards effective programming to address urban poverty and racial discrimination? The Public Affairs Committee of the JWB called a conference together on March 25-26th, 1969, and invited executives and representatives from urban JCCs to come to New York and discuss their successes and their struggles. 

William Kahn was incredibly progressive, and under his leadership the St. Louis JCCA mounted one of the most well-organized responses to the riots and disorder of the summers of '67 and '68. While no one expected him to change the world, or for the JCCA to single-handedly defeat racism in St. Louis, how can we not despair over this evidence? It's unfair to say they failed--in fact the JCCA did make a big impact on many black lives in St. Louis. I'm just left unsure about what to learn from this parallel. I've long believed that change happens at the margins, and that you have to believe in baby steps, but I've never been particularly idealistic either. It's so easy to swing towards cynicism when you see history repeating itself. 

A Checklist for Historians?

I've been having an obsessive week. In my working hours, I have delightfully obsessed over an amazing report written in 1968 by Irving Brodsky on how JCCs were reacting to the urban crisis. I spent five days poring over each page. In my non-working hours, I could not tear myself away from my SimCity. I played for hours each evening, erecting skyscrapers and stocking cargo ships on a little grid illustrated within my iPad. The final rabbit hole that I fell down was a book I devoured in two days, Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (2009). 

In this book, Gawande argues that a well designed checklist can help trained experts reduce the potential for failure by highlighting some of the most easily missed steps in a complex procedure. This emphasis on the obvious or routine steps then frees more mental space for experts to consider subtlety, variance, or emergent factors in the given situation. I was familiar with many of the hospital/healthcare systems improvements that Gawande described because of my internship at the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, where I observed firsthand how the implementation of checklists improved patient outcomes in hospitals, clinics, and long-term care facilities throughout Western Pennsylvania. From The Checklist Manifesto, however, I learned about the origins of checklists in aviation and how industries like construction and finance have adapted them throughout the years to improve outcomes, mitigate risk, and increase efficiency. 

All of that was interesting in itself, but the central question that kept me obsessively reading was: could a historian benefit from a checklist? And if so, how? Archival research is incredibly low-risk, for ourselves and others, and most of our work is done solo. We don't have people relying on us for their safety, nor do we often engage in collaborative endeavors that require leadership, team work, and communication. Yet, historical research is a complex, multi-step process that can be incredibly inefficient. 

One essential characteristic of modern life is that we all depend on systems--on assemblages of people or technologies or both--and among our most profound difficulties is making them work.

My system--which I have written about extensively--must surely have flaws and failures. I may not see them now, but what about when I start writing? Will I find that my notes are inadequate or inaccessible? In what ways? I've decided to spend the next week breaking down my system into all of its essential tasks and outcomes, to see if it will be possible to take Gawande's advice and create a checklist that increases my weekly reading input and writing output.

 

Reflections on Patriotism on the Occasion of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Yesterday I attended a professional sporting event in a large arena. As is customary, everyone stood before the game for the national anthem. I got up from my seat but didn't sing along. I stopped singing the Star Spangled Banner a few years ago because I dislike the mindlessness of the tradition. We sing the anthem before sporting events... why? What does our affirmation of citizenship have anything to do with the game about to be played? I get why it's meaningful before an international match, but this was a group of men from Pittsburgh trying to beat a group of men from New York. 

In addition to not really understanding the custom, my feelings about America, democracy, and freedom have been tense in recent years. In the abstract, they're all great--I'm proud to be a U.S. citizen, I wholeheartedly believe in democratic elections and representation, and who doesn't love freedom? I do find it hard, though, to ignore the shortcomings of our government and our society, especially when we do not grant the same freedoms to all of our citizens equally. I struggle to proudly vocalize my support of the United States when I know how many double standards persist....

Anyways, I bring this all up because yesterday, at this professional sporting event, the singer of the national anthem did something different. For the middle verse of the Star Spangled Banner, he lowered his mic so that the only sound in the arena was the collective singing of the crowd. It surprised and powerfully affected me. The crowd carried the anthem, steadily and quietly. Without the magnification of the leader's voice, I felt enveloped rather than blasted. It seemed more thoughtful, more committed, and less like a spectacle. 

I confess that I wasn't moved enough to join in the singing for the last verse, but it did make me re-interrogate my abstention. Appropriately, this is the weekend when we, as a nation, have collectively decided to remember a man who dedicated his life to exposing the shortcomings of American citizenship, democracy, and freedom. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not just a radical advocate for racial equality, he also fought for economic quality and against American' overreach abroad (particularly the Vietnam War). Dr. King was deeply critical of the false promise of American citizenship and the "American Dream," and he ceaselessly worked to remedy the worst policies, programs, and practices that disenfranchised vulnerable populations. 

Reflecting on Dr. King's legacy today, I feel foolish to have taken my citizenship for granted--what a privilege. So many men and women have fought over the past 238 years to expand access to the protections of U.S. citizenship beyond white male landowners. In my effort to not be blind to the miscarriages of justice that occur regularly in the United States and to see the rampant hypocrisy in our promotion of democracy and freedom abroad, my vision of the meaning and importance of American citizenship became blurry. I'm still not interested in singing the Star Spangled Banner at sporting events, but I appreciate that I had this moment--especially this weekend--to reevaluate why and when to be critical and when to do the brutally hard work of upholding values like democracy and freedom.