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Today in America we pause to remember the service of veterans who served in our armed forces. For the past decade or so, the generation who fought in the Second World War and in Korea has largely passed away, leaving behind family and friends who honor their memories.

Early this morning, Sergeant Henry Philler, who served his country from 1940-1945 and was my uncle, died from complications of just being too old. He was 90.

I did an oral history with Henry two years ago that I intend to deposit in the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. I had long known that Henry served as a cryptographer during the Second World War and that he had spent some time in the White House shortly after Truman took office. What I hadn’t known was the extent of his service.

When the Germans attacked Poland in 1939, Henry decided that the United States was going to end up in the war and so he ought to go ahead and enlist so that he would have a chance of doing what he wanted in the Army. His choice was the Army Air Corps, since he’d never been in an airplane before. Unfortunately, he washed out of the training program because, as he said, he was too interested in the scenery from up in the clouds and not interested enough in what he was supposed to be doing.

When his commanding officer told him he was done as an airman, he asked for advice on something else that would be interesting. The officer suggested the Signal Corps, so Henry signed on as a radio man. What he hadn’t anticipated was that his first post would be in Fairbanks, Alaska, where he stayed for the next three years.

While in Alaska, Henry taught himself how to use the Army’s coding machine. One day an officer needed someone to decode a message and he volunteered. From that day forward, he was a cryptographer, a job he kept until his discharge. After three years of “overseas” duty in Alaska, Henry was rotated back stateside and, through a series of lucky breaks, ended up stationed in the White House. He was in Warm Springs, Georgia the day Franklin Roosevelt died and sent the official telegram to Washington announcing the President’s death. He told me during my interview with him that it was the only message that he, as an enlisted man, wrote himself. His commanding officer was too broken up by Roosevelt’s death to tell him what to write.

Henry was also on duty in Potsdam, Germany, the day the message came through from Washington that the atomic bomb test in New Mexico had been successful. He said all he knew at the time was that there was a message that said “Officer’s Eyes Only” and it made him a little angry that, after all he’d been through, there was some message too important for him to decode.

Perhaps my favorite story, though, was that one of his jobs in the White House was to help run the switchboard–the old fashioned kind with the plugs for each line. When he was on the night shift, he and the other operators would play cards when no calls were coming in. Apparently Truman had some difficulty sleeping during his first months as President and would often knock on the door of the switchboard room and ask if it was okay if they dealt him in. The response of the enlisted men was, according to Henry, “Well sir, you are the commander-in-chief.” Truman would then sit with them and while away a few hours playing cards.

Henry Philler was one of the gentlest and most optimistic people I’ll ever know. He could whistle like a nightingale (which he did much of the day). He was a fantastic photographer, especially of landscapes and grandchildren.

I’ll never forget you Sergeant Philler.

After being completely consumed with various and sundry crises completely outside the normal crises that are part of the professor’s job description, I’ve finally begun to catch up on reading various things I had to put aside for later. I’m sorry to say, one of the first things I read was Mark Edmundson’s “Geek Lessons” in the New York Times Magazine (September 19, 2008).

Edmundson, a professor of English at my alma mater (the University of Virginia), has been beating the “computers are bad for education” drum for years. Whether in Harper’s Magazine, in book form, or in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Edmundson has been lobbing bombs at what he sees as the doom of education, learning, and teaching–the growing use of information technology by college instructors.

And, to be fair, he’s not entirely wrong. It is true, as he asserts in his essay in the Chronicle that many faculty members around the country feel pressured by administrators to incorporate information technology in their classes (or only have access to teaching improvement grants if they do). As I too have written, it’s bad administrative policy to pursue a technology-for-technology’s-sake approach to teaching improvement.

But when it comes to Edmundson’s real objections to what is happening in America’s college classrooms–at least as he expresses them in the Times–it seems that what distresses him the most is what he sees as attempts by some college faculty to be hip, be cool, and be loved by their students. These hipster wannabees, it seems, see technology as the key to fame and student adoration.

Just to be clear, it seems that (according to Edmundson) by letting my students use laptops in class, I’m pandering. By incorporating technology in my courses in ways that enhance certain aspects of the course, I’m trying to be cool. By creating websites for students and encouraging teachers to use those websites I’m hoping that at least one of my students will think I’m hip.

I guess the last 10 years of my career have been a tragically deluded attempt on my part to recapture my youth by sucking up to undergraduates. Wow. I sure feel like a dope.

So, having been shown the error of my ways, it’s time to get back on the true path. I want to be a good teacher, not a suck up, so let’s see what Edmundson suggests I do. I turns out I need to be much geekier:

“Why are good teachers strange, uncool, offbeat? Because really good teaching is about not seeing the world the way that everyone else does…The good teacher is sometimes willing to be a little ridiculous: he wears red or green socks so a kid will always have an excuse to start a conversation with him; she bumbles with her purse to make her more maladroit kids feel at ease.”

I can hardly believe it! All these years of studying student learning, assessing the impact of individual assignments on student work product, interviewing students about what does and doesn’t work for them when it comes to teaching and learning, and all the rest — and what I really should have been doing was wearing mismatched socks!

Think of the time I could have saved…

I’ll admit to a certain amount of incredulity when I realize that the Times actually published a piece that in the end suggests that rather than pandering to students by using technology, professors ought to pander to them by wearing odd socks.

But after thinking it all over, I’m even more incredulous that Mark Edmundson has a Facebook page…

Over the next 24 hours thousands, if not tens of thousands, of pages of text will appear on the Internet that will be of use to historians–books via Google, government documents, primary sources from archives, and many more. This blessing and curse of the digital age presents those of us who teach history with a serious problem.

How do we teach our students techniques for working with all of this text?

Once upon a time, in the “olden days” as one of my students put it recently, college professors took their students to the university library and taught them how to use the many resources available to them there. But we already knew the basics back in that time gone by. We knew what a book was and how to read it–not like a historian reads it, but we knew that books had tables of contents and indeces that could help us find things we were looking for. And, while the university library was pretty overwhelming compared with our high school libraries, it was small potatoes compared to the mass of online text that just keeps growing and growing and growing…

Now that the olden days are gone, it’s up to us to teach our students some new techniques. But where to start? Text mining–the new big thing in digital humanities–is a relatively higher order skill. Should history majors develop this skill? I happen to think so. And if I’m right, then how might we begin to teach them text mining skills?

One possible way is to use some of the new data visualization tools that are floating around online. One that I think has some promise as a teaching tool (not so much as a research tool) is Many Eyes. As my colleague Dan Cohen has already pointed out, Many Eyes visualizations can be very misleading when we use them to try to understand the meaning of text. That, in itself, is a good lesson for students when they start learning about text mining.

I think that, instead, we need to use these sorts of tools at a much more basic level. For instance, the next time I teach Historical Methods, I plan to use a number of new exercises I’ve been working on to get students thinking about how they might use technology to analyze text. One of these will be using Many Eyes to have them analyze their own writing–just to introduce them to the ways these sorts of tools might be used.

As an example, I took all three of the posts I wrote here titled Making Digital Scholarship Count and poured the text into Many Eyes. Here is an example of what the just over 3,000 words in those three posts look like when converted to a tag cloud.

Right away students can see that a few key terms dominate the text I wrote in those three posts. This doesn’t mean that the posts are definitely about “scholarship”, “digital”, or “work”, but focusing on these three terms is a starting point for analysis. In this case, of course, the posts are about digital scholarship, so seeing those terms writ large like this offers no big analytical breakthrough. This too can be a useful insight for students–sometimes the answer is pretty obvious.

But, Many Eyes offers additional tools that students can use to play around with basic text mining. For instance, because my posts were obviously most concerned with scholarship, in what contexts did I use this loaded term? Here’s another visualization of my text, using “scholarship” as the key word.

This particular visualization (click on it for a clearer view) is one they can use to start thinking about how a scholar or an historical actor used certain words.

Obviously, Many Eyes visualizations aren’t sophisticated analytical tools. But they do offer a useful first step toward a more sophisticated understanding of text mining and what it might do for historians.

Digital Campus has gone back to school at last. Episode 31 of our podcast is now up and available for your listening enjoyment. Among the topics Dan, Tom, and I discussed in this episode are the launch of Google’s Chrome browser and what this might mean for higher education and, most importantly, what trends in digital technology seem to have the most traction in higher ed at the moment. Our guest for this episode, Bryan Alexander of NITLE.org, gave us a new perspective on what might be coming down the pike. So, take a listen to the podcast and be sure to tell us what you think.