Building Social Networks with Computer Networks
A New Deal for Teaching and Learning

Project Director
Project Director
New Deal Network
tt544@columbia.edu

[Fig. 1] [Fig. 2]

To ask "How technology might make history personal" suggests that the reverse may more often be the rule. Technology hooked up to education is usually thought to enable economies of scale rather than more personal interactions. Technology and education usually means broadcast education, whether for democratic ends—the greatest good for the greatest number; for budgetary expediency—the lowering of the unit cost of education; or for commercial considerations—the counting of "click-throughs," the contest for "eyeballs," in the jargon of the dot.com marketers. Enthusiasts herald the arrival of universal access to information. Skeptics warn of the commodification and privitization of that information. Will it be PBS or ABC? Either way, the debate is framed in the rhetoric of broadcasting. And in many respects, the broadcast metaphor is a useful and familiar way in which to evaluate a website.

The New Deal Network (NDN), as not-for-profit history websites go, is a medium-sized broadcast network. Developed by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanites, IBM Corporation, and the Soros Foundation, NDN has been on-air for three-and-a-half years, and has attracted a growing audience. Site usage can be tracked with a fair degree of accuracy using logfile analysis programs. Last November, for example, NDN received 230,000 "pageviews," as the folks down in marketing would say. (See Web statistics for November, 1999) These pageviews were requested by 28,115 distinct hosts, which can be understood as individual users, although multiple users may share the same host. The site contains 18,500 separate text and image files. In November, 12,526 of these files were accessed, so site usage appears to be both deep and broad. Popular destinations within NDN include the Photo Gallery, the Document Library, the WPA Slave Narratives feature, the TVA feature, the Dear Mrs. Roosevelt Feature and the Rondal Partridge feature.

In addition to tracking usage, the Altavista search engine enables us to see how many other sites link to NDN; how many other networks carry our program, so to speak. (This is sometimes referred to as "ego-surfing.") One can find linked sites on AltaVista using the expression link:newdeal.feri.org. In December, 1999, Altavista recorded approximately 1,200 pages that linked to NDN.

So far, then, the broadcast model, in which selected materials are prepared for and presented to apparently passive "end-users," seems a fairly effective way to describe the New Deal Network.

However, although there were 28,115 distinct hosts who accessed the site, only 19,493 hits were registered to NDN's homepage. And even those hits do not necessarily reflect the point of entry. This leaves nearly 9,000 November visitors who entered the site without ever viewing the homepage; who came in through the bathroom window, so to speak. This, I think, suggests a pattern of use that the broadcast metaphor is ill-equipped to manage.

For example, 2,329 people visited this index page in the photo gallery, a collection of images, scanned from the FDR Library, depicting the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Despite Labor Secretary Frances Perkins' statement that March 25, 1911, was "the day the New Deal began," these photographs are not featured on the New Deal Network. Having found them while scanning images in the FDR Library, and thinking them of value to educators and historians, I added them to the NDN photo gallery with nothing but the barest of documentary information. How, then, do people come by this page? People and organizations found this page and linked to it via other websites. An Altavista search of sites linking to this specific page on the New Deal Network reveals 14 such websites. These sites generated the much of the traffic to that specific page within NDN.

A more modest example. In November, 1999, there were 325 visits to the content page to the Tennessee Federal Writers Project's Tennessee Guide. The popularity of this URL would have eluded me had it not been for a thank-you note I received via email a few weeks back. Again, an Altavista search found 7 sites, none concerned with the New Deal era per se, linking to this page. The Tennessee Guide was of interest to me because it included a nice chapter on the TVA. Why not scan the whole historical section, I thought.

People find their own uses for online materials. As these examples illustrate, the way in which material from the New Deal Network is put to use need not involve the active participation of NDN. The challenge on the part of educational web developers is to respond to those uses in a meaningful way.

Commentators have taken to referring to certain sites as portals, gateways that direct traffic to online resources. Yahoo, of course is an exemplary portal. Portals continue to be the most highly visited sites on the Internet, although, like airports, they are not places one would choose to linger.

Portals, with their undifferentiated mass of links, have their drawbacks, to which my daughter Chloe, the owner of a pet chinchilla, can attest. Apparently the online world of chinchillas is rather evenly divided into two camps, depending upon one's interest in the animals as Pets or Pelts. After a quick tour through the Yahoo Chinchilla Index, occasioned by sporadic shrieks of horror, Chloe rather quickly bookmarked the sites that suited her interests—One-Stop Chinchilla Pet Care Centers, catering to all your chinchilla needs. Deep, informational sites such as these have been called "vertical portals," or vortals. (Cf. Vortals, Computer Support Group Online, Industry Glossary) If portals are the point of departure, vortals are the destination.

I'd like to suggest a third category of websites, "associative portals," or aortals. An aortal is a site that enables the creation of social networks. H-Net is an aortal. Its structure is designed to foster the creation of distributed networks of academic communities.

If a website aims to be more than an archive, an online exhibit, a virtual textbook, it must consider how it can nurture similar dynamic relationships.

In practice, the engagement between NDN site development and users has resulted in a host of specific personal encounters. As project director, I'd like to consider some of the ways the materials on the site have been refashioned to meet the particular needs of individual teachers and students by showing email exchanges between site visitors and historians and by discussing some of the classroom and community activities that have emerged since the creation of the website.

Email is the most effective way the web is transformed from a broadcast into an interactive communications model. Email, for my purposes in this discussion, includes both the private messages received from correspondents and the group messages that are disseminated through the New Deal discussion list. One way in which history becomes personal and, as a consequence, scholarship becomes public, is the integration of a very public website, point-to-point email, and a moderated email discussion list.

Some time ago, for example, a correspondent wrote to me after finding photographs of the Julia Lathrop Housing project on NDN. "During my childhood, my family lived in the Julia C. Lathrop Housing Project in Chicago. In fact, we lived there from about 1935 through 1952. I would like to write some information about the 'Projects' in a paper I am writing for my children. Do you have any material on file at the New Deal Network other then the photos that you list?"

I didn't, in fact, have much more information on the Lathrop Housing Project beyond that which was currently online, but I suggested that, with his permission, members of the New Deal email list might be able to provide information. He wrote me a longer letter, describing his experiences growing up in the "projects," and his deeply felt wonder and concern over what had gone wrong with public housing in America, which I posted to the listserv. His post prompted a very interesting exchange of views, including an eloquent summary of the shift in public housing policy by Professor Gail Radford, author of Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era.

Privately, Professor Radford and this correspondent continued to share information on the Julia Lathrop housing project. And this was truly a sharing of information, not simply a brain-picking session. He was quite excited to find a scholar interested in hearing of his experiences and answering some of his questions. Professor Radford, in turn, had a rare opportunity to discuss this subject with a former resident of the housing projects she had described in her work. In this way the original correspondent was transformed from information seeker to informant, while the professor turned public historian.

Now Professor Radford is a public historian by inclination, I suspect. It didn't take a communications revolution to push her into the public sphere. She has gone on to make herself available for consultation to a High School teacher in Brooklyn whose students are developing a website on the Williamsburg Housing Project. She has offered very constructive suggestions towards improving the website. She's posted her class syllabus on the New Deal Network and, in turn has made extensive use of NDN materials in her classroom. Although we have never met, Gail and I are colleagues.

There is nothing new or unusual about that. This is networking in the old-fashioned sense: the development of a web of personal and professional relationships that, while enhanced by new technologies, looks very much like those relationships we have always had. This is not new wine in old bottles, but old wine in new bottles, although the dimensions of these new bottles are still unexplored.

In February 1998, a short article appeared in the City Section of the New York Times, reporting the impending destruction of the four Hugo Gellert frescoes that grace the lobbies of the Seward Park Coop Apartments. Despite the protests of Co-op residents, who had voted to preserve these important frescoes, the Board of Directors of the Seward Park Housing Cooperative marked them for destruction as part of a lobby redecoration project.

A group of artists, art historians, coop and community members formed the Friends of Gellert Committee. As project director of the New Deal Network, I offered Web support for the campaign to save the Seward Park murals. Like any group of activists, we turned to established networks of political, labor, and art preservation organizations. The Gellert Web site came to serve as a virtual Post Office box, information kiosk, and learning center for this campaign. It linked together participants in this struggle to the extent that at mural events at Seward Park, co-op members would approach me to inform me that "we have website, you know."

The New Deal Network, seemed a natural home for the Gellert Web. Gellert played an important role in the 1930s in organizing the Artist's Committee for Action and the Artists' Union, two pivotal institutions which greatly contributed to the instigation and perpetuation of the federally funded WPA art programs. He served on the editorial committee of Art Front, the Artists' Union's official publication. Gellert helped organize the American Artists' Congress and he became involved with the Artists' Coordination Committee for the National Exhibition of Contemporary American Art at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

However, Gellert's Seward Park murals, created in 1959, came out of a different historical moment. The four murals, which depict Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Albert Einstein, were commissioned by the United Housing Foundation, the organization which funded and developed the Seward Park Coop. The UHF, established in 1951, grew out of the New York City labor movement and its expansive vision of trade unionism—a vision that saw the fight against shop conditions as continuous with the struggle to improve the living conditions of working people in New York City. Ultimately, UHF projects would create some 30,000 units of moderately priced housing units dedicated to cooperative principles. Clearly, the significance of these murals extended beyond their artistic value to include the history of labor, housing and working people in NYC. As teachers, historians and artists, we thought it important to attempt to reintegrate the Gellert murals into the daily life of the Lower East Side by educating students and community members in the value of our public art. A brief lesson plan was developed for the Web site. Students from The Lower East Side School invited us to speak about the murals in their classroom. They later visited the murals, created classroom art projects, and mailed artwork and letters of support to the Co-op Board. In addition, a Hugo Gellert Symposium, sponsored by the New York Metro American Studies Association and the New Deal Network, was held at NYU's Tamiment Library. Half the members of the audience were co-op members.

We garnered support from other quarters, as well. The New York Municipal Art Society voted to urge the preservation of the murals. Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the New York State Assembly, and Jay Mazur of UNITE, wrote to protest the destruction of the Gellert murals. Letters and email poured in from Italy and California, turning what might have remained a local Lower East Side controversy into a matter of international interest. Finally, the Mary Ryan Gallery appraised the murals at $600,000, a figure which must have given the Seward Park Board of Directors pause.

We soon found ourselves communicating with representatives of the Seward Park Board. On May 4, 1998, the Seward Park Housing Corporation's Board of Directors met and rescinded their previous approval of lobby redecoration plans which would have resulted in the destruction of the murals.

This successful campaign relied upon a complex network of co-op members, artists, scholars, community organizations, local teachers and their students, and labor and political leaders. While the Gellert Website played a critical role in focusing our efforts and disseminating our message, in many ways it was but the merest representation of this complex social network.

Web sites are often described in the language of older media forms: as archives, directories, exhibits, or essays. While there is a certain functional equivalency to these categories, they fail to note the social potential of networked media. Computer networks used to create and enhance social networks can lead to innovative educational partnerships and can help to transform the teaching of history. In the final analysis, web development is always a form of social practice. It's networking in the old-fangled sense of the term. Not servers and routers and TCP/IP, but the building of those distributed social networks that we scholars more often refer to as a communities.