Saturday, April 30, 2005

The failure of metaphor in explaining history

It's hard to describe the process and problems of history, especially to those not familiar with the daily activities of historians.* Historians face a few fundamental questions that need answering, at least to their satisfaction, before "history" can be produced, disseminated, discussed, and whatever else you'd like to do with it. Chief among these is the basic, yet absolutely crucial, question that underpins all historical work.

How do we know about the past?

The simple answer is that historians look at sources from the past and compile information from them. But looking at it in such broad (and bland) terms obscures the variety of available sources as well as minimizing the difficulty of finding and interpreting them. But let's assume that the acquisition of historical knowledge is a straightforward activity. There's still the problem of putting this knowledge into a form that's easily transmitted. Not everyone, after all, has the time and inclination to plod though archival records. History has to take some other form. Typically that means books, articles, TV programs, lectures, and the like. In other words, history as most people experience it is at least one level removed from its source(s). Put another way, history is always mediated in some manner. We cannot and do not have direct insight on the events and workings of the past. You could even say that the past is lost.

But it's not easy to talk about the essentially constructed nature of history and its epistemological challenges. Discussions of the indeterminacy of language are often jargon-filled and abstruse. Archival work sounds boring. So historians, like all writers, turn to metaphor to describe their activities in more attractive and understandable terms.

Richard Evans, in In Defence of History** offers two such metaphors.

The first likens history to:
doing a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces are scattered all over the house in several boxes, some of which have been destroyed, and where once it is put together, a significant number of the pieces are still missing. The nature of the resulting picture will depend partly on how many boxes still survive and have been tracked down, and this depends partly on having some idea of where to look; but the picture's contours can still be filled in, even when not all the pieces have been located. We imagine the contours in this situation, and have to speculate on quite a bit of the detail; at the same time, however, the discovery of the existing pieces does set quite severe limits on the operation of our imagination. If they only fit together to produce a picture of a steam-engine, for instance, it is no good trying to put them together to make a suburban garden: it simply will not work. (p. 89)


In some respects, Evans's metaphor accurately captures the spirit and problems of historical research. Collecting historical evidence is hard work. There's no magical archive or library that holds every relevant source. For one thing, not every relevant source survives, or even existed in the first place. And that a source exists in no way guarantees that a historian will stumble upon it. Our knowledge of the past is necessarily incomplete, just as a giant jigsaw puzzle with lots of pieces missing necessarily fails to show the whole picture.

Yet Evans's metaphor is also problematic in some ways. First, it assumes that bits of historical evidence fit together in just one way that, while it may take some time to figure out, is ultimately clear-cut and indisputable. Document A relates to Document B to produce Meaning X. Second, this analogy presupposes that, if all the pieces of the puzzle/historical sources were present, our picture of the past would be crystal clear - just look at the "whole picture" and there it is.

Both these presumptions fail to adequately capture the complexity of historical interpretation. Sources rarely, if ever, mesh in such a way that all historians would agree on their joint significance. Rather, historians do their best to relate pieces of evidence to each other in reasonable, insightful ways that casts light on the past. But this step, crucially, is an interpretive one. The sources do not speak for themselves. In addition, the puzzle metaphor seems to suggest that there is a single history to be told. While this may have been the case in the nineteenth-century (the inaugural issue of the English Historical Review saw "States and politics" as the "chief subject" of history, "because the acts of nations and of the individuals who have played a great part in the affairs of nations have usually been more important than the acts of private citizens"), historians believe that there are a wide array of interesting stories to tell about the past, an array that meshes poorly with the flat image associated with a jigsaw puzzle.

Evans's second metaphor more accurately reflects the interpretive nature of history while maintaining his assertion that the surviving evidence places real constraints on historical interpretation.

Most historical narratives consist of a mixture of revealed, reworked, constructed and deconstructed narratives from the historical past and from the historian's own mind. We start with a rough-hewn block of stone, and chisel away at it until we have a statue. The statue was not waiting there to be discovered, we made it ourselves, and it would have been perfectly possible for us to have made a different statue from the one we finally created. On the other hand, we are constrained not only by the size and shape of the original stone, but also by the kind of stone it is; an incompetent sculptor not only runs the risk of producing an unconvincing statue that does not much resemble anything, but also of hammering or chiselling too hard, or the wrong way, and shattering the stone altogether. (p. 147)


This idea of "history as sculpture" more accurately reflects what really happens when historians do history. They carefully examine the evidence collected, select key elements of that evidence, and create a new narrative or analysis out of the building blocks of history, discarding the irrelevant and highlighting the key features of the significant.

But, like the puzzle metaphor, the sculpture metaphor is also flawed. In spite of Evans's claim that the "statue was not waiting there to be discovered," the block of stone itself did previously exist as a single entity. Yet, as the puzzle metaphor so aptly displays, finding sources is never quite so easy. There's also the slightly troubling notion that once evidence has been used by one historian, it is somehow unavailable to other scholars, chipped away and discarded.

Both the puzzle and sculpture metaphors, then, fail to capture just what historians do and the challenges they face. If anything, some sort of composite metaphor is needed where the pieces of evidence are scattered about like the pieces of a puzzle yet are still open to the historian's interpretation just as a block of stone is subject to a sculptor's touch. But it's hard to imagine just what that metaphor would be. History as a Lego sculpture, perhaps?

My aim here is not to criticize Richard Evans for his choice of metaphors. As metaphors go, the two I've discussed are fairly good ones in that they accurately describe a key element of historical work. But the fact remains that they're imperfect, as I'm sure Evans would readily admit. History's complicated business, and it resists simple comparisons to more easily comprehensible activities. To really understand what history's all about requires thoughtful discussion about the historical process in its own terms. Metaphors can be useful, but if their flaws aren't examined along with their insights, they ultimately fail to improve our understanding of history.

History, done well, is hard work, and it requires serious thought that goes beyond simple metaphors.

*I'm talking about history as a field of study rather than history as what happened in the past. I feel like I've said this before, but an easy way of distinguishing the two would save me the trouble of clarifying.

**Awkward as all hell, isn't it? Nick Hornby offers some fantastic advice in Songbook: "Never begin a title with a preposition." It just gets ugly.

Friday, April 29, 2005

High-level rock, paper, scissors

If this isn't the most surreal thing you've ever heard about, well, you lead a more interesting life than I do. Christie's and Sotheby's compete in a single round of rock, papers, scissors for the right to sell a $20 million art collection.

The lesson: steady rock.

Thursday, April 28, 2005

Placido Polanco versus David Bell

Last week I argued that Placido Polanco, not David Bell should play third base for the Phillies. Last night I got my wish: Placido Polanco played third base against the Nationals, with David Bell on the bench. Then Phillies manager Charlie Manuel goes and insists that "David Bell is my third baseman."

Bad decision, Charlie. First of all, it'll make you look like a jerk if you do decide to make Polanco your everyday third baseman, since Bell will argue, with some merit, that you've abandoned him.

But more importantly, it's just a bad idea to play David Bell instead of Placido Polanco at third base. The manager's responsible for putting the best possible team on the field. When David Bell's starting at 3B, that's just not happening. Simply put, Placido Polanco is a better third baseman than David Bell.

I offered some brief evidence for this last week, but I'm going to go into more detail now.

First, a comparison of how their offensive contributions this year. Polanco's batting .268, with an on-base percentage of .349 and a slugging percentage of .304. Bell's AVG is .221 (.221!), his OBP is .277 and his SLG is .338. How about OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage) which correlates better with scoring runs than any of those stats individually? Polanco - .653, Bell - .615. Then there's Gross Productive Average, GPA, which more accurately reflects the relative importance of OBP and SLG. Polanco - .233, Bell - .209. The conclusion here is obvious: in 2005, Placido Polanco has made a greater offensive contribution than David Bell.

Now, to be honest, I'm leery of putting too much faith in these numbers. 22 games is an awfully small sample size. So let's look at the long-term numbers.

Placido Polanco's career OPS is .748, David Bell's is .720. OPS+, a stat that takes into account park factors, also has Polanco on top: 95 versus 88. Over the course of their careers, Polanco has simply been a better hitter than Bell.

The there's the fact that Bell is 32 years old, three years older than Polanco. Baseball players' offensive skills typically start declining (sometimes rapidly) after the age of 30. Polanco should be in the prime of his career, Bell is likely on the decline.

Predicting baseball statistics is tough to do well, and I don't claim to be an expert. But it's hard to look at the numbers and not come to the conclusion that Placido Polanco's going to be a better hitter than David Bell this season.

So much for offense. How about fielding? Well, for one thing, fielding ability is notoriously difficult to measure. There's also the problem that there's not much recent data on Polanco as a third baseman, since he was the Phillies everyday second baseman through last season. So any conclusions reached offered here are necessarily speculative.

Over roughly 2300 innings at 3B, Placido Polanco has posted a fielding percentage of .981 and a Range Factor (which measures how many plays a defender makes per game) of 2.48. Bell's numbers are a bit worse: .956 and .239. When you do some league and park adjustments, Bell seems to come out as a slightly better fielder. This jibes with Michael Berquist's recent observation that David Bell is a better fielder than most people realize. Any defensive superiority over Polanco is, however, slight and potentially mitigated by Bell's age and injury history. In short, it's probably a wash.

So there you have it. Placido Polanco is a better hitter than David Bell, and no worse a fielder. Play Placido Polanco regularly at third baseman and you get Chase Utley's bat in your line-up every day. It's as simple as that.

So, could Charlie Manuel please explain why David Bell remains his third baseman?

(I find most of my stats at Baseball Reference. They don't have stats for the current season, so for that I usually go to ESPN.)

Saturday, April 23, 2005

Another trip

I'd hope to post another entry before my next trip, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen. Eight hours I'll be on a flight to Cork. I hope to get a few hours of sleep before catching a 3:45 bus to the airport. I come back to Cambridge on Tuesday.

But when I get back, more on the Phillies, pictures from Ireland, and some thoughts on Richard Evans's In Defence of History.

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Rome and Sarajevo photos

I've posted some photos from my recent trip to Rome and Sarajevo. There's not a ton of them, but they're the ones I like most.

For pictures of Rome, start with this one of Lovely Girlfriend having lunch outside the Colosseum.

And for Sarajevo, start with this one marking the spot where Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Possibly more to come.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

What's wrong with the Phillies? Part I: Offense

Yes, there is something wrong with the Phillies. A few things, actually. But first, here's how we know there's something wrong.

They've been outscored by their opponents 76-66, the second worst ratio in the NL East. Based on Bill James's "Pythagorean theorem," the Phillies should have a winning percentage of .430, that is an 6-8 record. Their record is better than it "should" be based on their run differential.

But the crucial thing is that their opponents are scoring more runs than them. You win baseball games by scoring more runs than your opponent. Consistently score fewer runs and you're going to lose more games than you win. It's as straightforward as it gets.

The Phillies are in the middle of the pack in terms of the number of runs they've scored - 7th out of 16 National League teams. This is largely the same lineup that scored the 3rd most runs in the NL last year. If anything, they should be scoring more runs, what with the putative improvement in centerfield and what was supposed to be the everyday presence of Chase Utley in the lineup. But the Phils just aren't scoring as many runs as they should.

Who's to blame for that? Who's underperforming? Catcher Mike Lieberthal, whose OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage) of .619 is more than 150 points below last year's OPS. First baseman Jim Thome, whose .644 OPS is more than 300 points below his career average. Sometime second baseman Placido Polanco; his .578 OPS represents a 200-point drop over recent seasons. Third baseman David Bell, OPS of .586, almost 250 points off his career year last season. Rightfielder Bobby Abreu, OPS .730, almost 200 point off his career average.

Yes, this is the time when you gulp. That's four and a half (Polanco counts as a half) out of eight regulars. There's not much worry with Abreu or Thome - they've shown the ability to consistently produce offensively for a number of years. Lieberthal's on the decline (as catchers typically are when they reach his age), but remains serviceable. The real problem, then, is David Bell. Bell had a monster year last season, outpacing his previous best in OPS by almost sixty points. He's due for a big drop-off. Coupled with his defensive woes, he's not a plus on the field right now.

The Phillies should bench David Bell and send Placido Polanco over to third base. Polanco's younger, has a higher career OPS, is a better defender, and has more speed. All Bell brings to the table at the moment is a history of back problems and the memories of last season's offensive heroics.

Just as importantly, moving Polanco to third allows Chase Utley to play second base everyday. Chase Utley, whose current OPS is a robust .960. Chase Utley who's probably a better defender than Polanco. Chase Utley, who's been the Phillies second baseman of the future for a long time. The future is now.

This switch would go a long way in addressing the Phillies run-scoring problem by getting Utley and Polanco's bats every day and keeping the currently ineffective Bell out of the batter's box. Once Thome and Abreu start producing (which they will), the Phillies will be strong from 1-6 in the lineup: Jimmy Rollins - Placido Polanco - Bobby Abreu - Pat Burrell - Jim Thome - Chase Utley. Stick with a lineup like that and you're going to score some runs.

Tomorrow, what's wrong with the Phillies' pitching. The short version: not much.

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

The failings of David Horowitz

Thanks to Ralph Luker at Cliopatra, I discovered that Swarthmore's own Tim Burke recently joined David Horowitz in a discussion about the latter's DiscoverTheNetwork. The Network "identifies the individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it; it maps the paths through which the left exerts its influence on the larger body politic; it defines the left's (often hidden) programmatic agendas and it provides an understanding of its history and ideas."

Burke opens the debate by criticizing DiscoverTheNetwork (DtN from here on) for its failure to precisely define what constitutes a "link" between two entities. The best explication of what DtN views as a link is found here. It's a rather broad definition, one whose implementation seems to involve scouring membership lists and coalitions for connections, however minimal, between "respectable" figures to those deemed beyond the pale. In Burke's words, "you could connect Lynne Stewart to Mayor Bloomberg or Noam Chomsky to Milton Friedman using the idea of linkage operating within the project." This is a legitimate critique. Figuring out the precise connections between groups and individuals and their significance is hard work. You need to justify how you're going to look for linkages and stick to those methods.

Horowitz responds by mischaracterizing Burke's take on DtN. "In Professor Burke’s view – respectfully rephrased -- DiscoverTheNetwork identifies networks but doesn’t explain why anyone who shares the assumptions and prejudices of the left should take them seriously." What? That's more than rephrasing... that's completely changing what Burke had to say. The rest of the discussion (largely dominated by Horowitz) proceeds along similar lines - Burke raises an insightful critique, Horowitz dismisses it out of hand and goes on to talk about how ignorant Burke is. It's all rather frustrating.

But this sort of thing is par for the course with David Horowitz. He claims he's interested in intellectual debate, but when faced with challenges to his arguments, he resorts to insults, non-sequiturs, and mischaracterizations. And that's on a good day.

Michael Bérubé also recently participated in a discussion with Horowitz. Except, when it came time to post the transcript on FrontPageMag, Bérubé's contributions were truncated. Yes, folks, this is the sort of thing Horowitz and his colleagues resort to. Throw out half your opponent's arguments then gloat over winning the debate. Does this sound like someone interested in genuine discussion?

Then there was the time that Horowitz spoke at Swarthmore and claimed that Howard Zinn was required reading in Swat's history department. No. This is just plain false. I'd know, being a history major at Swat and all. Zinn didn't appear on the syllabi of any of the classes I took. So in addition to all those other faults, David Horowitz just makes shit up.

So I've decided he's just not worth my time anymore. Yes, I know, we're supposed to consider the validity of a given argument on its own merits. But Horowitz has clearly demonstrated that his arguments are a waste of time. I'm going to do my best to ignore him entirely from here on out. For your own sake, you should, too.

I'm back

I mean it this time. My laptop's back at 100%, I'm just about caught up on my work, and I have things to write. I won't guarantee daily blogging, but I'm going to shoot for it.

Monday, April 11, 2005

Soon!

I still have no working laptop*. It's stressful. It slows down my research. It sends me to a windowless computer lab to do internet-y things. It's cost me hours and a fair amount of money to get it working again. And it's now been over a month.

But, if all goes well, my laptop will be fully functional tomorrow and I can return to the world of the productive and, more importantly for you, dear reader, the blogosphere.

*Well, my laptop does work. I don't have a power cord for it. It's a long story.

Monday, April 04, 2005

Update

I've just this morning returned from a grueling and immensely rewarding trip to Europe. The itinerary: Cambridge -> Rome -> Ancona -> Split -> Sarajevo -> Budapest -> London -> Cambridge. I hope to be writing up some observations and posting some pictures within the next few days.

Just in case you're curious, we left Rome Wednesday evening; I believe the pope's health took a turn for the worse some time Thursday, so things were still relatively calm then. It is a bit shocking to see pictures of Piazza San Pietro filled to the brim after leisurely strolling around less than a week ago.

Readers continue to add further errors to my list of Dan Brown's inaccuracies in Angels and Demons. Read the most recent ones for insights coming to light thanks to current circumstances in the Vatican.

And on a completely different note, the Phillies have their first game of this season this afternoon against the Washington Nationals. Expect lots of baseball blogging from now through October.

My laptop is still out of commission. But it should be back in working order within the next few days.