More on what games teach us

I have been thinking a lot recently about the ways in which we are institutionalized. Much of this is intentional, and basically a good thing for social order (i.e. we are taught things like stopping at red lights, driving on the right side of the street, yielding to pedestrians; all things that vary somewhat by area). But there are a lot of institutionalized behaviors that are side-effects, for good or ill. For example, when I was at the IPAM Humanities workshop, the staff noticed that humanities scholars drink twice as much coffee and eat half as much sweets as mathematicians and computer scientists. this is doubtless a side-effect of the types of work that the disciplines require of us, or of the types of personalities attracted to them. But certainly no-one sat down an decided to set up regulations on how much coffee historians should drink vis-a-vis the quota for statisticians.

One of my favorite examples of this type of observation comes from season four of The Wire, when former police major Bunny Colvin works as a consultant for a troubled-youth program in the schools. He observes that the "corner kids" (i.e. the troublemakers) are learning something in school, just not what the schools think they are teaching. Specifically, they are learning how to deal with authorities without "snitching;" skills that will presumably serve them well in their anticipated future careers as drug dealers.

In fact, there has been an increasing amount of research showing that boys (in particular) are not being reached by the institutional structure of schooling. As American schools have targeted improving girls' math-science skills and self-confidence, boys are increasingly being left behind. Ali Carr-Chellman argues that this is in large part because boys' culture, especially video games, are demonized at the schools, and the reward systems of those games offer them institutional alternatives to those offered in school. As a result, boys fail to engage with their teachers; or perhaps more properly, their teachers fail to engage with them.

Jane McGonigal has argued that for most of our and the following generations, gaming takes up as much or more time as schooling, and that it has therefore become a primary medium for teaching us institutions (i.e. "civilizing" us). She thinks that gaming, as it exists, teaches problem-solving skills and a certain sort of ambition. In other words, the institutions and reward structures that gaming teaches us can be harnessed in positive ways. This seems like a big deal, and I will come back to it later.

There are, however, negatives to being institutionalized by games. I don't buy most of the arguments about videogame violence leading to real-world violence. In fact, I think that the parents and media who focus on this have the issue all wrong. To be sure, most of the school shootings of our time have been committed by gamers - but for that matter, most instances of sandwich-buying in the past twenty years have been committed by gamers. More important is that video games seem to socialize kids, especially boys, into certain types of reward systems that often have no real applicability to the real world. This can lead not only to disillusionment with school, but with poor success in many social situations.

To demonstrate this point, I have two somewhat random anecdotes; not entirely convincing, I'll admit...

First, I was at a video-game discussion at THATCamp New England where a participant mentioned an iPhone app called Epic Win. This app is a rather ordinary schedule/to-do list app that adds a reward system familiar to many gamers: after going to the gym, you can give yourself +1 strength, etc. This person said that the reward system (to which he had been institutionalized) made him substantially more likely to do things on his schedule. This seems somewhat benign, but I have known other people who were more driven to do things like exercise, study, and even shower once the rewards for doing so were made explicit in this type of reward structure. Note, for example, the success of the Wii Fit in inspiring weight loss.

The other example is somewhat more sinister. Reading The Game, a book about the world of pick-up artists, struck me in a number of ways. Obviously, there are the reprehensible attitudes about women that pervade the pick-up culture. Also, the rather questionable use of sexual selection theory, especially as popularized by The Red Queen (on which, more in a future post perhaps). Nonetheless, the glimpse into the world of pick-up instructors left me, if anything, feeling sorry for the men most of all. Many of these pick-up artists, and especially the young men who aspire to emulate them, seem to be critically lacking in social skills that would enable them to meet women in more socially acceptable ways. Many of them treat picking up women as, well...a game, often referring to it as such. The positive aspect of learning "the game" seems to be that they acquire more self-confidence. They do this, essentially, by learning how to assign video-game type stats to real world situations, much as in the case of Epic Win, above. In doing so, they are able to apply the task-management skills learned through gaming to the business of making themselves more attractive to women.

The problem is that these skills are still acquired in an artificially imposed context. It strikes me as a case of "cheating" at the game, or "gaming" the system. Gamers can (and often are) split into two or three categories based on their goals in playing. There are some who like to immerse themselves in the artificial reality described by the game, often called "role players." Others tend to focus on how to "beat" the game, often called "power gamers" or "roll players" (based on their focus on dice in tabletop gaming). Finally, there are social gamers, who basically play as an excuse to hang out with their friends. I think that the second group is the one most likely to describe and include people who can have difficulty adjusting their game-based skill-set to other applications. This group includes some generally "positive" behavior, sometimes called "min-maxing" - essentially the process of figuring out how to maximize positive outcomes for a minimum cost, a logical toolset that applies well to things like math, science and economics.

At its extreme, however, this turns into "hacking," "game lawyering" or flat-out cheating - trying to figure out how to exploit holes in the system to "win" in ways not intended by the game. Like Wall Street bankers leveraging their connections to Capitol Hill to figure out how to leverage the latest regulatory shifts, they share long forum posts on how to exploit the latest updates aimed at promoting game balance to do just the opposite. Or they hack into the inner workings to give themselves unlimited gold or super-strength. In the "real world," this equates to anti-social behaviors like insider trading, pettifogging, bribery and graft. It is probably the gamers who tend to these extremes who turn to pick-up artists to learn, not only self-esteem, personal grooming and such, but particular ways of manipulating and deceiving women.

Would this behavior exist without video games? Certainly. Nevertheless, there are several aspects to the internal workings of video game reward systems that seem especially apt to institutionalize gamers to these types of negative attitudes and behaviors. Even when they do not promote extremes of anti-social behavior, most existing games promote certain unrealistic attitudes toward the world:

1. The value of essentially everything is knowable and constant.
2. Progress is basically linear and generally exponential.
3. Outcomes are immediate, visible and significant.
4. Gameplay is repeatable, reproducible and transferable.

These assumptions are, rather unfortunately, shared by a certain contingent of social scientists and policy makers. They represent, at one extreme, antisocial behavior, and at the other, a particular political project. What can be done to rectify this? It seems to me that creating games that project more sanguine institutional constructions would be a place to start. This does not mean boring, non-violent games (not the same thing, but still...); to me, it means more than anything games with plastic "tech trees," network (rather than categorical) phenomena, delayed repercussions, sensitive dependence and emergence (i.e. "chaotic" behavior) and non-repeatability. In various conversations, gamer friends have raised the very real possibility that these games would be "hard to balance" or simply "too complex to be fun." It is quite likely that the existing games are popular because they exhibit addictive reward systems, because they offer escape from realism, etc. These are problems I will have to think about and address later...

What do Blizzard games teach us about political ecology?

In high school and college, I spent a good bit of time playing real time strategy games, especially Starcraft. At some point, I will have to write a post about what these games teach us about technology and social progress, but for now I am interested in the models of ecology and economy that they build. In particular, my recent readings on pollution, weeds and disease have brought the Zerg creep to mind. The creep
(at right) is supposed to be some sort of organic substance that is necessary to support the Zerg buildings, but is impossible for the other races to build on. There have been some rather interesting meditations on the internet on the scientific reasoning behind the creep, as well as some less interesting uses of it as a metaphor for the invasive nature of progressive political thought. But I think at root, the zerg creep represents a particular political ecology of the Zerg civilization. In fact, from a game-play perspective the creep seems to have been a rather significant innovation of the Blizzard team, which they have subsequently employed in their other real time strategy games, including Warcraft 3, where the Undead have a virtually identical ecological creep, in this case called the "blight" (left).

In both cases, the understanding is that these civilizations both depend on and promote a particular ecological formation. Note that this logic is not unique to the Zerg/Undead; for example the Protos are only able to build within a certain radius of their power-generating pylons. In any case, these formulations promote a very visual, somewhat simplified understanding of the miasmatic, wake-type environmental effects of civilizations. For example, in Ecological Imperialism, Alfred Crosby makes the case that the particular ecology that developed around the European farming complex expanded with European settlers. This "creep" included not only the intentional promotion of plants and animals beneficial under the European wheat-and-livestock based political ecology (and economy), but also "side-effect" weeds and nuisance species, like crabgrass and rats. Like the Zerg creep, this had the dual effects of making the landscape more suitable for this political ecology and less suitable for others.

These "creep"-like phenomena can be seen in a lot of historical processes, ranging from the disease front accompanying (and preceding) colonization and warfare detailed by Diamond and McNeil, to the crops and weeds explored by Crosby, to the cycles of pollution and depletion promoted by/promoting artificial fertilizer/pesticide/herbicide use in modern industrial agriculture (not to speak of the debt cycles implicated therein).

So what do these games have to teach about political ecologies? I think they help foreground the inherently spacial/topological nature of these phenomena. In studying political economy, it is easy to be tempted to abstract relational processes to network maps, and differential phenomena to categories. This is patently true of much epidemiology and sociology since the advent of regression economics and germ theory. Most diseases are analyzed by some combination of their proximate vectors of transmission and social categories of risk. For example, we tend to think of AIDS as transmitted from person to person (primarily by sexual contact), with certain categorical risk factors like race and sexual orientation. We "know" that malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes and cholera by bad water, and that cancer is based on your genes (which you get from your parents) and your behavior.

In fact, the miasmatic, ecological understanding of these diseases is also, in a sense, "correct." More importantly, it is useful. Malaria's proximate vector is the mosquito, but it is spatially associated with swamps; AIDS (in a previous era), with bathhouses; cancer with toxic waste dumps.

Likewise, other social phenomena must be understood to have a miasmatic nature. Agriculture is not just about the chains of production and consumption, it is not just about understandings of nature, it is very much situated in physical space and has a transformative effect on that space. This type of understanding is easily lost in a lot of environmental histories (ironically enough), as they become obsessed with conceptions of nature, or energy flows. Disease, pollution, weeds, "creep" have the advantage or reminding us of the importance of space. This is very much Linda Nash's argument in Inescapable Ecologies, but this understanding is equally visible, if not more so, in the Zerg creep shown above.

Diet, natural selection, the zerg rush and the zombie apocalypse

Unnecessary personal introduction

I have been reading a lot recently on diets related to reconstructions of what prehistoric humans supposedly ate. Under names like The Primal Blueprint or the Paleo Diet, they make the basic argument that the evolution we have undergone since the domestication of agriculture is minimal compared to the evolution we underwent prior to that. Meaning, pragmatically, that we are not evolutionarily selected to do things like eat grains or wear shoes. This strain of thought seems to be based in a long stream of Romantic views of nature, but also in some hard science. Indicating, for example, that hunter-gatherers who don't eat much sugar or grains have better tooth and jaw structure (based in the research of Weston Price); that there is little connection between high dietary cholesterol and heart disease and so on.

The fact is, I've tried reducing my sugar consumption to near zero, and my grain-based carbohydrate consumption (esp. at lunch) to low levels, and I have found myself rewarded with higher energy levels and getting sick very rarely. My wife suggests that I have some deep discontent with society that leads me to seek outsider views, especially relating to my diet. And this is doubtless true - I was vegetarian on and off for about four or five years, played around with raw food briefly, etc. Nonetheless, I have been more satisfied with the short term effects of reducing sugar and grain consumption and upping animal fat consumption; short, intense, whole-body workout; minimal shoes and so on than I ever was eating lots of beans and jogging. The question of the long-term effects is still a somewhat open question, as far as I am concerned, although I am coming around to the opinion (belief) that limiting inflammation is much more important than minimizing blood cholesterol.

Personal experience aside, there is something deeply unsatisfying about the argumentation of a lot of the paleo party. On the one hand, they delight in ridiculing the laboratory reductionism of big science, pointing out population studies (like Weston Price's surveys of native populations, the Framingham Study, etc.) that support their positions, and selectively choosing examples of the most successful remaining hunter gatherers. On the other hand, they delight in citing instances of laboratory science that support their conclusions, or arguing study against study. Most existing criticism of this line of thinking has been even less self-critical, largely relying on what paleos dismiss as a "conventional wisdom" supported by an interested government-agribusiness-pharmaceutical alliance of interests. The lab study vs. lab study type of argument reminds me of nothing more than that line about statistics; the specifics of study design and similar factors mean that there is a huge tendency toward confirmation bias, even when researchers don't intend it. Population studies are notoriously difficult to unpack, and I can't really tell whether either side is selectively citing examples of hunter-gatherers. I will arbitrarily call these positions a wash. To me, the argument rests largely on the application of theory, in particular evolution.

The evolutionary argument for paleo

The best argument that the paleos trot out, for which I would direct you to Mark Sisson, is that agriculture is:

1. Too recent a development to have effects on evolution.
2. A system that makes it too easy for the weak to survive to reproductive age - by producing an easy surplus - thereby allowing all genes to be perpetuated.

It's a bit more complex than this, but basically the idea is that we still have the genes of prehistorical hunter-gatherers, and by having a very different diet and activity pattern, we are substantially less healthy. The reason we don't simply diminish and die is that we are surprisingly effective omnivores, and our gene expression changes so that we exist at a less effective, but still minimally effective, level of homeostasis. This minimal level of effectiveness allows us to pass on our genes without evolution playing a strong role - which means that we also pass on the genes that make grain-based diets unhealthy.

Implicit in this argument is the assumption that we have moved to a fundamentally different mortality regime. The prehistoric mortality regime was essentially random and selective - death was due primarily to accidents, seasonal starvation and only rarely infectious disease (essentially similar to most wild animal mortality patterns). This produced a population curve that tapered off rather steeply, but evenly across all ages (after especially steep infant mortality). This meant that barring accident or poor hunting performance, fifty or sixty-year-olds were nearly as healthy and able as twenty or thirty-year-olds, otherwise they would be unable to provide for themselves and die. It also provided for natural selection to take place on the individual level - poor hunters or gatherers were more likely to die of starvation or accident - and selected for people who do well eating meat and fish, fruits, vegetables and tubers.

The historic, premodern mortality regime was random but not selective, infectious disease based. Its shape was steep among infants and children, shallower during late childhood and early adulthood, and steeper again in middle age and beyond. The poor diet in this period meant a faster aging process, and an illness- and malnutrition-related die-off starting in the late 30s due in large part to things like tooth decay. The randomness was more likely to wipe out entire populations, but beyond infant mortality, it meant that people were more or less equally likely to live to childbearing age. Thus a continuation of poor health among the majority of the population, still selected to eat lots of meat and veg but unable to do so.

The modern mortality regime is both genetic and environmental, but not selective, chronic disease-based. The population curve has a much smaller infant die-off, some limited accident-based mortality, and very few deaths to infectious disease - basically a shallow slope into middle age. At middle-age, the curve steepens due to the beginnings of chronic disease mortality and again in 70s and 80s as chronic illness and age-related illness combine. Those with "bad genes" die of heart attacks in their forties and fifties, and those with "good genes" of stroke, organ failure, and decrepitude-related disease/accident combination in their 80s and 90s. The conventional wisdom is that we now die of cancer and heart disease because we live long enough to. The paleo critique is that we die of cancer and heart disease because we live long enough, and our behavior promotes it; and that both middle-age heart attacks and old age decrepitude are results of our behavior as much as our genes. In either case, we live long enough to pass on our paleo genes - its just that now most people live that long, rather than a large, random subset of them dying due to infectious disease.

My critique

As I see it, the problem with this argument is that it overlooks the effect of group selection on evolution. At the individual level, the changing mortality regime would seem to indicate that we are still hunter-gatherers at heart (and stomach, and DNA). But group-level and population-level effects are enormous! The transition to agriculture made major changes by building big enough population bases for infectious disease. This changed the pattern of our mortality, but it also changed the pattern of our responses. The last post was about some of these - the various things we have called "hygiene." Most of these responses are now operating on the level of "culture" rather than "nature" - memes rather than genes - but they still have genetic effects!

Consider this: John McNeal asserts that 20% of all human years lived in the past 40,000 years were lived in the past 100. This is not the same as saying that 20% of all people who lived in the past 40k lived in the past century, because our lifetimes are longer, so let's conservatively say that this is equivalent to 5-10% of people. This means that the vast majority of population expansion happened in the modern era. If we assume that people in the past had significantly more than two children per woman on average (i.e. above the replacement rate), this means that mortality was very high to prevent wild population expansion. This is not a controversial argument. This means that mortality was the dominant control on population. Non-random mortality is the hand of evolution. We have established mortality, if we establish non-randomness, then we have evolution.

Randomness may be a much more difficult question. We tend to think of disease as relatively random, but it is not the case. Recall the massive demographic effect of the plague on Europe or smallpox on the Americas. These had the effect of greatly reducing certain genetic pools while providing population vacuums for the immune to fill - i.e. for the demographic expansion of the Mongols, or of the Spanish, British, French genetic material. So it seems likely that we are selected on the group level for the types of people who make good conquerors. Who makes good conquerors? Nomads? Farmers? Definitely not hunter-gatherers.

In the early stage of Chinese history, it appears that farmers and hunters were rather balanced - see the long wars between the Shang and Zhou states and the four barbarians. But over time, the farmers won out. This was probably not because the farmers were individually better warriors, evidence seems to indicate quite the contrary, that the hunters were much better fighters, larger in stature and probably healthier. But over time, the weight of population, of energy, of technology came out on the side of the farmers - there were more of them, with better weapons. Not only this, but disease was on the side of the farmers. The farmers definitively won, there are very few hunter-gatherers left in the world, and only in areas where extreme climate or disease regimes keep agriculture at bay.

Later, the main opponent of the farmers was the nomads. It is not clear that this period of competition lasted longer than the farmer-hunter wars, but it is much better documented. Again, this appears to be a case where the nomads were probably more healthy. The nomads also had another energy reserve - livestock - on their side. They also seem to have been less susceptible to epidemic disease genocide. But the lost in the end to a gradual rise in demographic pressure and shifting of the technological balance. The role of non-organic energy may have also been critical - they were generally tamed by gunpowder empires and destroyed by fossil-fueled industrial farming and mining concerns.

There were also the wars between farmers and other farmers, or farmers and hybrid farmer-herders. This is where I would be interested to look for group selection. In the case of farmer vs. hunter, the energy balance was too uneven to promote any clear evolutionary pressure - even unhealthy farmers could defeat hunters. On the other hand when two different pools of farmers competed, the ones better able to use grain-based energy would have been less susceptible to disease, made healthier fighters, and seen fewer children die before they could become soldiers. This makes me wonder whether farming groups that adapted genetically, not just culturally, to farming would have survived better.

Finally, there are several pieces of evidence for evolution in historical time. Lactase persistence (i.e. not developing lactose intolerance as an adult), which would give those with the mutation an advantage over others, has clearly developed since the domestication of livestock among farming communities. Some native Mexican and South Chinese groups exhibit a "thrifty gene" that allows them to maximize nutritional content from grain consumption, but leads to diabetes when high levels of grain are consumed. This would have enabled easier population expansion of this group, at the expense of those who did not extract nutrients as readily.

There is probably also a great deal of genetic selection based on memetic selection. In other words, groups that produced good social ideas were likely to out-compete those that didn't. As these groups were generally based, at least to some degree, in kinship groups. Even within relatively static, peaceful populations, the expanded technological ability, capital resources etc. of successful families would likely promote their genetic material at the expense of the less sucessful. These forms of memetic evolution would tend to promote associated genetic material. While this selection is not directly on nutrition-related attributes, the connection between the political economy and food production is too close to assume that social behavior and genetic adaptations are completely unrelated.

The zerg rush and the zombie apocalypse

At base, I take the argument that individual evolution has not proceeded at the same pace, but I argue that group evolution has still occurred. The paradox of group evolution is that it seems to promote something like the zerg rush, the idea that hordes of lesser individuals can overcome a smaller group of more powerful ones. I feel that this has more potential to explain the entire system that both paleo and conventionals are part of - one in which the power of the large group depends on a system that results in the relative poverty and poor health of its constituent individuals. At the same time, the demographic power seems more like a slow creep than a sprint, something more like the zombie apocalypse. This has the metaphorical advantage of suggesting the role that the very illness of that group plays in its success.

This post has grown too long and incoherent, but I have a final, more hopeful suggestion. It seems that the power of the farm - the poor and dense imperative - was rather well balanced against that of the nomad - more individual power and sparser settlement - until the advent of fossil fuels. The biggest problem with the paleo solution is that it remains largely individual and dependent on volition, in the face of the power of the state and market. I have done little to address the social and moral aspects of paleo in the modern world (a topic for another post), but I would suggest that it is a small-scale solution at best, until paired with a viable political economy. Hunter has little to offer in those terms, but herder might.

Energy, Technology, Disease and Hygiene

Forget for a moment about all of the specifics of form and think for a moment about the basis of power. The physics of it even.

P = ΔW/Δt

In social terms, power is the ability to get work done in a certain amount of time. Work, of course, is simply application of energy.

W = ΔE

So power, including social power, is the ability to bring a certain amount of stored energy to bear on a problem within a given time. This means that social actors looking to exert power want to be able to store energy, and then apply it.

In the modern world, this is made incredibly complex by things like fossil fuels, which are huge storehouses of energy that can by used very quickly, and electricity, which is a relatively efficient means of transferring energy from one place to another quickly.

So let's step back to the premodern context. Energy still came in all the forms that it comes in now: mechanical energy, chemical energy, light, heat... The major difference was that the ability to collect, store, convert and apply energy were much more limited.

The ultimate source of energy is light, which plants convert to stored chemical energy. This energy can then be stored or converted into mechanical energy by animals, or to heat and light by burning. In a more indirect and less important sense, it can be converted into a peculiar form of potential energy in the form of structures.

But basically, we are concerned with mechanical energy, because this has been the primary form in which social actors wanted to exert power. In some sense, human history is the story of collecting and applying mechanical energy. In the premodern context, the power of an individual was largely determined by his or her own ability to convert energy. The power of an institution depended largely on how many people and animals it could control, and thereby make use of their energy. A family generally wanted as many children as it could feed so that it could use their labor. A state likewise wanted as many subjects as it could control, so that it could make use of their labor.

From the case of a single individual gathering plants, to the highly complex premodern empires with systems of taxation and warfare, the system at its root was about getting the most humans (and labor animals) to convert the most plants into energy. This energy could be applied in public works, in creating art, in warfare...whatever. Surplus labor for these things was a matter of surplus mechanical energy, primarily in human form. The development of complex states out of small kin-groups was essentially a matter of developing better technologies to create and organize this surplus. We can make the simplifying categorization of this into two forms of technology:

1. Production technology, generally physical technology.
   
2. Control technology, generally social technology.

The first form of technology comes in many varieties - anything that converts more vegetable matter into human. This most notably included agriculture and its many developments, although things like wind and water mills also produced energy, this was largely non-transferable. The second form of technology was mostly things that we might call "culture" or "institutions," although other things like grain storage also came into play.

So a quick set of examples. An early state, developed around irrigation would produce higher crop yields, and in turn a larger population that could be harnessed for its projects. These crop yields could also be stored, to a limited extent, for feeding future populations and making use of their labor in the future. But this was the only reason to store grain! In the second set of technologies, means of organizing and controlling this expanded population, to get them to build the pyramids or wage war for example, were also developed.

This hints at the major complication, which is that development of one type of technology tended to spur development of the other type. An increased population could not easily be controlled by the same institutions used to manage smaller ones. Likewise, bigger, well-organized populations could be funneled into developing more efficient means of gathering chemical energy in plant form. This is, in some ways a more general form of the Wittfogel thesis that despotic states emerged to control and organize the surplus of irrigation projects.

But its more complex than that. As the elder McNeil pointed out, the surplus of stored energy represented in a growing demographic base was subject to the predations of both micro- and macro-parasites, i.e. diseases and states. The concentration of stored energy created a breeding ground for both new social forms of extraction and for the maintenance of endemic disease. So in extracting and applying more of its population's energy, a state had to compete with plagues.

Both micro- and macro-parasites are further subject to the rule of network effects and the power law. That is to say, as ever-larger systems became integrated, they were more sensitive to propagating failures. Larger empires are more subject to collapse from even localized rebellion and disorder; larger markets are more subject to collapse from even localized recession; larger demographic pools are more subject to disease epidemics.

Thus, through much of history, as new production technologies expanded the energy (aka population) base, the chance of system failure increased. This would typically result in a cycle of dynastic rise, period of division, and the subsequent rise of a new empire, generally built around a new control technology.

It is especially worth noting that these control technologies existed at all scales, and came to include many things that now appear as things that can be grouped under the overdetermined term "hygiene" - everything from ethnicity to manners to epidemiology. I would argue that the changing nature of this term reflected the changing nature of the disease threat. Avoidance of certain foods has always been a good way of preventing diseases from crossing over to humans from their animal source. Race and ethnic taboos likely had their origin in keeping disease pools separate, perhaps in order to prevent cascading system failure by keeping sub-networks partially separated. As this became increasingly difficult, manners perpetuated forms of social separation, and personal hygiene came to encompass things like regular bathing. At the dawn of modernity, the integration of disparate supply networks in goods (as well as people) created a greater need for public health professionals and the modern concept of hygiene.

But control technologies existed in other forms as well. In the economic realm, coinage, finance etc provided more efficient extraction, storage, and some protection against system failure. But these technologies only made sense in an already-connected world.

This is only a preliminary sketch attempting to integrate a variety of very different theories.

Reading list:
McNeil, Plagues and Peoples
McNeil, Something New Under the Sun
Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts
Wittfogel, Hydraulic Despotism
Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity
Evans, Death in Hamburg
Mennel, Norbert Elias: An Introduction
Johnson, The Ghost Map
Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel

Thoughts on contracts and other documents

I have started working on markup for contracts to enable database functionality. Having spent a great deal of time (but not really) worrying about the fact that XML works on tree structures. Because one generally wants networks more generally (of which trees are a subset), I was worried that there are circumstances in which XML is insufficient, and so I played around with RDF for a while. XML applications are much better developed, RDF theoretically is more generalizable...couldn't make a decision.

Then I realized that for historians, we only need trees. For ego-centric networks, cross-relationships between branches are secondary to the relationship to the trunk, which for us means the document. I may need to think on this for a few days (and welcome commentary from my non-existent readership), but I think that we should ultimately be starting with the original documents and marking our way up. Under this paradigm, relations between entities mentioned in the document are functions of the document itself. This is a bit difficult to wrap my mind around, but I think it works like this:

• For entities mentioned in the head or foot of a document, their relationship is to the document (and to some degree, the implied readership). For example, the "Posted by Ian Miller" at the bottom of this blog post identifies my role, my relationship to the post (writer). In the context of most Chinese documents, this will be in a format like: "著 邰小宝" or "author: Tai Xiaobao".
• For entities mentioned in the document itself, their relationship is to the setting of the document unless otherwise specified. For example, in an American newspaper, "President Obama" is enough of an indication because in this context he is well known, whereas people from less immediate contexts are specified in more detail, as "German Chancellor Angela Merkel". In the case of historical documents of unclear provenance, this gives us some indication of where they come from. In a contract I am working on, for example, the sellers are identified as "长房林协、次房林必录," or "Lin Xie, primary household; Lin Bilu, secondary household." In other words, Xie is from the eldest son's branch of the family (whether in this generation or a former one), and Bilu is from the second son's branch. This implies that the context of this document is the Lin family or lineage, as the relationship given is to the family. Likewise, if I were to refer to Obama as "eldest son Barack," that would tend to imply that I am referring to him in the context of his family, whereas "President Obama" is in the political context.
• In some cases, entities are given a context that is not relative to the document. Me referring to Obama as "elder son Barack" seems a bit strange, but I might refer to him as "Ann Dunham's eldest son Barack," which specifies him relative to another context, that of his mother Ann. For the purposes of tree-structured markup however, this does not make the relationship external to the document; in fact, the relationship of Ann and Barack is itself a branch of the document by the fact of its mention.

Ultimately, many applications of the data contained in these documents requires us to pull these exterior relationships out of their context within the document. We may ultimately want to put them into a general network graph that cannot be fully specified by a tree. However, to historians, the source of the data about the relationship is as important as the data itself. To my mind, this means that we must first encode the relationship as part of structure of the document.

It is the nature of most (all?) documents that they can be encoded as trees. This was actually my epiphany today as I was working on coming up with a generalized tree structure for contracts: most documents are essentially the same as contracts; they:

• Have headers specifying the context of the document (authorship, date...)
• Specify entities by relationship to the context described by the document. First mentions of entities almost always specify this relationship. In contracts this is often written as so: "The vendor, Spacely Sprockets Incorporated". In other documents (i.e. news articles): Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany".
• Subsequent references to entities generally do not specify this relationship in full. In contracts, the format for these references is often defined at their first mention: "hereafter referred to as 'vendor' or 'Spacely Inc.'", which is not generally the case. Nevertheless, in second and third occurrences, you will usually see "Chancellor Merkel" (Germany no longer being specified), or even just "Merkel."
• Events and terms are generally broken into relatively discrete chunks to reduce the number of cross-references.
• Former agreements, quotes or prior events are set apart by quotation marks, paragraph breaks or (as in classical Chinese) set phrases or characters.
  

This means that I should make my document framework as general as possible. It also means that if I do a good job making a general framework, it can be used to analyze a wide range of documents.

It strikes me that this is the most exiting thing about doing history, or at least the type of history that I want to do. Documents generally come to us in linear format, demanding to be read from front to back. As anyone who has ever diagrammed a sentence or looked at guidelines to format cover letters, documents have underlying tree structures (this is especially clear in the blank contract provided in the Fujian Provincial Statues):


The epiphany of the day is that a general network graph can be built up from the individual trees (i.e. documents). To me, this is the real work of history: finding the trees in texts, building the trees into graphs, and then finding the logic within those graphs. This should not just be an exercise in pasting narratives together, but of seeing the broader shape of things!