Crymble’s Notion of Invisible College Making Up for What Formal Education is Lacking

Students are required to write 1.5-page (350 word) response essay.
The essay responds to the respective prompts based on your understanding of the main points of the readings and speaker’s presentation.
You may choose to respond to any prompts provided for each section.
Papers must be double-spaced, with one-inch margins and numbered pages.
Required Readings:
1. Crymble, Adam, “Building the Invisible College,” Ch.4 in: Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age, U of Illinois P. pp. 107-136 (2021). https://muse(dot)jhu(dot)edu/book/83120
2. Drucker, Johanna, “Designing Graphic Interpretation,” in: Graphesis: visual forms of knowledge production, Harvard University Press, pp. 180-192, July 7, 2014.
3. Staley, David. J, “Visualization as an Alternative to Prose,” Ch.2 in: Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past (2nd ed), Taylor & Francis, pp. 29-58. https://doi-org(dot)proxy(dot)library(dot)nyu(dot)edu/10.4324/9781315716572
Prompts (Choice of one of these):
1. How do you understand Crymble's notion of the "invisible college"? Do you believe the problems of self-teaching are problems of the past decades, or do they persist today? Do you have any self-taught skills which complement "traditional historical skills" (108)? Are there ways you have imagined doing history which are inaccessible to you in your formal training?
2. What do you think Drucker means in this quote from her chapter: "The contingent character of any act of textual production increases exponentially with the expansion of data on which it draws for its composition and display. The conditional text has become the norm." (184)?
3. What do you think of the arguments against the visual which make up the beginning of Staley's chapter (29-36)? How would you assess what Staley means by the statement: "visualizations may be categorized on a continuum between the representational and the abstract" (37). Instead of a prose response, you can make a visual one.