Clio Wired Fall 2008

Digital Campus Podcasts #46-51

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:24 GMT

For the past few months I've neglected to reblog in this space the availability of fresh new Digital Campus podcasts for your listening pleasure. Below is a list of the major topics of each of those episodes—if you're new to the podcast, pick one that sounds interesting and give it a listen. Or just subscribe to the podcast to have fresh episodes delivered automatically to iTunes or your favorite podcatcher.

Important changes have arrived in this span of podcasts as well. After being the “show runner” for the first fifty episodes (doing the voice-overs and guiding the discussion in my best impression of a late-night jazz host), the other regulars on the podcast, Tom Scheinfeldt and Mills Kelly, will assume these duties (along with me) on a rotating basis starting with Digital Campus #51, “The Inevitable iPad.” In addition, we've been joined by a rotation of “irregulars” who greatly liven up the proceedings and actually have intelligent things to say.

Episode 51 – The Inevitable iPad: Inevitably, we obsess over what the iPad means for academia, museums, and libraries.

Episode 50 – The Crystal Ball Returns: Our popular year-end/beginning-of-the-year wrap-up and predictions of what's to come.

Episode 49 – The Twouble with Twecklers: Twitter at academic conferences; speeding up the web.

Episode 48 – Balkanization of the Web?: The revised Google Books settlement; News Corp. v. Google; Wikipedia in its maturity.

Episode 47 – Publishers Bleakly: As publishing business models erode, we look at new models in their infancy.

Episode 46 – Theremin Dreams: How people adopt new technologies; Nook; Droid.

The PITS and the iPad

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 04:42 GMT

The unveiling of Apple's iPad this week provoked seemingly everyone to prognosticate the future of the device and the future of computing in general. I was instead prodded to revisit the past—specifically, the original design goals for the Mac spelled out by the brilliant (and humorous) Jef Raskin. Just read the principles Raskin lays out in 1979 in “Design Considerations for an Anthropophilic Computer“:

This is an outline for a computer designed for the Person In The Street (or, to abbreviate: the PITS); one that will be truly pleasant to use, that will require the user to do nothing that will threaten his or her perverse delight in being able to say: “I don't know the first thing about computers,” and one which will be profitable to sell, service and provide software for.

You might think that any number of computers have been designed with these criteria in mind, but not so. Any system which requires a user to ever see the interior, for any reason, does not meet these specifications. There must not be additional ROMS, RAMS, boards or accessories except those that can be understood by the PITS as a separate appliance. For example, an auxiliary printer can be sold, but a parallel interface cannot. As a rule of thumb, if an item does not stand on a table by itself, and if it does not have its own case, or if it does not look like a complete consumer item in [and] of itself, then it is taboo.

If the computer must be opened for any reason other than repair (for which our prospective user must be assumed incompetent) even at the dealer's, then it does not meet our requirements.

Seeing the guts is taboo. Things in sockets is taboo (unless to make servicing cheaper without imposing too large an initial cost). Billions of keys on the keyboard is taboo. Computerese is taboo. Large manuals, or many of them (large manuals are a sure sign of bad design) is taboo. Self- instructional programs are NOT taboo.

There must not be a plethora of configurations. It is better to offer a variety of case colors than to have variable amounts of memory. It is better to manufacture versions in Early American, Contemporary, and Louis XIV than to have any external wires beyond a power cord.

And you get ten points if you can eliminate the power cord.

Any differences between models that do not have to be documented in a user's manual are OK. Any other differences are not.

It is most important that a given piece of software will run on any and every computer built to this specification…

It is expected that sales of software will be an important part of the profit strategy for the computer.

It only took 31 years (not especially a long time in the history of technology), but I think the iPad is the device Raskin envisioned (given, as Raskin would have agreed, that “the interior” and “the guts” now includes the software interior/guts as well as the hardware interior/guts).

Fraser Speirs has called the tech community's negative reaction to the iPad “future shock” (via Daring Fireball); but it's really the shockwave of the past—the radical vision of computing Raskin and Steve Jobs always had—finally catching up to the present.

Is Google Good for History?

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:00 GMT

[These are my prepared remarks for a talk I gave at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, on January 7, 2010, in San Diego. The panel was entitled "Is Google Good for History?" and also featured talks by Paul Duguid of the University of California, Berkeley and Brandon Badger of Google Books. Given my propensity to go rogue, what I actually said likely differed from this text, but it represents my fullest, and, I hope, most evenhanded analysis of Google.]

Is Google good for history? Of course it is. We historians are searchers and sifters of evidence. Google is probably the most powerful tool in human history for doing just that. It has constructed a deceptively simple way to scan billions of documents instantaneously, and it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of its own money to allow us to read millions of books in our pajamas. Good? How about Great?

But then we historians, like other humanities scholars, are natural-born critics. We can find fault with virtually anything. And this disposition is unsurprisingly exacerbated when a large company, consisting mostly of better-paid graduates from the other side of campus, muscles into our turf. Had Google spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build the Widener Library at Harvard, surely we would have complained about all those steps up to the front entrance.

Partly out of fear and partly out of envy, it’s easy to take shots at Google. While it seems that an obsessive book about Google comes out every other week, where are the volumes of criticism of ProQuest or Elsevier or other large information companies that serve the academic market in troubling ways? These companies, which also provide search services and digital scans, charge universities exorbitant amounts for the privilege of access. They leech money out of library budgets every year that could be going to other, more productive uses.

Google, on the other hand, has given us Google Scholar, Google Books, newspaper archives, and more, often besting commercial offerings while being freely accessible. In this bigger picture, away from the myopic obsession with the Biggest Tech Company of the Moment (remember similar diatribes against IBM, Microsoft?), Google has been very good for history and historians, and one can only hope that they continue to exert pressure on those who provide costly alternatives.

Of course, like many others who feel a special bond with books and our cultural heritage, I wish that the Google Books project was not under the control of a private entity. For years I have called for a public project, or at least a university consortium, to scan books on the scale Google is attempting. I’m envious of France’s recent announcement to spend a billion dollars on public scanning. In addition, the Center for History and New Media has a strong relationship with the Internet Archive to put content in a non-profit environment that will maximize its utility and distribution and make that content truly free, in all senses of the word. I would much rather see Google’s books at the Internet Archive or the Library of Congress. There is some hope that HathiTrust will be this non-Google champion, but they are still relying mostly on Google’s scans. The likelihood of a publicly funded scanning project in the age of Tea Party reactionaries is slim.

* * *

Long-time readers of my blog know that I have not pulled punches when it comes to Google. To this day the biggest spike in readership on my blog was when, very early in Google’s book scanning project, I casually posted a scan of a human hand I found while looking at an edition of Plato. The post ended up on Digg, and since then it has been one of the many examples used by Google’s detractors to show a lack of quality in their library project.

Let’s discuss the quality issues for a moment, since it is one point of obsession within the academy, an obsession I feel is slightly misplaced. Of course Google has some poor scans—as the saying goes, haste makes waste—but I’ve yet to see a scientific survey of the overall percentage of pages that are unreadable or missing (surely a miniscule fraction in my viewing of scores of Victorian books). Regarding metadata errors, as Jon Orwant of Google Books has noted, when you are dealing with a trillion pieces of metadata, who are likely to have millions of errors in need of correction. Let us also not pretend the bibliographical world beyond Google is perfect. Many of the metadata problems with Google Books come from library partners and others outside of Google.

Moreover, Google likely has remedies for many of these inadequacies. Google is constantly improving its OCR and metadata correction capabilities, often in clever ways. For instance, it recently acquired the reCAPTCHA system from Carnegie Mellon, which uses unwitting humans who are logging into online services to transcribe particularly hard or smudged words from old books. They have added a feedback mechanism for users to report poor scans. Truly bad books can be rescanned or replaced by other libraries’ versions. I find myself nonplussed by quality complaints about Google Books that have engineering solutions. That’s what Google does; it solves engineering problems very well.

Indeed, we should recognize (and not without criticism, as I will note momentarily) that at its heart, Google Books is the outcome, like so many things at Google, of a engineering challenge and a series of mathematical problems: How can you scan tens of million books in a decade? It’s easy to say they should do a better job and get all the details right, but if you do the calculations with those key variables, as I assume Brandon and his team have done, you’ll probably see that getting a nearly perfect library scanning project would take a hundred years rather than ten. (That might be a perfectly fine trade-off, but that’s a different argument or a different project.) As in OCR, getting from 99% to 99.9% accuracy would probably take an order of magnitude longer and be an order of magnitude more expensive. That’s the trade-off they have decided to make, and as a company interested in search, where near-100% accuracy is unnecessary, and considering the possibilities for iterating toward perfection from an imperfect first version, it must have been an easy decision to make.

* * *

Google Books is incredibly useful, even with the flaws. Although I was trained at places with large research libraries of Google Books scale, I’m now at an institution that is far more typical of higher ed, with a mere million volumes and few rare works. At places like Mason, Google Books is a savior, enabling research that could once only be done if you got into the right places. I regularly have students discover new topics to study and write about through searches on Google Books. You can only imagine how historical researchers and all students and scholars feel in even less privileged places. Despite its flaws, it will be the the source of much historical scholarship, from around the globe, over the coming decades. It is a tremendous leveler of access to historical resources.

Google is also good for history in that it challenges age-old assumptions about the way we have done history. Before the dawn of massive digitization projects and their equally important indices, we necessarily had to pick and choose from a sea of analog documents. All of that searching and sifting we did, and the particular documents and evidence we chose to write on, were—let’s admit it—prone to many errors. Read it all, we were told in graduate school. But who ever does? We sift through large archives based on intuition; occasionally we even find important evidence by sheer luck. We have sometimes made mountains out of molehills because, well, we only have time to sift through molehills, not mountains. Regardless of our technique, we always leave something out; in an analog world we have rarely been comprehensive.

This widespread problem of anecdotal history, as I have called it, will only get worse. As more documents are scanned and go online, many works of historical scholarship will be exposed as flimsy and haphazard. The existence of modern search technology should push us to improve historical research. It should tell us that our analog, necessarily partial methods have had hidden from us the potential of taking a more comprehensive view, aided by less capricious retrieval mechanisms which, despite what detractors might say, are often more objective than leafing rapidly through paper folios on a time-delimited jaunt to an archive.

In addition, listening to Google may open up new avenues of exploring the past. In my book Equations from God I argued that mathematics was generally considered a divine language in 1800 but was “secularized” in the nineteenth century. Part of my evidence was that mathematical treatises, which often contained religious language in the early nineteenth century, lost such language by the end of the century. By necessity, researching in the pre-Google Books era, my textual evidence was limited—I could only read a certain number of treatises and chose to focus (I’m sure this will sound familiar) on the writings of high-profile mathematicians. The vastness of Google Books for the first time presents the opportunity to do a more comprehensive scan of Victorian mathematical writing for evidence of religious language. This holds true for many historical research projects.

So Google has provided us not only with free research riches but also with a helpful direct challenge to our research methods, for which we should be grateful. Is Google good for history? Of course it is.

* * *

But does that mean that we cannot provide constructive criticism of Google, to make it the best it can be, especially for historians? Of course not. I would like to focus on one serious issue that ripples through many parts of Google Books.

For a company that is a champion of openness, Google remains strangely closed when it comes to Google Books. Google Books seems to operate in ways that are very different from other Google properties, where Google aims to give it all away. For instance, I cannot understand why Google doesn’t make it easier for historians such as myself, who want to do technical analyses of historical books, to download them en masse more easily. If it wanted to, Google could make a portal to download all public domain books tomorrow. I’ve heard the excuses from Googlers: But we’ve spent millions to digitize these books! We’re not going to just give them away! Well, Google has also spent millions on software projects such as Android, Wave, Chrome OS, and the Chrome browser, and they are giving those away. Google’s hesitance with regard to its books project shows that openness goes only so far at Google. I suppose we should understand that; Google is a company, not public library. But that’s not the philanthropic aura they cast around Google Books at its inception or even today, in dramatic op-eds touting the social benefit of Google Books.

In short, complaining about the quality of Google’s scans distracts us from a much larger problem with Google Books. The real problem—especially for those in the digital humanities but increasingly for many others—is that Google Books is only open in the read-a-book-in-my-pajamas way. To be sure, you can download PDFs of many public domain books. But they make it difficult to download the OCRed text from multiple public domain books–what you would need for more sophisticated historical research. And when we move beyond the public domain, Google has pushed for a troubling, restrictive regime for millions of so-called “orphan” books.

I would like to see a settlement that offers greater, not lesser access to those works, in addition to greater availability of what Cliff Lynch has called “computational access” to Google Books, a higher level of access that is less about reading a page image on your computer than applying digital tools to many pages or books at one time to create new knowledge and understanding. This is partially promised in the Google Books settlement, in the form of text-mining research centers, but those centers will be behind a velvet rope and I suspect the casual historian will be unlikely to ever use them. Google has elaborate APIs, or application programming interfaces, for most of its services, yet only the most superficial access to Google Books.

For a company that thrives on openness and the empowerment of users and software developers, Google Books is a puzzlement. With much fanfare, Google has recently launched—evidently out of internal agitation—what it calls a “Data Liberation Front,” to ensure portability of data and openness throughout Google. On dataliberation.org, the website for the front, these Googlers list 25 Google projects and how to maximize their portability and openness—virtually all of the main services at Google. Sadly, Google Books is nowhere to be seen, even though it also includes user-created data, such as the My Library feature, not to mention all of the data—that is, books—that we have all paid for with our tax dollars and tuition. So while the Che Guevaras put up their revolutionary fist on one side of the Googleplex, their colleagues on the other side are working with a circumscribed group of authors and publishers to place messy restrictions onto large swaths of our cultural heritage through a settlement that few in the academy support.

Jon Orwant and Dan Clancy and Brandon Badger have done an admirable job explaining much of the internal process of Google Books. But it still feels removed and alien in way that other Google efforts are not. That is partly because they are lawyered up, and thus hamstrung from responding to some questions academics have, or from instituting more liberal policies and features. The same chutzpah that would lead a company to digitize entire libraries also led it to go too far with in-copyright books, leading to a breakdown with authors and publishers and the flawed settlement we have in front of us today.

We should remember that the reason we are in a settlement now is that Google didn’t have enough chutzpah to take the higher, tougher road—a direct challenge in the courts, the court of public opinion, or the Congress to the intellectual property regime that governs many books and makes them difficult to bring online, even though their authors and publishers are long gone. While Google regularly uses its power to alter markets radically, it has been uncharacteristically meek in attacking head-on this intellectual property tower and its powerful corporate defenders. Had Google taken a stronger stance, historians would have likely been fully behind their efforts, since we too face the annoyances that unbalanced copyright law places on our pedagogical and scholarly use of textual, visual, audio, and video evidence.

I would much rather have historians and Google to work together. While Google as a research tool challenges our traditional historical methods, historians may very well have the ability to challenge and make better what Google does. Historical and humanistic questions are often at the high end of complexity among the engineering challenges Google faces, similar to and even beyond, for instance, machine translation, and Google engineers might learn a great deal from our scholarly practice. Google’s algorithms have been optimized over the last decade to search through the hyperlinked documents of the Web. But those same algorithms falter when faced with the odd challenges of change over centuries and the alienness of the past and old books and documents that historians examine daily.

Because Google Books is the product of engineers, with tremendous talent in computer science but less sense of the history of the book or the book as an object rather than bits, it founders in many respects. Google still has no decent sense of how to rank search results in humanities corpora. Bibliometrics and text mining work poorly on these sources (as opposed to, say, the highly structured scientific papers Google Scholar specializes in). Studying how professional historians rank and sort primary and secondary sources might tell Google a lot, which it could use in turn to help scholars.

Ultimately, the interesting question might not be, Is Google good for history? It might be: Is history good for Google? To both questions, my answer is: Yes.

Digital Humanities Sessions at the 2010 AHA Meeting

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:28 GMT

Out of hundreds of sessions at the 2010 American Historical Association annual meeting, nine are on digital matters. Nine. I'm on one-third of the sessions. It's 2010, and academic historians seem to feel that digital media and technology are not worth discussing, and that we can just go on doing what we've done, how we've done it, for another hundred years. For comparison, the 2009 MLA has three times as many digital humanities panels.

Anyway, the digital sessions (hope to see you there):

Is Google Good for History?

Crossing the Electronic Rubicon: Navigating the Challenges and Opportunities Presented by Archival Records Created and Stored Exclusively in Digital Format

Teaching Sourcing by Bridging Digital Libraries and Electronic Student Assignments

Humanities in the Digital Age, Part 1: Humanities in the Digital Age, Part 1: Digital Poster Session

Humanities in the Digital Age, Part 2: A Hands-On Workshop

Scholarly Publishing and e-Journals

What Becomes of Print in the Digital Age?

Assessing Resources: Analysis and Comment on EDSITEment Lessons in the High School and Undergraduate Classrooms

American Religious Historians Online

Introducing Digital Humanities Now

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:12 GMT

Do the digital humanities need journals? Although I'm very supportive of the new journals that have launched in the last year, and although I plan to write for them from time to time, there's something discordant about a nascent field—one so steeped in new technology and new methods of scholarly communication—adopting a format that is struggling in the face of digital media.

I often say to non-digital humanists that every Friday at 5 I know all of the most important books, articles, projects, and news of the week—without the benefit of a journal, a newsletter, or indeed any kind of formal publication by a scholarly society. I pick up this knowledge by osmosis from the people I follow online.

I subscribe to the blogs of everyone working centrally or tangentially to digital humanities. As I have argued from the start, and against the skeptics and traditionalists who thinks blogs can only be narcissistic, half-baked diaries, these outlets are just publishing platforms by another name, and in my area there are an incredible number of substantive ones.

More recently, social media such as Twitter has provided a surprisingly good set of pointers toward worthy materials I should be reading or exploring. (And as happened with blogs five years ago, the critics are now dismissing Twitter as unscholarly, missing the filtering function it somehow generates among so many unfiltered tweets.) I follow as many digital humanists as I can on Twitter, and created a comprehensive list of people in digital humanities. (You can follow me @dancohen.)

For a while I've been trying to figure out a way to show this distilled “Friday at 5″ view of digital humanities to those new to the field, or those who don't have time to read many blogs or tweets. This week I saw a tweet from Tom Scheinfeldt (blog|Twitter) (who in turn saw a tweet from James Neal) about a new service called Twittertim.es, which creates a real-time publication consisting of articles highlighted by people you follow on Twitter. I had a thought: what if I combined the activities of several hundred digital humanities scholars with Twittertim.es?

Digital Humanities Now is a new web publication that is the experimental result of this thought. It aggregates thousands of tweets and the hundreds of articles and projects those tweets point to, and boils everything down to the most-discussed items, with commentary from Twitter. A slightly longer discussion of how the publication was created can be found on the DHN “About” page.

Does the process behind DHN work? From the early returns, the algorithms have done fairly well, putting on the front page articles on grading in a digital age, bringing high-speed networking to liberal arts colleges, Google's law archive search, and (appropriately enough) a talk on how to deal with streams of content given limited attention. Perhaps Digital Humanities Now will show a need for the light touch of a discerning editor. This could certainly be added on top of the raw feed of all interest items (about 50 a day, out of which only 2 or 3 make it into DHN), but I like the automated simplicity of DHN 1.0.

Despite what I'm sure will be some early hiccups, my gut is that some version of this idea could serve as a rather decent new form of publication that focuses the attention of those in a particular field on important new developments and scholarly products. I'm not holding my breath that someday scholars will put an appearance in DHN on their CVs. But as I recently told an audience of executive directors of scholarly societies at an American Council of Learned Societies meeting, if you don't do something like this, someone else will.

I suppose DHN is a prod to them and others to think about new forms of scholarly validation and attention, beyond the journal. Ultimately, journals will need the digital humanities more than we need them.

Digital Campus #45 – Wave Hello

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:34 GMT

If you've wondered what an academic trying to podcast while on Google Wave might sound like, you need listen no farther than the latest Digital Campus podcast. In addition to an appraisal of Wave, we cover the FTC ruling on bloggers accepting gifts (such as free books from academic presses), the great Kindle-on-campus experiment, and (of course) another update on the Google Books (un)settlement. Joining Tom, Mills, and me is another new irregular, Lisa Spiro. She's the intelligent one who's paying attention rather than muttering while watching Google waves go by. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Workshop on APIs for the Digital Humanities

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:49 GMT

Longtime readers of this blog may remember that one of my first posts examined the potential role for APIs (application programming interfaces) in the humanities. It's also been a long-running theme in this space that APIs can play a critical role in digital research and tool-building. So I'm very much looking forward to this weekend's workshop on APIs for the digital humanities in Toronto sponsored by NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment. Like others, I'll be tweeting the conference @dancohen using the hashtag #apiworkshop.

Digital Campus #44 – Unsettled

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:14 GMT

The latest edition of the Digital Campus podcast marks a break from the past. After three years of our small roundtable of Tom, Mills, and yours truly, we pull up a couple of extra seats for our first set of “irregulars,” Amanda French and Jeff McClurken. I think you'll agree they greatly enliven the podcast and we're looking forward to having them back on an irregular basis. On the discussion docket was the falling apart of the Google Books settlement, reCAPTCHA, Windows 7, and the future of libraries. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Crowdsourcing Manuscript Transcription

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 06:49 GMT

Gregory D. Massey's 2005 article in The Public Historian, “The Papers of Henry Laurens and Modern Historical Documentary Editing”, is a case study that traces the changes in historical editing over the last forty years. Though, “the Laurens Papers adopted a method that was more labor intensive than verification procedures at many projects.” (p. 50), the transcription process of colonial-era document collections is overwhelmingly time consuming.

Massey explains that, “Over the past twenty years, the Laurens Papers' difficulties in maintaining a staff and producing volumes in the face of budget constraints mirror the problems faced by other projects as federal support for documentary editing has decreased or remained stagnant. ” (p. 1) The publication of documentary editions of first-tier, priority designated projects like the papers of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Adams family, struggled far less for financial support, but they too required decades to accomplish.

Though a incorporation of the public into the transcription process of colonial-era manuscript collections is unprecedented, other projects have successfully employed crowd sourcing online. The most prominent large scale projects are related to the USGenWeb Project. “The USGenWeb Digital Library (Archives) was developed to present actual transcriptions of public domain records on the Internet. This huge undertaking is the cooperative effort of volunteers who either have electronically formatted files on census records, marriage bonds, wills, and other public documents, or are willing to transcribe this information to contribute. ”

An early standout smaller scale project is the Colorado Rivebed Case (completed almost 10 years ago), which incorporated volunteers with their own resources into their OCR project. In an online environment, OCR projects are easier to outsource to the public than manuscript transcription. Massey's article reflects the intense level of verification procedures that accompany traditional archival techniques and it is likely this strain of thought that has prevented the archival community from actively engaging in conversations concerning crowd sourcing and transcription.

“The Interactive Archivist: Case Studies in Utilizing Web 2.0 to Improve the Archival Experience” on The Society of American Archivists website provides a useful summary of the interests of the archivists in social networking and the usefulness of tagging, commenting/reviewing and rating services, but does not mention strategies for incorporating users into the archival process at the transcription or description level that remains the domain of archivists. In, “Archives of the People, by the People for the People”, published in the Fall 2007 American Archivist, Max J. Evans, “introduces the concept of commons-based peer-production as a means of turning collections inside out. It encourages archival institutions to reinvent themselves, and, in collaboration with other archives and with other types of organizations, to organize archival work in concert with a curious and interested public.” The public image of the Association for Documentary Editing seems more conservative in regards to technology. The only hint of community involvement consists of an invitation to join The Scholarly Editing Forum (SEDIT-L).

Andrea Odiorne

leads generated by a Spellbound Blog post.

Digital Campus #43 – Summer Wrap-up

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:19 GMT

Hopefully it doesn't sound this way to our audience, but it's harder than one might imagine to put together a regular podcast. Due to our very busy schedules and some happy and sad events over the past few months, Mills, Tom, and I just weren't able to find the time this summer to record a Digital Campus. But we return with renewed energy this week with episode 43 of the podcast, covering a lot of news and views. Get ready for commentary on the Google Books settlement, Google Wave, new ebook readers, and the real-time web as the Digital Campus podcast sharpens its #2 pencils for the new school year. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Moving forward

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:56 GMT

It's time to restart the blog. The History and New Media class last year taught me a couple of things. I should not be working solely in new media, at least with respect to history. It's too much like my day job. I cannot escape it, and I will use New Media tools and techniques, [...]

Departure from Dulles Airport

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:41 GMT

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Help Us Create the Future

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 04:30 GMT

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University is celebrating fifteen years of providing high-quality, free educational resources and tools to an audience that grows exponentially each year. Last year, sixteen million people visited CHNM’s websites and over two million people used our software.

The historians and technologists at CHNM feel lucky to serve this vast audience, but although all of our tools and resources are free, they are not without cost. With your help we hope to continue our service and innovation for another fifteen years and beyond. The National Endowment for the Humanities has given CHNM a rare challenge grant, which will match donations to CHNM’s endowment for a limited time.

Whether you use CHNM’s popular Zotero software for your research, get your daily fix from the History News Network, learn from award-winning sites such as Historical Thinking Matters and Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives, or scan through unique digital archives such as the Papers of the War Department, we hope you will make a contribution today. Your tax-deductible gift will help us to reach even more students, teachers, and scholars worldwide.

To make your donation right now, please visit:

http://chnm.gmu.edu/donate/

From all of us at the Center for History and New Media, we thank you in advance for helping us, as our motto says, “Build a Better Yesterday, Bit by Bit.”

UPDATE: An anonymous donor has stepped forward who will match the NEH's match for the month of June, up to $15,000. So now is a terrific time to contribute and stretch your donation even further!

Gearing up for summer and THATcamp

Fri, 29 May 2009 05:59 GMT

Ahoy bloggers! I failed miserably to keep up with my blog last sememster. But today is a new day and I'm thrilled to be preparing for the upcoming THATcamp un-conference.

check it out: http://thatcamp.org/

Amanda French has posted a geat topic- I'm really interested in being around for this dicussion.

http://thatcamp.org/2009/05/digital-history-across-the-curriculum/

Final Project

Mon, 11 May 2009 16:52 GMT

So, my project is done. Well, it isn't exactly done, but I feel that I completed what I set out to do. I added more items than I expected and did a lot less with the videos than I had planned. I was a little frustrated by using a content management system at first, because I spent a great deal of time trying to understand how some of the PHP functioned work and identifying divs. But when it came to inputting content, I was very glad to be using Omeka. The exhibit builder plugin was a real help.

Though I was concentrating mostly on the senses of sight and sound (my “content” that was produced before the course was on visual history), I was able to provide short video clips Micheal O'Malley on smell and taste. I also provided information and links on smell, taste and touch.

So I am finished since it is almost midnight, but I still have to work on the site. I promised the interviewees an email with a link. I am going to have to vastly improve the videos by then. They would have been much more elaborate, but I am such a lousy narrator that I just couldn't do much. I will have to rope some voice talent in if I am going to finish this project. Is anyone interested?

Finished product

Mon, 11 May 2009 07:30 GMT

I am all done with my project (or at least I have to be as it is due today, right?) Building a site is time-consuming. Understatement of the year I know, but seriously I think that has been kind of surprising to me. Every time I go to my site I think “Oh, I could change that just a little bit and make it look better or sound better” It's like it's never actually done because you can always make it better and it seems so “easy” to just change a couple things and update the site. In the end, you've spent countless hours improving something that others may or may not even notice.

Most recently,
- I faded my header image on the right hand side into the background, so now people with larger monitors will not see that rough, finite edge of my image.

- I added padding to my main navigation to make the text more legible. Now that I have done that I also think I have redirected some needed attention on what is important to the site in the first place: directing teacher and student attention to where they need to go to start using the site.

- I finished adding content to each image in my database. I could have added many more images, but that brings me back to my original point that work on a website is never completed.

Website building is tedious. A change you might need to do to your site may not be a major one, but can take hours of figure out and perfecting. My header is a fabulous example of this. I really can't tell you how long I spent on that because I've last track at this point. I will say that although something may be time-consuming, in the end something as simple as fading an image on the right hand side into the background may not sound like a big deal, but it really makes the site look more professional.

And that's the main objective, right? To present something to the public in such a way that it teaches something while also appearing legitimate and scholarly. No one wants to look at a site that is poorly done and reads/appears to have been done by a 10 year old.

I'm pretty proud of the work I've done and know that I have learned a lot about presentation of digital material on a philosophical level as well as on a practical and utilitarian level.

I hope everyone else's projects went well and have a great summer!!

Updated…

Mon, 04 May 2009 08:39 GMT

Alright, so after hours of trying to figure out what the heck was going on with my primary navigation bar, I finally got. So it should be visible in both IE and Firefox….. yea…..

Again, the site can be found here…

Website progress

Sun, 03 May 2009 19:33 GMT

My site is really coming along. At this point I'm just adding a little bit more description to each image I have uploaded. I completely changed my header, which I think helps in carrying the visual aspect I desired for the site as a whole throughout. All in all, I'm pretty happy with everything I've done and think my site is aesthetically pleasing as well as informative. I will be interested to see what you all think of it and whether you agree with me… Here's the link to my site again.

My Website is coming along

Sun, 03 May 2009 17:01 GMT

…My website is coming along! You can see my website has improved immensely since the last time we met in class. Actually, the revisions should be rather minor; I plan to correct the following:

Fix the links for grade level 3-5 and the headings on four of the pages (e.g. Historical Overviews, Lesson Plans, Educational Activities, and Books & Bibliographies). They all connect to the homepage now.
Fix the CSS coding in the footer (for some reason it looks different in Firefox). It looks fine on IE.
Trying to decide whether to include the external links on the homepage. It's not required as part of my project scope for this assignment, but may do so anyway. Any thoughts one way or another?

I appreciate comments and suggestions!

Plug-in along, or should I say web-in along?

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:48 GMT

Just checking in with everyone…thanks for your comments!

Since the HTML/CSS Mock-ups Presentations on Monday I have been “web-in along” with my website revisions, based on the your comments and my own. I have been working on the header image, the homepage photographs, and other doo-dads in need of correction. No major hold-ups so far. But with the end of the semester, and a paper to write and I am trying to do a little bit each day. This includes required HTML and CSS coding for drop-down menus, proper font colors, font sizes, and page alignment.

Well, I have got to get back to the “drawing board”, as they say.

HTML and CSS thingy

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:01 GMT

Alright so I have been working away on this and I think the most frustrating thing is that I can spend hours and hours on something really dumb and no one will ever know that I spent an entire afternoon doing it. One thing I have been trying to figure out is how to make the font size larger in the simple pages. I must have gone to several different sites and they all said that the code was (numbers varying according to how large you want the font). Well THAT wasn't working. So then I found another site that said I had to have a + in front of the number. So I did that. Nothing. Well to make a long story short (too late, I know) I finally figured out that there is just supposed to be a space between font and size and no – mark. So I got it working. What seemed like it should have been so easy ended up being more difficult than I thought it would be.

The other thing I spent forever on was building a decent timeline using a table. I went to several sites and their timelines were really cool, but my skills are not at the level these sites were at and unfortunately I really couldn't figure out how they performed their magic. I WAS able to manipulate one site using Fire Bug (I heart that firefox plugin by the way) and came up with what you see now on my site.

Comments are welcome. Let me know what you think. I will be showing the main page, Teachers, Timeline, and Why Classical pages in class.

I will be interested to see what you all think of the color chage I made from the plain gray to the pale red color.

HTML and CSS Mockups

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:15 GMT

I am happy to report that I didn't have any CSS issues that forced me to change my design mockups. I did however make some changes to the design due to some comments from Jeremy and Trevor. I agree with Sharon that this has been the most challenging assignment so far. And though I wouldn't call my product bulletproof, my CSS validates. The major changes include the header, footer and navigation.

Header: I changed the logo to call more attention to the movie reel icon by making my black underline smaller. I spent a lot of time working with the gif transparency. I ended up with an okay product, but in the end I didn't even need it.
Footer: It was suggested that the navigation image of people listening to the radio was visually detracting from my primary navigation, but that it was a good image and should be used elsewhere. I decided to use it as the footer, covering the text that came with the image with my copyright info. I had a more trouble using this image as a transparency, particularly when it was larger. The image was also very tall and narrow for a footer. Then I realized I could cut and paste the wave images, widening the image considerably.
When I widened the image I felt that the overall design was too lose, and lacked geometrical appeal. I still feel this way, but I made what I believe is an improvement by making color blocks for the header and footer. I used a lighter image background for these because I also thought it was a little too dark.
Navigation: I moved the navigation on the home page to inline navigation below the video essay image links. I spent a lot of time tweeking this and I am still not finished. I don't really understand but I had to make the ul background wider than the content area for the background to go all the way across. I also adding a lot of padding the the li elements to make them sit on the background the way I wanted. I think I probably did this the hard way. I will probably look into an easier way when I move over to Omeka.
Since I feel like the design is flat, I tried a lot of gradient layers for the navigation bar background image and shadows and all kinds of things. They all looked terrible so I moved on. Also, it would look strange for one lone element to have texture or color fading styles when nothing else does.

Conclusion: I really learned a lot. I found making changes addictive and actually pretty fun. I know where top, right, bottom, and left are. I spent over an hour trying to right align the ‘download script' link with an inline a element and fixed positioning and finally used a span with left padding. It worked.

I don't think my site really looks like a professional site, it is flat and pretty over-simplified. But I think I got a lot done, with just a little bit of knowledge and it is very encouraging. I need to add a script for the text roll-overs on the home page. I played around with some things, but couldn't quite get it ready for tonight's presentation.

Mockups

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:17 GMT

Based on the feedback I got from the class, I made some minor adjustments to the original logo/header. Subsequently, I reduced the verbiage in the subtitle and selected a different image of the newspaper. Belatedly, I came to the realization that the newspaper image I had originally selected was prior to my grandparent's ownership of the Herald. Now that I descovered this problem, I made the necessary change to the logo/header.

The WordPress template made the application of these changes much easier for an individual with my skill set. While I don't consider the process I had to endure to apply these design changes and edit the code particularly easy, the mere fact that I was able to accomplish it speaks directly to the value of a CMS for me. My confidence with WordPress is growing daily.

HTML and CSS Mock-Ups

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 15:57 GMT

Well, I would have to say that this assignment has been the most challenging for me! Although I have made some headway using HTML and CSS for my three mock-ups, I still have a long way to go. And this is a good time to mention that I have basically started from scratch when it comes to my website. I am no longer using the Autumn theme in Omeka, and writing the codes without the benefit of a “theme template.” Jeremy and I decided this would be the best option considering my evolving website design.

Looking at my HTML and CSS mock-up pages you can see that I have inserted all of my original layout components, but having difficulty positioning the search box and navigation links on top to span the entire homepage; in addition to figuring out the proper spacing and dimensions as per my “revised” website concept. Also, I haven't been able to figure out how to get the Colonial Architecture title situated on the background image for each page. Please keep in mind that because of the spacing and the lack of alignment at this point, there is a lot of empty space and random placement of text . I plan to change the blue and purple (automatic colors that I do not want) hyperlinks to match the other existing colors as specified in my wireframe mock-ups; move the (3) photographs over to the right side of athe page along with the text; add a sidebar to the Native American page with the state-recognized tribes and two other ethnic groups; and add a horizontal band of color (gold to match navigation links) to the footer and move the footer text to the right. I also would like to add a print capability to all of the “Resources” pages.

As I proceeded with my design, I decided to make a few minor changes on my pages that I believe will improve overall website navigation for a more user-freindly approach to teachers, as follows; 1) changed the top navigation links (historical overviews and glossaries, lesson plans, etc.) to reflect the educational resources on architecture; 2) provided the website specific information links (copyright, tools, etc. in the footer only; 3) removed the descriptive paragraphs/text on the three photographs; 4) removed additional lines to make the page less restrictive and confined; 4) eliminated “browse photos” in the navigation links because I have “primary sources” that will cover photos, maps, artifacts, etc. and it would be redundant.

To say the least, I still have alot of work to do for the final project to resolve the above mentioned issues, as well as fine -tuning my CSS page. I am open to any helpful hints!

Interesting Article and Blog

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 07:42 GMT

An interesting article in the current issue of Historically SpeakingBulletin of the Historical Society (http:/www.bu.edu/historic) by Professor Marshall Poe entitled “Fighting Bad with Good, or, Why Historians must get on the Web Now.” Title speaks for itself. I cannot find a link for the article because it appears in the current edition of the paper (April 2009). I am sure that our library has a subscription or you can get to it through the electronic databases.

Additionally, check out their blog found at http://histsociety.blogspot.com/ for some interesting commentary about some of the issues we have been discussing of late in class.

Alan