Clio Wired Fall 2008

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/

Digital Campus #42 – The Real World

Thu, 21 May 2009 13:10 GMT

This week's podcast looks at the fake, the real, the copies, and the bizarre: fake journals from Elsevier, the MPAA telling teachers to film their TVs, the University of Michigan asking for real uses for its copies of Google's book scans, and Wolfram Alpha's use of sources. Mills and I also give Tom a parenting quiz appropriate to the digital age. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Zotero 2.0 Is Here!

Thu, 14 May 2009 15:21 GMT

After an extensive development and testing period and the addition of even more features to make academic research easier, more collaborative, and ready for the future, Zotero 2.0 went public tonight. I'll be blogging extensively about Zotero 2.0 in this space over the coming weeks and months as it continues to develop, but here's a quick list of what you get with the major upgrade:

Syncing

Automatic synchronization of collections among multiple computers. For example, sync your PC at work with your Mac laptop and your Linux desktop at home.
Free automatic backup of your library data on Zotero’s servers.
Automatic synchronization of your attachment files to a WebDAV server (e.g. iDisk, Jungle Disk, or university-provided web storage).

People

Zotero users get a personal page with a short biography and the ability to list their discipline and interests, create an online CV (simple to export to other sites), and grant access to their libraries.
Easily find others in one's discipline or researchers with similar interests.
Follow other scholars—and be followed in return.

Groups

Create and join public and private groups on any topic.
Access in real time new research materials from your groups on the web or in the Zotero interface.
Easily move materials from a group stream into your personal library.

Even More Functionality That Makes Your Research Easier

Automatic detection of PDF metadata (i.e., author, title, etc.).
Automatic detection and support for proxy servers.
Trash can with restore item functionality so you don't accidentally lose important materials.
Rich-text notes.
A new style manager allowing you to add and delete CSLs and legacy style formats.

As always, the real credit for Zotero goes to what Roy Rosenzweig aptly called “The People Who Did the Work”: Zotero co-director Sean Takats; lead developer Dan Stillman; developers Simon Kornblith, Jon Lesser, Faolan Cheslack-Postava, Fred Gibbs, Matt Burton; community lead Trevor Owens; integration advisor Raymond Yee; assistant Andrew Howard; and the scores of people beyond the Center for History and New Media who made contributions large and small to this open source project.

Zotero 2.0 was created with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Idealism and Pragmatism in the Free Culture Movement

Tue, 12 May 2009 13:01 GMT

[A review of Gary Hall's Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Appeared in the May/June 2009 issue of Museum.]

Beginning in the late 1970s with Richard Stallman’s irritation at being unable to inspect or alter the code of software he was using at MIT, and accelerating with 22-year-old Linus Torvalds’s release of the whimsically named Linux operating system and the rise of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, with its emphasis on openly available, interlinked documents, the free software and open access movements are among the most important developments of our digital age.

These movements can no longer be considered fringe. Two-thirds of all websites run on open source software, and although many academic resources remain closed behind digital gates, the Directory of Open Access Journals reports that nearly 4,000 publications are available to anyone via the Web, a number that grows rapidly each year. In the United States, the National Institutes of Health mandated recently that all articles produced under an NIH grant—a significant percentage of current medical research—must be available for free online.

But if the movement toward shared digital openness seems like a single groundswell, it masks an underlying tension between pragmatism and idealism. If Stallman was a seer and the intellectual justifier of “free software” (“free” meaning “liberated”), it was Torvalds’s focus on the practical as well as a less radical name—“open source”—that convinced tech giant IBM to commit billions of dollars to Linux starting in the late 1990s. Similarly, open access efforts like the science article sharing site arXiv.org have flourished because they provide useful services—including narcisstic ones such as establishing scientific precedent—while furthering idealistic goals. Successful movements need both Stallmans and Torvalds, as uneasily as they may coexist.

Gary Hall’s Digitize This Book! clearly falls more on the idealistic side of today’s open movements than the pragmatic side. Although he acknowledges the importance of practice—and he has practiced open access himself—Hall emphasizes that theory must be primary, since unlike any particular website or technology theory contains the full potential of what digitization might bring. He pursues this idealism by drawing from the critical theory—and the critical posture—of cultural studies, one of the most vociferous antagonists to traditional structures in higher education and politics.

Hall’s book is less accessible than others on the topic because of long stretches involving this cultural theory, with some chapters rife with the often opaque language developed by Jacques Derrida and his disciples. Digitize This Book! gets its name, of course, from Abbie Hoffman’s 1971 hippie classic, Steal This Book, which provided practical advice on a variety of uniformly shady (and often illegal) methods for rebelling against The Man. But Digitize This Book! reads less like a Hoffmanesque handbook for the digital age and more like a throw-off-your-chains political manifesto couched in academic lingo.

Those unaccustomed to the lingo and associated theoretical constructions might find the book offputting, but its impressive intellectual ambition makes Digitize This Book! an important addition to a growing literature on the true significance of digital openness. Hall imagines open access not merely in terms of the goods of universal availability and the greater dissemination of knowledge, but as potentially leading to energetic opposition to the “marketization and managerialization of the university,” that is, the growing approach by administrations to treat universities as businesses rather than as places of learning and free intellectual exchange—a development that has upset many, including well beyond cultural studies departments. Similar worries, of course, cloud cultural heritage institutions such as museums and libraries.

Despite his emphasis on theory, Hall knows that any positive transformation must ultimately come from effective action in addition to advocacy. As Stallman unhappily discovered after starting the Free Software Foundation in 1985 and working for many years on his revolutionary software called GNU, it was Torvalds, a clever tactician and amiable community builder rather than theoretician or firebrand, who helped (along with others of similar disposition) to break open source into the mainstream by finding pathways for his Linux operating system to insinuate itself into institutions and companies that normally might have rejected the mere idea of it out of hand.

Hall does understand this pragmatism, and much to his credit he has real experience with creating open access materials rather than simply thinking about how they might affect the academy. He is a co-founder of the Open Humanities Press, a founder and co-editor of the open access journal Culture Machine, and is director of CSeARCH, an arXiv.org for cultural studies.

Yet Hall sees his efforts as ongoing “experiments,” not the final (digital) word. Indeed, he worries that his compatriots in the open access and open source software movements are congratulating themselves too early, and for accomplishing lesser goals. Yes, open source software has made significant inroads, Hall acknowledges, but it has also been “coopted” by the giants of industry, as the IBM investment shows. (The book would have benefited from a more comprehensive analysis of open source, especially in the Third World, where free software is more radically challenging the IBMs and Microsofts.) Similarly, Hall claims, open access journals are flourishing, but too often these journals merely bring online the structures and strictures of traditional academia.

Here is where Hall’s true radicalism comes to the fore, building toward a conclusion with more expansive aims (and more expansive words, such as “hypercyberdemocracy” and “hyperpolitics”). He believes that open access provides a rare opportunity to completely rethink and remake the university, including its internal and external relationships. Paper journals ratified what and who was important in ways we may not want to replicate online, Hall argues. Even if one disagrees with his (hyper)politics, Hall’s insight that new media forms are often little more than unimaginative digital reproductions of the past, which bring forward old conventions and inequities, seems worthy of consideration.

A wag might note at this point that Digitize This Book! is oddly not itself available as a digital reproduction. (As part of the research for this review, I looked in the shadier parts of the Internet but could not locate a free electronic download of the book, even in the shadows.) Other recent books on the open access movement are available for free online (legally), including James Boyle’s The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press) and John Willinsky’s The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (MIT Press). Drawing attention to this disconnect is less a cheap knock against Hall than a recognition that the actualization of open access and its transformative potential are easier said than done.

Assuming things will not change overnight and that few professors, curators, or librarians are ready to move, like Abbie Hoffman, to a commune (though many might applaud the lack of administrators there), the key questions are, How does one take concrete steps toward a system in which open access is the normal mode of publishing? Which structures must be dissolved and which created, and how to convince various stakeholders to make this transition together?

These are the kinds of practical—political—questions that advocates of open access must address. Gary Hall has helpfully provided the academic purveyors of open access much food for thought. Now comes the difficult work of crafting recipes to reach the future he so richly imagines.

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!

The Spider and the Web: Results

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:49 GMT

A couple of weeks ago at the Digital Dilemmas Symposium in New York I tried something new: using Twitter to replicate digitally the traditional “author's query,” where a scholar asks readers of a journal for assistance with a research project. I believe the results of this experiment are instructive about the significant advantages—and some disadvantages—for academia of what has come to be known as crowdsourcing.

For those who didn't follow this experiment live via Twitter, you should first read the two initial posts in this series. The experiment was fairly simple: I prepared followers of my blog and my Twitter feed (as of this writing I have roughly the same number of blog subscribers and Twitter followers, about 1,600 on each service) by noting that I would reveal a historical puzzle at a particular time. At the beginning of my talk in New York, my blog auto-posted the scan of an object found in a Victorian archaeological dig, which I simultaneously tweeted.

I asked those following me online to work together to figure out what the object was. Participants in the experiment could post live comments on Twitter, and others could follow along by searching for the #digdil09 hashtag. (A hashtag is a hopefully unique string of characters that enables a search of Twitter to reveal all comments at a specific conference or on a particular subject.) I encouraged everyone to talk to each other and leverage each other's knowledge. In addition, I set up what in the age of the print journal would have been a ridiculous deadline: only one hour for the crowd to solve the mystery. For a bit of theater (”stunt lecturing”?) I flashed the Twitter stream behind me from time to time during my talk.

It took much less time than an hour for a solution: nine minutes, to be exact, for a preliminary answer and 29 minutes for a fairly rich description of the object to emerge from the collective responses of roughly a hundred participants. Solution: the object was an ornamental gorget from the Cahokia tribe.

What happened along the way was as interesting as the result (which I have to admit was rather satisfying given the possibility of a live crowd in NYC laughing at me for using Twitter). First, Twitter was remarkably effective in multiplying my voice. Indeed, in the first five minutes about a dozen others on Twitter retweeted (rebroadcast) my mystery to their followers. This “Twitter multiplier effect” meant that within minutes many thousands of people got word of my experiment; over 1,900 actually viewed the object on my blog. And I'm lucky enough to have a particularly knowledgeable crowd following me on Twitter, as you can see from the word cloud of my followers' bios.

Once the race was on, solvers took two distinct paths toward a solution. The first path was the one I was trying to encourage: some quick thoughts about facets of the object, followed by scholarly debate. I mentioned that the object was made out of shell but was found far away from water in the Midwest (of the U.S.), which led to some interesting speculation about origins and movement of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans. Others focused on the iconography of the spider; what could it symbolize and which cultures used it? These were decent lines of inquiry that one could imagine in the back pages of a Victorian journal.

Twitter is mocked for its almost comical terseness, but even the most hardened Twitter skeptic must admit tweets such as these are far from useless assistance. And the power of this crowdsourcing is even more evident as you look at the full discussion trail as researchers pick up information from each other to take their speculations a step further.

The experiment was not, however, an unalloyed success, partly due to a mistake I made in setting it up. In hindsight I gave away too much my original post, mentioning St. Clair and the fact that the piece was made out of shell. Alas, Googling keywords such as these (as well as the obvious “spider”) immediately gets one hot on the trail of the solution. It's clear from the stream of tweets that a good portion of the solving audience took the “Google knows all” approach rather than the “scholarly discussion” approach.

I suppose even this aspect of the experiment is not uninteresting; I'll leave it to others in the comments below to discuss the merits of the “Google” approach, as well as the merits (and demerits) of this experiment in general.

[Afterword: As many have pointed out on Twitter, the experiment would have been better had I not posted an object that could be found online. To be honest, I thought I had found an unusual object with no scanned version; it shows how much has been digitized, and how good search is even on a small amount of metadata.]

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!

The Spider and the Web: What Is This?

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 07:50 GMT

In 1882, a young anthropologist from Washington, D.C., went west to collect objects for the Smithsonian. He found this object buried in a small hill in St. Clair county, Illinois. It's about three inches (8 cm) across, and seems to be made of a shell. It has two holes in it.

Confused about what this was, the anthropologist brought the object back and presented it colleagues. I would like to reproduce that activity digitally by presenting the object online, to see what readers of this blog and my followers on Twitter can make of it, individually and by talking to each other. Although you can post some conjectures in the comments on the blog, if you're reading this at 3p Eastern/Noon Pacific/20:00 GMT on Thursday, April 16, 2009, please post ideas via Twitter by @ replying to me or by using the hashtag #digdil09. You only have one hour.

I'll be posting the full results of this experiment in this space in a day or two.

So: What is this?