Clio Wired (History 696)

« August 2005 | Main | October 2005 »

September 30, 2005

Good vs Bad--Liz

BAD: The Feather Trade
GOOD: Tudor History

BAD: The Feather Trade
I wanted to like this site, but there were several flaws. This site was an online version of a 1999 exhibit at the National Museum of American History. The site strives to be basic—and it is … too basic. There is no great analysis; I thought I was merely walking through the exhibit. This would have been fine, if the design were better. On the home page, the font is small and hard to read (the main text on that page is an image, and appears a bit blurry). All pages on the site have huge white spaces, with images and text aligned left on the page. I would have liked to know more about the birds (their characteristics, etc), as well as had some sort interactive game or quiz.

GOOD: Tudor History
Although this site is privately maintained, it is comprehensive and well organized. To begin, the home page is relatively simple. It has an image of a stained glass window, a title, and a comprehensive table of what is available on the site. The font is consistent (Arial), although she includes .gif that reads “Tudor history,” recalling Renaissance-era lettering. She has updated the site recently (20 August 2005), indicating that she takes this site seriously. The rest of the site differs from the home page, but the design is consistent (textured wallpaper, overlaid with a white page and black lettering). The site contains a lot of information about Tudor times—I spent too much time in the section detailing Tudor words.

Posted by ejonese at 09:17 PM | Comments (1)

Web Design - Ammon

Good:
Achievement.org

Bad:
WorldWar1.com

Ugly:
HELLFIRE CORNER

Well, where to begin.....

First off, I'd like to add an OK site to the list. It happens to be the site where I found the three above. While looking for the best history sites, I figured I might find the worst as well. So I searched for "history" and found a link to the "best history sites" on the net. The site itself is decent, and it does have a pretty neat list of sites (I found all of the above from there). That's BestHistorySites.net incase the other link wasn't noticed. :)

Anyhow, the good was good because it is well laid out. You can get to any aspect of the site from any page you are on (ie, the navigation works well, and is well accessible). The color scheme is nice, text on background is easy to read. Just well done.

The bad and ugly suffer from similar ailments. They both employ the "put everything on one long page with no side by side column type of layout" technique. This is common among beginner and novice web page creators. Heck, I probably did the same with mine so many moons ago. Another problem faced by new commers (and portraid beautifully by the ugly site) is the "use a repeated image for the background" error. That's just not a very good practice. It's hard to read the text on such images, and it takes away from the other aspects of the site.

Anyhow, I've tried to keep things nice and clean on my site. Everything is well spaced, the menu is available throughout, there are only a few colors, which are consistent, etc.. (this is of course only talking about the part of my site after the GMU in the URL).

Anyhow, that's what I seen!

Ammon

Posted by ashephe1 at 08:35 PM

Comments are welcome

If anyone is interested, I just revamped the splash page of the online museum I run. It's much cleaner one than I had but I'm sure there is much room for improvement. If anyone has suggestions please send them on to me at: kknoerl@gmu.edu.

There is only one exhibit up at the moment and it's an old one but I have two new ones that are almost done that are much better. If you look at the current exhibit and compare it to the new splash page you'll see the difference in style. If anyone gets REALLY interested I'll show them the link to the test site for a children's exhibit and one for the shipwreck CSS Alabama. I've got thick skin so let me know what you think. I'm here to learn. Thanks.

If you look around the site you'll see the old logo on the underlying pages. I'll slowly replace those as I get time.

Here is the old splash page:

Here is the new one: http://www.uri.edu/mua

Posted by kknoerl at 01:19 PM | Comments (1)

Mills's Really Bad Designs

Hi:

Okay, here are some really bad examples of design from my own personal archive. I had to reload some of these because I'd taken them down long ago (thank goodness):

The oldest is a website from 1998 when I taught at Grinnell College.

Next on the list, in order of newness is a Western Civ syllabus from the fall of 1998 when I'd moved to Texas Tech. Some of the images are long gone from my site...sorry about that, you'll just have to visualize them in your mind...Notice the cool use of colors as you scroll down the page!

Worst of all--an online archive project I tried to do at Texas Tech in 1999. Note the frames!

Next comes another Western Civ syllabus from TTU. Note that attempt to get away from the straight down the page scrolling syllabus. I swear I had more images than just Chuckie Marx.

Next comes a freshman seminar syllabus. At least my images are getting more vibrant. But I'm still addicted to red/blue links.

Then I went through a very unfortunate black screen/white text phase.

I also tried a slightly annoying entry page for one syllabus.

Last, but not least are the more recent syllabi for my Western Civ and Eastern Europe courses. They're better, but still need a lot of work. What I really need is someone who knows what they're doing to clean up my act.

But, as I look back at the progress since 1998, it's not all bad.

Posted by mills at 10:32 AM | Comments (1)

September 29, 2005

Matt's use of good & bad design

Like Meghan, I've added examples of good and bad design from the websites I looked at. Click here to go to my Design page for discussion of what I did.

Posted by mhobbs at 04:27 PM

Amy's Design Finds

Good: http://texashistory.unt.edu/
Needs Work:http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm
Needs Work (not history, but notable): http://www.queencityclub.com/home.htm

I'll be adding this to my website on a page modeled after my "good" example; it should be set up this weekend.

The Portal to Texas History (http://texashistory.unt.edu/site) is quite appealing visually and easy to use. The site is really a “portal” to Texas history archival collections, but shows that a database-type site can be attractive and maintain some of the design ideas suggested in reading. The designs keeps scrolling to a minimum (even on a laptop) and the navigation bar is consistent. There is visual interest without graphics that take a long time to load or are distracting. Further, the red/white/blue color scheme is consistent throughout, especially on the “young scholars” page, which has small (and cute!) bullet graphics that are related to the link, for example cowboy boots and hat for the social life and customs section. Also, the design is clean and simple (therefore easy to replicate), which is especially nice after looking through other eye-straining source search sites.
The Avalon Project (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm) is not a design worth repeating. The internal links are set in a table, which is not a problem in itself, but the background of the table is a rainbow (the analogy I can think of is that it has that anti-freeze look…). This background makes the text difficult to read…and the text is hot linked and creates unnecessary movement on the page. Other text on the page is italicized and also difficult to read. Further, the pages require lots of scrolling. Especially problematic is on the Papers of Andrew Jackson (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/presiden/jackpap.htm) where the useful “search” function is at the bottom of the page, necessitating lengthy scrolling to reach this all-important feature. Even though the design is consistent from page to page, that design is inconsistent and generally unappealing.
And for fun, a Cincinnati business community club, the Queen City Club Restaurant (http://www.queencityclub.com/home.htm) page breaks a few rules too. Check out the graphic effect at the bottom of the page…yeah, that’s stylish.
Amy

Posted by alechne1 at 03:58 PM

My Personal Examples of Good and Bad Web Design

So I guess we're also supposed to show examples of good and bad design on our own sites, so mine can be found here.

I've created a blog to serve as my coursework repository because I figured that's the easiest way to keep with updating stuff. There's a link to it from my Clio page.

Meagan

Posted by mhess3 at 02:44 PM

Examples of good and bad design. -Kurt

Here is an example of a well designed site:

http://www.monitorcenter.org/

Here is a not so well designed site:


http://www.anmm.gov.au/

My example of good design:

The USS Monitor Center web site was produced for the Mariner’s Museum by a professional design shop. While I expected it to look good it quickly struck me as an effective site. It incorporates many of the elements that were mentioned in this week’s design readings. For example the viewer can quickly see who is responsible for the site. In this case the Mariner’s Museum logo is clearly displaced. The site is organized into 3 main sections: Life Aboard An Ironclad, 1861 – Present: The Interactive Story of Monitor, and Preserving An American Icon. Other supporting elements are also present but not in a manner that confuses the viewer. The design clearly indicates what path the designers suggest the viewer should take without forcing them into it. Other useful elements such as a site map and credits are available from this splash screen. And while not available from this first screen updates are posted with regard to the Monitor project.

The supporting pages maintain a consistent look and feel by using the same pleasing color schemes. Navigation around the site is fairly straight forward. Visual clues make it fairly obvious where one is within the site. Despite a being a little busy, the flash animation in the interactive story section actually presents useful information and helps fulfill the mission of educating the viewer rather than just dazzling them. The layout for the Life Aboard an Ironclad section was very attractive and workable though the depth of the content was a little disappointing. The Preserving an American Icon section used the same layout and generally provided much more content. I also appreciated the fact that despite having corporate sponsors and the obligatory gift shop, those elements are not thrust into the foreground to compete with the subject matter.

My example of poor design:

Sigh….where to start. I decided that to be fair I wouldn’t pick any site that appeared to be run by a small group of volunteers trying to get something up on the web in their spare time because I am one of those people and I know that you don’t learn if you don’t do. Not that any of them will read this review but still, that would be too easy. So, I looked for a professional organization of some sort and, trying to stay with my maritime theme here, I picked the Australian Maritime Museum.

The first page literally made me jump back in my chair. I was too close to the monitor and wasn’t prepared for the onslaught. I don’t mind black backgrounds; I’m using one myself for our class website. In this case, however the wavy lines of bright blue and black combined with 4 different colors, sizes, and fonts of text and the other images combine for a total of 8 different colors blazing forth in all their glory.

I was somewhat at a loss as to where to start due to the competing internal links and the graphics shouting out their offer of free entry. And if you were uncertain what they mean by free entry it is repeated to the right in large text. Just why they use the green symbol as a link to the “WHAT’S NEW” page is unclear. Below that is a dotted line with two arrows separating the top of the page from other internal links. I’m not sure why.

The visual roller coaster ride continues when selecting a link as we go from the dark front page to this:

I counted 4 different internal styles of background for this site which breaks any sense of being on the same site. Internal navigation links while present were often only available at the bottom the pages despite some of them scrolling for extended periods. Some sort of navigation at the top would have been helpful. To be fair they did do a few things well. They do allow you to exit the site, that’s a plus. (ok that was snotty) They do clearly state who they are (perhaps they shouldn’t?) and when the site was last updated. Considering this a site for the Australian government I was surprised how poorly it was designed.

Posted by kknoerl at 01:50 PM

Tai on Design

Disappointing Design: Powersource Native American Art and Education Center
Admirable Design: American Indian Nations

As encouraged by Paula Petrik, the Powersource site has relatively small images and does not take long to load. There aren’t any flashing animations or excessively long pages. However, as discussed by Mike O’Malley, the author of the site seems to have done little with design after loading a basic text document onto the website. On the first page of the site, you can see the haphazardly placed images of organizations who have awarded this website (why, I don't know). Although it does contain information on American Indian art/symbolism, individual pages have less design development than the page you see here. With most of the information though, users interested in learning about any topics discussed would prefer more information and/or links to other sites with more information. Pages appear to be uploaded text documents, with little formatting for web-use. There is not a maintained navigation bar and the only link provided is to return to the main page.

In the American Indian Nations site, it appears a team of designers are involved. The navigation bar remains constant on all pages. Organizations or topics are linked even within paragraphs to direct readers to further resources within the site. One is easily able to see what the resources provided on the site include. Contact information is made clear, as well as tabs on the top-right of the screen for easy movement to involved organizations/sponsors. The site is quick to load while maintaining visual aesthetics. Graphics indicate an experienced designer, who understood how to bolster the text and appeal of the site, without detracting from the information sharing.

Posted by tgerhart at 11:23 AM | Comments (2)

Hit with the Ugly Stick

Don't push the button! The Ugly Love Triangle The Good

Hyperhistory Online

Hyperhistory Online, how do you suck? Let me count the ways. Firstly, the navigation is excreable. There are egregious brown navigation buttons on the left-hand side that, when pushed, bring up information, not in the center frame (frames, ugh) where you would think that information would appear, but in the small frame on the right of the screen. If brown's not your color, you can push on the lovely pastel "color coded" buttons at the bottom of the screen--check out the awesome rollovers!--that will actually make information appear in the center frame. But get out those reading glasses! Hyperhistory online has "over 2,000 files covering 3,000 years of world history" and unfortunately, they present these files in the form of charts and timelines that are not only ridiculously confusing-looking with their miniscule text and their Easter egg color combinations, they also scroll from left to right!

Wait, it gets worse! When you click on one of the tiny timeline cells, it brings up further information--where? you guessed it! The right frame!
Okay, ugliness aside, the structure of this site is just all wrong. Even though the author tells you if you're lost you can "simply click on one of the five round navigation buttons on the left," the buttons make no sense and the left frame and bottom frame buttons both take you to different places so you can't find your way back (or forwards) for that matter. The text is hard to read, not only because it's so small, but because the colors make your eyes bleed. Having information pop up in the right frame instead of the center has the viewer confused, thinking that the link doesn't work because nothing is changing on the main screen.
The author (an architect, haha) explains that "the original concept for a synchronoptic timeline dates back to the time of our journey throughout Asia when I was writing about the histories of Asian cultures for a Swiss newspaper." Well congratulations to him because he has come full-circle; understanding this site is about as easy as reading about Asian cultures in French.

The Triangle Factory Fire
From Cornell University

The Triangle Fire web site's design, as Mike O'Malley would say, harmonizes with its content and with the message it tries to convey. The design is elegant, yet engaging. The text is easy to read and is presented in easy-to-chew chunks. The site is very navigable (is that a word?) with an easy search function and is a fully-functional hypertext, with links to resources interspersed throughout (but in a way that complements the site without distracting). The images are integrated into the text in a way that makes sense and doesn't detract; clicking on the images will bring you into a javascript window slideshow. The one suggestion I would make would be to switch the link color from default blue to a "hot color" (ala O'Malley)--this would fit in not only with the design scheme, but also obviously with the content of the site.

Posted by mhess3 at 10:27 AM | Comments (1)

September 28, 2005

amanda's narrative on Cronon

William Cronon’s article in JAH, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative” tells the story of postmodern environmental history and postmodern historian’s various methods of narrative discourse. What Cronon is saying is sublimely simple; that history can be told from different viewpoints and that narrative form often breathes life into otherwise meaningless chronologies by pitting human against Mother Nature. Without the human element of the story, we aren’t all that interested in the natural elements. Storms like Rita and Katrina come and go, but without people in the story, who cares? It’s how you tell the story that has some people distressed. But I think history, not just environmental history, has always struggled with the dilemma of how to represent the evidence in such a way that one can be accurate and still show that the facts mean something deeper. Everyone has their own truth to tell.

I believe it is in our nature as humans to create an act, or scene, as Cronon writes, with a beginning, middle, and an end. We humans don’t seem to like things without conclusions, even if they are unfortunate ones, such as Bonnifield’s down spiralling story of the Dust Bowl. We are therefore compelled to create history in some capacity. We cannot simply repeat the dates or order of events and then dismiss them. We need context and conclusion in order to care. We choose what to leave in, what to leave out, with care, sympathy, accuracy and necessary detail. We each paint the picture we want our audience to see.
It has been said, however, that as historians we must earnestly try not to impose ourselves; our political views, personal grievances, preclusions, etc., on history such as to “create” it. But this avoidance of creating our own history is not really possible, and it negates the “humanness” of history. As sensitive creatures in a dynamic world, our viewpoints alter over time. As generations pass we can no longer hold fast to ideas and mores that were preferable, if not fashionable, some time ago. We can only see history through our own unique and time appropriate lens. Therefore, we have something original to offer in the making of history; another monograph to be considered along with the many versions and viewpoints of the same subject. In telling our own stories, we are history.
Ideally each historian is able to arrive at a new conclusion; one that has been carefully researched and thought out, and is well written. My version will certainly be no better or worse than another’s, but will be unique and should stand together proudly with the others. I’m not saying it will be easy, and perhaps it will take me four drafts as it did Cronon, but I’m looking forward to telling my own story.

Posted by avonargy at 07:48 PM

For Tai - a diagram of my CSS

If you stripped all the text and images from my site, you'd have something that looks like the above. The container called "nonFooter" holds everything except the container "Footer." Inside "nonFooter" are two containters - "mainbox," which is floated left, and "rightimage," which is floated right. Inside "mainbox," there are two more containers - "nav," floated left, and "content," floated right.

Red = nonFooter
Yellow = mainbox
Blue = nav
Purple = content
Green = rightimage
Gray = footer

When I was playing around with the CSS, before I typed anything in, I gave each container a different, bright background color so I could see the website as just blocks of color. It helped a lot.

Posted by mhobbs at 06:30 PM | Comments (1)

I'm Famous!

From Rosenzweig and Cohen, chapter 2:

"Stephen Railton’s Mark Twain in His Times website received similar nonmonetary support from within the University of Virginia (UVA), including designated graduate research assistants to update it."

That was me! (or, I was one of them, I guess is the technical way to say it) Look at some of the fun stuff I had to do:
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/marketin/spiel.html Recognize my voice?

You never know where I'll pop up next,
Meagan

Posted by mhess3 at 05:18 PM

"Stop! My eyes!" - Matt on website design

My example for bad website design:

The Media History Project

Good website design:

The Journal of American History

The Media History Project, hosted by the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is a web design train wreck. For starters, the entry page consists of a Flash animation composed of cheesy clip art, complete with ridiculous soundtrack, which lasts almost a minute. To have your eyes and ears abused, click here. For those of you with a dial-up connection, or if you prefer to take my word for the quality of the Flash, you can go directly to the index page here.

Once you (finally) arrive at said index page, the reader is a assailed by the layout and colors of the site. The header is a competently composed image, but the main article on the page (a story about the “Dick and Jane” primer) is titled with plain Times New Roman text on a block of turquoise background color. The surfer is confused by dual navigation bars, on the left and right of the main content. Note that the first three buttons on the left nav bar don’t even match – “Search the Project” and “About the Project” are both white-on-black buttons, but “Advisory Boards” floats by itself as a simple link. The layout method appears to be based upon tables, although the site does use a CSS file.

On my browser, the menu on the right hand side overlaps the right-hand column of text from the Dick & Jane article. That article also has a very annoying bunch of blue borders at seemingly random places. The “meat” of the site are the Net links in the right-side menu, giving the surfer resources elsewhere on the Web that deal with the history of various media, such as television, comics, print, and computing. Each media type has its own webpage, but the layout and design between these pages are not consistent. Overall, a very flawed site. To be fair, the copyright notice is from 1996, but some content was updated as late as 2002, and the University of Minnesota is still maintaining the site.

A site with very good design belongs to the Journal of American History. The clean, elegant layout is complemented by well-chosen, muted colors and limited use of graphics.

The HTML code reads well, and although the site has a hybrid layout composed of both tables and CSS, it works well and never clogs the browser. A horizontal navigation bar across the top, beneath the header image, guides the user through the site. Pages with self-explanatory names such as “Issues,” “Web Projects,” and “About the JAH” provide information on the site’s structure without guesswork on the part of the user. New pages maintain the same header and color scheme, with left hand menus opening that allow the user to go further into the site. The main navigation bar stays in place so the surfer is never lost. All images also have alt tags that let a browser surfing without images to still navigate the site easily. It’s clear what everything does and where to find what you’re looking for. None of the windows ever require the user to scroll down more than a few clicks of the mouse, as well. A very good site.

Posted by mhobbs at 05:16 PM | Comments (3)

Matt's Web Design Diary, Part the second

Finally got that pesky footer problem licked. Cleaned up the CSS some more, removed some things I had hidden as comments, etc.

Click here to see the latest version of the site.

Click here to see the CSS. Warning: if you have Dreamweaver installed, clicking on my CSS link will launch the program. Plan for any processor slowdowns accordingly.

My thanks to Ammon, who gave me some suggestions on positioning of the footer.

Posted by mhobbs at 10:47 AM | Comments (1)

Non-happy hour

For those who might not have seen this:

The next meeting of the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies will take place on Friday, October 7, from 3:30 to 5:00 pm in the Woodrow Wilson Room (LJ-113), in the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. Michael Dirda will offer opening remarks and lead a discussion entitled "Reading in the Age of the Internet." The presentation and discussion will treat the topic broadly, spanning reading and issues related to reviewing, publishing, and journalism in our electronic age. Members are encouraged to come with questions.

Dr. Michael Dirda (Comparative literature, Cornell University), is a prize-wining columnist for the Washington Post Book World. His publications include Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments (Indiana hardcover, 2000; Norton paperback, 2003); his self-portrait of the reader as a young man, An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland (Norton, 2003); and , most recently, Bound to Please (Norton, 2004).

Please join us for Michael Dirda's discussion session and for dinner afterwards.

The Jefferson Building is located between First and Second Streets, SE in the District of Columbia. Nearest metro stops are Capitol South (blue and orange lines) and Union Station (red line).
For further information, consult the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies website at

http://www.wcupa.edu/_academics/sch_cas.eng/wagpcs.htm, or contact
Sabrina Baron, Eric Lindquist, and Eleanor Shevlin at
booksumcp@umd.edu.

Posted by kalbers at 10:05 AM

Evolving Rubrics

Hi:

It seems to me we are starting to evolve some rubrics in this class and that it might be worth recording them for posterity, or at least for ourselves.

Here's what I've got so far. Feel free to add, modify, disagree, etc.

"Scholarship" must be:

Original
Based on research
Peer reviewed
Public

"Narratives" must be (as per Nona):

Coherent
Plausible
Internally consistent

Next comes "good design", no?

Posted by mills at 10:00 AM | Comments (1)

September 26, 2005

Happy Hour?

So when is the all-class happy hour? This needs serious attention. Its part of Kelly's drinking culture research.

Posted by tgerhart at 08:09 PM | Comments (5)

I don't believe in isms......

I chose this question because I have avoided philosophy and its theoretical applications for most of my life. The language used to frighten and anger me, but in cutting through its (often unnecessary) obtuseness, I am finding many of these ideas to be very provocative. So, I’ll give this a whirl, even though I am far from confident about my grasp over the tenets of postmodernism and those of the structures it seeks to dismantle. Any comments, criticisms, pitying help would be appreciated (I’m begging here).

Keith Jenkins attempts to lay out the battlefield between traditional and postmodern historians and the respective arguments they make against each other. While Jenkins, as editor of a collection of essays on this subject, asserts that he is writing this introduction because “history students ought to be aware of this situation and ought to take seriously postmodern-type critiques of both upper and lower case histories,” his sympathies seem to be aligned with the postmodernists. He champions their cause and the possibilities postmodern offers in undercutting traditional historical narrative structure.

This would seem to be where he would focus his comments if he were to review William Cronon’s “A Place for Stories.” Cronon nakedly admits the discomfiture postmodernism has caused him, and the wrestling it took to produce his article over the course of five years. In trying to reach a final conclusion, Cronon offers that his “goal throughout has been to acknowledge the immense power of narrative [ie, acknowledge postmodernism contributions with regards to the inherent implications of narratives and metanarratives] while still defending the past (and nature) as real things to which our storytelling must somehow conform lest it cease being history altogether.”(1372) Cronon appreciates some of postmodernisms critiques, but fears to join them he must accept that the past is infinitely malleable, thereby undermining the entire historical project.”(1374)

Jenkins would counter that Cronon’s fears are unfounded, and that postmodernism’s deconstructive qualities present exciting possibilities rather than a devaluation into relative nihilism. He admits that postmodernism deliver son its promise to destroy, in the words of Robert Berkhofer, “the legitimating authority of factuality for history itself according to traditional premises,” and very much allows “historians to tell many equally legitimate stories from various view points, with umpteen voices, emplotments and types of synthesis.”(20) But rather than see this as a destructive force to history making, Jenkins (through Berkhofer) highlights that Cronon is worried because “normal history orders the past for the sake of authority and therefore power.”(20) Ultimately, traditional historical narratives are as constructed as fictions, and only through communal comparison can the relative merits of a historical work be judged.

Cronon would likely agree with this final point, as he himself highlights the importance of peer review. However, he might wonder, what if any, set of values postmodernism might propose to use as a community in assessing historical texts. Moreover, Cronon holds fast in proclaiming “the virtues of narrative as our best and most compelling tool for searching out meaning in a conflicted and contradictory world.” While postmodernisms deconstructions can be alluring, he would likely find them somewhat empty and impotent in presenting a new for

Posted by kalbers at 05:35 PM

Murray vs Manovich

My attempt in comparing the Murray book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, to Manovich's article on What is New Media.

Do you guys see things in hypertext, and that's why you write in it? Is it like thinking in another language once you learn and absorb it? I'm really curious because to me it looks like a lot of extra work. As it is, I use too many words to communicate...

Janet Murray writes about The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace in a creative rather analytical way in Hamlet on the Holodeck. This reflects her background and interests in creating novels, stories, television programs, and movies. She relates to the strong, yet imaginative, character of Captain Janeway of the starship Voyager as she indulges in Victorian fantasies on the ship’s holodeck. Murray earned her PhD from Harvard, and she has worked and taught in and around computers and humanities at MIT. If weighed in a balance, the humanities side would kick in heavier than the digital analog or computer side of Janet Murray’s world. Murray sees the digital world as a medium to create narratives and stories. Computers exist for the sake of their creative uses rather than for the sake of computing. She sees “the most ambitious promise of the new narrative medium is its potential for telling stories about whole systems.”

Murray takes the reader on a light-hearted journey through the art of storytelling from assembly of the first book through Shakespeare, James Joyce, the Perils of Pauline, Gilligan’s Island, and all the way to Star Trek and ELIZA, the computer therapist. The world of computer geeks turned computer gamers and the creators of online soap operas. The technical aspect is secondary to creative possibilities, and the downside of web problems is virtually ignored. She shows us what positive, well-adjusted people can create on the internet and with technology without examining the absolute lack of accountability that can result in very negative uses of the medium. Murray’s view of the future of narrative in cyberspace is partly true but not complete.

Lev Manovich writes that “today we are in the middle of a new media revolution – the shift of all culture to computer-mediated forms of production, distribution, and communication” in his article What is New Media? Manovich’s tone and purpose is very different than Janet Murray while still answering questions about the place of new media in society. Manovich’s article concentrates on the analytical aspects of the subject rather than the creative side. They both lead the reader through the history of computers using punch cards and the changes in creative expression, but Manovich looks at the effect of computer use and development on people and society. He examines the Modularity of computers and their uses and their modulating effect on people and the way they analyze situations comparing the previous method of print mode. New media transforms something into a new format, and the “computerization of culture gradually accomplishes similar transcoding in relation to all cultural categories and concepts. The book narrative is active one way, while the new media is interactive. The user becomes co-author of the work rather than just the receiver of the author’s intentions. Manovich concludes with the idea that mental processes of processing, problem-solving, and recall become externalized through new media as opposed to the thoughtful repose of a book reader. He questions the positive and negative effects of new media on society, and his article is cause for reflection and discussion rather than the rose-colored glass view of Janet Murray. Both articles have merit, but Manovich brings an analytical view that must be addressed in the midst of the revolution.

Posted by scarson1 at 03:54 PM | Comments (3)

Random thoughts on Murray: Geek Poseur?

After I wrote my "official" response, contrasting Manovich and Murray, I reflected upon what had rubbed me the wrong way about Hamlet on the Holodeck. I came up with a few points, which I'll summarize. Read on to find out why I doubt Murray's grasp on the Star Trek franchise, the difference between LARPs and tabletop RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons, and what planet really contained the Rebel base in "The Empire Strikes Back."

1. She chose the wrong Trek! "Voyager" was by far the worst of the post-Roddenberry series. ST:TNG may have had its goofy episodes (Bev Crusher falling in love with a Scottish ghost, anyone?), and ST:DS9 walked a little too close to moral relativism to hold true to Roddenberry's socialist utopia, but ST:V was just ridiculous. The characters were unlikable, the military discipline even more non-existent than in previous shows, and Janeway can't hold a candle to Picard, let alone Kirk. Of course, we won't speak of ST:Enterprise. It is not to be named.

2. In a discussion of deconstructivist narrative, how could she possibly fail to mention Choose Your Own Adventure books? The narrative was already divorced from the linear arrangement of the pages, requiring the interactor to select from certain actions/responses. My favorite was "Space Patrol."

3. Why the preoccupation with MUDs? I remember when they were hot stuff back in the late 1980s, in the bad old days of 2400bps modems and local BBSs you actually had to dial up and log into. From what I recall, the NoVA area had quite to BBS scene - I was a member of several prominent boards, mostly Metaconcert, the Time Zone, and The Flat Earth as Quantum Man and Johnny Realityseed. But MUDs were a very collegiate experience, which may explain Murray's obsession with them. They usually required a better network connection, and so university students had an easier time. They also demanded more programming skill than a kid with a little PASCAL and LOGO under his belt could muster.

4. I'm not sure Murray has a solid grasp of the difference between tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs, such as Dungeons & Dragons or Shadowrun) and Live Action Role-playing Games (LARPs or LRPGs, such as Mind's Eye Theatre, which is itself a spin-off from a TRPG called Vampire: The Masquerade.) Now, I'll be honest - after comics books, my second biggest hobby is the collection of TRPGs. I have over 250 pieces taking up an entire bookshelf, a collection worth almost $3000. I've even written a short scenario booklet (soon to be published) for the GODLIKE RPG from Arc Dream Studios. Thus, Murray's backhanded attack on RPGs on page 82 took me off guard. How can she argue that reading about being locked into the subterranean world world of Zork is a more immersive experience than either a TRPG or LARP? I would guess that Murray has never been involved in a tense session of Cyberpunk:2020, with nothing between her netrunner character and the goons from the Arasaka Corporation but the cruel imagination of her gamemaster. Not immersive, my eye.

5. Finally, Murray blows whatever geek cred she may have earned by misspelling the name of the planet Hoth on page 265. I'm not sure where "Hath" is, but I know for a fact that Han Solo rescued Princess Leia from the ice-planet Hoth while Luke Skywalker led Rogue Squadron in battle against the Imperial AT-ATs.

Posted by mhobbs at 02:56 PM | Comments (1)

Jenkins and Cronon

If Keith Jenkins read William Cronon's article, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative," he would probably criticize Cronon’s choice of the word “story” to connote the narratives produced by historians. Jenkins’ own essay on the historical practice, “Introduction: on being open about our closures,” argues that even the most careful narrative of the past is inseparable from present and personal ideology. Cronon also flirts with this idea, citing the challenge of postmodernism to historical scholarship, and Jenkins would nod in agreement with many of Cronon’s concessions. But Cronon stops short of accepting postmodernism as the new and absolute standard of truth (or nonexistence thereof). His reply to Jenkins would be to point out that the past was at one time real, regardless of how one represents it, and narrative is an intrinsic part of the way humans perceive existence. Therefore narrative is impossible to ignore and, “rather than evade it [historical narrative]… we must learn to use it consciously, responsibly, and self-critically.” (p. 1376)

Taken to their logical conclusion, Cronon would not dispute many of Jenkins’ assertions—that historians interpret history on their own terms and according to their beliefs and experiences, that histories and even the documents they are based on cannot be viewed outside of their contemporary context, that history is inherently self-referential, etc. However, the difficulty of Jenkins’ position is that the brand of extreme postmodernism he uses to challenge the “bourgeois” assumptions of academia offers no allowance for imperfection. Cronon, on the other hand, accepts that he cannot separate himself from the narrative he produces, but still finds validity in an imperfect narrative form that acts as a tool of communicating ideas and finding meaning (even constructed meaning) in the past.

Cronon’s argument raises a key aspect of scholarship and emphasizes the major point of our last class discussion. Without conscious reexamination of the past and its meaning, and continued reevaluation of previous histories, Jenkins’ critique of history as ideology gains more weight. Thus argument, criticism, and debate are at the heart of historical validity, not the false objectivity that haunts Jenkins view of historical narratives.

Posted by miles at 02:52 PM

Matt's Narrative: Manovich v. Murray: FIGHT!

Lev Manovich and Janet Murray both address the future of the narrative form in relation to emerging technologies. Both authors are also eminently well-equipped to do so. Manovich, who has work experience in computer animation along with an M.A. in experimental psychology and a Ph.D. In Visual and Cultural Studies, teaches classes in new media at the University of California, San Diego. Murray earned her Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught humanities and interactive design theory to the engineering students of MIT. For their similarities, however, the two authors reach divergent conclusions on the future of the new media.

Murray argues in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace that the advent of the new media will allow for the cyberbard of the future to tell entirely different kinds of stories, as distinct from print and film as the capabilities of those two media are from each other. Breathlessly peddling the innovative aspects of storytelling in cyberspace, Murray leads the reader through her theme using examples as disparate as Star Trek: Voyager, the graphic sequential art of Mike Baron and Art Spiegelman, the science fiction of Willaim Gibson (originator of the term "cyberspace"), and of course Murray’s own realm of literary criticism. To carry forward Murray’s preoccupation with role-playing and masks, her tone makes her the high priestess preaching to the masses, foretelling not omens of doom but prophecies of a bright, glorious future. In this future cyberdramas will turn the audience into interactors, free to use the flexible technology of the new media to explore the virtual worlds designed for them and find/construct their own plots and resolutions.

Lev Manovich’s approach is different, and certainly more cautious. He examines apparent dichotomies relevant to the new media – information access vs. psychological engagement, data vs. algorithm, database vs. narrative – and reveals their similarities rather than their differences. His sources and topics are strikingly similar to Murray’s; they both address the game TETRIS, for instance. This common ground only serves to throw their differences into relief, however. Where Murray, as the literary analyst, reads the 1990s popularity of the falling-block game as a metaphor for the chaotic lives of postmodern, late twentieth-century players who use their agency within the game to express their inner conflicts, Manovich sees the game “playing” the players by teaching them the algorithm to be successful.

Both Manovich and Murray acknowledge that a new form will emerge. Murray stresses the supremacy of the narrative, confident that above all the new media will be an outlet for storytelling. It will likely be interactive storytelling, but there will be plot nonetheless. Manovich doubts the preeminence of the narrative and lends much weight to the database, the syntagm that Murray largely ignores. For Manovich, the power of the new media is not in the unique forms of expression it may allow, but in the breadth and depth of information available to the narrator/audience/interactor.

While initially quit taken with Murray’s proposal, her argument lost steam for me as I progressed through her book. I read Manovich’s piece with roughly one hundred pages to go in Murray’s book, and found myself siding more and more with the theory of the primacy of the database. Perhaps I am merely an unconverted heathen, too cold of heart to listen to Murray’s gospel of an entirely new media art form to be born out of my desktop. I am more swayed by the weight Manovich places on the database over the narrative. One is not superior to the other, but Murray ignores the database at her own peril. Her experience with IBM punchcards and core dumps may have soured her on the true advantage that vast amount of data storage and collation the new media can lend to narrative, for the positive influence of both.

Posted by mhobbs at 01:20 PM

Kurt: Question #1

All of us are products of our culture and cannot escape the impact our own personal experiences have on our perceptions. Postmodernists argue that because of this we cannot truly write objective history. Historians cannot place themselves into the past and hence can never know what the truth is. William Cronon’s article acknowledges this, to a degree, and its impact on his work as an environmental historian. His article relates the story of his own “struggle to accommodate the lessons of critical theory without giving in to relativism.” It tells the story of his struggle to overcome this. He is uneasy with the shifting theoretical ground he occupies and speaks of frustration and his need for help from the historical community. And yet from the very fact that he does struggle comes the safe harbor he seeks wherein lies the answers to his own questions.

Cronon illustrates how several historians can write about the same event and arrive at different conclusions. For example some historians wrote about how some residents of the Great Plains persevered despite the ecological disaster of a devastating drought. Others wrote about how man may have caused the problem and were short sighted in choosing to farm in that region to begin with. How can one event spawn two different stories? This seems to support the postmodernists’ claim that if events can be seen from so many perspectives then we can never know which one is accurate if any of them are.

Further complicating matters Cronon points out that the historian’s use of narrative imposes a human way of organizing reality onto the natural world such that an event has a beginning, middle, and end. As an environmental historian he is especially concerned with how different people have lived in and used the natural world and is aware of the mechanics of nature. Nature does not have beginnings, middles, and ends, “things in nature just happen.” Many events are not linear such as the cyclical motion of the planets. After acknowledging these problems Cronin begins to find his way back to firmer ground.

He examines narrative and its use in history and suggests that it is so basic to our cultural beliefs that we automatically impose it on reality. It provides a way to defining were we come from and how we arrived where we are. Narrative, Cronin argues, is, “our best and most compelling tool for searching out meaning in a conflicted and contradictory world.” Postmodernism looses sight of what makes narrative valuable to historians namely that the difference between narrative and a chronology is that good stories make us care about the subject. Thus environmental historians can use narrative to tell how man has interacted with nature in the past and perhaps see lessons for the future.

Cronin’s own story arc began with his own doubts and questions about his own theoretical outlook as raised by the postmodernists. Dissatisfied with their direction he examines the nature and use of narrative and found value there but questions about bias remain. Cronon explained how he circulated versions of his article to colleagues and received several different responses and suggestions. “Each new version of the essay, and each letter and conversation that critiqued it, returned me to where I began: each became a different story about the meaning of stories, a different argument about how narrative does and does not ground itself in nature and the past. The essay, in other words, recapitulated the very problems it set out to solve.” But in this situation he found his answer, or something close to it.

Cronon suggests three ways to help restore confidence in narratives. First, good historians do not knowingly lie. Their stories cannot contravene known facts about the past. Secondly environmental historians’ stories must make ecological sense. They cannot obscure or exclude ecological facts when writing about man and his responses to the natural world, to do so would be another form of lying. Finally Cronin reminds us that scholars are members of a community and must circulate their work as he did with his essay in order to have objective viewpoints to aid him in weeding out errors as well as identify excluded facts. These are not simple objectives and can be frustrating but he points out, “the resulting text is…unquestionably better as a result.”

Having reached what Cronin calls his safe harbor his faith in narrative is secure and his belief in the value of environmental history sound. He encourages other historians to tell stories not only, “about nature but stories about stories about nature.” To him they are capable of great impact and keep us, “morally engaged with the world by showing us how to care about it and its origins in ways we had not done before.” Cronin ends his story by positing that man can not avoid story telling. It is within our nature and so narrative should be used responsibly, consciously and self-critically. He poses questions about man’s relationship to the world and notes that they are starting points for new stories.

Posted by kknoerl at 12:18 PM

The Stories We Must Tell (ques. #1-nona)

The Stories We Must Tell

Cronon, William. "A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative." Journal of American History, 78 no. 4. (1992): 1347-1376.

William Cronon spins a web, concerning the nature of the narrative, that is at once complex and intricate, but yet untangled. Cronon asserts that man by design of nature is a storyteller. It is part of his core, central to his very existence. And, that history is a discipline in which we satisfy this essential yearning and do what we have to do; we tell stories. Because we tell stories to make sense of the world, our chief protagonist and antagonist are more than likely ourselves (human being or human kind).1369) Thus, historians are tasked with the privilege and the duty of telling the stories that shape experiences and frame mankind’s existence.

Most prominent in the intricate web woven is Cronon’s “stories about story-tellers.” (1374) Cronon uses as his running motif, the tales told about the Great Plains. From Turner’s tales of the frontier and the heroic frontiersmen to the New Deal’s saga of man’s limitations and nature’s frailty, Cronon details the power of the narrative. Faced with the same pearls of facts and events, it is the job the story-teller, the historian, to lace them onto the string of narrative in order to assure their value; in order to make them mean something. These narratives, though based on the same evidence, have the undercurrents of the author’s biases and political positions and result in entirely different stories being told.

Although Cronon admits that the narrative form has the potential to be manipulative, he points out three ways that our story telling is bounded. Our stories cannot contradict fact already known about the past. Secondly, environmental historians are bound by natural facts of ecology. This can be extrapolated to suggest that all historians need to place the tale within the context of a larger picture be it economics or ecology. And, finally, there is a community of scholars by whom our stories are evaluated. We do not tell stories by ourselves; it is a tandem effort that involves our peers. These boundaries are vitally important because as is illustrated by the stories of the Great Plain, “we can achieve no neutral objectivity” in writing the story (1370). Decisions as simple as “separating story from non-story,” or choosing where the narrative starts and where it ends point to a subjectivity--to a bias--that is impossible to overcome (1349). This is the post-modern critical theorist’s “assault on narrative,” which calls into questions our stories. Cronon addresses this in another thread of his story, one that is more personal to him.

The reader is like one eavesdropping as Cronon questions whether it is possible to form narratives, relevant and honest ones, that at their heart cause the audience to care about the story’s characters, plot and scene. Stories that “keep us morally engaged with the world by showing us how to care about it and its origins in ways we had not done before.” (1375) Is it possible to create such narratives when post-modern thought threatens to make historical narrative impotent? It is, if like Cronon, historians come to the conclusion taht we must “accommodate the lessons of critical theory without giving in to relativism” (1374) Not only is it possible it is necessary.

“Historians, like prophets” Cronon says, “share a common commitment to find meaning of endings.” (1375) Cronon ends this story with questions, all of which are simply beginnings to countless other stories and with an admonition to use the narrative “responsibly and self-critically” and to not try to escape the moral judgments that inevitably come with telling a narrative. (1376) Cronon leaves us with a moral. The moral is that the stories we can tell as historians are important, even vital to society and its preservation. We must carefully craft our narrative because these are stories we must tell. We must not underestimate the power of the narrative, and above all, we should not be afraid to tell the story.

Posted by nmartina at 09:09 AM

Web Review Proposal

After much thought, I have determined to review a group of websites that deal with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. I debated whether it would be more appropriate to review a group of sites with common subject matter or if it would be useful to select a group of sites that shared intended audiences, methodologies, and presentation goals. The latter option would allow the reviewer to compare technical aspects and evaluate the potential power of new media to communicate ideas (or circulate knowledge), but differences in subject could complicate efforts to point out advantages and disadvantages for scholarship. Therefore, I decided that a common historical theme was necessary.

I have been interested in the 1900 American Negro Exhibit at the Paris fair for a number of years now, and I searched for potential sites to review on this topic first. I found a number of possibilities, but all but one or two were short and poor in quality, and lacked sufficient argument. However, during my search, I began to find sites that deal with the Chicago Fair. Many of these sites were well designed and useful, although scholarly argument still seems to be the difficult aspect of finding potential sites for review.

The Chicago Columbian Exhibition has been a source of much historical inquiry and there have been countless traditional texts devoted to the event. Most historians agree that the exhibition was one of the key American cultural events of the Gilded Age, although debates persist regarding its exact meaning. Because of the near universal recognition of the fair’s significance, many, many primary documents and contemporary artifacts and sources have been preserved, offering a wealth of potential for scholarship as well as appropriate materials for aspiring digital historians hoping to create a dynamic web presentation of the fair.

Yet, the options for Columbian Exhibition sites worthy of a web review are limited. I decided this lack of digital scholarship raises a question of why such a defining historical moment would have so little coverage. I picked the best group of sites I could find that deal with the Chicago Fair and, in addition to reviewing the sites themselves, I will access the state of quality online history resources that address this important topic in U.S. history.

The sites named below are the initial list of sites I will consider.

The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893
(http://columbus.iit.edu/)

This site is an archive of four digitized texts and their illustrations regarding the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago maintained by the Illinois Institute of Technology. The site was designed to serve teachers and researchers. In addition to the texts, the site also provides two introductory essays that argue the importance of the fair and its literature.

The World’s Columbian Exposition: Idea, Experience, Aftermath
(http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA96/WCE/title.html)

This project attempts to document many aspects of the fair and argues that the exhibition was actually a celebration of American culture and society. The site includes an introductory essay, short history, narrative tour, contemporary reactions, and an analysis of the fair’s legacy.

Interactive Guide to the World's Columbian Exposition
(http://users.vnet.net/schulman/Columbian/columbian.html)

I included this site because I found it early in my search, and it is cited by almost all the other sites, but it was created by a sixth-grade teacher and is basically a list (a very long list) of historical information without much argument or analysis. So, I might decide to omit it from my review.

Women's Art at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893
(http://members.cox.net/academia/cassattxx.html)

This site includes a large amount of information on one part of the fair—the women’s building and their art and literature at the fair. The site includes a narrative and many images and links divided between five sections: “The White City,” “The Women’s Building,” “Mary Cassatt’s Lost Mural,” “Women Painters,” and “Women Sculptors.”

Posted by miles at 08:49 AM | Comments (1)

Maureen's Narrative

Bill Cronon, in his essay "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative," provides his readers with multiple stories within a story in order to challenge historians to consider their own historical narratives. Cronon defines the historical narrative as a story that describes "an action that begins, continues over a well-defined period of time, and finally draws to a definite close, with consequences that become meaningful because of their placement in the narrative." (1367) Cronon then illustrates, literally and figuratively, his own story about the historical narrative through a brief historiography of the American Great Plains.

This historiography, the story of the history of the Great Plains, examines the different interpretations of the Great Plains that either argue for frontier progress and human heroes in an uninhabited wilderness or, in contrast, argue for foolish settlers who became the catalyst for the environmentally disastrous Dust Bowl in the 1930s. In a third group of historical narratives, capitalism, not man, had the greatest impact on on the Great Plains' environement. Cronon provides his readers with necessary background information on the historical moments of the time that had an impact on these different interpretations. However, as Cronon also reminds us, none of these versions incorporates the Native American narrative that provides a completely different interpretation of events. After losing their homeland, one Indian described the end of their way of life in the Great Plains as, "After this nothing happened." In this story, unlike the others, the end is truly the end. (1366) Thus, these different stories are all constructed in a similar manner so that the "plot and its changing scene-its environment-flow toward the ultimate end of the story." (1370)

However, these stories do not share a common, similar, ending. Cronon reminds us that where each storyteller or historian chooses "to begin and end a story profoundly alters its shape and meaning." (1364) Different interpretations of evidence is a logical outcome. At the same time, Cronon wants his readers to examine exactly how historical narratives ground themselves in the past. He argues that the problem of historical narratives lies within the storyteller's ability to "acknowledge the immense power of narrative while still defending the past as real things to which our story telling must somehow conform lest it cease being history altogether." (1372) He reminds us that historical narratives are protected from becoming 'bad history' because specific limits are in place: history cannot contravene known facts about the past; good history does not knowingly lie (historical narratives are bounded by the evidence they can and cannot muster in their own support); and, historians do not tell stories by themselves.

The purpose of Cronon's story is to define the relevance of environmental history narratives as stories that make readers aware that "stories about the past are better...if they increase our attention to nature and the place of people within it." (1375) Cronon's story is relevant for all historians who write about the past because we also need to write narratives that engage our readers, increase their awareness and add to their own historical interests. In this multi-layered story, historical narratives are challenged to become better stories.

Posted by mguignon at 07:44 AM

The Future of Historical Narrative - Ammon

1. Bill Cronon calls his essay "A Place for Stories." What is the story that Cronon tells in his essay?

William Cronon's story is about the place of stories in historical research. Stories, or narratives, deeply impact our telling of history. History can not be told without story. History written as a list of events or chronology have little meaning for humans. We need not a list of what happened and when, but a story or narrative to make an otherwise incoherent chronology into something meaningful. A historical fact is just a mere string or thread of existence, it takes a narrative to weave that thread among others to create a tapestry, to create an image that is recognizable, understandable, and meaningful to the human mind.

Historical writings follow closely the narrative path of other literary venues. Cronon shows that historical plots seem to follow two major lines of literary convention, 'progressive' or 'declensionist.' The progressive story is an upward moving, ever increasing and ever more positive story were the protagonist starts as the underdog and ends up on top. The declension story is the opposite, a downward movement, a lineal digression of positive elements towards negative hopelessness. (7)

As in literary works, the historical narrative is greatly influenced by the choice of protagonist. Ranging from the individual (a single pioneer or settler family), to the group (the plains farmers in general), to the broad and encompassing (civilization, man). Who the story is about will have a great affect on how the story is told.

Cronon defends the position that storytelling affects not only the way we look on a historical topic, but also impacts the outcome of future events. In recounting the efforts by the US government to control the disastrous situations caused by the Dust Bowl, Cronon found that the New Deal planners argued that the 'progressive' storytelling of the past not only falsely portrayed the Great Plains, but was the cause of the disasters of the 1930's. In effect, claims Cronon and the New Deal planners, "bad storytelling had wreaked havoc with the balance of nature" (16).

Another important factor in the historical narrative is how the author begins and ends the story. "Where one chooses to begin and end a story profoundly alters its shape and meaning...refram[ing] the past so as to include certain events and people, exclude others, and redefine meaning of landscape accordingly" (19). Where the story begins or ends, greatly limits the quality of the story to be told.

Cronon, in the last third of his essay, finally delves into the reasoning why narratives are so important to humans. Stories are a uniquely human invention consisting of beginning, middle, and end. What gives a story its power is our ability as humans to compartmentalize natural events, or events in our experience of life, into narratives with a beginning, middle, and end, and thereafter, to learn a lesson from it to gain understanding. For this reason, Cronon argues, narratives and storytelling are an important part of historical research. The story provides a way for humans to debate, think, and ponder about humans interaction with nature and their own struggles with personal values.

Posted by ashephe1 at 07:37 AM

Cronon’s “story”

Cronon is an environmental historian who has raised a lot of eyebrows.

Cronon is an environmental historian who has raised a lot of eyebrows. With “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Cronon demonstrates how historians put environmental changes in a narrative structure. As an environmental historian, Cronon deems it necessary to tell the story of nature’s place in man’s past. He opposes the “endless postmodernist deconstruction of texts that fails to ground itself in history.” (Cronon, 1374) These postmodernists make their subject the “least human and least storied of worlds.” (Cronon, 1374) Cronon would like the story of how humans have lived in and utilized the natural world to be heard. He also acknowledges, however, that historians should recognize nature and the past as real things, lest their works become something other than history. Historians might differ on how this relationship between man and nature co-exist, even if each has the same set of facts. To illustrate his point, Cronon discusses how historians have portrayed the Dust Bowl.

Writing in the late 1970s, Paul Bonnifield sees the story of the Great Plains demonstrates the triumph of the human spirit. Farmers, though tested by the great dust storms that plagued the Great Plains during the Great Depression, prevailed, symbolizing the determination of rugged individualism. However, if you ask Donald Worster, man was bested by nature—in other words “The story of the Dust Bowl is less about the failures of nature than about the failures of human beings to accommodate themselves to nature.” (Cronon, 1348). To Worster, who wrote at the same time as Bonnifield, the story of the Dust Bowl showed the contradictions of capitalist expansion.

The same set of facts, two different stories. However, both versions grab the attention of readers. When people learn about history, they like to hear a good story. Indeed, few people would listen to a vague chronology, listing the history of the Great Plains that includes people fighting a lot, disappearing bison herds, and Indians living on reservations. (Cornon, 1351) To spice things up, one author might focus on how the disappearing bison herds impacted the region. Another might focus on the rise of Indian reservations. As storytellers, they have the power to report some facts and ignore others—whatever fits their overarching theme. However, they need a plot to keep their audiences interested.

Posted by ejonese at 07:36 AM

Scott's Narrative (Question #1)

While wading through the rather large numbers of readings this week, I was struck by two: William Cronon’s eloquent discussion of “stories” and Janey Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck. Cronon because he placed his narrative in a specialized historiographical discussion of the Plains, my childhood home and Murray because she mentioned Star Trek. Come Sunday, however, and I was still wading through Murray and barely got through Jenkins, Landow and Manovich. So I opted for question 1.

William Cronon, a historian at Yale, describes himself as an “American. . .male. . .white. . .upper-middle-class academic. . .environmentalist. . .[and a] scholar” (p. 1373) uses a specialized historiographic article that covers some of the works written on the history of the Great Plains to argue about the importance, and necessity, of the narrative and “story.” He is admittedly uneasy about criticisms put forward by post-modernists regarding the value of the traditional historical narrative. In answer to the first question posed by Professor Kelly, Cronon’s story is all about his belief of the relevance and importance of the “traditional” historical narrative. He weaves in the importance of the narrative in his particular type of history, that is, environmental, but his argument is applicable to all historical studies. As he writes “that narrative remains essential to our understanding of history and the human place in nature.” (1350)

He takes great pains to describe the form that an effective story must follow. That includes the fact that a story must have a beginning, middle and an end (1367) as Aristotle noted. Most importantly it must have a plot, “the moral of the story,” which is the heart of any good story. Also important to the story is the “scene of a story” (1354). The narrative is an effective form of communication because it, the story, “is the chief literary form that tries to find meaning in an overwhelmingly crowded and disordered chronological reality” (1449) and is a “peculiarly human way of organizing reality.” (1367) The story-telling narrative is the way humans have made sense of their place in the world.

He also acknowledges the importance of understanding the underlying political tones that every author brings to the narrative, what some have called the meta narrative. In one sense this could be called a bias, but then again we have to understand who we are and what we stand for to write effective history. It is these underpinnings to what we believe as scholars that will frame our arguments, and without arguments all you have is a straight chronology. It is our ability (or inability) as writers to place our story in an effective narrative that will ultimately determine whether or not we write “good” history or, as he puts it, a “well-told tale.” (1364) That “well-told tale” will have “organic unity, a clear focus, and only the ‘relevant’ details.” (Ibid.)

He argues that the story is a way to bring an understanding of the “meaning” of our lives based on our background, belief systems, and points of view. (1369) The Graham Swift quotation speaks volumes. And the story is our method to give us a sense of place in history and the moral of our story gives us “lessons we wish to draw.” (1370) A good narrative will make us “care” about the subject, unlike a chronicle (1374) and will be “our best path to an engaged moral life.” Long live the narrative.

STP

Posted by sprice7 at 07:22 AM | Comments (1)

September 25, 2005

Website Review Proposal (nona)

Civil Rights in the American South:
Oral History Websites

Although oral history interviewing has taken place since the Zhou dynasty of China, and was used throughout US History for government purposes (in the 1890’s by the US Bureau of Ethnography and by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930’s) the first modern archives of oral history was not established until 1948. (Ritchie 1995, 1) And, it wasn’t until 1970’s with the introduction of Social History that were oral histories focused on the non-elites. One such group non-elites on which oral history focused was African Americans, allowing the voice of a people, whose cries before fell on unhearing ears, to finally be heard. The use of “new media” makes it easier for those voices to be broadcasted to a wider audience.

In my web review essay, I propose to evaluate sites that focus on the Southern Civil Right Movement, specifically those that have an oral history component, giving special attention to the evaluation of the oral history component using the suggestions for evaluating online oral history collections given at Oral History Online. I have selected the following sites:

Race and Place
(http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/raceandplace/)
This site attempts to “connect race with place by understanding what it was like to live, work, pray, learn, and play in the segregated South.”(http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/raceandplace/about_main.html) The collection is focused on the town of Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
(http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/index.html)
This PBS website was intended as a companion to a series by the same name by the same name. However the website is capable of being viewed as a standalone project.

Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project
(http://162.114.3.83/civil_rights_mvt/)
This project, presented by the Kentucky Historical Society, includes an online database that allows access to several hundred audio and video taped oral history interviews.

Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archives
(http://www.lib.usm.edu/~spcol/crda/oh/)
This project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services is a fully searchable database of resources that pertain to the Civil Rights Era in Mississippi. It has an oral history component.

Bibliography:

Race and Place
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/raceandplace/about_main.html

Ritchie, Donald A., ed. Doing Oral History. New York: Prentice Hall International, 1995.

Posted by nmartina at 03:58 PM | Comments (1)

September 24, 2005

Amanda's personal website created for clio

My personal clio website is currently located at http://mason.gmu.edu/~avonargy/ I had it up last week at the last moment and in all the excitement, I simply forgot to tell you all where it is.

Posted by avonargy at 03:21 PM | Comments (1)

horse-ing around with a web review

Amanda von Argyriadis
Dr. T. Mills Kelly/Clio Wired
Review Essay Proposal
September 24, 2005

I propose to review the topic of equine history, in particular, the history of the equine in the Piedmont region of Virginia. I have a few reasons for choosing this topic. Those of you who have read my bio or who know me from previous courses will note that my life has been strongly centred on horses and continues to be. It is a natural interest for me to follow. Furthermore, this project follows on the heels of my article, “Spurring the Sport of Kings; Polo in the Piedmont” in the September/October 2003 issue of The Virginia Sportsman; a project for which I could find little or no reliable research material on line. I wonder if this has changed in the past couple of years and if there is a gap to be filled by someone like me with a background in both history and equine related subjects. Finally, I am in the process of creating my own website, Cyberhistorypony.com, with which I intend to explore the history of Anglo-equine cultural influence in the Piedmont. Cyberhistorypony.com may or may not become a dissertation, depending on how much information I can reliably retrieve and upload on line without facing copyright problems or how problematic the project becomes in general.
I am generally fascinated at how cultures re-create themselves in remote locations. Early settlers in the Americas, American Indian, the Spanish and English alike, were all well acquainted with the ways of the horse. New Englanders carried on their English cultural mores here in the Unites States and rode to the hounds, played polo, held steeplechase meetings and bred for speed and elegance in racing. Even the breeding of a good plow horse was pivotal to sustaining a lucrative life on the gentleman’s farm. And while other cultures were infused as time wore on in the Piedmont, English traditions and cultural mores continued to flourish. Horses and horse sports are plentiful in other parts of the country, but they lack the essence that the Piedmont region posses. I intend to research the history of these regional events and what that essence of the lifestyle is on the web.
Today, plenty of evidence of country life imported from the United Kingdom abounds, as central Virginia is a Mecca for horse related activities with more horses per person than any other state in the union. The surrounding counties of Fauquier and Loudoun host more horses than any others in the state. Why does this culture prevail, in the face of highway congestion, massive housing developments, animal rights activists, and at times, a struggling economy? What is it that attracted so many English to the Piedmont in the early years? What attracts so many Americans today?

Some would argue post haste that the supposed “refined” style of English country living is the draw for Americans. However, having been involved for many years at the grass roots level I can attest that for most it is hardly a life of refinement; rather it boasts a basic mud and dog hair-coated existence that beckons a good trip to the Laundromat. Many small scale genteel farmers spend untold hours commuting to their city jobs to be able to commune regularly with their furry friends out in the country. This is not a life for the character weak or weary; it requires early morning workouts in the dark, slippery grass, stinky barns and endless chores for the horse care taker. These people would rather eat a tomato sandwich and give the horse the better meal. Every last dime is sent on riding equipment or vet bills, trailer repairs or some other equine related expense that most people (on the outside) would find untenable. Yet so many flock to the region with baited breath to get the chance to live like this.
What is the true essence of this lifestyle? Has it changed over the past hundred years? I would argue that there is something about this lifestyle that does not exist outside of the region exactly in this way. Is it the horse itself that is the magnet? Has it always been that way? What is it about the horse, part magician, part exercise bike, part best friend that has so many people addicted? Why am I still involved, even after I have no time for anything else and my life is turning to academics?

Some websites I will evaluate will be but are not limited to:
http://www.mfha.com/ Master Foxhounds of America, a site that looks promising regarding foxhunting and has many links.

http://www.nsl.org/ The National Sporting Library site with lots of links and archives to research.

http://www.thevha.com/main.htm the Virginia Horseman’s Association

http://www.vasteeplechase.com The Virginia Steeplechase Association with many related links and sites

http://www.horse-talk.com/Virginia.html Virginia Horse Directory

Posted by avonargy at 03:15 PM

Murray's Vision -Question 3

# 3. What is the meaning of the title of Murray’s book? What is Murray’s own narrative?

When Janet Murray named her book Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, she was referring to potential “new narrative formats” (Murray p. 280) resulting from technological innovation. By combining the reference of the Shakespearean character Hamlet with the fantasy environment made popular by a television program Star Trek she is states that narratives are a legitimate field of study no matter what their genre. Traditional high brow culture can co-mingle with low brow in a digital environment and foster in the cyberspace environment, creative, literary geniuses, on par with the great bard Shakespeare. These new bards will take advantage of the medium, perhaps through role playing, multi-user dungeons, or games, to develop new forms of narratives. She sees the “stage” of the future as cyberspace. Given the worldwide audience of the web, her thesis brings new literal meaning to “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” (Shakespeare, As You Like It. Act II, Sc. 7, Line 139)
For anyone possibly unfamiliar with Star Trek, Murray includes, in chapter one, an explanation of the concept of a Holodeck. It is a computer generated fantasy environment where stories are programmed to enable the participant to act out adventures with various scenarios. It is a place where imagination and dreams set boundaries. Murray sees the format of the Holodeck, one developed through advanced computer technology, as a very real possibility for the future and the path to using such devices as something mankind is already moving towards. She uses creative scenes derived from Hamlet to provide examples several times in the book, such as a live action role playing game scene (LARP) and has a poetic conclusion. She envisions new technologies as being supportive of variable plots where the user can manipulate the story line to produce a variety of conclusions. The concept expands on one of my daughter’s favorite book series Choose Your Own Ending. She sees the digital environment as a way to facilitate immersive environments and provide more imaginative, innovative stories than a traditionally linear narrative as described by Cronin (Cronin p. 1367)- one with the a specific beginning, middle, and end.

Janet Murray’s own narrative is a reflection on how “the narrative” has changed format and will continue to change over time. She defends the narrative as a necessary tool for communication regardless of form or genre but also as a fun aspect of the human experience. She explores the concept of the story telling genre, speculating that the audience will become the participatory author interacting in cyberspace, developing multi-variant events leading to a multitude of plots, simulations, and “do-overs” which she labels “cyberdrama.” She makes the point that the medium has little to do with the content and that it is unfair to judge TV and computer presentations inferior to the written word based solely on their medium. (Murray p. 273) I agree with her point. I think there are times when a quality multimedia production is more useful or appropriate than print materials.
One of Janet Murray’s meta-narratives is that games are acceptable as a form of expression, and she provides examples as well as a brief autobiography in her acknowledgments. As a result, her book is very readable; her references are familiar and comfortable. Technological developments and enhancements will pave the way for a revolutionary use of the narrative in a new digital form or genre. In her vision for the future, peoples’ senses are not numbed or desensitized by the new technologies. Instead she sees human emotions as a necessary agency and immersion as a way for the narrative to become so engaging, entertaining, and powerful that the medium is not even noticed.
She predicts that technology will evolve in mostly positive directions which is what I believe the critic in question #5 means when referring to her “utopianism.” While minimizes concerns over violence and pornography, (Murray p. 172) and overlooking the poor scholarship, lack of quality based on minimum editorial standards, and the current trend for just plain shlock and junk running rampant in many internet sites and games, Murray appears overly optimistic at best. While flexibility in story telling and multiple nonlinear plots may indeed have social value among the world community and do provide entertainment, Murray seems unconcerned with the potentially addictive properties of fantasy, role-playing, and computer games. Interactive games do engage the user but may promote anti-socialism as a result of interacting with technology instead of directly with other humans and Multi-User Domains (MUDS) create a networks for sharing among their members but also promote an exclusionary society. Murray’s Pollyanna-like belief in the potential of technology is a very upbeat vision of the future which I’d like to subscribe to. A more realistic vision however would be to continue to see the growth of scholarship in many forms through the ability to instantly share information with some small number of creative individuals pushing the limits. Change comes slowly in many areas of society and unless there is a financial benefit as is evidenced by popular commercial sites, the success of future technologies will still probably hinge on their affordability to the public and their use only updating more traditional forms of entertainment.

Posted by dschaef1 at 01:47 PM | Comments (2)

Narrative by Tai

In the following I will compare Manovich and Murray in tone, approach, and analysis. Specifically stating with whom I agree.

Tone

Manovich exhibits a theoretical tone in the discussion of narrative in new media while Murray displays her excitement over the potential for new media to produce a new type of narrative. Manovich defines her terms, explains the processes of syntagm/paradigm in natural language structure versus computer culture, and concludes: “New media does not radically break with the past; rather, it distributes weight differently between the categories that hold culture together, foregrounding what was in the background, and vice versa (Manovich, p. 229).” Murray also defines her terms, reveals how the new media narrative compares to old media narrative and displays her confidence in the new narrative to: “capture in cyberdrama something as true to the human condition, and as beautifully expressed, as the life that Shakespeare captured on the Elizabethan stage (Murray, p. 274).”

Approach

Both authors view the new media narrative as a form of previous narratives diverging from the linear tradition. Manovich describes at length how in natural language, the syntagmatic dimension is the written word on a page (explicit), while the paradigmatic dimension is the set of nouns or synonyms which are present in the writer’s mind and could have been interchanged with the written word (implicit). Conversely in new media, the database acts as the paradigm and is real, but the narrative or syntagm exists virtually. Because databases are interactive, they become the sum of multiple trajectories, eliminating a purely linear approach (Manovich, pp. 227, 230-232). Murray focuses on the unique ability of the digital world to communicate a multiform story, where a single plotline has multiple versions, mutually exclusive in the traditional linear progression. Linear stories must end in one place; multiform stories can have many endings allowing the reader to make choices as they move through the narrative. This agency of the reader is facilitated by the digital medium due the opportunity of the reader to enact stories rather than to merely witness them (Murray, pp. 30, 136, 170).

Analysis

Manovich presents an argument in a concise, theoretical and relatively objective manner, yet Murray’s argument is littered with ramblings of her science fiction passion and prejudice in favor of the new media’s possibilities. The ability of Manovich to present an argument through theory and scattered examples, allows the reader to remain centered on what is being proven. In contrast, Murray spends pages, nearly chapters, describing her interest in science fiction television programs and specific computer games. Therefore her argument is strung along, fractured and less than clear as she fancifully dances through her own musings on the new media. These may be examples for her argument, but they are too lengthy and divergent from the analysis to be worthwhile. Murray’s analysis presents one aspect of the new media narrative – a positive one. Manovich’s analysis provides definition while warning with the positives come many challenges in the narrative’s new media.

Posted by tgerhart at 01:02 PM

Heather's proposal

I incurred a bit of difficulty in finding web resources for many of my interests. As a service to my peers, don’t waste your time looking for web sites on 1.) Chautauqua movement 2.) Death in Early America 3.) American Transportation history 4.) American furniture in the 19th century or 5.) Cowboys and ranching culture. Some of the latter subjects do have a couple pages devoted in historical interpretation but; maybe, I was being a little too specific in subject query.

I decided on the search string Napoleon-French Revolution-Images as my focus for a web review. I like revolutions, empires, satirical cartoons, and most appropriately, the French.

Each of the websites provides a different approach to considering the history of Napoleon and the French Revolution. In the site analysis, I want to focus on content (text, graphical, presentation) and accessibility (navigability, audience).

PBS: Napoleon, is a companion site to the television special. It focuses on the life of Napoleon, his relationships, and his political career. There are many interactive features: a battlefield simulator, discussion board, and video clips.

Napoleonic Satires, is part of the Anna SK Brown Military Collection at Brown University. The site is an archive of all the images within the collection. There are descriptions for each image, and an introductory essay.

Imaging the French Revolution and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, are projects partially produced by CHNM. Imaging uses a series of revolutionary images as a springboard for discussion of the French revolution “crowd.” There are both scholarly essays and a discussion board. Liberty provides three paths to navigate the site: explore (read introductory essays), browse (categories of primary sources), or search (specific queries).

Posted by at 12:52 PM | Comments (3)

Amy's Reading Response

Below are my thoughts on question 6; to compare Manovich and Murray in tone, approach, and analysis. Amy

Both Manovich and Murray are concerned with developing “poetics, aesthetics, and ethics” for customizable, ever-changing new media forms (Manovich 219). They also share the question of the role of narrative in new media forms. Manovich divides new media into navigable space and the database which he correlates in his footnote to Murray’s spatial and encyclopedic categories. Beyond these considerations, the two diverge considerably.
Murray questions whether we can “capture in cyberdrama something as true to the human condition, and as beautifully expresses as the life that Shakespeare captured on the Elizabethan stage” (274). In this quest, Murray is extremely optimistic about the potential of the Internet to produce complex and beautiful narratives. Through the cross-referencing of hypertext, users can select possible plots and better think about the questions of existence (93). The new narrative medium of the Internet provides a global medium to tell stories of entire systems. She invests the Internet with the power to reflect the inner self in ways linear text has never been capable of before.
Manovich uses much of the same language as Murray, with similar interests in the role of new media, and more specifically computers, in culture in general. Like Murray who sees the Internet as a way to understand the complex workings of human thought, Manovich argues that the computer’s structure is projected on the cultural sphere in explicit manifestations (223). More specifically, the technology of the database creates a system where stories are organized according to thematic connections as opposed to Murray’s whole system narrative. In Manovich’s database system users access different elements in random order and therefore do not form a narrative (228). Murray uses similar language where users create narrative by selection, juxtaposition, and arrangement of content.
As such, both database and narrative claim to make meaning out of the world and cannot coexist. In the face of new media, narrative is not totally lost, but is to be created by focusing on how narrative and database can work together. Manovich approaches the question of narrative from an “info-aesthetics” approach as opposed to Murray’s more traditional narrative idea. This difference means that for Manovich, narrative needs to work with the computer structure whereas for Murray, narrative is of greater significance than the aesthetics of information.
While it is likely that the Internet will create a new information structure, it is unlikely that it will reflect the same type of narrative beauty of Shakespeare. It is unreasonable to hold such a different narrative form (the Internet) to the same standards as more traditional narratives. At the same time, Internet databases cannot be compared accurately to more traditional database forms. Given the greater quantities of information and the changing nature of the technology, traditional notions of the database cannot reflect the complexities that will result. It is then that narrative is necessary to make sense of it. Therefore, Manovich’s argument that a narrative’s meaning can be formed by imaginative combinations of narrative and databases is most convincing.

Posted by alechne1 at 12:47 PM

Tai's Propsal

I will be evaluating websites concerning education about American Indians, my personal area of interest. All sites will be of an educational (.edu) status. I will be utilizing the Journal of American History criteria discussed in class, specifically Content, Form, Audience/Use and New Media. Also the goal of the author(s) and the Accuracy and Accessibility Dr. McGrath employs. Additionally there will be the traditional discussion of: 1) basis on research, 2) subjection to peer review and 3) circulation of knowledge to the public. The following websites will be reviewed:

http://www.wm.edu/airc/ - American Indian Resource Center of The College of William and Mary, department of Anthropology.

http://sipapu.gsu.edu/index.html - Sipapu: The Anasazi Emergence into the Cyber World by John Kantner of Georgia State University department of Anthropology and Geography.

http://www.nau.edu/library/speccoll/exhibits/traders/ - Traders: Voices from the Trading Post by Northern Arizona University, Cline Library, Special Collections and Archives Department.

http://anza.uoregon.edu/default.html - Web de Anza: An Interactive Study Environment on Spanish Exploration and Colonization of “Alta California,” 1774-1776 by Center for Advanced Technology in Education, University of Oregon.

http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/blackhawk/index.html - The Black Hawk War of 1832 by James Lewis, Ph.D. and the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project and supported by the Illinois Humanities Council.

Posted by tgerhart at 10:50 AM | Comments (2)

September 23, 2005

A Modest Proposal

A few weeks ago I came across a site that I found particularly fascinating: Dr. Seuss Went to War. Military history is not something I have much interest in, but I do enjoy cultural history, and this site presented an expansive collection of images which might have shaped American consciousness during World War II and happened to be drawn by an extremely famous author of books for children.

That was the part that initially caught my attention, for I was unaware of this aspect of Theodor Seuss Geisel's career. Plus it happens to be (except for the frames) a pretty good site.

So when this project came up, I wanted to develop an idea in which I could incorporate this. A review of sites dedicated to political cartoons of World War II seemed most logical. In addition to the Seuss site, I'd like to at least look at these as well.

Arthus Szyk: Drawing On War examines Szyk's work through a series of audio narratives by historians and artists about specific cartoons.

World War II Through Cartoons presents an interactive tour and movie about Canadian cartoons and their impact on fomenting support for the Allied cause.

The Authentic History Center presents a small database of images of two cartoon which are of interest because of their overt sexism. Another site claims Male Call was the most widely syndicated strip of all time, which makes it particularly compelling.

I think these sites will offer the opportunity to analyze not only on the quality of the content, but also on the presentation and method for delivering information. They cover at least some of the range of opportunity the Internet offers historians for presenting material beyond the linear, textual narrative.

Posted by kalbers at 11:14 PM | Comments (1)

Matt's Websites to Review, or: I love this class!

There is no way my wife will ever believe that I'm doing work for this class. Either that, or she'll be insanely jealous when she's slogging through readings for museum studies and I'm checking out on-line collections of comic books.

That's right, folks. Comic books. I admit it - I'm gonna let my geek flag fly. I've been a loyal Marvel Zombie since I was nine, and have dabbled a bit in DC Comics and some creator-owned series since. Thus, I've decided to enjoy my work for this class and write an essay on the state of scholarship available on-line regarding graphic sequential art. Continue on to find out what sites I'll be reviewing, and why this is the best term in my Master's yet.

I'll be evaluating the following sites:

1. Comic Studies at the University of Florida - this website contains pages for an annual conference on comics, ImageTexT (an academic journal on comics), and hosts the Comix-Scholars list-serve.

2. ComicsResearch.org is the website of a professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, who defended a PhD on comics.

3. The Grand Comics Database is an archive of story info, creator, writer, artist, and cover for comic books. The eventual (and likely impossible) goal is to provide a catalog containing information on every comic published.

4. The National Association of Comics Art Educators provides resources for teaching comics at all education levels.

5. Sequential Tart is a webzine specializing in gender issues in comic scholarship, but also offers a broad range of academic articles, interviews, etc.

Posted by mhobbs at 05:35 PM | Comments (2)

Review Essay Proposal...Liz

The evolution of advertising in U.S. consumer culture.

I am going to review sites that document the history of advertising. At present, I plan to look at all forms of media—from print, radio, television, and, to the extent I am able, the Internet.

As one site I am reviewing notes, “Advertising… is such a pervasive feature of American life that our culture from the late 19th century onward cannot be fully understood without studying ads and the industry that created them.” It will be very interesting to see how advertising has changed since the 18th century, and just what these changes say about our tastes and our culture as a whole. It will be intriguing to see why certain ads have worked at certain points in our history (and why others have failed miserably), as well as how advertisers have changed their tactics as different forms of media have come to the forefront.

Sites under study:
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/hartman/: Extensive collection that Duke University has amassed.
http://www.adage.com/century/index.html: Advertising Age did a retrospective of the past 295 years of advertising, featuring some of our most popular icons. The contents include the 20th century's top 100 advertising campaigns, top 100 advertising people, top 10 jingles, top 10 slogans, top 10 advertising icons, and a 295-year timeline of the century's most important advertising-related events.
http://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/d-7.htm: Smithsonian Museum’s project on advertising. Includes a section specific to Ivory Soap, a collection of cigarette packs (foreign and domestic), and records associated with the “Pepsi Generation” advertising campaign.
http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger: A simply fascinating collection of ads. Includes those warning ads from the 50s and 60s, warning parents about the rampant sex and violence in which their children were engaging. Much of his collection was purchased by the Library of Congress (see http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/).
http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/seusscoll.html: Library collection of Theodor Seuss Geisel’s pre-Dr. Suess ads.
http://theimaginaryworld.com/page4.html: Is this scholarship? Good question. It’s an individual’s site, unaffiliated with any institution. We should see how he stacks up. As we’re all aware, ads came in all sorts of forms.
http://www.ec2.edu/dccenter/archives/ia/history.html: Advertising on the Internet.

Posted by ejonese at 03:31 PM | Comments (2)

To Blog or Not to Blog

Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me. (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene II)

More than just a catchy title, Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck urges the use of the computer medium to achieve more than just an “expensive way to rewrite Hamlet for the pinball machine.”

Using the metaphor of the Holodeck (the Trekkie’s virtual reality chamber), Murray examines the way digital narratives have begun to simulate imaginary worlds in which one can become immersed and retain agency. She reminds us that:
“the computer is chameleonic. It can be seen as a theater, a town hall, an unraveling book, an animated wonderland, a sports arena…but it is first an foremost a representational medium, a means for modeling the world that adds its own potent properties to the traditional media it has assimilated so quickly” (284).

But for Murray, the play’s the thing, for theatre and performance hold a central place in her argument (lucky for me, I was an English and Theatre major undergrad). They are the basis of the new forms she envisions, serving both as model and metaphor. Murray hopes to totally remove the Holodeck’s Fourth Wall, the imaginary invisible wall at the front of the stage through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play. Drawing a parallel between audience interaction in live theater and digital “interactivity,” Murray points out that the attraction lies in inviting the audience into the realm of illusion—“Holodeck experiences without the machinery.”

Murray’s story is the narrative of the gradual toppling of the fourth wall, brick by brick. Hamlet on the Holodeck examines the technologies of narrative, from Gutenberg to role-playing MUDs (which I find rather creepy), paying particular attention to forms of storytelling that anticipate those emerging in Cyberspace: blurring the lines between fiction and reality, requiring reader participation, or providing alternative endings/plotlines.

Murray points out that Shakespeare’s use of soliloquy in Hamlet was a way to let the audience into Hamlet’s mind, inviting them past the wall, and representing “a truth about human experience that could not be told before” (280). Murray is not asking if it is possible to translate Hamlet into a cyber-narrative, she is asking if any of these new cyber-narratives will ever “mean anything” to us, the way that Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech does, if “we can hope to capture in cyberdrama something as true to the human condition, and as beautifully expressed” (274).

Acknowledging that the fourth wall has not yet been completely toppled and that cyber-narratives are not yet Shakespearean (though they are much farther along than the type-writing monkeys), Murray remains hopeful that one day this MUDing and LARPing and hypertexting will all be much ado about something...but “for now, we have to listen very, very carefully to hear, amid the cacophony of cyberspace, the first fumbling chords of the awakening bard” (213).

…but then again, it could have just been a catchy title. Alliteration works every time.

Meagan

Posted by mhess3 at 03:19 PM

Valley Web Review

The Web Review for The Valley of the Shadow at

http://valley.vcdh.virginia.ecu/choosepart.html

Edward Ayers, Professor at the University of Virginia, originally planned to write a traditional book comparing two communities on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line in the antebellum, war-time, and postwar era of the Civil War. As his archival collection and modern computer technology grew, the original book turned into The Valley of the Shadow website created by the Center for New Digital History. The Valley is an impressive work of scholarly research presented in digital form. The website itself offers an archive of information about two communities, August County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania during the period surrounding the Civil War. Included in the website are articles written by Edward Ayers and William Thomas about the reasons to compare two communities on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line, and some conclusions to be drawn about the influence of slavery or the absence of slavery in these communities. The main emphasis of the website is to present archival information about the communities to a large audience for research and teaching.

The web designers created a master floor plan with three octagons representing the three time periods-- The Eve of War, The War Years, and The Aftermath-- as the home page and guide around the website. They refer to the website as a “research library in a box,” and the familiar octagons appear at the bottom of linked pages providing a handy visual guide for the unfamiliar user wandering around the library. The website is fairly easy to navigate with clearcut links and a help section for each area whether you’re searching through newspaper articles or census records. The help sections include suggestions, guidelines, and tools for searching the databases such as case-sensitive items and wild card options %. These are necessary as the user can get lost wandering through the shelves of the library or links in the website. The Letters and Diaries section requires several very informative links to get to the letters and diaries containing family information, but it’s easy to get bogged down or lost in the process. My computer couldn’t pull up the letters themselves, but I was able to read the summary of the letter in the link before it.

The map section, especially in The War Years, is excellent. By moving the project from traditional print to digital and web capability, Dr. Ayers is able to actively show the progression of the military units from the two counties on a map with a time line. Arrows move across the map from battle to battle in the same way the military units moved during the war. Another arrow at the bottom of the page moves simultaneously across a timeline to give a frame of reference to the battles. It’s the kind of Civil War action that teenage boys are drawn to, but it gives any user the geographical perspective on how many miles the troops moved between battles. The designers created a side bar to the maps with the possibility of adding modern cities, historical towns, roads, railroads, and rivers with the click of a mouse. This gives the user the option of looking at the maps historically or with a backward glance from modern times.

The teaching sections of the website are well done as well. The Valley of the Shadow is a remarkable resource for teachers K-12, and providing lesson plans for each individual level encourages teachers to use the website. Any teacher with access to the web can utilize The Valley of the Shadow because the academic staff at the University of Virginia has made it quick and accessible. It is a vast resource of materials, but today’s students with find clicking around on the web more engaging than walking through stacks of books.

The Valley of the Shadow provides the user with a number of ways to engage the website as a teaching tool, or archival research on topics ranging from finding family members to chronological progression of a particular military unit to statistics about the literacy of the communities. Any research project has limitations and the Valley of the Shadow makes it clear to the user that it is only including the August and Franklin counties in this Civil War history. The Valley of the Shadow is an extensive archival repository of information made accessible to a larger audience by presenting it in digital form on the web.

Posted by scarson1 at 10:32 AM

Review Essay Proposal - Ammon

My review essay will focus on web sites that cover the development of the technology that led us into the space age.

The development of the rocket really took off (excuse the pun) in Germany towards the end of World War II. Through the combined efforts of the Nazi Luftwaffe (Airfoce) and Army (Armee), Germany took the lead in researching and producing large rockets. While these rockets were used for destructive purposes, it was their inventors and the knowledge gained in their creation that moved the United States into the position where they were able to land the first man on the moon.

I would like to review web sites that look at this history: the birth of the rocket in Nazi Germany to the monumental footsteps placed on the moon. I would like to focus as much as I can on Wernher von Braun and his intimate involvement throughout this whole time period. The list of sites, so far, are linked below:

Smithsonian Institue - National Air and Space Museum

NASA History Division

Space dot com

The Space Race dot com

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center - Bio on Wernher von Braun

German site about Peenemunde where German's conducted research on first rockets.

V2rakete.de Another German site focusing on the V2 Rocket developed at Peenemunde.

The above list contains government sites (NASA, Smithsonian Institute), a commercial site (Space.com), and private historical sites (all of the others).

Posted by ashephe1 at 09:54 AM | Comments (1)

Fight the power!

There is a new handbook out for bloggers. Here's a quote from the site:

Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. Because they allow and encourage ordinary people to speak up, they’re tremendous tools of freedom of expression.
Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest.
Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation. It also explains how to set up and make the most of a blog, to publicise it (getting it picked up efficiently by search-engines) and to establish its credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles.

http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542

Enjoy!
Steve

Posted by at 08:03 AM | Comments (1)

September 22, 2005

The Early Years of American Slavery

My web review project will examine sites related to the earliest years of slavery in North America. The formative years of the colonies and the United States are filled with heroes like Washington, Adams, and Jefferson. Revolutionary War battlefields and other sites dedicated to the fight for liberty and equality are commemorated in National Parks, museums and websites. Living history exhibits at colonial sites such as Jamestown, Plimouth, and Williamsburg draw thousands of visitors each year. Tourists come for a peek at history.
How does the topic of slavery, antithetical to more glorious and proud moments of American history, fit in? The contradiction of liberty and slavery causes the collective American mind to pause and acknowledge that not all was bright and heroic about our past. How then is this topic addressed on the newest means of communication: the Internet? As the number of historically focused websites continues to grow organizations offer their perspective by sharing their research online.

I have selected five sites (the number and makeup of this list may change) with different institutional perspectives in an attempt to see what if any differences this might have on the form and content used to discuss slavery. The time periods and exact topic addressed in each site does differ. Assessing why that might be is of course part of this exercise. Those five sites are:

The Geography of Slavery produced by the Virtual Jamestown website.
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/gos/

From Africans to Americans produced by PBS in support of a television broadcast.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/home.html

Tangled Roots produced by Yale University.
http://www.yale.edu/glc/tangledroots/

The African-American Experience produced by Colonial Williamsburg.
http://www.history.org/Almanack/life/Af_Amer/aalife.cfm

Slavery in Boston produced by the National Park Service.
http://www.nps.gov/boaf/slaveryinboston.htm

Posted by kknoerl at 08:29 PM

Matt's Web Design Diary, Part the first

Another day off from IKEA, another day spent monkeying with CSS. My site has undergone another redesign. The visual changes will not be that apparent. Here we have a screen shot from the "old" site:

And below is v2.0:

Click here to see the new site design.

You can read more about the design philosophy in the Extended Entry.

The major changes are the addition of background image to the main content box, and a border around the nav bar and the content. I think it lends a cleaner look to the site. I toyed with the idea of figuring out some kind of background image, but I like the stark content boxes on the white background. I do think I'll Photoshop a background image for the header, though. Maybe some kind of collage of famous paintings, the maintain the "antiqued" theme. The Night Watch, Raft of the Medusa, Mona Lisa, and maybe a random Clio painting...

Well, that's the visual angle. From a design standpoint, the site has been rebuilt from the ground up. The original CSS code was scrapped after I did some reading, on-line and dead tree sources. My new CSS Dalai Lama is a guy named Jeffrey Zeldman. His website and a book of his my brother-in-law loaned me have been immensely helpful.

Zeldman runs the website for the on-line magazine A List Apart, which calls itself the website for people who make websites. It contains a number of tutorials and tips for making elegant, clean CSS code.

Zeldman's book, available through Amazon, is called Designing With Web Standards, and has been infinitely more helpful than the Williams book we bought for class. This is the book my bro-in-law, a website developer, loaned me, and it's made all the difference.

It helped me wrap my head around CSS. Forget the table method for desiging websites. CSS code, when written properly, means your website will download faster, be compatible with more browsers, and take up less space on the server holding your web pages.

My site, for example. The header is just an image I made in Photoshop. The main body consists of two boxes, one "floated" left and one "floated" right. Inside the left box, there are two smaller boxes, each also "floated" left and right, respectively. Thus you get the #mainbox div with the #nav and #content sub-divs, and the #rightimage div that is Mucha's lovely lady.

Click here to take a look at my CSS code. It's written after following a chapter in Zeldman's book and some on-line examples. The only thing escaping me is a footer bar, but I'm confident I'll have that problem licked shortly.

If you like the code, feel free to hack it to your heart's content. It should be fairly modular, and you can play around with the widths and sizes for all the boxes to get a different look. You could flip the positions of everything to get a right-hand nav bar pretty easily, too.

Well, that's enough for now. I should probably do some reading for my 20th Century Germany class, but this is just so much more fun. As more gets added to the website, more will be posted. Such is the hubris available to those who blog. Damn you, Dr. Kelly! I've become infected with the blog-meme. I weep for my lost free time.

Posted by mhobbs at 06:22 PM | Comments (4)

Scott's review essay proposal: Lynching

OK, here we go! In the late-nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the brutal murders of blacks by gangs of whites took place with terrifying regularity. Though the majority took place in the South, others happened in what most would consider to be improbable places such as Omaha, Nebraska and Duluth, Minnesota, well away from the hatreds evident throughout Dixie. That this period in our history still reverberates through our society, evidenced by the Senate’s recent apology for its inaction during the period mentioned, is clear from the numbers of scholars studying the subject. Historians have attempted to understand why these murders took place and many concentrated on the reasons why there was an increase in the numbers of lynching almost overnight beginning in the late 1880s. Websites covering this gruesome chapter in the country’s history are also available, but surprisingly few were dedicated to a detailed study of the entire period. Accounts of signal instances of lynching are readily available as are excerpts from some books and course syllabi. I've posted my proposed websites for review in the extended entry section.

I propose to review the websites dedicated to the study of lynching in the U.S., starting with those websites that cover the entire period from the early post-Civil War era to World War II. By reviewing those sites first I hope to obtain a general overview of what is available and then compare and contrast those with three (perhaps more) websites dedicated to the study of single instances of lynching.

The overall websites dedicated to the study of lynching that I have chosen are as follows. The first website is “American Lynching”, a very professional looking website that has a lot of information, photography, and new media: http://www.americanlynching.com/

The second is entitled “The African-American Holocaust” which appears dated (first posted in 1996), and is definitely not objective (a frequent problem with websites dedicated to this subject) but interesting nonetheless. It is a photographic essay documenting lynching: http://www.maafa.org/

From a design perspective the following website, "Lynching", looked somewhat amateurish but it provides a “foreign” perspective on the subject of lynching. The photo of a black man hanging from the arm of the Statue of Liberty was disturbing, too. I’ve always supported the use of comparative history and of also seeing from the perspective of scholars from other nations, particularly their arguments regarding U.S. history. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAlynching.htm(for a UK perspective)

The Modern American Poetry website has a section entitled "About Lynching" and it consists of essays on lynching:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lynching/lynching.htm

I chose the following in that they covered a single lynching incident and they appear to be very well presented and detailed websites:

1) “The Trial of Sheriff Joseph Shipp et al., 1907” presents original documentation, photography, and narrative regarding the lynching of Ed Johnson and the trial, by the Supreme Court (the only criminal trial in Supreme Court history), of Sheriff Joseph Shipp:
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/shipp.html

2) “Duluth Lynching Online Resource” [Duluth, 1919; an archival website run by the Minnesota Historical Society]:
http://collections.mnhs.org/duluthlynchings/

3) “A Horrible Lynching” [Omaha, 1919; a website run by Nebraska Studies/Historical Society; it includes primary documents, copies of newspaper articles, and photography]:
http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0700/stories/0701_0134.html

This list is preliminary and I am of course open to suggestions of other websites that perhaps I have not yet seen. Thanks!

Scott

Posted by sprice7 at 03:55 PM | Comments (1)

Readings, Part Deux

Thanks to Ammon--he put all the readings up in one place:

The Readings

Maybe it might be easier just to bring the booze to class? Although, technically "no food or drink" is allowed... but then again, Mills does want us to fight the man.

Posted by mhess3 at 11:34 AM

September 21, 2005

Brainerd

Going back to Brainerd after the class...

Initially, I was tempted to say that it reminded me of a county Web site--though I acknowledge that county Web sites contain valuable info, e.g., precinct voting patterns and such.

Upon reviewing further, however, I was very intrigued by the site. The site suggests new avenues for scholarship--studies on small cities, familial studies, etc. I guess the viewer needs to seize the opportunity, as with a book. The creator of Brainerd provides this opportunity with his bibliography. If I were to create the rules of a good historical web site, I would say that it must hint at further avenues of study--something the Brainerd does well.

Posted by ejonese at 09:53 PM

Do History

Read my website evaluation:

My initial impression of the DoHistory site left me disoriented. Although I recognize a circular-clockwise navigation I found the graphics (texts and images) too close together. I already feel a bit confused and the site’s intention appears so simple: “A site that shows you how to piece together the past from the fragments that have survived.” Now, that’s exciting. The direct language of the front page piqued my interest and drew me in. My first question, the subject of the site, is, who is Martha Ballard? The site/content designer must have read my mind, because I soon noticed a hyperlink that would answer my question.

I decided to check out the “About this site,” before I found out about Ballard. The target audience for the site was made clear in the first paragraph on the About page. Although this site was about Martha Ballard, the author/project team wanted to provide the basic tools for anyone to conduct historical research and interpretation. I would guess the intended audience included middle school-high school students, teachers, and individuals with a particular interest in history (scholarly or not). The project also wished to broaden the amount of information that the site visitor could gather on not only the themes surrounding Martha Ballard but also other links on how to interpret or “do” history.

One of the most intriguing parts of all web projects I find is, why? Why was this project done? I hadn’t made the connection that the web site was based on the scholarly work of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. I had just read her latest book, “The Age of Homespun,” just this past semester. Ulrich’s project illustrates the almost endless possibilities in historical research. Her project started out on paper almost two centuries old and hidden away in a state library and the diary now finds itself reincarnated three times, in paper format, video, and the Internet. This democratic notion of making what was once accessible only to a select few now accessible to the general public is, I believe, the foundation of the web. Networks of information and knowledge metastasize across borders. What is unique about this site is that it acknowledges this freedom of information but also helps breach the borders of education by providing tools (to any user) to “do” history.

This website provides a solution to the inevitable deterioration of primary source documents. The Internet offers a way for these documents to live forever. Although I wouldn’t completely endorse the alleged immortal quality of the Net, there are drawbacks that will materialize soon (issues of authenticity and authorship are present examples, system/database failures also could happen).

The site provides a comprehensive history of Martha Ballard’s time, not only detailing her life but contemporaneous developments in science, medicine, and U.S. history. The primary source documents available extend beyond her diary and also include maps, photographs, letters, and articles. There really is something for every site visitor (student, common historian/interested party). And there are multiple approaches to the material- an archive, two interactive presentations, and a guided narrative. The teaching guide is thorough and helpful in how to use the site, primary documents, and engage students with a different approach to historical learning and thinking.

In conclusion, although the intended audience is the general public, I would highly recommend this site to middle school teachers. I think that they (and their students) would get the most out of it. The site also serves as an example of how to make primary source documents more accessible and the importance of many points of entry. I can’t call into question the authenticity of the documents, I do believe they really are primary source but I think it’s always important in any historical interpretation to stress that it is an interpretation (this is one person’s view of a situation). Design-wise, I would increase the distance of the graphics on the main page to make it a little clearer and update the presentation to look a little less like 1998 (the design could definitely be improved, more color, more punch).

Posted by at 08:59 PM

Debbie’s Web Review Proposal: Museum Collections

I’d like to do my web review on various presentations of museum collections from on-line catalogues to objects highlighted in on-line exhibits. I reviewed these back in the mid-1990s when only a handful of museums presented their collections on the Internet. At the time, practically all were selections based on thematic on-line exhibitions and most complemented exhibitions in museum. While this is a topic I’ve worked on in the past, much has changes and continues to change on an almost daily basis. This would afford me the opportunity to revisit sites as well as to explore new sites.

I’d like to compare United States museum sites to those of foreign museums (I’ve worked with colleagues in Canada and the UK), explore the type of information that is presented by art museums with cultural history collections, natural history museums with ethnographic and cultural collections and history museums and historical societies.

Since I am thoroughly involved with making NMAH collections accessible through our web site, I’d like to focus on what types of object information is being presented by other museums with history collections. Thanks. Debbie

Web Sites I would like to use are:

Highlights of the Collections:
The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village
The Newport Historical Society and maybe Mount Vernon

Possibly Drexel University Museum's costume collection which it is not typical but more sites are beginning to to display on line this way. Also good single object example is NMAH's Star Spangled Banner site but again it is not typical.

On-line Exhibitions

Virtual Tours The Hermitage State Museum

Collections Catalogues
(old format= Peabody Museum, Yale

(new format= The People's History Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Intergrated or multifaceted sites
The British Museum

Posted by dschaef1 at 07:40 PM | Comments (2)

Maureen's Project Proposal

I posted my Review Essay Proposal on my Blog. Is it possible to move it to the proper category?

Posted by mguignon at 05:00 PM | Comments (2)

The California Gold Rush

There seems to be a variety of sources for the Gold Rush: a state sponsored site, a museum exhibit, a commerical site sponosred by a local paper, and a PBS site all with various degrees of scholarship, archive, and popular draw. And that's just a preliminary search.
1. http://www.californiahistory.net/goldFrame-2.htm
2. http://www.calgoldrush.com/
3. http://www.museumca.org/goldrush/
4. http://www.pbs.org/goldrush/
Amy

Posted by alechne1 at 05:00 PM | Comments (2)

The Readings

I have taken the liberty of scanning the 2 extra readings into .pdf format so that you don't have to copy them yourselves. However, they are rather large files, so some of you (those with dial-up, ahem) may find that it takes a looooong time to download.

The files are here:
Jenkins
Jenkins 2
(this is page 2 and 3 of the reading that was not included in the original copy for some reason... I had to scan it as a separate file because otherwise it would have been sideways)
Manovich
I had to put this on my server because for some reason Mills' was rejecting it... and since my server space is only 20 megs and this pdf is 14, I'm not leaving it up forever... I'll probably take it down on Monday, to give you time to check/print it out...

I figure I saved ya'll about $3... that works out to let's say, a beer, should we decide to have a CLIO Happy Hour sometime...

Meagan

Posted by mhess3 at 03:11 PM | Comments (4)

Maureen's Project Proposal

The question of who owns art, particularly cultural heritage, is an important and controversial topic in art history. My project proposal is to examine digital history projects that provide information about cultural heritage: the legal aspects of ownership and return; missing items in general; and how different organizations create their own view of ownership. I am interested in the underlying organizational program that validates each site's purpose. What sites are more objective? Who is creating the site and how does that affect its content? How do these sites argue for or validate legal ownership? I also want to examine the type of information available to students in order to add to their classroom experience.

I am interested in the topic because it is an important component of the History of the Museum course that I teach. The research will be pertinent for future projects in that course and it will also be incorporated into my minor field statement in Museums and Cultural Heritage. In other words, I am creating a lesson plan to teach a section of a college course on museum history by using the internet, not texts.

Main International Organization:

The main organization dealing with cultural heritage is UNESCO.It is instrumental in researching, defining, and protecting cultural heritage. This is an enormous site with simple access to numerous links dealing with cultural heritage including: laws and regulations, protection and repatriation, and updates. Go to: www.unesco.org/culture/heritage/

Big International Sites:

The Commission for Looted Art in Europe works with museums, communities, institutions, and families to research, identify and recover looted cultural property. Its central registry allows visitors to search by country.
www.lootedart.com

The International Council of Museums: International Committee on Museum Security has links to World War II, looted art and Iraq.
http://museum_security.org

Big National Museum Site:

The British Museum is well known for its collections and it is equally well known for the challenges it faces from other countries attempting to recover items within those collections.
Main site: www.bl.uk

From this site, there are many links to my topic. One link concerns looted art during World War II. You can go to: www.bl.uk/collections/wider/artwebsite.html

The museum is also the center for the International Dunhuang Project that makes ancient manuscripts, paintings and artifacts available on the internet for public research.

This is interesting because there is no mention of the British Museum as one of the largest repositories of cultural heritage that belongs to someone else, like the Dunhuang manuscripts. However, another link does argue why the British are the legal owners of the Elgin Marbles.
Go to: http://idp.bl.uk/
I assume they will follow with a similar link to make their claim for the Rosetta Stone, which Egypt has recently asked to be returned.

Foreign Sites:

The Lost Art Internet Database is Germany's central organization for the documentation of lost cultural property. It looks like an excellent resource for researching specific items.
www.lostart/.de/index.php3/lang=english

Small sites:

For a unique contrast to the larger sites, go to a new, small museum: www.afghanistan_institute.ch/
During the early days of Afghanistan's civil war, the warring parties
agreed to protect their cultural heritage before it was destroyed. The remaining museum collection in Kabul and some private collections were shipped to Switzerland to a small Afghan Institute organized by a German. He is now the temporary caretaker of the largest collection of Afghan artifacts in the world.

Equally refreshing is the Mills Lawn Elementary website. Go to:
www.yellow-springs.k12.oh.us/ys/mls/ to check out their lunch menu or to check out their website (under the Egyptian link) that provides students with an class activity to figure out who owns the Rosetta Stone.

Posted by mguignon at 02:59 PM | Comments (1)

Questions for 9/26

As you do the reading for next week's class, think about these questions. You should also post a blog commentary (ca. 300-500 words) on one of the questions.

1. Bill Cronon calls his essay "A Place for Stories." What is the story that Cronon tells in his essay?

2. What would Keith Jenkins say about Cronon's essay? How would Cronon respond?

3. What is the meaning of the title of Murray's book? What is Murray's own narrative?

4. Is Murray's book "radical" or "conservative?" What do those terms mean in relation to her book? What would Cronon or Jenkins or Landow say about her book?

5. One critic of Murray's book complains that "her utopianism colors all her arguments in this volume, leading her to ignore or play down the more disturbing consequences of technology while unabashedly embracing its possibilities." Do you agree? Why or why not?

6. Compare Manovich and Murray in tone, approach, and analysis. With whom do you agree?

Posted by mills at 01:01 PM

Thoughts on Scholarship Question

As with everything with this class so far, I am slow on the uptake but I ponder things until my head hurts. I'm having a hard time writing the web review because I keep going over this analysis idea of websites. I never read or reviewed historical monographs before I started this program but now I can do it with "relative" ease, so I expect with practice I can do web reviews as well. After the class discussion and rereading Roy's guidelines and Mill's blog questions, I spents some time (OK it was hours) looking at Pearl Harbor, Brainerd, Midwife's Tale, Salem Witch Trials, and Valley with the idea of categorizing them into: scholarship, entertainment, and informative/teaching. I found it easy to put Pearl Harbor in entertainment, and the other 4 into informative/teaching because they had the criteria of some or all of: information, archival materials, and teaching tools (probably more but that will do). I tried to compare them to the monograph I'm reading simultaneously for Colonial Origins, and I can't find the argument, data to support it, and conclusion in the websites we looked at. As you know from the Scavenger Hunt, I'm no web researcher, but I don't recall finding this scholarship idea out there on the web (in my limited experience). They seemed to be geared for information gathering, teaching historical concepts or events, or entertaining while informing - not for furthering an argument or presenting new historical ground to cover. Maybe I'm just now getting your point Mills for myself, but blogging is for thinking out loud, right? Now that I've blogged this out, maybe I can just sit down and write the review.

Posted by scarson1 at 12:20 PM

Scholarship Schmolarship

Well Mills, it's not your rubric... nor does it in any way tackle the question "what is scholarship?", but I thought you'd be interested to see what sort of guidelines other professors are giving in terms of website use.

From Dr. McGrath's HIST 610 (Historiography):

Authority: check the domain name--.edu, .org, and .gov are good ones, put your guard up for .coms, which indicate a commercial site (she didn't say they're bad, just said be critical)

Purpose and Objectivity: do they explain? present facts? act as an archive? is it a balanced perspective?

Accuracy and Accessibility:

• Look for spelling errors (!)
  
• facts vs. opinions
  
• are there complete or edited materials?
  
• do the graphics add to or distract from content?
  
• watch out for advertising (guess my Pearl Harbor site wouldn't make the cut...)
  
• reliability of links (and who's linking to it), the currency of the site--when was it last updated?
  
• Can the site be found in reliable directories? How close is it to the top of Google's list?
  
• Can it be found in academic library directories?

So, obviously she is not agonizing over the dilemma like we were, but I just thought you'd like to see...

Posted by mhess3 at 09:31 AM | Comments (3)

September 19, 2005

My website

Finally, after an agonizingly long battle with telnet

my website.

Posted by at 05:24 PM

Preliminary questions

After reading through everyone's blog postings the past couple of days, I have the following questions that I'm going to raise in class:

First off, what should our standards be when we review historical websites?

- Argument?
- Sourcing?
- Clarity of narrative structure?
- Originality?
- Wider significance for the discipline?
- Design?
- Interest in the wider world?
- Educational value?

A second question is whether these sites are more "archivish" or are they more "bookish"?

Third, what do you think about the whole "collecting history" angle, as in the Brainerd site? What's the value for advancing historical knowledge of having these personal contributions? This particular issue is one that the Center devotes a great deal of time to, the most prominent example being our September 11 Digital Archive.

Fourth, how essential is it that the website author control the reader's experience? For example, it is possible to proceed into and around inside the Valley of Shadow in such a way that one never comes to grips with the main arguments that Ayers and Thomas are trying to present in the project. Is that okay? Or is it incumbent on the scholar to guide the visitor in much the same way that an author guides the reader?

Fifth, now that you've been through the process of trying to penetrate and make sense of a larger website project, will graduate study ever be the same? By that I mean that in the past all graduate students had to learn the skill that I call "power reading", that is, the ability to unpack a monograph for all its relevant information in a couple of hours (or less). Will we develop similar "power reading" skills with these websites? Will it even be possible, given the amount of data they often offer us?

Posted by mills at 04:40 PM

CSS Help

For those of you needing some help with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) here are two sites that are handy. One even does the coding for you!

http://www.csscreator.com/version2/pagelayout.php

http://glish.com/css/

SR

Posted by at 01:49 PM

interesting, if not a bit boring

Websites today, to quote Forrest Gump, “are like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get”. The variety is vast and the expertise of the creators diverse. Some sites are meant to educate, some are to be used for their archival sources, some to entertain, and some mean to advertise or sell goods. As Takeshita points out, the web is unevenly developed “in terms of talent, financial resources, and content. As we learn how to create websites here at GMU, we as students are now facing some of the challenges we have read about this week regarding classification, technological know how, access to hidden or blocked files, and legal restraints.
Given this understanding of the difficulty obtaining accurate information and the freedom to use copy written texts or images, The Valley of the Shadow, http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu, an archival Civil War website exploring two counties of Virginia between John Brown’s raid through the era of Reconstruction, stands out as a particularly effective website. Not only is it informative and well organised, it appears to be technically sophisticated; using maps, images, archival documents and explanations of those documents that should help the viewer to understand and fully appreciate what the site has to offer. While there are no blinking lights and visually exciting cues for links, no fading scenes and changing vistas, the site is attractive and engaging, that is if you like history. I cannot imagine anyone really spending any time on the site unless they were interested in this particular subject, as it was not drafted with an aim at the general public but at academia and Civil War history buffs. I was slightly disappointed with this site, as I think it could be a lot more visually interesting given the content. Perhaps I’m just spoiled from all the bells and whistles most sites offer today.
Perhaps Takeshita would be disappointed with the amount of historical analysis that the site offers. While it contains more historical analysis than many “history” sites I have browsed in the past, this site could benefit from some additional analytical commentary. Then again, it is an archival site, and in the end, it seems intended to leave the historical analysis to the reader. The site poses no argument or position, but simply presents the facts. It is curious because the comparison of the two counties must have a purpose, but it is never fully explored or discussed. With regard to use in the classroom, it would be a helpful site for statistical reference and for examination of the actual words and writing styles used at the time. It is arranged in a straightforward manner with easy to read prompts and an uncomplicated site map.
Newspapers found on the site are always a good source for cultural analysis, with scanned photos of the actual documents for the reader to view. Without transcription, they allow the reader to determine for themselves how the media portrayed the war. We can also glean from newspapers vast amount of cultural information including literary interests, fashion, what was considered “news” or a headline, and the changes that emerged in those cultural themes from the John Brown to post war era.
Of particular interest are the diaries and letters that evoke personal emotion and illuminate the hardships that the residents of the two counties experienced, as well as those who wrote letters home from their remote location. These documents explore what Agre would call relationships and communities during the era of Civil War. These were real people living nearby who experienced the War first hand. Their words and thoughts would be of interest to many of us who study history or are just curious as to what people experienced one hundred and fifty years ago.
What is not preferable, perhaps, are the transcriptions offered. While transcripts may save the reader time, they may not accurately represent the writer’s meaning with regard to cultural differences and spelling disparities. Interpreters today may not catch the possible nuances left by nineteenth century authors and could predispose the reader to make conclusions that are not entirely accurate as a result. One cannot be too careful when analysing personal communications from another era, and therefore caution is to be used when reading the transcripts. One advisory remark on the site, however, is necessary; the site warns that some of the language contained within the documents may offend due (mostly) to race relations and there is a disclaimer explaining that these views are not shared by the site host (UVA). This is just one striking example of the cultural differences between the past and the present that we need to remember when writing and reading history.
That being said, however, the comparison maps and statistics offered on the site are particularly enlightening and save the researcher a good deal of time by providing this factual analysis. The search options allow the reader to find a keyword within any of the documents saving time and effort of poring over them. For example, I went to the images prompt and typed in “women”, receiving only a scant number of images. Apparently women were not seen as important enough to be frequently documented in this era.
Disappointing is the fat that there is no discussion group or real opportunity for viewer interaction here. It would be interesting to read remarks made by scholars and history buffs alike on this site regarding the archival documents contained therein. It would also be interesting to see an update of sorts; how the two counties developed over modern time and if they are currently similar or more dissimilar than they were during the Civil War era.
It is clear that The Valley of the Shadow was created to inform and to educate, perhaps to entertain. The aim surely isn’t focused on the average web surfer, but at the historian or history student. As an archival site, although not very exciting, it works well.

Posted by avonargy at 01:46 PM

Miles's Website

Here is the address to my initial website:

http://www.milesandbrooklynne.com/hist696/

Enjoy!

Posted by miles at 01:46 PM

A Most Feeble Site

I wanted to start low so I could only go up! ;^)

http://mason.gmu.edu/~kalbers/

Posted by kalbers at 01:31 PM

website

My website can be found at:

http://mason.gmu.edu/~scarson1/

Posted by scarson1 at 01:27 PM

Website Evaluation: Brainerd

For the website evaluation I decided to do the one about Brainerd Kansas. I'm not the best writer so be nice :-)

Steve

Brainerd, Kansas: Time, Place, and Memory on the Prairie Plains (http://www.rootinaround.com/brainerd/ ) Created and maintained by Kevin Roe, copyright 2000. Reviewed September 18, 2005.

For the website evaluation I chose the Brainerd Kansas site. I chose this site for because of focus on a small rural town. The site is easy to use and doesn't overwhelm a visitor with java, flash, or sound to distract from the purposed of the site: to describe one man's fascintation with the town that his relatives came from. The site is in the style of Electronic Essay/Exhibit and tries to be unbiased in its laying out of information about the town. The navigation is easy and straight forward. One thing that I like is that fact that it puts all the info out there for a visitor. There is no long analysis of the loss of small town USA or exploring the reasons why Brainerd has declined. I find that it is that kind of material that drives me away from a site. In the Rosenzweig and Cohen piece that we were to read as part of this assignment, I found myself dozing off as they went on and on and on about history on the web. The Agre piece was even worse...it was the epitomy of what not to do on a website...a long essay that quotes others with the same opinion to somehow give authority to the material being presented. My personal preference is for a web site to have primary materials and links to other sites and information. That way I can make up my mind for myself. Reading long winded anaylsis on a computer monitor is not the way to learn about history.

This site in particular would appeal to many people looking find out more about small towns, the mid-west, and early 20th century history. It has a good listing of sources so that someone who wants to can go and on their own do more reseach on the town and the surrounding area. One thing that is unique is the ability to download the entire site. This is something that I have never seen before. Since the site is small and simple the need to download the entire thing may be questionable, but this feature may be quite nice on other sites with lots of information and pictures that may be referenced over and over again.

In regards to the site and new media, it does a fine job. This is due to the ease of use of finding information on the site, the use of maps and pictures, and the ability to download the enitre site.

Something I found ironic is that the site seems to have not been updated in a few years (all the entries seem to end a few years ago). Ironic in that it's now a site that seems to have been forgotten...like the town it is describing.

I reason that I found the site about Brainerd interesting is because of my growing frustration with urban life. Too many people, soring costs, traffic, the fast pace of everything...it's enough to drive someone out of their mind! In a recent ABCNews story, they discussed how many people are now moving back to rural America, reviving the small town because of the issues I stated above. The ability for people to use new technologies such as VoIP, web cams, on-line collaboration, cell phones, etc. allow many people to work in a virtual office in rural America. I'm not sure the virtual office will save small agricultural towns but it will be interesting to see what happens.

Posted by at 12:35 PM

Brainerd, Kansas: Time, Place, and Memory

Brainerd, Kansas: Time, Place, and Memory(http://www.rootinaround.com/brainerd/) Created and maintained by Kevin Roe. Reviewed September 18, 2005.

Brainerd, Kansas: Time, Place, and Memory is an Internet project that presents the history of a small, rural town through the memories of long-time residents. Kevin Roe, the author and designer of the site, became interested in Brainerd through his grandmother who lived there as a child, from 1911 to 1915. As a graduate student, Roe built his Brainerd site to contribute to the body of knowledge regarding the interpretation of the landscapes of towns, cities, and rural areas. This site stands as a good beginning for this purpose, but it only hits the tip of the iceberg, demonstrating the potential for the Internet to make the history of previously obscure subjects, like Brainerd, much more accessible.

The main source of Brainerd, Kansas: Time, Place, and Memory is a set of oral histories Roe collected from four past and present residents of Brainerd. The site first provides some background on the history of the town, from its genesis as a railroad depot, to its decline when the railroad was rerouted. Then, using this history as a foundation, Roe explores why Brainerd continued as a community despite the departure of its original industry. Roe argues that the collective memories of long-time residents sustained the town. In a style appropriate to his journalistic background, Roe conveys these “memories” through a first-person narrative of his discoveries as he explored the town with his Brainerd guides.

Besides the narrative, the site also contains a gallery of 39 images that correspond with the text of the site. The images include town maps and historic black and white photographs of Brainerd people and landmarks, as well as more recent photos documenting the remaining town and remnants of its past. The images can be accessed by links included where its subject is mentioned in the text, or a visitor can browse the images by selecting the gallery from the navigation sidebar. Roe also offers a brief note below each image to help the visitor understand the significance of the images, which are sometimes very helpful, especially for explaining the meaning of the various maps and photographs of past buildings’ weed-covered foundations.

Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the site, however, is the guestbook, where visitors to the site can post a comment, thought, or story, or read the comments of others. Many of the guestbook entries are typical records of visits and offers of praise for the site. But, the guest book is particularly interesting because, among the well-wishers and random visitors, Roe’s original collection of four primary “memories” is supplemented by the stories of other readers who have various connections to Brainerd and the surrounding region. Some of these postings offer great potential for collecting a deeper, more complete history of the town and demonstrate the utility of the Internet for connecting a community across time and space. If the guestbook is any indication, an energetic historian who could supplement the site with a well-designed collecting application, and follow up with more traditional historical methods (interviews, archival verification, etc.), would likely discover a trove of material further illustrating the changing face of rural America.

The technical aspect of the Brainerd site is adequate. The layout is simple, but tasteful. The body of the site is displayed in a frame on the right, while a navigation sidebar runs vertically in a frame to the left. This sidebar makes it easy to navigate among the main sections, but several of these sections include multiple pages, so some additional browsing may be necessary to find desired information. For visitors who have very old hardware or slow connections, or are uncomfortable with reading on a monitor, the site also offers printer-friendly downloads as well.

Roe’s argument and the information he provides through his website are valuable contributions to the recorded history of Brainerd, as well as other small towns for which Brainerd could act as an example. However, the site lacks academic force because Roe does not cite his sources within the text and his interviews with the residents are do not seem to be archived and they are not made available through the site. Also, Roe’s analysis is vague and raises more questions than it attempts to answer. Why was the Brainerd Feed Store such a central memory for all of the interviewees? Why did the store survive when other businesses closed or moved elsewhere? Besides shrinking, how did the orientation of the town plats demonstrate the change of focus from the railroad to farms and ranches? A better-developed argument would help historians, as well as causal readers, engage the site in a deeper, more critical manner.

Brainerd, Kansas: Time, Place, and Memory is a good start toward recording and understanding more than a century of history in Brainerd and other small towns, but there is more untapped potential. The avenues for study Roe’s site suggests and the responses found within the guestbook are testaments to the horde of information that could be discovered by digging deeper into this town’s fascinating history.

Posted by miles at 12:27 PM

The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War is an exemplary online archive. The site, hosted by the Virginia Center for Digital History, is a repository for an enormous amount of material relating to two communities, both in the same Shenandoah Valley resting below the Appalachian Mountains, which found themselves on opposite sides of the political and violent lines drawn before, during, and after the Civil War.

The Valley of the Shadow represents the advantages an online archive can offer while maintaining the benefits any physical repository can offer. Most significant is the multiple avenues which are offered to approach the material by. Much like a non-virtual archive, The Valley of the Shadow allows a researcher to choose a broad topic or source, such as newspaper articles, and simply browse the material, culling bits of information one expects to find, as well as evidence stumbled upon. However, the archive, in reproducing documents as searchable text fields, allows the researcher to hone in on material which might have been overlooked or never even considered as a source. For example, in a section containing thousands of letters written during the war, a search for the word "bullet" identifies the eleven documents containing the word in seconds rather than months, and potentially with greater accuracy as well. The search tool, offered in most areas of the site, is powerful, offering researchers several fields, such as author and date in the letters collection, by which the results might be narrowed.

This is important given the breadth and depth of material offered here. The site is structured into three chronological divisions: antebellum, wartime, and the aftermath. All of these divisions contain collections of letters and diaries, newspapers articles, and maps. However, each era also highlights several unique topics such as census, church, and veteran records, soldier information, images, or the Freedman Bureau.

The site’s layout is also conceived so as to facilitate access to the materials. The sections are organized so as to be approachable in multiple ways. A graphical layout presents the researcher with an interactive “floor plan” of the archives, highlighting different aspects of the collection. However, one can also enter the “Reference Center” to view not only hypertext timelines and extensive bibliographies (organized by subject and type), but also a listing of the sites databases for a more traditional approach. Conceptualizing the material in these different modes lends a greater freedom and creativity to the researcher than a physical or even more constrictive virtual, archive allows.

Perhaps best of all, for those who might feel intimidated by such a far reaching and technical site, The Valley of the Shadow includes a walkthrough to help understand the site and its contents as well as teaching resources for educators who would like to incorporate parts of it into their lessons. This is a nice touch, making the site accessible to those who are unfamiliar with performing primary research, opening the field to academic and public scholars alike. The Valley of the Shadow should appeal to anyone with even a passing interest in Civil War history, and is a powerful tool for those who study it seriously.

Posted by kalbers at 10:48 AM

HTML and Photo alternatives

I've noticed some people complaining about Dreamweaver. I thought I'd post some alternatives that I've used over the years that have worked well for me. I'm not sure how our Professor will like this but maybe it'll help someone out.

HTML:
CoffeeCup VisualSite Designer
http://www.coffeecup.com/designer/

CoffeeCup HTML Editor
http://www.coffeecup.com/html-editor/

SciTE (this is a text editor- like Notepad- but will highlight stuff and reads all kinds of files)
http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/SciTEDownload.html

Photo Tools:
IrfanView
http://www.irfanview.com

The GIMP
http://www.gimp.org/

GIMPShop (makes The GIMP look like Photoshop)
http://freshmeat.net/projects/gimpshop/

I hope this helps!
Steve

PS- has anyone figured out how to turn off the automatic paragragh
insertion everytime you hit return in the WYSIWYG editor section of Dreamweaver???

Posted by at 10:27 AM | Comments (1)

Enter the Valley (nona's web review)

The Valley of the Shadows: Two Communities in the American Civil War (http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/)
University of Virginia, Edward L. Ayers
Reviewed September 18, 2005

The Valley of the Shadow is a digital archive dealing with two counties, one northern and one southern. It allows the reader to navigate three sections: The Eve of the Ear, The War Years and The Aftermath. Within each section, the viewer has the option to explore diaries, census records, maps, church records, images, news papers and general statistics. Also available to the viewer is a reference section that contains the timelines, the searchable databases and the bibliographies for each section.

Content:

The content of the site seems to be very thorough, or at least very balanced. None of the three chronological sections are comparatively deficient of material. And, by its nature it presents views from both sides of the conflict. That the collection contains war maps as well as diaries and newspapers allows the viewer the opportunity to obtain a well-rounded view of the inhabitants of the counties represented. There appear to be no obvious biases in either the selection or in the interpretation. As a matter of fact, there is minimal interpretation. Even the statistical comparison that might lend itself to interpretations contains simply a bare explanation of facts. The site is scholastically responsible in the use of citation of sources and the collection of bibliographies (so conveniently classified by type) is also very useful. If there is one short coming of scholarship, that is in presentation of statistical data. In the comparison statistics (as in others) the units used are not given and nor is the sample size is not provided.

Form:

There are several aspects of this site that are very well done. The design and layout are creative attractive. In addition, there are “how to guides” provided to help the user towards easy navigation and understanding of the site’s layout. However, the linking and the navigation stand in the way of that aim. The site design is not consistent on every page. On some pages in the third tier of the site, the navigation bar that exists on the first two tiers is conspicuously absent. Also, from most third tier pages there is no way to return to the second tier other than using the back button and when in the fourth tier there is no navigation menu option at all. If the reader is deep within a particular section, Franklin County Official Record for example, navigation within the section is difficult. Another problem is that the home navigation does not resize. This makes it difficult to read on screens with smaller resolution, causing the reader scroll over in order to see the entire navigation option. Finally, there is no easy way to browse through the site’s rich databases. Browsing by use of the search engine is not only not entirely intuitive, it is also returns a very cumbersome, difficult-to-browse result listing. The exception is the browsing feature in the newspaper sections, which is very accessible.

Audience:

Teaching Resources page included in the “Using the Valley Project” section, this site was not designed with teachers in mind. The site never state outright who it audience is. As the archive contains primary sources and several scholarly works have resulted from its use, on might conclude that the audience is the scholarly community of researchers, from college students to professional researchers. However, it is safest to conclude that a mixed audience was intended – an audience of all those interested in the history of the civil war.

Media:

The Valley of the Shadows makes effective use of several tools available only to this medium that benefit any audience. It employs a searchable database (of diaries, census and church records) that adds an ease to research that would not exist in a monograph or in audiovisual media(a less cumbersome browsing feature would be an invaluable addition). The maps are interactive in a way that they could not be in another medium. The site’s layout allows the reader to determine her own path through the archive while still providing structure to the journey.

Conclusion:

The Valley of the Shadows is a rich resources. The archives contains primary document that scholars would have before had difficulty finding in one location. In spite of its navigation problems, it presents the information in a way that invites further discovery and research. I would recommend this site to those interested in civil war history.

Posted by nmartina at 08:30 AM | Comments (1)

Tora, tora, tora. Scott's website evaluation

I lost the first draft and my witty opening comments this weekend as I attempted to blog using dial-up (I visited all the sites using a DSL connection on Friday). Here it is condensed: I chose the Pearl Harbor website because I have written about the event and so I felt I could objectively and with some knowledge effectively evaluate this particular site although I did enjoy the others, especially the "Do History" site and it's layout/design/content. I've posted my evaluation of the National Geographic website on the extended entry section (hope I do it right) as per the Professor's request.

National Geographic: Remembering Pearl Harbor. (http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/), maintained by the National Geographic Society. Reviewed 16 September 2005.

The attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy on 7 December 1941 is one of those events in history that historians, and in particular naval/military historians, love to study. Many of these historians enjoy examining the overarching themes that led Japan to attack the United States while what are known as amateur "buffs" (as well as many professional historians) would rather discuss how the Japanese got their aerial torpedoes to work in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor or how fast a Mitsubishi Zero flew in the humid air of the Pacific. Although historians and these buffs who studied the minutae of battles, and the equipment used by the antagonists, receive little respect from mainstream academic historians, the latter need not fear about this website. The following is a review of National Geographic's "Remembering Pearl Harbor" website using the "Web Review Guidelines" article authored by Roy Rosenzweig (listed at http://chnm.gmu.edu/jah/).

In trying to determine what type or category this website fell under, I thought it fell somewhere between an Electronic Essay/Exhibit and a Journal/Webzine. I believe it was based on a recent article in National Geographic that covered, in particular, the evaluation of the remains of the USS Arizona (but I have not read this article). After logging on to the website, my first impression was very favorable. It was attractively designed and visually appealing (although as a novice web manager it's not too difficult to impress me with a technically advanced website.) It starts off with an overview map of the Hawaiian Islands and an interactive timeline across the bottom with 21 "points" that refer to a specific time during that day, from 0300 hours until 1300 hours only. It is important to note that the website only really covers the events of 7 December 1941 and anyone looking for an extensive coverage of the beginnings of the war in the Pacific will have to look elsewhere. By placing your cursor over one of the points, a small box opens with a description of the event that occurred at that time and a "click here" notice that states "Explore the Full Story." Once clicked, you are taken to a page that gives a very brief narrative of the event along with the chance to click on a video clip of a veteran of the battle, both U.S. and Japanese. The website also includes a searchable "Memory Book" archive that visitors can examine or post their thoughts or remembrances of that day. Also included is a large format table entitled "Pearl Harbor Ships and Planes."

Regarding the website's content, it is a strict narrative that does not contain an academic-type argument. In a sense it was completely unbiased and objective. It is really a cursory overview of the events of that morning and there is very little "scholarship" involved. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor using midget submarines and naval aircraft, causing significant damage to the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet. Ultimately, I could not really determine a "point of view".

Regarding the website's form, it is laid out in a very clear manner. It was very easy to navigate and it did function effectively. I used a DSL connection to view the site, however, and so I do not know how a dial-up connection would work or not with this website. It's design was effective, easy to use, and it seemed to have a coherent structure. Overall I would argue that this was a well thought out website with an intriguing design.

The audience that I thought this website was directed to was anyone of the general public who had an interest in the attack on Pearl Harbor or who had read the article in National Geographic and who wanted to know a little bit more. Evidence that this was one of the targeted audiences was in the comments left in the "Memory Book" archive. Additionally, the website seemed targeted towards junior and high school students and World War II veterans and their families. Again, postings in the "Memory Book" point to the success of the designers in attracting that audience.

The website did make good use of New Media, although I found the music soundtrack quite annoying and turned it off. I could not determine if there was a way to make the chronology run as a streaming video. I had to click on each of the 21 timeline points manually and this got somewhat tiresome. But the use of the map and interactive timeline was interesting. They also had short video clips of original motion pictures and still photos from the battle, including some good shots of the Japanese carrier operations. Combining these moving images with the timeline and maps could only be done in the web-based venue. Overall the design and use of new media was very well done.

My overall evaluation of the website, however, is that compared to other sites that discuss the Pearl Harbor attack, this site was not of much value to a scholar. There was no analysis or argument. There was insufficient background to the attack (such as: why did Japan undertake this incredible risk?), and very little information that would prove to be of use to the scholar. The one exception to that for me was the only information I had not heard before was that the Japanese torpedo bomber pilots (in this case Haruo Yoshino) had no altimeter in their aircraft and had to judge heights by eyeball. He stated "We flew totally by the seat of our pants." To me, that quote alone made my visit and exploration of the website worthwhile, but it's overall value to a Pearl Harbor scholar is limited.

The Memory Book archive I found to be relatively uninteresting, with quotes such as "I wasn't even born yet" being representative. But a cultural historian may find that interesting. The table was something I was surprised to find but again, it had too little information included. Also, visual images of each vessel and aircraft would have been a welcome addition. For example, the extravagent way individual pilots of the Imperial Japanese Navy painted their aircraft belies the stereotype that the Japanese military was staffed with automotons. There was no information regarding the U.S. Army Air Forces' aircraft or the response by a few pilots who managed to get in the air and combat the Japanese. Ultimately what is missing from this website could fill volumes. In some sense I thought I was reviewing what ultimately happened with the Enola Gay exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum where the staff gave up on interpretation and simply listed that this was the aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. There is so much more to add to this website (for example see www.pearlharborattacked.com) but for the purposes of the authors, perhaps they put in as much as they thought was needed. It might make a useful supplement to teaching but probably falls under the umbrella of Vernon Takeshita's caveat that "As a source for intellectual development, the web faces problems in both theory and implementation" (Takeshita article, page 1) and would probably be a “distraction” (page 5).

Oops, I’m over 1,000 words, sorry Professor.

Posted by sprice7 at 07:20 AM | Comments (1)

Scott's Website

It's ugly but it's up. I'm keeping the photo in place, he has more hair than I do.

http://mason.gmu.edu/~sprice7

Posted by sprice7 at 07:20 AM

Website Evaluation - Ammon - Sept. 19, 2005

DoHistory.org - Martha Ballard's Diary. Created by Film Study Center, Harvard University and hosted by Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Reviewed September 19, 2005.

Playing on the common theme that a historian is a detective of times past, the DoHistory.org site offers the visitor the oportunity to 'play the detective.'

Encompassing the intriguing time period after the formation of the United States of America to a few decades into the following Century, the online diary of a common midwife, Martha Ballard, is presented in a fashion that allows the visitor to peruse, discover and explain for themself a 'mystery' and solution found therein. Incorporating basically four different activities, the site offers the visitor the oportunity to look at actual images of the diary, read the online version of a book written about the diary, view a movie based on the diary, and complete two activities that show the vistor how to be a historical detective.

The content of the site includes the online version of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's book based on the diary, A Midwifes Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary 1785-1812. This online book contains competent and coherent analysis on the life and times of this early frontier town, based on Martha Ballard's diary. What's more, Ulrich discusses the importance of the journals hidden stories that have been overlooked by other historians.

Helpful and accessible menus, interesting and original design, and complete usability make the site very affective for researching and learning about Martha Ballard's diary. A menu situated at the bottom of each page provides easy access to each feature of the site. A link to the site map clarifies any confusion left about the categories and options of the site. The homepage could benefit from less clutter, perhaps spacing the main graphic of the journal in between the bottom menu and other introductory messages and menus at the top. From an interactive stand point, perhaps the neatest feature of the site are the pages allowing the visitor to interact with images of the original diary. Javascript-ing allows the visitor to move a 'magic lens' over the 18th Century script which then shows the text in clear and legible type set. Other options are to view the complete diary in type set, a quiz to test ones transcribing skills and basic browsing and searching of the diary.

The site seems to be intended for high school level and above audiences. While designating a school level, it is by no means limited to educational use. The casual history buff interested in this time period, as well as the historian seeking for innovative and clever ideas for presenting history, would greatly benefit from a perusal of this site.

Available in both book and web form, the journal of Martha Ballard and the book about the journal by Laurel Ulrich are enriched and enhanced by the DoHistory.org site. Visual and interactive applications make the visitor feel apart of the discovery of Martha Ballard's life. The site uses Java applets, QuickTime movies, and unique instances of HTML (forms/input boxes in the activity of transcribing) to provide an instructive and engaging journey into Martha Ballard's life.

Posted by ashephe1 at 06:59 AM

Website - Ammon

Class web page. I've relocated my class web page. I just bought a new domain, so I moved it there.

GMU.Mossiso.com

Ammon

Posted by ashephe1 at 06:22 AM | Comments (2)

September 18, 2005

Liz's Web

definitely a work-in-progress

Posted by ejonese at 10:41 PM

Matt Hobbs reviews "Brainerd, Kansas"

As people grow more comfortable with technology, their use of it naturally increases. The ubiquity of mobile phones, digital cameras, and personal MP3 players should bear out this observation. So it is with the Internet. As the World Wide Web has exploded over the past decade, people have ceased to be merely consumers of web-based content and have become producers. New software applications make this easier, and as the “desktop publishing” revolution allowed anyone with a printer and word processor to become a published author twenty years ago, it is just as easy today to stake a claim in cyberspace and start manufacturing pages for others to see.

This is exactly what graduate student Kevin Roe has done with his website Brainerd, Kansas: Time, Place, and Memory on the Prairie Plains. Combining his pursuit of a master’s degree in American studies with his interest in his family’s personal connection to a small Kansas town, Mr. Roe has designed and written a website that is both personal and informative. Cited by Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig in Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web as one of the most successful historical “fanzines,” Mr. Roe’s site is the perfect example of an author with “…a historical enthusiasm that is too narrow to merit publication.” Brainerd, Kansas was a typical railroad boomtown, though even at its height it never claimed more than five hundred residents. Today, perhaps as few as forty people call the town home. However, the fact that any residents remain makes Brainerd an exception, when most of the Prairie Plains towns that went bust simply disappeared. Mr. Roe is fascinated by this unique escape of destiny, and so he set out to catalog the remnants of the town and its inhabitants.

Rather than just index some photographs and record the memories of former and current residents, Mr. Roe has an agenda. He seeks to answer questions such as “What reverberates in individual and collective memories? And what do these memories tell us about landscape, architecture and the intangibles that make up a particular place?” Clearly written as a social history, “Brainerd, Kansas” seeks to situate not the physical location of the town within the prairies, but the memories of the town within the larger context of Plains history. Interviews, personal correspondence, and primary sources such as newspaper records and government accounts are tied together to create a mental map of Brainerd within the mind of the reader.

The site’s design is simple and functional. All navigation is conducted through a left-positioned menu that guides the user through the site in logical progression. Typography and layout are clean, and the visual appeal of the site is maintained through the use of light, neutral backgrounds with a minimum of flash. The narration of the main sections, “History” and “Memories,” is interspersed with hypertext links that launch photos, maps, or pictures that relate to the text in a smaller browser window. All of these images are also available in a separate gallery page. However, this is the only flaw in the site’s design. The pictures, once they are loaded, are relatively small. This may have been a conscious decision to conserve bandwidth or storage space. Regardless, this is a minor flaw at most. This simplistic design does suggest that while the World Wide Web allows Mr. Roe to reach a wide and varied audience, perhaps many times larger than if he had printed this research as a monograph, there is very little here that demands the story of Brainerd be told on the Internet. There is nothing in the website’s design that inherently calls out for the unique capabilities of the Web. The site’s uncomplicated layout encourages a broad range of users, and this was surely Mr. Roe’s intent. The story of Brainerd is not just of interest to the small circle of people with a direct connection to the town. The site is as accessible to the layman as to the history professional. Anyone with an interest in western American history, the sociology of community development and disintegration, or even a casual web surfer will find something of interest here. A large percentage of this country’s population no longer has any direct connection to their area of residence past a generation or two. The story of a town where current residents can read their own surnames on tombstones over a century old has a certain mythic appeal to many Americans, appealing to a sense of home and belonging. It is exactly this desire for community that Mr. Roe has successfully explored with his website. In a smart riposte to Vernon Takeshita’s rather mean-spirited essay Tangled Web: The Limits of Historical Analysis on the Internet, the story of Brainerd as told on the Web proves that there is room for smart, specialized research on the Internet and that the medium has a rich potential for the professional history student.

Posted by mhobbs at 10:30 PM

nona's homepage

http://clio.makeda.org/hist696/index.html

Posted by nmartina at 10:30 PM

The Valley of the Shadow Eval--Liz

The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War (http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/) Created and Maintained by the Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia. Reviewed September 15-18, 2005.

Overview
I chose to review The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War site because I hope to focus on this period while I am at Mason. The idea of finding a site that can help me in my research intrigued me greatly.

To begin, this site is a great resource for the undergraduate/graduate student looking to research the lives of ordinary folks in Civil War era—both north and south of the Mason-Dixon line. The Valley of the Shadow site archives personal documents, newspapers, speeches, and census and church records from Civil War era-Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania—undoubtedly a Herculean task. Although the creator of the site, Professor Edward L. Ayers (UVA), originally envisioned this project in book form, the rise of the Internet encouraged him to move the project to the Web. To this day, he and his graduate students work constantly to upload new documents and resources.

Overall, the site is very comprehensive, breaking the information down chronologically—“The Eve of War (Fall 1859-Spring 1861)”, “The War Years (Spring 1861-Spring 1865)”, and “The Aftermath (Spring 1865 to Fall 1870).” Furthermore, the idea behind the site is very intriguing—what were common folks, separated by a mere 200 miles, thinking as the very future of the nation was at stake? Did the thoughts and personal lives of people in the slave-holding South differ profoundly from those of people living in free Pennsylvania? The materials contained on this site are quite wide-ranging, and go far toward answering these questions. Indeed, not only are white men represented on the site, but people that are considered under-represented in the historical archive (women and blacks) are as well. It is obvious that the project is a work-in-progress, as many letters and diaries lack links, but the information the site presents is quite fascinating.

Structure

The creators of the site categorize the site as more “like a library than a single book. There is no "one" story in the Valley Project.” (see, http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/usingvalley/valleyguide.html). The site is like a library; however, it is not always easy for a student to find what he seeks.

When the user clicks on the “Enter Site” button, one is taken to a page with three figures, shaped vaguely like architectural plan for houses. I found the page rather cluttered and bewildering, for although it demonstrates that the site contains many pages of information, the figures are not uniform—e.g., one octagon has church records, while the corresponding sections in the other octagons do not. The original idea organizing the site in this way—“a floor plan as a way to convey to visitors the sense that they were working with an archive with different “rooms”.” However, when I clicked on the Walking Tours of the Valley Archives (http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/usingvalley/evetour.html/
http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/usingvalley/wartour.html/
http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/usingvalley/aftermathtour.html, I found the design myself better able to navigate through the site.

I was very excited about the interactive maps, which detailed maps (some animated) and images. Such information could not be presented in book form as adequately. However, I could see that the technology involved could pose problems for some users with slower connections or disabilities. Professors Roy Rosenzweig and Daniel Cohen advise in their book, Designing for the History Web that web creators be cognizant of this fact.

Despite these cosmetic problems, I found the rest of the site very easy to navigate—and very useful One may search the diaries, letters, and newspapers by date, author name, or keyword, for example.

All-in-all this is a good site, and I intend to use it for future projects.

Posted by ejonese at 09:23 PM

Kurt's Website

Here's my attempt...

Click here to visit Kurt's site.

Here's the full URL:
http://www.clio.keimaps.com/index.html

Posted by kknoerl at 09:19 PM | Comments (1)

Tai's Website

http://mason.gmu.edu/~tgerhart/

Posted by tgerhart at 05:49 PM

Tai's Review of Brainerd, Kansas Website

Brainerd, Kansas: Time, Place, and Memory on the Prairie Plains (http://www.rootinaround.com/brainerd/ ) Created and maintained by Kevin Roe, copyright 2000. Reviewed September 18, 2005.

This is a review of Kevin Roe’s historical website about Brainerd, Kansas. I must admit my own bias at the outset of this review: I am a native Kansan, recently transplanted to Virginia. I recognized and have been to nearly all of the locations Roe describes, and I share much of his sentimentality towards the locale. Rather than detracting from my objectivity, I hope to hold Roe to the same standards needed in all historic sites in order to accurately represent my home state.

In terms of content, the Brainerd site and author Kevin Roe attempt to understand “a particular place in all its intimate detail” in order to “gain a great deal of respect for a landscape and its complex past and present,” while also discussing the “relationship between memory and place.” Thus Roe seems to be studying a socio- or psycho-history by coupling the remaining documentation/facts of Brainerd with the memories he gathers of current and former residents.

The form of the site is clear to an experienced or novice historical website user. The maintained navigation bar on all pages allows one to move between pages without difficulty. Similarly this navigation bar outlines an order for new visitors, allowing the user to fully understand what is being viewed in the context of Roe’s creation, execution and completion of this site.

The audience of this site is relatively broad. It appeals to residents of Brainerd as well as the entire state of Kansas. Due to the author’s fanciful attraction to visit Brainerd [“filling me with a hunger to see more of the Great Plains by placing the region in its important historical context and eloquently describing the vastness of the skies and prairie that greeted early explorers and settlers”], Roe arouses similar emotions in audience members of old hometowns, wide-open spaces and family history. For these recreational users, the Brainerd site certainly satisfies their longing for home and curiosity. From an academic perspective the site also aims to “help us better understand why this community has survived and not faded back into the prairie, unlike so many other Kansas railroad towns.” In this pursuit he is successful because of his knowledge of the limited historiography, specifically of Daniel Fitzgerald's Ghost Towns of Kansas (see site’s bibliography), motivating him to research and explain how Brainerd survived in spite of sharing many characteristics with Fitzgerald’s “towns.” The Brainerd site’s ease-of-use is directly connected to Roe’s broad intended audience. As represented by Phil Agre (in his essay, “Designing Genres for New Media: Social, Economic, and Political Contexts” http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/genre.html ), “[d]esign for new media…requires some rational understanding of who is using the materials, what they are doing with them, and how they fit into an overall way of life.” Clearly Roe understood this by making his site simple enough for his local and sentimental viewers, even as he included historiographic, bibliographic and primary source material for his academic audience.

Roe’s dissemination of his Brainerd research could have been executed through a monograph publication, but with a different result. This site follows a linear progression effectively reproduced in print, which would have been advantageous in the larger production of his images. Nevertheless, the audience he is able to reach through use of the Internet is exponentially increased. More than sheer numbers, the diversity of Roe’s audience is also expanded to anywhere the Internet reaches, made visible by many of the responses included in the Guestbook. Additionally the use of the Internet allows Roe to continue his research. Also apparent in his Guestbook are the memories of people far beyond the handful he interviewed for this original work. The ability to easily add new source material to one’s work ensures the continued viability and accuracy of Roe’s original project.

The use of this new media is one example of the possibilities for history on the Internet. Roy Rosenzweig and Daniel Cohen (in their article “Exploring the History Web” in Doing Digital History http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/exploring/4.php ) describe Roe’s site as a “historical fanzine,” meaning a site “created by people who are devoted to a particular topic.” Rosenzweig and Cohen admit sites of this genre can be motivated by the author’s lack of scholarly background or commercial viability for publishing. Yet this particular site garners their praise as a promoter of primary source information via the Internet, while producing a “virtual historical society for a community that has largely disappeared.” Vernon Takeshita (in his essay “Tangled Webs: The Limits of Historical Analysis on the Internet http://www.dartmouth.edu/%7Ehistory/newsletter/spring01/web.html ) recognizes the vast amount of primary sources available on the Internet, such as the Brainerd site, but criticizes: “historical analysis of any normal length is surprisingly absent.” Roe attempts to formulate some conclusions on his site, indicating “[t]he more I learned about Brainerd, the more I realized that it did not fit the pattern I expected to find,” specifically the deserted ghost town depicted by Fitzgerald. Thus Roe’s analysis leads to a conclusion centered around his initial theme of the relationship between memory and place: “The memories of a Brainerd gone by have become so strongly embedded in these residents' present-day conceptions of the community that the current townscape exists in a sort of time/space limbo -- the past is always present.”

Posted by tgerhart at 05:38 PM

Kurt's Review of Brainerd, Kansas

Brainerd, Kansas: Time, Place, and Memory on the Web
http://www.rootinaround.com/brainerd/
Kevrave Productions
Reviewed 9/18/2005

Kevin Roe’s Brainerd, Kansas website was based on a graduate project in American Studies and Architecture at Kansas University. It combines oral histories, photographs, and maps collected by the author. Together they create a collective memory of a landscape that continues to evolve and for now at least survives. The site seeks “to interpret the landscapes... so that we can learn more about ourselves and what we value." (Kevin Roe, Brainerd, Kansas, 2000) In answering perhaps the immediate question of why bother visiting this virtual memory the author responds, “that getting to know a particular place in all its intimate detail is a good and useful thing, and a process by which one can gain a great deal of respect for a landscape and its complex past and present.” (Roe, 2000) I agree.

The history section, though brief, provides the necessary context in which to enter the memories page where the viewer is given a tour of both the past and present structures and landscape of Brainerd. While this is interesting in and of itself the real people section is where the heart and soul of the town resides. The oral histories related there help tie the images together providing meaning and personality to the photos of past and present buildings and places. One views them with a different perspective and new appreciation. That experience alone is worth “the trip.”

The site is laid out cleanly and simply as was the town itself. Navigation is conducted primarily through simple vertical and horizontal menu and links that are slightly reminiscent of the grid like streets of Brainerd. There is a logical flow through the pages from the introduction to the conclusions. The site is devoid of glitzy color schemes or unnecessary interactives that would somehow seem out of place even in a virtual Brainerd. The clear path through the site avoids an over use of hypertext links that can spin one off into navigational oblivion. While options within a site are useful it is often better to provide a user with some sense of direction. Where do I start? When am I done? After that you can suggest other options. That type of site like Brainerd, Kansas offers a more cohesive satisfying experience. Having said that, however, the site could benefit from a broader field of view. A sample of similar towns that perhaps did not survive but still retain some elements of their manmade landscape would provide an interesting comparison that would show just how typical or atypical Brainerd really is.

What is interesting or not is often in the eyes of the audience. In this case the potential audience varies from local Kansans with a personal association with Brainerd to historians of the Great Plains as well as students pursuing oral or architectural history projects. Web pages of this sort, even minimalist ones such as this, demonstrate the true strength of the medium over purely print oriented publications. The site represents how even those who perhaps are not the most technically advanced can produce a simple yet effective web page that can reach a much wider and varied audience then a print journal article or live presentations.

Finally, the sources section of the web site offers useful comments by the author not only on what primary and secondary materials he used but on the processes as a whole. His acknowledgements effectively relate the value of personal interviews not only as sources but as an enriching experience in and of itself.

Posted by kknoerl at 05:37 PM

Maureen's Website Homepage

My website may be found at:

http://mason.gmu.edu/~mguignon/hist696/index.html

Posted by mguignon at 04:04 PM | Comments (1)

Debbie's Website

Hi class,
Debbie's website can be found on http://mason.gmu.edu/~dschaef1 There was no "website" category so I put the second category as General for now.

Also I discovered in the registering of Dreamweaver that even though the software is dual platform, the licensing is either Mac or PC and once you register for one they won't let you change to the other unless you buy another license. Debbie

Posted by dschaef1 at 03:12 PM | Comments (2)

Witch Review is Which?

Ever trying to stay ahead of my work before it eats me alive, here is my posting for the web review proposal. I (Meagan) plan on reviewing sites devoted to the study of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. While this is a topic with a huge web following (a Google search returned no fewer than 22,200 hits), I plan on focusing my review on the following sites by means of categorization: 2 "Scholarly"/Educational Sites, 2 "Commercial" Sites, 1 Individual site, and 1 museum site.

"Scholarly"/Educational Sites:

The Documentary Archive and Transcription Project from etext.virginia.edu
The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project consists of an electronic collection of primary source materials relating to the Salem witch trials of 1692 and a new transcription of the court records.

The Famous American Trials: Salem Witchcraft Trials from the UMKC School of Law's Famous Trials Project, maintained by Douglas O. Linder

Commercial Sites:

National Geographic: Salem Witch-Hunt--Interactive
"Experience the trials. Will you survive?"

Salem Witch Trials: The World Behind the Hysteria from discoveryschool.com
Included under the social studies section, this site is intended for students

Individual Site:

The Salem Witch Trials
Although this site was "featured on CourtTV.com, CBS News and Discovery Channel," the fact that it has ads for live pyschic readings, a message board, and a page on ordering witch costumes makes me believe that this site is a little less than absolutely scholarly...

Museum Site:

The Salem Witch Museum, Salem, MA
"Salem's Most Visited Museum" provides an online map and description of New England witch sites, educational background to the trials, FAQs, and the online exhibit, "Witches: Evolving Perceptions."

Posted by mhess3 at 01:58 PM | Comments (1)

Doing History: Martha Ballard's Diary Online

Do History: Martha Ballard's Diary Online
http://www.DoHistory.org
Created by Film Study Center, Harvard University and hosted by Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Reviewed 12-15
September 2005.

A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary 1785-1812 by Louise Thatcher Ulrich received numerous awards after its publication in 1990. This biography not only illuminated the life of a post-Revolutionary New England midwife and healer, Martha Ballard, it also detailed the process of reconstructing the past through historical investigation of primary sources. The biography was followed by a film version and then this multi-media website incorporating the author's primary and secondary sources, sections from the book and film, voiceovers by Ulrich, and instructional work tools. In "Exploring the History Web", Roy Rosenzweig and Daniel Cohen noted that "[v]irtually every scholar who writes an article or book assembles an archive of sorts." On this site, Ulrich has assembled the research for her book as an archive for public use.

Do History: Martha Ballard's Diary Online is an accessible, educational website with a variety of options for novices, as well as historians, to examine social history and engage in academic scholarship. From the homepage, a simple link, "What is this Site?", invites visitors to "explore the process of piecing together the lives of ordinary people in the past." It then clearly outlines what the site has to offer and how to explore within it. Teachers are provided with planning, designing and teaching activities to maximize the resources available for students from middle school age to adults. Anyone can use these resources and access informative sites about Martha Ballard, Midwifery and Herbal Medicine, Genealogy, Maine History, Religion or Domestic Life as well as photographs and local maps. However, the main focus is on two interactive tutorials that teach how to "do history." Each tutorial incorporates sections from within the individual topics in order to provide a unique opportunity to follow Ulrich's own historical investigation.

Ulrich's research linked Martha Ballard's diary entries to a court case dealing with rape and to the beginning of male doctors taking over midwifery cases. In "One Rape. Two Stories." the viewer can read either the official account found in the records of the Supreme Judicial Court or Martha Ballard's diary account. Ballard testified at a trial for a young woman who had been raped several times when her husband was away from home. Upon discovering she was pregnant, the woman took the men to court. The court decided the men were not guilty; however, Ulrich's research argues that the defendants were probably guilty based on Ballard's diary entries.

The website visitors become part of the historical process as they are able to access and read the same primary sources Ulrich used for her research. There are seventeen chapters in each account but the reader can maneuver easily between them and skim quickly. The text is found within the left side bar that becomes tedious to scroll down but it does provide carefully linked sources within the site for background information.

Martha Ballard's diary is a central piece of historical evidence for this website and it is also the main visual image on display as it is often located in the central screen. When reading the background text and information in the side bar, the corresponding page from the diary is shown. Reading the diary is challenging because of Ballard's personal shorthand and the historical period's spelling and script. Therefore, when pointed over Ballard's handwriting, a "Magic Lens" deciphers it.The entire diary is transcribed and available on the website and it can be searched by keyword and date.

In addition, the "How to Read 18th Century Writing" section explains, and deciphers, the differences in writing and spelling during the post-Revolutionary period. The "Tool Kit" also provides information on how to read other primary sources such as probate records or gravestones and these tools become an important resource for historical research both inside and outside of this site. For those who are unfamiliar with the problems of historical research, the site clearly defines some of the challenges researchers face in transcribing early documents and materials. Therefore, the Do History site also fosters an appreciation for academic scholarship among its users.

The Do History interactive website offers its visitors an accessible and searchable Internet resource that is as easy and interesting to browse as it is to engage in serious research. The site educates its visitors on how to use primary source evidence and research tools. It offers academic scholarship in a user-friendly process that also makes historical investigation fun for future historians. As Rosenzweig and Cohen note, "digital history vastly expands the traditionally limited audience for historical presentation." This particular website attempts to broaden that limited audience with an excellent historical presentation.

However, there are concerns that argue for a more cautious approach to this site and its less academic audience. Vernon Takeshita argues in "Tangled Web: The Limits to Historical Analysis on the Internet" that the "Web is the wrong place for students to begin their historical research." Takeshita is particularly concerned that the consistent use of the Internet will "undermine... analytical thinking." The Do History site does provide a more historically accurate approach to research and provides opportunities for analytical thinking. But, it must be asked if new, young historians are also learning to go beyond this particular website, and beyond the Internet itself, to seek more primary sources and to do more research on their topics in order to challenge the status quo. If not, then Takeshita's concerns remain very relevant and they must be addressed.

Maureen M.Guignon
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia
18 September 2005

Posted by mguignon at 12:50 PM

Salem Witch Trials Site

Debbie’s Web Review of The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project
Created by Benjamin Ray, professor at the University of Virginia.
This site is one of the projects on the Institute of Humanities website.

This comprehensive site covers the time from February 1692 to April 1693 but also includes some later sources. While primarily focusing on the Salem/Danvers area, the site also touches on the spread of witchcraft accusations throughout the region and includes later secondary sources, valuable related links, and images. I truly enjoyed reviewing this website because for the most part the information was well organized and the screens were pleasing to the eye. Since the topic is popular in American History, this presentation can be useful to both public and scholars alike. It provides access to many of the original documents of the time including those of the trials. They are presented through images of the documents as well as detailed transcriptions and updates on errors found on the original transcriptions, particularly those done during a WPA project of the 1930’s. The screens are cleanly presented for the most part. The site is divided into the main sections of the Home page, Archives, Maps, Documents, People, and Books and Letters. The introduction and overview are linked on the right side of the Home page and could be a little more evident if the font on the headings had been larger. The Project Information and Education link are also modestly inconspicuous at the bottom of the Home page in small font. That said, the page formats and main section links are located consistently throughout the site, facilitating visual comfort and navigation. But the while the screens are clean and easy to read, the navigation could be improved upon with more links back to the main page headings. All too frequently I found I had to use the back button or close a page and not enough pages link you back to the home page.
One of the few criticisms I have of this website though is that while the documents are easily searchable once you locate the search page, there are no dynamic links between the images of the documents and the transcriptions. The search feature on the home page is currently not active which may be why it is not obvious; it is in small font at the bottom of the page. This is deceptive because off the introduction page there is a very useful search of a thorough search for the Burr documents and an excellent keyword search of Boyer and Nissenbaum's The Witchcraft Papers. Also the key figures are easily found through a general names search in the People ection of the site or off a major link heading the top of several main screens or through Notable People link on the which is a link on the Introduction screen off the Homepage. The People section of the site has a different search presentation as well as a clearly organized index page based on the individual’s role. At first, I thought this was a different presentation between Mac and PC with there different browsers but further investigation found that the searches produced differnt formats. I prefer the display from the search on the Introduction screen off the home page because it propts the names in a less cluttered, attractive presentation, with the name with a red dot to clearly indicate which have additional pop-up biographical information while the People toggle at first gives just an alphabetic key and in browse mode highlights and underlines the names that have addition biographical information and displays the additional information on the right side of the screen. It is readable but has much more text on the screen at one time. Both have links to more in-depth biography screens (again a place where I think the Notable People display is more attractive) and images where they exist, and both have links to the related documents and specifically to the courtroom exam. It is entirely a matter of personal preference in terms of which search diplay you prefer; both are useable and readable but I find it interesting that both are included in the site. Unfortunately, not all the links work for the Maps link off the Biography screens on the Notable People link and they don’t exist at all on the People link- maybe they are still developing the feature.
With various new media features such as zooming in, the Maps section of the site is a pleasure to work with. It is both a resource and a teaching tool. While I often agree with Takeshita’s point that there is a lack of historical analysis in many historical websites, I feel analysis and a point of view are very much in evidence in the map portion of this site. Also, I own the published book form of the GIS map project and the on-line version is far superior. The Witchcraft Accusations map is a stunning interactive that prompts the user to identify an accused according to there place of residence by placing the curser over a date on the timeline. The only problem I found in the Maps portion of the site was that the Salem 1692 map which was listed as not being available on Mac browsers also got stuck loading the viewer on my PC using both Firefox and Internet Explorer. So the one place where there was suppose to be a difference between platforms resulted in no differnece. There were also a few broken links such as the Massachusetts Bay Colony link on the Overview screen and a couple of external site links such as Best Witches! under the Salem Web Site reviews (Education).
I found the educational link very useful for comparing to other sites on the same topic. I was fascinated with the history of the project with the various interviews, corrections of the interpretations and transcriptions from the earlier WPA project and the syllabus of the course that was taught. The process of assembling the metadata is to me as interesting at times as the actual end product. Imagine what fun it would have been to take Ray's class as an undergraduate. Too bad the board game link didn’t work!
The use of the E-Text database at University of Virginia to maintain copies of books about the topic as well as contemporary source documents also added greatly to the content. Even with the minor navigational annoyances, I would highly recommend this site. The commercial tie-ins were minimal and only consisted of a few related historical house sites in Danvers. I hope this site will continue to serve a both an access point to existing primary sources and a place to add new research material on the topic and not become another short lived sites such as those referenced in Digital History.

Posted by dschaef1 at 12:30 PM

September 17, 2005

My Website

Hi all,
My creation can be found at http://mason.gmu.edu/~alechne1/
I know about the confusing underlining and will fix it soon, but this is a start.
Amy

Posted by alechne1 at 11:38 PM

DoHistory Evaluation

Hi all, here are some of my thoughts on the DoHistory website. My screen shots didn't make it so I'll provide some links. Amy

DoHistory
(http://www.dohistory.org/) Created by Film Study Center, Harvard University; Hosted by Center for History and New Media, George Mason University; Reviewed September 17, 2005.

“DoHistory: A site that shows you how to piece together the past from the fragments that have survived. Our case study: Martha Ballard.”
The DoHistory.org website lives up to its namesake. The site is an in-depth look into the diary of Martha Ballard that inspired Laurel Ulrich’s The Midwife’s Tale. The book sought to tell the story of life in rural Maine in the late eighteenth-century and as a supplement to the book, DoHistory.org enables a more complete view by providing a context to Martha’s diaries. More importantly, however, the website takes full advantage of technology to allow educators and students of varying levels to look inside the diary itself in both its “raw” and transcribed states and to use it as a springboard to study the concept of multiple narratives. It is as its role as a teaching tool that it should be assessed.

The DoHistory.org purpose, to piece together the past from surviving remnants, is stated on the homepage to alert users to its main purpose. The homepage makes navigation into the site to examine the topic in multiple ways very clear and direct by listing the categories—Your Interests, Who Was Martha?, Martha’s Diary, Book, Film, Doing History, Archive of Primary Documents, and On Your Own—with graphic elements/hotlinked features and an easy-to-follow bar along the bottom of the page. This bar is important to notice because it stays consistent throughout the site, making it easy to return home or to jump to any other section from anywhere on the site.

The focus of the website, however, is the Diary itself. The appearance of this page is more sophisticated than the other sections of the site, reflecting the likely-use pattern (probably the most heavily visited page on the site) and the rightly placed emphasis on the Diary. This stands to reason as it is the example to study the process of using and benefiting from primary source documents. Further, the diary uses new media technologies to their fullest through processing with programs such as Photoshop to minimize flaws that make reading the document that much less troublesome. While digital technologies cannot replicate or replace the experience of handling primary source documents, they can allow larger audiences to access them with greater ease.
DoHisory.org does this well. The site offers full line-by-line transcriptions of the full diary text. These transcriptions are true to the form of the text so younger students may have trouble deciphering the meaning. Advanced students, however, have much to gain from the transcriptions as well as the interactive features that instructs in transcription methods and interactive features that allow virtual transcriptions.
http://dohistory.org/diary/index.html
The “Doing History” section of the site is another interactive teaching feature that emphasizes more about the study of history: the dual narrative. In these exercises, a user may see original documents to read an “official” version of an event and compare it, side by side, with Martha’s version. This is often a laborious, but necessary, task with traditional manuscripts. The virtual juxtaposition, however, streamlines the process to better teach it.
The ability to so easily contain multiple narrative or points of view is not always as well handled on the site though. For example, the Who Was Martha? section attempts to place Martha Ballard in time in relation to world, US, Maine, and medical history. However, the linear chart online is unfocused; there is too much information that can be displayed easily and at times, the timeline loses focus. The US/Maine history timeline also includes women’s history, but interspersed randomly with word events. Clearly, the designers were attempting to show time passage in the US, Maine, and for women but failed to label it as such. A remedy would be a refined label, but in an extensive site such as DoHistory.org that tries to present as much possible correlated information, the lack of a clear label leads to disorientation. Vernon Takeshita argues in “Tangled Web” that in most cases web resources are better suited for a more advanced student user; this is especially true in a case like the DoHistory.org timeline where younger students certainly would not grasp the inconsistencies in the content that places Sarah Knight Campbell’s trip from Boston to New York in the same category of notability as the slave trade. In an attempt to demonstrate visually the interrelationship of information from a micro to macro level, DoHistory.org does not have the organization in places to accommodate an ambitious amount of content.
See 1704 @ http://dohistory.org/timeline/frameset1.html
Overall, however, DoHistory.org works well with its materials and serves as a more than adequate teaching tool to supplement Ulrich’s novel and PBS movie based on the novel, or for the study of history in general through primary sources. The ability to search and browse the Diary itself is of great help to those who seek to learn more about daily life for a midwife in rural Maine circa 1800. While at some point the site becomes bogged down with too much information in and attempt to show competing narrative and levels of specificity in the re-telling of history, the fact that DoHistory.org attempts this in the first place with the intent to ease instruction of this important theoretical concept is worthwhile. While the DoHistory.org may not be flashy, it is certainly complicated; with activities and features for a wide scale of users from a middle school student just learning about history to an advanced student looking in the diary text for a clue for her own research.

Posted by alechne1 at 07:53 PM

Web Site Not Up Yet (she said hopefully).

Congratulations to those whose websites are up; they look great. Mine is: a. pedestrian and b. not coming up. So, I am back to Mason where the techies run screaming as I approach. Obviously, I will not be in Clio II next semester!

Have a great weekend,

Maureen

Posted by mguignon at 06:00 AM

September 16, 2005

Website up and running

Well, I was off today (Friday), so I decided to monkey around with my website. Dreamweaver is a frustrating program, with a lot of counter-intuitive functions and commands. This is especially apparent when attempting to manage CSS styles. After a few hours today, I have the bare bones of my website. I unashamedly stole some open-source CSS code from a couple of on-line reference sites in order to construct a simple three-column website, with navigation bars on both sides. I think I'll spend the rest of the day fleshing it out, and adding some personal stuff like pictures, links, etc.

I plan on setting up a links page dedicated solely to the sites I found useful when building the site, so if anyone is looking for some references, I'll post here when that page is updated.

Click here to go to my site!

- Matt

Posted by mhobbs at 03:08 PM | Comments (2)

Remembering Pearl Harbor Web Eval

Before anybody freaks out at the way my review looks, let me just qualify with the fact that one of my jobs at the Center for History and New Media is digitizing the JAH's website evaluations and so this is just the format that we use... definitely don't feel like you have to do the same....

Remembering Pearl Harbor
http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/
Created and maintained by National Geographic
Reviewed 16 September 2005

Roy Rosenzweig and Daniel Cohen explain in "Exploring the History Web" that almost every major historical film has a companion site. Do we consider Michael Bay’s 2001 film Pearl Harbor to be a major historical film? National Geographic certainly does, as evidenced by their companion site Beyond the Movie: Pearl Harbor, companion also to National Geographic: Remembering Pearl Harbor, the site that I’m evaluating.

Rembering Pearl Harbor

This site defies strict categorization, although if pressed, I would place it in the exhibit category: it doesn’t have enough primary material to be considered an archive, nor enough teaching material to be considered a teaching site, and includes few secondary sources. Rosenzweig and Cohen note that “major historical” film’s companion sites generally just advertise and supplement the video, and this is precisely where Remembering Pearl Harbor (RPH) fits in… with the addition that not only does this site advertise Pearl Harbor, it also promotes, of course, National Geographic.

One of the most prominent images on the RPH homepage is the "Subscribe today and save up to 62%!" button: while the actual site navigation is in sepia tones, that button (and the button for “Behind the Movie”) stand out in bright blues and yellows.

Interactive Attack Map

The main feature of RPH is the Multimedia Map and Time Line, which provides an animated map of the attack as dictated by the timing of the events, complete with eerie music and crackly auditory explanation. A “Full Story” option is available for each stage of the timeline, where you can read a paragraph-long description of the event, visually enhanced with photographs from the National Archives. Some “Full Stories” include a “We Were There” section with an oral history account from both attack survivors and Japanese pilots. The map can be a little difficult to navigate before you become accustomed to the timeline navigation. Make sure to click “Map” to exit out of the “Full Story” window; closing the box will close the entire map. Most annoyingly and least necessary, the map also has a dynamic National Geographic ad at the bottom which is distracting; I’m not interested in how many teeth a shark has or what King Tut really looked like when I’m reading a veteran’s account of watching his buddies being blown up.

RPH also has a Memory Book, where you can “Read personal tales of heroism and disaster, find a long-lost friend, or submit your own true tale of December 7, 1941.” While an admirable feature to promote interactivity, the Memory Book does not reach the emotional quotient of, say, “Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America.” Postings are on average less than a paragraph long, and include such gems as: “Hey, I don't know anyone that was in the Pearl Harbor attack, but GOD BLESS 'EM ALL!!! Those dudes did a number for our country. Hey, hit me up sometime and we can get a beer.”

The “History” section of RPH includes “easy-print” information on Pearl Harbor Ships and Planes (specs and attack details for both American and Japanese), a (textual) Pearl Harbor time line, a World War II timeline, and perhaps the most useful part of the site, a link to other web resources on the attack. Here you’ll find lesson plans for teachers and links to external sites like the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial site and MSNBC’s “Pearl Harbor: Attack on America”(scroll down to it), which, incidentally, provides a much better interactive experience than RPH.

Continuing to toot their own horn, the site also has links to “Oil and Honor at Pearl Harbor” from the June (no year?) issue of National Geographic, which promises that you can “relive the attack on the U.S.S. Arizona—both online and in print—with exclusive photos”…but apparently only if you subscribe because you can only “Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic magazine.” The “Oil and Honor” supplement also has a video link to “Watch vintage footage and listen to survivors’ stories in this excerpt of our Pearl Harbor special, which aired Sunday, June 3 (year ?),” but only if you use a Windows-based platform, for the file is in Real Player Windows Media.

Viewers can also be a part of “Expedition Online,” which follows National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Robert Ballard on his 2000 expedition searching for the first casualty of December 7, 1941: a Japanese submarine sunk by a U.S. destroyer. This section includes a background of the sub in question, an expedition overview, an animated map that shows waves and plane attacks, and also allows you to view the expedition log. And of course, there is the opportunity to purchase Robert Ballard’s books.

Should you feel the need to purchase any books, DVDs, or maps, there are naturally links to the Museum Store on every page of RPH.

The Major Historical Film Pearl Harbor

On the “Behind the Movie: Pearl Harbor” page, you’ll find interviews with Jerry Bruckheimer, Michael Bay, Cuba Gooding Junior and Alec Baldwin, through which you’ll learn that “We do tell the story of Pearl Harbor, of course, but we do it in a very short, abridged version, the CliffsNotes version.” The site also includes a “Real Stories/FAQs” section that attempts to answer such questions as “Was the U.S. Prepared for the Attack on Pearl Harbor?” (“No.”). There is a “Real People” section that provides the biographies on the “real people” of the attack, vs their movie counterparts. In both “Behind the Movie” and RPH, major emphasis is given to Dorie Miller, the ship’s cook on the U.S.S. West Virginia who manned a machine gun, for which he received the Navy Cross. As Cuba Gooding Junior (who portrayed Miller in the film) pointed out, “It’s always an immense responsibility to portray a character who’s real, who’s a part of history. I’m sure he has family surviving and they never go a day without thinking about him” (although apparently, he didn’t care enough to actually find out if he does indeed have surviving family…) “Behind the Movie” also provides a link to official Pearl Harbor movie site and, of course, another link to the Museum Store: “Find National Geographic World War II videos, books, and more--including our new, poster-size Pearl Harbor battle map. Just in time for Father’s Day (June 17) and graduation!” (obviously the site is not updated very often…)

I would say that the projected audience for Remembering Pearl Harbor is the armchair historian, the History Channel watching crowd (of which, I admit, I am a member)… or, obviously, fans of the Michael Bay film. A perfect example of Vernon Takeshita’s observation of the internet as a “remarkably large space that is most adept at doling out small bits of information,” RPH presents legitimate (though limited) information on the attack in a somewhat engaging manner, although its effectiveness as an academic tool is overshadowed by its obvious commercial intent. The site’s major boon is the interactive timeline and attack map, although I would argue that MSNBC’s Pearl Harbor: Attack on America provides even more information in a much more appealing and interactive way.

Posted by mhess3 at 11:50 AM

my web space

Here's my web space...

http://mason.gmu.edu/~sruzila/

SR

Posted by at 11:18 AM

My homepage

So I guess we're supposed to put a link to our Mason homepage, but I don't see the "website" category, so I'll just put it in mine:

http://mason.gmu.edu/~mhess3

Meagan

Posted by mhess3 at 08:59 AM | Comments (2)

September 14, 2005

Web Evals

So, I'm assuming/hoping that we're only supposed to be spending 2 hours examining the site that we're going to write this 500-1000 word eval on and not spending a total of 8 hours examining sites and then writing an eval about one of them? Please tell me its the former...

Meagan

Posted by mhess3 at 02:14 PM | Comments (4)

September 12, 2005

Photos from the website workshop

Check out the pictures from our website workshop.

Students take a break from all the hard work.

View image

The post-class party after everyone learned html.

View image

Posted by mills at 07:30 PM | Comments (1)

not a lot to do but wait with dial up!

1)Let me start out be saying that I live out in the boondocks and suffer from dial up…so I added 5 minutes to my time to make it fair! I still wasn’t able to complete it in 35 minutes, but more like 45. I did get them all but two, and was only really frustrated with those two and both were photos….
1) I image googled tito, idid and Eleanor photo and got the Clio website several times over, but then I did find a cool website; if you can read French it is worth a look. A site that has Sharon Tate, Eleanor Roosevelt, idi amin and bob Dylan on the same page is interesting…
I found photos of Eleanor and tito, and one of idi amin and tito, but not of the three together, so I hurried on to the next thing trying not to be tempted by the urge to surf.
2) Poem by Alice Miller found on Google by typing in “when all the women want it”
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/11689
3)http://www.fullbooks.com/Life-And-Times-Of-Washington-Volume-2.html part 14 has the quote that we are looking for found by typing in “certain forged letters” and Washington and Pickering on Google. But you do have to read the whole page to find the quote and it takes too long for this exercise so I think there must be a quicker site.
4) This was the fastest result yet http://thetalkingdrum.com/wil.html and there were many more below it. I don’t know how accurate any of these are, but there were a number of sites claiming to have the text of the speech and the relevant information on the period.
5) http://www.stark.kent.edu/library/reserves/speeches/havel.htm easily found by googling the date and the speaker
6) This looked like a journal entry to me so I went straight to Jstor and bam it came up in the Economic History Review, New Series, Vol 47, No.@, (May, 1994) pp. 374-407
I was in no way tempted to linger and read this one!
7)Easily found by googleing the title AND Syllabus
1) it.gse.gmu.edu/courses/syllabi/syllabus-edit741.htm 2)www.txstate.edu/education/ edtech/prospectus/5340SyllabusA.htm
3) www.personal.psu.edu/staff/j/c/jco10/syllabus.htm
4) courses.csusm.edu/vsar305kd3/syllabus.html
8) http://historymatters.gmu.edu/ from Google, typed in title and date
9) couldn’t find this one at all, but then it took me a few minutes to figure out what the heck a Sims was in the first place.
10) found this pretty quickly by a google of the quote on http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/textbooks/2001/article.shtml
it’s about 3/4 of the way down the page.

All in all it was fun but now I need a nap from the jet lag. It’s 11 pm for me!

Posted by avonargy at 03:01 PM

A few details...

Hi all:

Tonight's class, just in case you haven't read your email yet, will be in room 334 rather than the regular room.

Congratulations to everyone for their hard work and good cheer on the Scavenger Hunt. I'd like you all to consider Ken's posting on the meaning of this exercise. He raises some interesting points well worth considering--and that we will consider later on, or maybe even tonight.

A couple of technical details about the blog:

1. I have no idea why I have to keep approving your comments. Needless to say, I'd like to get out of that role and am working on a fix.

2. When you use html code, please be sure to have the ending code to go with the beginning code. That is, the / in the enclosing symbols for your code (I can't type it here, because it won't appear). Otherwise, for unknown reasons, the code you used -- bold, italic, etc. -- just stays in the subsequent postings on the screen. I've corrected the two postings that caused this style disruption.

3. When you have a long posting, please use the "extended entry" option for the bulk of the entry. That way people can read your entry, but don't have to scroll for long stretches to get beyond it.

See you in class...and don't forget the graduate reception at 5:00 in the JC, room C.

Mills

Posted by mills at 02:57 PM

STAR Workshops

Hey ya'll--
I know some of you are kind of squeamish about the Web Design component of the class and I wanted to let you know/remind you that there are workshops available through STAR*T that cover a lot of the bases. We're learning Dreamweaver basics tonight in class, but the workshops also offer Dreamweaver II and III if you're interested in taking it further, not to mention Flash, Composer, Photoshop and others. Here is their schedule:
http://media.gmu.edu/workshops/

I'm going to Dreamweaver II and III on Thursday evening if anyone wants to join in...

See you tonight,
Meagan

Posted by mhess3 at 08:38 AM

September 11, 2005

Suzanne's Learning Curve

Hello Everyone,

I'm here to tell my sad tale of the Scavenger Hunt. I thought I was prepared on Friday to do the Hunt. I printed out the Scavenger Searching Tips and tips on the Invisible Web and had them in front of me. I printed out the Scavenger Hunt and checked the clock. I went to Google Images and easily found individual pictures of Amin, Tito, and Roosevelt in 3 minutes at http://images.google.com, and then I misread the question and spent the next 20 minutes looking for a picture of all 3 of them together. I printed out pages of pics for each and gave up.

A little panicked on the time, I went searching for the suffrage poem and thought I was getting there when I googled: women suffrage 1915. I found a Women's History website and even found a list of authors of women's poetry, but then I got bogged down looking the particular quote by scrolling through poems. Another 40 minutes ticked by and I got pretty upset as I realized I really didn't have a clue how to get out of the hole I was in. So, I emailed Dr. Kelly and tried to resign from the course.(I know how to email successfully)

I walked away from the computer for about 45 minutes mulling over what I was doing wrong, and I came up with this. I view this searching the internet business like I'm walking into a library, looking in an old-fashioned card catalogue or library database online, finding the book or encyclopedia the information I need is in, and then flipping through the pages of the book to find what I want. I'm still doing the searching myself instead of clicking search options to make the computer find it for me. Sounds very old and out-of-date, but to my defense, I've tried many times to use the internet to find what I want with little success. Most of the time, I get hopelessly lost in some database or some file and call my teenagers to get me out. But Dr. Kelly emailed me some encouragement and I reread the Hunt questions and help search pages. I'm a visual learner and I learn from reading and seeing.

I got back on the horse and I cheated a little bit. Other people's Hunt Blogs kept popping up so I checked out where they started and this got me going.

Kurt's hint to google Tito and Titoville and Matt's about LOC got me out of the starting gate. In less than 5 minutes I found http://www.titoville.com.images/ and found the right pictures to the right question. I skipped When all the women wanted it for the time being and looked for Willie Lynch. In less than 4 minutes I found http:www.freemaninstitute.com/lynch.htm by Yahooing: Willie Lynch Virginia slave. In 3 clicks I Yahooed Former Czech President Havel 1990 speech and found #5, although I was confused about "the former webpages of the website". I don't understand the question, but I felt successful finding the speech.

Next I went to JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/ and easily found the article by Middleton and Wardley. It took me less than 4 minutes to go to http://chnm/gmu.edu/tools/syllabi/search to find the syballi for the Non-Designers Web Book (which is a godsend for me cause it's better than Internet for Dummies, it's Internet for Computer Idiots like me)

I have a home page for chnm but I don't know if it's right. I found Alice Duer Miller the suffrage poet,Jane Murray, the Sims, and Karl Jacoby but I don't know how to find the specific quote, or picture. I still find myself scrolling through text, but I've learned something about myself and computers.

All this took me 4 hours on Friday and I was too wiped to Blog then. I'm still in the class, so I'll see you Monday. And if you read this, then I will have accomplished a Blog posting on my own and that's an accomplishment.

Suzanne

Posted by scarson1 at 11:36 AM | Comments (1)

September 08, 2005

Computer Help

Some folks in class said that they aren't very good with computers. That's what I do all day. If you need some help let me know and I cam get with you sometime gratis. No tech support stuff please!!! Just showing you how to do basic stuff. If I'm feeling nice I'll clean up your computer and secure it.

Later.
Steve

Posted by at 12:00 PM | Comments (1)

September 07, 2005

Thanks!

I just wanted to say thanks to the folks who offered me advice after the scavenger hunt. I do appreciate it. Hopefully I'll be able to return the favor.

PS I also wanted to see if I could upload an image for posting.
-Kurt

Posted by kknoerl at 08:41 AM

September 06, 2005

Scavenger Hunt

My head hurts. I found 8 out of 10 in 30 minutes. The other two I tried for about fifteen minutes after I finished and still had no luck.

1. I Google image searched “Josip Broz Tito” and “Idi Amin Dada” with no results, and did the same with Eleanor Roosevelt, again no results. I tried a basic web search with the same name combinations in quotes but all I found was text. Then I searched “Josip Broz Tito” and the first hit was http://www.titoville.com/ and I found the pictures there.
2. I Googled the quoted portion of the poem. First hit from Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/11689. The eBook, Are Women People? By Alice Duer Miller is available in multiple versions.
3. I Googled “Washington letters Timothy Pickering,” it returned a hit on the American Memory website. The results were too many on the site so I typed in the quoted text and Pickering and found the letter George Washington wrote to Pickering on March 3, 1797. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/P?mgw:3:./temp/~ammem_DNjW::@@@mdb=mcc,gottscho,detr,nfor,wpa,aap,cwar,bbpix,cowellbib,calbkbib,consrvbib,bdsbib,dag,fsaall,gmd,pan,vv,presp,varstg,suffrg,nawbib,horyd,wtc,toddbib,mgw,ncr,ngp,musdibib,hlaw,papr,lhbumbib,rbpebib,lbcoll,alad,hh,aaodyssey,magbell,bbcards,dcm,raelbib,runyon,dukesm,lomaxbib,mtj,gottlieb,aep,qlt,coolbib,fpnas,aasm,scsm,denn,relpet,amss,aaeo,mffbib,afc911bib,mjm,mnwp,hawp,omhbib,rbaapcbib,mal,ncpsbib,ncpm,lhbprbib,ftvbib,afcreed,aipn,cwband,flwpabib,wpapos,cmns,psbib,pin,coplandbib,cola,tccc,curt,mharendt,lhbcbbib,eaa,haybib,mesnbib,fine,cwnyhs,svybib,mmorse,afcwwgbib,mymhiwebib,uncall,mfd,afcwip,mtaft,manz,llstbib,fawbib,berl,fmuever,cdn,upboverbib,mussm,cic,afcpearl,awh,awhbib,sgp,wright,lhbtnbib,afcesnbib,hurstonbib,mreynoldsbib,spaldingbib,sgproto
4. I googled “Willie Lynch speech,” first hit found it:
http://www.uky.edu/StudentOrgs/AWARE/archives/lynch.html
5. This was tricky. I tried Google “1990 Vaclav Havel speech” and didn’t find any leads. I went to LexisNexis, and found nothing. I tried “President of the Czech Republic” in Google. And followed http://www.hrad.cz/cz/ because the text wasn’t in English. I clicked around on various links and didn’t find anything because the English and German sites were both under construction but returned to the original page to find in the upper left corner a link to the original version. On the old page, I followed the links to President of the Czech Republic – Vaclav Havel – speeches – 1990 address to U.S. congress. http://old.hrad.cz/president/Havel/speeches/1990/2102_uk.html
6. I went directly to JSTOR, and typed in the title of the article and found it. http://www.jstor.org/view/00130117/di011847/01p0294n/0?currentResult=00130117%2bdi011847%2b01p0294n%2b0%2c0300000003&searchUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jstor.org%2Fsearch%2FBasicResults%3Fhp%3D25%26si%3D1%26Query%3D%2522annual%2Breview%2Bof%2Binformation%2Btechnology%2Bdevelopments%2522
7. I’m familiar with the various tools on the CHNM website, including the syllabus finder. I searched the book and found it listed for the following courses: EDIS 771W at UVA, VSAR 305 at California State University, San Marcos, Western Washington University, and Visual Thinking/Visual Computing at Brown University.
8. I had no idea how to approach this. And already pressed for time I skipped it.
9. I tried numerous search terms “Janet Murray and the Sims” “Janet Murray Sims” “Janet Murray screen capture” “Screen capture Sims” and yielded nothing. I visited sites that referenced Janet Murray, read her staff profile, downloaded a powerpoint, and watched a television news clip. Nothing! I decided since I had about 15 seconds left, I moved on…
10. I Googled “Karl Jacoby” and “Although I worry” and found the full article at http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/87.4/kornblith.html

Posted by at 01:01 PM

September 05, 2005

Matt's Scavenger Hunt

Well, I found seven out of ten within thirty minutes. I was on the track of the 8th, but I doubt I would find the last two no matter how much time I was given. Here's how it went down:

1. I, too, found the Titoville site with the pictures of Tito with Amin and Mrs. Roosevelt. First, I went to Wikipedia to look up Josip Broz, aka Tito. After the dictator's biography I found a link to the Titoville website. Click here to go to Titoville's photo gallery. I was a bit thrown off for a few minutes - the website's author misspells Roosevelt as "Roosavelt," so it took me an entire five minutes to realize I'd found my goal. Total time: 5:00.
   
2. To find the suffrage poem, I merely entered this into the Google search field: " 'when all the women wanted it' suffrage." This site was among the first listed. Total time stood at 5:41.
   
3. I cheated a bit on the George Washington letter. Last spring term, my wife took Dr. Henriques' "Age of Washington" class, so I knew the Library of Congress had collected and archived the papers of Washington. I Googled "papers of george washington," found the hit that contained the url of the LoC, and went to it here. I searched for the phrase "certain forged letters" as a whole phrase, and the only result was the letter to Thomas Pickering. Total time - 5:53.
   
4. Another easy one. I Googled "'willie lynch' speech" and found this website at the University of Kentucky. Total time - 6:33.
   
5. The speech from Vaclav Havel stumped me. I didn't read the whole clue, so after two minutes of searching the congressional record I had the speech and thought I was done. No such luck. Reading further, I realized I had the speech but not the webpage. I poked around on the Web a little, and found the official Czech government website at www.hrad.cz, bu couldn't figure out how to back up and find what Dr. Kelly described as a "...former webpage of the website of the President of the Czech Republic." Stumped, I moved on at a time of 12:10.
   
6. For the article from a scholarly journal, I accessed JSTOR through the GMU Library WRLC website. From there, I did an advanced search and entered "middleton wardley annual review of information technology," which returned the url for the complete article. Total time: 14:59.
   
7. Again, a little bit of cheating for number seven. Last week, while looking for the syllabus for our course on the CHNM website, I discovered the "syllabus search" function. Pretty sneaky, huh? Go the the CHNM website, click on Resources, then click on Syllabus Finder on the left toolbar. From there, I entered "non-designer's web book" in the search field and found these syllabi from California State University at San Marcos, Washington State University, Western Washington University, and UVA. Total time: 16:09.
   
8. At this point, I was getting cocky. I had six out of seven, and almost fourteen minutes left. I had heard about a website for archived webpages at www.archive.org, and figured this would be all I would need to find a website from 1998. After a few minutes of wrestling with the poor search interface, I gave up and moved on.
   
9. At first, I didn't realize Janet Murray was the author of our text "Hamlet on the Holodeck." After doing a Yahoo! Image Search for "'janet murray' sims," and seeing the cover of our book as a result, I began an image search using her middle initial to weed out the "false" Janet Murrays. Once I found her personal website at Georgia Tech, I figured I was on to something. But after scanning the websites for several conferences she is involved in that deal with computer gaming, I still didn't find a picture of her with The Sims. I assume Dr. Kelly meant the characters from simulation game "The Sims," published by Electronic Arts. I suppose someone must have Photoshopped a picture of Janet Murray together with a shot of a few of these characters. Darned if I could find it, though. My third failure.
   
10. Running out of time, I decided to find #10 quickly. To do so, I Googled the phrase "although I worry about turning the survey into little more than." I got one hit, and the resulting url was: www.historycooperative.org/ journals/jah/87.4/kornblith.html. So, going back through the library's WRLC, I logged into History Cooperative, browsed for the Journal of American History (the "jah" in the url), scrolled down to Volume 87, Number 4, and look at the table of contents for something reminiscent of "kornblith," which turned out to be the last name of the article's co-author, Gary Cornblith. Here is the complete article. At this point, I had about five minutes left, and divided it between more fruitless searches for #8 and #9. My watch beeped at the thirty minute mark, and I was batting .700, which is great for the majors, but only good enough for a "C" in academia.
    

All in all, it was pretty fun. It would seem that my biggest weakness is a complete inability to find "dead" or "former" websites. I never had to do it before, so I never learned how. Other than that, I'm fairly comfortable in my ability to look at the Web and separate the wheat from the chaff.

Posted by mhobbs at 02:56 PM

Scavenger Hunt Thoughts

So, like De La Soul asked, what does it all mean? On probably the most obvious level, the ability to find resources answering ten (or nine in my case) questions of a fairly specific nature in under thirty minutes is astonishing. It's certainly an advantage in many ways to be researching now, as opposed to even ten years ago. Not simply in just the amount and variety of information readily available online (and the corollaries, such as reducing or eliminating travel to archives), but the processes which allow us to manipulate this material, such as text search tools by which it becomes less necassary to actually read or scan entire documents, but instead zooms us directly to what we are seeking.
Of course this leads to another set of implications. For example, with research facilitated so much, how might expectation levels and scholarly standards change? Another potential problem is that in using text searches we liekly miss important or otherwise interesting information which might have been noticed using more traditional research methods. It seems it might be best to think of online resources as a powerful and excellent resource, but also as a supplement in addition to, not wholly as a replacement of, more conventional research.

Enjoy Labor Day everyone!
Ken

Posted by kalbers at 11:30 AM | Comments (3)

Close

1. http://www.titoville.com/voditelji.html (5 mins) I searched google images for Tito and Roosevelt. I misread this one to read a picture with all three, so it took me a while until I realized my mistake. Oddly, this wasn't my first visit to Titoville.

2. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/1/6/8/11689/11689-h/11689-h.htm 2 mins I searched google for the quote. "Evolution" Alice Duer Miller The Gutenberg Project is a great site-especially if you're taking nineteenth century literature classes and don't want to pay for books!

3. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/P?mgw:5:./temp/~ammem_e7G6:: 4 mins I searched American Memory's collection of Washington's papers for Pickering and forged and found this after a coulpe of tries.

4. http://thetalkingdrum.com/wil.html <1 min I searched google for Willie Lynch and it is the first site.

5. http://old.hrad.cz/president/Havel/speeches/1990/2102_uk.html 4 mins I searched google for the date and name, and I looked for a url with "cz in it. The link brought me right there, but I went up a few levels to confirm it was the appropriate site.

6. Looooong URL 4 mins Through GMU's library page, I accessed JSTOR and searched the title.

7. http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/syllabi/search.php?user_query=%22The+Non-Designers+Web+Book%22 <1 min Since I work at the Center for History and New Media, I knew about the Syllabus Finder which made this one pretty quick.

8. http://web.archive.org/web/19980128103923/http://chnm.gmu.edu/ 2 mins I plugged the address into the Wayback Machine at www.archive.org.

9. Couldn't find this one for the life of me, so I moved on....

10. http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/87.4/kornblith.html 1 min I used google to find this. It's not the full text though, but I ran out of time before I could get to the journal through the GMU library resources.

Posted by kalbers at 10:10 AM

Ammon's miserable failure

I did terrible in this scavenger hunt. I only found three, and that was after I decided not to try and find them in order any more (after the first 5 minutes). I'm more of a liesure searcher.... I need time to browse, look around, follow links, etc.

Anyhow, here's what I did find.

5. The February 21, 1990, speech by Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on one of the former webpages of the website of the President of the Czech Republic.

7. Four syllabi for courses that include The Non-Designers Web Book and that aren't at GMU.

10. The full text of the article in which Karl Jacoby says "Although I worry about turning the survey into little more than highbrow entertainment and students into passive consumers, having slides has in fact created new opportunities for student exchange."

Not all exactly what I expected, but I guess that's what I get for going into this assignment with such a cocky attitude. I might know a lot about building web pages, but searching them is a different skill. One I need to learn. :)

Posted by ashephe1 at 07:49 AM | Comments (2)

Scavenger Hunt

Scavenger Hunt

Truthfully, I was able to complete 9 of the exercises within the 1/2 hour allotted mainly because I’ve played this game before I knew I must not be sidetracked into surfing aand actually reading surrounding materials or actually reading any of the items on the hunt beyond what was needed to identify that I had the correct match. I was able to find the 10th one - Janet Murray - after much hunting and later- after the 1/2 hour was up.
I used the CHMN site, LC, Alta Vista, Google and Yahoo and spent a several hours documenting, composing and posting the blog even though the searching took about 1/2 hour, because there are so many links and every little code has to be correct for it to work. What a pain! I spent another 20 minutes at a later point going back to #9 because I just had to find it since I knew it was out there. Here are my results:

1. A web page that includes photographs of former Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito with Idi Amin Dada and with Eleanor Roosevelt.

I don’t know that I have the correct site for this. It seems a compromise to me because my answer is a link page that points to 2 separate images. The first time around I sepent about 5 minutes and a couple of tries with the search of Tito + Ida Amin + Roosevelt. Then I passed and went on to the other searches. These led me to a timeline where the 3 were mentioned, An image search with a list on a World History sit but each image had to be called up separate, and the Roosevelt library where there is a photograph of Eleanor with Tito but not Ida Amin. After doing the other 9 searched I came back to this one with the search combination of Tito + Ida Amin and tried the site
http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources/d/43.html
Since this our Professor’s site it is probable that what I was looking for was :www.titoville.com/voditelji.html but while this site does have a link under “shaking hands” to a page that lists both Idi Amin Dada and Eleanor Roosevelt (Roosevelt is spelled incorrectly) that page is actually a link to the photographs of Tito with Amin and Tito with Roosevelt.and not the photographic images themselves on a single web page which is why I am not sure I have this correct.
(5 minutes the first time + 3 minutes the second)

2. 1915 suffrage poem with the line: Whenll the women wanted it.

From Are women people? A book of rhymes for suffrage times by Alice Duer Miller
"When all the women wanted it" {the quotation with quotes around it} + 1915 searched:
www.geocities.com/Paris/Bistro/8066/ADMsuffrage.html
(less than 2 minutes)

3. A letter from George Washington to Timothy Pickering in which Washington complains about "certain forged letters" intended to wound his character and "deceive the people."

I knew that the Library of Congress has George Washington letters and papers on-line (Mount Vernon‘s archives aren’t fully automated yet) so I went to the LOC website http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query http://memory.loc.gov and searched for Washington’s letters 1741-1799: Series 2 Letterbooks In LC search I typed Washington + Pickering + “certain forged letters” and found the image of the letter of George Washington to Timothy Pickering, March 3, 1797 http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/">http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/P?mgw:4:./temp/~ammem_vtfY::@@@mdb=mcc,gottscho,detr,nfor,wpa,aap,cwar,bbpix,cowellbib,calbkbib,consrvbib,bdsbib,dag,fsaall,gmd,pan,vv,presp,varstg,suffrg,nawbib,horyd,wtc,toddbib,mgw,ncr,ngp,musdibib,hlaw,papr,lhbumbib,rbpebib,lbcoll,alad,hh,aaodyssey,magbell,bbcards,dcm,raelbib,runyon,dukesm,lomaxbib,mtj,gottlieb,aep,qlt,coolbib,fpnas,aasm,scsm,denn,relpet,amss,aaeo,mffbib,afc911bib,mjm,mnwp,hawp,omhbib,rbaapcbib,mal,ncpsbib,ncpm,lhbprbib,ftvbib,afcreed,aipn,cwband,flwpabib,wpapos,cmns,psbib,pin,coplandbib,cola,tccc,curt,mharendt,lhbcbbib,eaa,haybib,mesnbib,fine,cwnyhs,svybib,mmorse,afcwwgbib,mymhiwebib,uncall,mfd,afcwip,mtaft,manz,llstbib,fawbib,berl,fmuever,cdn,upboverbib,mussm,cic,afcpearl,awh,awhbib,sgp,wright,lhbtnbib,afcesnbib,hurstonbib,mreynoldsbib,spaldingbib,sgproto">http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/P?mgw:4:./temp/~ammem_vtfY::@@@mdb=mcc,gottscho,detr,nfor,wpa,aap,cwar,bbpix,cowellbib,calbkbib,consrvbib,bdsbib,dag,fsaall,gmd,pan,vv,presp,varstg,suffrg,nawbib,horyd,wtc,toddbib,mgw,ncr,ngp,musdibib,hlaw,papr,lhbumbib,rbpebib,lbcoll,alad,hh,aaodyssey,magbell,bbcards,dcm,raelbib,runyon,dukesm,lomaxbib,mtj,gottlieb,aep,qlt,coolbib,fpnas,aasm,scsm,denn,relpet,amss,aaeo,mffbib,afc911bib,mjm,mnwp,hawp,omhbib,rbaapcbib,mal,ncpsbib,ncpm,lhbprbib,ftvbib,afcreed,aipn,cwband,flwpabib,wpapos,cmns,psbib,pin,coplandbib,cola,tccc,curt,mharendt,lhbcbbib,eaa,haybib,mesnbib,fine,cwnyhs,svybib,mmorse,afcwwgbib,mymhiwebib,uncall,mfd,afcwip,mtaft,manz,llstbib,fawbib,berl,fmuever,cdn,upboverbib,mussm,cic,afcpearl,awh,awhbib,sgp,wright,lhbtnbib,afcesnbib,hurstonbib,mreynoldsbib,spaldingbib,sgproto

Also there is a link with the image of the letter from last year’s blog that can be reached on Yahoo by searching on Washington + "certain forged letters"
http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/rr/f04/cw/blog/archives/000346.html
(less than 3 minutes which is good because sometimes when I do LC searches at work it takes a little longer but this was at night)

4. An 18th century speech by Willie Lynch telling Virginia slave owners how to keep slaves in line.

http://www.duboislc.org/html/WillieLynch.html or www.freemaninstitute.com/lynch.htm from search Lynch, Willie + slaves
(less than 2 minutes)

5. The February 21, 1990, speech by Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on one of the former webpages of the website of the President of the Czech Republic.

The February 21, 1990 speech by Czech President Vaclav Havel to US Congress is easier found on a US page. First I searched on Yahoo Havel + Congress + February 21, 1990
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/havel1.htm
I also searched the Congressional record
Vaclav Havel + February 21, 1990 + Congress http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r101:H21FE0-31: (each search under 2 minutes) Then I realized that the assignment was for the Present of Czech's former page which meant searching a website that mentioned Havel as an author. Fortunately found what I was looking for on the first search half way down the page :The Art of the Impossible ... A Joint Session of the U.S. Congress. Washington, D.C., February 21, 1990 ... Copyright © 1994, I997 by Václav Havel and Paul Wilson ...
old.hrad.cz/president/Havel/work/dilo12_uk.html
(2 minutes)

6. A complete version of "Annual Review of Information Technology Developments for Economic and Social Historians, 1993" in The Economic History Review by Roger Middleton and Peter Wardley (one of first publications for historians to talk about Internet.)

I had several sites with the citation but to read the article you need JSTOR which I can access through the SI library or the GMU library by logging in.
JSTOR (included date and either Economic and Social Historians or “Economy and History”)
GMU Library : http://mutex.gmu.edu:2051/view/00130117/di011847/01p0294n/0?currentResult=00130117%2bdi011847%2b01p0294n%2b0%2c01%2b19940500%2b9995%2b80059499&searchID=cc99333c.10944118871&frame=noframe&sortOrder=SCORE&userID=81ae37f5@gmu.edu/01cc99333c005014832d6&dpi=3&viewContent=Article&config=jstor
(less than 2 minutes)

7. Four syllabi for courses that include The Non-Designers Web Book and that aren’t at GMU.

I searched CHNM Syllabus Finder: http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/syllabi/
Then I searched the title The Non-Designers Web Book and got 82 matches some that are duplicates and some are GMU. Examples of 4 that are not GMU are:
http://curry.edschool.virginia.edu/go/tempo/TEMPOWeb2004/Syllabus/Syllabus%20fall%2004.htm (EDIS 771W: Content Area Reading)
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~karlberg/350/350schedule.html (Schedule - Western Washington University)
http://courses.csusm.edu/vsar305kd3/syllabus.html (VSAR 305 Syllabus F2004 - California State University, San Marcos)
http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs024/syllabus.html (Visual Thinking/Visual Computing - Brown University:)
These can also find by searching syllabi + The Non-Designers Web Book and then just elliminate the GMU ones.
(less than 2 minutes)

8. The home page for the Center for History & New Media as it looked in 1998.

1998 CHNM homepage: I knew that old web pages and sites could be found at www.archive.org Way Back Machine, so I did an advance search by typing www.chnm.gmu.edu with a begin date of 1/1/98. web.archive.org/web/19980101-re_/http://chnm.gmu.edu
(less than 2 minutes)

9. Janet Murray with the Sims:

I tried the image search on Yahoo, Alta Vista, & Google without success but I remembered last year the image was found on a photo of Janet Murray taken at a lecture. There wasn’t enough time to search this way in the 1/2 hour but I went back later and found it. Also there are notes posted from last year’s blog that give hints.
www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/htdocs_v1/infotech/conf00/confpics/1.html

10. The full text of the article in which Karl Jacoby says "Although I worry about turning the survey into little more than highbrow entertainment and students into passive consumers, having slides has in fact created new opportunities for student exchange."

Searched his name and the text in quotes and found: www.indiana.edu/~jah/textbooks/2001/article.shtml
(2 minutes Google search)

Debbie

Posted by dschaef1 at 01:06 AM

September 04, 2005

Scavenger Hunt

It looks like I was the slow one on this assignment. I only got through 4.5 of the searches before time ran out. Really, I think I could have found most of the rest of these, but I got hung up on the fifth item and I don't think we were allowed to skip ahead, so the Czech Presiddent thing did me in. Any who... here's the description of my hunt up to the ill-fated meeting with Vaclav Havel.

1. I started with a google search for Josip Broz Tito, Idi Amin Dada, and Eleanor Roosevelt, which was way too specific. So I tried backing off to just search for Josip Broz Tito and Idi Amin Dada. This gave me alot of results, but not all had images. So, I switched to an image search and still had no luck. By this time I thought I was spending too much time on the first item, so I just typed Josip Broz Tito into the regular Google search and tried the first result which suprisingly gave me http://www.titoville.com/, a site that has both the photos I needed.

2. I stuck with google for the next search and used the exact phrase "When all the women wanted it." One of the first results was an online book at http://www.sakoman.net/pg/html/11689.htm. Then I used the "find on this page" function in IE to confirm that the appropriate poem is indeed included on the page.

3. This one slowed me down a little. I did a few searches for George Washington and Tim Pickering before I gave up and decided I need to be smarter. I guessed that the LOC would be a good place to start a more direct search, so I went there and found that the site search engine was a great tool. First I searched for George Washington and followed the link to his papers. Then I searched for Timothy Pickering and got 100 results. So I narrowed my search by adding the phrase "certain forged letters," and got 3 real possiblities. The first document yielded the desired letter. The letter is here.

4. I went back to Google and put in Willie Lynch and then skimmed through the first 3 or 4 result until I found http://www.freemaninstitute.com/lynch.htm.

5. This was my undoing. Since I was looking for not only the speech, but a certain site. I guessed (wrong) to start in a directory. I picked Yahoo and went through several headings (regions, Czech Rep., government, etc.). Then, I used the search funtion within the category to try to find the desired site. No luck. So I widened my search to the entire directory and still found nothing. Next, I went back to google and must have used a lot of bad term combos, because found nothing. Finally, I was getting desperate so I went to a Czech governement site and tried to find archived pages, which was tough because I don't speak or read any eastern european languages and the English translation tool on the site was not useful. Alas, this is where my time ran out and I had to give up. Now, having read some of the other posts, I think I was making this search harder than it really was.

Posted by miles at 10:17 AM

September 03, 2005

Maureen's Hunt

1. Photographs: Could not find both photos on the same website using Google Images and Yahoo Images. However, Tito and Idi Amin showed up Yahoo: spider bites.about.com/links detail_history 1900s.3htm and Tito and Eleanor showed up on Google: www.cr.nps.gov/ foreigndignitaries/photo

2. Suffrage Poem: Put line of poem into Yahoo search and was sent to Gutenberg etext website and found "Are Women People?" by Alice D. Miller. Scanned the text and found the line: www.gutenberg.org/etex/11689

3. GW Lettter to Pickering: I know LOC has a collection of Washington's papers and found some to/from Pickering but did not find the specific letter. Google: LOC; Search Washington Papers for Pickering; http: memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin.query
Then, checked website at gwpapers.virginia.edu/washington with no luck.

4. Lynch and Slaves: Googled "Willie Lynch Slaves" and was zipped over to http://the talking drum.com/wil.html and a full script of his speech. Great website to check out later as the flash visuals were striking.

5. Havel: Ugh, if it weren't for Willie Lynch's quick find, I would be concerned. However, a Yahoo (or Google) search of the terms "official website president vaclav havel" was equally quick to find: www.vaclachavel.cz/index.php?sec=1&id=18set/n=2. Clicked on Speeches, then period incorporating 1990, and found his speech to US Congress.

6. "Annual Review" in Economic History Review: I never use OVID at GMU libraries, but did this time with no luck. So went where I should have started in the first place and a quick check of JSTOR on the GMU Library database showed they had the Journal but the simple search by name (Roger Middleton) did not provide the correct title. I had to go to the Advanced Search to pull up the title and then the full article in Volume 44, No.2 (May 1991).

7. Four Syllabi: For a change, I used the Metasearch category on the GMU library database, Search.com, and found half a dozen syllabi immediately (search terms: "syllabi non designers work book"). The sites were:

www.hu.mtu.edu~kkarola/revisions

www.austen.sla.purdue.edu/handa.html

www.edu.umuc.edu/de/undergrad/syllabi/03/cmst310.htm

www.utdallas.edu/syllabus/syllabi/atec3320.00/gooch.pdf

8. CHNM 1998 Home Page: Zero luck on its home page or any other search engines (Google, etc; and www. archives.org) .... and I spent way too long on this one.

9. Janet Murray and Sims Photo: Googled Janet Murray and Sims with no luck. But, a search of "Janet Murray bio" showed up with a link to SIMS. That proved to be another interesting flash site with game cards that had pictures on them. Was one of them Janet Murray? I doubt it but it was another visually interesting site that needs another look at later on: http://thesims.ea.com/index_flash.php
Spent way too much time on this one, too...love those flash sites.

10. Karl Jacoby: Googled the first part of the quote and was directed to "Teaching American History Survey at the Opening of the 21st Century: A Round Table Discussion" by Gary Kornbluth and Carol Lasso: http:www.indiana.edu/~jah/textbooks/2001article_print.html Scrolling through the article, I found several comments by Jacoby and, finally, the quote on the list. However, I was out of time before I found the actual quote.....sigh.

Could have/should have done better, but interesting project. I look forward to seeing how everyone else did on the ones I did not get. I did get a laught when I would GOOGLE search terms and the first few hits would be "SCAVENGER HUNT, CLIO". I didn't look....but now I will.

Posted by mguignon at 06:38 PM

BlogGate 2005

I thought some of you might find this interesting. It's about Daylin Leach, State Rep. in Philadelphia; my good friend Zach is his assistant. I guess we can see it in a lesson about the power of blogging...

The articles are online here, but you have to sign up to Philly.com to read them. I pasted the text from the first article in this post, so you can get the gist:
thursday: http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/12528750.htm
friday: http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/local/12538845.htm
saturday: http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/12549528.htm

Pa. lawmaker's blog: Funny - or offensive?
By Mario F. Cattabiani
Inquirer Staff Writer

His blog is laced with references to pornography and strip clubs, a lust for whiskey and women, and disdain for President Bush and Céline Dion.
Then there are some politically incorrect quips about Palestinians and "a third-world type" who cleans hotel rooms.
It's not the work of Howard Stern, or even a college kid with too much broadband.

The author of www.leachvent.com - a collection of humor columns - is State Rep. Daylin Leach, a Democrat from Upper Merion.

It's all meant in good humor from an elected official and self-described frustrated comedian.

Written over the last eight years, the columns - which he signs as Dutch Larooo - touch on everything from the birth of his daughter to his 21/2 years in the statehouse. The title of one: "Legislating while drunk."

It's observational humor, the Montgomery County representative said.

"I respect my constituents and all people enough to think that they are not going to think this is real," said Leach, 44. "It's just a joke. It's like Woody Allen marrying a sheep. I don't think he has an attraction to sheep. It was funny."

Some aren't laughing.

"How did he ever get elected in the first place? He needs help," said Diane Gramley, president of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, an anti-obscenity group. "He's fixated on pornography and strip clubs. It should be a real eye-opener for his constituents."

The writings reveal a little-known side of Leach, who has earned a reputation in Harrisburg as a bright and independent-minded legislator. The blog also vividly illustrates what can happen when you put your thoughts on the Internet for everyone to see.

Many of Leach's writings have some reference to body parts, sex or pornography, or a combination of the three.

"We've all seen porno movies. In fact, we've all seen 5 or 6 porno movies a week since we were young boys growing up in Allentown," one reads.

Leach, a father of two, makes several references to young girls, including this passage about legislation he was backing: "The age of consent would officially be lowered to 'When Poppa ain't around.' "

He also quips about renewing his subscription to Hustler's Barely Legal and about knowing very little Italian.

"I've just learned the very basic things you would need to get by in Rome. I can say 'Hello,' 'Goodbye,' 'Where's the bathroom,' 'Is your sister really twelve?' "

Leach has tried his hand at stand-up and was a member of a comedic troupe years ago. "I don't have a sitcom, so it tells you how good I was," he said in an interview.

He said he started writing humor columns about eight years ago as "an outlet," and e-mails them to about 2,000 friends and acquaintances.

About a year ago, Leach started posting his "vents" online.

"I think we want, in society, to have elected officials who are not all the same all the time. And we should want them to occasionally let their hair down," he said.

"This is my private life. This is something I do. It's not obscene. It's not particularly offensive."

His columns, many written before he took office in January 2003, skewer a broad cross-section of America. He attacks the powerful and famous.

On Bush: "If he can become president of the United States, then there is no reason that the dumbest of you can't become Absolute Omnipotent Dictator of the Universe."

Dion, his most frequent foil, "has a voice like a thousand rabid monkeys trapped in a cement mixer."

He jokes about fictional exchanges with famous folks.

Pat Buchanan got a "little huffy," Leach wrote, "when I asked him if he'd ever been to a transvestite bar called the Bunny Hutch." A comment he made to Kitty Dukakis at the 1988 Democratic Convention - "Let's see the Ta-Tas" - spawned the low-cut sweater craze, he wrote.

He also pokes fun at those without any power. In one entry called "Travel Tips," Leach wrote:

"It may be easy to romanticize sleeping in a teepee, braving the elements and mixing with the dung beetles, but trust me, having a cozy bed and a third-world type who cleans your room and you can call 'Consuela' (regardless of her real name) goes a long way towards helping you forget any pending disbarment proceedings back home."

One column in particular has some Arab Americans fuming.

He wrote this about bachelor parties in different cultures: "The Palestinians like to welcome the bachelor to marital bliss by holding him up in the air and cheering, then strapping several pounds of dynamite to his chest and having him blow up a school bus (the groomsmen all chip in for the dynamite).

"Palestinian women are troubled by their future husband being splattered all over the ground, but grateful that he wasn't exposed to any naked women."

James J. Zogby, founder and president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute, called Leach's comments inappropriate and insensitive.

"This is outrageous. We've lowered the standards for our elected officials, but he fits even below those lowered standards," Zogby said.

Leach, who is Jewish, said: "I guess someone could be offended by that. I wrote it well before becoming a legislator. At the time, I had a law partner who was Arabic. It was not meant to be offensive."

His last posting chided the media for sending reporters to Seattle to cover legislators, including himself, as they attended the nation's largest convention for lawmakers last month.

It mentions that a reporter, whom it calls "Mario," would attend, and that knowing that they would be watched, lawmakers were given rules to stay out of trouble. One called for "no using tax dollars to get a haircut, or a tattoo or to get your jimmy pierced."

Such a volume of writings - there are more than 200 "vents" - could smell like red meat for a political opponent in next year's elections.

"In today's world, these are not funny things. Maybe if you are a professional comic on cable TV, you can get away with it. But not when you are in public life," Ken Davis, the Montgomery County GOP chairman, said after reading several entries. "If a candidate, Republican or Democrat, were to run against him, then they certainly would take a good, hard look at these comments."

Soon after joining the House, Leach wondered in a column whether his writings might affect his political future.

"After I was elected to the legislature, I was encouraged to put the Vent on hold for a while, if death threats can be considered encouragement. Some worried I might say something that would speed up the inevitable impeachment process. Others worried I would say something that might slow it down."

Mike Manzo, chief of staff to House Minority Leader H. William DeWeese, said he had read some of the columns and found them "downright hilarious."

"Daylin is one of the most genuinely funny people I've ever met," he said. "A lot of people will criticize him for this. But they just don't get his sense of humor."

Roderick Millwood isn't sure Leach has a future in comedy.

"I didn't see anything comedic there, and I was looking for something funny," said Millwood, general manager of the Laff House, a Philadelphia comedy club, who reviewed the site. "But he's free to come down on the last Wednesday night of the month, when we have open mike night, and give it a try."

A Leach Sampler

These are excerpts from State Rep. Daylin Leach's blog:

On giving

"I have found it rewarding to take time to do things for others. If Britney Spears needs a back rub, I'll give it to her. If Britney needs a big ol' spanking, I'm there."

On himself

"Do you remember how every elementary school has some kid who is so slow and pathetic that all the other kids beat him up. Well, in my school, that kid beat me."

Why we shouldn't execute Osama

"The minute we kill him we are sending him to paradise where 72 virgins await him (or 71 virgins and one girl who went horseback riding a lot)."

The political risks of S&M

"To me, being sat on by a morbidly obese, leather-clad dominatrix is not fun. But it would probably still be a bad idea to be photographed doing it."

Prepping for a marathon

"My training consisted of running through the streets of certain rural neighborhoods near the capital wearing a "Leave the Sheep Alone!" T-shirt. I thought being chased would motivate me to keep running."

A fulfilled life goal

"Get totally stoned on fine Lebanese Hashish with Henry Kissinger. Check."

On strippers

"Whenever Jasmine, Cocoa, Lolita, Puka-Puka or Clitoris (it's amazing how all the women with exotic names wind up working for strip clubs) came near you, you had to tip them to sit, to dance, to stop dancing, to leave, and to never tell you about their plans for medical school again."

On alcohol

"Specifically, I dreamt:... of a world where every Starbucks also served Whiskey - cheap, 24 hours a day - to absolutely anybody."

From "The Lost Poems of Osama Bin Laden"

Once I glimpsed a woman's foot

as I walked by the forge

I had to halt an execution

my loins were so engorged

Posted by mhess3 at 05:09 PM | Comments (3)

The hunt, by Liz

I began my hunt on Saturday at 2:10. Unfortunately, I have dial-up (until this Wednesday).

Um, in Dogpile, I found the results of last year's hunt (didn't read until after)

1. Tito/Eleanor/Amin: Photos were sloooow, so I gave up, seeing that it could take a while for me to download anything...watching the time tick by was enervating, but I intend to find it...

2. Went to www.dogpile.com, a site that searches the search engines. Alice Duer Miller

Evolution

SAID Mr. Jones in 1910:
"Women, subject yourselves to men."
Nineteen-Eleven heard him quote:
"They rule the world without the vote."
By Nineteen-Twelve, he would submit
"When all the women wanted it."
By Nineteen-Thirteen, looking glum,
He said that it was bound to come.
This year I heard him say with pride:
"No reasons on the other side!"
By Nineteen-Fifteen, he'll insist
He's always been a suffragist.
And what is really stranger, too,
He'll think that what he says is true.

3. Went to Google and found this site: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html. You have to go into the search engine on the site to retrieve, though. 3 March 1797

4. I found--I hope--the speech here: http://www.duboislc.org/html/WillieLynch.html. After reading the caveat, though, I think more research is in order...

5. I became a bit flummoxed here ... I thought to use the Wayback machine...but I had to obtain the site for the President of the Czech Republic. But, in my rush to get things done, I completely missed the top bar on the page that allowed one to go to the old site in English, and gazed with wonder at the page the foreign writing. I glanced back over the page after the 30 minutes, and found the speech here: http://old.hrad.cz/president/Havel/speeches/index_uk.html. Oops.

6. I didn't have access to JSTOR archives, but I was led there by Google and here. Setting it up so I can retrieve articles from home...

7. Here. Had found this before when trying to locate books.

8. The Wayback machine. Used that one at work when we were reconstructing our Web site...Always useful...

9. Google images didn't yield anything, but I believe I was on the right track... I only had a couple of minutes left, so I went to number 10.

10. ...which I found--I hope--here...

Posted by ejonese at 01:31 PM

September 02, 2005

Scavenger Hunt

Operation “Scavenger Hunt” commenced at 1300 hours on 2 September 2005, at work (dial-up at home would be way too slow—guess it’s time to fork out for DSL, huh?) during my lunch hour. Concurrently write/paste to a Word document as I go along:

1. Searched on Google for Josip Tito; found this site as the fifth entry “all you wanted to know about Tito”; then within the site: http://www.titoville.com/voditelji.html
2. Google again, put the phrase in quotation marks, many hits right on target, including http://www.sakoman.net/pg/html/11689.htm which has the poem Evolution by Alice Duer Miller
3. Georgie Washington, go to the Library of Congress!! American Memory, use their search engine to find letters from Washington to Pickering, too many listed; then tried, in quotations, “deceive the people” and it was the 7th entry, a letter dated March 3, 1797. It’s now been 12 minutes.
4. Google again, 9,270 hits. First entry had the speech. http://thetalkingdrum.com/wil.html
5. Spent almost 10 minutes on this, Google, Wayback, no luck here. Skip it!
6.GMU Library website, electronic journal search for The Economic History Review; it's in JSTOR. 34 page article in JSTOR. 24 minutes have passed.
7. Google, many hits, first few are Texas, Virginia, Toball College, Cameron?
8. Using the Wayback Archive, found:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://chnm.gmu.edu That listed 4 pages from 1998, only one of which was “archived” but without graphics/images.
9. Who? Running out of time so: http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~murray/ didn’t see anything about photographs. Should have tried Alta Vista?
10. Google, search for Karl Jacoby and “student exchange” it is the third hit. I’m two minutes over my 30 minute allowance.

M/C

Prior to starting this I read through the searching tips from the Clio Wired index and also scanned the article “Finding Information on the Internet.” I’m pretty familiar with the Library of Congress material so anything regarding US history I was pretty sure I could find (given enough time). The Czech question left me befuddled and the Janet Murray one as well. Needed more time, probably 20 more minutes, maybe? Would not have been able to do even half if I tried this at home, however, as dial-up is a killer.

Back to work now. I’ll add more of my thoughts on Tuesday. Interesting experience overall.

Posted by sprice7 at 12:35 PM

Scavenger Hunt

Oops, first posted this to Scott's Blog (primary category selection mistake, hey, I've never done a blog before):
Scavenger Hunt
Operation “Scavenger Hunt” commenced at 1300 hours on 2 September 2005, at work (dial-up at home would be way too slow—guess it’s time to fork out for DSL, huh?) during my lunch hour. Concurrently write/paste to a Word document as I go along:

1. Searched on Google for Josip Tito; found this site as the fifth entry “all you wanted to know about Tito”; then within the site: http://www.titoville.com/voditelji.html
2. Google again, put the phrase in quotation marks, many hits right on target, including http://www.sakoman.net/pg/html/11689.htm which has the poem Evolution by Alice Duer Miller
3. Georgie Washington, go to the Library of Congress!! American Memory, use their search engine to find letters from Washington to Pickering, too many listed; then tried, in quotations, “deceive the people” and it was the 7th entry, a letter dated March 3, 1797. It’s now been 12 minutes.
4. Google again, 9,270 hits. First entry had the speech. http://thetalkingdrum.com/wil.html
5. Spent almost 10 minutes on this, Google, Wayback, no luck here. Skip it!
6.GMU Library website, electronic journal search for The Economic History Review; it's in JSTOR. 34 page article in JSTOR. 24 minutes have passed.
7. Google, many hits, first few are Texas, Virginia, Toball College, Cameron?
8. Using the Wayback Archive, found:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://chnm.gmu.edu That listed 4 pages from 1998, only one of which was “archived” but without graphics/images.
9. Who? Running out of time so: http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~murray/ didn’t see anything about photographs. Should have tried Alta Vista?
10. Google, search for Karl Jacoby and “student exchange” it is the third hit. I’m two minutes over my 30 minute allowance.

M/C

Prior to starting this I read through the searching tips from the Clio Wired index and also scanned the article “Finding Information on the Internet.” I’m pretty familiar with the Library of Congress material so anything regarding US history I was pretty sure I could find (given enough time). The Czech question left me befuddled and the Janet Murray one as well. Needed more time, probably 20 more minutes, maybe? Would not have been able to do even half if I tried this at home, however, as dial-up is a killer.

Back to work now. I’ll add more of my thoughts on Tuesday. Interesting experience overall.

Posted by sprice7 at 12:35 PM