Clio Wired (History 696)

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October 31, 2005

Debbie’s Final Project Proposal for Clio Wired

My proposal is to redesign the current website Quilts, Counterpanes and Throws. I chose this topic because I am not taking History 697 next semester; I’m saving it until I am accepted into the PhD program and actually have to take it. By then I’m hoping my youngest will be driving and I’ll have a little more time! So I wanted to choose a project that would benefit NMAH. After talking to our web office (they suggested a redesign of the Archives site but since we have a deadline of little over a month that didn’t seem feasible. I suggested this group of objects because the collections fall under the divisions that I am responsible for assisting with their electronic records, and because I knew they had a volunteer that they were trying to get funded as a part time temporary to specifically assist with the quilt collection. I was able to schedule training for her and the curator to get them started on the road of enhancing the skeletal records as well as begin to discuss the digitizing of the slides and transparencies of the quilts.

Currently, there is a virtual exhibition of 30 images of quilts arranged by type. These records have one line of identification information and a detail image as well as the main image, but no narratives about the objects. Quilts are terrific objects of material culture and most have wonderful stories associated with them. The curator has written a book about some of them but many more are not yet documented! There are about 360-375 in the Textile collection with several others housed in other collections of the museum. I am proposing that we expand the presentation to include many of the narratives. I also would like to see a link to our on-line collections where we can continue to add object images and records as they are prepared for the web. There are also detailed quilt construction analysis notebooks; that are also very informative; the curator would like to make these available but most of the general public would not be interested in their level of detail and it is it is my understanding that they were produced on a manual typewriter and are not in electronic format. I like to see these made available as hyperlinks and we could handle them as PDFs. I would also like to see links to other quilt sites (such as Library of Congress and the Quilt Alliance with University of Michigan) that contain glossaries and recommended resources. Also new quilt home page would be a good place to include links to the quilt tour and to the care of quilts and textiles page. Finally I’d also like to add an interactive section with games and activities as well as a place for the public to send us stories about family quilts or experiences with quilting bees or community quilt projects. This may prove useful for oral history documentation and may also bring us a few worthy additions to the collection. I am not a quilter although I had a great aunt who was, but I find the medium exciting and interesting. They are functional as well as visual pieces of heritage.

Posted by dschaef1 at 01:55 PM

October 29, 2005

Ken's Proposal Proposal

The etymology of the word encyclopedia reflects two Greek roots: enkuklios, meaning "cyclical, periodic," and paideia meaning"education." It has been interpreted as "general education" or "whole circle of knowledge." While its meaning has changed over time, it has generally referred to a comprehensive attempt to gather knowledge in a single location.

The dynamics of the loci of knowledge sources as a representation of corresponding shifts in power can be viewed in attempts to locate and consolidate information. Whether this power operates hierarchically or in a more lateral, dispersed fashion has been a changing and contested process. In the world of oral culture, knowledge dispersion was a communal and interactive process. Those with exceptional recollective and narrative skills were often afforded respected positions within the community, but the utilization and continuity of information was reliant upon the efforts of the group. With the advent of print culture, and innovations in production and propagation, the control over the production of knowledge was held in fewer hands, and as a result, in many ways more uniform. An encyclopedia became a central source of knowledge to its readers, but what was on its pages was decided on by only a few. Moreover, the learning process had become passive - authors were rarely available to answer questions or challenges.

However, digital media has offered a new format for the encyclopedia. Early incarnations generally took the form of cd-roms which were similar to traditional encyclopedias, but with hypertext capabilities. More recently a new format has been introduced with the "wiki," specifically, but not limited to, the Wikipedia. In a sense, with important differences, the wiki model seems closer to the oral tradition, with a communal and interactive creation and dispersion of information, than to the print model. Users can both seek out and contribute to the collection of knowledge, potentially reclaiming from the "experts" the loci of control.

There are many nuances to this which I hope to explore in my project, through a history of past creation and uses of encyclopedias, as well as a detailed analysis of the potential differences wikis offer. These would include disputes over included material, how encyclopedias were made available to the public, and the influence the publishing industry held over these processes. Moreover, the passionate defenses and criticisms of the Wikipedia mark it as an extremely contested territory. Still. its high levels of traffic indicate it is not to be ignored. In addition to presenting a detailed hypertexted history of encyclopedias, I would hope to offer an experiment with media types in the project as well, where users could compare oral, print, and wiki versions of similar entries, and understand the multifaceted differences between them. This could outline the important impact which information control has on education and knowledge-power.

Posted by kalbers at 07:21 PM

Bay Street

The history of the Bahamas is told in many ways. Most commonly, it is the quaint tale of the events that lead to the creation of an island paradise, now the perfect destination for millions of tourists. The main foci are usually arrival of Columbus and the times of Pirates. This, however, is an incomplete tale that ignores the characters and events that have gone into shaping this nation-a nation, not just a tourist destination.

Bay Street 1800's

The project that I propose is an exploration of the history of those characters and events. The Bahamas is an archipelago of 700 islands and islets. Twenty-two of these have permanent settlements. The island of New Providence is the location of Nassau, the capital (and most populous) city of the Bahamas. Nassau is approximately 80 square miles and located on the north side of Nassau is Bay Street. Bay Street is and has been a main artery of commerce and culture in the Bahamas since as far back as the early 1800’s. With its tributaries of Market, George, Parliament and. Charlotte Streets, Bay Street has played-and continues to play-an integral part in the formation of the Bahamas and is the storehouse of much of the cultural memory.

Bay Street early 1900's

This project will fill an important void in digital scholarship. There is an excellent body of literature on the history of the Bahamas. However, no historical analysis of any complexity can be found in cyberspace. This project will fill be a step towards filling that void.

The primary audience of this site is secondary students in the Bahamas. To that end, it will have lesson plans with references to the primary texts used to teach these students. This site will also benefit other high school students of history as well. Whether these students are interested in the history of the Bahamas or how a small state played a part in regional and even global events. For even events that occur in Bay Street are not within a vacuum, context connects it to the United States, other islands West and Great Britain. The proximity with the Untied States allows participation in Civil War and Prohibition. Islands like Turks and Caicos, Jamaica and Haiti have ties to Bahamas as well. And as a part of the British Commonwealth there is more than a causal association with Great Britain. Queen Elizabeth remains the official head of state and the British Privy Council is the court of last resort for Bahamian citizens. Of course, the periphery audience which this site may serve is the general public

Bay Street circa 1935

There are several aspects of this project that will make use of digital media. The first way is that it will present multiple narratives with different avenues for the viewer to access the text. It will provide a search of both images and texts that is only partially possible in a non-web medium. This project will allow the viewer to experience the narrative through image, sound (music and speeches) and movement (video). In addition, there will be gallery of images of historic Bahamas.

Posted by nmartina at 04:12 PM | Comments (2)

Amanda's final project proposal

Women of the Weimar Republic

Introduction
Since WWI, historians have been trying to determine what it is about Germany that led the nation headlong into war. Many suggestions have been offered, and the notion of a German Sonderweg, or “peculiar path” has been argued back and forth with mixed results. One element of the German Sonderweg argument is the subject of women in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany. Some scholars posit that German women were unique in their feminist actions and contributed to the peculiar path Germany took; others feel German women had much in common with their neighbours in other countries.
Furthermore, while many websites available today cover the roles of women in Germany as dictated by men, few, if any, discuss life in Weimar Germany from the perspective of women. Examining the social and gender constructs of Weimar Germany on the web would be a unique and instructive project that would ultimately offer a critical examination of another viewpoint currently left unexplored.

There are quite a few scholarly books written on the topic of women in Weimar Germany using primary source documents such as journals and memoirs that would make an interesting and original project when expanded into digital media. My website would ultimately utilise the strength of the web by hosting links to archival material, essays, photos, statistics, articles, journal transcripts, etc.
Women’s history is of particular interest to an increasingly large number of students who, as many are women themselves, might be interested to learn the thoughts and actions of women in Weimar Germany. The plan, or question, within the site will be to examine if German women were peculiar in their views and actions or if they mirrored the actions and viewpoints of their neighbours in other countries such as England and the United States. Perhaps this information will allow for a larger, more catholic understanding of how Germany came became the antagonist of both WWI and WWII.
Scope and Genre
The objective of this subject resource site is to examine social and gender constructs in Weimar Germany within a larger effort to explain Germany’s involvement in WWI and WWII. A secondary role will be to teach students how to critically analyse secondary and primary source documents regarding this subject. It will be largely an archival site surrounded by an essay.
*Gender and role expectations of the period will be examined using all mediums possible from text to art and images. Attitudes towards women in Weimar Germany will be established and a discussion of how those attitudes fit into the larger discussion of period German history will be developed.
*As the period progresses chronologically, changes in attitude, if any, will be noted.
*Comparing and contrasting German women and women’s movements of other countries during the period will be offered.
*Biases in primary and secondary sources will be identified and evaluated.
Site construction
Stemming from the works of Anne Allan, David Blackbourn, Geoff Ely, Fritz Stern, Marion Kaplan, Ian Kershaw and others, an overview, or background of German feminist history during the Weimar Republic will be constructed in essay format using HTML text and simple hyperlinks. The foundational essay will be found on the homepage where the objective of the site will be explained. Within this foundational essay, more detailed discussion and analysis of chosen points of interest will be embedded as links to articles and book citations. Periods of time and subjects will link to specific essays, data, or parts of articles particular to that time period will be available whenever possible. For example, when a visitor clicks on 1850-1914, they will find a link to Ann Allen’s Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800-1914 as well as other books and scholarly articles regarding German feminism during that period available on the web. When they click o Friedrich Fröbel they will be taken to Fröbel Web. If possible, links to photos and any other visually stimulating documentation possible (such as art) at the time of posting will be offered. The site will use primary and secondary documentation from scholarly books, archives, and whatever additional records and citations are available.
Rationale for Digital History
Web based instruction allows for a broader audience for this topic and provides instant access to sources in a condensed site that is not available in published hard copy text.
Visitors will be able to quickly click through the essay and immediately gain information on a particular (hyperlinked) element of the essay they find interesting. This cannot be done with hard copy publications. Footnotes, when used, will be hyperlinked for ease of use. Bibliographies and articles embedded in the essay via hyperlinks will allow readers to access those documents immediately rather than having to scroll, flip pages to end notes, or search a database independently of reading the foundational essay. Wherever photos or images are possible, those will be available; a source element currently not available in many history based books and articles. With so many sources available in one location, visitors will be able to critically compare, contrast, and evaluate the material quickly and competently. The site can guide upper level high school and undergraduate students to draw conclusions from what they read in the essay and relevant links or to search for more information on their own.
Genre Site Reviews
Louis Otto Peters
http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/whm2003/otto2.htmlThis is a simple, straightforward essay page regarding the life and context of Louise Otto-Peters, a German feminist of the Weimar period and founded the first women’s organisation in Germany, the General German Women's Organization. The page is hosted by Sunshine for Women; no further information can be located on the page regarding the origin of the site. The main host page of Sunshine for Women offers women’s rights links and essays among other feminist subjects but does not reveal who the author(s) are or any information about its development. I have emailed them for further information. There are no visual bells and whistles on the above cited page such as photos or moving logos. The text is well sized, nicely formatted and easy to read. The essay was written from a collection of encyclopaedia entries and a few articles on feminism. It contains only one footnote which is not clearly marked within the text. No links to Otto-Peters writing is offered, although a translated poem of hers appears within the text, no precise documentation or further discussion of that poem is linked. Endnotes require scrolling of the entire page with three general links. This site could be much improved upon with the addition of embedded footnotes, hyperlinks to other readings and additional viewpoints from other writers.

Literary Resources — Feminism and Women's Literature http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/women.html
This site offers a good deal of information by way of links for the visitor to sift through without the benefit (or predisposition) of a foundational essay. It hosts a plethora of scholarly essay and book links regarding women’s literature, as the site title accurately conveys. Many of the links are academic and hosted by universities. Some are period specific, such as women’s writing in the British Isles, while others are period specific, such as women in Paris, 1900-1940. Stylistically, it is straightforward HTML highlighted links and text without visual gimmicks. This site should be quite useful in my quest for information and will surely be cited and linked on my site. The main site is clearly hosted and created by Jack Lynch, Associate Professor in the English department of the Newark campus of Rutgers University, specializing in the English literature of the eighteenth century. His literary source home site hosts a wealth of literary links and could be very useful to anyone studying women’s writing in general.

Worker’s Liberty
http://www.workersliberty.org/taxonomy/page/or/456This is a politically driven (socialist) site hosted by the Alliance for Worker’s Liberty (UK) with advertisements and many links to various subjects regarding socialism; the centred options are the snippets relevant to my site on the The German socialist women's movement, 1890-1914. Each of these links takes the visitor to a portion of an article written on the subject by Janine Booth, an AWL and RMT who has also written on German socialism and the “woman question”. What is different about this site is the ability to comment on the articles, and the site keeps tabs on how many people have read the article. It is most likely biased, but offers interesting viewpoints to consider. It suffers from a bit of a ditracting, left side aligned layout, but is relatively easy to use and does not breach limits of good taste and sensibility with regard to design. It would be helpful to know who the aurhors of the articles are at the onset; to include their credentials and footnote the articles would only benefit the reader and assist in an assessment of reliability. The site is well updated and current, and an intersting read.

European Women Bibliography
http://www.holycross.edu/departments/history/tmcbride/EurWombibl.htmThis is the bibliography page from a syllabus taught by Theresa McBride at Holy Cross College. I included it because it serves a purpose for those interested in locating additional texts regarding European feminist writings and context. When you click on the link at the bottom of the page which takes you to her syllabus for “Women's History from Emma Bovary to Mrs. Dalloway”, an undergraduate history course, you get a better understanding of how the material can be used in a pedagogical atmosphere. The bibliography page is arranged in subject groups with a nice copy of an impressionist painting as a focal point. It offers no links to archives, articles or books, but they are there to copy none the less. These readings serve as a good source for comparison of German women and their neighbours in Europe.

Kindergarten
http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/~Chastain/ip/kinderga.htm
Stemming from the “Encyclopaedia of 1848 Revolutions” website homepage, http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/~Chastain/index.htm, the “Kindergarten” link offers an in depth essay of the origin of the German Kindergarten. It is written by Ann Allen, a primary scholar in the subject of motherhood and feminism in Germany, and maintained by James Chastain. The essay does not include footnotes as the section in her book does, but offers a bibliography at the bottom of the page which the visitor must scroll down to see. The bibliography is not hyperlinked. This page is germane to my own because involvement in the Kindergarten was one of the ways German women were able to privately and socially demonstrate the value of motherhood, independence, and worth to society in general as women. The kindergarten figures very strongly in the origins of Weimar Germany feminism. Furthermore, the page supplies a further link to the main site page for study of the 1848 revolution in Germany that would assist the visitor to my site gain enlightenment to the origins of Sonderweg, among other various subjects regarding the era. The contributing editors to the main site are all scholars in the field of Eastern European history.

How Feminism Led To Two World Wars
http://www.heretical.com/sheppard/hflttww.html
This is an interesting link from the homepage of The Heretical Press and is useful for anyone who wishes to read radical, opposing text. It is formatted in simplistic HTML text with one small photo at the top. The site’s main focus is the content of the essay and not eye catching gimmicks. Some will conclude that the essay itself is a gimmick when they read its contents. Simon Sheppard, the author of the essay and BSc of the Heretical Press, Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire, England was sentenced to 9 months imprisonment at Hull Crown Court on Wednesday 14th June 2000 for the "crime" of "Publishing or Distributing racially inflammatory material.” When posing an argument, however, it is always best to offer as many options and resources as possible for the reader to survey; then they can decide for themselves what the truth is. This approach lends reliability and context to the argument as well as informs the reader of what controversy is out there in cyberspace. While the essay on this site and those available on the homesite of Heretical.com may be radical, they make some interesting points, although they must be read with some caution for those who are easily offended be sexist and racist remarks. Makes for an interesting contrast.

Baroness von Marenholtz Bülow recalls her first meeting with Friedrich Fröbel http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/7905/fblremin.html#index
This is an archival page that can be used as a good example of a primary source. It can be used to teach about primary source documents and how to use them. It can be transcribed and used in research. It comes to us from a link found on a main site for Friedrich Fröbel: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/7905/webindex.html#remin, another valuable site that hosts many links regarding the kindergarten and German women activists. The text is left side aligned, and some advertising appears on the right hand border, but despite these distractions, at least they are consistent throughout the sites. The links are easy to navigate and the links are well worth examining. Unfortunately, a few of the links don’t work, but this is the nature of the modern “moveable feast” of information.

Technical Plan
The site will be constructed using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX software and Adobe Photoshop as required in the class syllabus. The text will be straightforward HTML with simple hyperlinks and photos will be used according to copyright law. It is too soon to tell how many web pages the essay will comprise, but a five to ten page estimate is probably reasonable. It will not be open source, but I would like to include a discussion forum. It will take a good solid sixteen week semester to research and author the final essay, connect all the embedded links, and create all the bibliographies I would like to include.

Conclusion
The purpose of this proposal is to outline the structure, need, and importance of scholarly history on the web, and in particular, to demonstrate the usefulness of an academically sound essay and archival site regarding women and feminism in Weimar Germany. New media such as this can serve as a teaching tool, reach wider audiences than print publications and serve the academic community as a research source. Women of the Weimar Republic will combine the objective of further scholarly knowledge with an interest in feminist Weimar Germany and the argument of their uniqueness in the argument regarding German Sonderweg.

Posted by avonargy at 03:53 PM | Comments (1)

Maureen's Digital Project Prospectus:

Visualizing the Third Reich through Art.

The new order Adolf Hitler envisioned for Germany included one Reich, one leader, and one art. Modern art was individualistic and defiant; therefore, it had no place in Hitler's new world that required social and cultural conformity. In 1937, two museum exhibitions of art opened in Munich. At the Degenerate Art Exhibit, the old Archaeological Institute was filled with confiscated works of modern art despised by the National Socialists. The work of famous German artists was mocked by wall text and jeering staff members. At the same time, across the street in a new, classical Greek style museum, the ideal art of the Nazis was put on public view after a celebratory procession through Munich. These two exhibits provide an incredible contrast in art style and museum presentation that visually define their historical moment.

The Degenerate Art Exhibit is well documented and it is an important starting point for examining the question of who owns art because many works from the exhibit were confiscated and later destroyed or sold to support Hitler's war effort. In comparison, there is very little written about the Great German Art Exhibitions. This is not surprising because even Hitler was not always happy with the end result found in the museum.

In order to narrow the scope of my project, I planned to use the Degenerate Art Exhibit to examine the question of cultural heritage and ownership. However, I was still unsure of how to create an accessible digital project on that enormous topic. I then realized that a project on Hitler's approved art would provide a unique contribution to scholarship, mainly because there is very little about it on the Internet or in text format. I looked at the Imaging the French Revolution site again as an example of both a history and art history project. Similar to that project, I will provide both images and narrative in order to compare the two different types of art in Germany in 1937, modern art versus Nazi art. By using the comparison format, a project on German art in 1937 could be used as both a teaching resource and an analytical tool that works better as a digital project than it would in a more traditional format.

This project could be used as a small exhibit but its main purpose is as a teaching resource. It will provide historical background, in narrative form, about modern art in Germany during the Weimar period, the rise of Hitler and National Socialism, and Hitler's new goals for Germany. There would be links to other sources as needed. The purpose of the the site is to provide the opportunity to use analytical skills to examine the different types of art from each of the exhibitions in 1937. Therefore, the site would provide a series of individual pages with each page containing two images side by side: one modern work from the Degenerate Art Exhibit and one image from the Great German Art Exhibitions.The provenance of each work will be provided and then links will lead to discussions about each work, its artist, historical context, etc. Students will be provided with the necessary background information to understand its historical context.

Equally important, art history students will learn how to compare and contrast the formal elements of the work of art.The analysis of these different styles of art allows art history students to learn more about methodology. One of the methods used in art history is formal analysis and many students have difficulty in understanding the concept. Therefore, this site would also provide an opportunity for students to gain better analytical skills.

For an example of two images that would be shown together:

Kirchner:
http://www.moma.org/collection/printable_view.php?object_id=78426

Heymann:
http://wwww.dhm.de/lemo/objekte/pict/98005212

Both of these works are similar because they are oil paintings of women. However, Kirchner's scene takes place in a busy urban setting with angular, elongated, modern women painted in garish colors; he clearly depicts the tension of urban life in Weimar Germany. In contrast, Heymann portrays the idealized German countryside so vital for feeding the nation and where women are represented as mothers caring for their children; he clearly depicts how Hitler in turn cares for his children.

Since I am well aware of my IT limitations, I will not attempt to use innovative technology like the Imaging Tool, though I would argue that is not necessary for this particular project. Instead, I will rely on providing 5-8 sets of images with scholarly narrative and well planned links to other sites as needed. I intend to provide a careful comparison of the two types of art that were on display in these different exhibitions and to open a small window into what people actually saw when they went to these museums in 1937. In doing so, I hope to add to the history of art during the Third Reich as well as train art history students in formal methodology. At the same time, I would like to think that this is an innovative way to use the Internet for future teaching of history and art history in general.

Posted by mguignon at 02:30 PM

Liz's Digital Proposal

While I was doing my first assignment for this class, I noted a dearth of scholarly sites that provided an overall history of advertising. I realized that an all-encompassing history of advertising would be a tad bit much, so I decided to narrow my topic to investigate how soap and beauty aid manufacturers have transformed American society.

Prior to the Civil War, Americans were not the cleanest lot. This situation began to change after the war, begging the question, how did this happen? Using innovative techniques that would become standard practice for other products, personal hygiene hawkers not only changed our nation’s cleaning habits, but the advertising industry as a whole.

While my site will be an archive, it will also include a narrative, detailing how the soap folks changed our personal grooming habits. Most of the sites I saw in my initial project were archival—a sort of “create you own narrative”/”choose your own adventure idea.” As we’ve discussed, an archive can has a narrative, based on the choices made by the site author. However, I was rather unhappy with the limited narratives presented. I would presume site authors felt a need to not spoon-feed their audience, but I thought some of the sites could have used more thought, and not throw us a bunch of ads.
There are several books on this topic. However, with the number of photos that I would propose using, it would not make sense to put this in a print format. I intend to allow users—scholars or laymen—to zoom in on advertisements, allowing for closer examination.

So, if you have thoughts/criticisms, I’m always open…

Posted by ejonese at 01:48 PM

Digital Project Proposal - Ammon

Collection tool and gathering place for oral histories.

While any field of historical research is a potential target for this project, I would like to focus on an area of German history that has had little scholarly coverage. Germany has a long historical involvement with religion. Beginning with Charlemagne's forced application of Christianity and his reign with the Holy Roman Empire in the late 8th and early 9th Centuries, continuing with the Catholic Reformations of Martin Luther in the 16th Century, and including the horrifying Holocaust against the Jews in the 20th Century, Germany has played a part in many global changing events relating to religion.

After World War II, Germany became a divided nation with differing stances on religion. Whereas West Germany became relatively free and democratic, East Germany became just as regulated and censored as they had been under the National Socialists. After the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and the dust from WWII had settled, West Germans were able to move freely about Europe and the world, openly criticize their government, and freely practice most any form of religion they chose. The same was not true for East Germans in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The Communist government that had taken control through the help of the occupying Soviets, enacted restrictions that were eerily similar to the fascists of Nazi Germany they claimed to despise. This project will endeavor to collect the stories of religious people in East Germany and pull together a general narrative of how they lived their religious lives despite the restrictions placed on them by their government.

This project will collect, review, and organize oral histories and relevant documents and research relating to religious laws and religious society in the former German Democratic Republic. This project is innovative and important because very little research has been done in this area. Collecting oral histories will ensure that first hand accounts will be safely recorded while the people who experienced this time period are still alive. Providing a central location for historical documents and research done in this field will benefit future researchers of this topic. While the subject of religion in East Germany is very broad, it is my hope to refine the topic, after sufficient gathering of data, to a specific religious community, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, within the GDR.

Many oral history collections are done by personally interviewing someone and recording the response on paper, tape recorder, or video recorder. This site will allow interviews to take place in a 'virtual' setting. Potential interviewees will go to a web site and fill out a survey by typing in their answer or recording their voice and/or video responses to the survey questions. The technology is easily accomplished using Macromedia's Flash Communication Server. The voice and video application can be built into the survey so as to be used if the interviewee is able and would like to use it. Otherwise the answers can simply be input using text areas, check boxes, radio buttons, etc.

The greatest challenge will be spreading the word about the availability, purpose and hopes of the site sufficiently to provide an acceptable amount of feed back. This will hopefully be done by recruiting involvement through personal contacts with former GDR citizens, German Universities or students interested in this field of study, and possible collaboration with churches in Germany.

View it on my web site.

Posted by ashephe1 at 10:19 AM

Tai's Digital Proposal

Databases available on the Internet and/or purchased by universities for the use of their researching students and faculty rarely include primary source material on American Indians. Certainly databases and library catalogs allow users to find title and author information of sources, but full-text versions are not presented. To encourage and improve American Indian studies, primary sources need to utilize the accessibility and searchability provided by digital scholarship.

The sources included in such a database could potentially become as far-reaching as to include government documents, treaties, missionary writings, tribal correspondence, oral histories, manuscripts and art. However, at the outset I will develop this database as an easily accessible repository for government documents pertaining to Indian Affairs. My own research currently centers around Thomas McKenney, Superintendent of Indian Trade and later of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1816-1830), and his involvement with American Indian reform and removal. His office’s and personal correspondence reside in the National Archives and are available in laborious microfilm searching. A global presentation of these American Indian sources would greatly enhance researchers ability to understand the mechanics of United States government policy toward American Indian Tribes.

Examples of other websites, which expand upon the traditional archive to present full-text primary materials and will act as models for this project include: George Washington’s Writings and North American Women’s Letters and Diaries. Both of these archives present full-text transcribed versions of primary sources, searchable by author, recipient, date, location and word/phrase. My database would include these same search options and also incorporate a “browsing” option based upon author, recipient, date or location. Therefore a user could simply see all sources to or from (or both) Thomas McKenney in chronological order for the year 1827. Similarly one could browse all correspondence for the Creek Agency during a particular period.

Certainly I have limited expertise in the digital media. In fact I’m highly impressed by the fact I even know how to use a cascading style sheet. Therefore I will need guidance from someone with technical experience, especially when it comes to the searching tools. With design assistance this digital archive could prove exceedingly useful for researchers in American Indian studies.

Posted by tgerhart at 10:01 AM | Comments (3)

Miles's Project Proposal

Here's a link to my project proposal:

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

Have fun reading and leave me a comment!

Posted by miles at 02:59 AM | Comments (3)

October 28, 2005

Scott's Digital Project Proposal: Grrrrrrrr

In 1964 Pontiac Motor Division introduced to the American public a novel automobile, the Pontiac Tempest-GTO (Pontiac borrowed the acronym “GTO” from Ferrari-—it stood for Gran Turismo Omologato-—or Grand Touring-class production vehicle homologated for racing; enthusiasts nicknamed it the GTO Tiger -- hence the "Grrrr" in my title line -- a nickname based on Pontiac's first ad campaign for the new car -- and the "Goat" -- a simple play on the acronym). This was at a time when Pontiac’s parent company, General Motors, had gotten out of the racing business entirely the year before and was promoting its complete line of automobiles to the middle class family (except for the Corvette—always an exception there). GM's corporate emphasis was on safety, affordability, and practicality.

The GTO, however, was anything but a family-friendly sedan. It was, in fact, based on a family sedan, the popular mid-size Pontiac Tempest, but if the buyer chose the GTO option he got an incredibly fast, two-door rocket that was completely the opposite of the type of car that GM management was working so hard to promote. The Tempest-GTO was an immediate hit with the general public and sales exceeded expectations by tens of thousands. How does one explain the appearance of a GM drag racer at this time?

According to legend, the top engineer at Pontiac, John Z. DeLorean, the same man who in the 1980s launched his own car line and was arrested for smuggling cocaine, surreptitiously developed the GTO right under the noses of GM’s upper management because, as DeLorean later claimed, he saw a opportunity in the domestic automobile market for just such a car. According to DeLorean, he determined that there were thousands of young men with cash to spare who were eager to get behind the wheel of what amounted to a street-legal drag racer. Knowing that GM would never approve of a racing sedan, he was able to sneak through an option package to the base Tempest that, when chosen by a buyer, included the largest and fastest available engine made by Pontiac (an engine designed for the largest Pontiacs, not the mid-sized Tempest). Upper management did not notice this particular option and it was made available to the general public. DeLorean had succeeded in circumventing the bureaucracy of one of the largest corporations in the world! Once management saw the success of the GTO’s sales they gave DeLorean and Pontiac free reign to develop the GTO as its own separate line but continued to fret and meddle with DeLorean and his team. All during this time there was a young advertising executive, Jim Wangers, a member of DeLorean's team, who was also playing an instrumental role in the GTO saga.

Wangers has been described as a marketing genius. He was responsible for developing an advertising campaign that helped the GTO become one of the best selling cars in the GM lineup. Wangers used innovative print and television advertisements to reach the target audience. He also tied that ad campaign into television programs and the music industry, among others, to promote what became known as the first “muscle car,” including developing the Monkee-mobile, a modified GTO, for the television show “The Monkees.”

Jan and Dean and Ronnie and the Daytona’s wrote hit songs about the car. But GM’s management kept limiting what Wangers was able to do in these advertising campaigns and he, along with the GTO team, kept attempting to “put one over” on the old, staid, conservative management by camouflaging their messages within what appears to be rather bland advertisements. It was this tit-for-tat, back and forth battle between the innovators at Pontiac and the conservative elements at GM that shaped the GTO and the advertising campaign. Popular youth culture too, in another back and forth interaction, influenced the GTO. For example, the inspiration for the popular “Judge” GTO option, first offered in 1969, was borrowed from the TV show “Laugh-In.” The GTO, then, was a product of the times in which it was produced as much as it was a product of the internal tensions within one of the nation’s largest corporations.

This story opens up a number of historically interesting and, I think, significant questions. Is DeLorean's version of the birth of the GTO correct? Did he hoodwink GM or create a myth? If the former, would a corporation whose purpose of existence was to pay attention to the bottom line really worry so much about image over profit? What role did advertising play in all of this? What did the interplay between DeLorean, his team, and GM management and the cultural climate of the time influence these events? Did main-stream culture play a role or was the counter-culture more of a factor? These are but a few of the questions raised by the GTO.

I propose to develop a website that will examine DeLorean and the GTO in general and Wanger’s innovative advertising campaign in his effort to reach his target audience in particular. Pontiac had a history of using well-known artists to develop their print advertising and was way ahead of the curve compared to the other automobile manufacturers at this point in time. By tracing the history of the GTO’s advertising campaign by developing a web essay tied into an interactive database of both print and TV advertisements, I hope to explore the question of how this campaign developed as an interaction between DeLorean and the GTO team and their battle with upper GM management. If DeLorean’s myth is true, his attempts to circumvent GM’s bureaucracy may be seen as a product of the times, symbolic of the 1960s generation’s attempts to distance themselves from their parents' generation.

This project would be well served by publishing it to a website as it will use dozens of color and black-and-white images and TV advertisements, artifacts that would make it prohibitively expensive to use in a standard print publication. These will be added to a searchable archive-database. (The complete run of print ads are available through a variety of sources.) The site will also include an interactive timeline, tracing the key decisions by DeLorean and the GTO team, Pontiac’s management, and GM’s upper management. I would add some graphs that would document the sales figures for the GTO compared to other GM models by year of production and hopefully include copies of key GM and Pontiac memos in a document archive. I will also add a scholarly essay, complete with an argument and sources! I would hope to have links to other sites that explore the history of advertising in the 20th Century as well as some of the scholarly articles written on the history of advertising and culture while taking into account some of the arguments put forth by these very publications to frame my essay.

There are a number of excellent websites dedicated to the history of advertising, such as the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History sponsored by Duke University (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/hartman/) but few that target a specific type of automobile. The few that do are run by automobile enthusiasts and, for the most part, do not present a scholarly argument. For example, see the Muscle Car Club’s section on advertising (http://www.musclecarclub.com/musclecars/general/musclecars-ads.shtml). My website’s target audience would be scholars of advertising and the automobile as well as cultural historians concerned with the 1960s. Nevertheless I would hope that enthusiasts too would find the site interesting and informative. Hopefully, Professor Kelly will think so too!

Posted by sprice7 at 03:08 PM | Comments (1)

Image Zooming... the public can be such a drag.

A few folks expressed some interest in the zoomview software I included on my museum site. Dr. Petrik pointed out to me however that it may in some cases require the user to download a plug-in. She suggested there were other ways to accomplish this. I did a little searching on the web (only a little) and found a flash based program called zoomify (http://www.zoomify.com/) which is supposed to do the same thing. I downloaded it and have not been able to get it to work yet but I'm probably missing something simple. I looked at the demo's and wasn't all that impressed with the way it makes the transition between the pixilated image and the focused one. The benefit though is that it doesn't usually require the viewer to download any plug-in as most people have flash. The other benefit is that it is free.

Zoomview from viewpoint technologies requires a license key that I was able to beg for. I had to submit a form saying I was using it for educational purposes, which I am. It is a slight pain to have to do that each year but I think the zoom effect is much cleaner. One thing in Zoomview’s favor is that Photoshop 7 already includes the ability to create the zoom image. You only need to incorporate the code into your web page or place it in a popup window. I’ve done both and one isn’t any more difficult than the other.
(http://developer.viewpoint.com/dc/tools.jsp?tab=TOOL&sub=TOOL)
A question that comes to my mind is at what point do we sacrifice innovation because of user reluctance to take the time to download a plug-in. The zoomview plug-in is easy to download and only causes a moment of hesitation before being able to view the images which once seen appears to have been worth the trouble. I am not comfortable with creating web pages for the least common denominator but I also wonder if that makes me elitist or incredibly out of touch with the public. The guest speaker at last week’s colloquium suggested that the public is lazy when it comes to history and I recall thinking at the time that that was arrogant. Now I’m not so sure. I tend to that the trend seems to be that the public is coming along with regard to moving to broadband and grows in sophistication on a daily basis.

Then again it could be I just don’t want to give up my zoomview for a poor but cheaper substitute….sigh.

Posted by kknoerl at 02:19 PM

Kurt's Digital Project Proposal

It is my belief that historians should make use of as many sources of data as are appropriate to gain as complete a picture of the past as possible. To that end one area of research I received training in was underwater archaeology. Data from that research methodology played an important role in my MA thesis along with primary historical documents. My PhD dissertation will (hopefully) examine some aspect of the development of maritime culture and industry in colonial Chesapeake Bay. Although I will not do any archaeological field work I do plan to examine all the reports from the bay on maritime sites be they wharves, shipways, or shipwrecks that date to that period. It occurred to me that if someone else were interested in looking at such reports on a much larger geographic scale they would have a very difficult time for several reasons.

1) Most states do not publish site reports. Many such as Maryland require researchers to submit a request to see the reports and then only at the State's facility. They do this to prevent looting. Many sites lay in shallow enough waters that treasure or souvenir hunters that could tear them apart.
2) Site reports exist in numerous places such as individual state archaeological field offices, Army Corp of Engineer district offices, university departments, avocational organizations, the naval historical center, and other locations as well. This makes even learning what has been investigated extremely difficult.
3) Up until the advent of the Internet the technology and determination has not been there to put site reports online. I have been surprised just how far behind the curve archaeologists are in utilizing the Internet for collaborative work.
My proposal then is to create a searchable online database that would house bibliographic information on maritime related archaeological site reports. In addition to publication information I would include the document's location, contact information needed to properly request use of the report, possibly an abstract for each report, and metadata for subject search. The various searches could include, Author, Title, Subject, Location (rough location perhaps down to the associated body of water i.e. Potomac River so as not to endanger the site) Year of publication, and Age of site.
The value of this type of tool would be to:
 Make the existence of the data know to both the historical and archaeological community,
 Informed researchers as to where they can get the report and who they need to contact,
 Encourage the use of this type of data by historians.
Practical concerns include actually getting this data. I contacted the state underwater archaeologists from Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia. Each state has agreed to furnish the information I requested and has voiced support for the project. For this project I will create a mysql database with the proper tables and schema and use PHP to create the web interface. I have done this on a small scale in my current position with the US House of Representatives so I believe I am capable of writing the proper code. I would start with Maryland's data and spend some time in their office to gather the data and scan the abstracts. Dr. Langely believes they have about 150 to 200 reports. Once the initial problems are worked out I would try and set up screens that would allow other states to submit their own data sets in a way similar to the 911 archive created by the Center for History and New Media. After that I will be able to encourage other states, Universities, avocational groups, research institutes, and the Army Corp of Engineers to provide similar data sets. The Museum Underwater Archaeology would be able to host this project beyond my time at George Mason University.
Benefits
Besides providing a worthwhile research tool for historians and archaeologists this project would:
 Encourage a wider use of sources by historians,
 Gain some additional exposure for the museum itself so that other archaeologists might be encouraged to utilize the site to publish their research to the general public,
 Assist with my own dissertation research by gathering data on Chesapeake Bay excavations.
Problems
Would this be a scholarly site? I believe it meets the following criteria:
 It would be an original contribution to the field
 It will be subject to review by the very collaborative nature of the data gathering process
 It will provide information based on primary source material
Does it have an argument?
In and of itself an archival site does not have an explicit argument but the implicit argument is that archaeological evidence can be of use to historians especially if assessed on a large scale. By examining this data as whole rather than individually information previously unknown will become apparent and may inspire knew questions that can only be answered by viewing this data set as a whole. Potential examples could be incorporated into the site such as a map showing spatial relationships between different activities or events across time. Another example that could be included on the site could be an article that is site specific. For example one of the largest ship graveyards in the US lies in

Mallows Bay in the Potomac River. It is home to over 150 shipwrecks. Most of these vessels were wooden steamships built for World War One that never saw any service at all. Unable to do much with these vessels once the war ended they were placed in the bay and left to rot. Many have deteriorated down to the water line and have formed ship shaped islands with vegetation and animal life. These vessels comprise an amazing collection of maritime architectural features that highlight the change from wooden to iron and steel hull construction. It is an amazing snap shot of time. There are elements of their construction such as a V shaped concrete stern support structure that do not appear in any of the ship plans I examined from the Mariner's Museum in Newport News. This illustrates the point that hands on research in the field can add to the historic record. This type of multimedia approach using material culture lends itself well to the web.

Posted by kknoerl at 12:02 PM

Amy's Digital Project Topic

Here is a summary of my digital project. I look forward to reading about everyone's project ideas! Amy

Generally speaking, my project would be a history of digital history. I would be looking at well-funded sites as well as some trends for funding new projects. The main question I would like to explore is if these highly-funded projects are balanced in terms of scholarship, design, and technology. This would hopefully give an overall evolution of digital history and allow me some room to think through some ideas for the future.

I would analyze these sites in terms of their content, design, etc. to answer questions like: what is the quality of scholarship and research? Does it make good use of digital capabilities? Is the design thoughtful/useful/attractive? to get a sense of what is being and has been funded as these are often the sites that have the most activity for good or for ill (and that’s what I’d like to find out!)

To keep things organized and to aid a web format, I’ve decided on some categories. These will include: university sites (Examples: Michigan, Penn, and…), institutional sites (Examples: NYPL, Chicago Historical Society and…), and ‘commercial’ sites (Examples: PBS, History Channel, and…). In terms of funding, I will look at some of the funders that I see repeated (Examples: Government, Sloan, Mellon, and…) to provide some context and hopefully get a sense of progression from that front.

But what makes this more conducive to a digital format? I have been thinking a lot about this important question and here is a preliminary answer. My collection of essays/reviews/analysis will use hyperlinks especially in discussions of design, animation, interactivity, etc. As they say, a picture is worth 1,000 words (I realize the imprecision of this analogy but it’s the best I can do for now). Also, working with these (usually highly-technical and highly-designed) sites will raise the bar for me to learn more technical and design elements. That said, the conversion from “research paper” to digital work is something I will need to be constantly aware of. Another major challenge I will face from the way the project stands now is keeping it manageable in the digital medium (I think I would like to trim it down already).

I am a novice in this whole field from the technical web design side to knowing what digital history is out there so I am and will remain open to suggestions as long as I can. So if anyone knows of or finds something that is highly-funded, let me know and I’ll check it out.

Posted by alechne1 at 11:28 AM

October 26, 2005

Welcome to Yoknapatawpha

My project is a history of a small but characteristic little piece of the American South, a "postage stamp of native soil," as William Faulkner referred to Lafayette County, Mississippi, the main source of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. The central idea of the project is to use Faulkner's fiction to inform the historical interpretation and to use history to illuminate Faulkner's world.

Faulkner included a map of the town of Jefferson (in Yoknapatawpha) in the endpaper of Absalom, Absalom! that indicates where some of the events of his novels occurred. According to Janet Murray, Faulkner's map "binds the multinovel, multifamily, multicentury saga together, giving us a taste of how Faulkner himself saw his mythical Yoknapatawpha County, not as a mere backdrop for his elaborately spoken stories but as a continuous geographical and historical realm that transcended all the stories told about it."

I plan on creating an interactive map of Yoknapatawpha, using primary sources from Faulkner Collection at the University of Virginia (I'll explain later), that allows the reader to explore not only the fictional realm of Faulkner's County, but its actual historical roots as well. Murray contends, "the encyclopedic capacity of the computer allows for storytelling on the Faulknerian scale and invites readers to come up with similar contextualizing devices--color-coded paths, time tines, family trees, maps, clocks, calendars, and so on--to enable the viewer to grasp dense psychological and cultural spaces without becoming disoriented." I hope to use this encyclopedic capacity to invite readers into Yoknapatawpha.

I'm envisioning several things with this project. This summer, Oprah had a Faulkner summer reading list and her website includes a little map of Jefferson... Mine will obviously be much better and will delve deeper, but you get the idea. I'd like to integrate some sort of java zoom viewer, ala the Holocaust Museum's Szyk exhibit and I'm also digging the Alexander Hamilton Exhibition's map of New York with the pop-up postcards. I'm thinking that sort of design would fit in with the "postage stamp" theme... and with my projected title, "Welcome to Yoknapatawpha" (like a postcard)

As a Masters student at UVa, I had a research assistantship with Stephen Railton, who created the Uncle Tom's Cabin site and the Mark Twain in his Times site. During my T.A-ship of his Faulkner seminar, Railton worked on an interactive timeline of Absalom, Absalom! and we began discussions of a foray into a new Faulkner site, similar to his previous work on Twain. I've been in discussions with him throughout the semester about this project I want to work on and where it could fit into a larger project.

Special Collections at UVa holds the largest collection of Faulkner's manuscripts including holograph and typescript material from nineteen published novels and two unpublished novels, as well as manuscripts, typescripts, letters, photographs, documents, books, and other printed materials by and about Faulkner. By working with Professor Railton, I will have access to these materials.

I also have the following books that may or may not help, so we'll see: William Faulkner and the Tangible Past: The Architecture of Yoknapatawpha; Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha; William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond; William Faulkner and Southern History; and William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country.

P.S. It's pronounced YOK-na-pa-TAW-pha.

Posted by mhess3 at 07:48 PM | Comments (3)

Wedding Pictures

For those of you who might be bored or even interested: my photographer from the wedding gave me a few "teaser" photographs while we're waiting for the thousands he took to come in. So I've posted them and if you want to take a look and only want to see a few this is a good way to do it. See the album entitled "Teaser Wedding"

Posted by tgerhart at 05:19 PM | Comments (2)

Tai On Digital Scholarship - Post Nuptial

The Comic Strip and Harlan County websites have been examined for their contributions to digital scholarship. I began my analysis using the Randall Bass, three-part method of evaluation: “What these projects suggest together, then, is a blueprint for what appear to be three interdependent features of hypermedia writing: (1) a site's multiplicity (what Michael Joyce calls "coextensivity"--the capacity in a hypertext for one text to replace another); (2) a site's argument or story (the dimension of the site that moves toward something, while never entirely reaching it); and (3) a site's reflexivity (the apparatus furnished to the reader in order to comprehend the movement between the text's multiplicity and its story). Ultimately, the usefulness (and power) of hypertext and hypermedia to scholarly discourse in American studies will depend on our ability to make these three dimensions work together for "reading wrong" rightly (American Quarterly, June 1999, p. 282).”

Site’s Multiplicity: coextensivity – being extensive on several levels at the same time

Comic Strip

• Provides lengthy prose discussing portions of Westbrook’s three arguments: "The Business of the Strips" discusses the material context of comics production, with the ultimate goal of showing that comic artists transformed their visions of comics creation as they confronted their role in an economy of reproduction. "The Culture of Business in the Strips" discusses the participation of the strips in a broader urban market culture and in, more specifically, the contradictions of marketplace "realism." "Spectatorship in the Comics" addresses one particular formal aspect of the comic strip: the use of the panel to manipulate perspective and the reader's eye


• Within the prose, he has further commentary on linked phrases or words, acting as virtual footnotes to provide reader with more in-depth knowledge, going even further than an average printed footnote would allow


• Same method is continued with the images of the comic strips, which are presented as cited images and with additional insight on Westbrook’s analysis based on particular attributes of the comic strip

Harlan County, KY

• This site is far more extensive than the Comic Strip website. “Essay in Sound” provides chapters of interviews presented as audio essays. These essays are also transcribed on the website, providing multiple source material


• Charles Hardy, one of the authors, also provides a historiography of oral history and documents how the Harlan County audio essay project was created


• Alessandro Portelli also provides a detailed historiography of presentation of materials in sound, as well as background on his research and movement towards his co-authorship of this project

Site’s Argument or Story: moving toward something, while never reaching it?

Comic Strip

• Although Westbrook claims to have no thesis, he goes on to say: I argue that early comics drew their approach to perspective, framing, and picture space from notions of theatrical spectatorship associated with class. These classed spectator-constructions were ultimately tran[s]formed but not destroyed as artists gravitated toward sequential panels


• Therefore he has his own goal, story or argument for his scholarship. However, as Susan Smulyan argues, and I am applying to Westbrook: “the discipline of a page limit would help sharpen the argument and save readers time. In these projects, the trade-offs seem to be ones of time versus space and the benefits to the author versus benefits to the reader (American Quarterly, June 1999, p. 264).” Westbrook is definitely moving towards something, but should “never entirely reaching it” be a scholarly goal (Bass, American Quarterly, June 1999, p. 282)? The lack of the thesis does benefit the author rather than the reader

Harlan County, KY

• The authors of this website have a specific goal they are working towards - pioneering a new type of historical study: “this extended and pathbreaking audio work explores place, form, time, and the act of historical interpretation; it is an attempt by two oral historians, one from Pennsylvania, USA, and the other from Rome, Italy to create a new aural history genre that counterpoises the voices of subject and scholar in dialogue—not merely the dialogue that takes place in the real time of an oral interview, but the one that occurs as interpretations are created and scholarship is generated.”


• The Harlan County project does not suffer from the same lack of argument appearing in the Comic Strip article because of the emphasis on primary material presentation and interpretation. This usage of the digital media facilitates the mass audience opportunity to listen to and review of the “new aural history genre.” Certainly this removes some of the emphasis on the author’s own analysis, but a project of this nature is well suited for the digital media, and analysis could be well suited for another print or internet publication.

Site’s Reflexivity: Movement between multiplicity and story

Comic Strip

• As Westbrook instructs: If we must write about hypertext let us write about how to use it, not about what it is (American Quarterly, June 1999, p. 257). Yet, the movement of Westbrook’s website scholarship on comics is somewhat difficult to use. Westbrook is relatively clear in his pop-up windows for images, with removable analysis. Nevertheless his internal links based on words and phrases yield confusion. These should also open in secondary windows, to permit the reader to continue reading the main text with or without the further explanatory sections being loaded in the primary window

Harlan County, KY

• Purpose of using the website: “Part ethnography, part oral history, part radio documentary, 'I Can Almost See the Lights of Home' is a hybrid work, an 'essay-in-sound' designed to be heard, not read.” With this intention, the Harlan County project is well-suited for presentation on the Internet, and makes use of technological resources to move between the oral histories and the intended interpretation/ perception of audience members


• In focusing on how to use this website - the website is well-designed, easily navigated and readable. Maintained navigation bar, table of contents and breaking lengthy text into multiple pages facilitates the users movement between the extensive text and the intended use of this website

Conclusion
Harlan County goes further than the Comic Strip website to do something new with new media. Portelli and Hardy are trying to create a new method of approaching and utilizing primary, oral resources while maintaining traditional criteria in scholarship: “solid research, crisp analysis, interdisciplinarity, and clear prose (American Quarterly, June 1999, p. 239).” The Comic Strip website expands on citation and inclusion of source material, which could seemingly be done in a published text without page or length requirements. Both works show the promise of digital media through presenting opportunity for analysis of sources unavailable in print media. The Comic Strip website is a good first step into the possibilities of new media, however Harlan County shows the emergence of new historical methods of analysis and presentation which are possible for digital scholarship.

Posted by tgerhart at 05:03 PM

October 25, 2005

Blog-Obsessed at Work (this means you!)

Hi all:

Check out this story (in RealAudio) on the amount of time we waste reading blogs (this one excluded, of course) while at work...

Mills

Posted by mills at 02:06 PM | Comments (1)

More photo programs

I recently stumbled upon this program. It looks to be somewhat more user friendly than a full blown Photoshop, but can still do some neat things. Plus it's free.

Paint.net

It was developed by Washington State University students and mentored by Microsoft. It works only on Windows 2000/XP.

Posted by ashephe1 at 09:31 AM | Comments (2)

Memory Blank

Here it is after midnight and I almost forgot (again) to post my ideas about digital scholarship, it's promise, and the sites. My brain could use an upgrade in RAM I guess.

This week we again return to the $64,000 question - does “digital” modify “scholarship,” and if so how. Are websites, by and large, merely rehashings of books, journals, exhibits, etc. on a computer screen rather than a page or a pedestal? Or are they something unique?

One of the greatest advantages digital scholarship offers is its ability to transcend time ,space, and resources, potentially reaching a wider audience than previously available. This seems to often be understated or ignored, but really might be the largest influence “digital” has on “scholarship.” It certainly seems to have been to date. David Staley contests this notion in the opening sentence of the introduction to Computers, Visualization, and History, proposing “When composing the history of the computer, historians should align it with the telescope and the microscope rather than with the printing press, because the real impact of the computer has been as a graphics tool more than as a processor of words.” While the computers graphic abilities are undeniably unique and allow for previously unseen presentations, the impact of the printing press and the Internet (and hence computers), was and is not merely as “processors of words,” but more importantly as disseminators of words. Digital scholarships democratization (and at times, anarchization) of knowledge should not be ignored or glossed over in determining its “promise.”

Jack Censer recognizes this, noting in the introduction to Imaging the French Revolution, “Readers can consult a wider range of images than are usually available in a print format, and they can instantly access those images. Even readers far away from the major collections of French revolutionary imagery can in this fashion see, compare, and interpret the visual sources.” Releasing knowledge through wider and less controlled channels is a powerful endeavor, and as such makes many of the established powers nervous. While Imaging the French Revolution utilizes other advantages of digital scholarship, such as image reproduction and interactivity, in making both primary material and associated expert analysis uniformly available to those with access to decidedly un-novel technology, the site fulfills the digital scholarship’s promise to empower through access to knowledge.

In relation to a scene from the Last Action Hero, Christopher P. Wilson describes how, “For its sheer giddiness and cross-referencing, the moment seems positively hypertextual.” Cross-referencing is an essential element of hypertext. Even if the reader had assembled a collection of all of the works a deeply hypertexted document, such as Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger, uses, sifting through them would not offer the same facility hypertext offers. It allows for reinforcement of presented ideas, as well as support for multiple assertions.

Like a footnote, which one can whether or not to read, hypertext presents the reader with a clear and simple choice. Extra, secondary, and related material can all be made available with a simple mouse click. However, hypertext can be utilized in a greater way. Beyond the ability to present larger amounts of information than a book could (an attribute not inherently advantageous), it does allow for greater self-direction by the reader, possibly improving the learning experience. Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger exemplifies this potential, as a few clicks can take one from the introduction to dream accounts from the authors to movie reviews and essays discussing dream theory. It becomes an open ended, immersive learning experience in which the reader is challenged to develop ideas from a variety of sources and mediums.

The jazz historian, cultural critic, and novelist Albert Murray uses cross-referencing as a literary technique to enter the consciousness of his protagonist. Scooter’s childhood memories or philosophical revelations are consistently contextualized and cross-referenced in a sort of stream of consciousness among related memories or an academic chain of events. Scooter will recount how one reading led him to another, which encouraged a third and so on, as ideas were developed, altered and reinforced.

But for Murray, as with many novelists, the emphasis is on the journey to the idea, not the end result. Interestingly, a journey infers both time and space, concepts which are discussed much in reference to hypertext. Roy Rosenzweig questioningly quotes the prophesied “death of distance” the Internet is proposed to portend. Digital scholarship reduces or eliminates distance in many real and tangible ways, as evidenced above. But how does this affect the academic journey. It would at least seem to afford more avenues of exploration along the way. In reducing the physical time and space requirements tracking down physical texts requires, the reader is afforded more opportunity to digest, reflect, and synthesize information and ultimately produce conclusions and ideas.

Digital scholarship becomes exciting for its makers in a more selfish way as well. It allows the scholar to present more of his or her research and ideas. Not in some tacked on, rarely looked at appendix (everyone knows you don’t even need your appendix!), but in an integrated, and, consequently, more relevant fashion. Both textually and graphically, the medium creates a facility for transmitting knowledge which other forms lack, and provides a freedom of presentation to the scholar previously unavailable. It also upsets the hierarchy of publishing, opening access to new and untapped audiences, while encouraging old ones to experiment with new forms. While its definition is far from solidified, it is clear digital scholarship has promise.

Posted by kalbers at 12:33 AM

October 24, 2005

Digital Scholarship

What is digital scholarship? Elaborate.

Posted by mills at 09:49 PM | Comments (9)

Hypertext isn't how I wanted it to be.

A recent Slashdot article addresses how the creator of hypertext laments the course it has taken.

BBC article of the same.

Posted by ashephe1 at 07:40 PM

Digital Scholarship - Ammon

The promise of digital scholarship, and how it was met by two online articles. A short essay by Ammon Shepherd.

In reviewing Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge , and From Hogan's Alley to Coconino County: Four Narratives of the Early Comic Strip, it becomes clear that the development of digital scholarship, at the very least in the way of presentation, has not come far in the past five years. While the content of these essay-sites shoots par, the design scores much higher than a double bogey [to lightly use a golf analogy].

As previously discussed in class, a good quality website is made up of at least two factors, good content and good design. A 'scholarly' website must likewise employ these same two elements. A piece of 'digital scholarship' seems to imply a bit more than just good content and good design, though. As David Staley discussed his views on the 'virtual reality' that would eventually evolve from combining history and computers, he evoked a vision that historical works would soon include a similar interaction and involvement found in todays computer and video games. Staley's descriptions of the historical field of the future only lightly touch on scholarship produced for the World Wide Web, but they do include, therein, his ideas that these historical sites will be interactive, communal, and provide some sort of virtual reality. The sites I reviewed proved to be in varying nascent stages of Staley's virtual reality world of history. Generally websites contain two visual aspects, text and media in the form of still images, video, and audio. Digital scholarship is how well these visual aspects are interwoven into the scholarship the author is trying to portray.

Both of the sites reviewed included helpful introductions as to what to expect on their site. I was pleasantly surprised to see the foresight each author had to realize their works were not the same as a printed book, and as such would be viewed much differently. Both sites included a statement which acknowledged, and even encouraged, the viewer to peruse the contents in any manner they chose. While a single and complete essay had been written, in the case of the Los Angeles site, Philip Ethington, the author, states that the pictures, maps, and other aspects should be viewed in which ever sequence the viewer chooses. “But readers can also disregard the Essay altogether,” Ethington encourages, “because it is not essential to the site – only one of its elements” (Preface). Similarly, the Comic Strip site suggests that the contents can be reviewed by looking through the index of images and the accompanying text. Completely aware that allowing the viewer to 'choose his own adventure' may alter the meaning of the site, David Westbrook offers the following statement about his chronological index of thumbnail images:
“If this fourth thread succeeds in creating the impression that the strips are speaking for themselves in their own language, then I hope it will have made a gesture toward the same sort of deflation of pretension that cartoon characters have been effecting for over a century. While the scholars talk, the comics thumb their collective nose and follow their own path.”

While the authors are aware of the 'digitalness' of their scholarship, and make a valiant attempt to incorporate forms of new media in their sites, they fall short of the ideals of David Staley. Ethington's site on urban history in Los Angeles comes a the viewer a smidgen harsh at first with a large collage of images on the home page, the stark and eye jarring white text on black, and continuously changing images on the preface page. Ethington incorporates a multitude of images, detailed and somewhat interactive maps, and a few videos depicting a drive down Los Angeles streets. Although much is display, nothing much 'new' is used. The site is a good show of mostly stationary media, but does not incorporate the virtual reality spoken of by David Staley.

Westbrook offers even less in the form of 'new media.' While his content is documented with numerous resources and other aspects of a scholarly work, thus achieving the 'scholarship' of 'digital scholarship', Westbrook does not offer anything thing that couldn't be had in print form. One of the 'digital' tools found on the site is the chronology of images used througout the site. While this is helpful in looking at the argument from a different perspective, it is not something attainable solely in digital format.

Posted by ashephe1 at 05:34 PM

Visual history?

So I've been reading your blog entries and thinking back about Staley's argument about visualizing historical information. Together, they made me think about some of the more effective examples of visualizing information that have historical application. Here are a few samples...

The first comes from the Moodographer website. If you don't know Moodographer, their site description explains:

Moodgrapher plots the mood levels reported by LiveJournal users in their posts during the last days, updated every 10 minutes. Two numbers are reported by Moodgrapher: the percentage of posts reporting a certain mood (the dashed, black line below), and the "rate of change" of a mood — the difference between the usual amount of posts with this mood and the amount in a given hour (this is the continuous red line below).

So, an example of a Moodographer graph with historical utility would be:

This graph shows the frequency of "worried" in the LiveJournal.com blogsphere on the days when Katrian roared ashore on the Gulf Coast.

Example number two comes from the Baby Name Wizard at iVillage.com. Here are two graphs of baby name frequency in the United States over time.

Theodore (my first name):

Nona:

Sorry Nona, but Theodore topped out at 38th in the first decade of the 20th century with an average of over 2,000 babies per year getting stuck with my name. Nona topped out at 317th in the 1890s, with only a few more than 150 babies per year getting your name. You can all see that "Nona" and "Theodore" are now decidely retro names.

The third example comes from theyrule.net. This is a Flash application that allows you to visualize the relationship between members of the boards of director of the largest companies in the United States. So, for instance, if you wanted to see how the boards of Northrup Grumman and General Dynamics (two defense contracting behemoths) were connected, the visual example would look like this:

You can see that three men link these two boards together. But what about their links to other corporate boards? That graphic looks like this:

Now the interlocking nature of corporate leadership becomes more apparent.

The final example has to do with the use of words in the English language. Wordcount.org tracks the usage of words in the English language--written and spoken. Their About page says:

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus®, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage.

So, my own test was to enter the word Stalin, a word that came up often in my East European history class this afternoon. The result looks like this:

Uncle Joe's name turns out to be in 9,516th place in terms of usage. I found it somewhat interesting to note that just ahead of "Stalin" in terms of usage was "sexy". Go figure. And, because inquiring minds want to know, I decided to see if this site has any sort of feature that tracks queries. And, of course, they do. Here is the result of their query tracking. No surprises here! If you are offended by four letter words, stop looking now and hit the back button on your browser.

All humor aside, I think you can see how an historian might use a system like this. Imagine feeding in the 30,000+ personal narratives collected in the September 11 Digital Archive and subjecting them to this kind of analysis.

These are some of my favorite examples. I'd be interested to learn what yours are...

Posted by mills at 04:26 PM | Comments (1)

Digital Scholarship -- Scott's view of Arnie & Crime

When I first began this assignment, I asked myself what is the “promise of digital scholarship” that Professor Kelly mentions. Is there an exact definition, laid out for us linear thinkers, regarding this? That was the mindset as I read through the readings and explored my two assigned websites, Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz, “Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger” (picked in last week’s class simply because I liked the Terminator series—bad reason to chose a website to review) and Thomas Thurston’s “Hearsay of the Sun” – (picked at random because few others had picked it yet).

After finishing the readings I realized that there is some general consensus among the scholars we read regarding the “promise” but no fast and hard guidelines chiseled into stone. Rosenzweig noted that these web essays were attempts to bring together the scholarly article, or what David Staley calls the “word model,” the cornerstone of our profession that retains “the conventional validation and peer review” with “the networked and digital space of the World Wide Web.” Bass noted that the promise of “hypertext” (what seemed to be the preferred term for this new form of scholarship) is in its ability to alter the nature of the essay by “shifting the relationship between argument and artifact.” All the authors seemed intrigued by the uses of primary source documentation in these web essays. They also argued that such essays should have “interactivity.” Blitz and Krasniewicz chose this medium because they thought it would be the best way “for connecting disparate information in the same way that a dream does.” I wasn’t quite sure what to make of their statement as I have never really analyzed a dream--but OK, I'm in graduate school and need to challenge myself now and again.

Staley’s concept of where this medium will end up parallels what Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck laid out, that is, an immersive technology that will place someone literally within a historic “story” where one could interact with whatever figures the author(s) placed in that story. He called it a “three-dimensional immersive visual history.” Throw in some of the factors we have mentioned in class, such as there must be an argument, and we have some guidelines in reviewing these essays. Ultimately, though, as Rosenzweig points out, this is truly a new medium and we find ourselves in uncharted waters, which means the individual is still in a position to give their opinion, informed or not as it may be, as to whether or not a web essay or website lives up to this “promise” with little guidance. But as mentioned there are a few points of navigation in our relatively unchartered waters, such as interactivity, creative use of and access to sources, and visual appeal.

What can anyone say about “Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger.” I visited the site first at work but the site kept locking up on me. So instead I used my dial-up connection at home and found that some of the website’s features were slow to load and others were problematic, especially the film clips -- which made it tough to judge/critique the novel aspects of the site but still I went for it.

The viewer had lots of navigation choices under the appropriately titled link “Navigation Choices” but my first thought was that perhaps there were too many choices? It was frustrating trying to find some information to read! Overall the whole site seemed a bit “busy” and being a linear thinker of course I was at a loss where to first go when faced with their unique index page. I found that I felt at home with the narratives although I did have trouble following the thought processes behind the essays, such as “The Intersexts of Linda Hamilton’s Arms.” However, I tried to keep in mind the fact that when visiting a new neighborhood at first there is apprehension but with time one finds where one needs to go and becomes comfortable (or at least somewhat more comfortable) with their surroundings and so it went for this website.

The authors utilized novel techniques such as the “Ms. International Competition 1993” which was a series of photographs that were “interpreted” by Krasniewicz without text. I tried to be open-minded about this but again came up with more questions than answers. Is she referring to the blending of gender norms in our society or was it that there is a move of the female form towards the male?

There were the references to Arnold in everyday culture, which was fun for the most part but ultimately I kept asking “is this history?” Cultural history, perhaps. The Gallery of Pregnant Men? Oh my. The Dreams’ databases were interesting but a bit bizarre as were the Maria Shriver tidbits. I found I learned more than I wanted to about them on a rather private level: how sick Blitz got, etc. And their witty repertoire got to be a bit much. Their browser set-up suggestions were clear, however, and I kept wishing I could get the film clips to work! Then I began to wonder if I should have done an illegal drug prior to going through this site; would it have helped? The authors’ ultimate purpose was to offer a “template for exploring the issues of living and thinking at the end of the 20th Century.” Hmm. OK, I recognize that elements of Arnie have entered our culture and so what does that say about our culture? Not being a cultural historian may make any of my observations seen naïve, I fear. But here goes.

The authors were right, there was no way they could have included this much disparate information in any type of a traditional paper publication while the web suited it well. But does it demonstrate the “promise” of digital scholarship? It was almost too much to include in one website but for this form of cultural studies it may well be the best example out there – that’s one of the benefits of the World Wide Web – anyone can publish anything. Some of the authors we read noted that websites are constantly evolving and it is one of their detriments – when is a site done/finished/published and as such static? But I would argue that this particular site needs to do a bit more evolving. And as Susan Smulyan notes, give me a link for linear thinkers!

The “Hearsay of the Sun” site was a breath of fresh air after dealing with Arnie and the dreams of two people I knew nothing about (at least before I visited their website). Dial-up proved to be slow at first but once loaded was fine. The frames at first were distracting but once you felt comfortable moving about the site his design work did prove to be interesting. One of the authors noted that building such an essay took probably five times more work than simply writing a scholarly article and this site definitely took some effort. The back button worked! Seeing the entire text of his sources was also unique and I guess is one of the factors that should be considered “doing something new.” This feature provided a unique insight into the author and his argument by seeing what parts of a document he/she quoted and it was one way to check quickly for accuracy and also get a sense of the overall documentary base.

The site was very easy to navigate, and it followed along a traditional form of essay with an argument regarding race, identity and the legal process in the late 19th century. The most useful aspects of his web essay were the links to his secondary sources as well as the primary sources he used. After being on the site for a while, though, the layout did get distracting but I was able to minimize various windows to concentrate on his text. There were a few illustrations but not as many as I would have liked to see, which is one of the benefits of having a web-based essay, right? All through his site I kept asking myself if it was better than print and after thinking about it, with the amount of work it must have taken, I would have to say no, ultimately seeing his sources was a novel feature but was not really necessary and I would argue it detracted from his argument.

This would have worked fine as an article. It was a novel idea, though, and as such had merit as a web-based article. It is precisely this kind of experimentation that must be undertaken if such scholarship is ever to be accepted by the powers that give tenure. Taken overall, these sites were on the road to “promise” but I would argue did not meet the ultimate goal, which, unfortunately, I am at a loss to define; they certainly did not come within reach of Staley's “three-dimensional immersive visual history.” It was easier to judge the Schwarzenegger website as Westbrook quoted David Kolb and I found myself nodding vigorously: “The reader needs to have the sense of having entered a zone dedicated to an argument, a discourse, or a discursive gesture with some local form, rather than being within a random cloud of associations and links.” Judging Thurston’s site was more difficult. Ultimately I thought that Thurston’s web essay would have worked better in print. As for Krasniewicz’s and Blitz’s I’m still trying to determine which illegal substance would work best with it (or perhaps keep it legal and take a good stiff belt of Scotch?)

Posted by sprice7 at 03:28 PM

Digital Scholarship--Liz

According to Kirsten Foot, Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Washington, digital scholarship is “any element of knowledge or art that is created, produced, analyzed, distributed, published, and/or displayed in a digital medium, for the purpose of research or teaching."

According to Kirsten Foot, Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Washington, digital scholarship is “any element of knowledge or art that is created, produced, analyzed, distributed, published, and/or displayed in a digital medium, for the purpose of research or teaching." More specifically, the Electronic Imprint project at the University of Virginia defines digital scholarship as a “publication that (1) exists in digital format, i.e., as an electronic file or set of files that can be stored, transported, and displayed on general-purpose computers or other devices that manipulate digital files; (2) is incapable of being translated without loss of information or value into a non-digital format, such as that of a printed book, because it makes use of media, tools, structuring, or other features of computer presentation that cannot be conveyed in any other medium; and (3) is subject in all other respects to the demands of traditional print scholarship for originality, value, and selection via a process of peer review.”

With these definitions in mind, I analyzed “Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity, and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century American Courts,” by Thomas Thurston, and “Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge,” by Philip J. Ethington.

Hearsay of the Sun
Thomas Thurston is a graduate of Yale University, who was studying for his Ph.D. when he authored this site. In constructing this site, Thurston’s purpose was to consider “the legal reception of photography as a type of evidence in the appellate cases, legal treatises, and legal journals of the last half of the nineteenth century.” The essay is very well-written and engaging, allowing the reader to view a glimpse of the legal system of the nineteenth century.

It is immediately apparent that recreating this project in a book form would be virtually impossible. Mr. Thurston does something unique, using oft-cursed frames. In separate frames, Thurston allows the user to look at the text of the essay, footnotes, and the entire source cited in the footnote. Unlike other sites, the frames can be broken up, so a unique URL is formed (making citations and book-marking easier for those using this material). For example, if I were to cite the following quotation:

1. The great sun in heaven was summoned as a witness, and the sun would not lie. A voice was to speak to them from a hundred millions miles away—a hundred millions of miles near the realm toward which men looked when they dreamed of the Great White Throne.... the name swept through the darkness over an unseen track, and appeared upon the wall, within a halo of amber light.

I could provide a separate URL for the footnote (http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/photos/ essay/foot04.htm)—N.B., this URL will provide the URL for the entire chapter’s footnotes, the original source (http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/photos/texts/92holland400.htm), and Thurston’s essay itself (http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/photos/essay/4.htm). If I found all this information overwhelming, I could turn enlarge one frame, e.g., the essay, and read it alone. Although one could put all of this information in a book, it would not be as useful for the user, as it would be rather cumbersome to flip back and forth (not to mention very long).

To meet the peer review criteria, Thurston’s site was reviewed by scholars for the online American Quarterly experiment, and their reactions are presented online at Project Muse. Roy Rosenzweig is enthusiastic about Thurston presentation. While admitting that the presentation could potentially be done in print, he is excited because Thurston “offers us something else—a system for seamlessly linking argument and evidence.” Using the anchor tag, Thurston allows the reader to move “directly from one reference to the paragraph from which it originated and the "frame," which enables Thurston to keep all the different pieces (argument, footnotes, sources, illustrations) of his "article" on a single screen.” Such a structure is useful, and has not been attempted by many scholars. Furthermore, it does not appear that other authors have really examined this topic; therefore, this site meets the criteria for scholarship.

Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge
Philip Ethington, the author of this site, is a professor of history at the University of Southern California. His 2001 site was a joint venture between the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History. In his essay, Ethington looks at Los Angeles from a postmodernist perspective, utilizing maps, photographs, and hyperlinks to look at the city. He offers his hypothesis: “The key concept in the search for historical certainty should be "mapping" in a literal, not a metaphoric, sense.” He posits the idea that the Los Angeles, like all metropolises, is ultimately unknowable, begging the question of whether we can ever know an ultimate “truth” about something.

When I first came to the site, I was a little concerned—one of the first things I encountered was a broken link (see, A Multimedia Essay to Accompany the December Issue of The American Historical Review, published by the http://www.historycooperative.org December 2000). The left alignment of the text also bothered me a tad, but I thought the essay could make up for these design flaws.

I must admit, I was a bit flustered by this site. I liked some of the maps—they did show the complexity of the city with the multitude of political divisions. Furthermore, it did make me question about how we perceive situations and objects—how do people really know what things are? However, I quickly noticed distracting design flaws. I did not like the repeated menu going down the entire length of the page. The pages were far too long, requiring much scrolling, and I found myself quickly bored. He presents links to images throughout the piece—photos that he admits that he has altered, begging the question of whether the original significance of the building/object photographed has been obscured. He gives us a panoramic view of the areas he describes, but the technology employed is not useful. When I tried to focus on certain points on the photo, I was confronted with blurry images. Furthermore, the author provides us with no explanation—for example, is the Los Angeles River a junkyard for cars? There are also maps of global cities. I click on London, and I get the whole continent of Europe—this holds true for all cities—and I cannot zoom in to the actual city, making may wonder at the tool’s usefulness.

The site was featured in the American Historical Review; therefore, it was peer reviewed. After reviewing the essay and the accompanying maps and images, I went on to examine whether this sort of work is original. I found a similar site (Los Angeles: Past, Present, and Future) also done by USC. It was more archival, without the overarching essay. Therefore, I do not think anyone has covered Los Angeles from a postmodernist perspective. I suppose it is scholarship—though its intended audience is probably only a select few folk who are arguing epistemology and the idea of objectivity. A study such as this one could have been presented in a book—with difficulty—although he could not incorporate the panoramic revolving views into a book.

Posted by ejonese at 03:11 PM

Digital Scholarship

Oops, gotta move the cursor to see if I spell things right. That's why I write in Word, I need all the help I can get.

Posted by scarson1 at 03:04 PM

Digital Scholarshi[

Digital Scholarship -- Suzanne's View
My thoughts after reading the articles and reviewing "The Difference Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities" and "Imaging the French Revolution"

Digital Scholarship – Suzanne’s View

Do the websites examined fulfill “the promise of digital scholarship?” Do they do anything genuinely new with new media, and if so, do they do it well? The questions separate into two categories – digital/new media and historical scholarship – and then blend together in the forms of the websites examined. In our discussions of historical scholarship, the most important aspect has been the existence of an argument or expressing a point of historical view and then backing it up with evidence and drawing conclusions. As we discussed, the four essential points are: originality, based on research, peer reviewed, and available to the public. Our focus in evaluating digital/new media has been to ask the question, could the material been presented as well in book form? (We’ve phrased it several ways, but that’s my version of the question for this discussion) Janet Murray, in Hamlet on the Holodeck, points outs that in digital media, the computer emphasizes four aspects of delivering information: spatial, participatory, procedural, and encyclopedic. That’s a lot of requirements to put on any project, historical or otherwise.

David Staley’s book, Computers, Visualization, and History, at least in the introduction and chapter in the handout, gives a vision of the future uses of digital media as visualizations. His definition of visualization is “any graphic which organizes meaningful information in multidimensional spatial form…and their purpose is to organize signs representing data and information in two- and three-dimensional form” (p.3) The importance of his discussion is the transition from the written word to the three-dimensional form the computer is capable of producing, and how the academic community of historians is handling this transition. According to Staley and many others (including myself and others in this class born of the linear generation), it is a difficult transition to give up words for visual demonstrations of historical scholarship. It is difficult to let go of written explanations to visual experiences. The pictorial example he gives of the transition from Pre-Tokugawa to the Tokugawa Period (p.6-7) is a good use of a historical visualization, but the nuances and subtle changes were not apparent until I read the explanation. As he goes on to explain, the computer could create a spatial and participatory (to quote Murray) experience to better explain the transition. I wasn’t able to grasp the concept until Staley gave examples of models, simulations, and games that could give form to the idea of virtual reality. I thought of the movie Lawnmower Man to help visualize his concept. Staley’s scenario of the historian arriving at a conference to present her “virtual display as an expression of her understanding of the past being modeled.” (p. 111) helped to clarify what his idea of visualization is. The historian’s “gendered spaces” of a medieval village have no directly connected words, but it is a three-dimensional display of the village that can be viewed at different angles. As I understand from readings and class discussions, this is the goal of the new media/scholarly approach to history that the digital world can give us.

It would appear that there is a path from the written work of historical scholarship to the digital/new media work of historical scholarship, and we are somewhere along that path. To that end, I examined the websites: The Difference Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu produced by Will Thomas and Edward Ayers at the University of Virginia and Images of the French Revolution http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/imaging/home.html compiled by Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt at George Mason University. Both of these websites show a close affinity with the written word, and both are committed to infusing the written word with the wonders of digital media. The analyzed material, be it images from the French Revolution or Soil Types Map of Augusta County, are the links and images created in new media, but the analysis is in the written word. The majority of what is visualized in both websites are words of historical scholarship, complemented by visual aides that can be manipulated by the web user with the right digital equipment. They both fulfill the “promise of digital scholarship” as we know it know and are able to design and produce on the web. It does seem we are only part way along the path to pure visualization.

The Difference Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two America Communities (vcdh) takes information from the archival website The Valley of the Shadows http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/ and makes a distinct historical argument about “how slavery divided American society and culture in the years before the Civil War.” Key=TI1 The article is also an “applied experiment in digital scholarship.” (ibid) The article argues as much about the validity of “scholarly argument-into forms that take advantage of the possibilities of electronic media” as it is an argument about American society and slavery before the Civil War. The sections or links to the Introduction and Summary of Argument presents the two geographic locations to be examined – one county North of the Mason-Dixon Line in Franklin County, Pennsylvania and one to the South in Augusta County, Virginia – in their historical context. The Evidence Section is lengthy and contains links to countless pieces of archival sources from maps to charts to municipal records. Each Point of Analysis has links to supporting evidence that can be reached with a click of a button rather than flipping through a book or holding places with fingers or sticky tabs. If you don’t get lost in the links, it is a definitive advantage to the book form. The scholarly argument, evidence, and conclusions of the history of these two counties are here. The website has been to peer review, and it is definitely available to the worldwide web public. The scholarship piece is intact.

VCDH is also arguing the use of digital media to present their article. The authors, and their many students, relied on the use of new technologies to present their views. For analysis, they turned to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to arrange the social structures in a spatial form. They used Extensible Markup Language (which I don’t really understand) to connect the myriad of pieces of information to the articles on the page (which I do understand clicking on the link to quickly see the evidence to support the point). The site is supported by numerous maps, charts, and tables. I understand using XML to link these pieces of information to the written presentation, and I utilized the links as a participant in the discussion. I think Janet Murrary would agree the procedural process on the website is exemplary, and nothing could be more encyclopedic than having The Valley of the Shadow as your information source. The VCDH website fulfills the promise of the digital side of the question, but does it do this particularly well? I’m hesitant to be critical because of my personal lack of credibility in the field of new media, but if the goal is Staley’s visualization, the website is only a few steps along the path to this goal. Maps, tables, and charts can be utilized well in book form, but they cannot be manipulated by the reader of the book as can the user of the website. Perhaps more bells and whistles are needed.

Censer and Hunt’s Images of the French Revolution takes advantage of the digital form to present 42 images surrounding the events and people involved in the French Revolution. These Images were presented to six historians who were asked to write an article of any topic of their choosing about the Images. The marriage of visual image and written word is essence of the website. After the articles were presented, a time for discussion was allowed and some of the responses appear on the website. It would be difficult to make the presentation in book form for a couple of reasons -- the difficulty of getting a printer willing to print 42 images (as well as their varying presentations) unless it is a work of art history, as well as getting the printer to entertain the notions of interactive response to a printed work. These two things Images does quite well. The Introduction divides the website into two main parts namely “a bank of images that focused our collaborative discussion and six individual essays about the meanings of the images.” (Introduction) Although, each page of the website has four icons to choose from, Essays, Images, Discussion, and About. This work is a group effort, and therefore one single argument can be hard to determine, but Censer and Hunt synthesize the views of the other historians in identifying the difficulty of using French revolutionary prints and cartoons as accurate historical data. They argue the evidence surrounding the printers and intended audiences can tell as much or more than the prints themselves. The site gets a star for originality as the historians are given free reign to present differing viewpoints of the same images. The articles are well written by scholarly historians in their field of study, the French Revolution. The conclusions Censer and Hunt draw from the articles about the nature of the Images emphasizes the “slipperiness” of the Images as revolutionary imagery without the use of captions to explicate the meaning of the image. Again, the use of words to explain a visual is an important part of the presentation. The secondary argument is the pros and cons of using digital media as “the on-line version of these images leaves much to be desired; the text below and around the image is often obscured.” (intro) The strength in the on-line presentation is summarized in the About section. The reader or user is allowed access all 42 images, as well as providing an “Image Tool that permits close study and comparison…each image includes relevant data and is linked to various places throughout the site.” (About) These links and tools provide the spatial and participatory aspects of digital scholarship. The Discussion section is an excellent presentation of Peer Review and the website is in the public domain. The procedures or navigation of the website is easily accessible, but it would be difficult to stamp encyclopedic on the website. Encyclopedic does not seem necessary given the narrowly focused topic of 42 French Revolutionary images. Images aims at digital scholarship and does well in its presentation. The technology available allows user around the world to view all 42 images, and the tools (if the user has the right equipment) allow the user to manipulate the images that the book form would not allow.

Both sites fulfill the promise of digital scholarship as it known today. They both use new media effectively, and they are on the cutting edge of the use of new media. (as much as I know about new media and understand it) They still rely heavily on the written word for the conveyance of information, and this shows the field of academic scholarship has moved only a few steps along the path to Staley’s version of visualization. Small steps are integral to the process, and the steps along the path are as important as the end result. If there is an end result and it is attainable with the technology we have today.

Endnote: I was particularly encouraged by David Staley’s example of the historian as the director or producer of the project, and not necessarily the web designers or technical gurus able to make it all happen alone. I can relate to directing, producing, or delegating without ever being able to write hypertext at all…

Posted by scarson1 at 02:59 PM

Effective digital history? Amanda's remarks on Schwarzenegger and The French Revolution

Amanda von Argyriadis
Clio Wired
Dr. T. Mills Kelly
October 22, 2005

I found Krasniewicz and Blitz’s site “Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger”(http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/) to be a failed attempt at effective hypertext history as set forth by David Staley in his Computers, Visualization, and History, (introduction and chapter 4). First, know that I am a long time Schwarzenegger fan. Driven, ruthless, and talented, the man has accomplished amazing goals through hard work and perseverance. He certainly is an example of the "American Dream" and he is an American icon. I followed the author’s directive on how not to read the site. I understand the gist of Schwarzenegger being ubiquitous and the site mirrors that nature with the confounding number of snippets and bytes it provides through its links.

That having been said, however, I have some problems with dreams as a subject matter of history. The subject of dreaming as it is presented and the retelling of dreams the authors had about Arnold is simply not history, although it is a main component of the site. Dream study as it is presented here is psychology, anthropology or neurology at best; as a result the project just didn’t work at the most basic level as an interactive, informative history site. While it might fall under Staley’s category of a “three dimensional immersive collage”, or a synchronic narrative, it isn’t good history. As Westbrook suggests, “The various contrasting discourses and contexts that inform the creation of a cultural product can reinforce each other, highlight each other through conflict, and reveal things together that they never could apart”. (255) But that doesn’t relieve the authors from making some connection in a foundational, scholarly text. I agree with Kolb as found in Westbrook, “There need to be mechanisms for creating localities within the text . . . The reader needs to have the sense of having entered a zone dedicated to an argument, a discourse, or a discursive gesture with some local form, rather than being within a random cloud of associations and links.” (257) I embrace the notion of interdisciplinary studies in history, but this project fell well below the standard of academic excellence expected even at the graduate level of study. If I were Schwarzenegger, I wouldn’t have granted them in interview either when I got a load of what they were up to.

“Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger” is not a survey of the history of dreams or dream study, but an attempt to connect dreams and dreaming to the ideology of interactive hypertext and create a type of interactive multidimensional history that Staley describes. While the subject of Arnold Schwarzenegger might be pop culture history, and the idea of his iconic rise an interesting way to look at the “American dream”, dream study and Schwarzenegger are not connected here except for the inane retelling of the author’s dreams encountered while researching the project. The nature of scattered options dreams leave us, (as according to Bert States in Staley) is a valid and interesting paralell with a virtual reality that could be used in hypertext history. The scattered dream/optional ending ideology could parallel with an interactive virtual history site as described by Staley, but the connection didn’t amalgamate on this site. After many hours on the site, I had read all the text and clicked on every one of the links. The end result was that I learned little or nothing reliable about Schwarzenegger and even less about American pop culture and the development of the “American dream”. There was no cumulative experience, guided or unguided, that allowed me to understand history, as Staley suggests there need be, and I am still wondering for what audience they are aiming.

According to Roy Rosenzweig in the Forum on Hypertext Scholarship AQ as Web-Zine: Responses to AQ's Experimental Online Issue, the authors felt that common book or article type publication “did not seem to meet the needs of their subject and their analysis…"We needed a medium, a forum," they write, "that would allow us to incorporate not just the more formal components of investigative research, but also the kinds of discoveries and reflections that are more traditionally relegated to the margins of qualitative research." (242) But even in this chaotic and multifaceted forum with unlimited opportunity to develop their point, they have failed to recognise an important element to any project; it has to have a point, and argument, a raison d’etre. The “essays” were about why we dream and various styles of dream analysis. There is little if anything about why Arnold Schwarzenegger is an American pop culture icon and an example of the American Dream. The links are scattered and vary in quality and reliability with regard to common research parameters set forth in academic scholarship. There appears to be no real argument, no basis for the project except as an experiment in hypertext technology. Half of the links don’t work, which I think even Thurston would agree, makes the project even less successful. There is no discussion forum or image archive, nor explanation for why the links were there, what purpose each served. The only link that addresses the thrust of what should have been the thesis of a legitimate project is Why Arnold Matters, and in this essay they have the impudence to describe him as “possible Nazi sympathizer”. This example is precisely the reason why serious academics frequently eschew internet based history; lack of reason and evidentiary support. It’s time these authors cut off the legs of their sweatpants and took a good long look at their weakness. More is not always better. I’m not sure “Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger” has a place in history at all and I’m frankly surprised that AQ took it on, especially when compared to Castonguay ‘s site and the “Imaging the French Revolution” site.

Censer and Hunt’s “Imaging the French Revolution” succeeds where the Arnold site fails. Here lies a cohesive argument; visual images from history serve to tell us a great deal about the past in multifaceted ways. In what could be referred to “intertextual methodology” by Castonguay, Censer and Hunt discuss the images they link as evidence with footnoted remarks from historians, chroniclers and artists. The site also offers essays written by other scholarly academics who add their own flavour to the argument. The discussions include women, memory, the ambiguity of revolutionary images, and the meaning the artists might have intended the images to promote. The subject matter is definitively academic history, but it is not so lofty to be inaccessible to the general public. The use of images and hypertext works well in this format. Furthermore, the connection between art and history is a reasonable one and has long been accepted by scholars. The viewer seems to get the best of both worlds from this site.

The site invites viewer interaction and interpretation as Staley suggests need be. Censer and Hunt clearly state that they anticipate the viewer finding what they will by exploring the site on their own. It is clear that Censer and Hunt have a viewpoint; perhaps images that conflict with their argument exist. However, it is left to the reader to extrapolate what they wish by choosing which points of the argument to accept or reject. What the authors provide are plausible options, not fantasy or dreams. And while as Staley urges us to remember that what they offer is a view of the past and not the past itself, the viewer can get a well rounded feel for what the past experience might have been like through art created by those who witnessed the era themselves. Perhaps some sound bytes of cannons firing, horses hooves, or crows erupting could have lent more interest and made for a more interactive and immersed experience, but that is mere conjecture on my part. All in all, this is a successful website for anyone who wishes to better understand the period and event known as the French Revolution.

Posted by avonargy at 12:27 PM

Which Promise of Digital Scholarship? -Kurt

The concept of “the promise of digital scholarship” strikes me as premature. The scholarly historical community seems to have a grasp on traditional scholarship via print media and over the last decade or so has attempted to figure out just what to do with digital media. Some have seen stars in their eyes or as Dr. Rosensweig commented some saw this as the death of distance (Rosensweig, 238). The reality is that no one convincingly says what the promise of this digital media is for at least two reasons. For one thing historians are still trying to understand what to do with the power they’ve been granted and secondly no one quite knows where the media is headed and hence what will be available.

The most important question then seems to be what can and should be done with what we have now. A review of several academic institutions involved in digital scholarship seems to focus on at least maintaining that level of professionalism which print journals require i.e. original research, based on primary sources, evaluated through peer review, clear prose, and consisting of a clear argument. After that there seems to be some general agreement that digital media provides the ability to use other media tools such as graphics, maps, audio, and hypertext, but how? The short answer is anyway that works, we’ll figure that out as we go. This experimental approach in and of itself is healthy. Through experimentation one can see what works and what doesn’t or at least one can see what worked for some and failed for others in the manner in which they used the various tools at their disposal.

For this assignment I examined "The Difference Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities," http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR/ produced Will Thomas and Edward Ayers and "Images of the French Revolution" at http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/imaging/home.html organized by Lynn Hunt, Jack Censer. The question I posed as I went through these sites was what was the promise they made, how high had they aimed, and how closely had they made it to the mark. Both sites clearly laid out their goals. The Thomas and Ayers site examined how slavery divided American society prior to the Civil War by examining two counties only 200 miles apart with the same geographic conditions. One of which lay in the north in Pennsylvania and the other in the south in Virginia. They sought to “translate the fundamental components of professional scholarship-evidence, engagement with prior scholarship, and a scholarly argument-into forms that take advantage of the possibilities of electronic media” (Thomas and Ayers, Citation: Key = TI). They sought to fuse the electronic articles form with the argument itself, reconstruct the flow of their logic, use spatial analysis and spatial presentation through GIS analysis, to express that spatial analysis through the structure of the article, and allow for unseen connections with future scholarship. Hunt and Censer state that the digital format provided an opportunity for collaborative study and openness. A group of six scholars came together to evaluate 42 images of the French Revolution. After posting their observations they engaged in discussions about their insights and refined their work further. The website opened up this process to the general public by clearly displaying the source of this discussion, namely the images as well as the give and take between the scholars. They approaches both websites take certainly does not make use of all the numerous tools available to this media but wisely, though not necessarily successfully, they chose those tools that seemed appropriate to their subject, sources, and scholarly objectives.

Thomas and Ayers organized their site around the physical separation of the two counties in question. After setting out their argument in an effective narrative they proceed to breakdown the areas of society as impacted by their location with slavery being the variable in question. Issues were addressed in a standard journal style but unlike a journal they took the additional step of not just referencing their sources but instead mapped out how each conclusion was arrived at separately for each location. This area of the site is more extensive than the narrative itself and so seems to turn the focus from their conclusions to how they reached them. Going a step further they lay out support for that logic through numerous maps, charts, and tables. This is, at the same time, their best attempt to make use of the digital media and their largest miss-step. Visualization as described by David Staley attempts to use graphics to organize meaningful information in multidimensional spatial form. In the common tongue this means to present data not through extensive written narrative but through collections of symbols. Examples of this such as maps, diagrams, panoramas, charts, and graphs should organize information and present it in two and three-dimensional forms. Their use makes sense here considering the geographic nature of the analysis. As the visual presentation of data guru Edward Tufte states in the introduction to his book Envisioning Information, “The world is complex, dynamic, multidimensional: the paper is static, flat. How are we to represent the rich visual world of experience and measurement on mere flatland?” Presentation on paper was Tufte’s challenge when he wrote that in 1990. Thomas and Ayers have a leg up in that they are dealing with a medium suited for escaping from flatland. Despite this natural advantage and seemingly good fit their maps fall flat (excuse the pun). They are difficult to read due to poor color and text combinations. There is little explanation of what is displayed beyond a minimalist key and there is little imagination used to combine them into maps representing more than one or two variables. Interactive controls could have allowed one page to present several different views. This causes them to use far more maps than are probably necessary thereby creating more and more links to plow through if one sustains interest. Despite this disappointing return to flatland the site does meet its overall goals and succeeds for the most part though with less of a bang than was possible.

Hunt and Censer and Images of the French Revolution follow a similar path. Though much of the site could have been produced in a print publication the openness to the public of the discussion process is rarely if ever put into print. It could in fact be the very experimental nature and evolutionary climate surrounding the Internet that encourages and actually follows through on ideas such as this. Through their use of collaboration the discussion takes on a slightly less formal tone, more inviting and is thus more inclusive. They are aware of the teaching aspect of this format as they state in their conclusion, “Our readers' own interests, values, and aesthetic contexts will enable them to see things in these images that we have missed. Our hope is that we have given you some guidance in your own efforts to make sense of the visual imagery of the French Revolution.” As with Thomas and Ayers however this site’s use of its greatest asset the 42 images suffers from problems of execution. The benefit of digital media here is the ability to present a large number of color images that would be possible in print but very costly. Hunt and Censer attempt to take the images further by allowing large versions of the images to be displayed on the screen at the same time at various sizes, something not possible with print media. Unfortunately their methodology falls short. When first viewed the images are represented by thumbnails along with the following instructions, “Rollover detail image to preview the entire image. Click on the detail to open the entire image in a new window, including the caption, source, medium, dimensions and links to commentary on the image in essays or discussions. Use the Image Tool to take a closer look.” First time users, unaware of what the Image Tool is as well as unable to see it since it falls below the fold (too far down to be displayed on screen) naturally assume that clicking on the thumbnail will reveal the larger image. The window that opens does present the promised information but also an image that while complete is smaller in scale than the thumbnail. Even after finding the image tool one is distracted by the fact that the numbering scheme is different. The first set of thumbnails for example is labeled one through fourteen while the first window of the image tool contains only ten images that are not numbered. Flipping back and forth makes it difficult to match the additional data in the first new window with the larger images opened in the second window. The net effect is to frustrate the viewer and reduce the effectiveness of what could be the highlight of the site. But as with the Thomas and Ayers site, Hunt and Censer manage to meet their goals as set by themselves.

Both sites fulfill the traditional objectives of print scholarship with regard to effectively putting forth an argument and supporting it and both attempt to go further, perhaps cautiously so, by utilizing some of the tools available through digital media. Their promise of digital scholarship was never the proverbial rose garden, not the whole enchilada, but a reserved promise to make it worthwhile to pursue this avenue of publication instead of print. To that end these sites succeed.

Posted by kknoerl at 03:19 AM | Comments (1)

October 23, 2005

Hasta la Vista, Krazy Kat - Matt on Digital Scholarship

I reviewed Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger and From Hogan's Alley to Coconino County: Three Narratives of the Early Comic Strip.

Roy Rosenzweig, in Crashing the System?: Hypertext and Scholarship on American Culture, stresses that the four articles published by American Quarterly during their 1999 Forum on Hypertext Scholarship would be held to the same standards as print essays. These standards are “solid research, crisp analysis, interdisciplinarity, and clear prose.” This sounds remarkably similar to the rubric we have developed in our class (with the help of Dr. Kelly), namely that all scholarship must be original, based on research, peer reviewed, and public.

Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger and From Hogan's Alley to Coconino County: Three Narratives of the Early Comic Strip fulfill our class’s rubric, and we can assume that Dr. Rosenzweig agreed that they meet his (and AQ’s) standard as well, as they were chosen for publication. But would they excite the seer of cyberspace, Janet Murray? Do these two hypertexts fulfill the dream that Murray holds for digital scholarship, that somehow the medium of the Internet will give these works a level of importance that will transcend what they could achieve on the printed page?

Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz, in their hypertext Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger, certainly utilize the capabilities of the World Wide Web to the fullest extent. Their site uses at various times audio clips (annoyingly played when each page is loaded, every time), pictures, internal links between topics, Quicktime VR interactivity, and more. Originating in a desire to explain the Arnold Schwarzenegger myth as a central narrative in our postmodern culture, this joint project soon burgeoned beyond a simple authorial collaboration. Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger swerves giddily between semiotics and history, film studies and hermeneutics. While working on their article, Krasniewicz and Blitz began to dream about Arnold, over one hundred and forty dreams between the two of them over a ten year period, if the authors are to be believed. Recognizing the intertextual relevance of these dreams to their work, they decided to convert the project into a hypertext. The finished webpages consist of many parts, which the authors claim as the result of a dream wherein Arnold told Blitz that to understand him, Blitz must cut the Austrian actor into many parts. Take that as you will. Pages include summaries of all the dreams Blitz and Krasniewicz had about Arnold, dozens of film reviews situating Arnold in our culture as signifier of maleness, power, and many other things I didn’t understand, and the vast amount of correspondence generated over ten years between these two authors, in the form of copies of their e-mails to each other.

But what does it all mean? In the end, not much. I don’t think it’s my lack of background in semiotics or cultural studies. Instead, I think this is so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. The authors have exploited the vast storage capacity of the World Wide Web and vomited forth a mass of material with questionable value and even less coherence. The central motif of Arnold Schwarzenegger is not enough to tie together these disparate webpages. Just like a Hollywood blockbuster starring its focus, Dream Arnold Schwarzenegger is a product with a lot of energy and glitz, but you won’t be thinking about it next week.

In contrast, David Westbrook has selected a very small corner of mass media/culture and generated a hypertext that is well served by the medium of the Internet. From Hogan's Alley to Coconino County: Three Narratives of the Early Comic Strip weaves together three essays that examine the history of early comic strips in late nineteenth/early twentieth century American newspapers. These essays are entirely independent, though each makes use of the same database of comic pictures. Westbrook alternately examines the economic business of comic strip publishing, the culture reflected within the comic strips, and finally the experimentation with and evolution of the form of the comic strip by the authors of the strips themselves. These essays have imbedded images of the strips that the text cites as examples, which enlarge in new pop up windows when the user clicks on them. Each image then has multiple layers of information that the user can add or remove at will, to explore the various themes traced by Westbrook. There are internal links within each text and in the explanations attached to each image that will guide the user through all three essays, although it is possible for a reader to focus entirely on one theme and choose to avoid the other two.

Many histories of comic strips have been written and published in book form, with expensive glossy pages and full-color examples of the strips discussed. But Westbrook is able to lend a level of interactivity and immersion to his images with his layer technique that would be wholly absent in print media. Although when compared either by word count or as a simple sum of bytes of information, Westbrook’s site is dwarfed by the Brobdingnagian Arnold site (commentary by Blitz and Krasniewicz on bodybuilding?), From Hogan’s Alley to Coconino County holds a more satisfying historical narrative. As we all know, a narrative must be coherent, plausible, and internally consistent. Westbrook succeeds at all three, while Blitz and Krasniewicz fail at all but the last and I believe I am being charitable.

So, after evaluating these two sites, the promise of digital scholarship is batting .500, which is great for baseball but poor for historical research. The most “dangerous” element of digital scholarship is narcissism. With length, word count, image quality, number of videos, etc., limited only by the bandwidth an author is willing to buy (or be provided by a sponsor), the temptation is to throw everything related to a project on-line and posture about providing the user with a vast amount of “interactivity.” Clicking through pages of personal, usually off-topic e-mails is not interactivity, however. Just as most of the extras (especially commentaries) on DVDs are never used, all these “extras” tacked onto to websites nominally dealing with history end up being just so much clutter.

Posted by mhobbs at 11:31 PM

Debbie's Promise of Digital Scholarship.. or not

Historical Scholarship on the Web

I chose two completely opposite examples for my analysis of web scholarship. Both were part of the 1999 online experiment for the American Quarterly, and as Randy Bass suggests in The Expressive Shapes of Arguments and Artifacts, “these essays attempt-each in a different way- to experiment with making an argument that depends on the simultaneity of interpretive threads, as well as the multiplication of archival and evidentiary materials.” That is about all that is similar between these 2 presentations in there approaches to presenting their scholarly arguments. Our task was not to compare but to determine whether they “fulfill the promise of digital scholarship by doing anything new in new media and by doing “it” well. I presumed "it" refers to web presentations of scholarship and as my methodology I printed out at least some part of each site to get a sense of how effective the project would be in a traditional print format as compared to its electronic format.

Thomas Thurston’s The Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity, and the Law of Evidence demonstrates through a series of cases, how photography was viewed in the late 19th Century as evidence in courts of law. His argument centers on changing views of photography- from truth to a manipulative form but he also has several meta-narratives including one on American identity and views of race. His presentation is multi-linear but easy to follow; it is almost conservative in its approach which fits the topic. The site is easy to navigate through with an essay on the home page, four sections that classify his source materials through literary and legal case history, a list of sources and footnotes, and a page that actually discussed the project. His source material support his essay and take a central role in the narrative. Documents can be viewed side by side with the footnotes and source materials or images which I believe is a plus on the side of new media. “About This Project” dissects his rationale for the web project as well as his methodology. Photographs are used to illustrate his thesis but he also points out that of the 50 images and 42 court cases, 35 had not been published on-line or in any collection so he sees this site not only as a way to publish his arguments, but also as a way to make his documentary collection available to a wider audience. In terms of reaching a wide audience, he probably succeeds better than had this been traditionally published. Thurston himself is not totally convinced as he expresses in New Questions for New Media, Scholarly Writing, and Online Publishing his concern that while websites provide the opportunity to add new materials and change, sites and servers may also become obsolete. The very fact that the web is ever changing presents its own challenges and begs the question of how to fulfill a potential when the goal or target is forever moving.

I chose for my second site, Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger by Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz because it looked like it would be fun to go through. While I wasn’t disappointed at first, I found it was much more difficult to view in terms of digital scholarship. Some of the essays provide interesting arguments about popular culture, Schwarzenegger the icon, political culture and the American Dream, but I found their site too confusing and their adolescent fantasy dream section -which is central to their thesis on dream metaphor- too off the wall. The dead links were also annoying, the site froze my screen once and closed me down twice on the PC version, and the audio only occasionally worked in context with the text. The site is a very creative mix of hypertext links and essays, and it is visually attractive but I found myself wondering why a viewer should care about some of their choices and whether sorting through all the bits and pieces that make up this site are worth trying to make sense of their thesis amongst all the meta narratives. Also with no clear path, I ended up using the site map to make sure I hadn’t missed anything but there is also a page called Navigational Choices which also provides links to the textual contributions, the virtual reality movies, or the “dream database.” Perhaps it is my own training that is deficient; I am use to traditional treatises and find too much bouncing without a specific reason around distracting, and maybe understanding “dream metaphor” requires more experience than I have in the interactive and performance art on the web. In any event, while I would agree that this site takes advantage of a multitude of hypertext, I am not sure I can agree that "richness of scholarship" is also in evidence throughout the entire site. I do think it is telling that the authors admitted they had difficulty getting a traditional publisher interested “without compromising the varied and extensive nature of the information”…and they finally chose the web format because book publishers were looking for either a serious study or a trashy biography and while this has elements of both, the overall production is neither. It is as they stated, a “non-linear data presentation; publishing unpolished materials; providing multiple navigational routs through the material.” Krasniwiecz and Blitz stated they consider this project incomplete and plan to continue working on it. I think if they must, they should try a video version, which could be equally as thought provoking and probably just as useful a format for presenting their arguments. As a linear presentation it would be easier to follow. Better still would be to forget about Arnold; I think this site presents more than enough and should move on to something else!

Posted by dschaef1 at 06:00 PM

Maureen'sThe Promise of Digital Scholarship.

According to the University of Virginia, digital scholarship is defined as:

publication that (1) exists in digital format...(2)is incapable of
being translated without loss of information or value into a non
digital format...and is (3) subject in all other respects to the
demands of traditional print scholarship for originality, value
and selection via a process of peer review.
(www.ei.virginia/edu/digitalscholarship.html)

The "promise of digital scholarship" argues for providing new, innovative and thought provoking ways to disseminate history to the public and other historians on the Web. Both "Images of the French Revolution" and "I Can Almost See the Lights of Home~A Field Trip to Harlan County, Kentucky" sites are publications in digital format that would lose critical information in traditional book form. Both sites are original, they have value to specific interest groups and they are peer reviewed. However, the "Imaging the French Revolution" site fulfills more of the 'promise' of digital scholarship than does the "Lights of Home" site.

It took several attempts to access the audio portion for the "Lights of Home" but it was almost worth the effort. The oral history narrative is interesting, though disjointed, and the Harlan County residents provide poignant vignettes of their lives as the working poor. Their songs add to the history of this defunct strip mining area in Kentucky and their actual voices are a key element in creating the story. However, good scholarship, I argue, also requires easily accessible information about the purpose of the historical project. The brief "Host Introduction" in the beginning of the narrative is inadequate and should be replaced by Alessandro Portelli's "Introduction" at the end.

Portelli is looking for some unique connections between Italy, his home, and Kentucky that were not made clear in the confusing organization of the oral narrative and, for a site that is specifically based on a unique aural experience, this problem should be addressed. However, it is innovative and it provides an unique example of two historians, Portelli and Charles Hardy, actively conducting oral interviews and then interviewing each other on their own response to those interviews. Equally interesting is the connection made between Portelli's different visits: he notes how the "old" Harlen had disappeared since the last time he had been there. Its previous identification as a struggling coal mining area had changed to a community concerned with health hazards and the Viet Nam war.

Perhaps the Harlan County aural experience did not fully meet the promises of digital scholarship because of its comparison to the "Images of the French Revolution" site. The purpose of this site is to provide a small group of thumbnail images, specifically focused on crowd violence, from the French Revolution. Each image can be enlarged and the title, date and provenance are provided. Essays by historians are easily accessible on the site and there are also discussions concerning the specific images and their historical context. Viewers can easily locate pertinent articles or images if they have a particular image or theme they want to pursue.

However, there are 'only' forty-two images on line from the thousands that are available and they could have easily been incorporated into a book with the scholarly articles. What makes "Imaging the French Revolution" an innovative and original site of digital scholarship is the remarkable "Image Tool" that is magical, particularly for art historians. This tool allows the viewer to enlarge each image as well as to enlarge separate components of each image. The tool will also
place different images side by side on the screen in order to compare and contrast them at the same time. This becomes an interactive exercise that provides primary source documents illustrating the crowds during the French Revolution that can also be used within the context of the site's secondary texts or as the viewer sees fit. Even though it only incorporates a small collection of images, "Imaging the French Revolution" clearly defines new technical innovation as well as the other necessary goals of digital scholarship.

Posted by mguignon at 04:10 PM

October 22, 2005

digital scholarship - nona

David Staley asserts that “visualizations are as useful and rigorous as written prose accounts” and that they are “legitimate vehicles of scholarly thought and communication” (Stately, 2, 12).

He does not view those visualizations as supplementary to written accounts or as replacing written recounts, instead as “a different type of medium through which historians will organize their thoughts about the past and communicate those thoughts to the rest of the profession” (Stately, 12). The promise of digital scholarship appears to be the use of this new medium to accomplish the task of the historian.

To determine whether or not From Hogan's Alley to Coconino County and The Difference Slavery Made keep the promise of digital scholarship, I will employ the criteria set forth by Dr. Rosenzweig in “Crashing the System?: Hypertext and Scholarship in American Culture.” These works should do something “new or innovative” using the electronic medium and should also fulfill the requirements of good scholarship in that it should be based on solid research, have a crisp analysis and clear prose (Rosenzweig, 239)

From Hogan's Alley to Coconino County presents different threads of the “interpretation of early comic strips in the context of the market culture of turn-of-the century America.” (http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/comics/softfr_w.html). It is possible that this multithread narrative could have been presented with each thread as a chapter in a book. However, what From Hogan does that is not possible in a monograph is it allows interconnectivity between the threads. As a reader examines the interpretation of a specific comic strip in a pop-up window, there are links of interest that may lead the viewer to a thread other than the one where the pop-up originated. The bibliography presents evidence that this site is based on solid research. The prose is clear and the analysis crisp. It keeps the promise of digital scholarship.

Although the scholarship of The Difference Slavery Made is on point, the website seems to fall short of fulfilling “the promise.” What it sets out to do is admirable but not as innovative as the authors imagine it to be. For instance they claim that the reader will engage in their work in a way that is different form the way they would engage a book. Yes, on their website a reader can “decide which way to pursue the argument; they may go forward in the analysis or into the material to a depth and with a range a print journal does not permit.” (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu:8090/xslt/servlet/ramanujan.XSLTServlet?xml=/vcdh/xml_docs/ahr/article.xml&xsl=/vcdh/xml_docs/ahr/article.xsl§ion=text&area=intro&piece=presentation&list=&item=) So too can a reader of a monograph/journal article through browsing the table of content and sifting through subject headings or captions. The authors of this piece of digital scholarship also set out to make a site that required the reader to go through a series of steps to reveal layers and many components. This may indeed be an innovative in the ease of navigation but the way it is employed here; these extra steps are similar to taking the steps to the page to read detailed footnotes or an appendix of graphs and charts.

The promise of digital scholarship is exciting and is not unattainable. The most difficult aspect may of fulfilling the promise may be that the new media is not always the most legitimate vehicle for every narrative that a historian seeks to tell. Often times the only shortcoming of digital scholarship is that the subject matter would be equally served or perhaps be better served if it were presented in a traditional form. These should not be looked at as failing to keep the promise but as steps to understanding all that the promise entails.

Posted by nmartina at 07:58 PM

Amy's Digital Scholarship Response

Here are my comments on "I Can Almost See the Lights of Home" and "Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge"--Amy

“I Can Almost See the Lights of Home” is an “essay” in sound. So in this, there is definitely potential for new media. However, I think they went over-the-top in the presentation—just because something can be included, manipulated, etc., does not mean it should. Here, I mean the layer sound effects that were intended to create a sense of multiple, concurrent narratives (a good use of digital media in theory). However, sound, sound effects, or another narrative often underlay the primary narrative, thereby obscuring both the primary and secondary sounds.

One of the main objectives of using sound is to bring the listener “closer” to the subject and the story. If I was reading the transcript without the sound, I would not much care if it had a picture or not. With sound added, however, having images would enrich the experience. Unlike a journal, book, CD, etc. the digital form allows both sound and image concurrently for “immersion” into the story. I think that is something that can be improved on this site. The sounds (and stories) are multilayered and adding images would not complicate or diminish this element, but increase its impact.

This site tries to use too much of certain technology while omitting others. Further, the content has weaknesses. Mostly, the argument is not stated clearly nor are there efforts at analysis (in print) of the narratives as a whole. Granted, I do not have much experience with oral history so I do not have a basis of comparison for that particular medium. Without a clearly stated thesis, “I Can Almost See the Lights of Home” is scattered, which is made even more confusing by the hard-to-decipher overlapping sound narratives.

“Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge” investigates the “case for a mappable historical certainty” by juxtaposing through text and image the Los Angeles of the first half of the twentieth century to today. The author encourages viewers to jump into the project at any point and examine the concepts and images, etc. and points out that the essay is not even necessary for understanding the argument. As with the above site, there is potential for the use of digital media here, too. In this case, it is the lack of linearality of a less determined path. However, a main problem is that in the concepts section a few of them have no text and a few captioned images—if I were not reviewing this site with a specific purpose for this class, I might have left the site as a result of those uninformative sections. I found, however, that those few that I looked at first happened to be the only ones with such little information and that the other concept sections had plenty of explanation, argument, and cross-referencing (to make good use of the digital media).

An especially interesting aspect of this site is its self-reflective nature related to the use of digital media and uses of different mediums in the study of urban history. The author refers to debates concerning photography and ‘truth/authenticity.’ He argues that modern technology (i.e. Photoshop to create a panoramic image out of 12 still shots) creates a greater distance between the “real” and the “mediated” than older photographic techniques (e.g. stretching, bending, etc.) but that the end result is that the Photoshoped fake panorama looks much more believable and real than the older images. I think this idea is worth considering for digital scholarship on the whole (although I cannot think of a good example at this point).

Posted by alechne1 at 03:12 PM | Comments (2)

*sigh*

Imperialism in the World Wide Web?

"Lawmakers urge U.S. to keep control of Web"

Posted by mhess3 at 11:20 AM

October 20, 2005

Half-Empty Promises (or half-full?)

"We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot"
Abraham Lincoln

“The Promise of Digital Scholarship”… was this a key phrase that I should have read somewhere and therefore recognize? Without a handy little scrawling in my notebook, I had to figure out what exactly this "promise" was on my own... by breaking it down. Firstly, what is “scholarship”? Ahh, I did have a nice little rubric for that; Scholarship must be:

• Original
• Based on research
• Peer reviewed
• Public

“Digital”? A little trickier: Digital media encompasses digital audio, digital video, the World Wide Web and other technologies that can be used to create, refer to and distribute digital "content." (Thank you wikipedia)

The promise of digital scholarship should then be: to encompass all that is scholarship while also being digital. In other words, the “promise” of digital scholarship is to extend the investigation beyond the confines of the margins of the book and to add something significant to the story that could not be achieved on paper.

I examined Will Thomas’ and Edward Ayers’ “The Difference Slavery Made” and Lynn Hunt’s and Jack Censer’s “Imaging the French Revolution” in order to determine whether their scholarly essay is better in an electronic environment than it would be on paper and if they took advantage of the digital medium to try something “new”—in other words, whether or not they fulfilled the “promise of digital scholarship.”

"The Differences Slavery Made" by Will Thomas and Edward Ayers is "an applied experiment in digital scholarship." Using digital media, Thomas and Ayers wanted “to give readers full access to a scholarly argument, the historiography about it, and the evidence for it.”

BORing...

Their scholarly argument explores the paradox of slavery: the profound difference slavery made is widely recognized, yet studies show that “slavery did little to create differences between North and South in voting patterns, wealth distributions, occupation levels, and other measurable indices.” The “test-bed” for their article comes from the Valley of the Shadow Project, which is based on a detailed examination of the same two counties--one in Virginia and one in Pennsylvania--that had almost everything in common but slavery.

Published in the AHR—a peer-reviewed, public journal—“The Differences Slavery Made” is clearly scholarship… but is it good digital scholarship? Initially I was convinced that Thomas and Ayers brought nothing new to the table in terms of new media. While the article was talking about Vannevar Bush and thinking in webs, it seemed like they just hit “save as webpage” in Microsoft Word and slapped it up on the internet. I guess I was hoping for more than the text version of the Valley of the Shadow. When it comes to reading online, I string with George Bush: “One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures." I’m not trying to just read online.

Fantastic pictures.

But once I got past my design snobbery, I realized that “The Differences Slavery Made” definitely does take steps to take advantage of its digital medium: the inclusion of evidence and methods used, as well as subject historiography is something that is not impossible in print, but it is rarely—if ever—done. Thomas’ and Ayers’ inclusion of research materials is not, in this case, more beneficial to the author than the reader, as Smulyan would put it: they do not include the materials in an attempt to exempt themselves from “making decisions on the most important materials to present” (Smulyan). Rather, the materials are included in an attempt present the “fundamental components of professional scholarship-evidence [and] engagement with prior scholarship” (Thomas and Ayers) in a new way.

As Janet Murray points out, “literary [print] works are hypertextual in their allusions to one another,” but “The Differences Slavery Made” is hypertextual in that a citation within the text provides you with a link that includes the bibliographic information as well as an excerpt from that source and its relation to the information in the text. Thomas and Ayers put regular footnotes to shame.

The digital part of the essay is the “Tools” section, which includes a full-text search function, a reading record that informs you what areas of the article you have and haven't seen, a citation locater, and the ability to print a PDF formatted version of the article (hmm… maybe they did just “save as webpage.”)

While not blazing any new trails in terms of design and flashiness, “The Differences Slavery Made” does fulfill the promise of digital scholarship: it breaks away from the book, doing things online that can’t be done on paper.

In terms of design, the flashier of the two sites “Imaging the French Revolution,” is definitely more my (and George Bush’s) kind of website—lots of fantastic pictures. But I think they actually went a bit too far with the bling: the little flash intro/menu takes too long to load and to play out for no good reason.

Stop Loading!

Another “experiment in digital scholarship,” “Imaging the French Revolution” is organized in three sections: Essays (seven scholars analyze forty-two images of crowds and crowd violence in the French Revolution), Discussion (comments from an on-line forum that took place during the summer of 2003) and Images (allows readers to examine, magnify, compare and manipulate the 42 images).

I would say that 2/3 of the project fulfills the promise of digital scholarship: the discussion and the images.

A real-time forum is something that is obviously impossible to do in a book (although I’ll admit, now the site only has the archive of the discussion, which would be possible to replicate in print). The opportunity to give feedback and toss around ideas is the crux of an online community and a different form of communication. Interestingly, the discussion focuses not only on the site itself, but also on the impact of digital media on scholarship… Perhaps keeping an ongoing message board (a la the Blackout Project site) would be a way for this section to stay one-up on print (although you do have to watch out for the spam).

While this site does give readers the opportunity to “consult a wider range of images than are usually available in a print format,” this does not good digital scholarship make. What fulfills the DS promise is the “Image Tool,” which allows you to manipulate images and even to compare them by overlaying the images and making one transparent. Quantity and access can be done in a book; manipulation and movement cannot.

Unfortunately, the “meat” of the project—the Essays—do not break free from their print constraints. Though the essays provide the scholars’ analyses of the depiction of the Revolutionary crowd, I was let down with the lack of IMAGES in them. The images included in the text are few and far between, and they are thumbnail-sized—clicking on them brings up a (somewhat) larger image in a pop-up window. Otherwise, you have to click on the link: "[Images 1, 8, 25 and 26]" to see the images pop up.

I was really disappointed by this section because I felt like so much more could have been done to integrate the text and the images. The site is called “IMAGING the French Revolution,” yet the emphasis is on text—the “Essays” are always listed first in the navigation menu… it’s the section that you start with. It seems that the authors fall into the category that David Staley refers to when he says, “many historians view images as intrinsically inferior to words.”

It seems to me that there could have been a different (read: non-texual) way to fully explore the themes and questions coming from these images—maybe a (large) map of each image with pop-up text to point out certain symbols, maybe a zoom function that works with the text to examine certain portions closer… I don’t know what exactly, but something.

I actually feel like these essays would have been better presented in print format—with large images on accompanying pages… that actually gives you more “instant access” than clicking on "[Images 1, 8, 25 and 26]" to get the little pop-up window.

If the authors could just pry those last couple fingers off of the prose ledge, “Imaging the French Revolution” could work toward fulfilling the promise of digital scholarship… but as for now, it’s still hanging in there.

And so, to sum up, “The Differences Slavery Made and “Imaging the French Revolution”: Original? check; Based on research? check; peer reviewed? check; public? check plus. Encompasses digital audio, digital video, the World Wide Web and other technologies that can be used to create, refer to and distribute digital "content"? eh, not quite there yet… but at least we know where to go from here.

Posted by mhess3 at 11:44 PM

October 17, 2005

My Photoshopping

Posted by mhess3 at 09:05 PM

October 14, 2005

Debbie's Website is back.

My link to design is fixed again and my website is back. It can be reached at http://mason.gmu.edu/~dschaef1/

Posted by dschaef1 at 12:28 PM

October 12, 2005

web review

I final got my site working. here's the link.

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

Posted by miles at 04:29 PM | Comments (2)

The Way Comments Should Work

Hi:

Last night one of the sites we considered was the one from UVa about the Geography of Slavery in Virginia. During class I wrote to the site's creator, Tom Costa, and asked if they were planning to include mapping capabilities in the site. Here's what he wrote back:

Yes, we do plan to add mapping. That is part of a heml project undertaken by Bruce Robertson at Mt. Alison U. in Canada. The prototype is available at http://heml.mta.ca/ Click on gos1738 or gos1739 for static and active maps for those years. You'll need to download and install the svg viewer to make it work properly. It's still in the testing stage which is why we haven't gone live yet.

Following this link takes you to a very interesting project--the Historical Events Markup Linking project.

Mills

Posted by mills at 02:36 PM

Next week's prep

Hi:

Stephanie Hurter asks that you please review the following essays in preparation for next week's class. This class will be held in IN 336.

"Building Effective Course Sites: Some Thoughts on Design for Academic Work"

"Top Ten Mistakes in Academic Web Design"

Mills

Posted by mills at 02:34 PM | Comments (2)

Open Source Editor

I've been meaning to mention to everyone that there is a pretty good free, open source editor called Nvu. The project is linked to Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc), so it holds a lot of promise. It doesn't have all of the bells and whistles of Dreamweaver, but on a few quick tests seems more than adequate. And if you are really interested in moving away from the payware, The Gimp can replace Photoshop or Fireworks. Not the prettiest program, but again, it gets the job done. And there are super cool, smart people making these programs better all the time.

Posted by kalbers at 03:12 AM

October 11, 2005

Ken's review link

Here is my review essay.

Posted by kalbers at 07:23 PM | Comments (1)

Web Review Essay - Ammon

Here it is. My web review essay. Be kind, I'm no graphic artist... but the code is solid!

Web Review Essay

Posted by ashephe1 at 07:17 PM

Web sites reviewed

Click here to see the assignment

I reviewed several sites dealing with the changes in advertising in American culture and how certain Web sites have covered this topic.

I was quite surprised with some of the sites, a couple of which I deemed of little use to average students. Perhaps it is because I have not had the opportunity to go to Duke University to check their boxes; however, I found some of their site’s were less helpful than that of a small museum in Wisconsin (see http://www.eisnermuseum.org/home.shtm).

I reviewed the following sites:

http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/hartman/ (by virtue of their holdings, where I spent the most time). There are four projects, of varying quality—in my estimation.

http://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/d-7.htm

http://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/d-7.htm: The Ivory Soap part redeemed this site, in my estimation.

http://www.old-time.com/commercials/: An individual, unaffiliated with any institution, turns an avocation into a full-fledged Web site

http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger Houses the collection of Rick Prelinger. Has those odd instructional movies from the 50s, when kids were headed down the path of destruction, threatened by many vices—Perversion for Profit was… interesting.

http://www.ec2.edu/dccenter/archives/ia/index.html this defunct site was just sad … very sad. The timeline ends in 1997.

The Internet, I conclude, needs to catch up with books on this topic. One can find many resources at Amazon.com (book); however, Web folks need to do a lot of work.

Posted by ejonese at 04:45 PM

Debbie's Review Essay

Debbie's Review Essay on Museum Collections on the Web is now available at http://mason.gmu.edu/%7Edschaef1/hist696/review.htm

Posted by dschaef1 at 04:40 PM | Comments (1)

Scott's Web Review Essay

Hope to have it posted by 1830 on 11 Oct 05:
http://mason.gmu.edu/sprice7/scotts_web_review.html

Posted by sprice7 at 03:59 PM

amanda's web review essay location

read my web review essay at http://mason.gmu.edu/~avonargy/webreviewessay

Posted by avonargy at 03:12 PM

Kurt's Web Review Essay

I've posted my review as a PDF on my web site.
(Click here to go to the site.)

Select Web Review Essay under Projects.

Posted by kknoerl at 03:05 PM | Comments (1)

web review essay is here (until I can get it loaded)

Web Review Essay
Amanda von Argyriadis
Clio Wired/ Dr. T. Mills Kelly
October 10, 2005
As previously mentioned in my proposal, I intend to create a web site called Cyberhistorypony that chronicles the history of equine sports and Anglo-Equine culture in Northern Virginia. Here are the results of my query:
The home site for the Master Foxhounds of America , http://www.mfha.com/ offers a good deal of information regarding the history of foxhunting in Virginia , and that of North America in general. Various links are particularly useful, such as the history of foxhunting in America link. Here the authors are careful to emphasise that of the 171 recognised packs in the United States , all hunt for sport and not for the purpose of killing the fox. This is not the case in England where fox are considered vermin and their removal is desired by many. The uninitiated can read about costume, etiquette, and the rules of foxhunting that are designed both to keep the followers safe and the fox alive to be enjoyed at another time. All in all, this site did not satisfy my curiosity for the history of the sport per se, but it did have a lot of useful information and possible contacts for further research. I imagine a full MFHA subscription would garner more information of use, as it includes a year long subscription to Covertside, the magazine dedicated to the sport of American foxhunting.

The National Sporting Library site, found at http://www.nsl.org was more promising in general for any one wishing to study the horse in sport, and particularly in Virginia . Their archival collection is, in my experience, the most extensive in the nation for the history of horse sport and they are thankfully well organised. They offer a good search engine and outlines of many of their archival holdings so you can get an idea if your trip to view the primary sources will be a fruitful one. The only problem is access to the documents, many of which are not available in digital form, but those of us familiar with the methods of the Library of Congress will not be put out and will happily trudge to the source on location in Middleburg , Virginia . Digital items are viewable on the library computers. The library also offers an art collection and a rare book collection that shows potential for good primary source research. The National Sporting Library will not allow any loans off premises of many of their holdings. They will lend, however, through interlibrary loan, books they deem to be in travelling condition, to be viewed in the library. NO books, periodicals, films, artwork or other material may be removed from the library premises. Many of their collection are private donations, are very old and handwritten, include many photos, and offer interesting insight to the culture of the area, which is precisely what I was looking for. Eureka !
The Virginia Horseman’s Association site found at http://www.thevha.com/main.htm was not nearly as lucrative a find. I would have to say it is, over all, useless to an historian, unless you consider three years ago real “history”. It has some interesting if not amusing articles written about current events in flat racing in the region and the links can take you to some sites of minor interest, but by and large this site will not be a part of my future research.
The Virginia Steeplechase Association found at http://www.vasteeplechase.com fostered a slightly more positive response, with a history link directed at the origins of steeplechasing. While it was only one page, it did offer some basic information that could be followed for more research. It gives a brief history of the sport as it was imported from England and quickly moves into present day information. It sports an interesting map of the race locations that underscore the fact that central Virginia is at the eye of the steeplechase storm. There are sixteen race meetings within a 150 mile radius from Richmond to Washington , DC , more than any other state. Of particular use is their extensive links page, with many useful sites for auxiliary information related to horse sports, such as the Jockey Club site on which you can research a Thoroughbred horse’s pedigree and race history or a stable history and breeding record.
The American Carriage Driving Society’s most helpful bit of information is the reference to the two driving periodicals, The Whip and Omnibus, both of which I had never heard and will now investigate. Located at http://www.americandrivingsociety.org/ , ADS is a non-profit organisation that strives to inform about and to track carriage driving in the United States . It does not offer any history of driving but does give clues as to where this can be found in the list of related books for sale.
The United States Polo Association site found at http://www.us-polo.org/ proved to be useful in a number of ways when researching polo history in Virginia . It hosts the rules and official information needed to play in tournament polo in the United States . It was the only site I was able to use when writing my article a few years ago and it has improved since then, adding more information about clubs and local events that can be further researched. The site offers three individual and extensive pages of polo history. It also lists members in the region who can then be documented and possibly interviewed. The USPA also lists club names and locations, which would help in local research projects. Since polo has been played here in the U.S. since 1876, there should be a number of newspapers chronicling these events. Having the member’s names is a helpful way to research the sport from the bottom up.

All in all, half of the sites I reviewed turned up lame, but the USPA, MFHA and Sporting Library sites all gave me fodder for my next attack on Virginia local equine history. I will still have to do a great deal of research in the library, but at least I’ll have a better idea where to look for documents, who to ask for information, and perhaps even gain access to oral interviews from the information I was able to get for this review essay. The irony here is that just as in foxhunting, the thrill is all in the chase.

Posted by avonargy at 02:23 PM

October 10, 2005

nona's web review essay

nona's web review essay is posted here

Posted by nmartina at 11:28 PM

Matt's Web Review Essay

My web review essay is now posted to my homepage. Click on the image to check it out:

Posted by mhobbs at 09:30 PM

Maureen's VERY Late Good Web Page Design

A good Web Page Design is located on my web site:

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

Posted by mguignon at 09:29 AM

Maureen's Web Review Essay's Correct Location:

My Web Review Essay is located on my web page:

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

Posted by mguignon at 09:26 AM

October 09, 2005

Amy's Web Review Essay

My web review essay is posted on my website.

Posted by alechne1 at 07:57 PM

Tai's Web Review Essay

Tai's web review essay

Posted by tgerhart at 04:56 PM | Comments (1)

October 07, 2005

Witch Hunt: My Web Review Essay

My Web Review Essay can be found here. Try to not view it in Internet Explorer because it makes my damn text all centered for no good reason.

Meagan

Posted by mhess3 at 05:04 PM | Comments (4)

October 04, 2005

attention s p a n s

I misquoted slightly, the term is "continuous partial attention."

From a speech by Linda Stone:

In 1997 I coined the phrase "continuous partial attention". For almost two decades, continuous partial attention has been a way of life to cope and keep up with responsibilities and relationships. We've stretched our attention bandwidth to upper limits. We think that if tech has a lot of bandwidth then we do, too.

[content cut]

The next aphrodisiac is committed full-attention focus. In this new area, experiencing this engaged attention is to feel alive. Trusted filters, trusted protectors, trusted concierge, human or technical, removing distractions and managing boundaries, filtering signal from noise, enabling meaningful connections, that make us feel secure, are the opportunity for the next generation. Opportunity will be the tools and technologies to take our power back.

Posted by kalbers at 10:44 AM

October 03, 2005

Learning HTML and CSS

A pretty good site for learning the basics of HTML and CSS is W3Schools.com. I use this site a lot still to reference particular issues.

It's laid out as a tutorial type deal. Hope it helps you as well.

Ammon

Posted by ashephe1 at 07:37 PM

One last entry in the bad design sweepstakes

While looking for something else today, I found this one. There are so many ways that it's bad that I lost count. Given the amount of money UNESCO throws around, you'd think they could do a little better than this.

Posted by mills at 02:54 PM | Comments (1)

good and bad web designs

My search for a good website brought me to, http://www.thinker.org/index.org, and a more difficult search led me to http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/

I did a google search of Museums to find well-designed websites and I was not disappointed. There are some beautiful and beautifully designed websites for museums all over the world, but since I don’t read any other languages I narrowed my search to American museums. I settled on the home page for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, FAMSF. The site is a great example for me to critique since I’m not familiar with these museums and I am a perfect example of the stupid user (I need to learn the hypertext symbols for emphasis). The name of the site does not give a connection to the FAMSF. The URL is http://www.thinker.org/index.org. It is easily found through a google search.

The home page is for two museums, the Legion of Honor and the deYoung Museum. The home page is colorful and interactive with one picture in the middle of the page moving and changing. The movement does not distract from the clarity of the page presentation. The navigation column is on the left of the page and remains in the same place for subsequent links. It took me a minute and some clicking to determine that the larger logo for FAMSF above the navigation column is the ever-present way to return to the home page.

There is not a site map link, but the website is easily navigated even by users like me. Each page is colorful as you would expect a museum site to be, and I even found a display of one of the exhibits. The education section is a little weak, but it matches the exhibits and there are some good links. I didn’t find other links that would enhance the website, but for a self-contained site it is clear, colorful without getting in the way, concise, and easily navigated.

I spent some time looking for a bad website design, but I’m such a novice surfer, I didn’t find anything awful except one guy’s personal website from York, England. I didn’t think it was fair to criticize him. At Mill’s suggestion, I looked back at the websites I perused about the English Civil War and found one that is a great source of information, but it is big and complicated.

Take a look at http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/. I’m sure it is used a lot by researchers and/or educators, but it’s so big that it’s easy to lose your place and not be able to find your path back. I am speaking of stupid users like me, and, according to the readings, websites like Spartacus should be directed to people like me. Spartacus is for text/narrative readers who feels more comfortable with books, but there is too much text for a website. The blue links are all over the page and they make it confusing to read.

The navigation is all over the map, and the downloads in the middle of the page take forever. The website is full of facts and information, but it’s too big and unfocused. All the informational links have a box with Ask Jeeves and google ads at the top of the page. These take up space and look out-of-place. If you’re looking for an encyclopedia of history, Spartacus is a good place to look. It is not, however, well-designed

Posted by scarson1 at 02:42 PM

amanda's good and bad site recommendations

The first site I want to discuss is http://www.costumegallery.com/
It is a site designed to inform the public about the history of costume and calls itself “A Central Location on the Web for Fashion and Costume since 1996.” It downloads quickly and is an interesting idea to those of us interested in fashion and design history. From this site you can sign up to take classes online for fashion design and learn to make historically accurate corsets and other interesting articles of clothing. But you can’t download (borrow, copy and paste, etc) any of the material without permission from the web designer/host. Furthermore, the archival links are not accessible without a “library card” for which you must fill out a form. I did not care to give out information so I didn’t get a card. I also didn’t wish to pay a $55.00 annual subscription required for the articles and newspapers she claims to have available. There is no trial term so you don’t know what you’re getting until you’ve already paid for it. You can buy a three month subscription, but I’ll pass just the same. Clearly this host wishes to significantly restrict her audience. I wonder why she would do this. Some of the links go nowhere; others work but are time sensitive and over three years old, rendering them useless. A number of the sites turn out to be advertisement pages with products for sale, such as the Warner Brothers link, riddled with pop ups and blaring nonsense. It is centre aligned and not terribly easy to navigate. It is visually too busy with inconsistent font, and nowhere to really go when you finally decide what to click on. Finally, the costumegallery.com site is visually overcrowded, with too much to look at on one page and would benefit overall from a good house cleaning. This is not a site I would emulate when designing my own.

On the other hand, http://www.camelotintl.com/tower_site/index.html is really cool. I think Williams and Tollett would advocate the design of this site. It’s not an academic’s dream by any means, but it is effective in conveying the basic history of London Tower and relevant British history. It is a fully engaging site with good working links and interesting graphics. It is easily bookmarked for future reference. Visuals download quickly, but it took a few moments on dial up to catch up on the audio. You should install Shockwave (if you haven’t already got it) so you can enjoy the details. Graphics include image maps to click on as well as a nicely aligned list of site destinations on the left of the screen. It’s really child friendly but also works well for adults, a tough gap to close. And speaking of gaps, you often don’t have to scroll to see the whole page, it’s already there. If you do have to scroll, it’s all vertical and not the dreaded horizontal scroll. The sensibly clutter free pages are easily navigated and you don’t have to fill out any forms or pay for the information you get on the site. There is also a virtual tour of London Tower available with a talking guide. It’s like watching a home movie from someone who visited and filmed the tour. And while you can buy things form a link on the site, it is not an advertisement disguised as a history site. As for graphic sophistication, the images of the Crown Jewels were a bit cartoon like and therefore disappointing, but the “Shoot for Your Life” archery game is fun for this non video playing visitor; I managed to leave with my head in tact! Finally, the interviews transcribed of the Yeoman who currently work at the Tower is interesting and original. I would surely seek to emulate some of the positive elements of this web site when designing my own.

Finally, I think my own site http://mason.gmu.edu/~avonargy/ demonstrates an effort to be clear and simple with a left alignment, (although there is a bit of text in the centre,soon to be repaired) and a nice small photo that introduces me. It's nice to see who you're dealing with when you look at a personal website. The text is reasonably consistent and the font easy to read. Once I have the links worked out it will all function, adding to the positive aspects of this little starter site. Considering how much I knew about building a website a month ago,(less than zero)I'm pretty happy with it.

Posted by avonargy at 12:45 PM

web review proposal

Behind the 8-ball again, I emailed my ideas about the web review proposal previously and forgot to blog them. So here's my proposal:

My web review will focus on sites about the English Civil War and leading characters in the War. This blends nicely with my studies in the Colonial Origins class with Dr. Scully by delving deeper into the events on the British side during the earlier colonizing time period. It is necessary to analyze events in England in order to understand the actions and motivations of the English-American colonizers. My review will include some or all of the following historical websites:

http://www.open2.net/civilwar/

http://www.olivercromwell.org/

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/english_civil_war.htm

http://www.british-civil-wars.co.uk/

http://www.thehistorychannel.co.uk/search/
search.phh?searchtext=english+civil+war&x=&y=4/

http://www.bbc.co/history/war/englishcivilwar/index.shtml/

Posted by scarson1 at 12:36 PM

Exemplary Sites

What I have taken away from the readings, and from surfing the history web, is that there tend to be three factors which trump all others in defining the good sites from the bad: readability, organization, and navigability.

Since the meat of many, if not most, historical websites is in the text, readability is paramount as far as presentation goes. If a site is difficult to read, it is an unlikely a reader will be able to stay long enough to follow the argument. Next would be organization. Good sites tend to group its materials in a variety of ways: by topic, document type, era, etc. This makes it easier for the user to quickly identify the contents of the site, find the areas he or she wishes to engage, and later locate elements they wish to revisit. Finally, navigability ties importantly with organization. Being able to move between sections of the site easily through the use of a navigation bar is important, especially when different areas might be used cross-referentially. Having to continually return to the homepage or back through multiple pages to indices is frustrating and inefficient.

The American Red Cross Online Museum recognizes the benefits of good site design, and stands out for its usability. While the font could potentially be a little bigger or spaced further apart, it is presented nicely in black on white, with good margins, couched by red borders. It is pleasing to the eye and easy to scan. The site is clearly organized into three major academic sections: history, exhibits and collections, and roll call (an oral history project). Each of these sections is further organized into different topical and demographic interest areas. The navigation bar across the top allows the user to easily move between the major sections of the site, while the sidebar allows movement within them. Links stand out in blue, further enhancing site navigation.

On the other hand, Titanic & Her Sisters, is a good example of how not considering readability, organization, and navigability can make a site difficult to use. The blue on white text, while not unreadable, can become tiring after a while. Especially since the author decided to stretch the text fully across the page, making the users eyes work even harder. Some pages, like the Cargo Manifest, are virtually illegible. The site is almost haphazardly put together, with no divisions, topical or otherwise. Finally, without any navigation tool, the user is forced to back his or her way to the homepage. This problem in navigation is compounded by the links themselves being the same color as the text. They are marked by underlining, but this hardly differentiates them clearly.

Placing a nicely contrasting text in manageable columns, couched by navigation bars which reflect well thought out organization seems to be key in presenting a good site to the historical web.

ps- My site is an example of terrible site design (although I am finally getting close to putting up an all new and improved xhtml version). But I changed the Links page to be better. I don;t know if I'd say it's good, but it's certainly better.

Posted by kalbers at 12:23 PM

web design - posted to my site

I selected two websites on “The Great Migration.”
The examples are posted to my site.
http://clio.makeda.org/hist696/webdesigncritique.html

Posted by nmartina at 12:14 PM

Negro League Baseball and Web Design

Instead of just offering two sites for comparison, I chose to point out three. I chose sites that address the history of Nergo League baseball:

blackbaseball.com,
truebaseball.com, and
negroleaguebaseball.com.

I decided to point out three sites because I think it is almost unfair to compare the design of big-budget, professional sites with smaller, personal projects. Still, smaller projects have many options for good design without paying for expensive designers and programmers. The first site, blackbaseball.com, is an example of great professional design. The colors are attractive and easy to read. The navigation is simple and clear. One real flaw is the site's lack of alt tags that would make the site more accessible to all visitors. The second site, truebaseball.com, is an example of poor design. The page is set in frames, which I don't like because of compatibility issues with old browsers. The logo on the banner is designed as a background image, so the navigation links overlap it in smaller windows and become very hard to read. And even if a visitor can read the links they are not organized logically and do not offer quick access to the entire site. Obviously, truebaseball.com is a much smaller project than the sleek blackbaseball.com, but that's why I included the last site, negroleaguebaseball.com. This site is a good counter point to the idea that small project = bad design. negroleaguebaseball.com uses a blog format to present information, which I like very much. I think this is a creative and powerful way to serve information, and present it in an attractive and organized manner. The site is easily navigated, the text and images are formatted appropriately, and the site is a good gateway to information.

Posted by miles at 11:30 AM

More Sites on Design to Share

Hi Class
Here are 3 more sites that I found while doing this week's assignment on good & bad design features. Debbie

The first is by someone named
Robin Williams and is based on our text book.

The second is from a Dreamweaver workshop and has some great examples.

That site links to others. I expecially enjoyed webpagesthatsuck.com!

Posted by dschaef1 at 11:24 AM | Comments (1)

KISS: Scott's thoughts on design

This week’s assignment I found to be the most difficult so far as I have never really paid much attention to how websites are designed or structured or given much thought about it (Read: I’m not a “design” person). As I read through Professor O’Malley’s argument for academics to take the web seriously, I realized that in a sense he was directing his argument to scholars like me (if I may call myself one). As he wrote: “the whole profession tends to regard thinking about the way things look as vaguely suspect or superficial.” Heck yea! In fact, the more “designed” a website was the more I disliked it since I use a dial-up connection. I do not care about layout/graphics/images/color schemes, etc. As long as I could find the information I needed quickly, I was happy. But O’Malley may be right when he writes “. . .the consistent argument here is that the design of sites matters.” I took his class last semester and learned much from him so I’ll go along with his argument for the sake of it. After all, he may be right, but I'm not so sure (at least for historians??). Perhaps though I’m of the ilk represented by Steve Krug’s web usability book title (as quoted in the Cohn & Rosenzweig article) Don’t Make Me Think? I don’t know, my head hurts.

As I mentioned in an earlier assignment I am not comfortable criticizing subjects that I know little about so I’ll stick with what I know. I frequently work with the U.S. Navy and I know something about maritime and naval history. As such, I thought about examining how the U.S. Navy’s history website compared with the greatest sea service that ever set sail on open water, the Royal Navy, as Professor John Sumida (U of MD) used to call the British fleet. I assumed both websites would be highly professional and probably designed by one of the better web design firms since the military is the best-funded organization in a national government, right?

Talk about contrast! Once again, the U.S. is trumped by our cousins across the pond. This is an example of a well designed and structured website: Royal Navy http://www.royal-navy.mod.uk/static/pages/211.html

This is an example of a “poorly designed” website:
Naval Historical Center http://www.history.navy.mil/

As you would probably expect, the official website was detailed, well laid out and structured; all of the information a naval historian would look for was right there (we typically are looking for engineering specifics, dates, information on personnel, or ships’ histories). As Larry Gales points out, viewers have an affinity for scanning information, not reading it – the Royal Navy’s site gives it to you in a “short and sweet” manner. Are the majority of users “stupid”? or just impatient. Definitely the latter and designers must pay attention to this fact.

There was a problem that I had with both websites and that was finding their history site from their main index pages. In a sense this is a pretty serious fault I’ll admit but the Royal Navy’s was actually easier to find and once there, everything I could want to know from a website was easily accessible. Although I had the U.S. Navy’s site bookmarked, I attempted to find it from the U.S. Navy’s main index page and did after a 10 minute search. But once there, it wasn’t too difficult to find the information I might need. That is not to say that the U.S. Navy’s much more simply designed site doesn’t have it’s benefits (easier download) but it was generally much more cumbersome to find any information you might be looking for.

Overall, I compare designing websites to the Skunkworks’ aeronautical engineers’ philosophy of K.I.S.S. (Keep it Simple, Stupid—the Skunkworks was the nickname for the super-secret design lab at Northrup that designed the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird). As Jakob Nielsen’s article noted, real users do mind complex design. “These users are just like anybody else: they just want to get their work done. They have neither the desire nor the time to learn the idiosyncrasies of individual websites.”

Posted by sprice7 at 08:02 AM

October 02, 2005

Posted to my site

My examples of good and bad design have been posted to my site at http:www.clio.keimaps.com

-Kurt

Posted by kknoerl at 09:06 PM

October 01, 2005

Design on my site

My design links are up on my site at http://mason.gmu.edu/~alechne1/Design.htm Amy

Posted by alechne1 at 08:25 PM

Post-Class Research into Pub Culture - Monday, Oct. 3

Hey, gang -

Who's up for a post-class pint (or two...) at O'Brion's after class on Monday? It's the bar in the University Mall, directly across from the GMU entrance. The prices are reasonable, the decor is utilitarian, and the atmosphere decidedly manufactured, but it's nothing some camaraderie can't rescue.

Guests/SOs are welcome to join, of course, should they feel up to meeting us at 10:00 on a school night.

Posted by mhobbs at 06:09 PM | Comments (1)

Maureen's Good/Bad Websites.

Last weekend, a conference on the deaths of thousands of Armenians in Turkey between 1915-1923 was allowed to take place in Istanbul. This is a very interesting controversy and I decided to limit my search for good and bad history website design to sites specifically about the Armenian Massacres/Genocide.

A good website for this topic is the Armenian National Institute site. The home page is visually simple and user friendly; each clearly labeled link leads to individual pages with clean text and simple instructions for secondary links. The subdued colors provide an appropriate visual element for the topic while, at the same time, the contrast of colors on the screen specifically aid in navigating the site. A small image of a young Armenian woman is discreet but powerful. Access this site at www.armenian-genocide.org/

In contrast, a poorly designed site is Tall Armenian Tale: The Other Side of the Falsified Genocide.. The bright colors briefly provide an attractive visual element; however, the main text is in small white print that is difficult to read for a long time. And, unlike the ANI site, this site has too much information to read on each of its links. In fact, one of its links, Quotes, is 79 printed pages. (Don't ask why I know this.) This site is located at
www.tallarmeniantale.com/index.htm

Each website challenges the other's perspective. The ANI presents a much more "historical" point of view for its viewers through its design and structure. It lists its purpose, provides contact information and teaching resources. The site also offers photographs and documents to support its argument. On the other hand, the Tall Armenian Tale site is filled with rhetoric and it takes time to find out the site's purpose or origin. Once found, the author offers a very one-sided case for his purpose, as does the ANI site. However, if you had no knowledge, background or opinion about this topic, the ANI site is designed in such a way, visually, textually and navigationally, that it creates a much more serious, and thus, seemingly more historically accurate, point of view.

Posted by mguignon at 01:03 PM

Amy's Design Finds

I put this is the wrong category before so here it is again!

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 10:48 AM

Debbie’s Ruminations on Web Design

While some nonprofit museum and historical society sites are more interesting than others in content, and some employ flashier multimedia devices i.e. Mount Vernon, many seem to follow a similar web design format (see Monticello.) This includes information on visitors services and visitor information, on-line exhibits, collection information & related merchandise sale information.

Good Design or Beauty is in the Eye...
I had trouble choosing just one favorite but I think one of the nicest designs I have seen is The Oakland Museum of California site for their traveling exhibition: Gold Rush. The physical exhibit is closed but the web site remains available for visitors. This site is a pleasure to navigate through. Every link is clearly labeled and consistently placed. The pages are visually appealing with clear graphics , although to a certain extent I think that is subjective.
The audiovisual presentations work well on both Macs and PC's using both Shockwave and QTVR. There are clear directions for interactives such as how to for download necessary plug-ins as well as depictions of the icons that distinguish the audio from the videos. This site was easy to use as well as interesting. The overall presentation is logically organized, intuitive with consistency of design throughout, which helped facilitate the ease of navigation. There is an effective sidebar navigation for topics and clearly defined (highlighted) roll-over links.
At the bottom of each page is a navigation bar that includes both an internal search and a useful site map, a home link, a guestbook (which is now closed), credits which unobtrusively also include the sponsors, and a "get involved" section which includes educational materials that are also highlighted on the home page. Each section index also have a header bar with additional dropdown menus. The individual pages were attractive, using a color scheme that was appealing to the eye in both text and background. Throughout the site there was a consistency of format, page layout, use of fonts, and color. The pages were uncluttered and neat, balancing the use of image with text. The text was easy to read and the images were clear, relevant, and of decent quality. The content was interesting and well written for a broad audience

Additional Comments on Good Design:
Commercial sites appear to be a bit more varied in design than the non-profits, depending on their budgets, although they also contain predictable information about their finances, corporate identity, product information, and a history of the business. Sometimes though these sites can be surprisingly educational and fun! Two of my favorites, Coke and Energizer are examples of completely different approaches to web design through use and placement of multimedia, choice of backgrounds and color, navigation, and balance of text and image. Though both are corporate sites, they are visually quite different. The Coke site opens with an optional multimedia presentation, and the drop down menus and hyper links provide variety but sometimes the navigation isn’t obvious. The section labeled Heritage includes both multimedia in the form of a timeline on the development of Coke products, and advertising with a hyper link to an essay on the history of Coke, and pages integrating both text and image such as the Select a Story drop down menu in the Coke Lore section.
In contrast, Energizer Bunny site pages are more static and predictable, with navigation always on the top and left. Their pages appear clean and uncluttered due to their light background and use of empty space. The Bunny section includes a multimedia presentation of several past advertisements, but their is an intermediary screen which gives the user a choice of plug-ins and is more restful for the eye. The brief history of the Energizer Bunny and the Learning Center section also include informative timeline/history pages on batteries and flashlights, as well as science project pages and well drawn illustrations. While the product information is present, the commercial aspects appear less obvious.

One of my other favorite sites is the history section of the BBC web site . While the site is large with a portal type entry, it is beautifully designed with easy, intuitive navigation, good use of multimedia, audience engaging devices, and interesting content. Not just a site for Anglophiles, this site covers a wide range of historical topics and time periods. It has a useful site map, intelligent articles, reference links, short biographies, games and learning activities, timelines, a multimedia component, a children’s section, multi topic message/chat boards, a sign-up to be notified when new information appears, the usual contact information and the link to the television program scheduling. There is also a section under the World War II section that invites the user to submit family stories but unlike National Geographic’s Pearl Harbor Memory Book, this typically British site gives complete instructions and formats for submissions to the site. The unedited submissions may be temporarily viewed (a month or so) at a page called the “Editorial Desk” but only a select few will make it for a longer run on the web page for oral histories and stories.
Navigation is predictable and easy in this site; the fonts are usually a good size and with terrific use of rollover links the are clearly defined by both their underline and bright color. Generally larger theme navigation is located on the left sidebar which is hierarchical with the Home BBC page and site Search easily found at the top. If not bolded within a page, hyperlinks may be found on the right side of a page. The content is thoughtful and well presented; titles clearly indicate the indexed topics and the the grammar, spelling, and punctuation are impeccably correct. The site is also structured to make sense both topically and chronologically, and it is easy on the eye with informative pictures and text. The only complaints I have with this site are:
1. The multimedia sometimes requires different plug-ins than those that I already have, although downloading instructions are provided through hyperlinks.
2. Some of the detail screens contain very small print which is hard on the eyes (See Monarchs and Leaders timeline under the Church and State section.)
3. Not all links work because a URL may have moved and the address hasn’t been updated (i.e. the Bayeaux Tapestry link on the “Unpicking the past” page under the “History Trail- Go Further” section.)
Other than these occasional intermittent problems, this site is a gem, appealing and engaging, and I highly recommend it!

Bad or Ugly Design
I found it is relatively easy to come up with at least a few poor design elements in a good many web sites. One of the worst in “history” sites is The Museum of The Great American West.
The first couple of paragraphs on the introductory page are a good indication of the problematic content and design issues contained in this site:
“From archive collections we are proud to present the first of our museums for your enjoyment. Visit us often as we prepare 30 years of Serous historical collections into Fine Museums for your pleasure. Enjoy your stay with us
The Museum of The Great American West”
The Museum of The Great American West was created for your pleasure in a hope to shine a realism of light on a very interesting time in history. Directors of movies and authors of books have portrayed this frame of time in many ways...”
Note the misspelling, sentence structure, the lack of punctuation, and problems with word spacing. On the plus side the colors are aesthetically pleasing and the pages are not too overcrowded. Even the commercial box at the bottom is visually appealing. Because there is little to no variety in color, one would consider the consistency a good design but in this case the site is mostly excessive dull, boring text, which looses any points on visual appeal after the first page. With the exception of the inclusion of pages about women and American Indians, the content reads like an old history text book without much illustration, and appears to be written for a second grade audience. There is with nothing particularly thought provoking or engaging.
The site does include an list of hyperlinks to internal text pages with topics that include"Women Who Tamed the West" and events such as the Alamo. There are also some biographical pages on "noted frontiersmen and pioneers" such as Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Calamity Jane and as well as several entries on Native Americans and soldiers under the label of Indians and U.S. Cavalry. Very few images are included however. The biography pages do have some design consistency: an image at the top followed by birth & death information and then several paragraphs summarizing the person’s significance in Western History. Additional hyperlinks are also included for subjects & events i.e. for Sacajawea there is a link “woman” which links to the topic page of “Woman Who Tamed the West”. and several hyper links to the same page titled “Lewis and Clark Expedition.” Even though there are ample sites for use within the public domain and could have been referenced, all links are to pages within the site. Since the hyperlinks are always limited to the pages internal to the site the visitor is treated to the illusion of being caught in a loop and the “Back” button is used in abundance. Every page requires scrolling and all have a prominent commercial box at the bottom. Aside from the user scrolling, the text is static; the only movement on the screen is the Flag waving at the the Friends of United States Freedom Documents link (Uh oh- another militia site) and the pages of a book turning at the link for the Rocky Mountain Book Exchange. While the design undoubtedly draws attention to these sections, if can be very annoying after a short time, and given that this box is at the bottom of every page it doesn’t take that long.
The section labeled “American Western Trading Post” is the commercial area of the site. For sale are bronze stagecoaches, gold & silver coins, and spinning wheels. There is also page for general classifieds, a test site for selling Stagecoaches, Wagons and Carriages, a “Western” book exchange, and an Adobe download for a 1999 policy page that is actually a disclaimer for purchases of their advertised products. There is also a section called Freedom Hall which links the audience to copies of The Declaration of Independence, The Articles of Confederation, The Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights. Some of the documents are preceded by brief introductions which attempts to provide some historical context. There are also essays on other pages that are suppose to provide background or “give insight to the evolution of these documents.” All are "patriotic" in tone and stylistically simplistic. Mystery links that appear to have nothing to do with the topic often appear at the very bottom of pages. These appear to reference military topics such as army attack helicopters. These are provided by “sponsor sites” and while they may be interesting or scary to some, they do not relate to the web site’s topics ecept maybe with the fond reference to various weapons! Another problem is if you get to the site through the preview page of Netscape Explorer, the image on the Introductory page doesn’t always go away and often can’t be closed out unless you close the browser. So in addition to the dead ends, beware- your screen can freeze.

Additional Bad Web sites I’d like to share:
Both Jim Jacobson's Home Page and The History Guy are examples of really ugly personal sites. History Guy claims to be "a resource on Military History, World Conflicts, American Politics, and Biography." The scrolling text and colorful font are a visual nightmare. Jim Jacobson's site has a section called which has a section "Famous People Born On this Day in History" and "Events On this Day in History" which is how it can be considered a bad history site! The Jacobson site is entertaining at first but quickly gets annoying; with its overabundant use of audio, animation and GIFS it is truly headache inspiring, which is his intention as he prides himself on his "gaudy multimedia." Both sites contain idiosyncratic, outrageous, and often inaccurate in content.

Posted by dschaef1 at 01:46 AM