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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.

starks1891baystreet.bmp 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.

baystreet 1901.jpg 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

baystreet 1930's.jpg 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.

pontiac-gto-ads-1965a-small.jpg

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.”

66_monkeemobile_sm.jpg

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
mb.jpg

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.

yoknamap.jpg

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

Harlan County, KY

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

Comic Strip

Harlan County, KY

Site’s Reflexivity: Movement between multiplicity and story

Comic Strip

Harlan County, KY

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:

katmood.jpg

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):

theodore.jpg


Nona:

nona.jpg

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:

theyrule.jpg

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:

thetrule1.jpg

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:

stalin.jpg

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.

querycount.jpg

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