December 09, 2005
Suzanne's Final Project
Thanks to Meagan, my final project is on my website! My proposal for New Lights in Norwich can be viewed on my website at http://mason.gmu.edu/~scarson1/
I agree with Kurt's Blog that it has been a real pleasure taking Clio with you all. I've learned alot from all of you and without your help I certainly would not have made it through to the end. Best of luck to those of you taking 697 next semester, and I look forward to viewing those incredible websites you'll be creating. See you on Monday and come hungry.
Suzanne
Posted by scarson1 at 11:09 AM | Comments (4)
October 24, 2005
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
October 03, 2005
good and bad web designs
My search for a good website brought me to, http://www.thinker.org/index.org, and a more difficult search led me to http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/
I did a google search of Museums to find well-designed websites and I was not disappointed. There are some beautiful and beautifully designed websites for museums all over the world, but since I don’t read any other languages I narrowed my search to American museums. I settled on the home page for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, FAMSF. The site is a great example for me to critique since I’m not familiar with these museums and I am a perfect example of the stupid user (I need to learn the hypertext symbols for emphasis). The name of the site does not give a connection to the FAMSF. The URL is http://www.thinker.org/index.org. It is easily found through a google search.
The home page is for two museums, the Legion of Honor and the deYoung Museum. The home page is colorful and interactive with one picture in the middle of the page moving and changing. The movement does not distract from the clarity of the page presentation. The navigation column is on the left of the page and remains in the same place for subsequent links. It took me a minute and some clicking to determine that the larger logo for FAMSF above the navigation column is the ever-present way to return to the home page.
There is not a site map link, but the website is easily navigated even by users like me. Each page is colorful as you would expect a museum site to be, and I even found a display of one of the exhibits. The education section is a little weak, but it matches the exhibits and there are some good links. I didn’t find other links that would enhance the website, but for a self-contained site it is clear, colorful without getting in the way, concise, and easily navigated.
I spent some time looking for a bad website design, but I’m such a novice surfer, I didn’t find anything awful except one guy’s personal website from York, England. I didn’t think it was fair to criticize him. At Mill’s suggestion, I looked back at the websites I perused about the English Civil War and found one that is a great source of information, but it is big and complicated.
Take a look at http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/. I’m sure it is used a lot by researchers and/or educators, but it’s so big that it’s easy to lose your place and not be able to find your path back. I am speaking of stupid users like me, and, according to the readings, websites like Spartacus should be directed to people like me. Spartacus is for text/narrative readers who feels more comfortable with books, but there is too much text for a website. The blue links are all over the page and they make it confusing to read.
The navigation is all over the map, and the downloads in the middle of the page take forever. The website is full of facts and information, but it’s too big and unfocused. All the informational links have a box with Ask Jeeves and google ads at the top of the page. These take up space and look out-of-place. If you’re looking for an encyclopedia of history, Spartacus is a good place to look. It is not, however, well-designed
Posted by scarson1 at 02:42 PM
web review proposal
Behind the 8-ball again, I emailed my ideas about the web review proposal previously and forgot to blog them. So here's my proposal:
My web review will focus on sites about the English Civil War and leading characters in the War. This blends nicely with my studies in the Colonial Origins class with Dr. Scully by delving deeper into the events on the British side during the earlier colonizing time period. It is necessary to analyze events in England in order to understand the actions and motivations of the English-American colonizers. My review will include some or all of the following historical websites:
http://www.open2.net/civilwar/
http://www.olivercromwell.org/
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/english_civil_war.htm
http://www.british-civil-wars.co.uk/
http://www.thehistorychannel.co.uk/search/
search.phh?searchtext=english+civil+war&x=&y=4/
http://www.bbc.co/history/war/englishcivilwar/index.shtml/
Posted by scarson1 at 12:36 PM
September 26, 2005
Murray vs Manovich
My attempt in comparing the Murray book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, to Manovich's article on What is New Media.
Do you guys see things in hypertext, and that's why you write in it? Is it like thinking in another language once you learn and absorb it? I'm really curious because to me it looks like a lot of extra work. As it is, I use too many words to communicate...
Janet Murray writes about The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace in a creative rather analytical way in Hamlet on the Holodeck. This reflects her background and interests in creating novels, stories, television programs, and movies. She relates to the strong, yet imaginative, character of Captain Janeway of the starship Voyager as she indulges in Victorian fantasies on the ship’s holodeck. Murray earned her PhD from Harvard, and she has worked and taught in and around computers and humanities at MIT. If weighed in a balance, the humanities side would kick in heavier than the digital analog or computer side of Janet Murray’s world. Murray sees the digital world as a medium to create narratives and stories. Computers exist for the sake of their creative uses rather than for the sake of computing. She sees “the most ambitious promise of the new narrative medium is its potential for telling stories about whole systems.”
Murray takes the reader on a light-hearted journey through the art of storytelling from assembly of the first book through Shakespeare, James Joyce, the Perils of Pauline, Gilligan’s Island, and all the way to Star Trek and ELIZA, the computer therapist. The world of computer geeks turned computer gamers and the creators of online soap operas. The technical aspect is secondary to creative possibilities, and the downside of web problems is virtually ignored. She shows us what positive, well-adjusted people can create on the internet and with technology without examining the absolute lack of accountability that can result in very negative uses of the medium. Murray’s view of the future of narrative in cyberspace is partly true but not complete.
Lev Manovich writes that “today we are in the middle of a new media revolution – the shift of all culture to computer-mediated forms of production, distribution, and communication” in his article What is New Media? Manovich’s tone and purpose is very different than Janet Murray while still answering questions about the place of new media in society. Manovich’s article concentrates on the analytical aspects of the subject rather than the creative side. They both lead the reader through the history of computers using punch cards and the changes in creative expression, but Manovich looks at the effect of computer use and development on people and society. He examines the Modularity of computers and their uses and their modulating effect on people and the way they analyze situations comparing the previous method of print mode. New media transforms something into a new format, and the “computerization of culture gradually accomplishes similar transcoding in relation to all cultural categories and concepts. The book narrative is active one way, while the new media is interactive. The user becomes co-author of the work rather than just the receiver of the author’s intentions. Manovich concludes with the idea that mental processes of processing, problem-solving, and recall become externalized through new media as opposed to the thoughtful repose of a book reader. He questions the positive and negative effects of new media on society, and his article is cause for reflection and discussion rather than the rose-colored glass view of Janet Murray. Both articles have merit, but Manovich brings an analytical view that must be addressed in the midst of the revolution.
Posted by scarson1 at 03:54 PM | Comments (3)
September 23, 2005
Valley Web Review
The Web Review for The Valley of the Shadow at
http://valley.vcdh.virginia.ecu/choosepart.html
Edward Ayers, Professor at the University of Virginia, originally planned to write a traditional book comparing two communities on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line in the antebellum, war-time, and postwar era of the Civil War. As his archival collection and modern computer technology grew, the original book turned into The Valley of the Shadow website created by the Center for New Digital History. The Valley is an impressive work of scholarly research presented in digital form. The website itself offers an archive of information about two communities, August County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania during the period surrounding the Civil War. Included in the website are articles written by Edward Ayers and William Thomas about the reasons to compare two communities on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line, and some conclusions to be drawn about the influence of slavery or the absence of slavery in these communities. The main emphasis of the website is to present archival information about the communities to a large audience for research and teaching.
The web designers created a master floor plan with three octagons representing the three time periods-- The Eve of War, The War Years, and The Aftermath-- as the home page and guide around the website. They refer to the website as a “research library in a box,” and the familiar octagons appear at the bottom of linked pages providing a handy visual guide for the unfamiliar user wandering around the library. The website is fairly easy to navigate with clearcut links and a help section for each area whether you’re searching through newspaper articles or census records. The help sections include suggestions, guidelines, and tools for searching the databases such as case-sensitive items and wild card options %. These are necessary as the user can get lost wandering through the shelves of the library or links in the website. The Letters and Diaries section requires several very informative links to get to the letters and diaries containing family information, but it’s easy to get bogged down or lost in the process. My computer couldn’t pull up the letters themselves, but I was able to read the summary of the letter in the link before it.
The map section, especially in The War Years, is excellent. By moving the project from traditional print to digital and web capability, Dr. Ayers is able to actively show the progression of the military units from the two counties on a map with a time line. Arrows move across the map from battle to battle in the same way the military units moved during the war. Another arrow at the bottom of the page moves simultaneously across a timeline to give a frame of reference to the battles. It’s the kind of Civil War action that teenage boys are drawn to, but it gives any user the geographical perspective on how many miles the troops moved between battles. The designers created a side bar to the maps with the possibility of adding modern cities, historical towns, roads, railroads, and rivers with the click of a mouse. This gives the user the option of looking at the maps historically or with a backward glance from modern times.
The teaching sections of the website are well done as well. The Valley of the Shadow is a remarkable resource for teachers K-12, and providing lesson plans for each individual level encourages teachers to use the website. Any teacher with access to the web can utilize The Valley of the Shadow because the academic staff at the University of Virginia has made it quick and accessible. It is a vast resource of materials, but today’s students with find clicking around on the web more engaging than walking through stacks of books.
The Valley of the Shadow provides the user with a number of ways to engage the website as a teaching tool, or archival research on topics ranging from finding family members to chronological progression of a particular military unit to statistics about the literacy of the communities. Any research project has limitations and the Valley of the Shadow makes it clear to the user that it is only including the August and Franklin counties in this Civil War history. The Valley of the Shadow is an extensive archival repository of information made accessible to a larger audience by presenting it in digital form on the web.
Posted by scarson1 at 10:32 AM
September 21, 2005
Thoughts on Scholarship Question
As with everything with this class so far, I am slow on the uptake but I ponder things until my head hurts. I'm having a hard time writing the web review because I keep going over this analysis idea of websites. I never read or reviewed historical monographs before I started this program but now I can do it with "relative" ease, so I expect with practice I can do web reviews as well. After the class discussion and rereading Roy's guidelines and Mill's blog questions, I spents some time (OK it was hours) looking at Pearl Harbor, Brainerd, Midwife's Tale, Salem Witch Trials, and Valley with the idea of categorizing them into: scholarship, entertainment, and informative/teaching. I found it easy to put Pearl Harbor in entertainment, and the other 4 into informative/teaching because they had the criteria of some or all of: information, archival materials, and teaching tools (probably more but that will do). I tried to compare them to the monograph I'm reading simultaneously for Colonial Origins, and I can't find the argument, data to support it, and conclusion in the websites we looked at. As you know from the Scavenger Hunt, I'm no web researcher, but I don't recall finding this scholarship idea out there on the web (in my limited experience). They seemed to be geared for information gathering, teaching historical concepts or events, or entertaining while informing - not for furthering an argument or presenting new historical ground to cover. Maybe I'm just now getting your point Mills for myself, but blogging is for thinking out loud, right? Now that I've blogged this out, maybe I can just sit down and write the review.
Posted by scarson1 at 12:20 PM
September 19, 2005
website
My website can be found at:
http://mason.gmu.edu/~scarson1/
Posted by scarson1 at 01:27 PM
August 29, 2005
Suzanne Carson
My name is Suzanne, and I am a Master's student in European history. I have taken as many American as European classes. I usually only use the computer for word processing and email, and even doing historical research on my own gives me pause. I have avoided this class because I am severely technically challenged. My teenagers have to help me whenever I try something new.
I'm from Florida, and I have an education undergraduate from the University of Florida in Gainesville. I've lived in Virginia for 16 years. My husband is from Texas, and we have 4 children, ranging from 13 to 19. I thoroughly enjoy my classes and the intellectual stimulation I get from the professors and students. Keeping up with my studies and the activities of my children is an interesting challenge.
I'm looking forward to knowing more about computers and the web.
Posted by scarson1 at 07:12 PM