Heather just showed me this site, which you all should check out as another great example of archiving stories:
http://murmurtoronto.ca/about.php
Even better, it’s audio (sound clips of people’s stories, like oral histories) AND it’s interactive. When you’re at a place, a sign gives you a number to call, and you can listen to the stories about the place while you’re standing there. Pretty good idea, I think!
Spidering? Scraping? I sort of got the gist, at least in the sense of “data mining” (not that I really know what that is either, but it’s easier to guess). Is it something I would do, or do only the big search engines like Google do it? The problem with technology information, generally, seems to be that it presupposes the reader’s knowledge about the topic. I tried to look around online for better definitions of these two terms but with little success (don’t bother with dictionary.com…seems to be a few years, or is it only months? behind). So I will be glad to discuss these terms in greater detail in class.
The 9/11 Digital Archive was certainly impressive, especially the map portion. However, this kind of site seems possible only with some serious technical support. Digital History, on the other hand, gives a better idea of how to collect on a smaller scale, which is perhaps a more likely situation for us as historians (unless we have a lucky affiliation with CHNM or ASHP). I really appreciated the options it laid out (people email you so you can screen them and then post, or people post directly, you can better organize topics if you use a list serv, etc).
I thought some of the most important points in the Digital History chapter dealt with privacy and reassuring the user/contributer. They don’t seem very important in terms of site operation, but actually I think they are crucial in soliciting information from the general public. I didn’t really think about it until I saw the “About This Project” page on the Video Store project site. If I were considering contributing to a site, I would probably read that information and look for reassurance first.
I have a few questions for Josh, as creator of the Video Store site: How did you get people to go to the site when you introduced it? Did you try to link it to other sites, or just throw it up on the web and hope that people came across it? I guess I’m asking, is there a way to do some kind of marketing/publicity when you start a new site? Also, I noticed there were mostly customer and not very many owner/employee responses. Do you think you would have done something differently to target these audiences?
The pregnancy test site was definitely…unusual. At first I just thought, why?? I’m still not sure I have an answer (who would ever go looking for this site?), but I do appreciate the fact that it’s making public something we don’t really discuss as a culture, and I think that makes the personal testimonies useful.
It was interesting to compare the websites we were given. I thought the first two were very thorough, but the other two raised some questions for me. History Wired seems like a good idea in theory, but my question is, how would you ever know to look for it? By that I mean it seems like a fun site to browse, but not very useful if you are looking for specific information. Moreover, you’d only come across it if you happened to look in the Educators section of the Smithsonian homepage. Nothing about the site, however, indicates that it is intended for use by educators. This recalls some of the points raised by Agre, namely, that one must consider the needs of the particular user and the community. Or, if the point of this site is simply to browse, its presence on the web should be made more apparent for a curious browser, since he or she isn’t looking for anything specific in the first place.
Perhaps it was that I had just read the section in Digital History about corporate sites, but when I opened the National Geographic page, the first thing I noticed was the “Save up to 62% off our magazines” icon. This made me look at this particular site more critically and called to mind some of my experiences with fact checking. There are certain sites that are acceptable (usually those ending in .gov or .edu). Otherwise, it was up to our discretion to judge the credibility of a site. If I were to consider this site, I would probably see if I could find a better one, because the actual data comprises only part of the site and the rest is corporate packaging. When we use a site, especially for research, we must be careful to recognize who made it and, in many cases, we have to make a judgment call. Perhaps we could discuss further what criteria we’d use.
Lastly, I’d like to discuss in more depth Agre’s assertion that a community’s media, when they evolve without design, can become unequal and undemocratic. Does he mean access to media, or something about how sites/media themselves are constructed and used, such as the example of television versus the Internet? Is this something we can correct in existing media, or should we advance new forms of media that are more democratic to balance out the ones that have already evolved beyond some kind of democratizing realignment?
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