coeller

In this analysis of my project I will assess in four sections: The topic, the new media, the technology, and finally, the outcome and future direction of the project itself.

The topic: I believe that digitizing the Brotherhood Beacon has been a good project (and will continue to be). The best components of this project were that it forced me to learn the process of grant proposal writing and that it will eventually develop a terrific resource for those researching the Conservative Mennonite Conference (at least from the 1970s on). The unfortunate part of this project is that it is not the most innovative/malleable kind of project. Since I built the site primarily with researchers in mind, to some extent I had to follow the expected norms of researchers. While this was helpful in designing the project, I think it also limited the creativity and historical argument. It was helpful in that I am a researcher of sorts and so I could shape the database in ways that I thought would be helpful if I was researching - thus, a search function is absolutely necessary. However, you also want to be able to place each article within its historical context so it’s important to note the date and be able to browse the rest of that particular issue (some of these concerns will continue to shape the project as it progresses). On the other hand, orienting the database toward researchers also limited the space for overt historical argument. The project presents more subtle and fundamental arguments about the importance of a small religious sect, as well as emphasizing the importance of primary documents printed by the subjects of research in the historical endeavor. But researchers also want to see what they expect to see, so that also limits the shape of a research-oriented database. (more…)

Here’s a link: Brotherhood Beacon.

Copyright discussions make me tired. Thinking about setting up a website with lots of images, quotes, and other paraphernalia might be fun, but add the copyright issues and you get nothing but a headache. Unfortunately, this issue is something I’ll have to think about more in my digitization project.

Originally, I didn’t think that copyright would be much of an issue as I was hoping to publish/digitize the publication of the Conservative Mennonite Conference on their own website. The Conservative Mennonites don’t seem too concerned with copyright and that combined with publishing it on their website made me think I could avoid it. While I’m still hoping this proves true eventually, things have gotten more confusing in the short term. Unfortunately, I am having to build the website at a different location and then transfer the archive to the Conference’s website. Currently, I’m using a little space through the Center for History and New Media, but was also thinking I should check with the Conservative Mennonite bible college, Rosedale Bible College, to see if they could host at least during the construction phase and maybe for a longer period of time. Unfortunately, the librarian there has brought up copyright questions. I haven’t actually talked with him about it yet, but I’m already worried about how this conversation will go. I simply don’t like the problems of copyright.

This week’s reading did help me to see how I can identify with both sides of the debate, but I think it would be fair to say that I still generally fall on the side that says that copyright should be less restrictive. I know that original artists should be paid there dues, but in the academic setting we’re far more focused on protecting/claiming our ideas rather than making money off of them. It’s easier to use other people’s ideas in this way, you simply have to give them credit by citing them. This is fairly simple, but add in money/profit and things get confusing.

One interesting debate on this subject (which I’m hoping Peter Jaszi will mention when he comes to speak to our class) is the demise of the fantastic documentary - Eyes on the Prize. This is probably one of the best overarching documentaries on the Civil Rights Movement. However, they have recently run into copyright issues and haven’t been able to make a DVD version of the video series or continue producing the series. Thus, it now sells on ebay for sometimes close to $1,000 for the complete series on VHS. I (like many others) think this is a ridiculous tragedy. We are losing one of the best documentaries on the Civil Rights Movement, because the producers can’t afford to renew copyright usage agreements. This story was reported on quite a lot about a year ago (Washington Post, Wired News, etc) but I’m not sure where it stands right now. At one point, a Civil Rights Movement activist even encouraged people to violate the copyright and burn digital copies of the series to preserve it. Many of the articles also quoted people from the Center for Social Media at American University who were very interested in this topic as well. I’m a huge fan of this series and would hate to see it disintegrate on old VHS tapes before somebody creates a digital version, but that is what copyright costs are doing.

The Conservative Mennonites are a relatively small group of people, some 10,000 members spread across the United States. They are relatively unknown and unheard of. Their monthly publication, the Brotherhood Beacon, has been published since 1971. However, most of these issues are stored in only a few libraries in the country and are not easily accessible. The Conservative Mennonite Conference is beginning to build a presence on the web through their homepage, but could greatly increase people’s potential to learn about their history through opening access to the Brotherhood Beacon through their website as well.

My project intends to do just that. I am planning on digitizing the earliest five years of the Brotherhood Beacon and placing it on their website. Hopefully this digital archive will expand to include the entire 35 year span of the publication and allow for the conference’s webmaster to easily upload new issues into that database as well.

My primary audience is most likely members of the conference catching up on issues of the publication that they missed or searching for articles that pertain to some historical interest. Another audience that I think will benefit from the project is researchers. I know that there is an historian doing research currently to write the centennial history of the conference and I expect that this will be a useful source for him. This will also be a useful source for me as I hope to include the Conservative Mennonites in my research at some point. My latest idea is to include how they perceive and interact with Latin America and U.S. foreign policy towards Latin America. This digitized archive will allow me to research this subject in an efficient way. A third potential audience might be people who simply stumble upon the website and peruse articles to learn more about the Conservative Mennonites.

Considering my various audiences, I will be using streetprint software to create an online database that is both searchable and browsable, segmented into individual articles. The search function would allow people to search within articles as well as within title and author subfields. The process that each article has to go through in order to complete the archive is this: To begin with each page of every issue must be scanned in and cleaned and made uniform. Then each page must be sorted into articles, scanned by OCR software, and uploaded through streetprint to the website. The attached text file created by the OCR software will allow users to search through the text and then bring up the image of the page to read the article. To complicate matters, each issue will be scanned at the Mennonite Historical Library in Goshen, Indiana and then burned to cd and mailed to me for the completion of the process.

The general layout of the site will be manipulated through streetprint, but I expect a fairly simple, clean layout where users have a simple search function that brings up thumbnails of the pages one which their search terms were found and then they can access those articles through the thumbnail links.  I would also think that in terms of style they will match the Conservative Mennonite Conference website’s layout possibly by importing their style sheet, or maybe more simply just matching colors, etc.

The argument of my project is not too exciting and fairly simple–that increased access to Conservative Mennonite documents is essential for researching and understanding the history of Conservative Mennonites.  This history is important both for Conservative Mennonites and for those researching them to see how they fit into larger historical themes.

The Mennonites are a fairly small group of people. They include somewhere in the vicinity of 1.3 million people and some 60 percent of that number live in Africa, Asia, or Latin America. There are also quite a few different types of Mennonites. Amish, Old Order Mennonite, and Conservative Mennonite represent a few of these variations.

For my research project this semester I am planning on digitizing the Brotherhood Beacon, which is one of the publications of the Conservative Mennonite Conference (CMC). Since this archive will most likely be held on the CMC website I thought it would be interesting to survey how the CMC website compares with other Mennonite conference websites. I would also like to pay special attention to whether or not any other conferences have digitized and made available any of their publications on their websites.

That said, I began my search for other Mennonite conference websites by simply doing a search through google for “Mennonite conference.” This brought up many more websites than I would ever want to search through, but I clicked on a few of the ones that looked like official conference websites of some of the more major groups within the Mennonites. After bringing up these primary ones, I searched through their links and found a few others that the google search had missed (or hidden somewhere far down in the list of results).

There are far too many Mennonite conference websites to include in this review, so I will try to examine a sampling of conference websites ranging from the primary conferences to smaller ones within the Mennonite umbrella. Quality varies drastically over even this small sampling. (more…)

Here’s my website, alas no streetprint and thus no search engine yet, but it’s a start.

So I finally made it to a scanner and here is my image. It is page 15 of the January 2006 issue of the Brotherhood Beacon. For my final project for this class I’m hoping to digitize five years of this monthly publication. I’m really not sure if this is beyond my capabilities or not, but I’ve been told that there is some software that will help me with this process. I will use OCR software to create text files from each page image and then upload them all to a website using streetprint software which creates a searchable database.

For this particular image, I just scanned it in and cropped it to get just the page image. I scanned it in at 400 dpi to make sure that I get good enough quality scans to run OCR software and get readable text. I may try 300 dpi as well to see if it makes any difference. 400 dpi also gives me a good enough file to save for archives, even if I don’t end up uploading that large of an image. When I save them as .jpg images currently (on medium quality) I’m getting file sizes around 2.5 megabytes, the same is true for medium quality .pdf files.

I’m really not sure what kind of file type or size I will use yet when actually uploading. I think it would be great if the files that I actually upload were smaller so that people on dial-up connections can actually still use the archive. Finding the balance between that and readability will be my main job, as I can save the larger archive quality image on cds/DVDs and/or hard drives for safe keeping (although I guess we all realize now how safe they actually are).

I’m also considering whether or not I want to scan in color. It seems that the Brotherhood Beacon uses black and white and one other color per issue, so grayscale wouldn’t be losing too much I don’t think. I would have to check to see how much file space that would save me.

Okay, I don’t know why I can’t provide a link to my image and put it on another page on my blog. The image is too small to see what’s even on the page. Enough for now, must wait for class.

My current idea for a digital history project is to digitize the monthly publication of the Conservative Mennonite Conference - the Brotherhood Beacon. Yes, a bit random, but I grew up among the Conservative Mennos and I think they have some interesting elements in how they live life. Someday I’d love to examine how they perceive foreign policy. Maybe this will even become a component of a dissertation in the far off future. Maybe you won’t be surprised that the Brotherhood Beacon isn’t digitized and available for online searching, they are related to the Amish after all. But that is my goal, and to be honest it’s getting a little out of hand as I’m currently in the process of writing a grant proposal to the conference to cover some of the costs of digitization and it is most definitely my first time attempting grant writing.

Anyway, it is easily conceivable that this project could be expanded in the future to connect to our conversation last week about collection of personal histories. In fact, I think the digitized version of the Beacon could server as a kind of hook to get Conservative Mennonites onto the website and then there could be a place for them to share their own stories. If I was to expand my project in this direction I think I would formulate a two-prong attempt to get Conservative Mennos to tell their stories. First, I would probably attempt to direct it (using a questionnaire of sorts) towards research on perceptions of Latin America and U.S. foreign policy or possibly towards conceptions of gender within the Conservative Mennonite Conference. I would love to incorporate each of these elements into a potential dissertation. I think I would also leave a space for Conservative Menno visitors to discuss any topic they wanted and allow that to direct my research if it would play out in interesting ways.