coeller

Since I’m hoping to work with digitization for my final project, this week’s reading was very helpful as a how-to guide and also for important things to keep in mind. I’m hoping to construct my digital image searching/storage/display similarly to JSTOR to give you an idea of the direction I’m heading. I think small file sizes that can be OCR’d (can you use that as a verb?) and still produce good text are what I’m aiming for. I may follow the author’s advice though and scan in better quality images initially to have a better copy saved, but then upload a smaller image that is easier to work with online and hopefully still good enough quality to satisfy users’ needs.
I’m looking forward to discussing marking up text, etc in class (in an attempt to understand what exactly that section meant). It sounded interesting, but I think I’ll have to see some examples along with explanation.

One tangential question/thought that I had while reading about digitization this week was how increasing digitization of sources changes the nature of research and understanding of the past. Let me preface the conversation by saying that I love digitization and regularly use the online newspaper archives that AU has in doing research on recent history. I love being able to search for articles on a specific topic rather than reading through the whole paper for an important date or however people used to do research in the past. However, I wonder if we miss important context or peripheral details by doing this kind of searching and bringing up only relevant articles. In some of my past research, sitting at the microfilm machine scanning through old newspaper pages I would run across interesting related articles that searches never would have found (I forget what we’ve been calling this in class, but I’ll call it the Eureka principle just for kicks). More importantly though when we research the old fashioned way we also see the context that the article was originally printed in. It’s informative to see what other articles were published alongside the article you’re researching and also shapes how we view history if we understand that other important events were occuring at the same time and contemplate how they might have affected each other. I’m definitely not saying digitization is bad, but I do think that as responsible historians we need to think about ways to maintain a sense of context for whatever material we’re researching.

So I did a quick check on the usefulness of amazon’s SIPs. After our discussion of Foner’s A Short History of Reconstruction in Colloquium last week I wondered if amazon’s SIPs would have been able to help inform discussion on that book. So, Peter pointed out that “free labor ideology” was Foner’s big contribution and while amazon.com lists quite a few SIPs, free labor ideology is one of them. The nice thing is that you could then click on “free labor ideology” and see where it is mentioned in Foner’s book and other author’s books. It’s official - SIPs are a great resource.
#2 - Did anybody else wander off of the September 11 Digital Archive and onto the Hurricane Katrina, Rita, Wilma map? It’s great and gives such a sense of place to people’s stories/photos by integrating google maps. If I was ever to collect data online I would definitely want to add this kind of function. It’s just one more way that google maps can be used to make the world a cooler place.

Let me begin by saying that it took me a little bit to get past my initial questions surrounding collecting history from internet users. (And I’m not really sure that I have although I do realize the value. It just seems that these articles could have further addressed the issues surrounding user-based input, whereas they were more simply a how-to guide in how to facilitate this type of input). Secondly, my skepticism was not at all relieved when I read one of the article’s early examples “National Geographic’s Remembering Pearl Harbor site has received over a thousand entries in their “Memory Book.”” - I think we’ve at least addressed a little the possible shortcomings of such endeavors. I think their “Memory Book” not only raises questions of authenticity, but also tone of a “memory” section. It seems a comment like “dude my friend totally died dude at pearl harbor dude,” could really disrupt the flow of a conversation that might be happening in a memory section. This raises the question of censorship, which the articles did not address fully.
One of the first examples that helped me understand how comments sections could be used to create good history was Greenberg’s site for Video Store owners. Maybe it’s just my position in life as I’m hoping to start writing a dissertation soon myself, but I could easily see how such information would provide an excellent source to inform how private video store owners view themselves, the industry, and maybe the Blockbuster phenomenon. This kind of input is essential for informing historical work and moves the field beyond past source styles.
Another comment that I appreciated within their examination of user comments and their usage was allowing this source to fluctuate as it will and lead you in your research. This type of source seems unpredictable enough that if you open your research to being directed by the questions that user comments raise, I think it could lead your research in new and innovative ways that scholars might not think of initially.

In their final section on September 11th sites I had to wonder what the distinction is between history and people who are simply interested in hearing what people have to say about current events. The fact that wherewereyou.org was probably not conceived of as history initially makes me wonder where we draw the line. Just wondering what you all think of this question.
Two final comments: Reading about google’s advances in possibly bringing audio archives to the internet as well reminds me that google may someday rule the world and I should try to stay on their good side. Secondly, SIPs: statistically improbable phrases are genius and I plan on using them regularly for the rest of my life.

My main realization in this week’s reading and exploring of websites was that not only is the network of history websites vast and difficult to categorize, but even more that I have hardly begun to examine the wide variety of history on the web. Beginning with the Designing Generas article I had a hard time understanding exactly what the authors were talking about, but as I explored the other articles and then this week’s websites I began to understand the various levels of difficulty in categorizing and grouping historical websites. They are simply produced and consumed on so many different levels that any single way of categorizing/labeling forces you to ignore a variety of other ways in which these sites might be linked, utilized, or understood. Each of the websites also puts forth different forms of organization, which demonstrate strengths and weaknesses. Again here it simply becomes hard to describe as comparing the sites in one way forces you to realize that they could also be compared in numerous other ways. In my first examination the Valley of the Shadow seems to have direct and simple organization as compared with the incredible complexity of organization on the History Wired website. The National Geographic site is innovative in its use of multimedia, but the Imaging the French Revolution site allows for more in depth ways of exploring images of the French Revolution that could also be applied to Pearl Harbor in helpful ways, but it would be a very different version than the National Geographic website. Exploring these websites clarifies the difficulty in picking the most effective medium for examining an historical subject.

Now for a few questions:

One small interesting thing struck me early on in the Digital History article as they said, “Even by 1996, the “walking city” that was the History Web a year earlier had become a sprawling megalopolis that no one person could fully explore.” Their analogy comparing the History Web to a walking city that was growing exponentially is interesting. Not only does this demonstrate rapid expansion of the History Web and the increasing inability to fully explore it, but it brings to mind the changes in transportation that came with the transition from walking cities to tracked cities to rubber (or automobile-based) cities within American urban history. Each of these transitions not only expanded the city but also transformed how residents and visitors of that city interacted with the city.

Now, before I totally lose the analogy, what I’m wondering is whether the expansion of the History Web not only made it so that we couldn’t explore it all, but also changed the way that we interact with the websites that we do explore. I’m not sure exactly how it might change but I think it gives rise to an interesting question of how we connect with historical websites when there are so many of them. Are we more apt to “drive by” a website that does not present its information in ways that pull us in? Are we more likely to cruise through a large number of sites rather than stay at any one site for a longer amount of time? The creation of highways in physical cities also changed the way that residents of those cities interacted with one another. How might the expansion of the History Web change the way that historical websites interact with each other? Do historical websites link together in different ways than they did in earlier years? Is there a greater sense of competition? Do we even take the time to explore neighbors’ (be that content-based, regional, or other types of neighbors) websites or are we connected more directly to websites outside of the historical arena?

A second comment in that article that forced me to think about the nature of online historical archives and the accessibility of history was where they pointed out that “in addition to the costs of scanning and indexing, the copyright ownership of most of the intellectual products of the twentieth century means that only an entity that can sell access to the past can also afford to purchase the rights to it.” The fact that then only large organizations can purchcase access to these archives seems to make at least some components of history more easily accessible to those with organizational affiliations. Those who are not students or connected in some way to an organization which purchases access to the archive are thus not able to view these documents. It seems the goal of these online archives is to make history more easily accessible, but what does it mean that we are only increasing access for a few privileged groups? Does this accentuate existing inequalities? Is it worth the cost of accentuating existing inequalities if it makes history more easily accessible to some?