coeller

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…)

I really enjoyed this week’s article by Edward Tufte. His tone was perfect for PowerPoint. You really can’t speak too glowingly of PowerPoint. It can be helpful but it essentially an unlovable thing. It has caused far too much suffering in the world. Tufte says it well on p. 5 of his article as he notes that PowerPoint templates show 10% to 20% of the information generally found in routine news graphics. He argues that the appropriate response to such “vacuous displays” is for audience members to speak out: “It’s more complicated than that!” “Why are we having this meeting? The rate of information transfer is asymptotically approaching zero.” He’s exactly right, I think we would all gain a lot more from most PowerPoint presentations if this kind of exchange did occur and then maybe people could reconnect with real information and make the meeting worthwhile. But, as he later argues, PowerPoint presentations are not about meaningful or worthwhile exchange. Rather, “PowerPoint allows speakers to pretend that they are giving a real takl, and audiences to pretend that they are listening” (p. 25).
Tufte also shows Peter Norvig’s PowerPoint presentation of the Gettysburg address. Not only was this quite funny, but also helped demonstrate how great content is dumbed down by the PowerPoint format.

In his final section he talks about how to improve our presentations and basically says that we should use paper handouts and avoid PowerPoint altogether. I’m not sure I fully agree as I do think PowerPoint can accomplish one or two good things. It allows you to integrate images (real historical ones that is, not clipart) into your presentation and give citation material for those images as well. Basically I think this is one of the few good things that PowerPoint can do. I would think that there are probably times (especially in teaching large history survey courses) when you would like to incorporate historical images. I think the easiest place to find them is on the internet and thus PowerPoint basically allows us to quickly show them in a potentially non-distracting way (as long as we don’t fill up the rest of the screen with rubbish clipart or zooming bullet points).

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

This week’s reading was a good introduction into website production. It gives a great overview of important factors and also gives definitions of some of the important terms without getting bogged down in the technology.

I liked their metaphor of historians being more like architects of their websites rather than plumbers. I think if I tried to do all the detailed technical aspects of my own site, not only would the history element suffer, I think the overall image/structure of the site would suffer as well. I think it’s very important to contemplate the many aspects of how your site is presented, but then to use tools that make programming/design easier. That’s why I’m thankful for software like streetprint. This is the database creating software that we talked about in class last week. At this point I’m planning on using it for my project of digitizing a publication to put in searchable format on the web. Streetprint takes care of all the technical design issues and the many other functions for searching, etc that would be incredibly difficult to program, especially for an historian.

The authors also note the importance of examining other websites like your own. This is also important for creating a site that both connects with what material has already been published in your field, but making it easy to recognize what new components your adding with your website as well. (You can also learn from the mistakes/models in this process). I’m looking forward to the web review for this reason - to see how my website will compare to others like it, possibly on the same subject or with the same scope.

I’ve considered some of the factors that they discuss in their section on funding near the end of the chapter as I’ve tried to find funding for my own project this semester. Unfortunately, I don’t envision my website getting a lot of mainstream traffic as it seems the primary people that want to read about the Conservative Mennonites are the Conservative Mennonites. I did write a grant proposal to the Conservative Mennonite Conference, but I don’t think they often give money away for historical projects so I’m not too optimistic that they’ll fund the project. If that fails I may have to turn towards organizations that are interested in preserving documents.

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.

The Digital History chapter on Preservation contained many interesting observations. I hadn’t really thought about the many difficulties/dangers of preserving historical documents/artifacts through digitization. This article cleared that up fairly quickly.

One random point that I was struck by. They reported that “ink-on-paper content represented an incredibly miniscule 0.01 percent of the world’s information produced in 2003.” Is it just me or is that absolutely incredible. I could probably understand 10% or maybe even 3%, but 0.01? It just makes me realize that there is a lot of information produced. Because I’ve seen some of the ink-on-paper and there’s a lot of that. I’d love to see that statistic fleshed out. Who’s producing all this information and what exactly are we calling information?
A few words on the example sites for exploring organization: I use del.icio.us which is quite similar to Cite-U-Like in some ways. I think both could be tremendously useful tools. I still haven’t fully explored everything that can be done in del.icio.us, but Cite-U-Like adds a potential element of knowing what articles are popular or widely read in your field at any given moment as well. Although this only takes into account those who are registered on the site, so most likely a fairly tech-friendly crowd which is definitely does not encompass all historians. I know the other sites we checked out this week (lifehacker and 43 folders) help organize in various ways, but I still think that the user interface is more confusing than it should be. Simply put, I think there must be a better design than a blog layout. I don’t know what it is, but I hope that it arrives soon.

My digitized image will be up tomorrow. I have to wait until I can get to a scanner.

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.

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.