coeller

This week’s reading contained many excellent considerations in designing websites. The more open nature of website design and ownership allows users to create a vast array of styles, but many tend towards terrible, difficult to navigate, ugly to look at sites, but following these guidelines allows users to reap the benefits of good design without having to research every style for themselves.

I was interested by Cohen and Rosenzweig’s dispute of the idea of that web surfers have short attention spans that should be catered to. At some points they obviously argue that you need to make your website fit the audience, but on this point they adamantly claim that this dumbing down is unnecessary as we underestimate surfers. I fully agree. I think this harkens back to our discussion of PowerPoint in various ways. Both have the tendency to dumb down information to an extent that readers/users are no longer gaining significant benefit from the website. Reading is a good skill and it should be maintained on websites. People can read, and will, if the writing is good.

I think Cohen and Rosenzweig make some great points, but at some level they’re basically saying don’t make a crappy website. We all know a crappy website when we see one, but somehow we still create crappy websites and think they’re cool. Part of this surely comes from simply having too many options - when you can choose from 53 bajillion colors why in the heck would you choose black for your text color? Because it’s better that way. Basically, I think we just need to visit our own website as if we’ve never seen it before and think about how it comes across. It’s very similar to how some people suggest reading your papers outloud when proofreading them. In our minds we skim over a lot of mistakes, etc, but when we slow down and let the text or website speak for itself we can start to see it’s shortcomings more clearly.

In terms of how to navigate sites, fortunately streetprint will solve some of these problems for me on my site. However, it’s good for me to think about how people want to navigate the site and what would be most helpful for users. This requires running through a variety of user types/scenarios and seeing how different people might navigate the site differently. This of course will inform the types of search categories that are available, how articles/issues/pages are divided up for most simple browsing, and a variety of other navigation information.

Reading through Roy Rosenzweig’s essay on hypertext and history, I think he does present several innovative options for historians that coul shape the way that history is done in the future.

To start with, the first essay that he examines that uses anchored links to take readers directly to the point of the citation within the source allows readers to analyze the context from which the author/historian took their information. I think this allows for closer debate of how we use historical sources. I also wonder if it would shape the way that historians write from sources if they knew that readers could analyze so immediately how the author interpreted the source and utilized it in their work. (By the way, I really need to learn how to create anchored links).

I also wonder if such an immediate connection to, or reliance upon, sources changes the way that historians argue in these articles. Does it simply turn into show and tell, rather than focus on the complexity of the argument? This seems that it could be both a strength and a weakness, as readers can see the evidence very clearly, but might also be distracted from the narrative of the argument at the same time. This also connects with Rosenzweig’s question, “Can you say to a hypertext author that his or her argument is not clearly laid out?” What is a good argumentative structure within hypertext? Does it really change, or is there still a basic level of argument that the article must contain?

Turning to Benjamin Hermalin’s article, I was struck by how scholarly article databases online could be a very helpful thing. I already depend primarily on electronic articles for most of my journal/review reading. His note that from these pages people could link to further discussion surrounding the review/article, made me realize that scholarly databases online have not fully utilized their web structure. I’m sure there are many other helpful connections that could be made to more fully utilize the web in disseminating information in more helpful and interesting ways. I would love it if I could look up a book and it would have a webpage with links to reviews, short summaries, discussion surrounding the book, and/or links to historiographies that mention it. Surely this would be a massive project, but it seems that google or somebody could come up with this in some way that I don’t understand fairly easily.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.