The beginnings of a new age…
Reading the first chapter of Digital History, I realized how recent a phenomenon was the World Wide Web. The first websites began in 1991 and proliferated with the introduction of Mosaic in 1993. I was in grades 3 through 5 during that time period! No wonder it feels like the web has been a part of my entire life. It has been an integral part of my education for 10 years.
The section on finding good history websites is what really got me thinking. The chapter lists the plethora of great websites that are very hard to get to for one reason or another. Many are hard to find because they do not come up through the commonly used google or yahoo! websearches or indexes. Why don’t they? I feel that this relates to the list of questions from Agre’s article about audience and reasons one creates a webpage. If everyone knows that most people use google and yahoo! to find websites or another specific website (like history.com or something for tourism) why wouldn’t historians do everything in their power to have their websites be more easily accessible? The chapter talks about archives and great collections that do not appear with typical searches, but there does not appear to be any effort to get them to appear. I feel like a lot of the history-on-the-web community is a gated community. You have to know the password to get in, yet many of the stated goals of members in that community are to share and teach history to the wider populace. I strongly believe that people should do whatever is in their power to promote the good and reliable sites to the interested public.
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One small thing that struck me while reading the Agre article was his section entitled “The physiology of collective cognition (3)”. In that section, he discusses social inequality resulting from most people not being taught the ways to “accumulate capital” as thought leaders. While on certain levels I agree with his point, in general, I think that the new media he is discussing allows most people to break out of the traditional molds of how one needs to gain capital. One of the most important things on the web is that everyone is virtually equal. When one sees a post on a discussion board by “SilverSurfer86″, no one has any idea of the person’s age, expertise, race, or anything else that effects decisions in the real world. Anonymity is an incredible equalizer which I feel Agre did not address, but is one of the most important benefits of the internet.
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In the Valley of the Shadow website, one of the greatest resources is the map section. For a person to be able to tab from the written word to large maps I think is invaluable. It is always easier to picture distances and terrain with maps. Even on the most basic levels they were helpful: I thought the counties would be much closer than they turned out to be. Most books have some maps (even the fictional ones), but to be able to access so many different maps and to “interact” with a number of them was invaluable. I think that GIS stuff is one of the many tools that historians should use a lot more frequently because they are so effective. Even the Smithsonian site was like an interactive GIS map with which to navigate the museum. What were your thought about the use of maps as a tool of learning/teaching/navigating?
January 23rd, 2006 at 9:16 pm
I thought the same thing about search engines. It was really surprising to read the small portion of history departments that have a website that will come up on a search. You would think that would be very important. Of course, if you want to find a particular college/university’s history department, the easiest thing to do would go to the school website. So I am not certain its that big of a deal. On the other hand, the ability to be found by a search engine is very important for websites not affiliated with a college/university. Though, I wonder exactly how much control, if any, historians have on search engines picking up their sites.
Good point about Agre and social capital. I agree that the web can level the playing field. However, I think he was also arguing that socio-economic forces influence peoples access to information, such as the web. There is a big difference in being a kid with access to a computer and the internet at home. Compared to a kid who only uses computers at school or at the library. Though it is true that more and more households have computers and internet access.
January 23rd, 2006 at 10:11 pm
On the access question, it seems to me that there are a couple of points that bear further discussion:
1. On one hand, there’s the question of why historians might not be so good at things like search engine optimization (or even getting their pages into search engines in the first place); is it just that the people who’re making these sites aren’t sophisticated enough to handle search engines (doubtful), or rather that it’s just not seen as part of their traditional jobs? Is this a reflection on history in a digital context, or the relationship between historians and their audience across media?
2. About the access restrictions surrounding digital history resources: one of the biggest problems is the divide between “gated” materials and “open access” materials, something that we’ll come crashing up against next week when we talk about finding digital resources. In most cases, this is a division that’s fundamentally based on market economics and various attempts to restrict access in order to charge for it.
January 24th, 2006 at 12:20 am
I think maps are a great tool for teaching and learning. As we talked about in our Craft class, visualizations are not used frequently enough in history. You mentioned how great it is to be able to interact with the maps as well. I agree, and I thought that was a neat feature of the Smithsonian site too. Although the site itself isn’t really that helpful for research (and as Sarah mentioned, I’m not sure what you would really use it for) but the ability to manipulate and interact with the artifacts was pretty cool. That technology could definitely be used in other ways.
January 24th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
It is important that history websites utilize Yahoo and Google ot the best of there ability; however certain websites appear first, second, or third on search resultpages simply becuase they paid for that right. So I am not sure just how competative every history website can be with pages created by National Geographic, PBS, or the Discovery Channel.
January 24th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
The search engine question is particularly problematic for historians who want to reach beyond their traditional audience of fellow academics and students. If I understand my technophile friends correctly, Google, et.al. rank sites both by “purchased priority” (as Santral pointed out) and by the number of other sites linking to those sites. Perhaps web savvy historians should attempt to band together and link to each others’ pages as a way to increase the “relevancy” of carefully and thoughtfully produced history websites?
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