Conroy’s Corner

I began this project, sure of my historical knowledge and incredibly concerned about the technology.  I thought my idea about showing the monuments and some other points of interest in DC was a good idea, and my historical explanation of planned connections among monuments or other powerful symbols in Washington, DC, such as the White House and the Capitol building, would add an extra component to my research that would make it unique.  Instead of gathering sources and immediately beginning research, as I would have done with a typical research assignment, I decided to tackle the technology issue first.  I wanted to use a map in order to really give people a feeling of the spatial orientation of things in Washington, DC.  Although not on a strict grid like Philadelphia or many western cities, Washington is obviously a very planned city, and a map could allow people to experience certain aspects of the city before their visit.

The technology was difficult, but tools already available online to make Google Maps made the project feasible.  The big problem with the Google Map Maker was that it forced me to work in the code because I could not use Dreamweaver or some other program to design a website in a more What You See Is What You Get program.  The code was very, very hard.  I spent hours going through the code and adding things to make the pop-ups appear formatted and make sure each point was the right size and at the right location.  The incredibly annoying thing about the code was the smallest error threw off everything.  An extra carrot meant that my quotations wouldn’t appear, but the code of the map would become e readable.  An extra semicolon or a slight change in a number sequence resulted in points on my map disappearing.  Other mistakes, I still am not sure exactly what they were, caused the map to disappear completely.  They were the scary mistakes.  One moment I had a map and then the next second, after typing simple historical content into a pop-up, everything was gone.

Eventually, technology and I meshed and I was able to complete the map and have all of my points with their small historical blurbs to let people know what they were looking at and where they could go to learn more.  The next part then became the in depth research.  I had finally made it to the easy part: history…if only that had been true.  I went to the library and searched online for books on my topic.  There were not only no books on Washington monuments that were connected, which I already knew didn’t exist, the amount of research on any of the monuments was negligible.  I found out information about the Washington Monument by reading books on Washington and not by locating some book on monuments.  American University Library had absolutely nothing to offer.  George Washington University Special Collections had a number of original documents concerning the monuments, but they were hard to obtain and didn’t look like they would be much help.  Stumped at the library, I decided to turn to the professors that had inspired this project.  I met Professor Ed Smith, director of the American Studies department, with the hope that he could point me toward some better books.  He had given a Civil War tour of Washington, DC in the fall and knew all sorts of things about the monuments, the city, and various trivial facts.

Professor Smith hit me with a bombshell.  “Well,” he mused, “to tell you the truth, there really aren’t any books about what you are asking me and the other research is very hard to find.  I would recommend that you look at Thomas Mahon original 1901 plan for Washington, DC and draw your conclusions from that.  I also have a good friend who might be able to help, but he is very busy so only use him as a last resort.”  I ended up not contacting the friend at all because of time constraints and already having been warned that he was very busy.  “In terms of everything I know about the monuments,” Professor Smith continued, “I’m afraid that I know so much because I am good friends with too many people who work for the National Park Service down here and I go to a number of their functions where they discuss these little known facts as part of everyday conversation.”  I was devastated.  The part of the project that I had been most confident in and comfortable with blew up in my face. The lack of books on my topic I had not been too concerned about because I had these great professors to use as a resource, and I figured they could point me in to the right references.  Instead, they turned out to be the only resources and most of my “research” became hearsay history.

I tried not to let the discovery of how much original research I would have to do discourage me.  I returned to my Washington books and began researching the man behind the monument so that I could explain certain things about the monument.   I liked the result but I had wasted too much time.  I was once again in a predicament of technology against research.  The due date for the website was swiftly approaching and although I had a map, I had not formatted the rest of the website.  I returned to the lab to design the rest of the website, leaving the completion of the research for later.  I ended up confronting a lot of little hurdles in my website design.  Fortunately for me, Sarah Brockett had also used a Google Map and had a great website design, so she was able to help me with how to add tables in a way that would keep my website very ordered.  Her help was invaluable.  When I finally finished the website, I was ecstatic.  It looked better than I had hoped, and although I wanted (needed) a lot more research, I figured I’d be working on it through the summer anyway and I could fill in the history at my own pace.  At least the website itself was done.  I breathed a sigh of relief.

Then technology troubles struck again.  Everything worked great at school.  Everything appeared good from my home computer.  I decided I wanted to re-center some things and perhaps change the size of the full screen map, but everything was still working properly.  I even showed my parents the website, and it worked for them at home.  That was a really good test since they are not the most computer literate people in the world.  Then I discovered a problem.  When trying to access the website from work, nothing appeared.  I did not understand.  Then I realized my fatal mistake.  I had been using Mozilla for all of my tests.  Internet Explorer somehow would not display my Google map and displayed a light blue, blank page instead.  I would have to dig back into the code and see if I could fix the error.  Unfortunately, I could not figure it out.  After my finals, I am going to go back and recreate the page with some slight changes with the hope that IE will recognize it.  All of my other pages appear with Internet Explorer, just not the main page.  Time had run out on this semester though, so all I could do was hang my head and shake it slightly in disbelief.  That darn “best laid plans of mice and men…” quote cycled through my brain.

In retrospect, I would change a number of things about this project but keep the main parts of it the same.  Technology definitely improved this project.  I learned I needed to test my website from a greater variety of computers, but I am still happy with the end result.  The historical research I short-changed myself on because of my fear of disaster while dealing with the new technology, and I clearly would have benefited from a week of evenings spent at the Library of Congress.  Overall, I learned an immense amount.  I am confident in building websites, although now that my free trial of Dreamweaver has expired, I’ll have to buy it or always have access to a lab.  The Google Map Maker was a tremendous tool that I will use again and will actively search for other similar tools that make entering data and creating a map that much easier.  My project turned out not as great as I had hoped but better than I expected.  I plan on continue to use the website and building more and more to clearly demonstrate how powerful the web can be as a tool of research and presentation for history professionals.  I am confident that, largely thanks to the knowledge obtained through this semester in class and from experimenting online with class assignments, I will succeed.

Here is a link to my final website: Explore DC

http://eagle1.american.edu/~ec9128a/ExploreDC

I edited the wikipedia post on Daniel Boone. I added to his early life section by talking about his education briefly and about having to tend cattle as a ten year old boy. In addition, I also contributed the first two stories under folklore, which discussed him shooting a panther as a young boy and about punching some girls in the face.

I felt that they would be fun adds and are all accurate and well researched (he was part of my thesis).

Having talked about the “discussion” page of wikipedia. I have returned to the wikipedia article to answer people’s inquiries about a bibliography.  I may also comment on the tale of Daniel Boone almost mistakenly shooting his future wife but that will take a lot more time.  In short, the general story is popular, but I never read/heard about a deer having blue eyes.

After perusing the history blogosphere and history carnival and reading Mark Grimsley’s article on Custer and the Art of Blogging as well as Shannon Howard’s article championing blogging,  I am really convinced of the benefit and necessity of a blog for a historian.  While I understand that blogging can be “shameless self-promotion” as Grimsley hints, I feel that it is also very humbling.  As a blogger, you put your ideas and thoughts out on display for not only your friends, family, and colleagues to read but for the entire world.  Once an idea is put into words, people easily have the means to critique it and rip it apart.  These often humbling criticisms and suggestions are invaluable.  Few deny the positive results that come from having others input on their work and blogging enables more people than ever to read it.  I would never send a paper through the mail or even over email to many people I know, but they will happily access it online and can comment right in the web browser.  Shannon Howard makes this point in her article.  She also argues that by posting your ideas in the public sphere with a timestamp actually helps protect them too.  This was something that I believe more firmly after last week’s readings on and discussion of copyright.

The History Carnival site seems like a wonderful site to make an initial posting on a large idea.  I would think that if one posted a brief article, almost like a proposal, with some initial research that would help claim the topic as your purview as well as open it up to a huge and interested audience for input.  I believe that this class has opened us up to a just blossoming world of history blogging, and we have a rare opportunity to participate in the early stages of what I believe will become a mainstay of the history community and education.  It seems that there are a number of very young historians who have made good names for themselves blogging, and as a twenty-something myself, this encourages me to get out there and blog often.

Besides the typical blog that we have been exposed to thus far, the Pepys Diary website is a fascinating use of the blog.  User contributions make the journal a warehouse of historical information.  As wikipedia and similar sites grow in popularity and in quality of information they offer, Pepys Diary has taken the lead.  The one criticism that I had of the website is that I did not like how links opened up in the same window as opposed to opening a new one.  By clicking on a link to read more information about a character in the diary, I lost my spot reading and had to navigate backwards to return to the main text as opposed to just minimizing or exiting the window with the supplemental information.  Did anyone else find this annoying?  The idea of user contributions to the historical diary I think is ingenious.  It allows people to share what is often rather esoteric knowledge and explore their own areas of historic interest.  In addition, I feel that personal accounts are always a much easier way to get people involved in history.  By reading a real person’s diary and learning about a historical world through his eyes, readers can realize the beauty and enticement of history and historical research.  Pepys Diary is yet another example of how user input to a site is an invaluable but often overlooked tool.

As reading the blogs for this week and watching tv, I heard about an interesting book prize: the Blooker Prize. Since we are studying blogs this week, I thought it would be fun to post a little about it. The Blooker Prize is a prize awarded to a book that began as a blog. This is the British man that BBC was reporting on today, but an American cookbook won the prize (just announced today).

I always enjoy finding things I’m studying in the daily news, so if you have a moment, look at the clip.

Copyright, as it relates to online publishing, is a fascinating issue to study.  The chapter in digital history does an excellent at explaining the basic law and also identifying the grey area in which many digital publications play.  Although Phil mentioned it in his presentation about his jazz project, reading about how Scott Alexander tightrope walks along the line of copyright infringement by having streaming audio makes one seriously wonder about copyright laws and how they are enforced.

I feel that understanding the copyright for images and audio is the most difficult.  I feel that almost any image I can think of is available online somewhere for free.  I would have a very difficult time in determining what was copyrighted and what I should feel free to use as I wish.  I would be willing to (and intend to) cite where I obtained images, but I would not pay some annual fee to have a copy of a print on my website.  The court seems to reverse its own decision so often that it is difficult to keep up.  Tying in some reading from another class, Martin Sklar (in the awful, horrific, sluggish book The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism) writes that in American Society, laws reflect the society and change in accordance to its needs as opposed to controlling the change of society.  It is a nice notion, but I am not sure how much I believe in its truth.  Society, in my opinion, pushes more and more strongly for free access and rights to everything online, but powerful lobbying interest (like the RIAA) have quashed a lot of the free sharing online.

Since I am already on the subject of the RIAA and mentioned Scott Alexander earlier, audio presents a whole different problem.  Even if I pay for a download from Napster so I can use it freely (as all good Napster users do), can I only stream it from my website?  Can’t people record that streaming audio as well?  If I have paid for the song, is it mine to use as I see fit?  All of these questions swirled around my head as I read.

One thing that Cohen and Rosenzweig did not address that I think is important is the use of television clips.  People always (my lifetime) have been able to record television shows and share them with their friends.  Now with things like TiVo and simple computer programs and hookups, people can record television shows to their computers.  Would I be able to post clips online without worry?  Undoubtedly, every popular television show and many unpopular ones will release DVD box sets.  Clearly copying them would be copyright infringement, but what if I have compiled my own copies from personal recordings?  Confusion abounds.

Indy Junior Maps  -  http://www.bryanboyer.com/indyjunior/

Diary of Samuel Pepys  -  http://www.pepysdiary.com/

This is how a book combined displaying images and historic text

Refdesk claims to be “the single best source for facts.”  I agree.  It is like having an entire library on one webpage, yet despite the quantity of information, designer Bob Drudge has created a clear and easily navigable site.  The design is simple.  The site has three main columns and two halves.  The left column contains search engines and links to websites that most would use to find the answer to any question.  The right column contains constantly updating news headlines and links to various news sources.  That leaves the middle column to analyze.  The middle column changes everyday.  It is where one finds the site, word, thought, quote, of the day and other daily fun facts.  In addition to all of these facts, search tools, and headlines contained in the top half of the website, the bottom half contains even more specific links.

In the bottom half of the website, the user encounters a gigantic wave of links to satisfy any surfing desire.  The links are in clear subdivisions, but even if you can’t find something, the typical search function works on every word on the page.

Some people will find the site too cluttered, but open the mind and enjoy the rush of links.  This is the ultimate reference website and can be used to find anything and answer any question.  Use it often and try the ad-free design!

IPod as the Bathtub