Conroy’s Corner

WARNING: If you are looking for a post related to the readings, this is not it. You will have to scroll down the page to find course related material. This post contains my personal ramblings…

Some members of the class have taken to going out for drinks and/or food after class on Tuesdays. It is a very fun time and an excellent opportunity to get to know one’s peers better. Unfortunately, our knowledge of the local bar scene is rather limited, although we are attempting to expand it. I personally am no longer content with venturing to the over-priced Guapo’s or to the Dancing Crab (formerly the Malt Shop). We went to Armand’s Pizzeria last week and that was excellent! A $7.50 all-you-can-eat pizza buffet (Tuesday special) and fairly reasonably priced drinks. Armand’s is currently the front-runner on my “going out after class” list. That being said, I encourage, nay, I demand additional options! Washington, DC bars and restaurants should be explored for the common good of all graduate students.

The unfortunate drawback to bars and restaurants (even the best of the two) is that they are expensive. Due to that regrettable fact, I propose a humble solution for this week’s quest for a going out location. You are all invited back to my house after class for some beer and chips (unless I eat them between now and Tuesday). I live a mile and a half from campus (2818 North Glade Street NW, Washington, DC 20016) and will drive to class for those who would like a ride.

The current selection of drinks are Bud Light, Corona, Root Beer, and water. If people would like to bring additional beverages or food, they are more than welcome. I will see you all in class on Tuesday and hopefully many of you afterwards chez moi.

After viewing the websites from this week and last week, I feel that when I create a website, history-based or otherwise, I want to include a section where people can contribute their own stories. While I found many of the stories to be rather run of the mill and not that interesting, they were still oddly addicting. I spent way more time reading the stories on the website than actually exploring the website. A lot of the additional exploring often came from someone referring to something in their story and instilling a desire for me to go look up similar things on the site. The personal anecdote has always been a great hook in my mind to draw people to a topic. To have a section on a website of only personal stories is brilliant (If you did not read this and immediately say it again in the Guinness voice, please try again…Brilliant!). Did anyone else feel the same draw to the personal stories? Did they influence you in exploring the website further, either positively or negatively?

In Digital History, the authors site a statistic by the Philadelphia Inquirer that “only about 10 to 15 percent of their 300,000 registered users had entered bad email addresses.”  What I want to know is what qualifies as a bad email address because that statistic seems skewed to me.  I always give real email addresses, but they are rarely email addresses that are “mine” (I always give the screenname + aol.com address even though I can never check it).  Also, I think that people do not have as big of concerns giving email addresses and other information to newspapers.  It would have been a truer statistic to have used an internet-only site that did not have a repudiated business attached to it.  What are your feelings on email addresses and giving yours out to websites?

I readily admit that I have used Amazon.com as an easy way to create a preliminary bibliography. Even one of my teachers privately recommended it to me. I also like to use it to read the Introduction of books (through the “Look Inside Feature”) I was supposed to buy or would buy. These facts are all an introduction to a query about SIPs. As described inWilliam Turkel’s Teaching Young Historians to Search, Spider and Scrape, an SIP (Statistically Improbable Phrase) is “a phrase that is common in the book you are looking at, but that doesn’t commonly appear in many other books.” Has anyone used this feature of Amazon or of a similar site before? It would seem to be a better way to find related books than “Other customers bought…”

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?

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