Conroy’s Corner

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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