neylon

Edward Tufte’s unfettered hatred of Power Point in his book, The Cognitive Style of Power Point, actually was a little shocking.  I am rather ambivalent in my feelings towards this program, and I never realized that it could incite such strong feelings.  I understand Tufte’s points that the program disrupts the flow and limits the presentation, but I wonder if he is a little bit too harsh.  I have seen both good and bad presentations made with Power Point.  I found that the best presentations using this were ones that used actual pictures, not clip art, and if they used bullet points, it was merely to help the listener follow the speech.  The worst, on the other hand, used bad clip art that was actually distracting (I spent more time trying to figure out what the pictures were than listening to the speech), and they often used the text as the speech itself, and began reading from the screen.  In those cases, I did begin to wonder if the presenter even needed to be there.  I guess what it comes down to is that Power Point can be useful, if it is supplemental to the presentation, not the presentation itself.

I began thinking about my own upcoming presentation on my research paper on Chinatown, DC, and I actually began to stress a little bit.  It is almost assumed that I will use Power Point, especially because images are an important part of the analysis of my argument.  I am now concerned about how I will present my images if I use Power Point.  I am concerned about the quality, after reading Tufte’s criticisms of the program, but I do not think I really have a choice in how I will present the images.  All of these images only exist digitally, which seems to lend itself to Power Point.

I saw many references to slide projectors in the discussion thread about making presentations.  I have had plenty of experience with using slide projectors in presentations.  My experience with them is that there always seems to be something going wrong with them, the images are never quite in focus, and if the projector is old enough, the image can get a little lopsided if the legs are not sturdy enough.  This experience came from working at Gettysburg and presenting campfire programs.  The funny thing about all of this to me is that last summer people kept talking about how nice it would be to have a computer system at the amphitheatre so that we could use Power Point for the camp fires.  Do you think all of this comes down to a little bit of “the grass is always greener on the other side?”

All we have been talking about in class are uses of the internet in history (obviously, this is called Digital History), but I came across a blog this week that made me realize other uses for the internet and blogs, specifically.  I heard about a movie, I’m Reed Fish, and I wanted to know more about it.  I searched it in Google, since that is where I search for everything, and I found a blog for Reed Fish, the guy that made the movie.  I found myself going through the blog, and though it is not just about the movie, I learned more about what the movie is about, and I was able to see pictures from the filming.  After seeing all of this, I really want to see this movie.  If the only information I could find about this film was the vague information on other sites, I might have forgotten about the movie.  Anyway, the whole point of this is that the internet is an amazing advertising space, even if Reed Fish did not specifically intend for his blog to advertise the movie.

Some random thoughts on the reading for this week…

There is an interesting trade-off when using technology such as Flash.  It is great that there is such technology that makes your web page more interesting and perhaps more professional looking.  The only problem is, if you use Flash, it is harder for Google or other search engines to find the page.  This is actually disappointing.  Flash does a lot to make a website look nice, as well as allow visitors to interact with the pages.  There are great positives of Flash, but if the technology could end up limiting the number of people who ever find your page, is it worth it?  Digital History said that the search engines had most problems with sites that were heavily-laden with Flash, so I guess if you make sure to manage the amount of Flash you use, it would still be possible to make sure that people can find your site.  Otherwise, the ability to share your information with the world is somewhat limited.  This is another reason why it is very important to determine what the site is going to be before making it.  I would not want to spend the time and money to figure out how to use the program, just to determine that its use would be counterproductive.

I like the fact that we have our own spaces for websites through AU, but I seem some definite downsides to using the school’s server.  The biggest problem is that the URL is not memorable at all.  There is so much to it that even though I was just at my page the other day, I cannot remember how to get back there.  Though I do not really expect anyone to want to visit my site multiple times, if I decided to publicize the collecting site in some way, it would be convenient to provide the address so that people could go there on his or her own.  It would be great if the address were short and sweet, not complicated.  I always figure if there is a ~ in the address, it is really overly complicated.

We had talked about funding for sites through the NEH in previous classes, but I did not realize how many other places there are that could provide funds for creating sites.  I guess this is yet another reason that I should get some experience in grant writing.  I also find it encouraging that there are so many resources for funding online projects.  The academic world is sometimes slow in moving towards the use of new technology or even just new ways to look at history, but the use of the web in researching and publishing history has clearly been accepted, and will continue to change the way we look at “doing history.”

I was particularly struck by a point that was made in Digital History this week.  The comparison came in the sentence, “It would be a shame to “print” your website on the digital equivalent of the acidic paper used by many Victorian publishers, which is now rapidly deteriorating in libraries around the world.”  This sentence really made me think critically about digital history and the continued maintenance of information and sites.  The loss of access to most of the memories from the My History is America’s History website is pretty depressing.  I keep thinking about the possibility of creating a collection site for my project, but this is another problem that I would have to confront- how to make sure it keeps going, and remains available to the public.  There were some interesting suggestions in the chapter, including finding an institution to take over the website if I am unwilling or unable to maintain it myself.  I’m actually considering modeling my project on what someone else would be willing and eager to maintain for me if I do decide to stop working on it.

This week’s reading has only reaffirmed the discussion that we had last week, when a few people said that we have to re-save all of our documents periodically on new media, to make sure that nothing is lost over time.  I would hate to be an archivist, because my instinct is to back up and keep saving EVERYTHING.  When I did a class project at the Historical Society of Washington, DC, I was told to copy the newspaper articles in my collection onto acid free paper, and then throw everything else out.  There were so many newspaper articles that went into the trash, but weren’t copied either because they were not relevant to the collection.  Throwing things like this out is scary to me, because though we may not think something is important now, someone down the line may think it is.  In fact, I have run into this problem myself, where I wanted to see something that no longer exists because people at the time saw no importance in it.  But, with the amazing price drop in storage (Digital History said that in 1993 1 terabyte of digital storage space cost $5 million, and today it only costs $500), do we ever have to get rid of anything?  I understand the problems that the chapter raised, such as the inability to search the documents in the future due to the sheer numbers, but I also wonder about the longevity of the media on which the information is stored.  Is it possible that one day even the New York Times method of storage will turn out to deteriorate much sooner than they think?  At that size, how difficult would it be then to re-save all of that information?  And many years down the road, will the format used in the encoding be usable?  I’m starting to feel a little pessimistic about this whole thing…

I really enjoyed the Lifehacker site.  I was pretty interested in the procrastination article, though I disagree with it.  I don’t think I sabotage myself.  I’ll go back to the typical procrastinator defense- I work best under pressure.  But other than that posting, I was fascinated by the links to sites that I have never seen before in my life.  I never know that there was a site that would tell you how to do everything you would ever need to do in life.  I didn’t know that someone would need an instruction manual to introduce their kid to snow, or how to make a snow angel.  In fact, I don’t think such instructions existed before, and this brings me back to a question I ask myself all the time.  We are so used to using technology for everything, that we’ve become almost dependent on it- do people actually use it for things like instructions on making a snow angel, and if so, do they realize that we lived without things like this for many years?

Digitization is, in my opinion, a huge technological advance for researchers.  It is now possible to view and search many writings, and browse through photograph collections with a speed and ease that I would not have imagined a few years ago.  I discovered the online archives of the Cold War International History Project in my senior year of college, and was amazed at the number of sources I could look at without leaving school.  Without that archive, I would not have been able to research and write about Cold War history for my thesis.  I believe that everything that we should digitize everything we can.  Though it is not always a replacement for the original, when provenance and the social biography of the information or object are important, I think that digitization is an important democratization of access to our cultural heritage.

One of the important things that we have to remember when considering digitization is the audience.  As Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig point out in Digital History, historians must analyze the audience for potential digitized materials to determine whether that audience is real.  This makes sense, because it is important to have a resource that many people will use, in order to make the expense of digitization worthwhile.  Unfortunately, this limits the creativity of researchers who are unable to travel to the location of the materials they need.  If their topic of interest is not a popular one, it is not worth it to reproduce it digitally.  Do you think we will reach a point where it will be economically viable to digitize even the obscure papers, photographs, etc.?

I found it very interesting that outsourcing occurs in this field, as well, and that outsourcing of digitization to other countries is hidden because of the surrounding political controversy.  I understand outsourcing to other companies, because of the cost benefits, but I wonder about the reliability.  Maybe I just am very hands-on, but I prefer doing things myself.  However, when many of the places that need to digitized information do not have a lot of money to put towards it, do they have much of an option?

I am working on a research project about Chinatown in Washington, DC.  There has not been a whole lot written about its history, so I want to use all available sources to create a full picture of its past.  I have many images from the 1980s on, but only one from the first half of the 20th century.  I would love to use a website as a collecting tool for this project, but after reading the chapter about collecting online in Digital History and discussing these ideas in class, I am not sure that this would be a viable option for me.  I would really want to reach an older audience, who might not even use the internet, let alone have the capability to provide me with digitized versions of old photographs of the area.  I also realized the full extent of the work required to advertise a collecting site.  I wonder how long it would take to get real, valuable reactions to my questions and requests.  I am thinking it would be longer than the time I have to research and write this paper.  I also do not know if I am ready to try to judge the validity of any responses I might get.  The whole process is much more time consuming than I would have previously thought.

I found the discussion of collecting history online interesting.  While there are issues, as we saw with the National Geographic website for Pearl Harbor, the benefits of this method of collection are clear.  There will be a few “bad” responses, but I found it encouraging that they have found that most people answer honestly.  I think that this method is just as valid as that of oral history, as long as the historian keeps the same possible problems in mind for online history as for oral history.  When we use personal narratives about an event that occurred a long time ago, the information from the narrative must be taken with a grain of salt, because you cannot be sure how accurate the subjects’ memories are going to be.  Broad, sweeping questioning may be the best way to get as much information as possible when memories might not be that great anymore, and because some people see specific questions as a sort of test and attempt to provide the answer they think the researcher is looking for.  However, general questioning is not always enough; follow-ups after someone answers an online survey would help to get more details when necessary.  I think it would be great if researchers had the time to follow up on many of the stories gathered online, because people usually do have more to say that could be valuable.

My main question about gathering information online is how to handle responses that may be outside the scope of the research.  For example, some people responded to the video store project with stories of working for a store after the date range.  Should a researcher who runs into this issue discard the information, or incorporate it into the work in some way?  Do you think there is a sort of ethical dilemma in discarding this information?

The September 11 Digital Archive’s use of qualitative analysis in examining the submissions on the site was a way of using online history I had not considered.  The analysis showed the true ways that the country reacted to the events of that day.  The findings that nationalism was not the most common immediate response to September 11, but that the responses were much more personal, were very telling of how people view their lives, and more importantly to historians, their history.  People are far more likely to remember things in personal terms, because as important as a person’s country may be to him/her, it is his/her personal life that is most important.  Everyone connects to the broader, national picture, but mostly through the personal ties and experiences.

As for the searching, spidering, and scraping, I was with the author up until he began to talk about spidering.  I understand what he was getting at, but I don’t think I could fully comprehend it with my nonexistent knowledge of programming.

When I began reading for this week, I became interested in the many similarities in issues of digital history to that of museums. It is important to predict and understand your audiences for both, but it is impossible for a museum curator or a website developer to control who the audience will be in a free, open space. Trends in the two also seem to be similar, with the creation of spaces in which visitors can comment on the exhibits, both on the web and in the museum. This is an important aspect of interactivity because it does democratize the process, as people who were unable to write the history become able to influence the exhibitions or sites. This can become a problem, however. While working in the Whatever Happened to Polio? exhibit at the Smithsonian, I read many comments that people had written that disrespected the struggle of polio victims, and were very offensive. I found this same problem on the National Geographic website for Pearl Harbor. I think it is very important to create boundaries to prevent posting such comments, but this seems to be much easier to do in a museum than on a website, which may receive so many postings that it is no longer feasible to check each posting before it is visible to the public. The democratization of history in museums and on the web is a positive trend, but I wonder about the difficulties created by the limitations of the internet.

Another question came to mind as I read the first chapter of Digital History. It is interesting to consider the possibility of web-published articles within the field of history, but I wonder if these articles, if published outside of the realm of established historical journals, such as the JAH, could ever have and maintain the same respectability of the peer-reviewed journal articles.

I appreciate the value of discussion on the internet, such as that on the website of images of the French Revolution. One of the interesting discussions looked at “the power of images in establishing ‘historical memory.’ This discussion brought up common issues of visual and material culture. These include the struggle over how to use images- whether historians can take them as a literal documentation of history, or whether they are more of a documentation of the popular perceptions of the historical events. Despite this struggle, images are able to create a fuller understanding of history that textual documents cannot provide. The final statement in this discussion particularly intrigued me. This statement was that “Some historians have paid so little attention to images that when they include illustrations in their books they sometimes, in effect, misinform their readers. One might even say that they dispense false knowledge.” I was wondering what other people thought about this idea, and whether this is a problem that historians need to address by making further use of images.