suckow

Hi. Hope all the end of the year stuff came together for everybody. Posting this a bit early because I need to spend the next few days working on my thesis. Let me know if the file will not open.677postmortem1.doc

Hopefully the ChallengerColumbia site is linked here.

Added two sentence halves to the Apollo 1 article. Also made an addition of one paragraph to the Apollo Program article, added the paragraph referencing the CEV.

Reading over the Rosenzweig article on Wikipedia was interesting. Had not had a professional historian’s take on it, most of the critique I have run into is from the geek standpoint. I would agree that Wikipedia’s articles can be somewhat superficial, light on interpretation, from the perspective of a historical narrative. However, it is meant as an encyclopedia, which typically does not have much interpretive heft either. There are exceptions, of course, those tend to be profession or even genre specific. It is useful for the types of things encyclopedias do, provide basic information on a topic (names, dates, etc) or as a quick reference. Wikipedia does have a pronounced advantage, particularly for those with a short attention span. The articles are interlinked, so you can start looking up one thing and wind up somewhere completely different. On the way, there is a chance to pick up a lot of extra knowledge. There are issues with Wikipedia of course, the recent vandalism of some Congresspeople’s biography originating from Congressional offices mentioned another course blog, and the Kennedy assassination hoax mentioned by Rosenzweig, for example. The anarchy of it can be problematic. However, the anarchy of it means that the people who write and edit the articles are those who are really interested in the subject, and who will go the extra mile. This is not a case of entries written for a paycheck. The fact that partisans are writing and editing means there is a bias involved, but there always is in historical writing (sometimes as egregious as in some of the Wikipedia articles!) because historians, like everyone else, write about what fascinates them and write from their particular socio/economic/political viewpoint. The most important thing is to get people to develop the habit of critically analyzing what they read and see rather than to take any source as authoritative.

The history blogs we were to look over were quite interesting. Makes it quite clear that a historian can write for a mixed academic and nonacademic audience. There are some personal factors involved in one’s relative success in this endeavor. Some historians just cannot get out of academic jargon because of a fixed mindset and as a result will find their audience  narrowed and mainly academic. For others, they just tend write clunky prose and people will be less willing to wade through to get at what they are trying to say (guilty as charged, your honor).

For those who can write engagingly and on a set of topics of wide interest among the public, or on life, the universe and everything with history thrown into the mix, there is a definite chance to get people interested in history who would not necessarily run into it outside the blogsphere. It may not be “academic caliber writing,” but one may have the opportunity to provide an entrypoint to it for the reader. Furthermore, writing for a nonacademic audience can force the historian writing the blog to see whether they are clear in their own mind about what they are trying to say. Sometimes, peel away the academic jargon and what is left is fuzzy thinking or a rather obvious point.

The readings were interesting, though not entirely useful for what I am doing. It does look like, from what Rosenzweig and Cohen wrote, that I am going to have to settle for links to the news stories, rather than actually archiving the sites as it would be a copyright violation. Over the long term, if I can keep up the site, perhaps I can seek out copyright permissions on each item.

A couple issues are left that none of the readings dealt with. First of all, are blogs copyrighted material? They are obviously a form of intellectual property, but do they have the same legal status as copyrighted material? Or can they be pulled in their entireity as long as the original source is attributed, like a public domain item?

Somewhat related, is forum threads. There is a major orphan work problem. They have multiple authors, usually pseudonymous, and are in a public forum. But do they fall under public use?

Apologies for the unreadable proposal. Hopefully this fixed the broken link issue. 677Projectproposal.doc

The site I picked is www.space.com.

It is a very “busy” site, but manages look professional while doing so. The graphics are clean and high-quality. The layout of the site is such that the important stuff is center left and your eye immediately goes to it. The rest is arranged around it with the site navigation on the top and rest down the right and below. While there are ads, they are related to the sight and not obtrusive in any way. It includes streaming video and images but none take over the page as soon as you visit, you have to click to get them.

The reading in Digital History for this week raise a lot of interesting points. Most important, I think is finding the right level of aesthetics versus content. We’ve all dealt with pages, admittedly more and more being leftovers from the early days of the web, where there just seems to be “no there there,” just a list of links down a white page. On the other end, there are also a lot of pages where the effort to make them works of art has just about crowded out the content. After a certain point one reaches overload, and use of the “bells and whistles” looks amateurish rather than otherwise. The standard we expect tends to vary by domain name, a .org or a .edu should look better than a .com unless it is an obvious personal page without academic content.

Neither is design everything. A site with a sufficiently illustrious brick and mortar organization, a high-level domain, and good content can overcome design issues. The preceding link is the first one you come to when you look up “Challenger accident” on Google. This despite the fact that it looks more like a personal page and has not been updated since 1997.

The theory section of the readings was interesting. The question of censorship remains a potential problem, as it is considerably easier to block or alter items on the Net than than print (not to mention often leaving less of a trail). The recent attempts by the Chinese government to censor search results and wikis comes to mind. However, there is less finality to such attempts at censorship. They can in turn be altered. Firewalls and other blocks can be gotten around far more easily than one can find another print copy of a samizdat work. And such attempts at censorship must be by their very nature brazen rather than covert. There is no sneaking into libraries here. Open acts, though, are often more resented and protested than covert. The ability of history to remain “official” has in a large part been removed by its move onto the Net.

While electronic resources can create a more convenience store “grab and go” mentality towards the utilization of books and documents, when used entirely as a searchable item, they do provide a definite extension of reach when used like their paper counterparts. Archives are open without travel and books can be borrowed and read without leaving the house. Not to mention the amount of shelf space saved which can be turned over to favorite or needed print works. For example, in my bookmarks folder I have no less than three rather large dictionaries/lexicons (two foreign language, one technical), at least one of which would be multivolume in print. Instead of buying that half-shelf, there is a half-shelf of material in my field of interest. So, e-books can not only be of use as a reference in and of themselves, but allow one more freedom and money to stock a print library. After all, though the revolution towards a more electronic future for historical scholarship is coming, in the meantime, the likely book crash for most of us is from overstuffed shelves.

Historical scholarship using hypertext certainly seems to be a promising field. For starters, it helps escape some of the “format tyranny” inherent in publishing in a scholarly journal (x number of words, set out in x columns, etc). And, it allows one be creative in how to present one’s work. How much a scholar takes advantage of the flexibility is entirely up to them. Furthermore, the author has a far larger potential audience, since anyone may come across his/her work via a search or link, rather than being confined to the more limited number who come across the issue of the print journal in which they are featured. It also enhances the experience of the reader considerably. In an article which takes more advantage of the medium, the experience can take on a certain “Choose Your Own Adventure” quality, the reader can go off on a tangent which interests them and perhaps get more from the site than they would from having picked up the journal and thumbed through it looking for items of interest. Further, finding a particular note and reference is as simple as clicking a link, no paging back and forth muttering imprecations on the author and editor for using endnotes. Given the prevelence of scholarly articles online, one can even easily check the author’s evidence with a single click. Unfortunately, like all digital media, there is the problem of impermanence. The work can be lost if the website is not kept up, if the site changes domains but does not notify those who link to it of the shift, etc. Unlike a print journal which has many copies and potential places to be archived, unless the originating author or organization keeps up the site, that’s it. The practice of using hypertext may revolutionize historical scholarship, but unless it keeps an eye on itself, it will be a revolution that in future has little of its own history left.