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A lot of items exist on the Challenger and Columbia accidents on the Net. On the document side of things, collecting is going to be a matter of sorting through too much rather than having very little. As Columbia occurred recently, much of the news reporting was done on the Internet as well as print and television media and a surprising amount of it is still out there. Space enthusiasts have maintained an interest in Challenger and since they tend to be fairly tech-savvy, a great deal of documents in regards to Challenger have been digitized and placed here and there on the Net over the years. Not all of which has remained, unfortunately.

There is also an interesting subset of personal musings out there, about which I am of two minds about including. Both accidents have generated a number of hoaxes and conspiracy theories. I would like to include them as cultural artifacts as they say something about how people have responded to the accidents at the time and since. However, some relating to Columbia are anti-Semitic, because of the presence of an Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, aboard the mission. There may also be some similar problems with Challenger and I just have not found them yet. I do not want to condone or appear to condone such views in any way, but they are a response to the disaster and I think the bad should be remembered along with the good.

I was very impressed with the 9/11 site (http://911digital archive.org) and would like to do something similar. It does a very good job of combining and balancing the collection of personal artifacts (stories, images, etc) and documents while making the two sides seem like parts of a whole rather than segregated areas. I would like to do a project rather like that, including both document and personal sides, and if possible multimedia collections as well. Probably a bit ambitious for a first try, but I’d rather fail while daring greatly.
Topicwise, I would like to do it on the Challenger and Columbia accidents. The Challenger accident is my first memory of a nationally significant event and as a space enthusiast pretty much ever since, Columbia hit hard. So, it is a topic of both personal and historical interest. Challenger particularly hit the nation in a strong way, it was the first time the U.S. had lost a crew in flight. The presence of Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space, heightened the media and national interest at the time and since. There is a collecting site for Challenger by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), but it is in rather bad shape. A number of the links are dead, including the one which led to personal stories. Columbia is still fairly recent in memory, and like 9/11, a lot of people created tribute images and multimedia in response to the accident. None of this has been centralized and some may have been lost already. The Columbia accident also had a rather widespread effect, the accident took place over land and many people in the Southwest, especially Texas, saw the accident as it happened, wound up with debris literally in their backyard, or helped search for debris. There are a lot of personal stories out there which are not collected and the memory at this point would still be fairly fresh.

If one is collecting blogs on a subject from the Net as opposed to soliciting contributions, is it a violation of copyright to not seek the blog writer’s permission first as it is their intellectual property? Or is it a case of an item in the public domain?

The ability, as a result of collections on the Net, to collect history related to pretty much any aspect of human experience is quite impressive. The primary discussion in Digital History was about collecting information and sites before they disappeared due to the ephemeral nature of the Net. Yet, the collections of these sites and information suffer from the same issue as what is being collected, they themselves belong to a relatively ephemeral medium. Except for those groups which are fortunate to have “brick and mortar” backing or a very dedicated person or group willing to keep it alive over a long period of time, the collections themselves can (and sometimes do) disappear and the information is lost with them. So, in digital archives, there is the additional problem of history being lost because the archive itself has evaporated. However, due to the shear number of sites on pretty much any topic out there, one can be assured that what will be preserved, and the amount easily accessible, will be far more than at any time in previous history. Cultural historians will likely have a field day with what we considered important to preserve.

Looking over the websites for this week and last, there is a definite effort to incorporate oral history, and like oral history done face to face, it has its ups and downs. For example the “dude U.S.S. Arizona” post on the National Geographic website. The problem of checking veracity is magnified on the Net, especially when there are no means to track down the original poster.  The sites have taken a variety of approaches to this, from not doing anything at all (Nat Geo), to placing a statement that all entries are included despite possible misinformation because that emotion etc is part of the history too (9/11), to including a space for store locations so the very basic facts at least can be checked (video proj). Which approach do you favor? Or do you think it could be done better and if so, how?

Unrelated note, does anyone know of a good book on President Johnson’s foreign policy that is not about Vietnam? Having trouble locating anything useable for a project I am working on.

Given the wide range of education by users on the Net, and the increasing reliance of K-12 students on Net research as a primary if not sole tool of research, is it an obligation to “pitch” what one places out on the web to a certain level of education (provided that the site is not intended to be aimed solely within the historical profession) in order for it to be of maximum use? Or is it a matter of doing what one is comfortable with and hoping the audience will manage? Reason I ask is I have run across some history sites which are apparently meant to be popular use sites but use language more frequently found in Ph. D dissertations.

Near the end of his article, Agre asks the question of how an authentic community voice can be maintained and how a community’s collective cognition can be designed to be immune to corruption by advertisers and other outside interested parties. With the advent and explosion of blogs and forums on the Net (and media which access it) in which communities have greater control over their creation and maintainance, as well as a wider range of what is allowable in its internal discourse, is Agre’s concern less warranted? Or is the potential for misinformation and cooptation of communities greater without the mediation of a controlling (but almost certainly biased) central entity?

Looking over the JAH review guidlines, chnm.gmu.edu/jah/index.html, I noticed that one of the things discussed was navigation and design issues (i.e. how well written and how easy it is to move around within the site) and it also made an interesting comparison to book reviewing in that regard. To comment on navigation is a necessity for web pages, but is considered rarely a point of comment for books, generally noted only when the book is obviously flawed in that regard. Would history book writing improve if issues of navigation and design were taken as seriously for books as for webpages? Or would such a requirement be an unnecessary sidetrack for a writer?

So there is something here besides “Hello world,” welcome to my history class blog. Q’apla for your semesters.