TheLen

Honestly, I hate admitting I don’t know things. My sister loves to tell me “You don’t know!” — especially when I would respond to anything she told me with “I know.” So, it was interesting for me to be in a class where I had no delusions of knowing and no investment in denying my ignorance. Of course, I still didn’t ask questions every time I didn’t know or didn’t understand something and I certainly didn’t learn everything I need to know to use digital media/technologies as effectively as I know they can be used.

That said, I learned a lot this semester and the final project for this class was possibly one of the most concretely useful assignments I’ve had in my (too, too) many years of school.[1] Building a personal quasi-database from my research was both incredibly challenging and rewarding. Fortunately, someone else did the hard technical part – writing the software that makes a wiki work – and all I had to do was add content.

At least, I thought all I had to do was add content.

Unlike other semester projects, particularly term papers, this project let me truly explore the potential of digital research tools – wikis and the digital pictures I take at archives– but also forced me to think through concrete organizational concerns. When I write a research paper, I usually think of what I want to say, gather my information, and let the organization take care of itself. I’m a well-trained writer, so I can usually use words to make a poorly-organized paper coherent and comprehensible. However, since this wiki didn’t have transitions in the normal sense of the term, I couldn’t get very far without organization. It feels like the main pages of my wiki went through hundreds of incarnations before I found an organizational structure that let me make the wiki software do what I wanted – and the only way I was able to get that far was by creating multiple “slush” pages with discarded organizational structures (check out the “home” page of my wiki) or random notes to self (see the “README” page). Even though I only put information about a few groups in this incarnation of the wiki, I already have a better sense of the groups (individually and collectively) and their relationships with each other and the Nixon White House than I did when I started working with this wiki.

Much of this new understanding comes from the many tools built into my wiki (I used a free personal wiki from www.pbiki.com). Discovering, understanding, appreciating, and using these tools was much harder than I expected. When I started this project, I thought I already knew how to use the wiki software since I had been playing with a purely personal – and extremely informal and disorganized – wiki for a few months. I quickly learned that making an organized, intuitive, and truly useful research wiki would take a lot more time and mental energy than the chaos of to-do lists in my other wiki. This wiki, on the other hand, is formatted and even has tables of contents for individual pages – it’s been a fascinating learning experience for me!

When I first started playing with the organization and formatting of my wiki, I quickly realized that I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with the site. It had been incredibly easy all semester to say, “I’m going to make a research wiki on pro-Vietnam War groups,” but actually doing it – writing the pages and planning the site – forced me to realize how little useful thought I had put into my dissertation. Starting the project, I assumed that my pre-dissertation-proposal thinking would transfer (seamlessly) to the website. After all, I had already thought through what I needed to know about the different groups, as well as what I want to focus on for my dissertation. Needless to say, I was a little too optimistic. Working on this project was the first time I forced myself to isolate the different pro-war groups from the larger movement and I spent a lot more time digging through my research than I would have liked.

Although it was very frustrating to spend so much time digging through books, notes, and printed pictures, constructing the wiki after I had a good idea of the direction of the dissertation did help me to organize the wiki so that it will have the greatest potential to support my research without needing to be restructured any time soon. Of course, I won’t be certain of this wiki’s usefulness until I write my dissertation and finish graduate school. But, seeing as I plan to continue using the wiki, I can confidently say that it has met (and exceeded) my expectations. I hoped this wiki would help me keep the different groups and their pro-war activities organized and it has helped me to find connections between the groups and the Nixon Administration that I missed the first time around. Even the tedious organizing process has been useful beyond the digital world as my thinking about my topic became more organized with the wiki. Now, I have an outline on the major activities of each group as well as a solid understanding of how each group related to the Nixon Adminsitration and the larger pro-war movement and this understanding will be invaluable as I revise my dissertation proposal and eventually write the dissertation.

I will definitely use a wiki to organize my research in the future – the ease of clicking between pages or windows to see connections and access details is priceless – but I hope I will learn from my own mistakes in the future. Particularly, I hope that I:

• sift through my research – and research notes – after each day of research, and add relevant information to any and all sections of the project wiki it *might* relate to
• link bibliographic information and notes to each other and to relevant pages of primary source information
• learn how to make an image into a thumbnail that links to the full-size picture of the relevant document(s) – if I get the hang of this, I might even pay for more storage
• write out my goals and plans for the research project and how I think the wiki will support those goals
• force myself to find ways to fit the above ideas into pages with one-word titles (before I start the project, instead of half-way through when I have to go back and rename all the important pages and change all of the links)