TheLen

This blog started as a requirement for a requirement for my digital history tool of research (TOR).  Using it to post responses to the weekly reading assignments and comment on other students’ posts, I started to appreciate the role of an academic blog as a sort of middle ground between researching/thinking and a final, written product.  Mark Grimsley’s “Custer and the Art of the Blog” series of posts at his blog, Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, really helped change my mind about blogging and academia.

After the class ended, I found myself thinking of new blog posts — most for myself than for an audience — and decided to continue using this blog to explore some of the ideas and issues tied to my TOR.  So, the tags to the right of the screen link to different aspects of either the digital history class (weekly writing, web review, final project), as well as other parts of the TOR including wikis, blogs, teaching, Scribe, research, and how I see the internet and digital technology changing academia.

The odds and ends category covers things that I found interesting and tangentially relevant, but that didn’t fit into any of the other categories — from a picture of my car accident to a Washington Post article about Wikipedia.

My ideas about blogs in history classes are pretty similar to my thoughts on wikis in educational settings. There’s a lot of potential, but I’m still not sure how things will work out. That said, I do have some ideas about how I’d like to at least try to use blogs in my classes in the future.

I really like the idea of having a structured, moderated course blog. I would be able to post readings and know they wouldn’t change while the students would have the freedom to express themselves and engage their classmates in the comments section of the blog. I also really like the idea of breaking the class into groups — possibly by research interests — and having each group create a blog about their subject as well as the research process.

Similarly, individual students or groups of students could be responsible for leading discussion every couple weeks. The students would be in charge of finding, posting, and contextualizing the readings as well as moderating the comments. They would then structure a class discussion building on the blog comments and after class, post a final summation of the topic and the class discussion.

But, maybe that’s too much information to make available to the world as well as too much to expect?

Below is a sample assignment showing how I would use a wiki in a college-level history course. It’s far from a perfect assignment and I would love feedback about how to improve it, but I think it conveys some of my basic ideas about how wikis could reshape classroom interactions.

The class would build parts of a wiki as weekly assignments. The assignments would be scheduled at the beginning of the semester and the wiki pages would be due the week before the relevant classes. Wiki entries would include: (a) context for the readings/topics witing outside sources, (b) any relevant news stories, (c) discussion questions, (d) and overview of key issues, (e) possibly identification terms and exam questions. After the week covered by each group, the group members would be responsible for posting a summary of the in-class discussions and how they relate to the wiki posts and the rest of the class.

The goal of this assignment would be to have the students create a useful site for themselves (essentially a review sheet of the course) as well as for anyone interested in the topic.

I’m still not completely sure how I would control access to the wiki. I’m inclined to start with a free open-access wiki from pbwiki, but I do want to limit the wiki to class members during the semester. Perhaps the most efficient option would be to use a premium wiki to make some pages private, lock others, and give the class limited access to the rest?

Rather than blather on and on and on and on about Scribe and how I organize my research, I’ve put together a powerpoint tutorial of the program as I use it. It’s a text- and image-heavy file, because it is intended to stand alone, online, to help other people build their own digital database — or at least help people understand what I’m doing.

Scribe tutorial powerpoint

The keyword searches at the end of the tutorial are the part of Scribe that I anticipate being most useful for me. Being able to find sources addressing veterans, women, labor groups and other specific group with a few keystrokes will make the writing process so much easier.

I have yet to spend a dime on photocopies at the National Archives. In fact, it probably costs me more to get to the Archives than to actually do research there. Now, I know it doesn’t technically cost anyone money to do research at the National Archives, but I don’t see many people relying exclusively on research notes for their projects. No, most people make photocopies of their sources. Some people have elaborate (and probably expensive) laptop-scanner combinations, but more and more people — myself included — are using digital cameras for archival research.

There are many advantages to digital cameras in the archives beyond the cost savings. For researchers travelling long distances to get to their sources, a digital camera and a laptop (both of which would probably be brought on a trip anyway) are significantly lighter and easier to deal with than boxes and piles of photocopies. It’s also much faster to process materials if you don’t have to get up and stand at a photocopier for hours and instead can take pictures at your desk. Digital files also take up a lot less space in homes and offices (and eventually landfills) than the reams of paper photocopies.

Despite these very real advantages, digital copies come with some pretty formiddable obstacles. Chief among these is the danger of information loss. With paper copies, only catastrophes — fire, flood, etc. — threaten a personal archive. However, digital sources can be lost in myriad ways: lost or stolen laptops or cameras, broken hardware, viruses, lost or damaged memory, and so on. Additionally, it is dangerously easy to rename and move digital files and in doing so, lose valuable research.

In the face of the above, I have opted for a careful combination of technology and paranoia to protect my growing digital archive. I backup my laptop hard drive once a week to an external hard drive and then backup the external hard drive on the university’s servers once a month or so.

Of course, no matter how many copies of my research I have, it doesn’t do me much good without a way to organize and use the digital copies. Rather than build a database from the ground up, I use Scribe.  Using this program, I have created a searchable database of both my research images and my secondary sources.  Scribe does not change the original file of a research image and it lets me manipulate those images without running the risk of corrupting or accidentally deleting them.  Using the keywords, I can search for very specific pages, as well as pull up a wide range of sources — searching for “veterans” returns results including the VFW, American Legion, specific leaders and veterans, as well as White House strategies to appeal to the veterans and keep them in the public consciousness.  If, however, I’m looking for a specific reference to the VFW I can simply search for “VFW” and only pull up sources directly related to that organization.

I was thinking of making a screencast for one of the requirements for my tool of research. I probably won’t at this point because I don’t have a microphone and I’m still not completely comfortable with the software. But, it’s fascinating stuff all the same. And, to avoid relearning this stuff later, here’s everything I know at the moment about screencasting.

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Putting theory into practice wasn’t originally how I imagined the process of researching my dissertation. Instead I saw research as I imagine most historians do: a chance to dive into original documents and learn about the past first-hand. I was actually recently chastised for spending too much time in the archives: “Yes, Sarah, I know it’s more fun. But you really need to start your week at your desk — *thinking* — and reward yourself with trips to the archives.” I love how researching and working in the archives have made me feel like a real scholar (instead of a pretender), but an unexpected side-effect has been the theory-into-practice phenomenon mentioned above. Of course, it shouldn’t have been unexpected, but I guess I was just blinded by the documents.

While I still have a lot to learn, I have a much better handle on how to use digital tools in the process of my research. I know to own a tripod if I plan to take a lot of pictures without doing an impressive (and probably annoying) imitation of a jack-in-the-box. I also learned, thanks to one of the NARA employees, to put a piece of white paper down on the desktop to make the pictures clearer — especially pictures of those tissue-thin copies of internal memoranda. Now, when I get my declas tab, I also write the bib information with pen on a piece of paper attached to the tab and get my two pieces of tape and white paper even before looking for a seat. Recently, I’ve had a couple successful experiments with tabbing pages in the folders and then having massive picture-taking days instead of taking pictures every day while reading through the folders. I’m not sure if it saves time or not, but it does make me a bit more discriminating when deciding if a document is relevant or not.

I’m not making as much progress on the database front — mainly because it’s mind-numbingly boring — but the little bit of work I’ve done with Scribe and my pictures suggests that all of the tedious work will be worth it. Now, my main decision is whether or not to switch to Zotero (the newest version of Scribe from the brilliant minds at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.)