Week 12 Reading

Chapter 7 of Digital History provided a lot of imformation about copyright laws. There has always been an ever changing balance between ownership rights and community use as the history of copyrighting is a long one. It goes as far back as the constitution and has been altered many times over the centuries since then. The chapter talks about these copyright laws as they relate to to digital media and the world wide web. One of the things the chapter mentions are the flexibility of the web, which provides more opportunity for some kind of copyright infringement with the incorporation of pictures, videos and sounds rather then just text. Digital media also increases the chances of copyright infringement due to its accessibility. But one good thing mentioned is that usually copyright issues are quick and easy to fix on the web. For this reason the author states that people should not spend excessive amounts of time worrying about accidently violating copyright laws. It also says that you should not worry about infringement apon your own property rights. The chapter ends with giving a chart of some copyright laws for workes created in different time periods and goes into talking about some confusing areas such as renewed copyrights and works created outside the United States. This chapter really got me thinking about copyright issues when it comes to the web and made me realize that maybe Im not as careful as I should be.

Chapter 8 was about preserving digital history. It talks about the reasons that digital information is so hard to keep in existence for long periods of time. While many non digital materials are still usable after some deterioration, that is not the case for the digital world. Many times once a CD is even a slightly bit corrupted it is no longer usable. The chapter tells of a few different occurances where important digital information has been lost. I found the one about the Ivar Aasen center having to bring in a hacker to retrieve their information pretty amusing. The original reason they came up with that password system was to protect the information and now they needed someone to bypass the security they had created. The chapter touches on deciding what you want and how much of it you want to preserve, documentetning your sources and technical considerations. All of these are things that one must think about when trying to preserve their digital information. The chapter concludes by saying that the the future of preserving digital materials is bleak and lists some of the steps being taken to try and fix this. Some of these are better media, backing up and transferring data and then ”migration” or “emultation.” Since so much of our information is stored digitally these days, I think its very important that that we are able to improve preservation digital materials.

Building an Audience

This chapter decribed a number of different ways to get and maintain an audience for your website. Two main principles the chapter discusses are the emphasis on community. Or in other words, it doesnt necessarily matter how many people visit your site, rather it is more important how useful the site is for the people that use it. I agree with this because if a site is too general in its focus, you may find a lot of people going to the site once and then never again. It is better to hook a smaller number of people and have them continue to come back to you site. Another principle it talks about it being flexible with your site. You may need to change the content in order maintain an audience. Later the chapter talks about developing ways to reach the communites you are looking to attract. To do this, you need to know where your intended audience is going to be, both online and off. If you have a good idea where to find your intended audience, you have a better chance of getting their attention. It is just like advertising and promoting anything else. The Chapter also gives some helpful hints about how to get your web site ranked higher on search engines such as google. This caught my eye because I always wondered how google decided to rank sites, but it appears that for the most part their formula is a mystery. Some hints the chapter gives is to make sure your title includes keywords that people would use when seraching for your site and also try to get links from other sites. The chapter ends with talking about “return traffic”, or getting people to frequent your website. In order to keep people coming back you need to continually update your site with new material if possible. if the site is never changed, people will get bored with it.

Technology and Museums? Hmmm…

When I think of Museums, technology doesnt really come to mind. Actually I almost see these two things as opposite. Museums are there to preserve the past and technology is leading us into the future. But lateley the two worlds having been coming together to create a new type of museum experience. One of the articles assigned for reading talks about the steve museum project, a group of museums researching the the adavatages social tagging could have for museums. One of the big advantages is increased accessed to their collections. Museums have been using the on-line environment for a while now, but it is not always very efficent, ecspecially for those searching a museum database that dont have very much knowledge of the collections. Social tagging provides people with an easier way to find what they are looking for as they could type any number of keywords to help navigate themselves. I can see this working out really well for museums becasue it gives each person an opportunity to individually connect with a piece of art based on whatever they may relate it to in their mind. This is known as “folksonomy”

Another article, “Visual Velcro: Hooking the visitor” talks about new technologies museums are using in order to keep patrons interested when at museums. It is the younger visitors that they are really aiming for when using these new technologies. A study they did showed that a large number of people under the age of 40 would not take an audio tour of a museum but when these tours are offered on newer technologies such as Ipods or cell phone, these people under 40 are much more likely to participate. This makes sense to me because it is only natural that people would want to use the technology they are more familiar with. Not to say younger people arent familiar with simple audio, but the newer technologies are much more appealing for many. I would much rather use an ipod or cell phone myself.

Other articles mention some different types of technologies thats Museums have been experimenting with, such as web blogs, chats and social networking programs. Museums continue to try and find ways to involve the outside community in order to stay valuable to those that use their services as a resource and new technology is helping them to do this in many different ways. After reading these articles, I believe the better museums are able to incorporate their world with the world of new technology, the better off they will be.

Week 8 Reading

The main reading we had this week was chapter three of Digital History. This chapter was about turning analog History into digital History, which is a process that has already started as large amounts of history has already been digitized. Reasearch and teaching have been greatly improved due to this digitization. I know from my own experience, that the digitization of information makes it so much easier to access. Today, it is possible to reasearch in ways that would have never been possible a decade ago. The world of digital history continues to grow but at the same time, there is still a lot more out there that has not made its way into the the digital realm yet and there are many reasons for this. There is a group of people out there that believe when digitizing history, something is always loss and on top of that there is a cost to digitzing. This is true, but in my opinion digitzing whatever u can is a good thing for one main reason and that is what i mentioned before, access. I really find it incredible that so many people have access to so many materials that you would have to travel long distances to see in the past. The chapter talks about the many different ways to digitze text, images, audio and video and they all have their advantages and disadvantages. It finishes by talking about whether digitizing history should be done “in house” or by a commercial vendor and gives the reasons for doing it each way. It seems that most of the time this question is answered one way or another based on some type of financial issue. In the end, even with the loss of some information and the costs it creates, I think digitizing history is well worth it.

Podcasting

To tell you the truth, I really had no idea what podcasting was coming into this week. I mean sure, I have heard the word many times before but I never really had any experiences with it and what very unfamiliar as to what it was and how it worked. After looking over the case studies I guess the sense that I got is that podcasts are kind of like a smaller version of television shows. They are about specific subject matter and there are many differnt episodes. As I looked over the case studies I was surprised to see how many different podcasts you could actually subscribe to. Because There were so many, the sites utilized search engines so that it was possible to find exactly what you were looking for. I serached a little bit to see if I could find podcasts of interest to me and I pretty much found everything I was looking for. Its like they have podcasts dedicated to everything under the sun. Now that I have introduced myself to podcasting, there are actually a number of them that I am interested in subscribing to. The only complaint I had was that the main sites seemed a little cluttered at first. But that may be due to the fact that I am totally new to the podcasting world. After looking around a little I was able to figure it all out.

Week 6 Reading

The reading we had this week came from Cohen and Rosenzeigs book, Digital History. It was about the creation and designing of websites, ecspecially history websites. Im glad we were assigned this reading becuase Im thinking about having a website incorporated with my final project and this will be a helpful guide for me as to how and go about doing that. The beginning of chapter 2 discusses HTML and HTTP. I never actully knew what HTTP stood for so it was interesting to find out that it was short for “HyperText Transfer protocol.” Im not to up to date on the tehnology that comes with creating a web page, so I was glad to see the chapter say that you do not need to get too wrapped up in this technology. Rather, focus on the purpose of your webpage and what you want to do with it or the “primary questions,” then from there determine the technology you need or the (secondary questions.) The Chapter then goes on to talk about different types of software you can use to set up your web page. It mentions text, images, multimedia, databases and XML. Like I said, I really have no expereience with creating a website so im glad the chapter touches on all of these different possible technologies and gives example of each. It at least points me in the right direction.

Chapter 4 talks more specifically about history websites. One of the first things metioned is simplification and complexity. On one hand there is oversimplification, which may be good for commercial websites, but isnt always the best thing for history related sites. On the other hand, if you make the site to complex or worry to much about its design, it can really take away from the learning of history. The key is to find a happy medium, something in between that works best for your particular site. Then it goes on to talk about some of the design features mentioned in chapter two. I got a lot of useful information from these sections. For example, it has become more and more common for websites to “chunk” or consolidate their text because it is easier for the user to read, rather then long sections of text. Unfortunatly for a history website, it is difficult to “chunk,” and the chapter gives some advice about how to combat this. It also gives helpful hints about the color schemes to use on the website, like that it is probably best so use simple dull colors rather then bright extravagant colors. These are things I probably would have never known if not for this reading.

The appendix talks about more complex software you can use for bigger projects. I thought both chapters and the appendix did a good job of explaining how to bring a website together and I found them all very useful.

Digital Scholarship

The reading assigned for this week had to do with digital scholarship. When I started the reading i found myself asking what is digital scholarship exactly? After looking over Our Cultural Commonwealth, the answer I came up with for myself is digital scholarship is just humanistic scholarship altered due to new technologies. Some people believe this new type of scholarship to be a good thing, and others think it is wrong but there is no doubt that technology has changed the way that the humanties and social sciences are taught and learned. the Our Cultural Commonwealth report talks extensivly about these changes and the implications they have on the future. In Lisa Spiros “Doing Digital scholarship” article, she talks about some of the things she finds most crucial to the digital scholarship realm. These are discovering, comparing and representing. In the comparing section she mentions TAPOR which is something I had never used or even heard of before. I went to the site and fooled around with it a little bit. There are actually a number of different tools you can use to analyize and compare texts. I would think that using this site would help to give you a much more complex analysis of texts rather then going through them and trying to do it yourself. There was also another article by Dan Cohen titled “From Babel to Knowledge.” This article talks a lot about data mining in the field of digital scholarship. He talks about the syllabus finder he created  and H-bot, which we learned about in a previous article. Cohen gives us three lessons. He says we need more APIs for digital collections and that quanity may make up for lack of quantity. I agree with both of these, but Im not so sure about the third lesson he throws out there. He says that free to use in anyway sources are more valuable then gated or use restricted sources. This may be true when it comes to data mining, but even then u want to make sure the information your getting is reliable, and that is not always the case with free to use in anyway sources like Wikipedia. I was taught that Wikipedia and other similar sources are not reliable and shouldnt be used in research so I have trouble wrapping my mind around the point that Cohen is trying to make. The bottom line that I got from all the reading is that digital scholarship is quickly on the rise and will continue to expand as many new programs continue to develop.

Wikimapia

The case study I spent the most time with this week was Wikimapia. It caught my attention right away and I found myself using it for longer then I ever expected. It is like google earth, where you can look down at different places around the world from satelitte images. I was surprised about how much you could actuallty zoom in and the amount of detail you could see. Ofcourse I had to find my house and a few other locations familiar to me. It is just really interesting to me to see the world I have grown up in from a totally different perspective. They have a lot of places marked for you so it makes it easier to navigate and find exactly where your looking for. I was surprised about some of the things they had marked. If you zoom in close enough and look at the atlantic ocean off the coast of the United States, it will show you exactly where the titanic sunk and even where JFK jr’s plane crashed. One gripe I had with wikimapia is that there is a large amount of the world that they dont have covered. Still, overall I enjoyed using this program and chances are very good that I will use it again in the future.

Week 4 Reading

The Rosensweig article gave me some information that I didnt know prior to reading it. It was interesting to read about how Wikipedia was developed and how it got its name. I have always wondered why they chose to put “Wiki” in front of the “pedia” and this article gave me that answer. I didnt realize that Wikipedia has been around for almost a decade but thats probably because I have only started using it in the last few years. Wikipedia is unique because anybody can contribute to the site, this can be a good thing or a bad thing. At the beginning there were hardly any rules for those that wanted to be involved. As you might imagine this caused a number of different problems. If anybody can write anything they want, the source may not be very reliable and early on this was a big problem for those in charge of Wikipedia. But is there anyway to really fix this and still leave the site open to everyone? The article then goes on to talk about Wikipedia and its complicated reltaionship with public history. I can see how professional historians may struggle to be involved with Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia doesnt include original research but it does include contributions from “amature Wikipedians” its got to be tough for the professional historian to get a foot hold in the realm of Wikipedia. A few of the other articles for this week also talk about differnt aspects of Wikipedia. One article talks about the  relationship with google and yahoo and another warns against online collectivism. But an article that really caught my eye was “No Computer Left Behind.” This article talks about multiple choice testing and the fact that it may be endangered because students can find the information on the internet. Even if the information they find on the internet is not exactly right, since multiple choice questions list out answers for you, it really only has to be “good enough,” for students to determine the right answer. As an example of this someone created a software agent called “H-bot.” I actually went to the website and tested it out. You can type in historical questions and most of the time it will come up with the correct answer for you. Unfortunantly there were some draw backs to the program, like the fact that it could not answer any of my questions that started with the words “how, why, where, or which.” This limits the questions you can ask. But it was tested on dozens fo questions from the 4th grade NAEP history exam and managed to get 82% of them right. I just wonder if these questions were selected at random or specifically chosen by someone who knew H-bot’s capabilities. The main point the article makes is that its getting to a point where the use of the web to answer history questions is going to be comparable to the use of a calculator to answer mathematical questions and because of this, multiple choice is no longer a suitable form of testing. I agree, but if your assuming that people are going to use the web to answer test questions, what IS a suitable form of testing??

“Valley of the Shadow” Case study

The Case study i chose to try out this week was “Valley of the Shadow.” It caught my eye right away because the Civil War is one of my biggest interests when it comes to history. This site had a plethora of different information that I found myself immeresed in. It is set up in a way that is very user friendly and easy to follow so I was able to easily navigate through the information. I like how the site is based on two different areas. Representing the confedracy, they have Augusta County in Virginia and for the Union its Franklin County in Pennsylvania. It was interesting to see the contrasts between these two areas because they were very different at the time of the Civil War. The letters and diaries is where you can see these contrasts the most. Both parties believe what they are fighting for is right, either against northern agression or southern secession. I also really like that you could look at newpaper articles and images. Another plus in the way the site is set up. It is split into 3 different time periods, that is pre war, during war, and post war. This makes it even easier for the user to sort through the material for whatever they are looking for. The site also has a number of different databases in which you can search. I found this case study very useful and suggest it to anyone with interest in the Civil War.