Month: April 2016

We are in the home stretch for our project now, and will be finished with everything after the weekend so we can give the website one final look through before it is due on Tuesday.  There are only a few things we have left to accomplish.  Firstly, we must complete the StoryMapJS to trace the movements of Private George Murray during the war.  We are about 3/4 of the way done with this, and only three to four more locations need to be added.  Secondly, we must finish putting together the introductory video for the front page of the website.  Kim and I did a voice-over for it last week, and we are now in the process of adding in pictures and music in appropriate locations to match the narration.  We worked on this for about 5 hours on Tuesday, and now that we have the software figured out (we had to switch to using Final Cut Pro, which is more straightforward, from iMovie so our contract will likely need to be tweaked a bit to accommodate this), it should be a much faster process.  We completely finished 45 to 50 seconds of the video, have pictures plugged into other places, and have a folder full of more images in our Google drive folder, so it will just be a lot of importing to finish it up on Thursday afternoon.  Lastly, Breck and I need to finish the bibliography, which, now that we have accumulated many pictures for the video, has grown considerably.  Between the two of us, however, we should be able to work through this quickly.

I have been working with the 3D objects that we are tasked to work for the James Monroe museum. I have had my ups and downs with it and for those who are wondering whats those are this blog post will explain the issues that I have had with it.

First I would like to talk about the hardware that I was using. When I first saw what tools we had to use in order to scan the objects with I was excited, until I saw how they actually scanned that is. We had the option to pick  between a large platformed scanner, a small platformed scanner and a ipad scanner. The small platformed scanner would be unusable because of it didn’t scan in color and only could scan small objects. The big platform scanner had a bugs that needed to be fixed like, the drivers that would make the software that was need on the computer weren’t working so we weren’t able to use that scanner. So the last option we had was the ipad scanner which did indeed scan and capture the colors of the object.

Since the Ipad scanner was the one we ended up using I had to figure out how to use and figure out any flaws that it might have when scanning an object. I didn’t encounter many problems, but one the main problems had to be the amount of space we had. We needed space to move around the object so that the scanner could render a better scanning of it. The other problem that I had was trying to scan outside. The sun would mess up the camera’s ability to capture certain colors and also made it hard to render the 3D image. With this I could conclude that too much lighting is bad for capturing an object. The last problem that I encountered was capturing a thin object or the musket that I was suppose to scan. The scanner had a little trouble rendering the small details and certain parts of the musket, but in the end I at least captured the shape of the weapon and also the primary color of the object.

Overall I think that 3D printing still has a long way in advancing. The one I used is very good and it captures medium to large items with good color and decent detailing. The technology right now is pretty good and I’m sure if want a better rendered image there is technology out there, but its probably expensive to obtain.

Here an example of the 3D I scanned for the James Monroe Mueseum page that I have been working on with my team:

NC
by James Monroe 3D
on Sketchfab

 

Readings this past week were on the importance and uses/growth that Digital History has had for the History field as a whole. From the importance of student blogging read on a blog called Blogging for your Students to the impact of growth found by correlation to the Accecibiity of ‘Digital History’ in a post titled “Digital History Reader”. Over all the sources seem to be covering once again what we have touched upon frequently in this class and classes prior, the blessing and the cures that is ‘digital’ history the abundance and the availability the strengths and the weaknesses that historians have more recently encountered.

The past week in Group work: we mannaged to finally get an interview in from a librarian stand point, we filmed our walkthrough of the HCC and have been working on many aspects of videos, and the web-design.

This week has been very productive for my group. We are nearly done with our website, which makes me really happy as it’s been a a tough process getting the pages to look exactly as we envisioned. I can say that it’s tested my resourceful-ness especially with the image gallery I wanted to include for both Slaughter and Murray’s introductory bios. I couldn’t alter the HTML in a way that would allow  me to integrate an image slider into the pages so I created small icons for the images I wanted to include and attached links to them that redirected to “secret” pages where I could host the image at it’s original size and provide captions.

see ex: http://slaughtermurray.umwhistory.org/slaughter

Yesterday I also joined my group mate Kathleen to record the introduction video for the website which we’re hoping to have done by next Thursday. Otherwise things are coming along well, my other group members are continuing to record some more letters this week and our StoryMap is almost complete. Other than some more website fine-tuning these are the three major things we hope to complete by the project due date. It’s amazing how fast the weeks seem to be racing by at this point.

In “The Digital History Reader: Teaching Resources for United States and European History by E. Thomas Ewing and Robert P. Stephens the authors introduces readers to the Digital History Reader. This new technology is very useful for both professors and teachers because the large availability and accessibility of primary source documents allow educators to incorporate primary source documents and charts and graphs into their lessons. The authors predict that the inclusion of the resources will encourage students to develop historical research skills such as evaluating and analyzing historical documents instead of only reading about them and memorizing their characteristics. According to the report, Digital History Reader is a more inclusive technology for learning environments because it has multimedia components such as audio and video files available for students.

From the reading by Ewing and Stephens I think the Digital History Reader is a wonderful tool for educators to employ while teaching United States and European history because it challenges students to learn research skills and it caters to different types of learners. The Digital History Reader  is an encouraging example of the potential for digital technology to enhance the learning experience and it proves that investing in digital technology can be advantageous for school systems.

In “Blogging for Your Students” by David Voelker, the author defines ‘blog’, discusses their advantages for use in classroom settings, and discusses how he uses the online resource into his own classroom to communicate and thoroughly engage in the subject matter with his students. Additionally, the author provides links to blog platforms including: WordPress, Edublogs, and Blogger, so that other educators can create their own blogs.

I chose to read and comment on this  article due to its relevance to this class and my overall educational experience at UMW. Throughout the three and a half years I have been at UMW, I have created and participate in six blogs. While I understand the many benefits to blogs from a professor’s perspective including the easy flexibility and accessibility, I have never enjoyed blogging. Not only do I find blogging to be an impersonal and unfulfilling experience. I detest the fact that my words will be on the internet forever and I also dislike the fact that it requires me to use technology even more than I already do. While comments about blog posts can be helpful sometimes, I prefer having conversations with people to gage how they are saying what they are suggesting and being able to ask them for clarification on a comment or suggestion.