Category: digital history

Hello everyone! Today, I’m bringing you a small update for our Convergence Center project before the first big presentation. We ended up scheduling most of appointments for our interviewees for the week we return from Spring Break. We will be interviewing Hurley on Monday and quite a few people on the following Friday, so we will be quite busy. I’m not too worries since we all had training for the upcoming interviews.

We had some trouble with the test site that we were messing with. We needed a way to link pages and posts together and luckily, I remembered how to do that. I didn’t do it for all the pages because I wanted everyone in the group to be okay with it. They were, so we ended up finalizing our domain name after being unable to add-on to the actual UMW website. The name of our site will be explorehcc.umwhistory.com and if it works out in the end, whoever manages the UMW website can merge our site with existing Convergence Center one.

The last thing we ended up accomplishing  was gathering some files from John Morello to help expand our timeline. Since only one member from our group, Andrew Steele, was able to meet with him, I can’t really talk about the files, but I will do so in a future post once I see them for myself.

I was given the task to look at the Discussion and History tabs of a few Wikipedia pages, so I decided to look at the featured article about Myles Standish and a random article about Jacob van Ruisdael. Beginning with the Discussion tab, it was actually a lot better than I expected it to be. I was kind of expecting it to be in the same tier as the YouTube comments. Meaning, I thought the users were going to be pretty bad and not cooperative. Referring to the Standish page, they are mostly discussing facts about Standish and letting others know why they edited a piece of the article. Some users even had a discussion on how Standish’s first name is spelled because the article itself keeps going back and forth between “Myles” and “Miles”. In the Discussion tab for Ruisdael, there wasn’t that much, but the few users did discuss if a certain spelling for Ruisdael’s last name was helpful to the article. They ended up deciding that it wasn’t, so one user removed it. They were  also worried that they may mislead someone with the image listed on the page. Some may think it is an official painting of Ruisdael even though it is stated that no one knows what he looks like later in the article.

Looking the History tabs of both articles, there isn’t really anything that stands out to me personally. The Ruisdael article is slowly being worked on. It began in 2006 and since then, it was edited 44 more times by 20 users. Compared to Standish’s 98 edits by 42 users, it’s pretty small.

To conclude this section of the blog post, I have the say that the users of Wikipedia are actually pretty friendly and are willing to help each other out on various articles. The discussions show how much the contributors care about the articles they work on and how much they want to make it the perfect article for informing the reader of whatever topic they may be looking at. It makes me wish more online communities were more like Wikipedia’s. The History tab was also pretty interesting in the fact you can compare all of the edits together to see how the article evolved over the recent years. I like how it’s there for public viewing, so you don’t have to use an extra tool like the Wayback Machine to view the article in its early years.

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For our future Convergence Center website, we probably wouldn’t use a Creative Commons License since we are most likely going to pass the finish product over to the university once we finish and they can decide whether or not they want a license. If I had to choose one though, it would be the ShareAlike license, so that each of us could still be credited for the foundation of the website.

Copyright isn’t much of a problem for our project, be we have to make sure that if we do a video trailer or walk-through, we need to use some CC music and not a copyrighted song to avoid the videos form being taken down. We also need to make sure that our interviewees sign off on a form saying that they agree on being  part of our project.

From looking at the History and Discussion tabs of many Wikipedia history entries, I never realized how much conversation when on about the content on the sites. I also never realized how frequently they are updated. Most of the pages I looked at have been updated within the month. Some of the discussion I noticed were questions regarding sections that people thought needed revision, as well as opinions on the validity and accuracy of the information. People also comment explaining what edits they made. Most of the discussion focuses on how each specific page can be improved, which is the purpose of the Discussion tab.  Because each page is so heavily discussed, I think it makes Wikipedia a more valid source of information than I once thought. Each page is constantly being red-over and improved, most of whom seem to be intelligent people. Additionally, at the top of the pages, there is a message reminding editors to use goodwill and write with non biased views while discussing the information.

The Creative Commons license that our website could use is the Attribution-NonCommercial license. According to Creative Commons, “this license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms”. This will allow others use the information and change it as they would like, without getting financial gain while still giving us credit. Due to the nature of our project, some of the information will change over time, so editing our site will be necessary. This license will allow others to edit our site, while still giving credit where it is due.

When looking at the specified Wikipedia discussion tabs on several historical pages, the first thing I generally noticed was something further specifying what the page was, and a listing of what categories and WikiProjects the page was related or relevant to. That page would also tell you if the article had been nominated for or won any good or featured article type awards within its category. Following that, what you would see is a listing of posts by various users about the article, particularly about how to improve it or fix problems. While the discussion page isn’t supposed to be for general discussion of the article’s subject, there were some examples I saw of historical debates breaking out on the page over discussions ostensibly about improving the article. One example was on the page for the Thirty Years’ War, where there was something of a debate about in what order to list the belligerents of the war, with the idea seeming to be that the importance or scale of those nations’ contributions was relevant to how they were listed. There was even some nationalism on display, as one user seemed to be arguing that the English-speaking world downplayed the French contribution. The “history” tab, which showed what edits had been made, generally showed people had made edits in order to improve the attributions and categorizations of the articles, rather than major changes to the text.

For our own group project, I feel the most accommodating CC license, that of Attribution, would be the best. Going through the Stanford guide to fair use, I feel the nature of our project, a published website which we will try to disseminate as widely as possible across the Civil War historical community, is something we should very much encourage people to visit and use material from with no fear of fair use problems.

 

 

 

Recently, we met with Kyle Allwine from Admissions to discuss the ways we could bring traffic to our future site. The talk went swimmingly as we constantly threw ideas at each other. We talked about putting up billboards around campus to encourage students and faculty test out the various technology within the building. We also came up with the idea of having QR codes around that would send anyone to our site, so they check out the rooms and services for themselves.

After a group discussion, we decided to to keep the option of video interviews open to everyone, but we believe that we have to video interview President Hurley since the building has his name. We have fourteen possible candidates to interview and it would be great if we could get to them all, but if worst comes to worst, I believe 7 or 8 should be enough input on the building  and their involvement. We plan  to split up and do the interviews in order to get them all.

Before I conclude this small update, I would like to talk about the group’s plan for this week. We each will be doing our own research on the Convergence Center while also trying to the perfect WordPress theme for our site. We need to make sure that it works on both mobile and desktops if we plan on doing the QR codes mentioned earlier. Part of that research requires us to take a small tour around the building to make sure we understand everything ourselves. Once we do that, our next step is to put together the timeline for the building.

My group has been assigned to digitize the letters of Montgomery Slaughter and George Murray, and so far, I think we are making pretty good progress on that front. The members assigned to scanning the documents are doing well, and we are experimenting with how to make the site, do an introductory video, and handling other details. I think the question of audience is very important to our group, not because of any confusion as to who might be in that group, but just because that might be a very broad audience we’ll attempt to reach. Historians, teachers, students, and tourists are all groups that we would definitely want to reach through our project.

I think there’s a variety of things we could do to increase traffic for the website once it exists in a completed form. The most obvious of course, is to make sure we use plenty of tags and terms that will cause the website to come up quickly in google searches. What we can also do is contact various Civil War groups to try and promote the site, as well as use our own social media accounts to drum up interest that way. Another thing that might be worth trying is making flyers or something of that nature to distribute to local visitor centers and tourist sites.

One easy way to deal with site maintenance after the semester is over would be to simply hand the log-in information for the site over to the National Park Service; as it will be linked to their site, I would imagine they might take responsibility for occasionally checking in on the site to make sure it is at least functional.

I have to say that I am pretty excited to begin working on this Convergence Center project. We will begin immediately next week by talking to admissions and doing some thorough research on the building’s history and its primary uses. In class today, we briefly discussed as a group what we wanted to do for the future interviews. Should we record video or just record a short audio interview? The latter would reduce the risk of losing footage, but we decided to leave it in the proposal just in case we do decide to use video for the interviews.

If we were to do video interviews, we would use a format similar to that of the show 60 Minutes. For now, we will focus on the research and setting up the future interviews with the people involved with the planning stages and others that we need to meet with in order to make the final product what we imagine it to be.

The more we discuss the future of the HCC website, the more I realize how important it is for the school. We could potentially bring in more students and increase overall traffic to the building. Like I mentioned in the beginning, I can’t wait to begin, but there will always be that thought of messing up and not getting enough publicity,making it unappealing, etc. haunting me everyday until most of the hard work is complete.

One finall thought before I conclude this post. It would be great publicity for our website and even the other groups websites if we were able to advertise in The Blue and Gray Press, the town paper itself, and their online counterparts. I’m sure  they will bring in some early traffic once all of the websites are up and running!

So for my group, I, as well as the rest of the group, believe Omeka could be incredibly useful. Creating an exhibition of sorts for displaying the primary sources we are dealing with, which are Civil War-era letters, would be a good way to set up a site so that the public can view said letters. In addition, Omeka’s set-up makes it very easy to layer information; as well as just setting up an exhibition for the letters and adding transcriptions, we can very easily design other sections of the site to display additional information about the authors, people and events mentioned in the letters, and other relevant information. This will allow users to peruse the main feature of the site, the letters themselves, and then research the subject in greater depth through the information on the site, and other linked sources on relevant material.

In terms of layout, among the sites I’ve looked at, I liked the websites for Mapping the Republic of Letters and University of Houston’s Digital History site. The first site has some issues with clearly needing some updates or maintenance, but the general layout was interesting and useful for finding a variety of information; with just one click from the case studies page, you could access whatever specific information you were looking for or interested in. The Houston site was simplistic in its display, but quite easy to navigate and search.

The Molasses Flood website was certainly original and unique in its display, and could definitely not be mistaken for anything else; the way it allowed for closer viewing of the material it displayed was also good, My only criticism would be that especially with having to scroll down extensively on the side-section for additional information, it wasn’t terribly intuitive to use immediately.

For sites I liked less, MapScholar struck me as odd in that it did not seem to exploit Omeka very well, there was little at first glance to distinguish it from your usual WordPress site. The Davis Diaries is clearly a good idea, but it is not displayed in any particularly interesting visual way, and again, may as well be on WordPress; the bar that lets you swap through the dates is sort of neat, but overall the site does not look especially distinctive.

 

We’ve only had three class periods so far, but all of these different tools make me want to go all out on the semester long project. A site like WordPress that is known for blogging could be used for larger projects like hosting tutorials, web comics, podcasts, and other various forms of media. It can even be used for archiving historical artifacts like Omeka, but I’m sure the latter does a better job at it after having the Omeka workshop.

Omeka is rather interesting. I forgot that I already used it in one of my previous Digital Study courses to map out the origin of the parts used to create an iPod. It would be great to do something similar for the HCC/ITCC and show where each material came from, but that would require us to break up the building or just simply find records of the materials they used to track down their origin. Making a timeline showing the creation of a place like the HCC/ITCC or historical events would definitely be great alternative way to use Omeka.

I already knew you could do some pretty cool things with WordPress using HTML and now that I know that you can do the same for Omeka, the possibilities seem endless if you know enough HTML. For example, I could have a WordPress with all of the information and have it link to or merge with an Omeka timeline or map, so everything won’t be as cluttered as it could be.

After looking at the the sites listed on the syllabus, I really like most of them. A few did look a bit outdated, but I really love The Valley of the Shadow site. I can imagine our group creating something similiar, but making it more like a virtual tour to appeal to incoming students. You can have them click a room and bring up an image with and a description of the room and what it could be use. I would personally like our final product to be rather clean and appealing to our audience or just about anyone who comes across the site. The Digital Scholarship Lab site appears to have a nice balance between images and text on the homepage. The site also has soft colors that are easy on the viewer’s eyes as well, so it’s perfect and it’s what I strive for our project to be. Comparing that site to the French Revolution site, the latter looks a bit outdated and a site like Emile Davis Diaries kind of throws you into it immediately instead of  slowly working you into the information. Others may find them suitable, but I personally don’t think they would work well for what we envision for our project.

Each website tool can be used creatively, and in ways that may not come to mind immediately. For example, I could see a use for Omeka, other than storage for digital library collections. Omeka was originally built for library and museum professionals  to build digital collections, but I think Omeka could be useful for other professionals, such as artists. Artists could use the tool to store and display their artwork as an advertising means. Since the platform does not require much technical experience, an artist would not require a lot of technical skill to use it.

Additionally, if you think want to use multiple platforms to combine into one website, you could link the main site to another site that uses a different tool, but design each platform to look uniform so that a viewer would not recognize a difference. This would give your site more flexibility, considering more tools would be available.