ADH 5.0 – Page 4 – Digital History 2016

Digital History, Group Progress

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’s Reading Reflection

This week, we read articles about the impact of digital history on historians and on the practice of history.

One of the articles called Blogging for Your Students, talks about all the benefits of blogging for a class. Blogs allow the author to make updates in the form of a log, and allows for interaction between the author and reader through commenting. Additionally, blogging is a great teaching tool. Because they are open to the public, no passwords are required. Since comments are made public, they tend to be more well-thought out because students know they will be seen. Professors can also post blogs to clarify difficult readings, and it forces students to think about topics before in-class discussions. The article compared making a blog to making an investment in the future. At the end of a semester, professors have organized reflections on all course material that they can use for future classes.

Another article, called Is (Digital) History More than an Argument about the Past?, by Sherman Dorn, analyzes what the relatively new issue of digital history, and how it impacts historians. Digital history poses many new questions for historians. Databases are now more sophisticated. One challenge that arises with publishing digital history is choosing how to display primary resources. Today, there is not so much of an issue of being able to display primary resources, but more so, how they want to display them. Later on in the article, it discusses the wide range of digital history projects that exist, as well as the range of tools available to present history. These tools range to present artifacts, events, teaching and learning, and argumentation. Digital history will require that historians work more in teams to document history. For example, tools will become outdated, so to make sites last for long-term, they constantly need to be updated and fixed.

Both of these articles bring up interesting and important points that historians need to consider when viewing and presenting history in today’s world.

This Week’s Reading Reflection

This week, we read articles about the impact of digital history on historians and on the practice of history.

Both of these articles bring up interesting and important points that historians need to consider when viewing and presenting history in today’s world.

Group update

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.

Week #12: Reading Reflection

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.

Impact of Digital History Readings

I found the central point of the Sherman Dorn article rather interesting, and very relevant given how this class works. The article’s demonstration that you can present scholarship as something besides a polished final product is not something I’ve ever considered in that light before, but in hindsight it seems obvious. After all, this is exactly what our group presentations to the class have been doing, showing a decidedly unfinished and polished product and explaining the sometimes messy and irritating process we’ve been dealing with. And some of the input and feedback we’ve been receiving has definitely been useful in shaping our projects as we’ve gone forward. This is also what some of the Talking History talks from faculty in the history department are often about. In the digital world, it is much easier and more accessible to present history in this way and receive feedback and commentary from however broad of an audience you may want to engage in the discussion.

The Robert Wolff article concerning Wikipedia and students also struck me as interesting, particularly the bit where he noted that the traditional history students in his class, despite most of them being first-year, already had ingrained, very traditional notions of what the practice of history was. From Wolff’s point of view, this actually served them poorly in understanding the digital humanities, and perhaps this sends the message that we need to begin incorporating a broader view of history not just at the college level but further down as well. Before college, most kids in the future will likely engage with history primarily through the web. Future generations will need a broader understanding of history at an earlier stage in their education.

Thoughts on readings

For this weeks reading I found that one important principle for the future of digital humanities seems to be how to use technology to make information more accessible. In one of the articles I read “Zotero: Social and Semantic Computing for Historical scholarship” it was stated that the library of congress contains over a million academic dissertations, but much of this information is typically buried within itself due to it’s size and depth. The task is to make all the information easier to organize, share and discover and this is where program concepts like social computing via del.icio.us, or Zotero come in handy. I am already familiar with Zotero, having used it for previous research assignments, and there are many aspects to it that I find useful such as being able to store and share information from your personal collection with others via it’s cloud website.

A similar article I read which stressed the importance of incorporating new tools was by Amanda Grace Sikarskie called “Citizen Scholars: Facebook and the Cocreation of Knowledge” and focused on the new role of the historian or “Citizen scholars” (non-traditional academics) in using social media as a tool for historical research. In her example she mentions a Facebook fan page for quilts she managed and how she would regularly post questions for followers to answer. In this she explains how within the online community of quilt enthusiasts a broad scope of information was shared but also returned and analyzed by this online collective :

“Social media shifts the role of authority from being vested solely in a historical cultural domain, such as the museum or the university history department, to being shared with a community- or user-generated body of information that is critiqued within the community.” (Sikarskie)

I personally agree that this shift is a good thing for the future of digital history, as was mentioned in a previous class Wikipedia used to hold little academic standing but that has changed in the last few years. Likewise, I believe social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are going to be further adopted into digital history methodologies because they offer accessibility in both their reach and organization of information.

Impact of Digital History on Historians and on the Practice of History

The first article I read was “The Digital History Reader: Teaching Resources for United States and European History” by E. Thomas Ewing and Robert P. Stephens. After I saw “teaching resources” in the title, I knew I needed to read this piece. The reader itself is a group effort, which historians, secondary educators, and education technologists collaborated on in order to help universities teach students historical critical thinking skills, even in large classroom settings. The book is inquiry-based, and each section focuses on a central question that can be answered by analyzing the attached set of primary sources. These sources reprint copies of things such as photographs and speeches, but also include links to other information such as songs and video clips. There is also a resource section, which provides students with more sources to look at to learn more about a given topic. After reading this article, I felt disappointed I had never used this in my college classes. As a future teacher, it would have been beneficial to receive additional training with primary sources before I have to teach it to my students. But, I can still get a copy of this reader to add to my teaching repertoire, and this book mirrors an emerging trend in the field of education, which is the Inquiry Design Model (IDM), so I think it is still relevant for my purposes, even though this article was published in 2007. Another reason I like this reader is because it already provides the sources so educators do not have to go hunting for things. In Dr. McClurken’s article, he said that many times educators and students will spend hours searching for appropriate, accurate, and reliable primary source material online, so this reader will help decrease the time spent searching and increase the time spent actually working with the documents.

The second article I read was “Is (Digital) History More than an Argument about the Past?” by Sherman Dorn. Dorn states that digital history has challenged traditional history in the sense that research as well as publication norms have changed. Physically visiting a library is no longer the primary way that historians do research because there are plentiful electronic resources, such as those housed in online databases. Furthermore, because many people, not just professional historians, can publish their work online, the prestige of university presses has somewhat eroded. However, digital history also has its advantages. The one that stood out most to me was the ability to engage the public in the process of history. As Dorn points out, history is messy and even though an author may finish with an argument, that argument is never truly complete and is always changeable as new evidence is uncovered. By publicizing this process, historians can show how subjective the discipline is. To accomplish this task and to make historical projects more accessible, Dorn lists several resources historians can use. Is there a place to find historical works in progress as examples for my future students? I think this would be beneficial to share with them because before I began taking classes for my history major, I never realized how extensive a research project could be, and as such did not have as much appreciation for the subject as I do now. I suppose a somewhat acceptable variation of an actual historical research project could be Wikipedia because the pages are constantly being written and revised.

Digital History and Technology

When looking up articles that had to do with digital history and technology, the first article I looked at was “Enhancing Internet Use for History by Categorizing Online Resources” which talked about how easy it is to categorize and find various points in history. Everything can be found with a quick search (provided there is proper use of keywords) and by using indexes, catalogs, and databases; users can easily look up whatever they need to. If the user is looking for something printed, they can look up where a printed copy is; be it at a library or a museum, something will come up on the internet. That said, the article also explains that libraries holding certain items are irrelevant if there are full-text databases that hold everything given that there is no need to visit a library since the information is already right in front of the user. Ultimately, this article makes a point that technology makes looking up any information easier and that historians should try to learn this technology to make information gathering easier in the future.

The second article I looked at was Visualizations and Historical Arguments which talked about how images and videos can be used to help show relations or dramatizations of certain events. Simple visual aids like graphs or maps can show comparisons between two or more different categories or how far some group has moved over a certain period of time. Dramatizations of various events can show how certain events (like a bomb dropping for example) may have looked from different angles. They can also be used in the future to show how events will look depending on whether or not certain actions are taken (to try to explain it better, Y depends on X which has not happened yet; visualizations of Y can be made to prove which X should take place). Small parts of visualizations such as color, lines, bars, etc. can make a large difference in the visualizations that are made. In the end, historians should learn to make these visualizations (or know someone who can make them) and learn how to read them.

Both of these articles drive the point that while technology is moving forward, historians need to grow accustomed to the changes that are being made. While technology is making processes easier as a whole, it is up to the people using technology to know how to use them in order to easily find what they are looking for. Technology is somewhat a middle-man for how historians find what they may want but it is faster than any alternative. As technology gets better, that middle-man will get faster and faster.

Adventures in Digital History! 2016-04-05 01:05:42

“Yet there are new opportunities and challenges that did not exist several decades ago. One is the ability to display primary sources and related data objects tied to those sources (tables, charts, and maps). As this volume’s chapters by Stephen Robertson and John Theibault demonstrate, we are surrounded not just by the type of static images and data objects that historians have used to make arguments for years but by the ability to present audiences and interlocutors with manipulable objects, using software to allow readers to zoom in and move around, add or subtract data layers, change axes and variables, or set the data object in motion” (Dorn).

I personally think this is one of the coolest things digital history has to offer. Creating a database of a collection is interesting and compiling primary sources is fascinating but creating something unique out of the information presented and presenting it in a manner that would have taken years to create is really, really special and indicative of the capability of computers and digital history.