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.

The Impact of Digital History

The idea that struck me the most from this week’s readings was the idea of forming online groups of historians and archivists. I find it surprising that given the ways in which the internet has increased the accessibility of primary sources, and the ways it has connected people, that internet crowd-sourcing and social media groups of historians and like-minded people have not come to play a large role in how history is practiced. I believe that much better scholarship could take place if as many scholars participated as possible. I also think that the relative lack publicity of places for scholars to form groups online has slowed the development of the active engagement of historians on the internet. I was surprised to learn that Zotero was not only a tool for managing digital sources and citations, but also a place where groups could form for people to remotely collaborate. After searching the groups, I found several that would have been incredibly useful as places to find ideas and sources for my theses. In addition to the lack of publicity, is digital history being slowed by a fundamental wariness to share research among scholars?

Week 12 Readings

For this week’s readings, I decide to read pieces on Blogs, Zotero, and Categorizing. There’s no particular reason why I  chose these other than I have some personal experience with  Zotero and blogs.

David Voelker’s piece on Blogs reminded me of what Professor McClurken does for our class. He has all of the readings and blog assignments listed ahead of time to give us all a chance to read them before the next class period to increase the probability of discussion. Voelker also talks about the convenience that blogs have for other things like grading keeping up with the students and from a student perspective, I agree. Most of my Digital Study courses that I’ve taken used Blogs as a hub for the students and professor to communicate with other. It’s a lot simpler than having to e-mail every student about something since there is a risk of said e-mail getting lost in the spam folder.

Daniel J. Cohen’s piece on Zotero basically talks about how everyone uses Zotero today. I’ve never heard of Zotero until I took a course with Professor Whalen. We used the tool to create a large bibliography for everyone in the class to help the arguments of our papers that were due at the end of the semester. I think it’s a great tool and use it for just about every paper now. It’s perfect for historians since you can save anything with just the click of a button if you have the browser plugin and if you want to find a large library of academic works or documents, you can even search for them on the Zotero website once you have made an account.

Edward A. Riedinger’s piece about categorizing various online databases like JSTOR to change the way we use the internet by making it a bit simpler and enhancing our experience. It sounds like a good idea and reminded me of the UMW ezproxy that has a list of all possible resources that you could access for academic sources. I’m not sure if there is a website out there that categorizes these resources, but it would be pretty useful for historians in long run to make all of the online databases easily searchable via a website that categorizes all of them.

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

Prior to reading these articles I was not aware how studying and teaching history has changed do to the Digital Age. One main development in the Information Age is the increasing amount of primary sources that many people all over the world can access. The article about the Digital History Reader by E. Thomas Ewing and Robert P. Stephens shows how teachers are using technology to provide their students with access to primary sources as well as providing them with the tools to ask questions and reach conclusions. The goal of the Digital History Reader is to provide primary sources and show how historians draw conclusions from them. I think that this is a very useful and important digital project because it allows large amounts of students the ability to learn how to analyze primary sources to understand history.

In Stefan Tanaka’s “Past in a Digital Age,” he discusses the changes that are occurring in how historians write and study history. I agree that the amount of historical information can affect how historians value history and also make scholars question why they have done things. History has not always been studied the way it is today. For example, the study of social history did not really exist until the second half of the twenty-first century. Tanaka also believes that the digital age will create a more inclusive historical narrative where the forgotten stories of the past can be told. Although I think this is a bit optimistic it is clear that technology has and will change the discipline of history for years to come.

Group Project Progress Update

Our group has made some major progress this week. Uploads of George Murray’s letters have been completed by the other members of the group, so many thanks to them. With that done, I have so far uploaded the rest of Slaughter’s letters, and intend to deal with the rest tomorrow. In addition, Matthew and I have essentially completed the audio recordings for Slaughter’s letters and at least most of Murray’s. The group as a whole has also gathered the material we wanted for the introductory video, and in addition, the website itself is looking the way we wanted it. All in all, the video is the only major component of the site that is not yet complete in some form, and there should be no difficulty meeting that deadline. The project is coming together,

The Ingredients of Progress

The past few weeks have been amazing, with the project all things seem to be coming together. We managed to finish up all of our planed interviews, and are now looking to see if we can/should be outreaching to any other interview candidates. We have also been working on many aspects of our website, I am astonished of the progress and ideas that the group has tackled. The visual aspects of the site are melding and provide pride for calling it ours.

With all these aspects and branches of our videos and documentations its feels good that we now have most all the ingredients to make our website everything we wanted it to be, and quite frankly maybe more.

Weekly Update 3/31

There’s not much to report this week, the group is mainly finishing up loose ends at this point.  All of our Murray letters are on the site, I just need to put up the tif files on all of my letters.  At this point, we just need to record readings of each of the letters, finish the “About Us” page, get the Slaughter letters up, and tweak the site so that it looks good.  We are in the stage that we are just tying up loose ends and wrapping everything else up.  I imagine it will not be long before we are completely done with the project.

Week 11: Update

We are making a lot of progress uploading metadata and images of the diaries to the site. Our group has been discussing and updating each other on how we are formatting our information so that there is a sense of consistency throughout the site. For example, we have chosen to use dates for the title of each diary page using the format of month, day, and year such as August 1st, 1862. We chose this format because it is similar to how Gordon titles most of his pages. To help us decide on information to add to the metadata we are using the Omeka Library guide that was made by Carolyn Parsons in special collections. The only major issue we have had is that when we started uploading images they were not showing up but that issue has been resolved.

I am still trying to find the pension record on Stephan Gordon but the national archives that should have it takes several weeks to get the copy back to you and also it costs money. At this point, I think having the index record that I found included in the page about Gordon would be beneficial because interested people could do further research to track down his pension based on the information on the index record.

We have a lot of work ahead of us still but I think we are making good progress and I personally am learning a lot about the decisions a group has to make when formatting information because everyone can do it their own way.

Civil War Letters Update

Since our last presentation, my group has accomplished several things.  Firstly, we have just about uploaded all of Murray’s letters to our website.  Once Murray has been completed, we can then upload the Slaughter letters.  The StoryMapJS based on Murray’s letters is over halfway done and we were able to fix the zooming problem.  Murray was actually more specific with his locations, other than just giving “Washington, D.C.” as a general area, than I originally thought, so it looks much better now.  Secondly, we have our letters chosen for the audio recordings for both sets of letters.  Matthew and Breck will be going this afternoon to get these completed.  Thirdly, the introductory video has been started.  Last class, Breck and I went through and chose clips from reenactment videos he had found.  I then extracted the clips for our video.  Also for the video, I have begun photoshopping the best images of Murray’s uniform as they have glare.  I have never used Photoshop before, so another group member who is more familiar than I will likely have to make more tweaks.  I also started a group Google doc so we can begin mapping out exactly what our video will include.  We anticipate it will be 2-3 minutes long and will include general information about the Battle of Fredericksburg, Slaughter, and Murray.  Fourthly, Kim has finished the home page website design, which looks wonderful.

Update #4

Hello once again everyone. As you know, I am one of the members of the Convergence Center group and I have some news for you. I have completely edited four of our seven interviews, but have only uploaded three of them to YouTube. The seventh interview will be going up either at the last minute or after the project is completed, so I’m more than half way finished with them. Once I have all of them up on YouTube, I will list the videos as public and add various annotations on the video and links in the description for our website and the interviewee’s website. The last few videos will be uploaded by the end of this week.

The reason why I have only uploaded three of the four interviews is because I  ran into a small problem while editing. The Cartland Berge interview was missing some footage, but luckily we caught that and downloaded a back-up before completing the editing process.

Other than that, everything is going fine. We decided to schedule a walkthrough to record all of the HCC’s resources and spaces that the students can access. We may have one or two more interviews to do, but we have finished all of the main ones who were involved in the building’s creation. Our main goal now is to focus on our website and make sure everything is nice and organized for our audience.

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