That was my failed attempt to be quirky with my South Pacific reference.  I apologize in advance for the late entry; I came back to Amherst last night and kind of had to toddle it back to campus on my own, so I have not had the chance to sit down and write an entry until now.

This was the first time I’ve explored the H-net listing, and given what I have read and experienced, it functions much differently than a non-educationally based social networking site does.  It wants to provide as many resources as possible to its audience, and I think some of these lists do go beyond providing a list-serve as seen by the H-net for Art History.  What I like about this H-Net listing is that it also serves as a resource center for links on the topic, as well as reviews for new books, something that would serve me much better if it were not in french, german, or italian.  But it does create something of an archive interested parties can look through if they’ve missed previous emails.  In all of these list-servs, they all seem to have a search function, but I like how this particular list divides up the sections, making it much more organized, rather than searching through a pile of links.

And because I was in DC this weekend, I toured around H-DC History for a bit as well. The menu makes it easier to navigate, and it is quite clear that they want to make it easier to subscribe to this list, thereby attracting those who may be interested. I am not sure if I understand who the targeted audience is in this list though– on one hand, I’d like to say it is those who are solely interested in DC’s history, but on the other, it appeals to those who look to Washington as a kind of example for the rest of the nation, particularly in terms of national interest.

I would like H-net to move on beyond the confines of a list-serv, but to keep their archiving and link exchange portions. The second list did have a link to a discussion forum which was highly unsophisticated, and not at all something that should be developed like that. If there were more thread boxes, and the capability to create new threads, like a normal forum would, it would be something to highlight in H-net, especially if scholars are constantly looking for new resources. These discussion threads can then be linked back to the the articles/reviews that they are referring to, so that all the information can be accessed within a few links.

I, too, have to apologize for getting my blog in late, but unlike Laura, I have nothing to link to show my efforts, so only an apology will have to suffice.

I was quite happy to explore the links made available to us this week, even though I did feel that there were limitations, particularly in content.  One of the areas we were asked to think about was how well these websites explored current scholarship and how did the website go about challenging its audience. 

If there is one thing that looking at this set of websites that struck me, it is that all events have at least one narrative that has been able to claim itself as the dominant narrative to history.

Take the History Channel site.  I did appreciate it’s vast coverage of all it could call history, but the mere scope of the site seemed a little too short and incomplete in many aspects.  The topics that a visitor could browse through were very general and specific at the same time.  Things like “Culture” and “World History” could be developed into a huge web of pages that could take on a life of its own.  But due to the History Channel’s heavily American-centric viewpoint, the world history section seemed to suffer from a bit of neglect.  The overall website is visually impressive, and it does draw the websurfer in looking at features like, “This day in history” first before the individual goes off to check other sections of the page.  Content-wise, however, a lot of the material read much like a textbook.  I’m not sure its a fault of the website, as it is heavily linked to a television network, and by extention is trying to achieve the goals of that station, of which I have little knowledge of.  For me, I see the History Channel and it’s website do not deviate from the dominant stories of history, and instead seem to be interested in offering a dam-breaking deluge of information (facts).

In terms of challenging the visitor and using current scholarship, I think the Deerfield site wins hands down.  Unlike the other sites, it does these two very well, in the sense that the topic of the website is fairly narrow and allows a kind of case-study view of this little-known raid in Deerfield.  It acknowledges that in the larger scheme of historical retelling, this incident would have been just labeled as a insignificant raid during the French and Indian War.  The rest of the website then moves to contest this view by not just highlighting the battle, but contructing character composites in order to give us a more fufilling narrative of the people within the battles.  What may not be considered a sanctioned move among historians, it appeals to those of us looking at Public History because it is an innovate way to use sources in order to capture Public attention.  Perhaps it is not the most artistically sophisticated of the websites, but it does give us a series of stories that allows the websufer access into a historians imagination.

The Julia Child website, Devices of Wonder, and History Wired sites stood to archive physical artifacts and allow us to interact with such objects on the web.  In provoking public interest and challenging an audience, I believe the Julia Child site was probably the most successful on this point because it challenges the visitor in making a connection between historical figure and artifact, versus simply giving us thumbnails to scan through– which the History Wired site seemed satisfied to do.    The Devices of Wonder site was quite wonderful in its use of multimedia to allow the surfer access to the artifact– and I very much enjoyed getting a “hands on” experience of such artifacts on the web, but it did not challenge the individual to  move beyond playing with buttons.

The Pearl Harbor site was quite a disappointment to me, especially when I looked at the Memory Book and found that it was more of a blog comment page than actual and meticulous recordings of first hand accounts of survivors of Pearl Harbor.  Some of these veterans are still alive, as well as their Japanese counterparts.  And while I think the blog idea would have been a great way to supplement serious collection on the web, this section is just too informal for my liking.  Again, there is nothing too enlightening on this site, though I must admit, the timeline is very appealing, I think it would do well to also include current pictures of the Arizona memorial and the ceremonies in which we honor the bombing today.  In past commemorations, old Japanese soldiers came down to meet with their old American enemies to show that they had put the war behind them.  I think this is one way they could have provoked a stronger reaction  into the visitor.

All in all, a lot of these websites treat the visitor as though they are a passive bunch willing to take information in rather than interacting with it.  I’m not sure if I was simply looking for inspiration, I think response to the historical content of a website can certainly make up for perhaps a lack of technical sophistication on a page.

Also, I don’t think you’ll see this, but:

Good luck with your comps, Bill!

As I’m working on my project and trying to “Think big,” it seems hard to put a limit on how historians have changed the way they conduct their research on the web, and even through various multimedia.  (Are there not other forms of digital mediums outside of the web?)  It has given us better access to sources that are not readily available to us, in some cases, and allows the public historian a new venue in which we are allowed to freely experiment.

As we have talked about in class, we have seen the way the internet could eventually breed a type of lazy historian.  and perhaps, we have become a bit comfortable sitting at our computer desks and perusing through e-journals of the DuBois library and the collections of the other Four Colleges in the area.  But we did have to gain the technical savvy to navigate these databases much how we had to learn how to whittle down what collections were necessary and what journals would not be useful.

For the public historian, the web gives us yet another research tool in which we can gather a variety of information.  It allows us direct contact with our audiences.  Through feedback, we can see if our presentation is successful.  We may not always get the feed back we desire, after all, the Google presentation does show us that websurfers are much more inclined to give feedback if they are displeased with our services rather than what  tehy find enjoyable.  But even with that example in mind, we cannot take silence to mean assent.  The creation of dialogue between historian and audience also aids in the quest for information that cannot be found by the usual methods of historians.  Flickr Commons is the strongest example I have in mind.  In that case, historians had already dig through archives and government documents trying to identify the pictures, but failing to do so.

If this is the trajectory that digital history is headed in the future, then even more  changes in technique and methodology are necessary in order for a historian to use digital scholarship in the future.  First, historians must become much more technologically savvy in terms of assessing materials on the web, and how it fits with their educational goals.  Not all historians that will be using the internet for research purposes will be digital historians.  Some my just want to use it for personal use, and as a way to access their materials more easily.  Some will want others to see their work.  It is important that historians know the reasons why they are using the web for their scholarship.

I also believe that historians need to become more willing to compromise and share their works on the web.  As most university presses do not make a whole lot of money, it is not an issue of profit that historians are dealing with, but the right to hold claim to their orginal, intellectual thesis–the existence of their scholarship.  However, if one is going to be a public historian and use the audience in order to retrieve information, they should also realize that from then on, the public also owns a part of that research.

Finally, historians, myself included, need to start to understand the scope of the internet beyond issues of accessibility and ownership.  It is almost an intangible object that can be molded to our needs, but at the same time, resists taking any solid form.   We want it to help us become more accessible, yet, we don’t want to become lazy in our research and base everything purly upon what we can find through our computers.  We want to use it to showcase our work and our accomplishments, as some professors have done, but we resist showcasing the actual work.  We need to learn to relinquish some habits inherent in the job of historian, so that we may gain skills that will move us to better controlling our work, our research and our sanity.

Hi everyone,

I seem to be much too facinated by the copyright issue, but what do you all think of Cory Doctorow?  He’s a blogger/writer who advocates for the free sharing of digital material.

I want to start this week’s blog with some lighthearted fun that I thought addresses some of the issues we talked about last week and this week: copyright laws and accessibility of digital files.  I had not considered that in the desire to claim ownership of digital material, that people and businesses would go as far as to outdate the hardware used to collect and store digitized materal to make it difficult for others to share it.  There will be people who will hack and convert such files as to may it easier for the (cheap,) average person to get their hands on it.  It is as though we are nurturing a culture of digital pirates, and it some sense, historians are fighting this battle because of their professional mindset.

We want to be able to go to an archive or some sort of depository of information that is both legitimate and large.  We want to be able to say that the information in this collection is reliable and that no small bit of information has been overlooked and excluded.  And perhaps that is why Rosenzweig battles this question of “Scarcity or Abundance” in his own essay.  The internet is not a building with physical limitations.  Indeed, the more that we propose to control and rein in its boundless limits, the more it seems to want to break out of the boxes that we put it in.  On one hand, we have an endless amount of information just based on websites alone, never mind e-mails and instant messages.  The “Pitt Project” Rosenweig describes in his essay tries to find a solution for this problem, but it doesn’t work for historians.  Yes, we do look at “official” documentation through our research, but we also find a glorious amount of evidence in correspondence, especially when one is most interested in cultural history.The internet has not only changed how we store history, but how we look at change over time. The instantaneous nature of the internet is reflective of the instantaneous nature of the media-filled Western world.  Recently, it has been noted that presidential canidates are quickly forgiven for mis-speaking in front of cameras because there is a constant vigilant effort to record and display everything they say.  It is like the spoken word is but a fleeting moment in time that has become easily erasable.  Likewise, if one does not save an instant message to their hard drive, then it becomes lost forever.  And even those who wrote and participated in these online discussions forget what happened.

As for the hardware issue of storing data and digital materials, I do agree that we have to find a way to make these materials last a lot longer than they do.  We are sacrificing quantity over quality.  However, unless someone is willing to sit down and say their product is going to be a surefire way of storing data reliably for the next forty years, the market is going to continue to evolve and outdo itself and changing the way we save materials.  It just seems like we’re going to be stuck in this area because new hardware is in this search of perfection that is just unattainable.  We’re looking for more gigs or terrabytes, or increased pixels.  It’s this never ending cylce of improvement.  And because the cost of retrieving materials  depends on the market value of the hardware, it always becomes expensive to go back and get a hold of old digital data.

Unless it’s pirated. 

I think we may be approaching a point where historians will have to pick between legitimacy and access.  Where we have to choose whether to remain a historian that lives in the legitimate archives and is only given a certain amount of documents, or to go where the culture and people are and risk dealing with pirates, but have a wealth of information in our hands. 

I was struck by John Willinsky’s statement: “The key to copyright is the right of the authors to profit from their work.”  This was my fundamental notion of how copyright functioned, especially in the eyes of the author/creator.  In this way, I see copyrights as literature patents–something that gives credit to the person of origin and even more importantly, if there is money to be made, then copyrights let us know who the money belongs to.  But then, it also hightlights the tension between who created the work and who distributes the work.  In the non-digital format, we know who the author and publishers are, and it is the publisher who has a tight rein over the copyright.  Rarely do we see individuals in the book industry claim these copyrights for themselves.  So perhaps it is not the brilliant indivdual who is being protected, but some fundamental root of capitalism that is being closely guarded.  Individuals rarely exist in a captialistic model.  Larger, more powerful structures and institutions are what move profit and commodities.That being said, the digital age of copyright gives new meaning to who owns an idea, a piece of art, or a video and pushes it into a more public sphere.  

Creative Commons, one of the most widely used copyright forms on the internet allows creators and authors to define the way their work is handled online.  As I scanned the list linked above, I cannot help but think that as the internet allows people more access to items, documents, and photos than ever before, there needed to be a change or addition in the copyright law to protect not just the creators, but the consumers as well.  And because copyright is directly linked to ideas of ownership, this sharing of material also shows the communal ways collective bodies own material online.  

The online copyright, the one most pertinent to digital media, allows the original author to restrict others in using his or her work and, at the same time, acknowledges that in the case of some works, it is permissible to take a part of it, inject their individual personality into it, and make it their own (at least with proper citation and acknowledgement, as would be expected of any history academic).   The easiest example of this would be in the use of photographs and videos.  As we were looking at Flickr and Flickr Commons last week, I was reminded of the various other art sites and personal networking sites where users allow others to take their photos to create new bits of art.  (Stock photos, for the most part, are “generic” photographs that one can use to create icons, avatars, or model into images of personal use.) Perhaps it is in this spirit of creating and wanting to share and give others access to work rather than trying to protect and barricade ideas in the copyright bunker, that allows us to not only think of the individual creations, but those who consume it, sit on it for a few days, and then become creators as well.

 Perhaps these trends in copyright laws also lend themselves to trends in who owns history.  This idea has plagued me for a while now, but it seems with the growing number of historic/public history/museum/related to history sites, there is this drive to make history and the past collective.  There is this divide: academic and professional historians write books to interpret the past, but history (whatever intangible object that may be) cannot be exclusively owned by an author or individual.  This goes against a lot of the websites and histories we have encountered, especially when issues of funding and maintenance come about.

There are many fourth walls being broken in this scope of digital media.  The interaction between performer/creator and audience is not only done through the use of forums or the blog format, as we have proposed in many situations when considering audience participation, but how our work is presented, and how others percieve the work to be useful and workable in their own contexts.

By putting the past online, especially the April 16 archive, it raises the concerns on how the public views tragedy that is still within the public knowledge and memory–and the pain and terror that go along with such an archive.  The Virginia Tech site in particular had links to the victim’s honorary places– pictures of headstones, and places where those who wanted to remember left items of sorrow.  In one sense, these websites function in the same way as a concentration camp that remained standing during World War II would.  It is a historical marker and a reminder of a past to terrible to forget.  However, these websites also exist in a weird  plane: an imaginary place called the internet where history can be molded and added to with a mere click of a button.

This makes the internet a much more liberal, and in some cases, dangerous medium to deposit a collection.  Having no sense of physical space, there are no questions on full one’s collection can be.  There are only questions on what decides the shape of a collection.   Being that these collections are also in an intangible form, it also means that pieces of the collection can be removed and replaced at will.  This gives whoever is running the website incredible leeway based on the political and social environment and if that changes as well.

It is understandable that the CHNM is heavily involved in the preservation of these recent tragedies (with exception of Flickr and Flickr Commons).  Their breaking into this area of history also gives rise to the debate of what constitutes as history, and how recent can history be in order to become history.  Virginia Tech, The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, and the 911 Archive are historic events– but can they be incorporated into the trends and themes of their times while we are still living in their recent shadow?  These websites aim to collect information and store it.  The analysis and interpretation of these events have not quite fermented beyond the idea of a tragedy.  Would the same idea of a collection work for something not so terror-related?

Although most of these images and collections are protected by the Creative Commons, using images as a way to record historical memory is inherently intertwined with who is allowed to write and record history and who owns a particular history.  The collections of victims’ memorials from the Virgina Tech site provide no pictures as to who they were, only of what remained.  In that particular site, we are given a look at what is public, but not personal.   On the 911 archive we get a counterpoint view– people bringing their private memories, regardless of how unrelated they are to the actual event, to public interest.  The Creative Commons law does not only give rights to who owns what memory in a certain event, but who is allowed to share their memories with those who are interested in history.

For my digital history project, I propose to continue what I worked while at my undergraduate university and has been near and dear to me:  100 years of Women at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

There is already a skeleton-like page that has been barely filled out by content.  A lot of the pages were things we were hoping would supplement the tour guide brochure, but fell through because of time or other constraints.  However, for this project, I would like to concentrate on three main areas:

1) Finishing the bonus walking tour section.  We have our main routes for these areas plotted out, and we do have information on all of the relevant buildings and explain why these places are important to explaining women’s history.  What needs to be done: taking and displaying pictures in a way that is pleasing and accessible to people, writing blurbs on the website–pdf form is not necessary, and putting each bonus tour on a separate page so that others can pick and choose which area of campus they would like to explore.   These areas tend to be quite aways from the main campus, but there is always something to be said about women’s sports in our athletic complex as well as the Center for Hawaiian Studies.  Something extra that could be done with the tour routes: would podcasting be appropriate?

2) Personal stories portion of the site.  Interviews need to be conducted, and there needs to be a way we can arrange these stories to make easy to read and attractive her-stories.  Transcripts are out of the question.  Possible ideas include: Digital video, podcast, forum (though I worry how message boards get out of hand.  This idea will need quite a bit of maintenence).  This should be one of the highlights of the website as personal narratives could make the site much more interactive for people with stories to tell.  Originally, the plan was to interview former students, faculty and staff.

3) I’m still trying to figure out why the university did not allow us to do this the first time, but recently, with all the talk about digitizing the past, I have wanted to scan and make some of our yearbooks available online.  Our library does own the complete collection of yearbooks, and my advisor had wanted to give people the opportunity to look through old university yearbooks that showcase events like the University of Hawaii Multicultural Beauty Pageant.  At the very least, I’d like to make a collection of these photos available because they are such a great source when looking at the ties between women and notions of beauty and speaks volumes about images of multicultralism in Hawaii.  Having a topic like this on our website would be fairly interesting, and absolutely relevant to our topic (versus running a complete history on why the buildings on campus are relevant to women’s history).

For this week’s assignment, we looked at three different Wikipedia entries and their discussion and history pages.   I chose three pages that revolve around technology: television, YouTube, and the podcast. These “technologies” are fairly recent inventions and all are fairly accessible to the public.  Although  YouTube and podcast are the most recent, and takes some savvy to operate, they have been increasingly popular and widespread across the internet, and does provide some interesting discussion on their boards, especially among people who have watched these two technologies grow into what they are today.

With the television entry, people seemed to be most concerned with what sort of television should be introduced to the entry and how wide the scope should be.  Given the history of television, which is considerably longer than the other two, the main issues do not stem from left wing/right wing politics, but rather trying to efficiently convey what television is, and organize it into sections and areas that make it easier for the Wikipedia user to get at what they need to find.  One large comment in the discussion section actually gives out a proposed structure for the television section of the article.  Also interesting to note is the breakdown of different articles–there is an actual link to a History of Television entry which is being to encouraged to grow with the discussion of this Talk section.

Also interesting: the arguments as to how analytical Wikipedia should be toward television and the movers and shakers in its industry and use.  One brought up that television’s effect on society should be brought up.  While that in and of itself is interesting, I can see why it would be open to debate.  Wikipedia would not be just reporting “facts,” but making judgements as well, at least in the eyes of those who are looking to use Wikipedia as a resource of encyclopedia information, or a laundry list of facts.

This assignment asked us to look at two public history sites within our fields and review them.  As a beginning Master’s student who only vaguely knows what she’s interested in, I first started looking at a website that was near and dear to my heart: 100 Years of Women at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Why yes, I am quite biased.

The website was created with the public in mind; specifically, those who were looking for something fun and interesting on the web to comemmorate the University’s centennial.  It does not seek to be analytical about the the history of the largest educational institution in Hawaii, but rather, it seeks to insert women into a narrative that has been little explored.  It is meant to be user-friendly, especially toward an audience that has little to no experience with computers (for example, alumni).  The separate webpages that make up this site are not substantial, but text is in short blurbs.

The main “meat” of the site, if you will, is the guide for the campus walking tour that is available both through Adobe PDF format (you can download all eight pages of it, plus a map with the walking route drawn in for you) or can be printed straight off the site.  Again, this was done in order to service those who are interested in actually walking the routes and want a relatively easy guide to carry with them, and those who are not quite as tech savvy, and do not have Adobe Reader installed onto their computers.

What might not be so obvious is something that should be highlighted on the page.  When the websurfer reaches the page of the campus map, they can click on individual buildings that are related to the tour and see pictures of that particular site paired with the short historic blurb written about the area.  The pictures are not displayed in any sort of organized fashion, but there are so few pictures on each page that it doesn’t seem to be a picture dump anyway.  However, it would be much more interesting to have more pictures organized in a more cohesive fashion and create a real virtual tour.

What grieves me most about this site is that is woefully incomplete.  The personal stories side of the website was is nothing more than a plea for more information.  (Inside information: We truly wanted to get this side of things done, but given the time constraint and the amount of funding we had for this project we decided to concentrate on the walking tour side of things).  That being said, the fact that this webiste is very diverse in its ideas means that it can further built on in the future.  The walking tour is definitely a highlight, but other areas of the website should be worked on as well–especially the section on personal stories.  If this website could get personal histories up and running, I think it would be a great step towards the digital history superhighway.

The San Diego Chinese History Museum is a Public History Website in the sense that it acts as an extended arm of the physical museum. It is fairly simple– the blog-like frontpage makes it easy to see upcoming events.  Most of the website is steered towards those who are interested in taking a trip down to the museum rather than supporting a collection online.  Whatever great event that is highlighted at the museum also shows up under their “Exhibits” page.  The surfer firsts encounters a grand lists of said exhibits, and once he has chosen a link to visit there is a short blurb containing the who, what, and when of the exhibit.

Again, this website is not made to be used heavily by historians or academics, but to be visually pleasing to the regular passerby.  Under the “Collections” tab, the websurfer can see what sorts of art and artifacts the museum has in its aresenal.  While some of these items may be of use to a historian, a lot of these pieces are there because they catch the attention of the visitor.  A lot of the items listed are either artworks or sculptures, and nearly all can be exotic to someone unfamiliar with Chinese history and culture.  This page is merely a teaser for the surfer to scan through in order to pique their interest and convince them to visit the museum.

While it is certainly not wrong for a museum to sell itself online and convince people to visit their location, the number of artifacts on the website is rather small and only in list form.  You have to scan through the list to see what you want.  And even though they do block the list up by type of artifact, it still could use more categorization and organization.  Furthermore, just because a museum has a lot of their material online does not mean that the number of visitors to the actual museum will decline.  A lot of museums/historical societies that have websites that I have seen seem to be especially afraid of it.  The website then, just becomes one big commercial for their building, rather than a show case of digital history.  It is this desperation that takes a little away from this museum’s website.  The front page already mentions their big events in the blog format, but there are two large banners on the left of that also calling attention to those same events.  It is understood that these events are important, but there need not be so much repetition.  These same events can also be found in the “Exhibits” tab of the website.

For both public history sites, their connection to the public and people outside of the museum and academia is what keeps them going.  For the Women’s history site, they interact with their audience by offering a campus tour (and asking for the submission of personal stories).  For the Chinese museum, they continuously encourage the websurfer to get up and visit their physical building to see what sites and events are coming to fruition there.  And in both cases, I think this bond between webcreators and webvisitors can be strengthened in order to create a work of digital histoyr.