The only H-Net list I have much experience with is H-Announce, which I signed up for through the GHA last year, and which regularly fills up the GHA email inbox with lists of academic positions, calls for papers, lists of book reviews, and other info. There doesn’t seem to be much activity over on H-Public at first glance, though that may have something to do with the way that the list itself is moderated–most posts on the log pages originate with the “H-Public Editors”, (aka Cathy Stanton, from what I can tell), and it’s only by digging down into the messages that you can find the original posters (most of the activity this past month has been announcements and calls for papers in any case, which I already recieve). It is different over on H-German, which I decided to look at in comparison– there, the logs give the appearance of a very active community, messages coming from a number of people, and topics ranging over much more than upcoming conferences or open positions.

As Kate wrote in her post for this week, perhaps adding a more open format to H-Net might give other boards a leg up in developing the same sort of activity that H-German shares– or perhaps not. The Massachusetts Studies Network, which went live early this past July, is shooting for just such a mix of professional networking and personal network that Kate (and boyd and Ellison, for that matter) might have in mind– but the network is off to a fairly slow and rocky start. Early adopters found that there was not much more to do than log in and find your colleagues, and though I, for one, added it to the “list of things to look at while I drink my morning coffee”, after a few weeks I stopped checking in, since there didn’t seem to be a lot of activity. It wasn’t until about a week or so that I actually posted something on the site.

Last year, I had the same sort of experience moderating the Connections2007 website and messageboards: we never seemed to build up to the “tipping point” where activity on the network would be self-sustaining (and unfortunately, never shall– the boards were closed by the powers-that-be soon after the conference and semester’s classes were over). So I suppose my question concerning SNSs for academia ends up being how to promote the “network” over the “networking”, as boyd and Ellison make the distinction…

Anyhow, that’s just some of my thoughts– sorry it’s taken a while to get to it. On a related note, did we ever set a tiem for tomorrow’s meeting?

When I was browsing through the websites for this week, my first reaction was that out of all of them the old familiar Deerfield site was the one that I found most engaging. Granted, Julia’s kitchen was interesting (and we got to listen to snippets of Julia herself, which added to the presentation, even if the comments deeper in the site were a bit short), and the Pearl Harbor site did allow people to add their own comments (though I’m not sure what salience “New Zealand rules!” had to, well, anything), the Deerfield site was more straightforward. Though the exhibit of old toys held some charm, I found the interface limited, and I was missing some required software and didn’t feel like sitting through the download and installation process just to watch a short movie. It also took me a while to figure out the HistoryWired site– the opening timeline seems unneccessarily confusing, and the interface (double-clicking zooms you in, object details open in a new window, and so forth), while not overly complex, was still too involved for my tastes.

Michael Frish, in the essays concerning museum exhibits in A Shared Authority, notes that an often-overlooked element of the process is working with what the public brings in to the museum, not just the message you (as curator or exhibit designer) want to provide them. My personal context this week is one of time limitations and distraction– so what I’m bringing with me is mostly a desire not to have to work too hard to get to the “meat” of this collection of websites. Both the Pearl Harbor and History Channel came up short in this regard– the History Channel especially so, since it took me some time even to find content (as opposed to programming information) on the frontpage. And the toys, though interesting in themselves, suffered in many cases from what Jon has called the “two-step” rule: I found I had to click a number of times to get to something I wanted, and even then the animations and interactives were often minimal (the shadow puppets being a good example– they seem to have only one or two movements programmed, like “hands up” versus “hands down”).

The Deerfield site is clearly laid out and easy to access and navigate. It may be less interactive and flashy in terms of how it uses the medium, and certainly is predicated on “presenting the message” (“here is the information we, the curators, want you to have”) more than sharing the authority (“what can you as audience and we as historians say about 1704 together”) but in terms of my personal context this week, less is certainly more.

It also reveals that I have an unfortunate tendency not to ever throw anything away.

In just a few years, I seem to have adopted the internet as a primary research tool, in just the way that Patrick Leary outlines in the article “Googling the Victorians”– Google and JSTOR have become my “first port of call” when looking for information on any variety of topics, with Wikipedia not far behind for general ”common knowledge” information. I see this as the main effect the internet has had in the recent past, and probably will have in the near future– as a repository of source information, readily and speedily accessible. That is not to say that I dismiss other aspects of digital technologies we have discussed in weeks past, such as the use of the medium to foster “shared authorities”, or the ways in which the interaction of both amateur and professional historians serve to re-articulate academic and cultural heirarchies– just that I, personally, still view the internet as more a “tool” than an “epistemology”.

Some of this may be generational– I certainly never adopted the use of an electronic calculator in my early mathematics classes– in point of fact, I never had the chance, since I was mostly done with math before calculators became de rigeur. But I do question statements such as Rosenzweig and Cohen’s that “most people quickly realized that providing calculators to students freed them up to work on more complex and important aspects of mathematics.” My father, for example, who learned to perform higher-order functions using a slide rule in the 1950s, has a more natural understanding of the concept of “magnitude” than many younger engineers who have learned their mathematics calculator-in-hand. Because of examples like his, I tend to find the thought of automatic relational programming (such as outlined in the Norvig lecture) unsatisfactory in a pedagogical sense– if the relationships or translations are handed to you, will you really learn to make them yourselves? Will a student be able to make connections and relations on his own, if deprived of the technologies he has grown accustomed to? Adopting and using new technologies in our work is something we should do, certainly– but we should not let the technology drive the scholarship.

One of my first reactions as I read through this week’s assignment was “Wait, we’ve talked about a lot of this already.” And we have– we’ve touched on the issue of permanence and the necessity of developing a strategy to ensure your digital resources stand the test of time, on the issue of what to keep and why, whether everything is useful or there should be some rubric for seperating the wheat from the digital chaff, how to approach issues of shared authority in online history… many of the points that Rosenzweig addresses in his article are things that have come up repeatedly in our blog posts and class discussions.

Thinking back on our class discussions, it is also fairly easy to perform a type of “source heuristic”, and to see where each of our individual backgrounds and interests color our approach to these issues. I, for example, tend to work from a “collections management” point of view, and so the necessity for having a well-developed strategy for the continued maintenance and upkeep of a site from day one (or before) is an important point, while Kate, with her library and archival science background, is very engaged with the issues surrounding archival collection policies.

And we all (Laura, our oral historian, perhaps leading the way) are very engaged with the issues of shared authority. In my opinion, that is perhaps what differentiates the “public” historian from the “academic” historian. Rosenzweig touches on this in his article, noting that “most historians would argue that, while digital collections may put ‘the novice in the archive,’ he or she is not so likely to know what to do there”, and that “most hostorians have not embraced this vision in which everyone becomes his own historian.” In this he refers back to Carl Becker’s 1931 AHA Presidential Address “Everyman His Own Historian“, taking it in one of the two most often used ways– as a call for more engagement with the public by our profession. Rosenzweig is not alone in this view of the historical profession– John Kuo Wei Tchen, in the December 1994 Journal of American History article “Back to the Basics: who is researching and interpreting for whom?” does not go so far as to argue “that to be a truly competent historian, one should first master the basics of being a public historian”, but does note that academe remains disengaged from the general public, writing only for itself, and states “A public-oriented historian, I would argue, is qualitatively different from an academic historian… theorizing from direct engagement with everyday people is quite different from theorizing from archival evidence.”

This is perhaps why courses such as ours seem to end up under the Public History mantle. As has been noted repeatedly, the web is a fundamentally “democratizing” technology– and the issues of contested authority in terms of historical interpretation and memory that arise from this orientation lead directly to engagement with the people who develop web-based history content, whether archives, web monographs, or interactive exhibits. And considering this, perhaps we should do Mr. Tchen one better, and ask “to be a competent online historian, should we first master the basics of being a public historian?”

This past summer, as a “break project” from studying for my comprehensive tests, I worked on updating the UMass Graduate History Website, in an effort to neaten up some of the code, and replace many of the graphics with images that I thought (or hoped) would be copyright-free. After reading through the selelctions for this week, I thought I might go back and see how I had done. Not very well, apparently… by my count, there are six original images, two that are public domain, at least one each that fall under the Creative Commons Attribution license and the GNU Free Documentation License, and two for which I have no documentation whatsoever. At least I have permission from the individuals depicted, and from the photographers for most of the original work (except for MaryAnna, but she hasn’t sued me yet, so…).

There are one or two things in my favor, however. I did, in good faith, attempt to contact everyone pictured on the page, and have copies of their permissions in my files. I also referenced the original photographers or artists in many cases, treating these images as if I were footnoting a paper (grad student training dies hard). Most of them are also “derivative works”, having been modified in Photoshop in some way. If nothing else, there’s very little chance that anyone would care if the page for a small, non-profit student organization turned a photo of an old train into a thumbnail– it’s unlikely that Vitaly Volkov, over there in Belgium, will ever end up at our site.

Which doesn’t mean that I won’t be going back over the site again soon, to try to make it as legitimate as I can. Consider, however, that this is just a small, graphic-light, six-page site (if we don’t count subsidiary pages that do not appear regularly, like the “under construction” or “technical difficulties” pages), and there are at least four questionable items that I found with only five or ten minutes’ worth of checking– and then consider the types of graphic or literary resources that you envisioned using when you drew up your project proposals two weeks ago.

For my own part, this scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is something I would wish to use. Paramount, apparently, does not issue licenses for academic use, which I certainly would classify a proposed look at the “image of the museum in popular culture” to be. However, Cohen and Rosenzweig note that “Paramount…said they would not license [their properties] for use on the web at any price…” (Cohen and Rosenzweig 2006, p. 216). What to do?

As much as providing for continued curation should be part of any museum object accessioning, and providing for continued updates and hosting should be part of any digital project, my final proposal will have to take into account any projected copright issues, and any budget would also have to reflect the projected costs. If I were proposing to a professional institution, I would also make sure I had consulted with a copyright lawyer, either the institution’s own legal department or an outside source, as early in the process as possible. Even if I believed (which I do) that the use I intended to make of the film clip was strictly academic, it would be a good idea to take some advice from Michael Wallace (from Mickey Mouse History and other essays on American memory) and include some form of “impact study” to the proposal, noting the potential problems and pitfalls that might arise should copyright owners challenge the use of their material.

Samuel Wineburg, in his book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, terms this sort of approach the “sourcing heuristic”– beginning, in any reading of a document, with the writer, who he is and where he comes from, and only then moving to the document itself. Texts become, not information, but social exchanges, conversations in which the author, and not the information or propositions within the work, becomes the defining aspect. According to Wineberg, approaching a text in this manner is one of the distinctive ways historians work, whether the text is digital or analogue.

Sourcing a text online, however, adds one or two extra layers to the process, some of which are related to the interactive aspects of “shared authority”. If a poster is anonymous or posting under a pseudonym, how then do we determine who they are? Both CHNM sites, the September 11th and the Hurricane Archive, address this issue by collecting metadata from their posters, noting at the very least names, places and occupations. “As with any historical sources (including, for example, newspaper accounts), there are always questions about reliability, and all researchers need to evaluate their sources critically,” the CHNM states in the “About this Archive” page, “and suggests that these metadata be examined in relation to one another, in relation to the content of the submission, and in relation to other authenticated records. Sound research technique is the basis of sound scholarship.”

That being said, another issue we must deal with in relation to digital sources is the ways in which the ephemerality and/ or the friability of the medium affects our ability to perform this investigation of the sources. As an example, the September 11th archive project has ended, and though CHNM is still collecting accounts, they not that the website is not being updated. One of their final updates, it appears, was a new format (the homepage notes that it is a “beta version”). I had some difficulties initially using this version– it did not load correctly in Explorer, making some of the data hard to read on my screen. It did load correctly in Firefox, however. Additionally, the previous version is available, but working in this version I often found broken links and missing objects. So, my critique would be that closing a project such as this without making allowances for periodic reviews and updates is not recommended, much as accessioning an object into a physical collection without providing for future curation resources is not a recommended practice. Tristram Besterman, in the article “Disposals from Museum Collections: ethics and practicalities,” in Museum Management and Curatorship 11 (1992), called this “disposal by attrition”– and attrition on the Internet is notoriously continuous and abrupt.

How are historians countering this? One way is to provide print versions of blogs, websites, or other texts, for instance Tom Engelhardt’s World According to Tomdispatch and Mission Unacomplished, which collect “the best” of his posts and interviews in book format. In some ways this points to a still-prominent feeling that “old media” retains a validity and permanence that “new media” does not (which Kate, for one, discussed in earlier posts). In my opinion, it also is a re-statement of the advice we’ve been giving, and been given, for years– always back up your work, and always have a paper copy of important files. 

Not too far from where I’m sitting as I write the first draft of this post is the Philadelphia Museum of Art, home to perhaps one of the most well-known images of a museum in American popular culture– the “Rocky Steps“. Repeated throughout the franchise, ranked as one of the most enduring moments in entertainment, and spoofed and rearticulated in television and movies, Rocky Balboa’s triumphant moment at the top of the PMA east staircase has become a cultural icon. In the movie, running to the top of the steps represents an achievement for Stallone’s character, as his training regiment improves his fitness and skills as a boxer. Read another way, the scene could be articulated as part of a class-based narrative as well: working-class Rocky, fighting his way up the exterior of the museum, is also fighting his way up in the heirarchical culture the museum represents. By improving himself, he is improving his way in the world.

The museum as a place of self-improvement is only one of the theoretical articulations museologists have given to the institution– others include the museum as a place of colonialism (or post-colonialism), as a shrine, or as a place of business. While the academic literature on museums is extensive, however, there has been very little investigation on the pop culture “literature” about museums, such as how they are depicted in the movies, on television, or in novels. How have museums been depicted in popular culture, and do these depictions reinforce or dispute the ways in which academic museologists have theorized about the space? What can be said, if anything , about our culture’s view of the museum as an institution (if we take as a starting point the idea that American culture is, in many ways, popular culture)? This project will investigate these questions. 

In general form, the project will be an online exhibit or digital essay. Using film as object, however, opens the project to a variety of choices. Developing this project as a monograph or essay, for example, would be one method– describing the scene, then detailing the interpretation, in much the same way as this blogger analyzes Back to the Future. Film could also be included as illustrative of the text, as in this Yale University film studies site. Youtube features a blog-style interface (which might also be a way to involve the audience with the interpretation), but one method of interrelating film and text that I think might be interesting to investigate is that used by the VH1 program Pop-up Video (an example is here) . Though coding this sort of interactivity presents some problems, both Youtube’s video annotations and the Reuter’s news service offer free, online versions of this annotation method. If hyperlinked “museum labels” and interpretive paragraphs can be substituted for the simple pop-up “info nuggets”, then the project audience will also be able to interact with the film in a non-linear, non-narrative way, drilling down where they wish to form their own narrative between the images and the ideas.

As more and more collections and sources are digitized, access will undoubtedly become easier– and as John relates in his post this week, as companies move from subscription and fee-based access to advertising-driven systems, more of the limimtations will be removed. Access, however, has different meanings to different people. That we can find the sources we need online is only half the story– we still, as historians, need to be able to read and digest the material. Personally, I find it difficult to read long documents or books online– when I need a source, I routinely print out and compile a physical copy. With that in mind, I’d like to look at this end of the digitizing process.

GoogleBooks is perhaps one of the best examples for this– digitized files are easily searchable, printing can be done by single page, and all the different works i checked justify for printing to standard paper size. Though this may make the relative font size of larger-format works a bit small, I have had no difficulty working with the printouts from this site (reading, highlighting, and so forth).

Another good site, in this respect, is America’s Historical Newspapers, part of the Readex “Archive of Americana” system (I access this through the Boston Public Library’s “Electronic Resources” page– those of you who are new to Massachusetts, you can get a BPL electronic library card, simply for being a resident/ having an address in-state. Costs nothing, so it’s definately worth plenty more than you paid…). Newspaper images are displayed in full, or by selected article, once you determine what you want. SMall items such as advertisements will expand for printing to cover the whole page of standard printing paper, and the site gives you the functionality to choose your own layout and printing format for larger, multi-column articles.

I cannot say the same for works from Early English Books Online, however (note that this link is through the UMass library system). EEBO holds many sources not found on Googlebooks, but as an end-user, i find the way they arange their files very unsatisfactory. A short work, such as the twenty-two page “A Continuation of the state of New-England” (concerning the war with the Wampanoags in 1676) is split into eleven different .pdf files, each with two pages of the original work. Printing these pages reduces the original down to approximately half a printed page– relative font size drops to 8-point or less. EEBO does make .tiff files available for use, so with a bit of work in Photoshop you could make a comfortably-reaadable file… but that seems a lot of work left for the end-user. The situation os mitigate by EEBO’s offering a full-text version of each work, but I still wonder about their decision to seperate each page view of the original.

The discussion pages on many entries, especially those that deal with contested issues such as the debate about teaching creationism in the schools, same-sex marriage, or the legal and ethical controversies surrounding the question of abortion, become a continuing analysis on whether the article adheres to this neutral point of view, and what may or should be added or removed to bring the entry closer to neutrality, or at least consensus.

The neural point of view is still a point of view, which Wikipedia recognizes. The idea that consensus equals neutrality, though, opens Wikipedia to the same types of criticism in terms of the political biases of its articles as is levelled at other media, such as tevelision or journalism. The arguments revolve around either the fact that only a few editors might monitor any one entry, so the “consensus” will reflect only the opinions of a few (a tyranny of the minority), or that some opinions are marginalized due to their being not very well-accepted or common (the tyranny of the majority).

In response to these issues, conservative author Andrew Schlafly started the Conservapedia wiki, Shlafly felt that Wikipedia promoted a liberal, anti-Christian and anti-American bias. He became concerned about bias in Wikipedia after the site’s editors repeatedly undid his edits on the article concerning the 2005 Kansas evolution hearings. Reading through the discussion page of that entry gives as example of what Schlafly would see as the tyranny of the minority– in this case, his argument seems to be with the editorial rubrics of other users, as opposed to issues with the NPOV itself. Schafly characterizes his treatment on the Wikipedia boards as, and developed Conservapedia to counter, a form of mobocracy– characterizing the other editors, and the wikipedia site itself, as a group of people unrestrained by any meaningful principles.

In my opinion, and recogizing that it may sound a bit sensationalist, Schlafly’s arguments and his development of Conservapedia can be seen as another entry in what has been called the “culture wars” in twentieth-century American studies. In many ways, it takes on the kind of “orthodox” (read as adhering to an external standard of ethical thought) versus “progressive” (read as adhering to an ethical standard that takes into account personal experience and subjectivism) tenor. The idea of “shared authority” lends itself to the progressive viewpoint, drawing as it does on elements of the New Social History of the 1960s; Schlafly’s reaction takes on elements of the “threat to common ethical standards” arguments that characterized the conservative reaction during the 1980s and 1990s. 

With that in mind, I thought I’d look at the websites of two organizations that deal with the presentation of current archaeological research to the public. Links will open in a new window.
 
The APVA “Jamestown Rediscovery” pages: extensive but fragmented.

The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities’ Jamestown Rediscovery project is an ongoing archaeological investigation of the first permanent English colonial site in North America, 1607′s James Fort in Virginia. The APVA maintains two linked websites devoted to the project: the Jamestown Rediscovery site, and the Historic Jamestowne site.

The Rediscovery site focuses primarily on the dig and the artifacts recovered prior to 2002. The site provides information pages on the history of Jamestown dig, the different areas of the island that have been investigated, and online versions of two previous artifact exhibits associated with the project. Each exhibibt allows the user to “drill down” (though perhaps “excavate” would be a more apt metaphor in this case) to the level of the individual artifact, and gives a short description of the piece, and information on the context and interpretation of the piece as related to life among the English colonists and their Native American neighbors. The Historic Jamestowne site, on the other hand, is as much an audience-building site for Jamestown as an historical attraction, providing information on visitation, the different venues associated with Jamestown Island (including the recently-opened museum, the Archaearium), as well as current information on the dig and the APVA in general.

The two sites are interconnected and in some ways function as one– but not in all ways. Trying to find current information on the Jamestown dig takes you to the “News from the Dig” page of the Historic Jamestowne site, which is updated roughly once a month; trying to answer the question “what have they found?” will take you back to the Rediscovery site, or to a separate page of “Featured Finds”.  Trying to find out what is in the Archaearium, however, only leads to a general information page on the museum itself.

In my analysis, these two sites could very easily be combined into one comprehensive whole, adding more layers of information to the Historic Jamestowne site, and making the Rediscovery project perceptually more a part of the APVA as a whole– applicants to the Field School or persons interested in examples of artifacts would not move between two sites with different design rubrics, for example. Any new information would also be unified with what has come before, giving context and a sense of the history not only to Jamestown itself, but of the process of archaeology as a whole.

Project Archaeology: focused but sparse.

Project Archaeology is an educational program developed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to foster an understanding and appreciation of archaeology among school students. Originally focused on the western states, the program is in the process of expanding nationwide, a “major transitional period” that includes, as stated on their website, plans to “research new products such as videos, web sites, exhibits, television programs; and produce new materials as appropriate”.

With that in mind, I would describe the current Project Archaeology website as an “incipient” resource. It remains, at present, a site devoted to members of the organization and teachers who have, presumably, become involved through local events (nowhere on the site, for instance, did I find the opportunity to join up and access the content under the “Teachers” page, though I did contact the webmaster to inquire). However,  there are some indications that the online presence will become more integrated into the organization as a whole– they have included one digital video for download, and do advertise a forthcoming blog.

At the moment, though, the Project Archaeology website is an example of a general organizational page– outlining the purposes of the group, giving contact information for the local branches, and providing an outlet for their hard-copy media. Though well-designed, it is not, as yet, taking true advantage of the internet as a resource.

Later Update (Friday, 9/19, 8:45a)

I heard back from the Project Archaeology folks last evening. Jeanne Moe from the National Office writes:

We will probably some offer materials for the general public via the website in the future. The shelter database will probably remain passworded for educators who have obtained the Investigating Shelter book through professional development of some kind.  Other materials may be available without a password. We are just beginning to think about new materials as we finish the bulk of the work on Investigating Shelter, and we’re open to suggestions.

Browsing through the Shelter database, I found material in support of the Project Archaeology Investigating Shelter social studies workbook– either printable .pdf files of teachers’ instructions, worksheets for students, and downloadable pictures of animals, plants, or other items to supplement the classroom exercises. There were also two (out of four projected) interactive Flash files, explaining the history and construction details of the Pawnee earthlodges or the Plains Indian (Crow tribe) tipi. So, work is happening on the “New Media” elements of the site. I’ve got a password for the database– if you want to learn to build an earthlodge, let me know. Might not be  a bad skill to have, considering the current housing situation (nationally and on campus)…