Rally the crowds, it's historical sourcing time! Note: This blog asks more questions than it answers

                In a world with so much information at our finger tips, in combination with increasing technology at unfathomable rates, it is hard to plan how to process, even contain all of the information we have.  Let’s hypothetically proclaim that money and time aren’t an issue, how do we preserve all of that which we know?  Think about it, if the ancient civilizations were able to document and store their architectural documents for such works as: the Egyptian pyramids, Machu Picchu, Stonehenge, etc., we wouldn’t have to have television programs-as well as other medias-speculating whether or not extra-terrestrials helped in some way to construct them!  We would either know aliens did help or didn’t, as well as how precisely they were built.  So now, thousands of years later, we have nothing to fill the gaps in information.  Imagine what civilization will wonder about our place and time in 6 thousand years…   

                This dilemma is shaping the world of digital preservation as we speak.  From not only deciding on how to collaborate, what exactly to preserve, how to fund it and whether or not to share it, historians-along with every other profession-have to figure out how to preserve information so that the information will be around for millennia, and not just twenty years.  Because of technologies’ rapid turnover, it can be cost degrading, time inefficient and overall consistently disappointing in trying to keep up.  One decade we’re preserving our data to floppy disks, yet a few decades later we need to switch everything over to a hard drive and a second hard drive (at least) for backup!  At this rate, those wishing to preserve will be “re-preserving” every twenty years, neither time nor cost effective in the least.  Is the HD-Rosetta disc the best we can come up with?  Did anyone else feel that a disc created to specifically withstand nuclear war, a little disheartening?

The Library of Congress is another site  that has an array of American and world history topics, separated by: different eras in American history and different regions of world history.  The LOC interacts with other users and institutions by using an array of social media technologies and websites to engage the public with Library news, events, acquisitions and exhibits. The LOC is also sharing selected historic content from their own collections.  By creating your own LOC account, you can: view and create your own collection by saving interactive exhibitions, individual exhibition objects, lesson plans, online activities and more (stated from the email they sent me after I created my account).

    

                Cohen and Rosenzweig speculate on this exact issue.  But first, wonder how to assess proficient ways in collecting oral histories.  Online collecting of information from those willing to contribute their stories, documents, images, etc. is not the answer all to gathering recent history, as opposed to traditional ways-such as collecting in person.  But it certainly is a respectable way of gathering a sizable cohort to create a solid discussion on your topic of interest.  Which raises the question, what is an ample following for your topic?  Is it enough that you get a hundred people participating in discussing the Vietnam War when considering millions of people are still alive today who contributed and lived through Vietnam in multiple facets?  Say we meet our expectations for what is sizable, is collecting that information online an appropriate method for collecting oral history when those currently still alive are considered senior citizens?  Not the biggest internet user demographic exactly. 

                History is about community, and I would argue that the youth who knows no time before the internet, finds it difficult to socialize without the comfort of sitting at their own home and hiding behind their monitors.  So, is this technology preventing us from interacting with our community face to face?  Isn’t there some value in interviewing a war veteran in person when a well written historical narrative would describe the veteran’s emotions as he described his experience?  IMs, emails, blogs, forums-none of these can describe “tonal inflections of a spoken dialogue”.

                Crowd sourcing, the utilization of a crowd of people to do work for you, can be exemplified with Zooniverse’s (found here https://www.zooniverse.org/) project of cataloging the different types of galaxies.  There are millions of galaxies captured in Zooniverse’s database, yet the majority of them are not distinguished according to type.  Zooniverse, ingeniously, created a website where viewers can take a quick tutorial on the different types of galaxies, and then, those that grasp the differentiations can begin cataloging the pictures according to their galaxy type.  This is saving NASA and astronomers big bucks and time, while also engaging the community.  This is just one example of crowd sourcing.

                Estlund’s and Hebert’s ‘Creating Citizen Historians’ describes their project, Utah Digital Newspapers, as participating in collecting newspapers from all over Utah with the help of many institutions and organizations.  Their aim, as evident, is to build a vast digital newspaper archive.  They aim at using the originals as well as having a board of individuals decide exactly what to digitize, no easy feat as mentioned in the beginning of this blog.  UDN, as of 2007, when the article was written, had goals of becoming financially self-sustaining, broadening their user community and to engage a bigger K-12 audience.  Though, as of 2007, they stated they do not have sufficient funding to digitize anything after 1922, a graph on their site depicts that as of 2010 funding has been achieved.                   

           

     

            Another site utilizing the concept of crowd sourcing is Flickr: the Commons.  This site is a site geared towards crowd sourcing with the collaboration of the LOC.  Everyone visiting can comment and /or describe a multitude of public photographs.  An array of museums, archives, libraries, universities, societies, NASA, organizations such as: the Smithsonian, Library of Congress and the Getty Research center, from all over the world participate.  

Cebula’s article, "Lick This": LOC, Flickr, and the Limits of Crowd Sourcing, our author points out the obvious, is our society in general “mature” enough to be given this responsibility?  Is crowd sourcing hurting or helping us?  When the majority-by a long shot- of comments on a single photograph on LOC’s and Flickr’s project are not historically helpful, let alone arguably mature, can the government afford to spend resources on it?  And do we want this representing our civilization when the site is unearthed by (humans?) hundreds of years from now?  Is the movie ‘Idiocracy’ fulfilling some sort of prophecy?

In summary, I agree with Spellbound Blog, crowd sourcing is not perfect.  There will be many ways to tag a photo, regardless of the tag’s content, but in all rationale each tag does increase the chances of a viewer’s capability in finding the photograph.  And this is LOC’s pilot project, and like all projects, kinks will occur but will be dealt with accordingly. If anything is obtained with this project, the very least is that people are exploring history and taking an active interest in it.  Hopefully with the collaboration of LOC and Flickr, more citizens will find their way back to the LOC site. 

Crowd sourcing is a hot topic among all academic disciplines, and I think the overall consensus is that it does add a valuable component to understanding history.  But there is some responsibility to the viewer to decipher what is quality information and which is not, for instance, are you going to lick the forehead of the female aircraft worker…?               

The Player's Lounge

                 It is obvious to most who dare to venture into my blog, that I have quite an issue with condensing my thoughts.  I eagerly blog three times as many words as instructed to do so, suggesting that I myself will have an abundance of issues as a digital history player in presenting my historical research through the use of websites.  It is through this week’s readings that I have found inspiration to, well, not be so wordy!  Here goes!

                What stuck out to me more than any other piece of advice in our readings so far, is Cohen and Rosenzweig quote from Michael O’Mally in their work “Designing for the History Web” where O’Mally explains that the art of the site lends itself to the content of the site info itself.  I interpret this, though incorrect as I might be, that I should supplement a good portion of my words with visual representations.  Charles Joseph Minard’s map showing Napoleon’s failed expedition into Russia in the winter of 1812 exemplified all the information needed which could arguably take hundreds of words to explain.  Not only does this save space, it helps visual learners comprehend the content as well.  It is because of this, that I respectfully disagree with our authors that text gets points across quicker, though it is probably determined off of the learning style of the reader. 

                How does one go about marketing their work once the final project is ready to be presented?  In “Building an Audience”, the authors support the influence the news and media can have in reaching a broader range in audience; especially if your work is associated with an upcoming anniversary date or historically significant event.  More importantly for our authors, spend your time and energy on free publicity, not money on advertising, such as on the Google search engine.

                Stepping back a few strides, arts-humanities.net offers a multitude of advice in how to plan your website before you physically construct it.  This site offers examples of other projects’ approaches to their construction with the use of spelling out: their subject, place, time, meta-data, sources, type of access, data formats, meta-data standards as well as revisions to the project.  These models coincide with Cohen and Rosenzweig’s framework of how to lay out your website before you start the actual programming. 

                It was interesting to see how everything we’ve been reading applies to already existing digital archives.  ‘250+ Digital Archives and Libraries’ is a great site to visit to see all of the advice being implemented.  Though, disappointing to see such states as Rhode Island, which has a wealth of history and following, does not have an archive listed!  Saying that, I’d love to see Spokane listed as having their own archive with their rich historical background.  I know, I know, money is always the culprit!

                I hope that there isn’t a dying interest in sharing digital archives, however.  It appears that the site ‘A Compendium of Digital Collections’ lost its momentum in sharing various archives.  The last blog was in early 2009, with the exception of the 2011 entry where the site facilitator, University of New Hampshire Library, states they are no longer hosting the site.  Maybe there is more energy going into broader searches, such as Google searches; which is evident, has its own issues.

                Many commentators ding Google for their inability to provide relevant search results for topics of interest.  We have all had it happen before, we become puzzled and frustrated that what we’re searching for through the enormous search engine does not provide us with our desired feedback.  Cohen specifically argues, however, that Google can learn to rank search results without bibliometrics and text mining.  Instead, Google should study how historians rank and sort primary and secondary sources.  Cebula also comes to the defense of Google’s seemingly lacking search capabilities, by stating that many of the inconsistencies of Google searches are irrelevant to people’s searching anyhow.  For one, we already know what we’re looking for, it is just a minor blip if something with the wrong category shows up; and above all metadata can be fixed, that is why Google has options to leave feedback. 

                Time is paramount in historical research as well as digital construction.  Catone uses witty graphics to suggest ways to find what you’re looking for, while Tedesco does the same, suggesting time saving methods of research such as-my favorite-the control ‘f’ option to find a particular word or phrase in an article, saving me time from having to read the entire article. 

                When time is not of the essence, I very much enjoy such interactive sites, or mobile applications, such as Spokane Historical, or Cleveland and New Orleans’ historical applications, Cleveland Historical and New Orleans’ Historical, respectively.  I have been using the Spokane Historical app for some time now, always making a point to reference it when I am out and about.  This has prompted many of my friends and family members to download the same app.  It appears that other historic areas, e.g. Cleveland and New Orleans, implement the same methods of getting their community excited about their own history. 

The Spokane Historical app is fun to use just walking around town!  I would definitely recommend it when you're at a boring event out on the town and need some historical enrichment.

                Not only do I enjoy Spokane Historical, I enjoy reading about history of communities in general.  I didn’t find historypin.org as relevant to my interests, because I don’t care to see people’s random-non historical-pictures of their husbands and cars around the world.  However, I am excited to learn about and play around with the new app ‘Next Exit History’.  I am an ardent road tripper, so this tool will be by my side on every trip I take!  Can I suggest that this is something to be incorporated into the navigation systems in cars?  Just suggesting…

                We are all players in digital history; we all contribute in some way from either: publishing work, or looking it up or offering advice to others on how to do either.  I find that we would be hard pressed to discover a person not engaged in digital history.  This is suggesting that digital history is evolving into its own “science of the humanities.”

If anyone is still counting, I did a lot better on reducing my content.  But still much more to learn from this course!

               

Appropriate Technology for Historians

                Today’s digital world seems, to most, an unexplained phenomenon in which little is unobtainable.  However so many resources exist out there for historians to utilize when exploring means to present their work.  From visual representations, audio, interactive websites, it is hard to decide what will add to the significance of one’s work in ways that will help the public- either professional, general or even both- comprehend their work.  These resources though are a subject matter all their own.  Huge academic departments exist now in order to teach students how, when and why to implement each resource.  Information technology students spend years acquiring the skills necessary to create and maintain websites and understand networking.  Now, it is a key component to many professional careers for them to flourish, with or without the academic training, one of those being historians.

                When using websites to showcase your work, it is very important to make sure the website will do the project justice. Cohen and Rosenzweig explain that the technology used to produce a website should be appropriate for the website’s content and purpose.  If you are doing a feature on a family tree, it is very useful to have a family tree representation along with photos and even scanned records, e.g., birth, marriage and death certificates.  It would not be necessary to add large files to the content of the page that do not pertain to your subject matter.

                Cohen and Rosenzweig also support the disseminating of humanities to multiple audiences.  It is important that your website is clear on goals of your project and above all, be passionate about your topic even when you lack the resources you desire during your pilot projects!  They lay out three ground rules for embarking on such an endeavor as starting a website for your work: be careful in choosing who you get to host your website, as there are an array of options out there; assess what your needs are, this will help you organize more efficiently and budget more efficiently; and finally, plan your project out, try and think of the necessary ideas and functions of your project.

                I find it not at all surprising, though I do find it astonishing that the increase in the digitization of books which were once neglected and considered obscure, have increased in use dramatically.  Information out there has a place, if it was important enough to write down, then to someone that information can be an immensely valuable tool in their research projects.  From tax records to diary entries, they all have their place.  But is this cost effective?

                The digitization of information is overwhelming and financially burdensome.  Where does one start?  Who chooses what to digitize? And how do we go about digitizing that information?  With the economic downturn in American society, it is very faux pas to mention, let alone do it, outsourcing work to other countries.  However, there are very few professional companies that digitize information on the enormous scale historians need.  So, do the cost savings outweigh the economic and political anguish it causes American citizens?  That is an entirely new topic that can be debated for hours, which ultimately reside in each person’s own value system.  But, if an institution or company cannot pay to digitize work, then history will never be open and free to the public.  On a smaller scale, DIY website building and digitizing can be more satisfying to the professional, anyhow.

                In 2005, at the Center for History and New Media, Rosenzweig and Velez commented that there are five categories in which to work in: teaching and learning with digital resources, making the approach to history the central focus; collecting and preserving history online, which focuses on issues of digital preservation; digital tools and scholarship, where online databases and resources are developed; scholarship, asking oneself if it will change the matter of the argument, communication and publication; public outreach, making the information free and reaching out to non-academic audiences.  All of these points are keys in formulating a project for digitization.

                The Virginia Center for Digital History commented that Teaching America History, a United States Department of Education program that provides professional development training to history educators, will be voted against in Congress this year.  However, the Administration suggested a plan to consolidate many subjects, including history, into a training program called Effective Teaching and Learning for a Well-Rounded Education.  This program would fund grants to states, high-need local education agencies and nonprofit partners in hopes of emerging pioneering practices to progress teaching and learning of the arts, foreign languages, history, civics, economics and financial literacy, environmental education, physical education, health education, and other subjects.  If the funding remains the same, with some hesitation, I would fully support this bill.  Regardless of whether or not you agree, take a look at the National Humanities Alliance, it is our civic duty to participate politically with laws that will affect our personal and professional lives.  

                Many institutions are implementing their digitization techniques into projects they are working on.  The Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities is working on many projects, a few in which I tweeted about.  The University of Nebraska at Lincoln offers project reviews for graduate students, something I hope to be taking advantage of within the next couple of years. 

Led by Hayim Lapin, Ph.D., Robert H. Smith Professor of Jewish Studies and professor of History at the University of Maryland, the project will encode the text in TEI, in order to provide a research tool for the collation and comparison of text. Additionally, the database will include targeted searching, transcriptions, and an annotated translation for a wider audience (http://mith.umd.edu/research/project/digital-mishnah/).

 

                Rosenzweig, who envisioned representing perspectives of ordinary people over the wealthy and powerful as well as democratizing the study of the past to diverse audiences, was head of the Center for History and New Media.  Their current project, Gulag:Many Days, Many Lives, tells the experiences of prisoners through vast digitized sources.  Documentaries, audio feeds, documents, images and bibliographic resources-to encourage further study-were all utilized in their project.  This simplifies the idea that many sources are needed to truly represent your project and to do the lives of those prisoners any justice at all.  For many who want to learn, it takes a combination of learning styles to fully comprehend a topic.  Visual, audio and kinesthetic are all good styles to include in your project to make the general public more informed. 

                Booker’s analogy of history being like layers is very helpful in understanding the process of presenting history.  We need to peel them back to see the past so that we can understand the future.  Visualization tools help students do just that.  Booker’s Visualizing San Francisco Bay’s Forgotten Past, was very substantive in proving his point.  The visual representations were not only a nice break from gobs of text, but also easier to interpret than many author’s verbiage.

                Spiro’s articles will remain very useful in contending with the overwhelming idea of how to present my work in a digital age.  From formulating my goals to utilizing existing tools, the most important advice I took away from her blog was to remain active and participatory on the digital front.  I will explore training opportunities as well as continue to network and keep abreast of new technology.  Given the advice, it seems to make more sense for me to just start immersing myself in the digital realm NOW.  Though I may not even come close to holding a degree in any kind of technological field, I am going to embrace the training given to me to explore and discover new information on just how to present my work so that the general public will comprehend and appreciate it.               

To digitize or......no, just digitize!

The questions it seems being asked of us are: whether or not digitizing is the answer to humanity related disciplines' survival and 21st century adjustment and what we can achieve by doing so, or not doing so?  The answer for me is really simple.  Just do it.  It may seem vast, after all, there are centuries of works to digitize.  But really, we need to start somewhere.    David Eun, in Katie Hafner’s piece stated it best, if we really do look at the metaphorical glass of the digitizing process as half full, then we really are doing the discipline a disservice by overwhelming ourselves.  There has to be a starting point somewhere in the preservation process of historical objects.  The biggest concern, as pointed out by almost every author we read from, is money.  Yet, there are an array of organizations, companies and individuals that are taking enormous strides in attempting this inconceivable feat.  From manual labor to flat out donations: Google and I.B.M. for instance.  The truth of the matter is, history doesn’t stop, meaning, we will never catch up with the digitization of every record.  However, as New Orleans witnessed firsthand, we cannot risk losing historical items that cannot be replaced. 

Is this process something we can even gain something from?  Absolutely.  As Gallagher put it, the web strengthens the public’s want for more info.  Gallagher also shares that museums do not risk the peril of disappearing forever because the web encourages its viewers to interact more within the social realm.  The viewer is not isolated as one would suspect.  As the viewer obtains more desire for information, they will realize that no digital representation of an object can ever replace the intrinsic value of seeing the object first hand, and therefore encourage museum attendance.  In an article from the LA Times, it is explained that museum attendance has been increasing, though they are not quite sure how to factor in the variable of the downturn in the economy. 
   

The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, CA has combined most intriguingly the concept of collaborating digitizing information and the physical presence in a museum.  For instance, you walk through a life like representation of a concentration camp, where there are digital recordings of vulgarities called out to you as you pass through, just as the detainees at these concentrations camps experienced.  (museumoftolerance.com)  

Turkel's convictions are that more and more job postings mention digital history as either a desired skill or even a requirement.  We need to be thinking critically about what exploring the digital world and applying it to history can do for the career outlook for many students.  Turkel argues, historians, as well as other disciples, suspect breaking into the digital aspect of history is for other generations to take care of.  Turkel wants his pupils to be “producers” and not so much classified as only “users.”  Turkel argues that centers cannot be the only ones expected to jump aboard the digitizing wagon, Turkel contends that new history programs need to be “programming historians.” 

Taylor, shares that these new programs pose an interesting shift in how students need to think about history.  History students were conditioned to think linearly, not by quantifiable means, such as other scientific and mathematical disciples do.  Students and experts of history need to solve complex social issues.  To do this, they need to distinguish and crunch hard data from other sources, not necessarily connected to the incident they are specifically studying.  Tax records, property records, manuscripts, journals, genealogy records, all these offer hints and clues as to why such events are led up to in the first place.  Maybe this type of information can dissuade or even encourage different actions to prevent, what many say, "history repeating itself."

Cohen, possibly my most agreeable author, suggests that there are so many benefits to the mass sharing of information, even for the ones producing the work.  The accessibility of their work helps build their reputation.  So while there may not be immediate financial gain for sharing their work, the sharing of information gains them more notoriety in the subject which could possibly lead to more financial opportunities.  Producers need to lobby for more open access as well to historical documentation.  The additional pertinent information out there will only benefit their work! 

Lastly, open access, digitizing and web publishing only further the history discipline in the sense of it being taken seriously as a subject that matters infinitely, as well as help other historians collaborate on their work, and gain insight and feedback from others where they may have overlooked.  We need history, but mostly, we need it to remain a passion for the public.  The public has a desire, and right, to know about itself, freely and readily.