Upon using this tool I find it helpful that we can work as a group and collaborate to come up with precise decisions and examples regarding the words assigned. I defined the word quality and used an example of a falsified picture from the article we read. I am looking forward to being able to collaborate with classmates to come up with new ideas and ways to look at digital history.
My contribution to the group document was providing the intial definition for flexibility which came from the text written by Rosenzweig and Dan Cohen. I first included a word for word definition as provided by the text, and then gave my own summary of how the two authors see the word, flexibility, relative to digital history. While doing this assignments I thought that having this be a group work allows me and others to view other people’s work, so that we can see how they formatted their contribution and use it to help us.
By September 3:
1) Join Digital History Group on Blogs@Baruch
- Log in at https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/
- Go to https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/groups/digital-history/
- Click “Join Group”
- From Digital History group page, choose “docs” tab and open “Digital History Lexicon”
- If you see a warning that someone else is editing the document, leave a comment with the phrase “insert as definition for…” and then come back and clean it up (or we will).
- Edit the document, either contributing, modifying, polishing, or illustrating with an exemplary link the key phrases listed in bold, or commenting on the doc using the comments interface below it.
3) Write a blog post of 250 or fewer words detailing the contributions/changes you made to the BuddyPress doc, and reflect on the constraints or possibilities for using this tool for collaborative work.
By September 5:
4) Create accounts, if you don’t already have them, on Twitter, Delicious, and Google (reader).
- Send a tweet with the hashtag #baruchdh, and save at least one digital history site to your Delicious account with the tag #baruchdh
5) Complete readings:
- Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” Journal of American History, Vol. 93, No. 1 (June, 2006): 117-46.
- William Cronon, “Scholarly Authority in a Wikified World,” Perspectives on History, February 2012.
1. Housekeeping:
- Attendance
- Reminder that no class on Monday
- Expect a post like this one for every class, as well as another post that lays out the assignment for the next class
- Reminder to please use online syllabus since it is an evolving document
2. Blogs@Baruch / BuddyPress docs tutorial
3. Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History (2005), “Introduction”
- benefits: capacity, accessibility, flexibility, diversity, manipulability, interactivity, hypertextuality/nonlinearity
- dangers: quality, durability, readability, passivity, and inaccessibility.
4. Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History (2005) “Exploring the History Web”
- Historicizing the trajectory of digital history
- Five main genres of history websites: archives (containing primary sources); exhibits, films, scholarship, and essays; teaching; discussion; and organizational.
5. Jonathan Shaw, “The Humanities, Digitized: Reconceiving the Study of Culture,” Harvard Magazine, May-June 2012.
- How have things changed between 2005 and 2012? (archive construction, crowdsourcing, geospatial analysis, simulations, text-mining and visualizations, deep and/or broad collaboration)
- Examples: Show and tell, e.g. http://www.jdarchive.org/?la=en
- Are we in the middle of a revolution? On the cusp of one?
6. RSS in Plain English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU
7. Google Reader, Delicious, Twitter.
8. For new version of assignments due September 3 and 5, see this post.
- Complete survey on course blog
- Leave a comment on the welcome post here
- Read Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History, 2005, “Introduction,” and “Exploring the History Web.”
- Read Jonathan Shaw, “The Humanities, Digitized: Reconceiving the Study of Culture,” Harvard Magazine, May-June 2012.
This space houses the work of HIS 3460: Digital History, a course co-taught by Thomas Harbison and Luke Waltzer at Baruch College during the Fall 2012 semester.
Here’s a description of the course:
This course will explore current methods in the field, and also imagine future possibilities. You will study a range of theories of new media and employ them as you collect, analyze, and produce historical scholarship. Throughout the course we will assess how and why the creation, archiving, and interpretation of historical data are changing in the face of new forms of digital communication. We will also examine how these tools impact the primary goal of the historian: producing narratives that explain historical change. You will learn about and work with emerging tools in the areas of data mining, graphic information systems, image and audio production, and social media. With classmates, you will produce a digital project using data and artifacts that historicize the 2012 presidential election.
Much of this course will be open to the public, and outside commenting is welcome and encouraged.
See our syllabus for additional detail.
Looking forward to a great semester!
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